Mafia in America from Alexander Hamilton
to Richard Nixon

 

 

In 1954, a free-lance writer from an American magazine came to Racalmuto in Sicily and spoke to Rafaeli about the mafia. The writer was nervous about being in mafia country. Rafaeli, whose tailor shop then was the center of intellectual life of a town in sulphur-mining country, was a man of great wit and a practiced tease, at times boarding on the cruel.

When the writer asked about the mafia, Rafaeli looked at me and, with a gleam in his eye, said in Sicilian, “Ci lu facemu a chistu?” [Shall we put it to this guy?”].

Then, in a voice which seemed to mock all authority, but his own, he said, “Tell him it is no longer called ‘mafia’ here. These men, their friendship is recognized by the fact that they eat minestra together. They are known as amici di minestra.” I ex­plained this to the writer who noted it down dutifully.

Years later, in a scholarly work taken seriously by the aca­demic community in America, one writer came up with still an­other name of mafia: amici di lasagna, companions of the order of lasagna. Rafaeli’s joke had taken hold. The friends of mine­stra had become companions of lasagna! (Blok 1).

Mafia has captured the imagination of the Western World, and an image of appealing (and at the same time repelling) crim­inality that distorts reality has been created. Simply to speak of crime and Sicilians is to add to the distorted vision of life of a people.

Sociologists, journalists, hack writers (in the good sense that they can write on any subject), and anthropologists have all plunged so deeply into the subject that, like some German histo­rians of the nineteenth century, they have muddied the waters forever.

Web upon web of theories have been spun over the years from visceral sources of American thinking, that depict Sicilians as having unique criminal qualities. The psyches of Sicilians have been laid out and rummaged through on both sides of the Atlantic until time has encrusted words with such meaning that people who first used them would never recognize. It is difficult today to speak of Don Baldassare, my grandfather, and evoke a man of some accomplishment, a certain aisence in living, a status, a well-being. One can hardly say he was “a good family man” who looked after his children and his relatives, let alone say he was a man whose very stature and presence called for respect. These words, Don, family, respect, have been so debased when speaking of Sicilians that they can no longer be used to describe early im­migrants or their children.

The distortion of these words makes one look back to the 1920s and see this period as crucial to the development of Sicilian (and other immigrant) criminality, overlooking in one’s haste what was really essential to the development of this criminality; i.e. the movement from a humanistic anarchism of men like Sacco and Vanzetti to the criminality of such men as Luciano and Capone. It may not have been the Volstead Act alone that caused the flowering of criminality.

The Sacco and Vanzetti execution (which overshadows and hides from history the Italian-American anarchist movement) was a crossroad for the pragmatic Sicilians, much like the Rosenberg executions were for the radicals of all varieties in the 1950s. The Italian American was made to understand that to take the route of political activity as he saw it meant being martyred. Taking the road of crime, however, meant adoration, glory, and success, American style. The Italian applied all his bravery, courage, and warrior viciousness so admired by Western society to achieving this success. It helps explain why at heart many Americans admire the image of the mafia. The image is deeply rooted in American values and history.

To speak of a history of mafia from Alexander Hamilton to Richard Nixon is not Sicilian mockery; it is simply to note its deep roots in American culture and aspirations. It also helps one understand why in all the countries where Sicilians have mi­grated it is only in America that this mafia has flourished. The roots of the mafia run vien-like through the age-old struggle be­tween Hamiltonian cunning and Jeffersonian libertarianism. Those Sicilians who sided, or would have sided, with Jefferso­nian principles were assassinated along with Sacco and Van­zetti. Those who noted this chose Hamiltonian cunning and joined organized crime which already existed and flourished in urban America.

It is no accident that American anarchists have seen Alexan­der Hamilton as their enemy for generations. In 1902 anarchist, Moses Harman, wrote:

 

Hamilton foresaw that this Constitution could and would be made the shelter and shield behind which the forces of aristocracy, of monarchy, of militarism and imperialism could establish and entrench themselves, and thus would be gained by strategy the advantages that could not be achieved by frank and open avowal.

 

No better definition of the mafia has ever been written. For this reason Mafia constitutes an aristocracy of an elite group of men honored by underlings, respected by the masses. It relies not on reason but on force to maintain its privilege within the law and order it creates. Mafia relies on the complete domination of oth­ers—emotionally, socially, economically, spiritually—which is another way of defining Imperialism. All this is achieved through guile: We help keep society together—we help the de­serving poor, those in trouble.

Giovanni Spagnuolo, a Sicilian observer, finds the origins of the mafia in Phoenician-Carthaginian antiquity with its morbid exasperated sense of individualism which “has as its principal human value to dominate others by any means possible, even the worst of crimes, with extreme courage and exceptional disregard of life”—an apt description of the character of Hamilton who was killed in a duel; more applicable, too, to those who followed and spoke of infinite free enterprise with Darwinian disregard of life, even their own. Spagnuolo would also write of mafia values: “Life of the body does not count or counts for little before that which is the true life, the true humanity of the self, in the over­coming of all limits in infinite liberty.” One might quickly add that the infinite liberty of one demands the infinite slavery of others; if the Marquis de Sade taught us anything, he taught us this. What is implied in “infinite liberty” is the mafia value that human life be sacrificed to individualism.

Anarchists have been pointing out for generations that Hamilton and his followers have institutionalized this concept in the state. Voltairine de Cleyre, a libertarian ex-nun, devoted servant of the poor, put it this way in 1900:

 

Crime is not a thing-in-itself, not a plant without roots. . . . Where law supports a particular class of people in demanding tribute from the rest, it is inevitable, that who are deprived, will emulate the actions of their op­pressors.

 

She saw Hamilton as the founder of this institution, Hamil­ton who made finance appear complex so that the average man and woman upon whom the system rests were unable to under­stand how it functioned. She blamed the mutual corruption and desire for plunder of the times on Hamilton’s “logical mind.”[1]

Napoleon Colajanni, the Sicilian Socialist and student of mafia values, saw this also and came to this conclusion:

 

To combat and destroy the reign of the mafia it is necessary and indispensable that the Italian government stop being the king of the mafia. But it has taken a great haste to make use of its dishonest and illicit power; it is too im­mersed in evil. We reduced to destroying the state if we want to destroy the mafia. (Loschiavo 42)

 

And this was in 1896.

Hamilton’s cunning was in creating a way of life in which men with feudal aristocratic values could live and rule in a “democratic” society. His efforts set the pattern, “to gain by strategy that which could not be achieved by frank avowal.” Those who followed and would control America in his image first called themselves “republican” and then ruled behind symbols. The symbols might be a Ulysses S. Grant or a Warren G. Harding, a Dwight D. Eisenhower, or a Roland Reagan. When men could not be symbols or shields, they came to power with false issues such as anti-Communism or, as in the case of Richard Nixon, the shield of the Vietnam War.

“The new Federalism,” Harman wrote in 1899, “was in reality a Feudalism which far from being the extension of democracy . . . was actually the introduction of a system of corporate capitalism which would serve to enslave the American people.”

Mafia in Sicily was rooted in Feudalism, and its history is also one of creating new images behind which it could maintain its power. This reality of the mafia whereby political power is tied to criminal power in the most intimate ways—politics, unions, government, religion, and vices—is in America covered by a romantic notion; that is, it is portrayed as the privileged would like it to be rather than what it is.

The screening of The Godfather perhaps best depicts this. An elderly Jewish woman watching the film was confused. She did not quite understand what all the killing was about and her voice rose in the darkness, “But who’s killing who?” Another voice answered that it was Michael, the son of the Godfather. And the old voice answered in bewilderment and disbelief, “Michael? How can that be? He’s from such a nice family!”

This by way of saying that the mafia fantasy touches the emotional sources that give comfort: loyalty to a group, the tribe, kinships, bravery for the group, even sacrifice of one’s life for the good of others. There is a great audience for this fantasy. Then, too, it is comforting to blame American criminality on others.

Considering the potentially vast audience, it is understand­able that editors and filmmakers have churned out an avalanche of books and films on the mafia. They have become sources of in­come, a prize in the American competitive syndrome. It turned a good writer, weary no doubt of writing for a pittance and good re­views, into a hack writer in the sense that he writes for money only and now receives offers he cannot refuse. In the 1960s every­one began to write and sing about the mafia. Bob Dylan, forever lusting for one more audience, tried to turn Joey Gallo into a mar­tyr in an album called Desire.[2] Journalists searched out the most ignorant of criminals and raised them to heights of stardom, tak­ing their every word as gospel truth. Novelists, law-enforcement agents, and academics were not far behind, using the hack writ­ers as sources for their serious works. It was understandable; there were by-lines to be gained, reviews and Hollywood con­tracts, greater budgets for law-enforcement agencies, and tenure and houses in Santa Barbara by the sea or houses in Vermont for academics.

For the Italian Americans it meant a crippling image in poli­tics, and if they were convicted of crimes, they were sure to get four or five years more, simply because their names sounded Ital­ian. The mafia label was certainly used to destroy the political career of Geraldine Ferraro. Mafia somewhere along the line was put into the competitive machinery ruled over by the great god­dess of free and enterprising success.

This had its counterpart in Italy. All violence and corruption had been blamed on Sicilians, or sometimes Southerners, by the Hamiltonian-inspired North: as if there were nothing wrong with Italian society. The remark made by Lincoln Steffens in 1904 concerning some Americans’ attitudes toward crime could be made of Northern Italy: “The foreign element excuse is one of the hypocritical lies that save us from the clear sight of ourselves” (Steffens 2–3).

In Italy there have been a number of views of mafia which ranged from complete denial to complete acceptance of the Amer­ican view. This last view sees mafia as an organization originat­ing in Sicily for Sicilians only, with secret ceremonies, oaths, and initiations. Its rules are: silence before the law, punishment of traitors, and death if these rules are broken, etc., etc., as Balzac would say.

The Sicilian writer from Racalmuto, Leonardo Sciascia, as ex­cellent a writer as he is, has the tendency to fire a shot even in the most exquisite of his works such as Todo Modo. In the calm, controlled language, he feels obliged to kill someone, as if he could not trust his editors and readers to see value in his works otherwise. It is a great temptation not to make use of this image that distorts and maligns a group of people for one’s own pur­poses; it relieves the writer from the responsibility of creating and maintaining a tension on his own.

Other Sicilian writers, such as Colajanni, took the position that violence and criminality were used in Sicily for centuries to crush revolutionary movements and to “maintain the miserable under the yoke.” The poor were always shown, through the use of violence against them, that revolution would only lead to their destruction, and yet Sicilians have so often rebelled that Marx was prompted to write: “In all of human history no country or no people have suffered such terrible slavery, conquest and foreign oppression for their emancipation than Sicily and the Sicilians.” (qtd. in La Storia 58).

The action and reaction of rebellion and oppression created, among Sicilians, a profound anarchism that often became a polit­ical statement. If a bandit tortured a rich victim by cutting him up and stuffing his wounds with sardi salati (those salted sar­dines which were the monotonous accompaniment to the sulphur miners noon-day bread) this too was a political statement.

In 1894, rebellion came to a head in the famous Fasci Siciliani. The Islanders took the lead in European socialism. For seven months in 1894 Sicily was under martial law imposed by Premier Crispi, a Sicilian himself from Agrigento: people of all classes were arrested and exiled, the press stifled, co-op stores of the poor dissolved, their property seized. Military courts condemned rebels with mock trials. One rebel was brought to trial because the arresting officer had “metaphysical certainty” that he was guilty. Although there was no evidence, he was convicted of “advocating the moral and material emancipation of the labor­ers.” Eventually 1,800 Sicilians were sent to penal exile on the off-shore islands. Forty thousand troops were sent to quell the re­bellion, one soldier for every participant. In many ways—the colonization by the North, its rebellious tradition, from the slave revolts in Roman times to the Fasci, its literary tradition from Empedocles to Luigi Pirandello, Elio Vittorini, Salvatore Quasimodo, and Leonardo Sciascia—Sicily is the Ireland of Italy.

The years after World War I and after World War II labor or­ganizing attempts were put down by the establishment with the open support of mafia; this extra-legal force was used with extra-legal violence. Union organizers could be gunned down, demonstrators machine gunned, and the powers that be could say they had no hand in it; they could even deplore it.

The Sicilian immigrant was instinctively aware of the privi­leged classes’ way of operating. He was not surprised to find the same structure in America. The repression of radical groups, par­ticularly of the Anarchists, confirmed this. The immigrant cer­tainly did not see the conflict stretching back to Gouverneur Mor­ris vs. Tom Paine, or to Hamilton vs. the Rebel Daniel Shay of Massachusetts; but he did see that the American Legion and the KKK in the early part of the century were the same extra-legal source of violence much like the mafia, to be used against the mildest form of rebellion, whether it be of foreigners, anarchists, or freed slaves. The privileged could, like the barons and princes of Sicily, say that they had no hand in it, all in reaping the ben­efits of a cowed radical movement.

After the knowledge of lynchings, the Palmer raids, and the electrocution of Sacco and Vanzetti, who among the Sicilians would be the fool to join any Anarchist, or other radical move­ment, especially a Marxist group which many anarchists saw as tied to the power structure of capitalism, like the tail-side of a coin.

Petrosino, the Italian-American detective killed in Palermo, after all, headed a special force to combat Anarchists and crimi­nals. The children growing up during this period found a double identity crisis; that is, of puberty and the metamorphosis from Sicilian to American. They certainly would not take Sacco and Vanzetti as models of heroes or martyrs. Seeing their parents confused, at times neurotic, they took to the streets. They hung around street corners, joined clubs modeled after the Irish, and soon were in gangs where they found the comfort and strength they could not find in the confused and anxious family. Among the outlaws, the young would eventually be used by the power structure in counter-intelligence, and in war, to commit acts the privileged could disavow.

The men who rose to prominence in crime were nearly all ei­ther born in America or brought here at an early age. Many were not even Sicilian. All of them spent formative years in America. Frank Costello was born in Larapola near Cosenza in Calabria and brought to East 108th Street when he was four. He did not marry into a Sicilian family. He married Loretta Geigeman. Al Capone of Neapolitan parents was born in Brooklyn. Luciano was ten when brought from Sicily to New York and settled around First Avenue and Fourteenth Street in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. He went at school to PS 10 and was noticed be­cause “he was beyond the control of his parents.” “Black Tony” Parmagini of San Francisco was born in 1890 on Telegraph Hill. “Little Man” Marcello was brought to New Orleans when he was eight-months old by a laborer father.

It was in the cities of America that the young blended into a system of criminality woven into American life. New Orleans, a mix of eye-gouging, good old-boy violence, racism, and warrior hoop-la, was a corrupt city long before Sicilian or Italian fish­ermen and laborers came. Yet America’s image of mafia began there.

In the 1880s the crimes in which Sicilians and Italians were involved were of a personal nature. In a card game a man was shot. The coroner’s report tells us death was caused by a knife wound at the base of the head. Fifty years later in a “serious” ar­ticle (in that it appeared in the Louisiana Historical Quarterly of April, 1939) entitled “Who Killa de Chief?” one John Kendall described the incident this way:

 

[someone] crept up behind him and with a razor, at one stroke, very nearly severed his head from his body. . . . The body tumbled into a wagon, hauled to the Canal, and thrown into its muddy water . . . [it was] distinctly a mafia murder. (Kendall 507)

 

In 1972 in an authoritative book, Nicolas Gage turned this mur­der into “the first recorded mafia killing in the United States” (Gage 35). When a Frenchman, Marcel Mangelon, was killed, the newspapers reported him as Manuel Mageloa shot and killed by “unknown Sicilians.” There were dozens of such distortions which became imbedded as “sources” and used as late as 1972 by “investigative reporters” such as Nick Gage of The New York Times.

Yet, in actuality, Sicilians as victims of crime did not fit in with the American view of mafiosi; on the contrary, they re­ported to and cooperated with the police. Nor did they settle ac­counts among themselves any more readily than did other people in New Orleans. On the other hand, the myth of a Sicilian mafia created by the newspapers of New Orleans had drastic consequences for the Italian community there. It led to the lynch­ing of nine men. It was a myth deeply rooted in primeval bigotry. The New Orleans Times Democrat (March 10, 1890) saw Sicilians as people “whose low, receding foreheads, repulsive counte­nances, and slovenly attire, proclaimed their brutal natures.”

It is understandable then, if, when the Police Chief Hennessy, himself as corrupt as any imagined mafioso, was murdered, that everyone went rushing to find the killers among the Sicilians. The Times Democrat turned the affair into a buck-like confronta­tion: “Unless the assassins of Chief Hennessy are captured,” it wrote, “tried and punished, the victory is theirs . . . New Orleans must surrender to the Mafia” (Nelli 51). New Orleans Mayor Shaespeare added, “we must teach these people a lesson they will not forget for all time. What the means are to reach this end, I leave to the wisdom of the council to devise.”[3] Nine­teen Italians were arrested on charges of murder and intent to murder. Nine came to trial in February 1891. The Italian commu­nity could do nothing right in the eyes of the establishment. When the Italian newspapers in New York, Chicago, and other cities raised funds for the defense of the nine, the New Orleans papers trumpeted that money was pouring in from mafia organi­zations throughout the country.

The trial itself presented the jury with 80 witnesses who pro­vided alibis for all of the accused. They were lying, the good cit­izens said. The prosecution’s evidence was shown to be peppered with contradictions, gaps, and inconsistencies; the prosecution’s witnesses were shown to be unreliable; the good citizens over­looked this. The jury deliberated the whole night and in the af­ternoon of the next day found all of the accused not guilty, except for the demented Politz (Polizzi), Scaffidi, and Monasterno. On these last three they could not reach a verdict.

“The jury had been bought,” the newspapers announced. The citizenry of New Orleans was enraged.The impulse for the lynching that followed came from the duly elected officials and the elite of the community. The Mayor called together the Com­mittee of Fifty to “remedy the failure of justice.” He advised them “to come prepared for action.”

Politicians, the Mayor’s own campaign manager, newspaper editors, and corporation lawyers gathered in the streets at the head of a mob estimated to be from 5,000 to 20,000. These leaders of the community made speeches rallying the mob to storm the jail and avenge Hennessy’s death. All the warden and guards did to protect the prisoners was to tell them to hide the best way they could. The mob stormed the prison and the hunt began. Cor­poration lawyers, prominent politicians who had sworn to up­hold the law, good citizens, all hunted down the prisoners and systematically shot and clubbed them to death—eleven in all, including Politz driven mad by the ordeal.

Where did the rage and fury in these respectable men come from? One can sense it, obliquely, in the remarks of those who did the killing: a corporation lawyer wrote after his killing spree, in justification:

 

The Italians, when they had heard of the accused acquit­tal, had torn down the American flag and run up the Ital­ian flag with the stars and stripes beneath it. . . . Sicilians all over the city made the boast, “The mafia is on top now, and it will run the town to suit itself.”[4]

 

After having felt the challenge, met the threat, and having proved himself by killing, one can hear the satisfied male relax­ing in a spasm of satisfaction.

It mattered little that four of the lynched were never impli­cated in Hennessy’s murder, or that Matranga, believed to be the “mafia” leader, had hidden and avoided death. (He later was released and with his wife Hazel Dullentz, lived out his life to age 86 working as a stevedore.) It matters little that the Italians who were beginning to dominate the import-export business lost their businesses to those who did the killing. On the basis of this incident, then, all “serious works” begin the legend of Sicilian mafia in America. It is as if the authors refuse to look over their shoulders to see that the image they created of the mafia was in reality a projection of a system that persisted in most urban American centers.

The New York City of Boss Tweed, decades before the great Sicilian migration of the early twentieth century, was one such system. Elections were fought over with the help of criminal groups, votes were bought, ballot boxes stuffed, voters intimi­dated, beaten, and murdered. The ferocity of the battles re­flected the enormity of the spoils. The victors created jobs in­volving no work and large salaries for the victorious soldiers of the electoral battles. Friends were invited to sue the city and re­ceived huge indemnities for injuries never incurred. The courts were rigged, and the judges received their cut. Within three miles of City Hall were 4,000 “abandoned women.” Next to a school were additional brothels which, if they were raided at all, it was “more for blackmailing purposes” or as a reminder to pay their $600 weekly tribute for police protection. The city had 30,000 professional thieves and 2,000 gambling dens, all tied to the political system. No criminal who befriended a politician went to jail, no matter how violent or terrible the crime.

One Patrick Duffy, who had family ties on the City Council, killed on whim for self-interest without fear of punishment. Without provocation, one day while drunk, he killed a Black man. Friends intervened, and the case never came to trial. Two years later, he nearly killed a sea captain. He was brought to trial and fined six cents by a judge known to his friends. From 1867 to 1870 he killed a gas fitter in front of the Eighth Precinct Sta­tion, a Black barber, and a restaurant owner. He was never brought to trial because the witnesses “disappeared,” and the cases were dismissed. He was rewarded for his activity and was made a member of the General Committee of Tammany Hall. In this capacity he had an occasion to stab a policeman to death. Duffy pleaded guilty and was sentenced to nine years and six months in Sing Sing Prison. Within a year his friends had ob­tained a pardon for him from Governor John Hoffman (see As­bury).

Pat Duffy may have been the extreme, but not the exception. In 1868 it was estimated that 10,000 indictments were quietly pi­geon-holed in New York. One was aware of the pattern which protected the criminal friends of friends. As The New York Times remarked, “a kind of languor steals over the proceedings. . . . The case is never ready for trial, witnesses do not come forth, or dis­appear, and the culprit goes free” (qtd. in Rovere 5).

New York managed to overthrow the Tweed crime “family” but was not capable of preventing new lawlessness. It was as if those who had brought about reform simply wanted power to or­ganize corruption for themselves.

As the early Sicilian immigrants arrived, municipal govern­ments all over America were for sale to the highest bidder. No law was passed or defeated free of charge. There were rates for laws to be passed. When there was opposition, the rates were higher.

In St. Louis, in 1903, any city contract or permit to build a util­ity or a wharf space had to be “paid for” according to a schedule set up by the combine. To be passed, a law giving grants to the Suburban Railway, which thereby increased its value by three to six million dollars, cost $144,000 in bribes.

In face of this in 1969 a Donald Cressey could write of Sicilian criminals; “It is one thing to bribe a policeman . . . but it is an­other thing to dictate the actions of a state legislator or federal congressman or senator. It is one thing to amass a fortune by im­porting narcotics, but it is another thing to use this fortune to buy immunity from prosecution”; and he spoke of Sicilian Americans “who stand in a corner of the establishment, figuratively speak­ing, shifting a gun from pocket to pocket, or fingering a blade of a razor sharp knife . . . men holding knives at the throats of Amer­ican businessmen . . .” etc. (Cressey 161).[5] Such remarks by academic authorities blaming mafia for corrupt police, corrupt unions, corrupt building inspectors, the high price of meat, and inflated doctors’ fees, as if the Sicilians had discovered the um­brella and whoredom, have contributed significantly to the mafia fantasy in America.

If writers such as Cressy would step back in time, the view would become quite different.

Minneapolis, a city where “the New England spirit predomi­nates,” as Lincoln Steffens wrote in 1901, was dominated by a Doctor Ames turned political boss. Upon election, he organized a criminal syndicate to exploit his victory. He called an “Appalachian-style” meeting of his relatives and all the crimi­nal elements in the region. He appointed his brother, Colonel Fred Ames, as police chief and Norman King, a former gambler, Chief of Detectives. King called a second meeting, and the vari­ous criminal activities were systematically divided according to special talents: one was given the gambling dens, another the control of graft and extortion; brothels were set up with a divi­sion of procurer and of administration which saw to it that doc­tors were sent out by the city to “inspect” the women. (This visit soon simply meant that the doctors, friends of Ames, came to col­lect a fee of five to twenty dollars.)

The Chief of Detectives assigned his men to assist and carry out these activities. To facilitate the procedure the force was re-organized. One hundred and seven “unreliable” police were fired. Those who stayed had to pay kick-backs for the privilege. The men new hired also paid. But the rewards were great. Criminals and con-men were let out of prison. New thieves were recruited.

A certain Bill, also known as “Big Mitt” Edwards who testi­fied before a grand jury in exchange for immunity, spoke of the organization as the whole thing, which the immigrants might have translated as la Tutta Cosa. “Big Mitt” told of his en­counter with Detectives Norbeck and Gardner who were head men, or capos, under Ames, head man of all the head men in the Minneapolis syndicate, in this way:

 

I had been out on the Coast and hadn’t seen Norbeck for some time. After I returned I boarded a Minneapolis car one evening to go down South Minneapolis to visit a friend. Norbeck and Detective Delaittre were on the car. When Norbeck saw me he came up and shook hands, and said, “Hullo Billy, how goes it?” I said, “Not very well.” Then he says. “Things have changed since you went away. Me and Gardner are the whole thing—now. Before you left they thought I didn’t know anything, but I turned a few tricks, and now I’m it.”

   “I’m glad of that, Chris,” I said. He says, “I’ve got great things for you. I’m going to open a joint for you.” “That’s good,” I said “but I don’t believe you can do it.” “Oh yes I can,” he replied. “I’m it now—Gardner and me.” “Well if you can do it,” says I, “there’s money in it.”

   “How much can you pay?” he asked. “Oh, 150 or 200 a week,” says I. “That settles it,” he said, “. . . we’ll fix it.” (Steffens 51)

 

The gambler was in business, as were burglars who planned their break-ins with the help of the police.

Minneapolis nonetheless was not one of the most blatantly cor­rupt cities. Pittsburgh was worse, and when one came to Philadelphia, the situation seemed despairing, as most every­one was aware of the plunder of the city which was accepted with an amorality befitting any “backward society.”

The pattern which emerged and gave a tone to the “quality of life” was one of crime with direct links to the organized politi­cian. There was a network of relatives and friendships held to­gether by understandings and a code of silence. Criminality was so endemic to the urban society that most reasonable men de­spaired of ever correcting it. For if they saw the Tweed Ring dis­banded and defeated in New York, they also saw a new combine organized more effectively taking its place. Exposure taught these criminal cartels to improve their methods of extortion until the most honest of men in their despair looked every which way except to the heart of the matter to explain it.

A sincere New Yorker told Lincoln Steffens, who was about to investigate another city, “The Irish, the Irish Catholics were at the bottom of it all.” This prompted Steffens to write, “The for­eign element excuse is one of the hypocritical lies that save us from the clear sight of ourselves” (qtd. in La Storia 267).

 

***

A generation later no one made better use of the “foreign ele­ment” excuse to advance his own and his friends’ interests than Richard Nixon. His and his friends’ values came directly from Hamiltonian mafia cunningness. He too found his values in con­flict with the humanitarian democracy of the Declaration of In­dependence. At heart he did not believe all men created equal. His tapes growled his hatred of Jews, Italian Americans, Blacks. He believed in the power of money groups. And in order to gain power, this man who had such an unsavory image, he understood that his only road to power in a republic had to be behind the cover of some false issue or at least an issue, as Tom Paine used to say, that would make the electorate look every which way but at his own failings. He used communism as a false issue, by tar­nishing everyone with it. He surrounded himself with consiglieri capable of breaking the law to protect the head man and main­tain power. Kissinger played this role in Cambodia.

Nixon used extortion to obtain money for his campaigns. His head men were dedicated to a code of silence. He chose a for­eigner, in Kissinger, as top consiglieri almost a parody of the Godfather, which (as Time Magazine reported) apparently was Kissinger’s favorite film. These men took care of each other in country-club prisons, and the capo of all the capos even pulled strings to get off without a trial or punishment. His appointments remain in the highest court of the land to this day; a tribute to a mentality, as Judge Sirica said, “more interested in protecting their friends than in serving justice.” But then, in the eyes of the powerful, the weak are always guilty.

 

***

An old Sicilian now living an anxious life in a small flat in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn remembered his wild youth in the streets of the lower East Side. He remembered strikes in Patterson, New Jersey and Lawrence, Massachusetts; he remembered men dying on the job and being buried on the spot to become part of the Hol­land Tunnel. In his Bensonhurst apartment he recalled, when asked about the mafia: “What mafia! They were just gangs—you had to form a gang—a man without a gang was a loser—niente—nothing. What mafia?” And he spiraled his hand upward in a old Sicilian gesture of disgust.

He remembered, too, many Anarchists who moved in and out of his life. From his closet he took out two books, one on yoga the other Single Tax by Henry George. He spoke about store, front Anarchist Clubs where plays were put on in Italian. “Those fel­lows,” he said as if he had suddenly remembered, “suspected even books and writing as things of corrupting power.” After a while he added: “Everybody remembers Sacco and Vanzetti and forgets the others.”

Sitting in that Brooklyn flat alone, with a man recalling the 1920s, I could not help but think of Vanzetti’s last words: “If it had not been for these things, I might have lived out my life talking at street corners to scorning men. . . .”

I said to the old man: “The year Sacco and Vanzetti were elec­trocuted, about the same time a gangster was shot and killed. His funeral was like a festival.”

“Look,” the old man interrupted, “They’re all a bunch a’ rack­eteers: Roosevelt, I mean Teddy Roosevelt too, Truman, the whole Kennedy family, Nixon—all a bunch of racketeers. And Sacco and Vanzetti were made cornuti—cuckolds.”

Outside, in the treeless streets of Bensonhurst, houses looked tired. On the stone stoops were worn spots, the shape of tractor seats, where men and women had sat on summer nights. There were hardly any children in the streets. It was quiet, becoming an area where the powerful never lived or visited, and perhaps where Vanzetti would have lived out his life “talking at street corners to scorning men.”

 

Ben Morreale

Plattsburgh, NY

 

Works Cited

 

Adamic, Louis. Dynamite: The Story of Class Violence in Ameri­ca. Glouster, MA: Peter Smith, 1960.

___. Age of Industrial Violence: The Activities and Findings of the US Commission on Industrial Relations. New York: Columbia UP, 1966.

Asbury, Herbert. The French Quarter. New York: Knopf, 1936.

___. The Gangs of New York. Garden City: Knopf, 1927.

___. Gem of the Prairie; An Informal History of the Chicago Un­derworld. New York: Century, 1917.

Blok, A. The Mafia in A Sicilian Village. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1975.

Browning, Frank and John Gerassi. The American Way of Crime. New York: Putnam, 1980.

Cressey, Donald. Theft of the Nation. New York: Harper, 1969.

Gage, Nicholas. The Mafia is Not an Equal Opportunity Em­ployer. New York: McGraw, 1971.

Horowitz, I., ed. The Anarachists. New York: Dell, 1964.

Hostetter, R. The Italian Socialist Movement. New York: Van Nostrand, 1958.

Kendall, John S. “Who Killa de Chief?” Louisiana Historical Quarterly 22 (Apr. 1939): 505–10.

Loschiavo, G. G. 100 Anni di Mafia. Rome: Vito Bianco, 1965.

Mangione and Ben Morreale. La Storia. New York: Harper, 1992.

Nelli, Humbert S. “The Business of Crime.” Times Democrat 21 Feb. 1891. Rprt. NewYork: Oxford UP, 1976.

Rovere, Richard. Howe and Hummel: Their True and Scandalous History.  New York: Farrar, 1947.

Steffens, Lincoln. The Shame of the Cities. New York: McClure, Phillips & Co., 1904.

 

 

 

 


[1]For sources of Anarchism see Horowitz, The Anarachists; Hostetter, The Italian Socialist Movement; and Adamic, Dynamite, The Story of Class Violence in America and Age of Industrial Violence.

[2]Also see “Mafia Chic Joey Gallo Was No Hero,” Village Voice 8 March 1976.

[3]For details and sources see Mangione and Morreale, La Storia.

[4]For details and sources see Mangione and Morreale, La Storia.

[5]See also Steffens, The Shame of the Cities; and Browning and Gerassi, The American Way of Crime.