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Michael Woodiwiss - Organized Crime and Migration - The Lombroso Mafia Myth

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Michael Woodiwiss - Organized Crime and Migration - The Lombroso Mafia Myth

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Organized crime and drinking were becoming increasingly institu-

tionalized, pervasive, and destructive. Second,


migration: the Lombroso it was often believed that law enforcers were
Mafia myth unable to match the ever-increasing sophisti-
cation of criminals, who stayed one step ahead
Michael Woodiwiss of the law. Immigrant and migrant popula-
tions were implicitly connected to the core of
Most media outlets, governments, and interna- these assumptions.
tional organizations in the early 21st century Organized crime was not only associated
tend to favor descriptions that identify the with disenfranchised populations, but also
term “organized crime” with large-scale con- with the most concentrated seats of city power.
spiratorial entities such as the Mafia, the Triads, Urban politicians like those in New York’s
and Colombian – or Mexican – drug “cartels.” Tammany Hall machine were seen as the
When definitions are used to describe organ- puppet masters of illegal activity. They were
ized crime, as they were in the United Nations said to turn a blind eye to the use of illegal vices
Convention against Transnational Organized and other criminal activities in exchange for
Crime (UNTOC of 2003), they tend to be for- bribes, rather than directing the city police to
mulated as groups of people who combine in enforce the law honestly and efficiently. The
structured organizations to commit crimes. assumption was that the “foreign element” was
Many academics agree, however, that the com- more likely than the native-born white com-
plexity of systematic illegal activity makes a munity to succumb to the corrupt promises of
satisfactory definition elusive, and some would machine politicians (Myers 1901; Panayioto-
claim that the constant repetition of central- poulos 2006; Dinnerstein & Reimers 2009).
izing demonologies conceals more than it During this time there were many people
reveals about the problem. who supported criminal justice reform in
America, such as Roscoe Pound, who was one
of the most influential jurists of the early 20th
Political machines as organized crime or century. Reform was necessary, he argued in
1912, because the current system was outdated
as sources of representation
“in a heterogeneous community . . . contain-
Although the term “organized crime” is now ing elements ignorant of our institutions.”
ubiquitous, it was first used in the United Referring to the immigrant ghettoes, he con-
States at the end of the 19th century. It was a tinued that this was especially true of a com-
time of rapid industrialization, urbanization, munity “Where the defective, the degenerate of
and migration. Tens of thousands of impover- decadent stocks, and the ignorant or enfeebled
ished, unskilled, and often illiterate African victim of severe economic pressure are exposed
Americans were among those migrating, along to temptations and afforded opportunities
with millions of similarly disadvantaged Euro- beyond anything our fathers could have con-
peans and Asians. The middle-class reform ceived.” Pound referred to the poor as “the
movement known as progressivism sought to unfit,” a tendency indicative of his particular
bring order to this disruptive process. Progres- view informed by social Darwinism, more gen-
sivism introduced several themes that would erally. Pound’s perspective was shared by other
shape common notions of organized crime. elite reformers, who argued that the only hope
First among these was the assumption that for improved municipal conditions was to take
vices such as gambling, prostitution, and 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
2 organized crime and migration: the lombroso mafia myth

“unfit” constituents, thereby putting an end to with the businesses of illegal gambling and
organized crime (Auerbach 1976: 17–18). drug trafficking, both of which, according to
By the middle of the 20th century, these many press, radio, and television reports, were
reformers had brought about an end to old- flourishing. One of the most popular solu-
style politician machine rule. Civil service and tions seen by American journalists, politicians,
other progressive reforms had reduced the and pundits was increased federal commit-
number of jobs, contracts, and other favors ment to make up for the failings of local law
that had once been at the disposal of local offi- enforcement. Often, increased federal polic-
cials. Control over the police departments, dis- ing was seen as a viable alternative to local
trict attorneys, municipal judges, and other law-enforcement failings. Enforcement of the
public positions went from local politicians to laws prohibiting gambling and the use of
city and state agencies. In New York City, Phila- certain kinds of drugs were seen as the answer
delphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and many to organized crime. Regulation of gambling or
other cities, the machines were no longer able medical treatment for drug addiction was not
to count on the support of the more estab- a seriously considered alternative for govern-
lished groups of immigrant populations and mental agencies. The Federal Bureau of Nar-
had little to offer the millions of recently cotics, the Senate committee chaired by Estes
arrived African Americans, Mexicans, and Kefauver to investigate crime in inter-state
other newcomers. commerce, and scores of journalists, chose to
However, these reformers were wrong in support a bizarre alien conspiracy interpreta-
assuming that honest and effective policing tion of America’s organized crime problems. If
would end organized crime. Formerly, pimps, people believed that organized crime was run
prostitutes, drug dealers, gamblers, and gangsters by an alien conspiracy, they would accept the
had dealt with local politicians as the interme- need for a greater federal response to gambling,
diaries of law enforcement and the criminal drug taking, and, later in the 1950s, to labor
justice system. After the collapse of local racketeering, the focus of another Senate com-
machine politics, these criminals relied on mittee, this time chaired by John McClellan.
lawyers or special police units for more discreet Slowly, social responsibility for organized
deals within the court system. Progressive crime was attributed to mass Italian immigra-
reformers like Pound had thus helped, inadver- tion that occurred around the turn of the 20th
tently, to restructure some types of organized century. Common stereotypes suggested that
criminal activity without significantly elimi- there was a closed organization amongst these
nating it (Fogelson 1977). immigrants known as the Mafia, a group which
The end of old-style machine politics also had become centrally and nationally struc-
meant the end of representation for certain tured. Eventually, the grandiosity of the Mafia’s
immigrant and migrant populations in Ameri- structural control over crime in the United
can cities. Machine politicians had served the States was so inflated that virtually all acts of
needs of the poor, helping with specific prob- organized crime in the country were attributed
lems and needs in return for votes. New arriv- to it. Stories told to support this interpretation
als from the 1970s onward had no such source tended to be unrelated and often unsubstanti-
of representation. New, bureaucratized police ated anecdotes that do not stand up to empiri-
forces were larger and existed primarily to keep cal scrutiny. This interpretation was derived
impersonal order (Coleman 1989; Burnham from the influential Italian criminologist Cesare
1996; Chambliss 2011). Lombroso, whose Criminal Man was published
in America in 1909. This work misleadingly
suggested that southern Italians were more
Enter the Mafia
likely to be involved in organized crime than
Organized crime in the immediate post-World others and ignored cases from other parts of
War II period was most closely associated the Western world including northern Italy.
organized crime and migration: the lombroso mafia myth 3

American opinion makers reshaped Lombro- Mexican, English and Irish backgrounds . . . Some
so’s misinterpretation by publishing claims were related by blood or by marriage. Some grew
that were often based on unrelated and unsub- up together in the same neighborhoods or met
stantiated anecdotes about southern Italian in prison. Others shared ethnic backgrounds or
met in the social context of local under-
criminals to support the alien conspiracy theory.
worlds . . . They were the producers, refiners,
Ideas about a centralized and all-powerful
distributors, importers, exporters, wholesalers,
Mafia organization persist but they have not retailers, pushers, financiers and enforcers
stood up to empirical scrutiny (Block 1980; involved in an inherently extensive transnational
Critchley 2009). criminal enterprise based on a myriad of rela-
The alien conspiracy theory of organized tional ties formed with an extensive, interna-
crime informed the US government’s response tional social system of organized crime.
to the problem in spite of insubstantial data (McIllwain 1999: 318–319)
and its use as a popular catchall. Government
agencies pushed for and passed the paradigm- The Mafia conspiracy theory, however mislead-
setting Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. ing, was a simpler story to tell and resurfaced
American organized crime control policy was, whenever journalists of the period produced
therefore, designed to cope with a highly cen- background “histories” to accompany the global
tralized and rational organizational structure “harmonization” of organized crime control
that was not empirically validated. policies from the 1980s that culminated in the
Few chose to challenge the alien conspiracy ratification of the UNTOC.
theory before the 1970s, and the most far-
fetched assertions about Mafia power and
Adaptations of Mafia mythology
reach were reported routinely in the newspa-
pers as fact. Although these claims about the By the time President Ronald Reagan’s Com-
Mafia were never officially repudiated by any mission on Organized Crime, chaired by Irving
member of the executive branch, they were Kaufman, began to investigate the problem in
flatly contradicted by evidence presented in the 1980s, Italian Mafia families were no longer
1964 by the US Senate’s permanent subcom- seen as the only source of organized crime in
mittee on investigations examining the role America, particularly after the 1965 immigra-
of organized crime in the illicit traffic in tion law had overridden earlier restrictive leg-
narcotics. islation. Immigration remained restricted but
The subcommittee, according to the crimi- was no longer determined by race or national
nologist Jeffrey Scott McIllwain, found “a vast origin. Many new immigrants were Hispanics
network of criminal entrepreneurs that tran- or West Indians, fleeing the poverty and politi-
scended state borders, ethnic identity, culture, cal regimes of Mexico, the Caribbean, and part
religion and other social variables.” The network of South America, often arriving without doc-
had over 400 actors spread over cities in half uments and hoping to live a shadowy existence
a dozen different countries: in low-wage jobs. Other immigrant popula-
tions were Asians, particularly from China or
Without even considering relational ties to its Vietnam. At the same time as this new immi-
upperworld allies (e.g. corrupt cops, politicians, gration trend, federal officials claimed that the
customs officials or judges) and other under- Mafia was now being challenged by several
world actors in Asia, the Caribbean, Mexico, and
crime “cartels” emerging amongst Asian, Latin
Central and South America, the Committee
identified over 400 men and women tied to each
American, Caribbean, and other groups. Most
other in an extensive social network engaged in of these groups were thriving among growing
transnational organized crime. The actors com- populations in the United States as well as their
posing this network came from Lebanese, Sicil- country of origin. This claim was merely an
ian, Italian, French, Corsican, Armenian, Turkish, adaptation of the Mafia alien conspiracy inter-
Chinese, French-Canadian, African-American, pretation for changed conditions rather than
4 organized crime and migration: the lombroso mafia myth

an overhaul in official thinking about orga- ence. It’s just a matter of time before they
nized crime. The argument remained the same: take over. What you’ve seen so far is just the
forces outside of mainstream American culture, head of the dragon, you can be sure of that”
most of whom were foreign, threatened other- (Posner 1988: 260–261).
wise morally sound American institutions.
Gary Potter has described the new official con- Conclusion
sensus as the “Pluralist” revision of the alien
conspiracy interpretation (Potter 1994: 7). Sadly, the rhetoric and background literature
The American media accepted this new to the aforementioned United Nations Con-
interpretation along with its corollary that the vention against Transnational Organized Crime
government’s undoubted successes against the echoed this kind of analysis (Woodiwiss 2001).
Mafia must be accompanied by an effort to The great majority of the world’s states have
“stay in front” of the emerging “cartels.” In signed up to this convention and two of its
sum, as every mainstream commentator supplementary protocols that have direct rel-
agreed, the US government’s basic approach to evance to migration: the Protocol to Prevent,
organized crime, based on the 1970 Organized Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons,
Crime Control Act, was sound but needed a especially Women and Children, and the Pro-
harder line on all fronts: more wiretaps, infor- tocol against the Smuggling of Migrants by
mants, and undercover agents in order to get Land, Sea and Air. Criminal justice systems and
more convictions, which would require more law enforcement systems have already adapted
prisons; more criminal assets forfeited would or will adapt to these commitments made to
ostensibly help to pay for at least some of this the international community.
expansion. Future research may tell whether the orga-
The revised narrative gave a new generation nized crime control methods that result from
of journalists and television documentary makers new initiatives actually control organized
a way to update, pluralize, and internationalize crime, or whether, as in the American model,
their organized crime formulas at a time when these methods simply become mechanisms to
mass migration was on a scale that dwarfed keep impersonal order in a world with porous
that of the late 19th century. In Mafia Wipeout: borders.
How the Feds Put Away an Entire Mob Family
SEE ALSO: Hometown associations; Nativism
(1989), for example, Donald Cox wrote that “A
and xenophobia; Police raids, detention, and
new Oriental Mafia was rising from the ashes deportation of migrants; United States: nativism
of the old Italian-Sicilian Mafia in urban and migration; Urbanization and migration
America to rule the underworld” (1989: 387).
Gerald Posner, in Warlords of Crime – Chinese
References and further reading
Secret Societies: The New Mafia (1988), went
beyond North America to write that, “As a Auerbach, J. (1976) Unequal Justice: Lawyers and
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that Chinese Triads are the most powerful Oxford University Press.
criminal syndicates in existence and that they Block, A. (1980) East Side–West Side: Organizing
pose the most serious and growing threat Crime in New York, 1930–1950. Cardiff, UK:
confronting law enforcement” (1988: xviii). He University College Cardiff.
Burnham, D. (1996) Above the Law: Secret Deals,
concluded with comments on the seriousness of
Political Fixes and Other Misadventures of the
the Triad “threat” from US law enforcement offi- U.S. Department of Justice. New York: Scribners.
cers, including a DEA (Drug Enforcement Chambliss, W. J. (2011) Key Issues in Crime and
Administration) agent: “Chinese criminals have Punishment. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
hundreds of years of history and tradition Coleman, J. W. (1989) The Criminal Elite: The
behind them. They are willing to take risks, Sociology of White Collar Crime. New York: St.
and they follow their leaders with blind obedi- Martin’s.
organized crime and migration: the lombroso mafia myth 5

Cox, D. (1989) Mafia Wipeout: How the Feds Put Panayiotopoulos, P. I. (2006) Immigrant Enterprise
Away an Entire Mob Family. New York: in Europe and the USA. Abingdon, UK:
Shapolsky Publishers. Routledge.
Critchley, D. (2009) The Origin of Organized Crime Pezzino, P. (2009) Mafia, organized crime, and
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Donziger, S. R. (ed.) (1996) The Real War on Secret Societies: The New Mafia. London:
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