Organized crime and migration: the Lombroso Mafia myth 9781444351071

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Organized crime and migration: the Lombroso Mafia myth Michael Woodiwiss Most media outlets, governments, and international organizations in the early 21st century tend to favor descriptions that identify the term “organized crime” with large-scale conspiratorial entities such as the Mafia, the Triads, and Colombian – or Mexican – drug “cartels.” When definitions are used to describe organized crime, as they were in the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC of 2003), they tend to be formulated as groups of people who combine in structured organizations to commit crimes. Many academics agree, however, that the complexity of systematic illegal activity makes a satisfactory definition elusive, and some would claim that the constant repetition of centralizing demonologies conceals more than it reveals about the problem.

Political machines as organized crime or as sources of representation Although the term “organized crime” is now ubiquitous, it was first used in the United States at the end of the 19th century. It was a time of rapid industrialization, urbanization, and migration. Tens of thousands of impoverished, unskilled, and often illiterate African Americans were among those migrating, along with millions of similarly disadvantaged Europeans and Asians. The middle-class reform movement known as progressivism sought to bring order to this disruptive process. Progressivism introduced several themes that would shape common notions of organized crime. First among these was the assumption that vices such as gambling, prostitution, and

drinking were becoming increasingly institutionalized, pervasive, and destructive. Second, it was often believed that law enforcers were unable to match the ever-increasing sophistication of criminals, who stayed one step ahead of the law. Immigrant and migrant populations were implicitly connected to the core of these assumptions. Organized crime was not only associated with disenfranchised populations, but also with the most concentrated seats of city power. Urban politicians like those in New York’s Tammany Hall machine were seen as the puppet masters of illegal activity. They were said to turn a blind eye to the use of illegal vices and other criminal activities in exchange for bribes, rather than directing the city police to enforce the law honestly and efficiently. The assumption was that the “foreign element” was more likely than the native-born white community to succumb to the corrupt promises of machine politicians (Myers 1901; Panayiotopoulos 2006; Dinnerstein & Reimers 2009). During this time there were many people who supported criminal justice reform in America, such as Roscoe Pound, who was one of the most influential jurists of the early 20th century. Reform was necessary, he argued in 1912, because the current system was outdated “in a heterogeneous community . . . containing elements ignorant of our institutions.” Referring to the immigrant ghettoes, he continued that this was especially true of a community “Where the defective, the degenerate of decadent stocks, and the ignorant or enfeebled victim of severe economic pressure are exposed to temptations and afforded opportunities beyond anything our fathers could have conceived.” Pound referred to the poor as “the unfit,” a tendency indicative of his particular view informed by social Darwinism, more generally. Pound’s perspective was shared by other elite reformers, who argued that the only hope for improved municipal conditions was to take power away from the machines and their

The Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration, Edited by Immanuel Ness. © 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1002/9781444351071.wbeghm403

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“unfit” constituents, thereby putting an end to organized crime (Auerbach 1976: 17–18). By the middle of the 20th century, these reformers had brought about an end to oldstyle politician machine rule. Civil service and other progressive reforms had reduced the number of jobs, contracts, and other favors that had once been at the disposal of local officials. Control over the police departments, district attorneys, municipal judges, and other public positions went from local politicians to city and state agencies. In New York City, Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and many other cities, the machines were no longer able to count on the support of the more established groups of immigrant populations and had little to offer the millions of recently arrived African Americans, Mexicans, and other newcomers. However, these reformers were wrong in assuming that honest and effective policing would end organized crime. Formerly, pimps, prostitutes, drug dealers, gamblers, and gangsters had dealt with local politicians as the intermediaries of law enforcement and the criminal justice system. After the collapse of local machine politics, these criminals relied on lawyers or special police units for more discreet deals within the court system. Progressive reformers like Pound had thus helped, inadvertently, to restructure some types of organized criminal activity without significantly eliminating it (Fogelson 1977). The end of old-style machine politics also meant the end of representation for certain immigrant and migrant populations in American cities. Machine politicians had served the needs of the poor, helping with specific problems and needs in return for votes. New arrivals from the 1970s onward had no such source of representation. New, bureaucratized police forces were larger and existed primarily to keep impersonal order (Coleman 1989; Burnham 1996; Chambliss 2011).

Enter the Mafia Organized crime in the immediate post-World War II period was most closely associated

with the businesses of illegal gambling and drug trafficking, both of which, according to many press, radio, and television reports, were flourishing. One of the most popular solutions seen by American journalists, politicians, and pundits was increased federal commitment to make up for the failings of local law enforcement. Often, increased federal policing was seen as a viable alternative to local law-enforcement failings. Enforcement of the laws prohibiting gambling and the use of certain kinds of drugs were seen as the answer to organized crime. Regulation of gambling or medical treatment for drug addiction was not a seriously considered alternative for governmental agencies. The Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the Senate committee chaired by Estes Kefauver to investigate crime in inter-state commerce, and scores of journalists, chose to support a bizarre alien conspiracy interpretation of America’s organized crime problems. If people believed that organized crime was run by an alien conspiracy, they would accept the need for a greater federal response to gambling, drug taking, and, later in the 1950s, to labor racketeering, the focus of another Senate committee, this time chaired by John McClellan. Slowly, social responsibility for organized crime was attributed to mass Italian immigration that occurred around the turn of the 20th century. Common stereotypes suggested that there was a closed organization amongst these immigrants known as the Mafia, a group which had become centrally and nationally structured. Eventually, the grandiosity of the Mafia’s structural control over crime in the United States was so inflated that virtually all acts of organized crime in the country were attributed to it. Stories told to support this interpretation tended to be unrelated and often unsubstantiated anecdotes that do not stand up to empirical scrutiny. This interpretation was derived from the influential Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso, whose Criminal Man was published in America in 1909. This work misleadingly suggested that southern Italians were more likely to be involved in organized crime than others and ignored cases from other parts of the Western world including northern Italy.

organized crime and migration: the lombroso mafia myth 3 American opinion makers reshaped Lombroso’s misinterpretation by publishing claims that were often based on unrelated and unsubstantiated anecdotes about southern Italian criminals to support the alien conspiracy theory. Ideas about a centralized and all-powerful Mafia organization persist but they have not stood up to empirical scrutiny (Block 1980; Critchley 2009). The alien conspiracy theory of organized crime informed the US government’s response to the problem in spite of insubstantial data and its use as a popular catchall. Government agencies pushed for and passed the paradigmsetting Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. American organized crime control policy was, therefore, designed to cope with a highly centralized and rational organizational structure that was not empirically validated. Few chose to challenge the alien conspiracy theory before the 1970s, and the most farfetched assertions about Mafia power and reach were reported routinely in the newspapers as fact. Although these claims about the Mafia were never officially repudiated by any member of the executive branch, they were flatly contradicted by evidence presented in 1964 by the US Senate’s permanent subcommittee on investigations examining the role of organized crime in the illicit traffic in narcotics. The subcommittee, according to the criminologist Jeffrey Scott McIllwain, found “a vast network of criminal entrepreneurs that transcended state borders, ethnic identity, culture, religion and other social variables.” The network had over 400 actors spread over cities in half a dozen different countries: Without even considering relational ties to its upperworld allies (e.g. corrupt cops, politicians, customs officials or judges) and other underworld actors in Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico, and Central and South America, the Committee identified over 400 men and women tied to each other in an extensive social network engaged in transnational organized crime. The actors composing this network came from Lebanese, Sicilian, Italian, French, Corsican, Armenian, Turkish, Chinese, French-Canadian, African-American,

Mexican, English and Irish backgrounds . . . Some were related by blood or by marriage. Some grew up together in the same neighborhoods or met in prison. Others shared ethnic backgrounds or met in the social context of local underworlds . . . They were the producers, refiners, distributors, importers, exporters, wholesalers, retailers, pushers, financiers and enforcers involved in an inherently extensive transnational criminal enterprise based on a myriad of relational ties formed with an extensive, international social system of organized crime. (McIllwain 1999: 318–319)

The Mafia conspiracy theory, however misleading, was a simpler story to tell and resurfaced whenever journalists of the period produced background “histories” to accompany the global “harmonization” of organized crime control policies from the 1980s that culminated in the ratification of the UNTOC.

Adaptations of Mafia mythology By the time President Ronald Reagan’s Commission on Organized Crime, chaired by Irving Kaufman, began to investigate the problem in the 1980s, Italian Mafia families were no longer seen as the only source of organized crime in America, particularly after the 1965 immigration law had overridden earlier restrictive legislation. Immigration remained restricted but was no longer determined by race or national origin. Many new immigrants were Hispanics or West Indians, fleeing the poverty and political regimes of Mexico, the Caribbean, and part of South America, often arriving without documents and hoping to live a shadowy existence in low-wage jobs. Other immigrant populations were Asians, particularly from China or Vietnam. At the same time as this new immigration trend, federal officials claimed that the Mafia was now being challenged by several crime “cartels” emerging amongst Asian, Latin American, Caribbean, and other groups. Most of these groups were thriving among growing populations in the United States as well as their country of origin. This claim was merely an adaptation of the Mafia alien conspiracy interpretation for changed conditions rather than

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an overhaul in official thinking about organized crime. The argument remained the same: forces outside of mainstream American culture, most of whom were foreign, threatened otherwise morally sound American institutions. Gary Potter has described the new official consensus as the “Pluralist” revision of the alien conspiracy interpretation (Potter 1994: 7). The American media accepted this new interpretation along with its corollary that the government’s undoubted successes against the Mafia must be accompanied by an effort to “stay in front” of the emerging “cartels.” In sum, as every mainstream commentator agreed, the US government’s basic approach to organized crime, based on the 1970 Organized Crime Control Act, was sound but needed a harder line on all fronts: more wiretaps, informants, and undercover agents in order to get more convictions, which would require more prisons; more criminal assets forfeited would ostensibly help to pay for at least some of this expansion. The revised narrative gave a new generation of journalists and television documentary makers a way to update, pluralize, and internationalize their organized crime formulas at a time when mass migration was on a scale that dwarfed that of the late 19th century. In Mafia Wipeout: How the Feds Put Away an Entire Mob Family (1989), for example, Donald Cox wrote that “A new Oriental Mafia was rising from the ashes of the old Italian-Sicilian Mafia in urban America to rule the underworld” (1989: 387). Gerald Posner, in Warlords of Crime – Chinese Secret Societies: The New Mafia (1988), went beyond North America to write that, “As a result of my research I am absolutely convinced that Chinese Triads are the most powerful criminal syndicates in existence and that they pose the most serious and growing threat confronting law enforcement” (1988: xviii). He concluded with comments on the seriousness of the Triad “threat” from US law enforcement officers, including a DEA (Drug Enforcement Administration) agent: “Chinese criminals have hundreds of years of history and tradition behind them. They are willing to take risks, and they follow their leaders with blind obedi-

ence. It’s just a matter of time before they take over. What you’ve seen so far is just the head of the dragon, you can be sure of that” (Posner 1988: 260–261).

Conclusion Sadly, the rhetoric and background literature to the aforementioned United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime echoed this kind of analysis (Woodiwiss 2001). The great majority of the world’s states have signed up to this convention and two of its supplementary protocols that have direct relevance to migration: the Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, especially Women and Children, and the Protocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by Land, Sea and Air. Criminal justice systems and law enforcement systems have already adapted or will adapt to these commitments made to the international community. Future research may tell whether the organized crime control methods that result from new initiatives actually control organized crime, or whether, as in the American model, these methods simply become mechanisms to keep impersonal order in a world with porous borders. SEE ALSO: Hometown associations; Nativism and xenophobia; Police raids, detention, and deportation of migrants; United States: nativism and migration; Urbanization and migration References and further reading Auerbach, J. (1976) Unequal Justice: Lawyers and Social Change in Modern America. New York: Oxford University Press. Block, A. (1980) East Side–West Side: Organizing Crime in New York, 1930–1950. Cardiff, UK: University College Cardiff. Burnham, D. (1996) Above the Law: Secret Deals, Political Fixes and Other Misadventures of the U.S. Department of Justice. New York: Scribners. Chambliss, W. J. (2011) Key Issues in Crime and Punishment. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage. Coleman, J. W. (1989) The Criminal Elite: The Sociology of White Collar Crime. New York: St. Martin’s.

organized crime and migration: the lombroso mafia myth 5 Cox, D. (1989) Mafia Wipeout: How the Feds Put Away an Entire Mob Family. New York: Shapolsky Publishers. Critchley, D. (2009) The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891– 1931. London: Routledge. Davis, M. (1990) City of Quartz: Excavating the Future of Los Angeles. London: Vintage. Dinnerstein, L. & Reimers, D. M. (2009) Ethnic Americans: A History of Immigration. New York: Columbia University Press. Donziger, S. R. (ed.) (1996) The Real War on Crime: The Report of the National Criminal Justice Commission. New York: Harper Perennial. Fogelson, R. M. (1977) Big City Police. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Garland, D. (2001) The Culture of Control: Crime and Social Order in Contemporary Society. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McIllwain, J. (1999) Organized crime: a social network approach. Crime, Law & Social Change 32, 301–323. Myers, G. (1901) The History of Tammany Hall. New York: Reform Club Committee on City Affairs.

Panayiotopoulos, P. I. (2006) Immigrant Enterprise in Europe and the USA. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Pezzino, P. (2009) Mafia, organized crime, and social protest. In I. Ness (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Revolution and Protest. Oxford: Blackwell. Blackwell Reference Online. At www. revolutionprotestencyclopedia.com/subscriber/ tocnode?id=g9781405184649_yr2011_chunk_ g9781405184649954, accessed Dec. 19, 2011. Posner, G. (1988) Warlords of Crime – Chinese Secret Societies: The New Mafia. London: Macdonald Queen Anne Press. Potter, G. W. (1994) Criminal Organizations: Vice, Racketeering and Politics in an American City. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press. Schneider, J. C. & Schneider, P. T. (1976) Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily. New York: Academic Press. Woodiwiss, M. (2001) Organized Crime and American Power: A History. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.