[edit]Prohibition era
Al Capone's violent rise to power in Chicago and the media attention it brought made him a lasting figure of the prohibition era and organized crime in general.
On January 17, 1920, Prohibition began in the United States with the Eighteenth Amendment making it illegal to sell, manufacture or transport alcohol. Despite alcohol production and consumption being made illegal, there was still a high demand for it from the public. The profits that could be made from selling and distributing alcohol were worth the risk of punishment from the government, which had a difficult time enforcing prohibition. There were over 900,000 cases of liquor shipped to the borders of American cities.[7] Criminal gangs and politicians saw the opportunity to make fortunes and began shipping larger quantities of alcohol to American cities. The majority of the alcohol was imported from Canada,[8][9] the Caribbean, and the American Midwest where stills manufactured illegal alcohol.
In the early 1920s fascist Benito Mussolini took control of Italy and waves of Italian immigrants fled to the United States. The Sicilian Mafiosi also fled Sicily as Mussolini cracked down on Mafia activities in Italy.[10] The Italian immigrants resided in tenement buildings. As a way to escape the poor life style some Italian immigrants chose to join the American Mafia.
The Mafia took advantage of prohibition and began selling illegal alcohol. The profits from bootlegging far exceeded the traditional crimes of protection, extortion, gambling and prostitution. Prohibition allowed Mafia families to make fortunes.[11][12][13] As prohibition continued victorious factions would go on to dominate organized crime in their respective cities, setting up the family structure of each city. Since Mafia gangs hijacked each other's alcohol shipments, forcing rivals to pay them for "protection" to leave their operations alone, armed guards almost invariably accompanied the caravans that delivered the liquor.[14][15]
In the early 1920s Italian Mafia families began waging wars for absolute control over lucrative bootlegging rackets. As the violence erupted, Italians fought Irish and Jewish ethnic gangs for control of bootlegging in their respected territories. In New York City Frankie Yale waged war with the Irish American White Hand Gang. In Chicago Al Capone and his family massacred the North Side Gang, another Irish American outfit.[12][16] In New York City, by the end of the 1920s two factions of organized crime had emerged to fight for control of the criminal underworld: one led by Joe Masseria and the other by Salvatore Maranzano.[1] This caused the Castellammarese War, which led to Masseria's murder in 1931. Maranzano then divided New York City into five families.[1] Maranzano, the first leader of the American Mafia, established the code of conduct for the organization, set up the "family" divisions and structure, and established procedures for resolving disputes.[1] In an unprecedented move, Maranzano set himself up as Boss of All Bosses and requiring all families to pay tribute to him. This new role was received negatively by his men, and Maranzano was himself murdered within six months on the orders of Charles "Lucky" Luciano. Luciano was a former Masseria underling who had switched sides to Maranzano and orchestrated the killing of Masseria.
After prohibition ended in 1933, organized crime groups were confronted with an impasse and could no longer maintain the high profits they had acquired through the 1920s. The smarter of the organized crime groups acted prudently and expanded into other ventures such as unions, construction, sanitation and drug trafficking. On the other hand, those Mafia families that neglected the need to change eventually lost power and influence and ultimately vanished.[17]
[edit]The Commission
Further information: The Commission (mafia)
FBI chart of American Mafia Bosses across the country in 1963.
Instead of ruling as Boss of All Bosses, Luciano set up the Commission,[1] where the bosses of the most powerful families would have equal say and vote on important matters and solve disputes between families. This group ruled over the National Crime Syndicate and brought in an era of peace and prosperity for the American Mafia.[18] By mid-century, there were 26 official Commission-sanctioned Mafia crime families, each based in a different city (except for the Five Families which were all based in New York).[19] Each family operated independently from each other and generally had exclusive territory they controlled.[1] As opposed to the older generation of "Mustache Petes" such as Maranzano and Masseria, who usually only worked with fellow Italians, the "Young Turks" lead by Luciano were more open to working with other groups, most notably the Jewish-American criminal syndicates to achieve greater profits. The Mafia thrived by following a strict set of rules that called for an organized hierarchical structure and a code of silence that forbade its members from cooperating with the police (Omertà). Failure to follow any of these rules is punishable by death.
The rise of power that the Mafia acquired during Prohibition would continue long after alcohol was made legal again. Criminal empires which had expanded on bootleg money would find other avenues to continue making large sums of money. When alcohol ceased to be prohibited in 1933, the Mafia diversified its money-making criminal actives to include (both old and new): illegal gambling operations, loan sharking, extortion, protection rackets, drug trafficking, fencing, and labor racketeering through control of labor unions. In the mid-20th century, the Mafia was reputed to have infiltrated many labor unions in the United States, most notably the Teamsters and International Longshoremen's Association.[1] This allowed crime families to make inroads into very profitable legitimate businesses such as construction, demolition, waste management, trucking, and in the waterfront and garment industry.[20] In addition they could raid the unions' welfare, health and pension funds, extort businesses with threats of a workers' strike and participate in bid rigging. In New York City, most construction projects could not be performed without the Five Families' approval. In the port and loading dock industries, the Mafia bribed union members to tip them off to valuable items being brought in. Mobsters would then steal these products, pay off security, then fence the stolen merchandise.
Meyer Lanksy made inroads into the casino industry in Cuba during the 1930s while the Mafia was already involved in exporting Cuban sugar and rum.[21] When his friend Fulgencio Batista became president of Cuba in 1952, several Mafia bosses were able to make legitimate investments in legalized casinos. One estimate of the number of casinos mobsters owned was no less than 19.[21] However, when Batista was overthrown following the Cuban Revolution, his successor Fidel Castro banned American investment in the country, putting an end to the Mafia's presence in Cuba.[21] Las Vegas was seen as an "open city" where any family can work. Once Nevada legalized gambling, mobsters were quick to take advantage and the casino industry became very popular in Las Vegas. Since the 1940s, Mafia families from New York, Cleveland, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Chicago had interests in Las Vegas casinos. They got loans from the Teamsters' pension fund, a union they effectively controlled, and used legitimate front men to build casinos.[22] When money came in to the counting room, hired men skimmed millions of dollars in cash before it was recorded, then delivered it to their respective bosses.[22] This money went unrecorded, but the amount is estimated to be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
Operating in the shadows, the Mafia faced little opposition from law enforcement. Local law enforcement agencies did not have the resources or knowledge to effectively combat organized crime committed by a secret society they were unaware existed.[20] Many people within police forces and courts were simply bribed, while witness intimidation was also common.[20] In 1951, a U.S. Senate committee called the Kefauver Hearings determined that a "sinister criminal organization" known as the Mafia operated in the nation.[1] Many suspected mobsters were subpoenaed for questioning, but few testified and none gave any meaningful information. In 1957, New York State Police uncovered a meeting and arrested major figures from around the country in Apalachin, New York. The event (dubbed the "Apalachin Meeting") forced the FBI to recognize organized crime as a serious problem in the United States and changed the way law enforcement investigated it.[1] In 1963, Joe Valachi became the first Mafia member to turn state's evidence, and provided deatailed information of the its inner workings and secrets. More importantly, he revealed Mafia's existence to the law, which enabled the Federal Bureau of Investigations to begin an aggressive assault on the Mafia's National Crime Syndicate.[23] Following Valachi's testimony, the Mafia could no longer operate completely in the shadows. The FBI put a lot more effort and resources into organized crime actives nation-wide and created the Organized Crime Strike Force in various cities. However, while all this created more pressure on the Mafia, it did little to curb their criminal activities. Success was made in the beginning of the 1980s, when the FBI was able to rid Las Vegas casinos of Mafia control and made a determined effort to loosen the Mafia's stronghold on labor unions.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Mafia
