obligation to handle matters within their territory for other gangsup to and including murders. Such rules, discussed in detail in the "Mafia" entry, were not restricted, in the new picture, to the Italian criminal gangs. For example, the Jewish Purple Mob in Detroit handled assignments in its area for the Capone Mob, and if it needed certain chores taken care of in Cleveland it could rely on the Jewish mobsters under Moe Dalitz or his Mafia allies in the Mayfield Road Mob.
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After 1920, in a stunning development, the ethnic criminals of the daythe Italians and Jews (as it happens, the successors to the Irish in the criminal breeding grounds of the ghettos)were catapulted to new heights of power, accumulating such great wealth that they were no longer the lackeys of the political bosses and their police puppets but rather the new masters. Indeed, Prohibition created something very new in historythe millionaire criminal, the beneficiary of bootlegging.
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By the early 1930s a purge within organized crime had eliminated the less foresighted among the vastly enriched criminal leaders. The two most important criminals of the dayLucky Luciano, Sicilian-born, and Meyer Lansky, a Polish-born Jew, but both Americans to the coresuccessfully unified the great criminal gangs into a vast national crime syndicate. It was they who set up a board of directors of organized crime, who apportioned territories and rights and duties among the gangs, and who even set up an enforcement arm that was to become known as Murder, Incorporated.
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Still, the end of Prohibition could have spelled the end to organized crime in America but for the Depression and the law (or frequent lack in enforcement thereof). The syndicate had become so rich it could suffer through some lean Depression years as it moved into other rackets. But, perhaps more important, the economic climate itself helped the organization achieve stability. With Repeal the Italians and Jews should have reverted to their prior condition as ethnics about to step out from the ghettos, but the Great Depression froze these groups in place. Only those talented in the entertainment and sports worlds, and a few through better education, could avoid the realities of a battered economic system. Most youths were trapped in the ghettos and for them the only avenue of escape was crime. Thus organized crime had a steady supply of new recruits from its own ethnic ranks. This allowed organized crime to further sophisticate its own appreciation and understanding of crime.
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The wisecracking, loud-dressing, obscene and violent criminals of the 1920s did not disappear but more and more became the followers of more intelligent criminal leaders. Meyer Lansky saw the potentials in new rackets; Luciano had a superb ability to activate such plans. And Frank Costello, Longy Zwillman and others knew how to corrupt a political system to achieve substantial non-interference by the law.
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Ironically, some elements of the law itself cooperated, remarkably, without prompting and without bribery. The national syndicate came into being because it had no problem corrupting the criminal justice system on a local or often a statewide basis. And as its tentacles lengthened nationally, it felt little resistance from the federal government. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics had only its one sphere of interest. What was required was the energetic employment of the Federal Bureau of Investigation to battle organized crime, especially in the infancy of the national crime syndicate. However, under the ironfisted rule of J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI was nowhere to be found, and it would remain in the main outside the fray for some three and a half decadesan astonishing period of malfeasance (or nonfeasance) in leadership with tragic consequences (see J. Edgar Hoover entry).
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Thus Prohibition, the Depression and the invisible Mr. Hoover were all midwives in the birth and nurturing of organized crime in America.
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Aiding this growth was a lack of scholarly study and hence understanding of organized crime and particularly of the Mafia's role within the syndicate. Yet scholars had good reason to be faint-hearted since their knowledge of organized crime was culled heavily, as one researcher put it, from "unsubstantiated accounts of informers or the ideological preoccupations of law enforcement agencies.'' Predictably, journalistic accounts often extended into the sensational, with false "facts" introduced for want of fresh angles. Sociologists John E Galliher and James A. Cain noted (
American Sociologist
, May 1974): "There are two troublesome aspects to this reliance on such sources, one empirical, the other political. In arriving at conclusions and statements of fact, the journalist or political investigator is not bound by the canons of scientific investigation as is the social scientist." Still other researchers were frightened off by the realization that their findings might smack of reactionary ethnic bias. Thus most scholars gravitated to a line that one hard-bitten journalist refers to disdainfully as the "there-ain't-no-Mafia school of thought no matter how many corpses litter the streets."
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Proponents of the theory that the Mafia is but legend or myth had their heyday in the early 1970s. Some used what can only be described as empirical trivia to "prove" that not only was there no American Mafia but also that there never was one in Sicily. It would take another volume to refute all their claims and sort out all their terms, but history has in its own way resolved the problem. It is now impossiblewith the wealth of
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