Blame the Ladder?: A Response to "The Crooked Ladder"

In The Crooked Ladder, Michael Gladwell's article in last month's issue of The New Yorker, Gladwell explains the injustices done to modern African Americans as one of their ladders of upward mobility has been kick out from under them: crime.

Gladwell cites Francis Ianni's 1974 book A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime, and uses the book's crime family as an example of how some later generations of Italian Americans became "white" by using organized crime as a ladder to the middle and upper classes(Ianni changed the name of the names in his book to protect identities). He also claims that today, because of the intense police crackdowns on narcotics, that African Americans are denied the same advantage.

Gladwell also uses Alice Hoffman's  On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City to illustrate how life is currently for African American criminals who try to use crime as an elevator for upward mobility. Hoffman, who lived among the subjects of her book for six years, paints a picture of life in a low income neighborhood in Philadelphia.

I understand the message that Gladwell is trying to get across in his article: why should one ethnic group be able to climb out of poverty through crime, and why should another be condemned for it? In comparing the Mafia with modern black gangs, Gladwell is making glaring generalizations. Besides the historical differences between the two groups that Gladwell mentions in his article, there are several major factors that divide the two criminal organizations:

1.) Violence

One of the major differences between the Mafia and the African American gangs that operate today is violence.

This past month in New Orleans there was a shooting in which two gunmen opened fire into a crowd of mostly women and children in the lower 9th Ward. The drug dealer, who police believed was the target, was killed along with a sixteen year old girl. Five other bystanders were wounded, including  a 4 year old who is now blind, and his two year old brother who has brain damage thanks to a shot in the head.

Also this month a trial started in which Dedmond "Little D" Sandifer , a member of the New Orleans street gang 110ers, was accused of a quadruple shooting. Sandifer later returned to the scene of the crime where he took photos of himself brandishing a revolver and posing with gang signs. Sandifer also uploaded the pictures to Instagram.

During the writing of this response, a news story broke that eleven people were shot overnight in Chicago. The week before, seven people were murdered in Chicago, and 29 were wounded.

The drive by gang shootings that plague Chicago, New Orleans, and several other cities in America, are very reminiscent of Prohibition-era Chicago; where a war between Al Capone and the alliance of Mafia leader Giuseppe Aiello and North Side gang leader George "Bugs" Moran turned the streets of Chicago into battlefields.

But as violent as Chicago was during the Prohibition-era, there were less murders than there are today (1).

As well as the body count being less, it also seems that most assassination attempts were more targeted, with less innocent people being shot in the crossfire. Of course, innocent people were injured and killed. In one particular assassination attempt on Capone, an innocent family was shot. After Capone escaped unscathed from the assassination attempt, he ran over to the Freeman family car, and discovered that Mrs. Freeman had been shot. Capone insisted that he pay for the family's medical bills (2).

Even the 1929 St. Valentine's Day Massacre, one of the largest and brutal gang shootings in the history of the United States, no innocent civilian was killed. Granted, not everyone who was gunned down in the Chicago warehouse that day was a gangster, but they knew they were taking part in a criminal enterprise.

I'm not trying to say that the Mafia has never killed an innocent person. It has. The Mafia just realizes that when innocent people die, it attracts attention. Both from the cops and the public. And it's the public who is going to be sitting on the jury.


2.) Organization

During the closing days of prohibition, organized crime was re-organized. To avoid the violent prohibition-era clashes in the future, the Mafia in New York organized "families", carved up territories, and formed a national commission. And for the most part it worked. The majority of Mafia violence after prohibition has been internal, within the Family(3). Rather than two families going to war with each other. 

For the most part, the Mafia commission avoided bloodshed and brought out the democratic side of organized crime. One example is with the New Orleans Mafia. In 1947,  New Orleans mob boss "Silver Dollar" Sam Carolla was deported back to Italy. Instead of passing on his title to his son, Anthony Carolla, he named up and coming mobster Carlos Marcello as his successor. Carolla thought he was entitled to a larger share of the New Orleans Mafia, and also he should be named Marcello's successor. One would expect the passed over mobster to assassinate Marcello and take over the New Orleans rackets as his birthright. But that didn't happen. Carolla took the issue to the commission in New York. The mobsters met and came to an agreement. The issue obviously being resolved at another venue: Marcello, Carolla, New Orleans underboss Pete Marcello, New Orleans Capo Frank Gagliano, along with Tampa Mafia boss Santo Trifficante, Jr., and other New York mobsters met for a late lunch at La Stella restaurant. All of the men there were arrested for associating with one another, and were soon released on bail. The meeting has been dubbed "Little Appalachian."(4)

But that is just one major example of how the ruling body of the Mafia works.

At this point in time the Mafia should even be considered more of an institution. There are clear hierarchies and lines of succession within the Mafia. When a boss or major figure dies, someone moves up.

That is what some modern African American gangs lack: organization. Some street gangs have a limited organizational structure and fade in and out of existence depending on membership (5).

Other, multi-generational, African American organized crime groups have imitated some of the same organizational techniques that has made the Mafia successful. The Bloods and the Crips are divided into "sets", and each is run independently from one another. While this can extend membership, the problem is that it isn't uncommon for these sets to rival one another, leading to violence(6). Fighting over territory or more often over a perceived slight, the Bloods and the Crips lack the tight organizational structure the Mafia has(7).

In Chicago, a more developed organizational structure has taken place. Two coalitions of street gangs have formed alliances against one another. Mostly African American and Latino gangs make up both the Folk Nation and the People Nation. Because of this coalition alliance, this make the membership structure for these two organizations far more complicated.

A great example of this structure can be found in The Street Gang Identification Manual, which categorizes a four-way breakdown of Chicago gang membership:

"This member is from the Disciples street gang.
1) Immediately he or she is listed under the Folks nation.
2) The next heading would be under the generic designation of Disciples.
3) The faction would now have to be listed, for this example I will make it Spanish Gangster Disciples.
4) Finally, the sub faction would have to be addressed (the exact location). We will make this person a member from the sub faction located at 88th and Houston streets, an area that is known on the street as the “danger zone”."(8)

While this is somewhat reminiscent of the Mafia Commission, the present gang violence in Chicago may suggest these alliances may be more geared towards conflict rather than diplomacy.


3.) Opportunity 

If there is one advantage that the Mafia had over modern gangs, it was alcohol prohibition. The prohibition on alcohol changed the Mafia from the street gangs that it once was to the highly organized criminal syndicate that it developed into. While there were African American organized crime groups during the Roaring Twenties, they were largely subservient to their European counterparts (I wrote a film theory paper on colonialism in The Cotton Club (1984), which touches on this).  The current prohibition of narcotics, though even more profitable than the prohibition on alcohol, is not nearly as tolerated by the public or the government. 

The Mafia also had the luxury of its existence being denied by the Federal Government until 1957 (9).

This is the main point in which Gladwell's article touches on. Since Italian organized criminals were able to climb the latter of upward mobility through alcohol prohibition, Black organized criminals should be able to do the same with drugs.

The problem with comparing the two substances is that one is much more tolerated by society than the other. To quote documentarian Ken Burns:

"Comparing alcohol to today’s illicit drugs is something of an apples-to-oranges analogy. “It’s such a stupid parallel to draw,” insists Ken Burns in an interview. “Drugs have always been parts of some very rare subcultures, but every culture drinks alcohol as fermented or distilled spirits.” Opium, for example, has a long history of use – and opiates certainly have a place today as a viable medical treatment – but it has never been integrated into the daily life of healthy humans in the way that alcohol has. Scientifically, too, alcohol and other intoxicants are just not the same. Unless you’re a recovering addict, a glass of wine per day is absolutely not going to hurt you, and we've even seen evidence of minor medical benefits from light drinking. The same cannot be said with illegal drugs—imagine having a little bit of heroin each night with your dinner!"(10)

Burns makes a solid point. Since alcohol is consumed by society more than narcotics, wouldn't it make sense that society would be more tolerable of breaking its prohibition, thus more tolerable towards the criminals that do so?

This would be the reason that law enforcement was more tolerable towards the Mafia than organized Black gangs today. It's not so much the race of the criminal, rather the product they are peddling. The Mafia didn't get the same tolerance from law enforcement in the 1970s and 1980s, when drug dealing was common within the Mafia. The problem became so bad, that most Mafia families in New York banned selling drugs, the penalty being death.


4.) Legacy and Culture 

The Godfather (1972) destroyed the Mafia, but also acted as its savoir. One of the worst things it did for the Mafia was make it popular. Audiences everywhere were exposed to a highly exaggerated version of the Mafia . The outlaw and gangster have always been in American cinema, but this was the first time a film has strictly portrayed Italian American criminals and their criminal organization. Italian Americans were so offended by the film, even Colombo Crime Family boss, Joe Colombo,  protested the making of the film (11).

Though all the bad it did for the Mafia, The Godfather, and its two sequels, are probably the best PR campaign the Mafia ever had. Unlike real Mafia bosses, Don Vito Corleone, boss of the Corleone Crime Family, is portrayed as a moral, wise patriarch. The Godfather also portrayed Mafia members of men of honor and respect. Men with a code of honor that separated them from society.

African American gangsters have no such luck with such PR in cinema. Hoodlum (1997) and more recently American Gangster (2007) have both portrayed African American gangsters Bumpy Johnson and Frank Lucas in a positive light, more like Vito Corleone than Michael Corleone, but neither of the films will ever be as big as a hit that The Godfather was.

Washington Post Article 

In Alyssa Rosenberg's Washington Post article Michael Brown's Death and the Shrinking of the American Dream, a response to The Crooked Ladder, Rosenberg whines about racism in the article and brings up the crooked ladder in the death of Michael Brown. One particular area that struck me is when she compares Michael Corleone from The Godfather to Frank Lucas from American Gangster.

Rosenberg says:

"If Lucas were white, he might have become Michael Corleone, unhappy but solidly entrenched in both the U.S.  economy and the hierarchy of the Catholic church. But because Lucas is black, he redeems himself in prison, collaborating with the police to dismantle his own operation."

To me it is unfair to compare the two films in this argument. The reason is that Michael Corleone is a fictitious character, whose fate is written anyway the author desires it, and Frank Lucas is a real person. Michael Corleone, more specifically the Corleone Crime Family, didn't sell drugs, while Lucas built an empire out of it.

A more fair comparison can be made with Henry Hill from Martin Scorsese's Goodfellas (1991). At the end of the film, Hill, a real Irish-Italian mob associate who was arrested for selling narcotics, is forced to betray the lifestyle and people he has known since he was a kid. While Lucas and Hill both cooperated with police, Rosenberg claims that Lucas is redeemed by cooperating with authorities. There is no redemption for Hill. Only exile and a life looking over his shoulder. Where Lucas's sins are washed away with cooperation, cooperation is Hill's ultimate sin. Rosenberg's unwarranted cries of racism in cinema should be quickly dismissed.


Conclusion

The ability of the Mafia: to use limited and targeted violence, to have a tightly organized and strict hierarchy, being able to take advantage of alcohol prohibition, and having penetrated popular culture is why it was the successful organization that it once was. Modern African American gangs will never be as successful as the Mafia , not because of race, but because of this set of particular circumstances.

The reason why the police are so successful in suppressing the evolution of organized crime in America today, is because they use the same laws against African American gangs that were used against the Mafia. The RICO (Racketeering Influence Corrupt Organization) Act was established in the 1970s to dismantle the Mafia. While the Mafia survived the legal onslaught, it was permanently crippled. Now the RICO Act is used against criminal organizations of all races.

Soon after the Patriot Act was signed into law, it has been used to combat drug dealers more than it has terrorist. Using the reasoning that selling narcotics can be one of the ways terrorist organizations are funded, is making the legal consequences of selling drugs even more dire.

The largest Mafia bust in American history was just two years ago.

It's a bad time to be a criminal, no matter what race you are.


Notes
(1) http://www.nbcchicago.com/blogs/ward-room/Lets-Make-Chicago-As-Safe-As-It-Was-During-Prohibition-163189636.html
(2) Bergreen, Laurence. "Chapter 5: The Return of Al Capone." Capone: The Man and the Era. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994. 206. Print.
(3) See: The Banana Wars (Bonanno Crime Family) , Joey Gallo's Revolt (Colombo Crime Family), John Gotti's Rise to Power(Gambino Crime Family) 
(4) Davis, John H. Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1989. 356. Print. (5) http://www.jurispro.com/uploadArticles/FrankPetroneArticleStructure.pdf
(6) http://web.stanford.edu/class/e297c/poverty_prejudice/gangcolor/lacrips.htm
(7) http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052748704115404576096392318489246
(8) http://www.jurispro.com/uploadArticles/FrankPetroneArticleStructure.pdf
(9) Southwell, David. The History of Organized Crime: The True Story and Secrets of Global Gangland. London: Carlton, 2006. 38. Print.
(10) http://www.phoenixhouse.org/news-and-views/our-perspectives/prohibition-not-repeatable-but-not-a-failure/
(11) http://www.shortlist.com/entertainment/films/the-mob-vs-the-godfather