THEFT of the NATION the Structure and Operations of Organized

THEFT OF THE NATION Criminology Sociology American Studies THEFT OF THE NATION THEFT Th e Structure and Operations of Organized Crime in America Donald R. Cressey With a new introduction by James Finckenauer OF THE NATION Organized crime in America today is not the tough hoodlums familiar to moviegoers and TV watchers. It is more sophisticated, with many college graduates, gifted with organizational genius, all belonging to twenty-four tightly knit “families,” who have corrupted legitimate business and infi ltrated some of the highest levels of The Structure and Operations of local, state, and federal government. Th eir power reaches into Congress, into the executive and judicial branches, police agencies, and labor unions, and into such Organized Crime in America business enterprises as real estate, retail stores, restaurants, hotels, linen-supply houses, and garbage-collection routes. How does organized crime operate? How dangerous is it? What are the Donald R. Cressey implications for American society? How may we cope with it? In answering these questions, Cressey asserts that because organized crime provides illicit goods and services demanded by legitimate society, it has become part of legitimate society. with a new introduction by James Finckenauer Th is fascinating account reveals the parallels: the growth of specialization, “big- business practices” (pooling of capital and reinvestment of profi ts; fringe benefi ts like bail money), and government practices (negotiated settlements and peace treaties, defi ned territories, fair-trade agreements). For too long we have, as a society, concerned ourselves only with superfi cial questions about organized crime. Th eft of the Nation focuses on to a more profound and searching level. Of course, organized crime exists. Cressey not only establishes this fact, but proceeds to explore it rigorously and with penetration. One need not agree with everything Cressey writes to conclude that no one, after the publication of Th eft of the Nation, can be knowledgeable about organized crime without having read this book. About the Authors

Th e late Donald R. Cressey was professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and served as organized-crime consultant to the President’s Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. Educated in

Minnesota, Iowa, and Indiana, he was dean of the College of Letters and Science Cressey at Santa Barbara, Professor of Sociology and chairman of the department of anthropology-sociology at UCLA, visiting professor in the Institute of Criminology at Cambridge University, and in the law faculty of the University of Oslo.

James Finckenauer is the former editor of Trends in Organized Crime.

www.routledge.com THEFT OF THE NATION

THEFT

TheOF Structure THE and NATIONOperations of Organized Crime in America

Donald R. Cressey with a new introduction by James Finckenauer

~~ ~~o~:~~~~~up lONDON AND NEW YORK Originally published in 1969 by Donald P. Cressey.

First published 2008 by Transaction Publishers

Published 2017 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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Library of Congress Catalog Number: 2008006864 ISBN: 978-1-4128-0764-7 (pbk)

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Cressey, Donald Ray, 1919- Theft of the nation : the structure and operations of organized crime in america / Donald R. Cressey. p. cm. Originally published: New York : Harper & Row, 1969. With new introd. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4128-0764-7 1. Organized crime--United States. 2. Maﬁﬁa--United States. I. Title.

HV6791.C715 2008 364.1’060973--dc22 2008006864 FoR MARTHA, ANN, AND MARY

Contents

Introduction to the Transaction Edition ix

Preface xxiii

I Trouble 1

II From Mafia to Cos a N astra 8

III War, Peace, and Peaceful Coexistence 29

IV Educating the Public 54

v Demand, Supply, and Profit 72

VI The Structural Skeleton 109

VII Origins of the Authority Structure 141

VIII The Code 162

IX Some Functions of the Code 186

X Shifting Patterns of Authority and Recruitment 221

XI Corruption ofthe Law-Enforcement and Political 248 Systems

XII Search, Destroy, and Appease

Notes 325

Glossary 343

Index 357

Introduction: Theft of the Nation by Jim Finckenauer

IN THE FALL OF 1963, I was a first-year graduate student studying sociology and criminology at New York University. Given my interest in the study of crime, I was much taken by the news coverage of the hearings, then being held in Washington, DC, by the Permanent Subcommittee of the Senate Committee on Operations, chaired by Arkansas Senator John L. McClellan. Among the witnesses appearing before the committee were Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy and a small-time hoodlum named Joseph Valachi. Attorney General Kennedy, unlike his predecessors, had given a high prior- ity to combating organized crime from his first days in office. And it was that attention from the very highest levels that helped stimulate the FBI's, until then, somewhat tepid interest in this problem. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had consistently denied for years that there was anything like a nationwide criminal cartel known as the mafia operating in the United States. Joseph Valachi, the McClellan committee witness, was the most prominent ofthe newly cultivated FBI informants developed in the early 1960s. It was Valachi, along with other sources, and most especially the critical fruits of the then just recently expanded FBI electronic surveillance (bugs and wiretaps) that not only informed Kennedy's views, but that largely shaped the McClellan hearings, and most importantly the overall picture of organized crime that emerged following those hearings. It was this Valachi-painted and surveillance-derived picture, when combined with what had been learned from the Kefauver Committee hearings in the early 1950s, from the investigative follow-up to the aborted Apalachin, NY gathering of organized crime figures in 1957, and from a series of meetings known as the Oyster Bay Conferences in 1965-1966, that pretty much comprised the state-of-the-art knowledge of organized crime at that time. It was also during this period (the mid 1960s) that President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had successfully defeated Republican candidate Barry Gold- water in the 1964 presidential elections, decided to form a national crime commission. Despite having won the election handily, Johnson recognized

ix x INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION the resonance of the crime issue in the law and order campaign waged by Goldwater. The so-named President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice began work in 1965. A task force on organized crime was added to the various task groups of the Commission somewhat later-albeit pretty much as a low budget afterthought. That latter group brought in as one of its consultants, Donald R. Cressey, a professor of sociology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Cressey's subsequent report for the task force, "The Functions and Struc- ture of Criminal Syndicates," not only influenced specific recommendations made by the Commission in its 1967 report, but more importantly set out a view of what organized crime in the United States was like that has influenced law enforcement policies and practices, as well as research and writing on organized crime for more than forty years. And it was from his consultant's report that Cressey fashioned Theft of the Nation, first published in 1969. At that time, I was still a graduate student (finishing a doctorate), but was also working in a research capacity for the New Jersey State Law En- forcement Planning Agency. That agency was one such body created in all states and territories following the recommendations of the aforementioned President's Crime Commission. Among the crime issues facing New Jersey at that time, perhaps not surprisingly, was organized crime. The Newark race riot had occurred only a year or two earlier, and the investigation of that riot led to disclosures about corruption and mob connections. There were also allegations of mob influence in the NJ state legislature. Organized crime was thus a hot topic. So, as part of the background research to help develop a plan for confronting organized crime in New Jersey, I carefully read Theft of the Nation. Although I was naive at that time to fully appreciate Cressey's historical and sociological analyses of the data and information available to him, I found the book to be an impressive piece of research. It was scholarly. It was well-documented. It was persuasive. But then again, I was just a relative neophyte. Now, nearly four decades later, I am at least no longer a neophyte. Whether I am sophisticated enough to judge Cressey's analyses and conclusions will be for others to decide. What is clear to me is that I come to the book with different eyes than I did in 1969. I am honored to introduce this new edition of Theft of the Nation, and given the history just outlined, not just a little bit in awe. INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION xi Several Premises My first premise in approaching this task is that anyone who would rewrite history in the context of contemporary developments and thinking should do so only with caution. This is particularly so when it comes to rendering critical judgments. The actions of historical figures were taken at a mo- ment in time that was framed by the standards, experience and knowledge extant at that time. And just as people are products of their times, so too are scholarly works products of their times. Putting aside prescience and some ability to predict the future, any such work must have been based upon the state of knowledge at the particular time it was done. But just as this means we should not accept a particular historical version of some reality as the received truth, it does not mean that either the actions or the scholarship are time bound and have no relevance to the present. We have learned a great deal about organized crime in the past forty years. Keeping this in mind, it is appropriate to ask whether Cressey's book has current relevance? And if so, what is that relevance? A second premise related to this, is that it is also appropriate to ask about the heuristic effect of a scholarly work. To what extent has it stimulated further investigation and discovery, thus increasing the scope of know ledge? What Donald Cressey sets out in Theft of the Nation is not a theory per se, but rather a description of reality as he observed it. His description is more fittingly called a model, a likeness of something that is "an imitation or an abstraction from reality that is intended to order and to simplify our view of that reality while still capturing its essential characteristics" (Forcese & Richer, 1973: 38). Donald Cressey's model, his description of the organized crime phe- nomenon in the United States in the 1960s, has certainly been a stimulus to discussion, debate and research, and ultimately to greater explanation and understanding. There is hardly a book or textbook or paper dealing with organized crime-in whole or in part-written in the past four decades, that does not reference Cressey's work and use his ideas to shape the authors' own analysis and discussion. To cite just a few examples, Peter Lupsha called Theft of the Nation a "textbook classic," and said the collaborative work of Cressey and NYPD's Ralph Salerno (who assisted Cressey in defining his model of La Cosa Nostra) was a contribution that "should neither be forgotten nor underestimated, for it provided a systematic, unsensationalized, overview xii INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION of the subject that paved the way for serious academic and law enforcement analysis" (Lupsha, 1986: 38). More recently, Selwyn Raab (2005) describes how Cressey's work influenced Robert Blakey's conceptualization of the Federal RICO statute that has proven to be the single most powerful prosecutorial tool in combating organized crime. All the major textbooks on organized crime, including Abadinsky, Albanese, Lyman and Potter, and yes, Kenney and Finckenauer, have referenced and heavily cited Donald Cressey's work. That his book was not parochial in its influence can be seen in the fact that many scholars outside of the United States have also looked to the Cressey model for guidance. An example is Letizia Paoli's latest book called Mafia Brotherhoods (2003). Not all the derivative work, comment and reaction to Cressey have, however, been laudatory. Not by a long shot! But before we look at some of the criticisms and disputed issues, let me briefly elaborate on the historical context in which Theft of the Nation was first written. That context, as we will see, is very much linked to the critical commentary. At a Place in Time As suggested earlier, the available body of information about organized crime in 1965 was quite limited. The televised hearings and the report of the U.S. Senate Committee chaired by Senator Estes Kefauver of Tennes- see were one major source. In fact, the report of the task force on organized crime for which Cressey was a consultant began with a recitation of findings from the Kefauver Committee report. That latter report had been based upon a series of hearings held in various cities around the country in 1950-1951. This was noteworthy in part because television was then in its infancy, and programming was very sparse. Thus, televised hearings of mobsters became a great viewing attraction. That these mobsters were all Italian-American or in some cases Jewish was not accidental, and it served to confirm in at least some people's minds that organized crime was some kind of alien conspiracy of foreigners colluding against honest, hard-working Americans. Senator Kefauver was positioning himself for a run for the presidency in 1952, and this sort of exposure and coming across as the good guy standing tall against the bad guys could not but help his candidacy. Putting aside the political atmosphere (which surrounds almost any Congressional hearings) and the expose nature of the hearings, there were underlying truths to the Kefauver Committee's investigation. These rein- INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION xiii forced its conclusion that there is "a Nation-wide crime syndicate known as the Mafia ... [that] is a secret conspiracy against law and order." And that conclusion set the tone for any discussion and debate that followed. It clearly influenced Attorney General Kennedy, the FBI, the McClellan Committee, and Donald Cressey. A second source, as mentioned, was the insider information provided by Joseph Valachi to the FBI and to the McClellan Committee. It was Valachi who, on September 27, 1963, introduced the name La Cosa Nostra into the public domain. He described how LCN was organized into twenty-four or twenty-five families in various cities around the country, including five families in New York City. He further described the hierarchical structure of these families, how membership to LCN was gained, and the wide variety of crimes they committed. Although much was made of the Valachi input, especially by the FBI and the McClellan Committee, Cressey recognized its limitations. For example, he describes Valachi's recollections as just "the memoirs of one soldier," that he said were rambling and sometimes incoherent. Cressey equates the level of knowledge of this low-ranking LCN member with his own (as a sergeant in World War II) of "what President Roosevelt, General Chiang Kai-shek, Prime Minister Churchill, and Premier Stalin had in mind" when they ordered some military action. Nevertheless, Cressey's necessary dependence upon Valachi's depictions of organized crime left him relatively uninformed (that is relative to the whole picture of organized crime), and thus in possession of only partial truths. He admits as much: "We know very little," Cressey writes in the end. "Our know ledge of the structure that makes either Cos aNostra or' organized crime' organized is only a little bit better ... than the knowledge of Standard Oil which could be gleaned from interviews with gasoline-station attendants." Besides Kefauver and Valachi, Donald Cressey also had Sgt. Edgar Cro- swell. It was Sgt. Croswell of the NY State Police who had stumbled across a gathering of organized crime bigwigs at Joseph Barbara's estate in Apalachin, New York in November 1957. Follow-up investigations established to the satisfaction of many authorities that "there existed an organized crime network extending across the United States" (FBI, 1988: 3). This new information influenced subsequent legislation giving the FBI greater investigative tools and latitude. The results influenced FBI thinking and by extension then, Donald Cressey's thinking as well, since he made extensive use of FBI files. xiv INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION Another major background source was the work and report of the Oyster Bay Conferences held on Long Island in 1965-1966. Cressey was invited to sit in on these meetings of government officials, academics, law enforcement heads, lawyers, and information specialists in his consultant role with the President's Crime Commission. He acknowledges their influence on his work; and the conferences report Combating Organized Crime is clearly reflected in Theft of the Nation. What might have been missing from these sources? Actually, many things! With respect to sources of information and data, I think it is safe to assume that the FBI wiretaps and eavesdropping were concentrated almost exclusively on mafia or LCN targets. Valachi was a member of LCN. The Kefauver Committee, the McClellan Committee and the Oyster Bay con- ferees an focused on the mafia or LCN versions of organized crime. On the other hand for example, Irish American gangsters, although plentiful and powerful as English (2005) points out, were not on the FBI radar. As for other threats, there was no Russian mafia (this was before the 1970s ex-Soviet immigration to Brighton Beach and well before the tearing down of the Berlin Wall). There were no Colombian drug cartels or Mexican drug cartels (who heard anything about cocaine?). There was no Chinese mafia and no Japanese yakuza impact in the United States. The outlaw motorcycle gangs, e.g., Hells Angels, were not the nationwide and worldwide threat they later became. Cressey worked with the information he had-warts and an. It was, as they say, what it was. In addition, as he explained after finishing his paper for the organized crime task force, he had had less than fifty days to complete that project. It is true that he then worked several years before completing Theft of the Nation. But the framework, the skeleton, was set in his initial work. The various hearings materials, the FBI intelligence, the views of Attorney General Kennedy, and the advice and guidance of Ralph Salerno, the foremost expert of his time on the LCN families in New York, were all significant influences on Cressey's thinking. Some Responses to the Cressey Stimulus The current tendency to equate immigrants with crime and a host of other social problems has a long standing history in this country. Indeed, an "explanation" of organized crime in America that gained popularity beginning way back in the 1890s was that "it" was the work of an alien conspiracy of INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION xv Italian (usually Sicilian) immigrants who imported their criminal ways to our shores. They allegedly brought with them a secret organization called the mafia. Among the problems with this explanation is that if indeed American organized crime and the mafia are or were synonymous, then there should have been no non-Italian organized crime. And, there should have been no organized crime here before the arrival of the Italians. Since neither of those is true, this explanation obviously comes up a little short. Where Cressey comes into this debate is that he has been accused by some of feeding this alien conspiracy notion that American organized crime is principally the work of Italians, in his case La Cosa Nostra. Whereas it is certainly true, as just described, that Cressey depended upon sources that focused on LCN as the principal organized crime threat, it is also clear as he explains in the opening chapter of Theft ofthe Nation, that he recognized the role of myth and scapegoats in attributing organized crime almost exclusively to the Italian mafia. Cressey in effect anticipated later criticisms of his work with respect to the alien parasitic conspiracy idea when he wrote: "While the members of Cosa Nostra, and its affiliates, have learned a thing or two from the Sicilian Mafia, this organization is indigenous to the United States. It does things 'the American way."' He further recognized that LCN/mafia were not the only game in town when he acknowledged that there were criminal (bootlegging) gangs made up of immigrants and descendants of immigrants from many countries operating in the United States in the 1920-1930s. In his book, The Mafia Mystique (1975), Dwight Smith blamed Donald Cressey for contributing to the maintenance of a mafia mystique. Smith accused Cressey of buying (assumedly from the FBI, Kennedy, Valachi, et al.) a perspective that saw organized crime and the mafia as one and the same thing. Smith said that this narrow perspective was "bounded on one side by a limited view of human events and on the other side by a set of pejorative, stereotypical labels that reinforced a moral imperative behind the initial as- sumption" (Smith, 1975: 311). Smith is certainly correct in his assessment of the place of stereotypes in associating organized crime with Italians, and most especially Sicilians. Invariably when I ask college students what they think of when they think of organized crime, the answers generally involve Italians and the mafia. This should not be surprising, given that the main sources of information about organized crime for most people are The Godfather (book and movies), xvi INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION Goodfellas (movie), and especially The Sopranos (TV show)-all of which feature the Italian mafia. When asked in a survey to name the first famous Italian they could think of, Purdue University students namedAl Pacino, John Gotti, Al Capone, Tony Soprano, Joe Pesci, and Robert De Niro--all of whom were either real or play mafiosi. So yes, there is definitely stereotyping and scapegoating, but I think this is much more attributable to the tremendous influence of the popular culture (especially television and movies) than it is to the work of serious scholars like Donald Cressey, or for that matter, Dwight Smith. The prevailing mafia myth or mystique has had a life of its own, separate and apart from anything Cressey may have contributed to it. The fact is that, irrespective of the subject, we scholars and researchers are kidding ourselves if we think we can compete with the popular culture in shaping the attitudes and opinions of the general public. Theft of the Nation cannot contend with The Godfather in this regard. Perhaps the harshest criticism of Cressey's work came from another reputable scholar of organized crime. Joseph Albini's book The American Mafia: Genesis of a Legend (1971) is widely considered to be one of the classic works in the field. Along with his own insightful analyses of how organized crime is in fact "organized," Albini criticized Cressey for having used a "historically fragmented approach" ... that "can produce no more than a fragmented explanation and description" (p. 176). It was years later, however, that Professor Albini really took Cressey to task. A Critique and a Rejoinder In what was, somewhat ironically, supposed to be a tribute to the by then deceased Professor Cressey, entitled "Donald Cressey's Contributions to the Study of Organized Crime: An Evaluation," Joseph Albini leveled his most serious charges (Albini, 1988). I will not try to summarize Albini's critique here, but instead simply highlight several of the most serious allegations. While acknowledging that Cressey had had a powerful impact on the study of organized crime, Albini accused him of having been captivated by the "governmental conception of organized crime" and the "mafia mystique." This was at least in part, Albini implied, because "Cressey ... was not a specialist in the study of organized crime. He had no data other than that given him by sources drawn from the government, police, and one underworld informant-the celebrated Joseph Valachi" (Albini, 1988: 340). INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION xvii There were, according to Albini, two major flaws in Cressey's approach that led to a "serious historical weakness." In fact his was, wrote Albini, a "historyless" approach. The first flaw was that Cressey did not begin with "an adequate, researchable definition of organized crime;" and second, he did not undertake a "critical evaluation of his data." Finally, while acknowledging that Cressey's model had proven useful for comparative purposes, Albini concluded that it was apparently the case that the model only ever received even limited support if researchers used government data. In what might be his most damning charge of all, Albini says: "It seems that so long as we do not use that [government data] base, we cannot seem to find what Cressey found" (Albini, 1988: 350). He (Cressey) was, in other words, taken in, hoodwinked, by government officials who wanted to tell a particular story in a particular way for a particular reason. Four years later, Albini's "tribute" received an outraged response from two other major figures on the subject of American organized crime. Charles Rogovin had been the director of the organized crime task force that retained Donald Cressey as a consultant in 1965 (and was later a law professor at Temple University). Frederick Martens, a former intelligence analyst with the New Jersey State Police, was Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission (a body that focused its efforts on fighting organized crime and corruption in Pennsylvania). Rogovin and Martens tellingly titled their rejoinder, "The Evil That Men Do" (1992)! Again for those interested in the details of the brouhaha, I suggest reading this article along with Albini's. Rogovin and Martens concede that Cressey's research, although accurate, was perhaps "skewed in that it explored only one model - albeit, then and now, the most advanced form of organized crime, La Cosa Nostra" (Rogovin & Martens, 1992: 63). Contrary to Albini's allegations, Rogovin and Martens argue that "the volumes of [criminal] evidence produced, as well as books that have been published by researchers, journalists, investigative reporters, private citizens, and members of La Cosa Nostra have corroborated Cressey over and over again" (p. 70). They conclude their defense by observing that "Cressey's model of organized crime has stood the test of time" (p. 76). In the interests of full disclosure, I will point out that in a text I published (with Dennis Kenney) in 1995, I considered some of these same issues. With the advantage of a dozen years of further research and reflection, would I make the same observations now? The answer is a hedged yes-with some caveats and nuance. Let me offer two examples. xviii INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION First, Kenney and I concluded our discussion of Cressey's work with the organized crime task force with this assessment: "Donald Cressey ... gave researchers and investigators an explicit model of organized crime. Much, although not all, of the research since then has failed to find support for this highly structured, hierarchical, centrally controlled model. Nevertheless, as a research model, it still has great value. But as a foundation for organized crime control policy, it has been problematic" (Kenney & Finckenauer, 1995: 246). Although this conclusion might have benefited from more elaboration, it is still accurate in its essence. Most criminal organizations, including LCN (although less so in their case), are more loosely organized into what have become known as criminal networks than Cressey's work suggested. And as a model for crime control policy, the image of criminal organizations having highly organized hierarchical structures created a mindset that actually prevented investigators and prosecutors from pursuing other forms of criminal organization. If, in other words, a target did not look like the preconceived notion of a mafia/LCN family, it must not be organized crime. The more loosely organized criminal networks that existed in reality also created problems for law enforcement techniques that had been honed for combating hierarchical, highly structured groups. Second, Kenney and I concluded our discussion of myths and organized crime by asking several questions: Are Italian-Americans involved in organized crime in the United States? Are racketeers of Italian descent the only ones doing organized crime here? And, are they (Italian-Americans) as "well organized, as bureaucratically structured, as nationally powerful as Kefauver, McClellan, Kennedy, and Cressey seemed to believe?" Our answers were yes, no, and no. In hindsight, I do not believe anyone would take issue with the first two answers, but it is on the third question where there would probably still be some debate and difference of opinion. A few years later, while at the U.S. Justice Department, I did a report on LCN for the United Nations transnational organized crime program. I concluded that report as follows: "In recent years, LCN has been se- verely crippled by law enforcement, and over the past decade has been challenged in a number of its criminal markets by other organized crime groups .... Along with the effectiveness of law enforcement, the absence of [community] support for LCN means that recruitment has become difficult. Some families have disappeared, and others are only 50 percent to INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION xix as little as 10 percent of their size 30 years ago .... La Cosa Nostra is today much less powerful and pervasive than it was in the past. A loss of political influence has accompanied its general decline. In its heyday, LCN exercised its political influence mostly at the local level, through its connections with the political machines that operated in certain U.S. cities such as New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, and Philadelphia. With the demise of those machines, and with the advent of political reforms stressing open and ethical government, many of the avenues for corrupt influence were substantially closed." (http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/nij/international/lcn.html). Admittedly, these contrary conclusions do not make Cressey, et al., wrong in their perceptions of four decades ago-remember my admonition about historical hindsight! The point is that whatever it may have been, La Cosa Nostra is no longer. So, what does that do to the relevance of Theft of the Nation today? The Test of Time Donald Cressey wrote in the preface to Theft of the Nation in 1969 that it was, like his report to the President's Crime Commission, "an analysis and elaboration of ... eight facts and the relationships between them." I will conclude my introductory words by revisiting these eight "facts," to see whether they have indeed stood the test of time.

1. A nationwide alliance of at least twenty-four tightly knit 'families' of criminals exists in the United States. Whether there were exactly twenty-four families at that time is debatable; as is the characterization of them as being "tightly knit." For a variety of reasons as already indicated, neither is true today.

2. The members of these ''families" are all Italians and Sicilians, or of Italian and Sicilian descent .... 3. The names, criminal records, and principal activities ofabout five thousand of the participants have been assembled. Since Cressey had access to these materials, the latter assessment is probably accurate. In my 2000 research on LCN, I determined that made members, sometimes called "good fellas"or "wise guys," are all male and all of Italian descent. The estimated made membership of LCN was then roughly 1,100 nationwide, with more than 80 percent of the members operating in the New York metropolitan area. xx INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION 4. The persons occupying key positions in the skeletal structure of each ''family" ... are well known to law-enforcement officials having access to informants. Again, I think this was and is accurate. As I noted in my 2000 report, each of the so-called families that make up LCN has roughly the same organizational structure. There is a boss who controls the family and makes executive decisions. There is an underboss who is second in command. There is a senior advisor or consigliere. And then there are a number of "capos" (capo-regimes) who supervise crews made up of "soldiers," who are "made members" of Cosa Nostra. The capos and those above them receive shares of the proceeds from crimes committed by the soldiers and non-made members called associates.

5. The ''families" are linked to each other, and to non-Cosa Nostra syndicates ... and ... to a "Commission" .... There is considerable evidence, including most especially from the RICO prosecution of Anthony "Fat Tony" Salerno, et al., in United States v. Salerno (1989), that there clearly was an oversight structure composed mainly of heads of the five New York families. Thus, I think Cressey was correct in this conclusion. Today, however, as with other features of LCN, the Commission has in Selwyn Raab's words, been shattered.

6. The boss of each ''family" directs the activities, especially the illegal activities, ofthe members of his ':family." Yes, this was and is true-see above.

7. The members of this organization control all but a tiny part of the illegal gambling in the United States ... loan sharks ... narcotics ... infiltrated labor unions ... monopoly on some legitimate enterprises ... owned large proportion of Las Vegas ... owned state legislators and federal congressmen and other officials ... judges consider themselves members. This particular assessment covers a lot of territory. Let's take each point separately: I doubt that LCN controlled all or even most gambling in the United States in the 1950s-1960s. "Big time" gambling? Probably yes, but certainly not all the nickel-and-dime stuff going on at any time across the country. Today, this is clearly not the case. With respect to narcotics, probably yes (see, e.g. the 1970s French Connection case). But again, obviously not today. LCN INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION xxi very definitely infiltrated labor unions, most especially the Teamsters and the Longshoremen's unions. And, labor racketeering is still a prerogative of LCN. The big crime families have maintained a monopoly over both labor and business racketeering for many years. Infiltration and monopolization of legitimate enterprises? Definitely yes, as witness such enterprises as the garment industry, the waste carting business, the Fulton Fish Market, JFK Airport, and other entities in New York City. Although not eliminated, this infiltration is considerably less now than in years past. Yes, LCN was heavily involved in Las Vegas, profiting from the gambling, as well as such ancillary criminal activities as loan sharking, drugs, and prostitution. Today, this is still true in Atlantic City and other venues for major forms of gambling, as well as in Las Vegas. Finally, corruption-one of the most insidious arms of all! Unquestionably, LCN had cops, prosecutors, judges, legislators and other officials on the take. Corruption is the mob's insurance policy against government interference. How high did this go? The history of organized crime (LCN) connections with the Kennedys and then with Nixon, tells us it probably went pretty high. Does this still go on? Unfortunately, yes!

"8. The information about the Commission, the 'families,' and the activities of members has come from detailed reports made by a wide variety of police observers, informants, wire taps, and electronic bugs." It is true today that much of the information about organized crime, and not just LCN, comes from these sources. Another major source that did not exist in 1969 arose from the combined use of the RICO and Witness Protec- tion statutes. The first threatens very severe penalties upon conviction for racketeering (the "stick"), and the second offers protection and assistance if an insider is willing to "cop a plea" and testify for the prosecution (the "carrot"). This combination has brought down many mob bosses. A classic example is Sammy "The Bull" Gravano, John Gotti's underboss in the Gambino crime family, who agreed to testify against Gotti as part of a plea deal that landed him in the Witness Protection Program. The information Gravano provided was crucial to Gatti's being convicted and sent to prison.

Beyond these observations and conclusions, I believe one of the most important lasting contributions of Cressey's work is his argument that organized crime requires enablers or facilitators to be successful. Individuals in the professions, who regard themselves as being honest and upstanding citizens-lawyers, accountants, investment bankers, financial analysts, and xxii INTRODUCTION TO THE TRANSACTION EDITION yes, public officials including law enforcement authorities-become willing partners in carrying out the crimes of organized crime. Cressey's description of the roles of the corrupter, the corruptee, and the enforcer as being essential to the organization of organized crime, was an insightful look at just what the organized part of organized crime means. Having reread Theft of the Nation for this assignment, I must say that I remain impressed, albeit for somewhat different reasons, just as I was nearly four decades ago. Given the state of knowledge and the politics of the times, Donald Cressey got it just about right! References Albini, J.L., The American Mafia: Genesis of a Legend, New York: Appleton-Cen- tury-Crofts, 1971. Albini, J.L., "Donald Cressey's Contributions to the Study of Organized Crime: An Evaluation," Crime & Delinquency, Vol. 34, No.3, July 1988. English, T.J., Paddy Whacked: The Untold Story of the Irish American Gangster, New York: Regan Books, 2005. Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Wanted by the FBI: The Mob, FBI Organized Crime Report-25 Years after Valachi," Washington, DC: FBI, 1988. Finckenauer, J.O., "La Cosa Nostra in the United States," (http://www.ojp.usdoj. gov/nij/international/lcn.html}. Forcese, D.P. and S. Richer, Social Research Methods, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Pren- tice-Hall, 1973. Kenney, D.J. & J.O. Finckenauer, Organized Crime in America, Belmont, CA: Wad- sworth Publishing, 1995. Lupsha, P.A., "Organized Crime in the United States," Organized Crime: A Global Perspective, R.I. Kelly (ed.), Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield, 1986. Paoli, L., Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style, Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003. Raab, S., Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence ofAmerica's Most Power- ful Mafia Empires, New York: St. Martin's Press, 2005. Rogovin, C.H. & F.T. Martens, "The Evil That Men Do," Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice, Vol. 8, No. 1, February 1992. Smith, D.C, Jr., The Mafia Mystique, New York: Basic Books, 1975. Preface

IN DESCRIBING America's era of Prohibition, Dean Jennings recently wrote, "The law was sick and dying, and no one cared. . . . Crime was just a harmless little game, and its heroes in almost every conflict were the gangsters who could outwit the villainous men with the badges." The Prohibition era is gone, but organized criminals are more powerful than they ever were when their principal occupation was rumrunning and bootlegging. Their activities continue to be viewed as a harmless little game. But the game is neither harmless nor little. Organized criminals are gradually but inexorably stealing our nation. And still no one cares. This book is an extensive revision of a report I prepared for the President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice. That report was written under conditions which can best be described as "desperate." Time pressures were such that important questions could not even be clearly formulated, let alone discussed. I viewed the report as a "first draft," and after it was published I spent a year collecting materials necessary to revising it. The secrecy of organized criminals, the confidentiality of the materials collected by law-enforcement and investigative agencies, and the various filters through which both informers and investigators see organized criminals all pose serious problems for anyone who would write coolly and calmly about organized crime in America. The ongoing activities of organized criminals simply are not accessible to observation by the ordinary citizen, the ordinary reporter, or the ordinary social scientist. Even gaining access to some of the observations made by law-enforcement officers and investigative bodies requires "connections" such as appointment as a consultant to the President's Commission. It is not difficult to get information necessary to writing a gossipy expose that "names names." The tough job is , that of obtaining information about organization.

xxiii xxiv PREFACE Upon being invited to work for the Commission, I was not at all sure that a nationwide organization of criminals exists. Discussions with my friends and colleagues indicated, and continue to indicate, that this skepticism is widely shared. I changed my mind. I am certain that no rational man could read the evidence that I have read and still come to the conclusion that an organization variously called "the Mafia," "Cosa Nostra," and "the syndicate" does not exist. Henry S. Ruth, Jr., Deputy Director of the President's Commission, invited law-enforcement and investigative agencies to submit reports on organized crime to the Commission. A summer spent reading these materials, exploring other confidential materials, and interviewing knowledgeable policemen and investigators convinced me that the following eight points are facts. An additional year of similar kinds of reading and interviewing supported my conviction. This book, like my report to the Commission, is above all an analysis and elaboration of these eight facts and the relationships between them.

1. A nationwide alliance of at least twenty-four tightly knit c"families" of criminals exists in the United States. (Because the "families" are fictive, in the sense that the members are not all relatives, it is necessary to refer to them in quotation marks.) 2. The members of these "families" are all Italians and Sicilians, or of Italian and Sicilian descent, and those on the Eastern Seaboard, especially, call the entire system "Cosa Nostra." Each participant thinks of himself as a "member" of a specific "family" and of Cosa Nostra (or some equivalent term). 3. The names, criminal records, and principal criminal activities of about five thousand of the participants have been assembled. 4. The persons occupying key positions in the skeletal structure of each "family"--consisting of positions for boss, underboss, lieutenants (also called "captains"), counselor, and for low-ranking members called "soldiers" or "button men"-are well known to law-enforcement officials having access to informants. Names of persons who permanently or temporarily occupy other positions, such as "buffer,'' "money mover," "enforcer," and "executioner," also are well known. PREFACE XXV 5. The "families" are linked to each other, and to non-Cosa Nostra syndicates, by understandings, agreements, and "treaties," and by mutual deference to a "Commission" made up of the leaders of the most powerful of the "families." 6. The boss of each "family" directs the activities, especially the illegal activities, of the members of his "family." 7. The members of this organization control all but a tiny part of the illegal gambling in the United States. They are the principal loan sharks. They are the principal importers and wholesalers of narcotics. They have infiltrated certain labor unions, where they extort money from employers and, at the same time, cheat the members of the union. The members have a virtu!U monopoly on some legi~imate enterprises, such as cigarette vending machines and juke boxes, and they own a wide variety of retail firms, restaurants and bars, hotels, trucking companies, food companies, linen-supply houses, garbage collection routes, and factories. Until recently, they owned a large proportion of Las Vegas. They own several state legislators and federal congressmen and other officials in the legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government at the local, state, and federal levels. Some government officials (including judges) are considered, and consider themselves, members. 8. The information about the Commission, the "families," and the activities of members has come from detailed reports made by a wide variety of police observers, informants, wire taps, and electronic bugs.

Bibliographical notes are at the end of the book. Since most of the notes refer only to the location of quotations and other pieces of information, I have not used superscript numbers; the citations are identified in the notes (pp. 325-342) by a key phrase. Most of the quotes appearing without citation are from interviews. Policemen with access to informants often quoted them to me. A few incidents have been slightly altered in the interest of anonymity. My objective is not that of identifying crooks who ought to be in jail. The objective is to show the effects of the fact that some crooks are organized. I owe special thanks to Ralph Salerno, who until recently was with the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the New York City Police xxvi PREFACE Department. Mr. Salerno is an extraordinary teacher. He gave me lessons at all hours of the day and night in all parts of the country. I have swiped a few of his jokes and a lot of his stories. I also am deeply grateful to other members of "the organized- crime gang" which developed as we worked together in Washington. These include Charles Rogovin, Director of the President's Com- mission Task Force on Organized Crime and now Assistant Attorney General of Massachusetts; Henry Ruth, Jr., Deputy Director of the Commission and now Professor in the University of Pennsylvania Law School; G. Robert Blakey, Consultant to the Commission and now Professor in the Notre Dame Law School; Robert L. Emrich, Consultant to the Commission and now the anthropological member of The Office of Law Enforcement Assistance; Henry E. Peterson, Chief of the Organized Crime and Racketeering Section of the United States Department of Justice; and Robert Herman, my research assistant and now a graduate student in political science at the Uni- versity of California, Irvine. The participants in the somewhat confidential Oyster Bay (New York) Conferences on Combating Organized Crime at first looked at me with a fishy eye but then unselfishly began contributing to my education. The originator of the conferences, Eliot Lumbard, then Special Assistant to Governor Rockefeller of New York, frequently walked with me in the woods and gave me lessons in elementary political science. My old friend Lloyd Ohlin got me started in "the organized-crime business," and a more recent friend, James Voren- berg, kept me going. Harper & Row's Alfred E. Prettyman and Miss Jeannette Hop- kins were so helpful that I dedicated my hand-wrought, three-stall, horse stable to them. DoNALD R. CRESSEY Santa Barbara, California "The racketeer is not someone dressed in a black shirt, white tie, and diamond stick pin, whose activities affect only a remote underworld circle. He is more likely to be outfitted in a gray flannel suit and his influence is more likely to be as far-reaching as that of an important industrialist. The American public may not see him, but that makes the racketeer's power for evil in our society even greater. Lacking the direct confrontation with the racketeer, the American citizen fails to see the reason for alarm. The reason, decidedly, exists. The financial cost of organized crime is not limited to the vast illicit profits of gambling or narcotic.s. When the racketeers bore their way into legitimate business, the cost is borne by the public. When the infiltration is into labor relations, the racketeer's cut is paid by higher wages and higher prices--in other words, by the public. When the racketeer bribes local officials and secures immunity from police action, the price exacted by corrupt law enforcement-in- calculable in dollars-is paid, again, by the public. In short, organized crime affects everyone. It cannot be the concern only of law enforcement officers. It must be the urgent and active concern of every citizen." RoBERT F. KENNEDY

CHAPTER I

Trouble

The most flagrant manifestation of crime in America is organized crime. It erodes our very system of justice -in all spheres of government. It is bad enough for individuals to turn to crime because they are misguided or desperate. It is intolerable that corporations of corruption should systematically flaunt our laws. LYNDON B. JOHNSON

IN THE UNITED STATES, criminals have managed to put together an organization which is at once a nationwide illicit cartel and a nationwide confederation. This organization is dedicated to amassing millions of dollars by means of extortion, and from usury, the illicit sale of lottery tickets, chances on the outcome of horse races and athletic events, narcotics, and untaxed liquor. Its presence in our society is morally reprehensible because any citizen purchasing illicit goods and services from organized criminals contributes to a culture of fraud, corruption, violence, and murder. Nevertheless, criminal organizations dealing only in illicit goods and services are no great threat to the nation. The danger of organized crime arises because the vast profits acquired from the sale of illicit goods and services are being invested in licit enterprises, in both the economic sphere and the political sphere. It is when criminal syndicates start to under- mine basic economic and political traditions and institutions that the real trouble begins. And the real trouble has begun in the United States. It is one thing to make a few dollars selling illegal lottery tickets, but it is another thing to achieve a monopoly on illegal gambling

I 2 THEFT OF THE NATION services by means of a simple weapon, a gun. It is one thing to bribe a policeman to overlook gambling, but it is another thing to dictate the actions of a state legislator or federal congressman or senator. It is one thing to amass a fortune by importing narcotics, but it is another thing to use this fortune to buy immunity from prosecution for murder. It is one thing to embezzle from union funds, but it is another thing to use a union to extort a small businessman's means of live- lihood from him. It is one thing to beat up a loan-shark victim who is delinquent in his payments, but it is another thing to bribe city officials in order to get a liquor license or a construction contract. It is one thing to control gambling and most other illegal activities in a neighborhood, but it is another thing to demand, with a gun, a share of the butcher's profits, the baker's profits, the doctor's fees, and the banker's interest rates. While organized criminals do not yet have control of all the legitimate economic and political activities in any metropolitan or other geographic area of America, they do have control of some of those activities in many areas. In some cities, all night-club owners must hand I o percent of their income to a collector who stands in a comer of the establishment, figuratively speaking, shifting a gun from pocket to pocket or fingering the blade of a razor-sharp knife. In other cities, or areas of cities, all butchers must buy their meat, at inflated prices, from a man who, similarly, holds a deadly weapon in his hand. Some workingmen, especially unskilled laborers, do not know that they are members of a labor union-their employer pays their "dues" to a man standing in the doorway of factory or shop holding a bomb or, in the case of beauty salons, a box of live mice or a hive of honey bees. Equally important, members of crime syndicates have invested in every conceivable kind of legitimate business, and they completely control both small and large business firms, ranging from restaurants and trucking companies to international importing and distributing companies. They operate many of these businesses illegally, as the Kefauver Committee showed over fifteen years ago. They monopolize by force. The men holding knives at the throats of American businessmen, whether these businessmen be engaged in illicit or licit enterprises, are not "independents." They work for someone who works for someone who works for someone. They have jobs to do. They are TROUBLE 3 "organized." This means, among other thifigs, that money extorted from night-club owners goes into the same coffers as the profits on narcotics importation and distribution. Moreover, the rulers of crime syndicates have strong interests in the governmental process and they are "represented," in one form or another, in legislative, judicial, and executive bodies all over the country. The residents of some political wards no longer have an effective vote--their governmental officials represent criminals rather than the law-abiding voters. Even the American citizens who are represented by honest elected and appointed officials have lost, to organized criminals, a few decibels of their democratic voice. The honest politician who must cope with a politician controlled by criminals loses some of ])is effectiveness. Organized criminals have gone beyond buying licenses to gamble from law-enforcement officers and minor city officials. They now are concerned with influencing legislation on matters ranging from food services and garbage collection to "invasion of privacy" (wire tapping, electronic surveillance, and computerization of criminal records) and the "defamation" of Italian-American hoodlums. We recognize a danger. We cannot be sure of the degree of the danger any more than the observer of the beginnings of any other kind of monopoly can be sure of the degree of danger. If a large retail firm similar to the Atlantic and Pacific Tea Company lowers its prices to a level such that its small independent competitors happen to go bankrupt, that is free enterprise. If, after its competitors are forced out of business, the large firm raises its prices above those existing when it had competitors, thus forcing consumers to pay a tribute, that is exploitive monopolistic practice. By analogy, rulers of crime syndicates are beginning to drive legitimate businessmen, labor leaders, and other supporters of the ideology of free competition to the wall. They have established, by force, intimidation, and even more "legal" methods, monopolies in several relatively small fields such as distribution of certain kinds of vending machines, the supplying of linen to night clubs, and the supplying of some forms of labor. In some political arenas they have, as indicated, used force and fraud to monopolize the processes of democratic government. A "monopoly" on government is, of course, a dictatorship. A former special attorney in the Organized Crime and Racketeer- 4 THEFT OF THE NATION ing Section of the United States Department of Justice accurately has pointed out that "when organized crime embarks on a venture in legitimate business it ordinarily brings to that venture all the techniques of violence and intimidation which are employed in its illegal enterprises." Accordingly, consumers and taxpayers unknowingly pay tribute to the organized criminals who have entered legitimate business. This situation is more dangerous than was the situation in the 1920's and 1930's when the monopolies controlled by organized criminals were primarily monopolies on only the distribution of illicit goods and services. The real danger is that the trend will continue to the point where syndicate rulers gain such a degree of control that they drive supporters of free enterprise and democracy out of "business" and then force us to pay tribute in the form of traditional freedoms. Syndicate rulers are among the most active monopolizers in the American economy. On the occasion of his retirement from the Criminal Investigation Bureau of the New York City Police De- partment, one of the nation's few police experts on organized crime said, "Organized crime will put a man in the White House some day, and he won't know it until they hand him the bill." He might have said, alternatively, "We won't know it until they hand us the bill." Syndicate rulers are among the most active monopolizers of the democratic process. Danilo Dolci, the Italian social reformer, has emphasized the potential danger of organized crime by pointing out that even now a "Mafia-client system" of politics operates under the label of democracy in much of the world we know best, the Western world. This is the system of politics in which a politician's clients buy votes for him with handouts of food, low-status jobs, a few pennies, personal recommendations, and "favors," or, alternatively, muster votes for him by threats of terror. This is the system in which the politician is able to obtain personal power and advantages in every possible combination because his clients are rewarded for procuring the votes of people whose collective interests lie in a direction very different from those of their governor. And this is the system of politics that America's syndicated crime rulers would with a vengeance substitute for an ideal participatory democracy. Dolci describes "the Western world" as follows: TROUBLE 5 The people in the industrialized zones have no effective political rela- tionship, but rather some vague and distorted notions of current ideol- ogies, while in the underdeveloped areas, what is being smuggled in under the guise of democracy, generally with complete success and immunity, is a genuine Mafia-client system. Under this system a large proportion of votes is acquired en masse through the purchase of news- papers (and newspapermen), television stations (and their staffs), and ••politicians," or through all the many tried and tested techniques which range from ingratiating smiles to blackmail and intimidation-and this from the level of local administration to the highest levels of national government.

In other words, the goals and methods of public officials may not be as far from the goals and methods of our crime syndicate as we Americans would like to think. If syndicate rulers are permitted to achieve a monopoly on the democratic processes in the United States, we surely will regard as inevitable or even as "democratic" a world of ghettos, inequality, and discriminatory practices. Rather than steady movement toward total, continuous, and strategic commitment to the construction of a democratic world, there will be a throwback to a political system in which the strong increasingly come to agreements with the strong, powerfully increasing the ability of the strong to extract tribute from the weak. It is difficult to determine the point at which antitrust action should be taken against the fictitious large retail firm noted in the example above. It is also difficult to determine the point at which the danger to American freedom posed by despotic rulers of crime syndicates is clear and present enough to justify strong defensive and retaliatory action. We are concerned because millions of Americans are, in hundreds of minor ways, already paying ransom to organized criminals. We do not mean the man who bets a dollar at I to 500 or I to 6oo odds when the "honest" odds are I to 1000. We mean the housewife who must pay a few cents extra each day to have her trash hauled by a company controlled by criminals. We mean the teen-ager who pays a few cents more for a hamburger and a glass of milk because the vendor must buy his supplies from companies controlled by criminals. We mean the college student and the lawyer who must pay a few cents more for their books because they have at 6 THEFT OF THE NATION

1some stage been hauled by a truck operator who must, in order to maintain labor peace, buy his tires from a company controlled by criminals. We mean all the other citizens who are required to spend a quarter here and a dollar there because someone, somewhere in the chain from raw material to. finished product, must pay a tribute to criminals. We also mean the taxpayer, the poor taxpayer, who must in the long run finance kickbacks to organized criminals and who must pay both his own taxes and a large proportion of the syndicate member's share of taxes. "If organized criminals paid income tax on every cent of their vast earnings, everybody's tax bill would go down, but no one knows how much." In the four-year period 1961-1965 the In- ternal Revenue Service assessed organized criminals almost a quarter of a billion dollars in taxes and penalties beyond the amounts paid by the criminals when they filed their income-tax forms. In 1965 the City and State of New York lost over $50 million in cigarette-tax revenues to cigarette smuggling by organized criminals. Further, since the smugglers paid no tax on the income derived from the sale of about $138 million worth of cigarettes, another tax source also dried up. These are insignificant amounts as the nation's budget and New York's budget go. They also are insignificant amounts of the tax burden citizens must bear because organized criminals cheat. The economic costs of organized crime to the ordinary citizen are similar to the economic costs of misrepresentation in advertising-each individual is damaged onlv a little, but collectively the citizenry pays plenty. In some cases, of course, the monopolies started by organized criminals do not seem to hurt .any individual's pocketbook. They might even reduce prices for a time, as does the fictitious retail firm mentioned above. The gambler whose bookie pays the same odds as does the race track feels no pinch if a part of the bookie's profits goes to an organization whose agents protect him from the poliee, and from themselves. A quarter in a juke box is a quarter in a juke box, whether the machine is owned by a crook or by my grandmother. The coins inserted in a cigarette vending machine release one package of smuggled cigarettes or one package of tax-paid cigarettes. If the dues and benefits in each of two union locals are the same, it costs me nothing if I pay my dues to a "paper local" owned by criminals rather than to a legitimate local. TROUBLE 7 The threat of organized crime to America is similar to the threat any potential monopolizer poses to a small businessman: "This man can hurt me." But there are differences, too. First, organized crime uses force· and threat of force to obtain monopoly, while legitimate firms do not, at least not as often. Second, organized crime nullifies legitimate government more directly, and to a greater extent, than do other forms of monopoly. Business firms "own" elected and appointed officials, just as do criminal syndicates. The former attempt to nullify government by securing favorable legislation, the latter by this means and by· obtaining immunity from the regulatory effects of legislation, including the criminal law. If a significant proportion of a society's rewards go to those who openly violate the law, and those who obey the law come to feel that criminal behavior pays more than honesty, we are in danger, even if the "leftovers" make us the wealthiest persons in the world. We agree with the President's Com- mission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice, which drew the following conclusion: In many ways organized crime is the most sinister kind of crime in America. The men who control it have become rich and powerful by encouraging the needy to gamble, by luring the troubled to destroy themselves with drugs, by extorting the profits of honest and hardworking businessmen, by collecting usury from those in financial plight, by maim- ing or murdering those who oppose them, by bribing those sworn to destroy them. Organized crime is not merely a few preying on a few. In a very real sense, it is dedicated to subverting not only American institutions, but the very decency and integrity that are the most cherished attributes of a free society. As the leaders of Cosa Nostra and their racketeering allies pursue their conspiracy unmolested, in open and continuous defiance of the law, they preach a sermon that all too many Americans heed: The government is for sale; lawlessness is the road to wealth; honesty is a pitfall and morality a trap for suckers. We also agree with Robert F. Kennedy who, when counsel for the Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Com- mittee on Operations (McOellan Committee), became convinced that "if we do not on a national scale attack organized criminals, with weapons and techniques as effective as their own, they will destroy us."