Crime, Organized

CRIME, ORGANIZED

CRIME, ORGANIZED. Organized crime is a term that has been used selectively in the twentieth century to identify particular criminal coalitions, often ethnically based, that others wished to define as dangerous criminal conspiracies. The criminals identified to be part of "organized crime" have seldom possessed the hierarchical structure or the power ascribed to them. Yet, labeling them as "organized crime" often influenced popular attitudes and the policies of law enforcement. A history of organized crime, then, includes both a history of criminal structures and of the selective use of the term.

From the 1860s into the twentieth century, certain types of gambling received increased coordination in many cities. During and after the Civil War, policy gambling—a type of illegal lottery—became widely popular. Fans could bet on the numbers in bars, barber shops, newspaper kiosks, and similar retail outlets. Concurrently, entrepreneurs backed the local retailers, so that the retailer retained a fixed percent of each bet while the backer(s) paid off when bettors won. By the 1880s, as betting on horse racing also became popular, off-track bookmaking was coordinated much like policy, with bets placed in local bars and other hangouts for men, while bookmakers backed the local sellers. As a result, especially by the 1890s, policy and bookmaking syndicates enjoyed the support of bettors, local businessmen, and the politicians who sought their votes.

Outside the South, the Irish were heavily involved in the policy and bookmaking syndicates. Among the earliest and most famous was John Morrissey. After winning a disputed boxing match in September 1853, many recognized him as the American champion until October 1857, when after a successful title defense, he retired. He used his fame to open gambling houses in New York City and during the Civil War put together a major syndicate to back the rising policy gambling in the city. In Saratoga Springs, New York, during the summer racing season, he also operated perhaps the finest casino in the world and found time to serve two terms in the state legislature and two terms in the U.S. Congress. However, criminal entrepreneurs like Morrissey emerged too early to be labeled organized crime.

The term "organized crime" was first used in the 1920s, perhaps from John Landesco's Organized Crime in Chicago, a book-length section of the Illinois Crime Survey, published by the Illinois Association for Criminal Justice (1929). But the concept of powerful bootlegging gangs was popularized by newspaper stories and by movies about Al Capone (and other bootleggers). They were key factors in ascribing to the often decentralized and independent bootleggers a mythical power. In the same decade, activities such as labor and business racketeering were also called "organized crime," capturing the fears of elite businessmen and lawyers that the urban underworld was becoming organized bureaucratically like legitimate businesses. A fear that some criminal activities were now more dangerous because more organized continued as an undercurrent among some criminal justice professionals and academics through the 1930s and 1940s.

From the 1950s into the 1970s, the danger from "organized crime" was reinforced by identifying it with a belief that an Italian American "mafia" exercised nationwide domination of crime. In 1950 and 1951, the idea received popular dissemination when the Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime (popularly known as the Kefauver Committee after its chair, Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennessee) held televised hearings, which were America's first big TV event. Listeners were fascinated as the Committee moved from city to city and allowed the public to hear various alleged crime kingpins respond to the grilling by the staff and members of the committee. Perhaps the high point was the testimony of Frank Costello. In eight days during March 1951, he refused to allow his face on camera, but the audience could hear his gravelly voice and watch his clasping hands as he responded defiantly, evasively, or honestly to the committee.

In 1967, the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice published a report on organized crime, based chiefly upon FBI wiretaps. The report claimed that twenty-four cartels, consisting solely of Italian Americans, cooperated across the nation in the coordination of gambling, loansharking, and drugs. Combating this menace became a central focus of law enforcement. The U.S. Justice Department established Organized Crime Task Forces in many cities where Italian Americans were active in criminal activities. States and cities cooperated. The news media reported the investigations in detail, while novels and movies such as The Godfather (1972) provided the public with vivid and exaggerated images of the power of such men. The focus of federal, state, and local prosecutions on Italian Americans, combined with media attention, increased the idea of the power of such groups, while obscuring and ignoring the complexity and diverse roots of criminal activities.

In the 1970s, with the launching of the "war on drugs," drug trafficking gradually began to supplant the "mafia" as the focus for law enforcement and media attention. It became clear that a so-called mafia could not explain the extensive drug trafficking that provided marijuana, LSD, cocaine, and heroin to a diversity of users. The term "organized crime" was extended to foreign drug "cartels" or to powerful and profitable domestic drug organizations. Again, the effect was to simplify a complex system but also to externalize America's drug problem by suggesting that powerful foreign organizations were at fault. More recently, the expansion of international banking and trade, combined with the management of the international economy by computers, has expanded the term "organized crime" to encompass money laundering, banking and credit card fraud, and other criminal activities embedded in the new economy. After the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings by Middle Eastern hijackers on 11 September 2001, terrorism was added to other transnational crimes as part of international "organized crime."

The term "organized crime," introduced in the 1920s, has been applied to a diversity of criminal activities, generally ethnically based. The effect has often been to simplify an understanding of complex and loosely coordinated activities, to suggest that the activities constitute a foreign danger to the United States, and to exaggerate the power of those engaged in the activities labeled "organized crime."

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fox, Stephen. Blood and Power: Organized Crime in Twentieth-Century America. New York: Morrow, 1989.

Haller, Mark H. "Ethnic Crime: The Organized Underworld of Early Twentieth-Century Chicago." In Ethnic Chicago: A Multicultural Portrait. Edited by Melvin G. Holli and Peter d'A. Jones. Chapter 19. Rev. ed. Grand Rapids, Mich.: W. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1984.

———. "Bootleggers as Businessmen: From City Slums to City Builders." In Law, Alcohol, and Order: Perspectives on National Prohibition. Chapter 9. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1985.

Lacey, Robert. Little Man: Meyer Lansky and the Gangster Life. New York: Century, 1991.

Reuter, Peter. Disorganized Crime: The Economics of the Visible Hand. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1984.

Mark Haller

See also Bootlegging ; Drug Trafficking, Illegal ; Organized Crime Control Act ; Tweed Ring .