Nigel Blundell - The Worlds Most Evil Gangs

I f youre an American, you dont have to deal with the Mafia. All you need do is refrain from drinking, smoking, doing drugs, looking at porn, gambling, investing in the stock market, travelling, buying clothes, living in apartments and eating. In other words, the Syndicate has its greasy fingers in everything.

Were bigger than US Steel, said Mafia financial whiz Meyer Lansky, mogul of the Mob and brains of the underworld, who died in 1983, aged 80. He made that comment in the Fifties. Today his boast would be a terrible understatement. Organised crime costs America well over a trillion dollars a year. It is estimated that two cents of every dollar spent in the US goes into Mafia pockets.

The notoriously gun-toting days of the Mafias rise, the Roaring Twenties and Thirties upon which legend thrives, were certainly exciting. But were they really profitable? The big inroads into all aspects of American life came only after World War Two. It was then that the Mafia moved in on the giant American trade unions and, through terror tactics, dominated them. Even back in the Chicago of 1928, Al Capone had gained control of 91 trade unions and companies. Today this power base has mushroomed. It has given the Mob the ability to use the unions as a weapon against the employers for the benefit, not of the workers, but for their own enrichment. Things cost a lot more because of the Mob, said ex-prosecutor and former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani. In fact, nationwide there are hidden taxes on all kinds of goods and services all imposed by the Mafia. And because of the Mafias control of many American unions, he added: You want the job done? You pay the Mobs price.

It is estimated that one quarter of the cost of many construction contracts goes directly to the Syndicates. The Mafias evil tentacles snake out everywhere. Theyre into banks, airlines, construction, real estate development, the oil industry, the fashion business, car repairs, waste disposal, the music business, the list is endless. They even reach into Wall Street stockbroking firms, where the Syndicates fantastic wealth can be sifted back into the system for even greater profit.

Mafia investors infiltrate law-abiding firms and use them as fronts, while the really bad boys operate the main, illegal, money-spinning businesses from behind the scenes. And they dont always see the need to strong-arm their way into a legitimate company. With vast resources from their criminal activities, they can afford to lay out cash where others would have to scramble for credit.

Nationwide, the Mafias illicit operations and the use of tax shelters cheat the US Treasury out of untold billions. It is thought that some 50,000 people are involved in Mafia-linked trade. So, from the day an American is born to the day he dies, anything he touches will have been touched in some way by the Mafia before him. Its a brilliantly organised operation that has the whole of the worlds richest nation in its grip. In the old days, a mobster picked up by the cops would protest: Im a businessman. True in a way, then. Very true now. For organised crime is in the hands of men whove had their training at prestigious business schools.

The FBI estimates that the Mafia own, control or exert influence over some 20,000 legitimate major businesses, ranging from pizza restaurants to banking. No one can escape not even the FBI itself. The Bureau was fleeced by the Mob when administrators at New Yorks FBI headquarters were found to have paid way over the odds to have furniture moved from one of its offices to another. The contract had been rigged by the Mafia!

So how did it ever get to this stage? Why was civilised society turning a blind eye while a criminal cancer festered as it gradually grew out of the slums?

The Mafia has been Americas most costly import. Italian immigrants brought both the Mafia and its Neapolitan equivalent, the Camorra, across the Atlantic with them in the late 1800s and it was in the city slums of the US that the two groups merged.

According to the official FBI history of the American Mafia, a villain named Giuseppe Esposito was the first known Sicilian Mafia member to emigrate to the US. He and six other Sicilians fled to New York after murdering the chancellor and a vice chancellor of a Sicilian province and 11 wealthy landowners. He was arrested in New Orleans in 1881 and extradited to Italy.

New Orleans was also the site of the first major Mafia incident in the US. On 15 October 1890 New Orleans Police Superintendent David Hennessey was murdered in a planned execution. Hundreds of Sicilians were arrested and 19 were eventually indicted for the murder but their eventual acquittal generated rumours of widespread bribery and intimidated witnesses. Outraged citizens of New Orleans organised a lynch mob and killed 11 of the 19 defendants. Two were hanged, nine were shot, and the remaining eight escaped.

Ironically, this gave an early boost to the fledgling secret societies in exile. The government paid $30,000 compensation to the widows and families of the hanged men but the money was expropriated by the criminal brotherhood. With further massive influxes of southern Italians around the turn of the century, the Mafia took its hold on immigrant ghettoes of the major cities.

It was there that the huddled masses of poverty-stricken Italian immigrants first felt the need to assert their power, particularly in New York, where they were terrorised by the citys most preponderant group, the Irish, who dominated politics, police and the legal system. From their early days as street vigilantes, the Mafiosi grew to become a protection agency offering security at a price. Then their activities spread to illegal gambling, loan sharking and prostitution.

The American Mafia evolved as various gangs assumed and lost dominance over the years. The Black Hand gangs operated in New York around the turn of the century. The citys earliest Mafia family were the Morellos, led by Peter Clutching Hand Morello for 30 years until his murder by mobster rivals. The Five Points Gang were the dominant racketeers in New York through the 1910s and 20s, their most feared operator being Ignazio The Wolf Saietta. Related to the Morellos, The Wolf ran a notorious Murder Stable, where he systematically tortured and butchered his victims. (Almost uniquely, he was allowed to retire from the Mafia and went into small-time business, dying of natural causes in 1944.) From the 1920s, the focus switched to Chicago, where Al Capones Syndicate controlled Americas new crime capital through bribery and corruption of police, lawmakers and city officials.