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The decline of the American Mafia
Public Interest, Summer, 1995 by Peter Reuter
Not surprisingly, the increasing incidence of informants has begun to destroy the families from within; by early 1993, 11 Lucchese family members had been killed in an internal struggle. As Ronald Goldstock, longtime director of the New York State Organized Crime Task Force, commented in 1993: "The fate of anyone who assumes a leadership position in a [Mafia] family is a life prison sentence or assassination by a rival."
Incompetence. The Mafia has continued to recruit from among uneducated, tough felons and requires that they commit serious and brutal crimes to gain admission. This is not a very effective method for finding the best and the brightest of criminal talent, particularly when the shrinking pool of young Italian-immigrant labor has much better legitimate opportunities than in the past. Whereas in the period from 1900 to 1909 over one million Italian males under the age of 45 migrated to the United States, for the 1960s the figure was only 80,000.
Inevitably, some older leaders lost their edge. Mark Haller, the leading historian of American organized crime, reports that Harry Riccibone, a senior member of the Bruno group, was accused by one of his associates of turning into a "philanthropist" because of his unwillingness to act aggressively against his debtors. The current leader of the Genovese family, Vincent Gigante, may be mentally impaired, though some maintain that this is a ruse on his part to ensure that he cannot be tried.
The leaders may be decisive, they may be shrewd at determining when to use force, but they are not strategic in their thinking. Colombian drug distributors are less sophisticated than suggested by highly stylized accounts, such as novelist Tom Clancy's Clear and Present Danger, but they do seem to have acquired a few contemporary business practices, particularly with respect to financial services. The American Mafia languishes in suspicion of such sophistication, with nary a computer in sight.
The future of organized crime
This is not to say that organized crime has disappeared from American cities. New ethnic gangs, mostly from East Asia, have become wealthy through their control of large-scale illicit drug-distribution systems. Chinese and Vietnamese importers have come to dominate the importation of drugs into New York and Los Angeles; they are sufficiently competent at these activities that the price of imported heroin has simply collapsed, from $2,000 per gram in 1980 to less than $500 per gram in 1992.
They are also effective extortionists of their own communities. Chinese gangs have long been able to intimidate small businesses in traditional Chinatowns; the expansion of these communities, with new migration and economic mobility, does not seem to have reduced that capacity. Like their predecessor migrant populations, Asians have been unwilling to go to alien police to deal with indigenous intimidation. Police departments have made only modest recruiting efforts in Asian communities, with little success.
Yet, these gangs have not been able to diversify, as the Mafia did, into control of mainstream political and social institutions outside of those communities. The leading Chinese triads lack the name recognition of Mafia families in the non-Asian community. Asians are only just now producing their first generation of prominent local politicians, reflecting, in many cases, the lack of an active political tradition in their own nations. The path to success of the Mafia in American urban politics does not seem to be the path that the Asian gangs will follow.
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