It is useful in a historical sense to trace the origin of the Mafia back to Sicily. In many respects, however, the history is confusing because the Mafia today is not the same one that emerged at the end of the last century.

The American Mafia is really only a little over a half century old, and it came into being when Lucky Luciano and his allies - including Jewish gangsters in large numbers - wiped out the last important Old World Mafia leaders: Joe the Boss Masseria and Salvatore Maranzano. This new Mafia had no tolerance for the old ideas of the Sicilian mafiosi. The old "Mustache Petes" felt that "honor" had to be maintained either by avoiding or by warring against other ethnics and indeed other Italians. Settling old vendettas was more important than making money. These ideas were preposterous to the new mafiosi, who moved with other ethnics to organize the underworld in the most efficient methods. This new Mafia cooperated with others to increase crime profits, and they killed only those who stood in the way of profits.

In order to secure profit as the primary Mafia objective, many of the old Mustache Petes were eliminated and mobsters did this almost by instinct from about the middle of Prohibition on. Luciano was not the first to rebel against the old guard, but since he converted the East Coast Mafia - which composed probably more than half the numbers of the mafiosi nationally - his action was the most significant.

For many years our understanding of the Mafia has been limited by argument on whether there even was a Mafia. In the recent decades that argument has been more or less settled, and the principal argument remaining is whether or not organized crime and the Mafia are one and the same thing.

In part the confusion revolves around an understanding of the real nature of organized crime has existed since the earliest days of the nation and, indeed, earlier. This is true if the mere acting in concert of a number of criminals means that crime is "organized." But organized crime achieves its status not only by the fact of groups of practitioners, but also by a network or agreement between such groups. Organized crime is syndicate crime in which certain activities are apportioned out to the various gangs and honored in the main by these gangs. For instance, New York mobs accept the primacy of New England mobs in New England, and if they have to come into New England territory, permission is required. Gangs in one area may be asked to carry out a killing for a gang from another area, and it has the right and duty to carry out such a killing. No rewards are paid in matters of territorial rights. This was never the case in pre-prohibition crime. The Bloody Tubs gang in Baltimore in the 19th century, for instance, had no such obligation to take care of the needs of the Dead Rabbits or the Daybreakers or other criminal organizations in New York.

Prohibition and the nature of the crime business it engendered required intercourse between mobs in different cities. Al Capone in Chicago was dependent on booze supplies from Canada coming through Detroit where the Jewish Purple Gang dominated. A rapport developed between these groups. If the Purples needed a killing of a recalcitrant member who had fled to Illinois, it fell to the Capones to see that their problem was resolved. Similarly, Capone could not send his own killers to Detroit to handle a job. The Purples would not permit this and would probably have killed such intruders for the insult. Instead, Chicago would request Detroit to take on the hit assignment.

It was a new form of cooperation in the underworld, and although it hardy worked to perfection at all times, mobsters came to appreciate the concept. Thus desperate Jewish mobs, Italian mafiosi and non-mafiosi, some Irish, Polish and even WASP criminal organizations, joined together in a de facto union. In 1931 the gangs organized a national crime syndicate on a permanent and efficient basis, largely through the handiwork of Lucky Luciano and Jewish mobster Meyer Lansky.

At the time the Mafia forces, extended to include Italian gangsters from any part of Italy rather than just Sicilians, were hardly the most dominant. No census exists of the composition of the syndicate at the time, but if one judges by cities involved, it is possible that Jewish mobsters actually out numbered mafiosi. It is not a matter of great moment since cooperation between Italian and Jewish criminals had long become a matter of course. The Italians had felt the poverty of the homeland and the Jews their ghettos of Europe. Both arrived at the same time and both felt the same lash of discrimination in America.

Typical of this Jewish-Italian cooperation was the composition of the national syndicate's infamous enforcement arm, Murder, Incorporated - about half Jewish and half Italian. A rapport developed between the two groups that did not develop in the main with Irish gangsters, who throughout the 19th century had dominated American crime and who found themselves being threatened by the expanding activities of both the Italians and Jews. As a result, probably more Irish criminals were wiped out in the establishment of organized crime in America than any other national grouping.

But a fundamental difference ultimately emerged to separate what may be called the Jewish and Italian Mafias. The Italians united in a structured organization with crime families, an order based on a leader or boss, an underboss or two (the second sometimes called a consigliere, although such duties had different meanings with different crime families), a number of capos or lieutenants, and then a group of soldiers. This hardly composed the entire crime family, but was probably only a minority composition of the group. Some clamored and hoped and even bribed to become "made" members of the family, while others had little such interest. Luciano had sanctioned this order within the new American Mafia. Although he personally had little interest in such trappings, he came to realize that after the brutal New York wars of 1928 to 1931, many of the survivors still clung to their upbringing of mafioso organization with the need to render fealty to a leader.

The Jewish mobsters showed no need for such a structure and indeed felt little loyalty to their won areas of operation. When the Dalitz forces of Cleveland and the Purples of Detroit saw criminal revenues in their areas decreasing and new and greater opportunities. Developing in Florida and Nevada gambling, for instance, the dissolved their operations (or turned them over to local mafiosi) and moved on. The Mafia would hardly transfer its entire operation in such a manner. The very structure of the organization kept them tied to a geographical sphere of operation.

Yet, its structure gave the Mafia its very lifeblood. By the 1960s or 1970s a fundamental change was taking place in organized crime. The Mafia, rather than withering away, as many experts had predicted, actually was gaining in strength while the Jews declined.. this was hardly the result of any purge of falling out between the groups, but rather the result of the different organizations among them. The Jewish mobsters were empire builders, not dynasty builders. Nepotism among Jewish gangsters was virtually non-existent and their removal from ghetto life produced a decreasing supply of fresh young punks eager to step into crime. Among the mafiosi the situation was different. When the Jewish mobsters of the 1920s and '30s died off, more often then not they were replaced by Italians. The switch from Longy Zwillman to Jerry Catena in New Jersey serves as an example. As the ravages of age hit the longtime syndicate mobsters, the structure of the Mafia filled the void.

We understand very little about the Mafia and are misled by a great number of myths - that there is nothing unique about mafiosi (and their Jewish counterparts); that the Mafia is dying; that there is any such thing as ethnic succession in organized crime. But the Mafia is an exploitive society, not only of its victims but also of its practitioners, a quality from which it derives much of it's strength and ability to renew itself.

Organized crime developed in America as a pure aberration, something new on the world scene - not even seen in Sicily, the birthplace of the mob. There were three fundamental reasons for the genesis of organized crime in the 1920s and its continuing growth - Prohibition, the Great Depression and J. Edgar Hoover. Previously the country was plagued by the great criminal gangs of disorganized crime, criminal groups that found allies and protectors among the aspiring gangs, the politicians overlooked their minor peccadilloes of bashing open a few heads among the honest citizenry now and then, of looting the waterfront and banks, of fielding armies of prostitutes. The important thing was that the gangs could win elections and maintain the politicians in power by intimidating voters at election time.

There were gangs such as the Dead Rabbits, the Bowery Boys, the Whyos and many more. The last important such gangs were the 1,500-member primarily Jewish Monk Eastman Gang and the equal-numbered Italian Five Points Gang under Paul Kelly. But shortly before the First World War these organizations had turned into liabilities for the political power structure. Reform movements were spreading and the politicians could no longer allow the gangs to rob and kill (often to order with detailed price lists) and expect Tammany or its local equivalent in other cities to offer protection. The politicians, concerned with their own survival, turned their backs on the gangsters and allowed frequent arrests and imprisonments, and the great gangs started to fall apart.

There were no rackets that could support such a criminal establishment and splinters of the gangs fought each other for control of what rackets were available, such as union busting, strike breaking and the like. None of this meant that crime as an institution was finished or that citizens could walk the streets in total safety, but rather that the die was cast and criminality as a way of life rather than merely as a youthful, generally ghettoized activity was waning. The Great Way took many gangsters away from home and further fractionalized their organizations and many returned home in 1919 to face a most unusual prospect - actually seeking work to survive.

Then the first major break occurred for the future of criminality. The nation, unlike other advanced Western nations, embarked on a fatal but "noble experiment" of social legislation, the outlawing of demon rum by the Prohibition amendment. Instantly, the great criminal gangs coalesced again. As Prohibition was doomed to fail and criminals gained a popular image as bootleggers, the seeds of organized crime were planted. The criminals became far richer than they had ever been before. It was no longer necessary for them to curry favor with the politicians. They were the great source of wealth in the country and they bought the politicians and the police in wholesale lots. The politicians of the 1920s could not dictate to criminals as their predecessors had done; they had to come to them hat in hand and palms open.

At the coming of Prohibition, the main occupants of the ghettos were predominately recent immigrants, the Italians and Jews. Criminality within these ghetto ethnic groups was exactly the same as it had been when the Irish were there and would remain the same later on when blacks and Hispanics moved into the ghettos. But the Jews and Italians achieved their primacy in crime at the time when crime really paid. Although this alone was inducement to remain in crime, still with Repeal many of the bootlegging criminals dropped out of crime to live off their acquired wealth.

But a second development further institutionalized crime - the Great Depression. Ethnic progression should have moved many of these groups out of the ghettos but they were frozen there by the economic climate. Ghetto youths, progressing beyond the usual mindless ghetto crime, saw no salvation save in crime. They flocked to the new criminal syndicates and provided a glue that held the Jews and Italians to their criminal organizations.

The Great Depression coincided with the Luciano-Lansky plan to take syndicate crime national, a program that met practically no federal resistance. This third development, or non-development, saw J. Edgar Hoover spending all his time fighting communists and what he perceived to be the deadliest peril of all to the nation - juvenile car thieves. He would not fight organized crime, declaring it and the Mafia to be myth, a position he would hold for more than three decades until he was carried, figuratively screaming and kicking, into battle against organized crime and the "Cosa Nostra" (a term invented to give him an out for his years of insisting there was no Mafia). In fact, Hoover paid so little attention to organized crime that, as historian Albert Fried noted, "one could accuse him of dereliction of duty." And a strong case could be made that the leaders of organized crime had their own special ways for "stroking" Hoover to keep him most docile.

In any event organized crime thrived in the Depression and beyond, and the Mafia perhaps most of all, if not in revenues (Lansky alone probably ended up with a personal fortune in the $300 to $400 million range) certainly as the surviving structure. Helping that development was the aforementioned exploitive nature of the Mafia.

In the Mafia, the boss soaks and exploits his under boss, the underboss the capos, the capos the soldiers and the soldiers the "non-made" hangers on. This may best be illustrated in the loan-sharking racket. The crime boss in a typical operation finances much of the action by advancing money to his underboss and/or capos for about one percent weekly interest. This is not what you would call a risk loan. The boss' underlings are fully responsible for the principal and interest and no excuses are accepted if the money is lost. The money must be repaid. This second-echelon group then re-lends the money to lower-ranking members of the mob at anywhere from 1.5 to 2.5 percent per week. These soldiers then make their money by collecting interest at 5 percent or more per week, depending on what the loan traffic will bear. A capo or soldier might end up in an especially lucrative situation that nets him a bonanza. If so, he can expect his superiors to move in on him for a larger cut.

The Mafia does not put its members on any payroll but merely affords them the right to operate and the right to be gouged by their superiors. Oddly though, this underworld version of the Peter Principle gives the Mafia its very vitality. The mafioso accepts the gouging because he hopes to ascend the ladder at least in a small enough way so that he can become a little more of a gouger and a little less a gougee. The Mafia in reality is a ladder of troughs.

It seems unlikely that the Mafia is doomed to wither because of what is called "ethnic succession in organized crime." The exponents of this theory seem to overlook the difference between ghetto crime and organized crime. There has been an upward mobility from the ghetto that has led all ethnics to better positions in society, but the Jews and Italians stayed in organized crime after their profits from crime had raised them far beyond the ghettos. The similarities between the Italian Mafia and such new menaces as the "Black Mafia" the "Cuban Mafia" (of Latin Mafia), the Chinese Mafia," and the Pakistanis, Vietnamese and Japanese are difficult to draw. Except for humble beginnings, the Mafia as a crime group has no real equal.

There is no doubt that the Mafia overall is reducing its stake in narcotics, not so much because of the growth of competition from other ethnics but rather because of the heavy penalties involved. However the process is a slow one, and the Mafia often funds much of the operations of non-Mafia groups. Chinese gangsters probably control 20 percent of this county's heroin traffic from bases in Hong Kong and Taiwan and many of this country's Chinatowns. In almost all cases these groups have formed working alliances with the traditional Mafia families. In black and Hispanic ghettos gambling operations fees are generally paid to the Mafia for the "franchise" to operate and because the Mafia maintains the key to political and police protection. The abandonment of street-level activities, the high-visibility part of many rackets, has always been a hallmark of organized crime and should not be overemphasized as a sign of transition.

The fact remains the Mafia thrives and moves into more-sophisticated areas of racketeering because of its members long learning period in organized crime. The crude mafiosi of the 1920s who fought the booze wars with garlic-coated bullets were not capable of the sophisticated crimes of stock manipulation, computer theft and other financial flimflams that the Mafia engages in today. Today the new ethnics are, with some exceptions, about 50 years behind the times.

Proof positive that the Mafia is an ongoing concern comes from the fact that an endless supply of young gangsters are panting for admission. They wait impatiently on the periphery, doing the odd jobs for the mob, or as one New York police official put it, "fencing stolen goods for family members with only a small cut for himself, or even dirty work like burying bodies." They seek membership to win the "right to do the hijackings rather than the peddling, the rubouts instead of the shoveling. He might even be allotted a loan-sharking or numbers territory, franchises with a steady income and, because of the family protection, little fear of competition."

One aspirant in New York was so eager for membership that he flipped for joy when told he was to be "made." He got all dressed up on the big night and drove off with some of the boys, never to be seen again. He was not to be made, but unmade, having fallen into disfavor and slated for execution.

Whither the Mafia? In the late 1980s it appeared that profound changes were taking place because of heat from the federal government's crackdown on the leadership of the of the various crime families. The government obviously hoped that pressuring the bosses, traditionally men in their 70s, might produce some who would crack under the strain of convictions and the anticipation of dying in jail. Previously, the famed informers - Reles, Valachi, Teresa, Fratianno - despite all the hype from their promoters, were not top-drawer operatives. The revelations of some of these informers hurt the Mafia and organized crime more than others, but if a boss would talk, the rewards could be electrifying.

Would such men, in contradiction of their entire career philosophy, talk? The motivation of most informers originally is that they were "screwed" by other mafiosi, robbed of their money while in prison. The bosses do not have such justification. However, there seemed good reason to suspect that the government was only provoking lower-echelon mafiosi to kill their bosses, for fear that they might talk. That could have been an added reason for the assassination of Paul Castellano, head of the Gambino family, on December 16, 1985. At the age of 70 he was facing a whole series of indictments. Conviction would doom him to spend the rest of his life behind bars. Would Big Paulie talk?

A very suspicious story appeared in Time magazine just a short time before Castellano's murder (actually datelined the day of the killing but printed earlier). It claimed that Aniello Dellacroce, the number two man in the Gambino family directly under Castellano, and who had died of lung cancer on December 2, had been an FBI informer. Time, it seems, may have been fed FBI misinformation. That Dellacroce, known as a very tough mafiosi, had talked seemed highly dubious to many observers. Many crime observers believe that the agency used Dellacroce as a scapegoat to protect other very real informers. It is also argued that the Mafia, nervous that a man like Dellacroce would defect, would think, how about Castellano, who was considered personally far weaker than Dellacroce?

The true efficacy of the FBI efforts to nab bosses cannot yet be measured. Yet, the Mafia can counter the threat by returning to the ways of the Mafia during the early syndicate days. Then the leaders of most crime families were in their 30s or 40s. The benefits were obvious. If a boss of 75 were hit with a 20- or 30-year sentence, he could crack, knowing he was at the end of the line. A boss aged 40 could do such a term "standing on his head," getting out in as little as six or seven years, allowing for good behavior. The older boss might talk, the younger would not. And a shift to younger bosses might not weaken the Mafia at all, but rather strengthen it in the long run. One thing remains certain, bloodied or not, as one young mafioso told a reporter defiantly, "We ain't dead, that's for damned sure."

The American Mafia is still a rather young creature, only in its 70s. Rather than learning from the Sicilian Mafia, today it is more aptly described as Sicily's tutor. The 1985 testimony of Tommaso Buscetta - the high-rank Sicilian mafioso, whose defected led to the arrests of hundreds of alleged mafiosi in Italy - described the structures of the two Mafias on each side of the Atlantic as similar, but added that only the American version had an organization called "The Commission." Buscetta said the idea of a commission was pressed on the Sicilian Mafia by two members of the American Mafia - Lucky Luciano and "a gentleman named Bonanno coming from the United States in 1957." Buscetta said Luciano and Joe Bonanno had told their Italian counterparts that such a commission was valuable to resolve disputes between the crime families, 20 in Palermo alone, throughout the island.

U.S. law enforcement agencies had no problem figuring why Luciano and Bonnanno were so interested in having a commission established in Italy. By reducing the disputes, the arguments over spoils, they would guarantee that the heroin pipeline from Sicily to the United States functioned smoothly. It was the hallmark of the American Mafia - exporting good old American know-how.

Copyright © 2000 CarpeNoctem. All rights reserved.
Revised: August 2003.
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