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.
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It was a new form of cooperation in the underworld, and although it hardly worked to perfection at all times, mobsters came to appreciate the concept. Thus disparate 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.
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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 outnumbered 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.
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Typical of this Jewish-Italian cooperation was the composition of the national syndicate's infamous enforcement arm, Murder, Incorporatedabout 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.
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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.
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The Jewish mobsters showed no need for such a structure and indeed felt little loyalty to their own 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, they dissolved their operations (or turned them over to local mafiosi) and moved on. The Mafia could hardly transfer its entire operation in such a manner. The very structure of the organization kept them tied to a geographical sphere of operation.
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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 or 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 than 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.
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We understand very little about the Mafia and are misled by a great number of mythsthat 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 its strength and ability to renew itself.
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Organized crime developed in America as a pure aberration, something new on the world scenenot even seen in Sicily, the birthplace of the Mafia. There were three fundamental reasons for the genesis of organized crime in the 1920s and its continuing growthProhibition, the Great Depression and J. Edgar Hoover.
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