SEMPRE AVANTI - JUNE 2005 COLUMN WORD COUNT: 1,122 THE TRUTH ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME By Dona De Sanctis How many Italian Americans have ever been on the FBI s Most Wanted List? I raised that question recently with some friends when the conversation got around to stereotyping. Most of them, including several Italian Americans, didn t believe my theory that television and the movies shape the average person s perception of Italian Americans. To prove my point, I asked everyone to guess what percentage of the names on the FBI s Most Wanted List have been Italian since the list began in 1950. Their estimates ranged from 30 percent to 70 percent. The correct answer is five percent. In fact, only 26 names on the list of nearly 500 fugitives over the past 55 years have been Italian. Why did they think the number was so much higher? AN ALIEN CONSPIRACY No doubt their immediate connection of Italian Americans with crime is due to the stereotypes offered up by the U.S. entertainment industry, but the roots go further back in American history to a popular theory in criminology called the alien conspiracy. 1
According to this theory, organized crime began in Sicily in the 1860 s and was imported to America with the Great Migration that brought an estimated 5 million Italian immigrants to America between 1880 and 1923. The alien conspiracy theory also proposes that U.S. organized crime is made up of 25 or so Italian crime families that have divided the country into different geographical areas or fiefdoms that they control. These include the West Coast with Las Vegas; the Mid-West with Chicago, Cleveland and St. Louis and the East Coast with New York, Philadelphia and Boston, among others. Many scholars of criminology, however, believe the alien conspiracy theory is an oversimplification of the very complex and multi-ethnic nature of crime, according to Michael Lyman and Gary Potter in their exhaustive study, Organized Crime. For one, crime experts point out that virtually every large American city had welldeveloped organized crime syndicates long before the first wave of Italian immigrants hit these shores at the turn of the last century. They also note that during the 20 th century, organized crime bosses included many Irish, Polish, Russian and Jewish immigrants and their children, who, along with Italian hoodlums, built empires based on organized crime. ORGANIZED CRIME = MAFIA The federal government and principally the FBI have used this alien conspiracy theory to impress the general public and especially those political leaders who control law enforcement budgets and regulate police powers that it is doing its job in investigating, arresting and incarcerating dangerous criminals. Labeling organized crime as Italian-based and Mafia helped enormously. 2
This equation of Organized Crime = Mafia gained even greater national prominence in 1950 with the notorious Kefauver Committee hearings on organized crime, which were televised. Despite any direct evidence, the committee concluded that an international criminal conspiracy from Sicily, called the Mafia was solely responsible for organized crime in the United States. The Kefauver Committee s findings have long been discredited, but they have left their mark on the American psyche. Their influence is especially notable in the national news media which for years has put an Italian face on crime with its sensationalized coverage of organized crime as strictly a Mafia affair. The reason is simple: the Mafia sells newspapers and attracts large television viewing audiences because Americans are fascinated by this secret society. With discouraging regularity, for example, the New York Times runs stories about aging Italian American mobsters on page one above the fold while television news programs offer up retrospectives on John Gotti or Joe Adonis especially on Columbus Day. As a result, many public perceptions of organized crime have been skewed toward the belief that it is solely an Italian American phenomenon, Lyman and Potter conclude. The result of this over-simplification is that Al Capone s name is as familiar today as it was 58 years ago when he died in 1947, while scarcely anyone has ever heard of Capone s contemporaries Arnold Rothstein, whom many consider the true father of 3
organized crime; Charles King Solomon, who ruled in Boston or Morris Kleinmann, who led the Cleveland mob. Teen-agers today know the names of Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gambino and Vito Genovese, but ask them who was Meyer Lansky, Legs Diamond, Bugsy Moran or Dutch Schultz and you will be met with blank stares. Thanks to Hollywood and television, kids know all about the fictitious rituals of the Mafia, but nothing about the practices of the very real enforcement arm of organized crime called Murder, Inc., founded by Lansky and his pal Bugsy Siegel and made up of professional killers who traveled the country murdering total strangers on orders from crime bosses from the 1920 s through the 1940 s. Even fewer people have heard of Pablo Escobar, co-founder of Colombia s Medellin Cartel or know anything about the new generation of mobsters. As William Kleinknecht points out in his book, The New Ethnic Mobs a wave of new ethnic crime groups has diluted the power of the Mafia over the last two decades and revolutionized organized crime. These include the Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Hispanic, Jamaican and African American syndicates that thrive in U.S. cities and suburbs coast to coast while Mafia legends like John Gotti and Carlo Gambino lie in their graves and their successors are hemorrhaging power. CONCLUSION No one would dispute that Italian Americans participated in organized crime. Like families, every ethnic, racial and religious group has its black sheep, but the actual 4
number of Italian Americans in crime syndicates past and present is much smaller than the public s perception. The U.S. Justice Department, for example, estimates that about 5,000 people currently belong to organized crime syndicates in the United States. Even if all 5,000 were of Italian descent, that percentage would constitute.0025 percent of all the Italian Americans less than one quarter of one percent. Clearly, gangsters of Italian heritage have been given too much credit for putting the organization in organized crime. This misperception has tarred the image of an estimated 26 million men and women of Italian heritage in the United States. When I asked that same group of friends what percentage of Italian Americans in the work force today were educated professionals in such white collar jobs as corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, teachers and administrators, they estimated 10 to 20 percent. The real figure, according to the U.S. Census Bureau is 66 percent. Why didn t they guess that? Dona De Sanctis, Ph.D., is deputy executive director of the Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA), the oldest and largest national organization in the U.S. for men and women of Italian heritage. Contact her at ddesanctis@osia.org or call (202) 547-2900. 5