Crime Incorporated. William Balsamo
time nor the onslaught of crime fighters as well as this, most extensive, most effective criminal body in the world.
There are many who feel that the power of the Mafia does not prevail any longer, that “Mafia” is just a word loosely used by sensationalist headline writers to boost the sales of newspapers, magazines, and books, to boost box office sales, and to hype the Neilsen ratings for network television shows.
The authors maintain that the Mafia does exist. The chapters that follow will chronicle the rise, and rise, and rise of this sinister underworld government. It does not exist as a colossus of crime with branch offices in every major city. Nor does it work with IBM or push-button efficiency, as some may envision.
The Mafia today is a relatively loosely-knit group who work together for their mutual well-being and continued dominance of criminal objectives and who share in a way of life that brings its followers an understanding of trust for one another.
Their efforts are concentrated, to a very large extent, in narcotics. The Mafia is the principal and dominating agent in drug trafficking, and the rise of such Johnny-come-lately dealers in opiates and sopophoric agents as Colombians, Haitians, Puerto Ricans, Chinese, and other newcomers to the field, have not lessened its domination.
The Mafia is also deeply involved in illicit activities such as gambling, the coin machine rackets, juke box businesses, pizza parlor operations (which are also used as fronts for drug trafficking and money-laundering), prostitution, extortion, smuggling, and counterfeiting.
Then, too, the Mafia has become deeply entrenched in the control over such lucrative legitimate ventures as trucking, restaurant supplies, laundry services, restaurants, nightclubs, labor unions, garbage hauling, beer and soft drink distributorships, garment manufacturing, ready-mix concrete, and many others.
They have intruded into the world of sports. Men from the crime kingdom exercise powerful influences over boxing, harness racing, dog races, and other professional sports.
As the Mafia spreads into each new area, the tribute to it grows accordingly—at the expense of average, law-abiding citizens.
The Maffia (as it was originally known) did not begin as a criminal agency. Its infamous web has only been spun over the last century. Prior to then, it was an underground patriotic society, born more than six hundred years ago on the Mediterranean island of Sicily, the “toe” of Italy’s “boot.”
It rose to prominence in the thirteenth century as a resistance group to foreign oppression. Through the centuries Sicily had been invaded repeatedly—by Arabs, Normans, Germans, French, and Spaniards. The underground organization was formed to conduct warfare against these intruders. For hundreds of years the society was held together only by an indomitable spirit of patriotism to repel all foreigners.
We chronicle the transformation of this early organization, banded together by a sense of nationalism, into its present-day configuration as a criminal colossus unmatched by any other body of criminals anywhere.
The advent of Prohibition in 1920 gave rise to the Mafia as we know it today in the United States. Many Mafiosi who had emigrated here since the turn of the century and dealt in shakedowns and extortion of the hapless Italian newcomers became aware of the lucrative rewards in bootlegging and rum-running, which opened the way to a climb to power. Many of the hardy survivors of those early roaring twenties days of mobsterism emerged as overlords of organized crime in the thirties and kept their power into the forties, fifties, sixties, and even the seventies.
Among them are: Frank Costello, Vito Genovese, Michele “Mike” Miranda, Tony Accardo, Joseph Profaci, Michael “Mike” Spinella, Joseph “Joe Adonis” Doto, Thomas “Three Finger Brown” Luchese, Anthony “Tony Bender” Strollo, Albert Anastasia, and Anthony “Little Augie Pisano” Carfano.
Contrary to general belief, the Mafia in the last sixty years has not restricted its membership to Sicilian emigrants or their descendants, nor even to those of Italian extraction. Members of today’s Mafia hierarchy include, for example Meyer Lansky and Abner “Longie” Zwillman.
Membership in the Mafia is achieved through diverse ways: by birth, marriage, or through the sponsorship of relatives or close friends.
Members are selected for their particular aptitudes and abilities in the toils of the underworld.
Those with unusual talents who can serve to further the Mafia’s aims and controls in the rackets are initiated as “brothers” regardless of national origin. Nationalistic sentiment is set aside for someone with a genius for extending the perimeters of the Mafia’s racket preserves and enriching its coffers.
Gaining acceptance in the Mafia is a slow, gradual process. A candidate no longer goes through the ancient religious-flavored ritual of being transformed into a “brother”; now he puts in a period of apprenticeship as a full-fledged member’s stooge, moving with him in Mafia circles and lighting his cigars and cigarettes, running his errands, raking in his bets, collecting extortion, and carrying out murders.
The area of the underworld in which the candidate receives his experience depends upon his sponsor’s particular specialty, which could be narcotics, prostitution, labor extortion, gambling, or any other unlawful arena in which the Mafia is entrenched.
When his protégé proves himself and is ready for full-fledged membership in the organization, a sponsor will take him on as a partner or set him up with a racket operation of his own in a neighboring territory. Once thus established, the new member is eligible for all the protection, secrets, and privileges incumbant on the Mafia to provide its own. It is a union that can be dissolved only by death.
Deepest secrecy is the organization’s binding code, epitomized by the Italian omerta, a variation of umerta, a Sicilian word meaning “humility”—a quality which every Mafioso must exhibit. In the primitive dialect, the word meant “noble silence.”
This conspiracy of “no speak to nobody,” the traditional trademark of the Mafia, is rigidly enforced. Anyone who violates the code is certain to meet a swift and violent end, and the aggrieved members take their revenge by their own methods.
Although there’s been considerable intermarriage among Mafia families that gives the organization the specter of being a single far-flung clan, it seldom holds big meetings.
And when it did—it was the first time Mafiosi got together to talk things over in an open forum…
That meeting, held on the palatial hilltop estate of mobster Joseph Barbara in upstate New York’s serene, picturesque hamlet of Apalachin, degenerated into a colossal boner.
The infamous conclave finally gave credence and validity to the accumulating claims of one investigator after another that a supergovernment of crime—the Mafia—indeed exists.
That warning toll was sounded with electrifying reverberadons on a rainy November 14, 1957, when Empire State troopers, led by Sergeant Edgar Crosswell, and United States Treasury agents invaded Barbara’s mansion.
Crosswell’s curiosity was first aroused by a procession of sleek, expensive cars with out-of-state and out-of-country license plates sweeping up through the tiny community (pop. 280) to Barbara’s secluded fifty-three-acre estate.
At the first sight of the gray-clad troopers and Treasury agents in street garb, sixty-three impeccably tailored men deserted two hundred pounds of beef at the barbecue pit, grabbed their coats, and scrambled for the exits. The troopers managed to nail fifty-seven of them in different stages of flight—some at a roadblock, others tripping aimlessly on foot through the dense woods.
“The troopers on the raid had a field day when they went into the woods,” said Sergeant Crosswell. “All they had to do was find the guys wearing the pointed patent leather shoes and they knew they had Mafiosi.”
When taken in for questioning, and asked who they were, where they came from, and why they were in Apalachin, the fifty-seven trapped delegates answered that they’d come to visit a “sick friend”—Barbara—who, ironically, died just a few years later without a single Mafioso at his bedside.
While