I get the impression Brust himself is a bit like that - apparently he/a lot of his friends really were in the mob in the way that Vlad is, up until a friend of his got killed doing it. I heard that's why the later books take a darker/more critical perspective on the whole setup. (Not that it was ever like, yay the mob, but.) Until this post, the closest I'd got to describing it was that there was still the Goodfellas-y feeling going on.