proceeded in the normal fashion: An ethnic group occupies the ghettos, produces crime, matures and moves up the social ladder at least to the extent of turning over the bottom rung to the next ethnic minority. The Irish were succeeded in close proximity by the Jews and the Italians, who became the criminals of their day, as in lesser numbers did the Poles and Russians and others.
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By logical progression the Jews and Italians should have moved away from crime. Indeed before the start of World War I, the 1,500-member, Jewish Monk Eastman Gang and the like-numbered Italian Five Points Gang under Paul Kelly (Paolo Vaccarelli) both had splintered. Both groups had been abandoned by the political machines who understood that their use of the gangs was ending under the cutting edge of reform. There simply were no more prospects for such huge organized gangs.
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America's entry into the war contributed further to the destruction of the gangs. We should have entered the post-war period with no more than the usual and temporary outbreaks of violence caused by returning soldiers. Instead, within a short time Prohibition lay heavy on the land.
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Great new criminal vistas opened. Americans had no intention of being deprived of beer and booze, and the Jewish and Italian gangsters had a great rebirtheven the Irish staged a big comeback. The 1920s, when the Jewish and Italians should have been tapering off on their criminal activities, saw them instead expanding. Money poured in so fast that the criminals no longer needed to curry favor with the politicians. They did, in fact, buy the politicians in a unique reversal of the normal arrangement.
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The Italians and Jews combined forces at a new and previously unheard of level of organized crimeafter a series of wars eliminated those who resisted syndication. Infusing this new criminal combination was a steady supply of young blood. The Depression of the 1930s froze the ethnic groups in their ghettos. It was perhaps the deepest and most severe economic crisis to afflict the nation, and many youngsters, lacking special talents or abilities, were forced into crime. They were eager to "make it with the mob."
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Coupled with these two favorable factors for the new crime syndicate was the lack of police repression. In many cities the syndicate had little trouble buying off the police just as it bought off the politicians. The only hope lay on the federal level and here, incredibly, nothing happened. Through the 1930s and, indeed, for the next two decades the federal government did nothing to curb syndicate crime. The FBI was muzzled by its director, J. Edgar Hoover, who refused even to acknowledge the existence of either the Mafia or organized crime in any way, shape or form.
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During the lost years the structure of organized crime solidified to the extent that the demise of any of its players has now become meaningless. The system continues.
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Some analysts, failing to appreciate the uniquely favorable climate that gave birth to the
American
Mafia and the national crime syndicate, have seen the normal criminal development by the now ghettoized blacks and Hispanics as an indication that they will step into power in syndicate crime. But such organized crime is based on a sophistication that does not come to any criminal ethnic group in a single generation. It must be remembered that the Italian mobsters of 1920 were little more than illiterate, hulking, Black Hand-type extortionists whose appreciation of criminal activities was limited to crude shakedowns and murder. It took the schooling of the bootleg years, the forced transition to more advanced crimes after Repeal; gambling, not just to numbers, but legalized casino operations and the sophisticated principles of the skim; the laundering of money, the use of Swiss banks, the infiltration of the banking and business system, the looting of pension funds through well-papered transactions.
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Yet the exponents of the Black Mafia in the mid-1970s were talking about a decade that would show huge strides forward for the Black Mafia. It has not happened and if it were to happenand given the lack of very powerful social and economic events, it cannota logical guess would be the rise of a Black Mafia by the 2050s.
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The "Bible" of the Black Mafia theory is
Black Mafia, Ethnic Succession in Organized Crime
by Francis A. J. Ianni. While an exceedingly informative and colorful portrayal, the book can't help but go far to demonstrate against the author's very contention. What Ianni calls a Black Mafia, as organized-crime authority Gus Tyler notes, "consists of a pimp with a stable of seven hookers, a dope pusher, a fence who dabbles in loan sharking and gambling, a con man who gets phony insurance policies for gypsy cabs and a numbers racketeer." Tyler grants these activities are organized but ''they are not in a class with white organized crime either qualitatively or quantitatively" and don't conclusively support a theory of "ethnic succession."
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It may well be that talk of a Black Mafia or a Cuban Mafia merely makes an excellent cover story for the Mafia and its syndicate mobsters, who in the meantime claim to be "going legit."
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Ianni is very impressed with the comments of one Italian crime family leader: "... what the Hell, those guys want to make a little, too. We're moving out and they're moving in. I guess it's their turn now." Such a high-flown philosophical attitude is remarkable within an underworld that maimed and murdered in wholesale
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