The decline of the American Mafia

The American Mafia emerged during Prohibition as the wealthier and more violent successor to local city gangs involved in prostitution and gambling. It is thus a contemporary of the Soviet Union, another long-standing problem for the United States government. Coincidentally, the Mafia and Soviet Union have ceased to be significant strategic adversaries at almost the same time. The Mafia is almost extinguished now as a major actor in the United States' criminal world. And, to extend the comparison with the Soviet Union perhaps beyond its fair limits, the Mafia's decline is the result of both its conservatism and of federal government actions.

Initially, the American Maria was a prominent supplier of bootlegged liquor. That required good connections with the local police department and political machines. Paying off the local beat cop provided a speakeasy, with its conspicuous and regular flow of traffic, little effective protection. Instead, it was necessary to guard against any cop who might be on that beat; the efficient solution was buying the whole department, if it was for sale. In many cities it was. Frequently, that also meant connections with urban political machines. While Al Capone's control of Chicago (though some scholars question Capone's Mafia membership) in the 1920s is the most notorious instance, almost 50 years later the Mayor of Newark, New Jersey, Hugh Addonizio, retained strong connections to the local Mafia family. Elliot Ness and the federal revenuers, frequently less honest than legend, were a nuisance but not a major one.

At the same time, the Mafia acquired control of many unions, largely through direct intimidation of members. By 1929, when John Landesco did his classic study of organized crime in Chicago, he could already list a dozen local industries that the Mafia dominated through the unions. Prices were fixed and/or territories were allocated, with the threat of union strikes or picketing of customers as the enforcement mechanism. The Depression, which created a demand for cartel-organizing services later met by various New Deal agencies, such as the Reconstruction Financing Administration, added a few more industries (e.g., fur manufacturing) to the Mafia list, particularly in New York.

By the 1960s, the Mafia had mostly shifted from direct provision of illegal services, like bookmaking and loansharking, to selling services to bookmakers, loansharks, and other criminal entrepreneurs. The organization's reputation for being able to deliver on threats was good enough that it could, in effect, sell these entrepreneurs contract insurance and dispute-settlement services. A bookmaker could insure himself against extortion by other gangsters or customer welching by making regular payments to some Mafioso. The organizational reputation, painstakingly and bloodily acquired earlier, was now the principal asset.

Losing to the competition

The evidence of the Mafia's decline is partly of the "dog didn't bark" variety. A Senate committee has a hearing on international fraud and organized crime, and the American Mafia goes unmentioned. The Department of Justice lists its principal targets for drug enforcement, and Mafia leaders don't make the cut. The New York City Police Department has yet another major corruption scandal, and none of the events involve the Mafia. A major numbers banker in New York, "Spanish Raymond" Marquez, who paid 5 percent of his profits to the Mafia in the 1960s, now pays only $300 per week.

There are a few more direct indicia as well. At least one family, based in Cleveland, has effectively disbanded. The New York Times, long the newspaper of record for Mafia events, now lists the membership of the five major New York families as only 1,200, down from 3,000 in the early 1970s. The DeCavalcante family of New Jersey, admittedly a weaker family even then, now has only 10 members, scarcely enough to fill a good-sized dining table, let alone an organization chart of the type so dramatically displayed by the FBI at numerous Senate hearings.

The Mafia has failed to maintain control of the New York heroin market and has been a marginal player in the cocaine business everywhere. Mexican-source heroin became available when the heroin market first expanded in the early 1970s, and the Mafia was never able to prevent its distribution in New York City, the home of perhaps one-third of the nation's heroin addicts. Its earlier control of the market had apparently rested on its domination of the New York docks, through the longshoremen's union as well as its connections with southern European processors. Mexican imports evaded that bottleneck. By the late 1980s, the traditional circuitous route for Southeast Asian heroin, through Sicily, southern Italy, or France, had primarily been replaced by direct importation, via the West coast, by Chinese and Vietnamese entrepreneurs. The Mafia proved helpless to deal with any of these incursions on its traditional territories.

Asian drug distributors have major advantages as heroin importers and domestic wholesalers. In the source countries for heroin, they can more cheaply ascertain the credibility and capacities of producers and exporters, as well as the corruptibility of local officials and transportation executives. Chinese gangs are better partners for Kun Sa, the long-standing leader in the Burmese/Thai opium trade, historically connected with remnants of the Kuo Min Tang army from pre-1949 China.