Acknowledgements vii
Introduction xi
1 The City of Brotherly Love 1
3 The Land of Opportunity 21
4 What is this Thing Called Thing? 33
5 Tales of Bosses and ‘Made’ Men 50
6 The Politics of the Saloon 60
7 The Nobbled Experiment 68
8 Al Capone – Public Enemy, Public Servant 75
9 Voices from Prohibition 94
10 Always Pay Your Income Tax 99
11 The Outfit, the President and the CIA 108
12 The Unholy Alliance 124
13 Racketeers, Racketbusters and Tammany Hall 132
14 The Fall and Rise of Lucky Luciano 149
15 The Cleveland Story 168
16 Gambling with the Mob 181
17 Las Vegas – the House that Bugsy Built 192
18 The Mob, the Boardwalk and Atlantic City 211
19 Sinatra – His Way 222
20 On the Waterfront 232
21 The Mob Keeps on Trucking 246
22 The Chokehold on New York Construction 269
23 One Big Octopus 276
24 New Scams for Old 297
25 Banks,Wall Street and Three-piece Suits 302
26 The Political Fix 309
27 Can the Mafia Survive? 325
28 ‘Reports of Our Death are Greatly Exaggerated’ 348
29 Organized Crime Goes Global 373
Bibliography 401
Notes 403
Index 409
Organized crime is America’s biggest business. According to some
estimates, its profits are greater than those of Fortune magazine’s top
500 business and industrial corporations added together. One
estimate accepted by the US Senate in 1979 assessed major crime
revenues in America at over $160 billion a year. By 1984 the annual
retail value of illegal narcotics alone had risen to anything between
$50 billion and $100 billion. Organized crime worldwide in all its
forms now (including vastly expanded corporate fraud and peoplesmuggling
activities) has a turnover running into hundreds of
billions of dollars.
But what is organized crime? I appropriate here two attempts at
a definition of organized crime. The shorter version comes from
Ralph Salemo, the eminent former New York detective:
Organized crime is a self-perpetuating, continuing criminal
conspiracy, for profit and power, using fear and corruption and
seeking immunity from the law.
A longer definition comes from the Task Force Report on Organized
Crime, published in 1967:
Organized crime is a society that seeks to operate outside
the control of the American people and their governments.
It involves thousands of criminals,working within structures
as complex as those of legitimate governments. Its actions
are not impulsive but rather the result of intricate
conspiracies carried on over many years and aimed at
gaining control over whole fields of activity in order to
amass huge profits.
The core of organized crime activity is the supply of illegal
goods and services – gambling, loansharking, narcotics and other
forms of vice – to countless numbers of citizen customers. But
organized crime is also extensively involved in legitimate
business and in labor unions. Here it employs illegitimate
methods – mono-polization, terrorism, extortion, tax evasion –
to drive out or control lawful ownership and leadership to exact
illegal profits from the public. And to carry on its many activities
secure from governmental interference, organized crime
corrupts public officials.
I can foresee that there may be places where a torrent of
concentrated fact might confuse the general reader. This seems
most likely when I refer to the five Mafia crime families of New
York. I attempt a summary here.What began in 1931 as the Lucky
Luciano family is now known as the Vito Genovese family.What is
known today as the Carlo Gambino family was originally led by the
Mangano brothers and then by Albert Anastasia until he was
murdered in 1957. The three smaller families are the Joe Colombo
family (formerly led by Joes Profaci and Magliocco), the Joe
Bonanno family (named after its founder boss, who died in 2002
aged 97) and the Tommy Lucchese family, founded by Jack Gagliano.
The families are now led by men with different surnames but all
five families have retained the names of their bosses in the 1960s.
These names are, of course, accorded by law enforcement rather
than by the mafiosi themselves.
Most of the quotations, unless otherwise attributed, are taken
from my filmed interviews for the television series.
My use of the word ‘Mafia’ throughout the text may not be true
to a strict interpretation of the word, meaning a purely Sicilian
organization. This the Mafia in America today is certainly not.
However, Mafia is the only term which can adequately convey the
true...
Martin Short (Author)
Martin Short is the author of Inside the Brotherhood: Explosive Secrets of the Freemasons and the creator of the documentary Crime, Inc.