The Best American Essays 2015 (18 page)

During Prohibition, the Lupollo gang moved into bootlegging. The vehicles that were used in the liquor trade became the basis for a trucking business. Gambling money went to family bankers, who directed the funds to Brooklyn Eagle Realty and other legal investments. “After the money from gambling is ‘cleansed' by reinvestment in legal activities,” Ianni wrote, “the profit is then reinvested in loan-sharking.”

Ianni didn't romanticize what he saw. He didn't pretend that the crooked ladder was the principal means of economic mobility in America, or the most efficient. It was simply a fact of American life. He saw the pattern being repeated in New York City during the 1970s, as the city's demographics changed. The Lupollos' gambling operations in Harlem had been taken over by African Americans. In Brooklyn, the family had been forced to enter into a franchise arrangement with blacks and Puerto Ricans, limiting themselves to providing capital and arranging for police protection. “Things here in Brooklyn aren't good for us now,” Uncle Phil told Ianni. “We're moving out, and they're moving in. I guess it's their turn now.” In the early seventies, Ianni recruited eight black and Puerto Rican ex-cons—all of whom had gone to prison for organized crime activities—to be his field assistants, and they came back with a picture of organized crime in Harlem that looked a lot like what had been going on in Little Italy seventy years earlier, only with drugs, rather than bootleg alcohol, as the currency of innovation. The newcomers, he predicted, would climb the ladder to respectability just as their predecessors had done. “It was toward the end of the Lupollo study that I became convinced that organized crime was a functional part of the American social system and should be viewed as one end of a continuum of business enterprises with legitimate business at the other end,” Ianni wrote. Fast-forward two generations and, with any luck, the grandchildren of the loan sharks and the street thugs would be riding horses in Old Westbury. It had happened before. Wouldn't it happen again?

This is one of the questions at the heart of the sociologist Alice Goffman's extraordinary new book,
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.
The story she tells, however, is very different.

When Goffman was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, she began tutoring an African American high school student named Aisha, who lived in a low-income neighborhood that she calls 6th Street, not far from campus. (Goffman, like Ianni, altered names and details.) Through Aisha she met a group of part-time crack dealers and was soon drawn into their world. She asked them if she could follow them around and write about their lives. They agreed. She had taken an apartment close by and lived in the neighborhood for the next six years, profiling the lives of people who, in many ways, were the modern-day equivalents of old Giuseppe Lupollo, in his earliest days on the streets of Little Italy.

At the center of Goffman's story are two close friends, Mike and Chuck. Mike's mother worked two and sometimes three jobs, which meant that he was well-off by the standards of the neighborhood. His mother's house was immaculate. Chuck was a senior in high school when he and Goffman met. He had two younger brothers, Reggie and Tim, both of whom were devoted to him. Chuck had a harder time of it; he lived in the basement of his family's derelict row house, where, Goffman writes, “sometimes the rats bit him, but at least he had his own space.”

Goffman immersed herself in the 6th Street community. Her school friends dropped away. Chuck and Mike—and occasionally another friend of theirs, Steven—eventually moved in with her, sleeping on two couches in the living room. She lived through a war between her friends on 6th Street and the “4th Street Boys.” One day Mike came home with seven bullet holes in the side of his car. (“We hid it in a shed so the cops wouldn't see,” she writes.) Goffman, Mike, and Chuck would text one another every half hour, to make sure each was still alive:

You good?

Yeah.

Okay.

Chuck did not survive the gang war. At the end of the book, Goffman attaches a fifty-page “Methodological Note,” in which she describes the night that he was shot in the head outside a Chinese restaurant. The passages are devastating. She came running to the hospital room where his body lay. “I cried to him and told him that I loved him,” she writes. Then Chuck's girlfriend, Tanesha, and his friend Alex arrived. “Tanesha was talking to him and telling Alex and me what she saw: how he moved his arm because he was fighting, he always was a fighter; how she had followed the ambulance here. How could he leave her and leave his girls? She noticed that his body was beginning to grow stiff.” Tanesha began to cry softly. “You are my baby,” she said. “Why did you leave me?” Finally, gathered around Chuck's bed, Goffman writes,

we talked about bringing Reggie home from county jail on a funeral furlough. I said that if Reggie came home, all he was gonna do was go shoot someone, and Alex said, “Please—somebody gon' die regardless,” and Mike nodded his head in agreement, and Tanesha too. Alex counted one, two, three, four with his fingers. The number of people who would die.

Chuck and Mike were criminals: they were complicit in the barbarism of the drug trade. But in the Mertonian sense, they were also innovators. Goffman describes how they craved success in mainstream society. They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to find themselves thwarted. Selling crack was a business they entered into only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them. In Chuck's case, his mother had a serious crack habit. He began dealing at thirteen in order to buy food for the family and to “regulate” his mother's addiction; if he was her supplier, he figured, she wouldn't have to turn tricks or sell household possessions to pay for drugs. Chuck's criminal activities were an attempt to bring some degree of normalcy to his family.

The problem was that on 6th Street crime didn't pay. Often Chuck and Mike had no drugs to sell: “their supplier had gotten arrested or was simply unavailable, or the money they owed this ‘connect' had been seized from their pockets by the police during a stop and search.” And if they did have drugs, the odds of evading arrest were small. The police saturated 6th Street. Each day Goffman saw the officers stop young men on the streets, search cars, and make arrests. In her first eighteen months of following Mike and Chuck, she writes:

I watched the police break down doors, search houses and question, arrest, or chase people through houses fifty-two times. Nine times, police helicopters circled overhead and beamed searchlights onto local streets. I noted blocks taped off and traffic redirected as police searched for evidence . . . seventeen times. Fourteen times during my first eighteen months of near daily observation, I watched the police punch, choke, kick, stomp on, or beat young men with their nightsticks.

Years later, when Chuck went through his high school yearbook with Goffman, he identified almost half the boys in his freshman class as currently in jail or prison. Between the ages of twenty-two and twenty-seven, Mike had spent three and a half years behind bars. He was on probation or parole for 87 weeks of the 139 weeks that he was out of prison, and made 51 court appearances.

The police buried the local male population under a blizzard of arrest warrants: some were “body” warrants for suspected crimes, but most were bench and technical warrants for failure to appear in court or to pay court fees, or for violations of probation or parole. Getting out from under the weight of warrants was so difficult that many young men in the neighborhood lived their lives as fugitives. Mike spent a total of thirty-five weeks on the run, steering clear of friends and loved ones, moving around by night. The young men of the neighborhood avoided hospitals, because police officers congregate there, running checks on those seeking treatment for injuries. Instead they turned to a haphazard black market for their medical care. The police would set up a tripod camera outside funerals, to record the associates of young men murdered on the streets. The local police, the ATF, the FBI, and the U.S. Marshals Service all had special warrant units, using computer-mapping software, cell-phone tracking, and intelligence from every conceivable database: Social Security records, court records, hospital admission records, electricity and gas bills, and employment records. “You hear them coming, that's it, you gone,” Chuck tells his little brother. “Period. 'Cause whoever they looking for, even if it's not you, nine times out of ten they'll probably book you.” Goffman sometimes saw young children playing the age-old game of cops and robbers in the street, only the child acting the part of the robber wouldn't even bother to run away:

I saw children give up running and simply stick their hands behind their back, as if in handcuffs; push their body up against a car without being asked; or lie flat on the ground and put their hands over their head. The children yelled, “I'm going to lock you up! I'm going to lock you up, and you ain't never coming home!” I once saw a six-year-old pull another child's pants down to do a “cavity search.”

When read alongside Ianni, what is striking about Goffman's book is not the cultural difference between being an Italian thug in the early part of the twentieth century and being an African American thug today. It's the role of law enforcement in each era. Chuck's high school education ended prematurely after he was convicted of aggravated assault in a schoolyard fight. Another boy called Chuck's mother a crack whore, and he pushed his antagonist's face into the snow. In a previous generation, this dispute would not have ended up in the legal system. Until the 1970s, outstanding warrants in the city of Philadelphia were handled by a two-man team, who would sit in an office during the evening hours and make telephone calls to the homes of people on their list. Anyone stopped by the police could show a fake ID. Today there are computers and sometimes even fingerprint machines in squad cars. Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost 70 percent.

In the previous era, according to Goffman, the police “turned a fairly blind eye” to prostitution, drug dealing, and gambling in poor black neighborhoods. But in the late 1980s, she writes, “corruption seems to have been largely eliminated as a general practice, at least in the sense of people working at the lower levels of the drug trade paying the police to leave them in peace.”

The Lupollos, of course, routinely paid the police to leave them in peace, as did the other crime families of their day. They got the benefit of law enforcement's “blind eye.” Ianni observed that in Giuseppe's lifetime, “no immediate member of the Lupollo clan had ever been arrested.” Uncle Phil hung out in Washington, in a blue suit. “I have met judges, commissioners, members of federal regulatory bodies, and congressmen socially when I have been with Phil Alcamo,” Ianni wrote. At such meetings, “Phil openly discusses the needs of the family where government is concerned and often asks for advice or favors. He also suggests favorable business investments or land-purchase opportunities and will ‘put someone in touch with someone who can do something for them.'” Apparently no one in Washington during that period found anything unusual about a Mafia capo openly discussing “the needs of the family where government is concerned” and suggesting “favorable business investments” for the politicians and regulators whom he was lobbying.

The Federal Witness Protection Program did not yet exist; federal wiretaps weren't admissible in court. Only the FBI was properly equipped to tackle organized crime, and under J. Edgar Hoover the Bureau saw targeting communism and political subversion as its primary mandate. “As late as 1959, the FBI's New York field office had only 10 agents assigned to organized crime compared to over one hundred and forty agents pursuing a dwindling population of Communists,” the attorney C. Alexander Hortis writes, in
The Mob and the City.
In the unlikely event that a mobster was arrested, Hortis points out, he could expect to walk. Between 1960 and 1970, 44 percent of indictments of organized crime figures in courts around New York City were dismissed before trial. In that same ten-year period, 536 mobsters were arrested on felony charges, but only 37 ended up in prison.

Hortis retells the story of the famous Apalachin incident, in 1957, when several dozen mobsters from around the country gathered at the upstate New York property of Joseph Barbara, Sr., for a weekend retreat. The get-together was broken up by the police. Some of the mobsters ran into the surrounding woods—and the resulting arrests led to congressional hearings and headlines. How did this happen? By chance, a detective ran into Barbara's son at a local motel and eavesdropped on his conversation. He drove by the Barbara estate, saw lots of fancy cars, ran their plates, and called in reinforcements. The subsequent grand jury investigation, Hortis says, was a “farce.” One mobster claimed that he had dropped in while on an olive oil sales trip. Another said that he had had car trouble. A third said that he had heard there was free food. Twenty mobsters were convicted on conspiracy charges, and all twenty convictions were reversed on appeal.

That's why the crooked ladder worked as well as it did. The granddaughter could end up riding horses because the law—whether from indifference, incompetence, or corruption—left her gangster grandfather alone.

The idea that in the course of a few generations the gangster can give way to an equestrian is perhaps the hardest part of the innovation argument to accept. We have become convinced of the opposite trajectory: the benign low-level drug dealer becomes the malignant distributor and then the brutal drug lord. The blanket policing imposed on 6th Street is justified by the idea that, left unchecked, Mike and Chuck will get worse. Their delinquency will metastasize. The crooked-ladder theorists looked at the Mafia's evolution during the course of the twentieth century, however, and reached the opposite conclusion: that over time, the criminal vocation was inevitably domesticated.