The Origin of Organized Crime in America

The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931

David Critchley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781135854928
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

While the later history of the New York Mafia has received extensive attention, what has been conspicuously absent until now is an accurate and conversant review of the formative years of Mafia organizational growth. David Critchley examines the Mafia recruitment process, relations with Mafias in Sicily, the role of non-Sicilians in New York's organized crime Families, kinship connections, the Black Hand, the impact of Prohibition, and allegations that a "new" Mafia was created in 1931. This book will interest Historians, Criminologists, and anyone fascinated by the American Mafia.

1
Introduction

This is far from the first book covering organized crime and the Italian-American Mafia¹ in New York City before the 1940s. Journalists writing long after the events depicted have had a free hand to write stories that inflate the Mafia peril. Under the headline “The Conglomerate of Crime,” for example, Time magazine in 1969 declared, “The biggest and most important truth is that La Cosa Nostra and the many satellite elements that constitute organized crime are big and powerful enough to affect the quality of American life.”²

Forbes alerted its readers, “Organized crime’s profits—some $50 billion a year—are in a class by themselves.”³ Such sources have, in the absence of critical historical research, formed the empirical foundation of much of the current historiography.

Off-the-shelf narratives of colorful New York crime figures of the stripe of Arnold Rothstein, Frank Costello and Lucky Luciano are much the most popular form of propagation of this history. They frequently trade mass-market sales for lack of context, repetition, and a cavalier attitude towards precision and verification. But with few exceptions, social scientists and researchers have avoided the field of empirical research into American Mafia organizational structure and composition. Left unanswered are a number of important questions.

New York City’s organized crime “Families” that America’s governments, since the 1950s, have spent so much time and manpower fighting are the direct successors to the Mafia constructions attended to in this book. But what has been strikingly absent is a fresh look at this history, systematically marshalling the full range of resources presently available in order to interrogate benchmark accounts.

Because “real life” cases have informed the theoretical proposals and are frequently used for illustrative purposes by scholars, they are included here where appropriate. Easily overlooked, in addition, is the inescapable fact that journalists have been by far the most active in attempting to chronicle this history. Texts “of varying quality,” Jacobs revealed, are “typically the only readily available account of various events and personalities.”⁴

The book charts the growth of New York City Italian-American Mafias between 1891 and 1931 within the framework of a dispersed, and in large measure restrictive Italian-American criminal underworld. Reports that a far more dangerous creature emerged in 1931, La Cosa Nostra (LCN), are explored and counterposed against earlier forms of Mafia organization, principally those centered on New York City.

A misleading historiography of the formative organization of New York City Mafia crime has arguably distorted governmental priorities, diverting scarce resources to fight a largely mythical foe utilizing tools that threaten civil liberties and democratic accountability, but which have had a wide appeal in Western Europe. According to Alexander and Caiden, “Laws continue to be framed with the Mafia mystique in mind.”⁵ Fijnaut and Paoli among others argue that European governments have blithely accepted an alarmist history of the U.S. experience of Mafias in order to frame domestic legislation “towards the suppression of this particular type of crime.”⁶ Block and Chambliss referred to “the Al Capone or gangster imagery” as having “a rather perverse effect on European scholarship.”⁶ “This conception of organized crime,” Paoli contended, “has been imported into Europe, with particular success in those countries with little or no direct experience of the mafia phenomenon.”⁷ The strategic danger from contemporary organized crime has also been contrasted against a history of the U.S. Mafia’s evolution that embodies caricatures and exaggerations.

Material collected for this book suggests that New York City’s Mafias were localized and diffuse in their procesess and structure, and that ties to other U.S. Mafia groups were loosely defined and operationally devolved. No single line of development uniting Mafia groups was discernible beyond the need at the enterprise level to respond in comparable ways to market conditions.

Nonetheless, in major East Coast cities such as Buffalo, Philadelphia, and New York City, similar organizational forms, means of adjusting disputes and admission rituals were noticeable, suggesting a common historical root in Sicily. In other U.S. locales, the “Sicilian” effect was weaker.

One type of Mafia historiography proven especially influential detects U.S. organized crime history as moving through successive evolutionary stages towards a single destination. The credibility of the approach depended on the writer in question lumping together disparate time frames, cities and organizations in order to fit a preconceived pattern at the cost of denying the reality of innumerable variations that spoiled the resulting explanatory norm.⁸

PERSPECTIVES ON MAFIA ORGANIZATIONS

Cressey’s concern in 1969 was that organized criminals were “gradually but inexorably stealing our nation.”⁹ Underpinning his hypothesis was the supposition that American Mafias were enough alike in their goals, lines of authority and communication systems to permit a unity of purpose and action. Within this scenario, the LCN became part of a single nationwide conspiracy, a view that continues to carry considerable weight outside of academia.¹⁰ But concrete evidence for the thesis remains elusive.

The previous view (more evident in Italy than in America) of the Mafia as a “state of mind” rather than as a structured set of organizations¹¹ was shattered by pentito Tommaso Buscetta with respect to Sicily in 1984, when he detailed a set of powerful “Cosa Nostra” (“Our Thing”) criminal syndicates that he and others belonged to. Subsequent Sicilian cooperating witnesses¹² have confirmed Buscetta’s seminal description, which matched the data released in America years earlier.

In the United States, statements casting the Mafia as a menace to national security were a recurrent theme but lacked factual support. They were nonetheless given official sanction by the Kefauver Committee in 1951 and through periodical pronouncements made by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN), which had chased Italian narcotics traffickers since the 1930s.¹³

The discovery of several dozen Italians at the Apalachin, upstate New York, estate of Joseph Barbara Sr., in November 1957, ignited a national debate. Through its post-Apalachin “strategic intelligence” gathering operations, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) uncovered the specifics of several of the larger Mafia formations, and learned of the existence of the “Commission” which is addressed in Chapter 8.¹⁴

During the latter part of 1962, a federal inmate convicted of heroin trafficking, Joseph Valachi, began to talk to the FBN and later to the FBI about the inner workings of the New York City Mafia as he knew it as a Genovese organized crime Family “soldier.” Valachi’s 1963 recollections before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as they were construed, formed the empirical basis for subsequently devised models.

Valachi was judged by the Subcommittee in its 1965 report to have exposed “the reality of organized crime.”¹⁵ The “alien conspiracy” case that emerged from this interpretation reflected central assumptions made in the 1950s, tracing the evolution of American Cosa Nostra organizations from Mafia infested towns and villages of rural Sicily where it functioned as a “terrorist society.”¹⁶

An unambiguous thread of understanding led from the discovery of the Apalachin meeting, to Valachi’s recollections, to the passage of contentious anti-racketeering laws after 1970. A version of Valachi’s testimony as specifying a centralized, rigidly hierarchical, and monolithic criminal empire run by Italians, stood as the framework used to explain the former, and gave a reason why the latter measures were justified.

But intelligence data publicly surfacing from 1969 cast doubt upon the perspective. Primarily the result of prolonged FBI surveillance work, a reasonably consistent picture emerged which was at odds with the interpretation favored in political and media circles after Valachi’s testimony. The released information made no mention of a nationwide conspiracy. Instead, it indicated a fragmentation of structure with no overarching control system apparent. Businesses connected to Mafia members tended towards a modesty of scale, whether operating in the licit or illicit spheres.¹⁷

Notwithstanding signs of a shift in the historiography attempting to take into account the revelations, no study has yet related the discourse to the history of Mafia organization in that most influential site of activities, in the five boroughs of New York City. Perhaps because of a misguided perception of the difficulty of the task, the formative years of Mafia evolution in New York have failed to elicit sufficient attention, in spite of their importance.

TIME FRAME CHOSEN

The selection of 1931 as the end point for the volume reflected suppositions about the manner in which Mafia groups emerged into a dominating force by means of the La Cosa Nostra, instituted according to legend in 1931. Anchored to the LCN agenda was the “Americanization” proposal that referred to the same events and that remains a principal explanation of change at the leadership level. But neither the LCN approach, nor the Americanization proposal, is empirically sustainable.

Subtopics influenced by the LCN and “Americanization” hypotheses include relations between the U.S. Mafia and the Black Hand (Chapter 2), interactions with Sicilian Mafias (Chapter 3), U.S. recruitment practices (Chapter 4), and the admission of non-Sicilian Italians into the New York City Families (Chapters 5 and 8). The implications for existing theory are summarized and assessed within each chapter.

NEW YORK CITY

New York was, over the period 1890 to 1931, the biggest American city with the greatest number of Italian immigrant residents. Between 1901 and 1913, “a little less than a quarter” of Sicily’s population departed for America, most living in New York for a time if not setting up permanent residence there.¹⁸ Nelli calculated that “In the years before World War I, New York housed more Italians than Florence, Venice and Genoa combined.”¹⁹

How the American Mafia phenomenon has been depicted is heavily attuned to the professed experience of Mafia groups in New York City. “Out of town” police witnesses before the 1963 “Valachi Hearings” for example felt a continuous need to refer to their “own” crime syndicates in ways that matched in their form New York City’s Mafias as they were believed to function and to organize.²⁰

The application to other cities of “titles” and of an organizational structure mainly found within the New York Mafia, together with the LCN approach— based on a New York City Mafia history—have slanted the record. New York City has housed the largest number of American men of honor,²¹ who have functioned as a reference point for lesser Mafia organizations.

A comprehensive and accurate exposition of the city’s history is therefore esse...

Table of contents

• Routledge Advances in American History
• Contents
• Photographs
• Charts
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Black Hand, Calabrians, and the Mafia
• 3 “First Family” of the New York Mafia
• 4 The Mafia and the Baff Murder
• 5 The Neapolitan Challenge
• 6 New York City in the 1920s
• 7 Castellammare War and “La Cosa Nostra”
• 8 Americanization and the Families
• 9 Localism, Tradition, and Innovation
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• About the Author
• Index