How to play Dogs when you don’t want to play Dogs

Based on the back-cover copy for DitV and incorporating a suggested alternative setting from the GM’s section:

Dogs in the Junkyard is about the Mob’s enforcers, young men and women called on to keep the Family together and keep the business running — not necessarily in that order. From their home in Chicago, they’ll travel from burg to isolated burg, carrying news and instructions that can’t be trusted to phones or the mail, taking care of the Family and “taking care” of the disloyal.
The setting is a fiction inspired by any number of mob movies and television shows. The air is dirty, the suits are spotless, the guns are loud, and Silence is Golden.
Picture the Family, facing jailtime and prosecution from the Law, murder and betrayal from their competitors (and sometimes their allies). They?re running a business based on graft and violence, founded on family loyalty and respect. They?ve been around for years, but they’re still in danger on all sides — times keep changing, after all. The business has to be subtle and agile these days and it’s vulnerable to attack from within (betrayal, either purposeful or unthinking) and without. Under that kind of pressure, pride becomes resentment, resentment becomes hate, hate becomes violence… and everyone and their cousin is waiting for someone to make a big mistake.
You’re there to hold it all together.

…not that I’m remotely qualified to run this; I don’t have the media exposure I’d need at all.
Execution of the ‘towns’ would be essentially the same — a big mass of people, at least some of which have family ties to each other — in which Pride leads to Injustice leads to “sin” — strictly speaking, activities which weaken the strength of the Family in the area and allow either internal or external forces that will eventually tear the place apart.
Reading through all that blurb, it strikes me as a good… “something” for someone turned off by the default DitV setting, which in turn would probably be less interesting for the folks who already like the concept as is. It also nicely supports a “yah can’t just kill everyone, every time” idea — it’s bad for business. 🙂