By Dona De Sanctis
Recently, I asked some friends to
guess how many Italian Americans
have ever been on the FBI’s Most
Wanted List since the list began in
1950. Their estimates ran from 30
percent to 70 percent. The correct
answer is 5 percent. In fact, only
26 names on the list of nearly 500
fugitives over the past 61 years have
been Italian. Why did they think the
number was so much higher?
THE “ALIEN CONSPIRACY”
No doubt, their wildly inaccurate
guesses were due to the stereotypes
of Italian Americans offered up by
the U.S. entertainment industry, but
the roots go further back in American
history to a popular theory in criminology called “the alien conspiracy.”
According to this theory, organized
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12 crime began in Sicily in the 1860s
and was imported to America with
the Great Migration that brought an
estimated 5 million Italian immigrants
to America between 1880 and 1923.
The alien conspiracy theory also
proposes that organized crime in
America is made up of 25 or so Italian crime families that have divided
the country into geographical areas
or fiefdoms that they control. These
include the West Coast with Las
Vegas; the Mid-West with Chicago,
Cleveland and St. Louis; and the East
Thanks to his
Mafia hearings,
Sen. Estes Kefauver appeared
on the cover of
TIME Magazine
March 12, 1951.
Coast with New York, Philadelphia
and Boston, among others.
Many scholars of criminology,
however, believe the alien conspiracy
theory is an oversimplification of the
very complex and multi-ethnic nature of crime, according to Michael
L yman and Gar y Potter in their
exhaustive study, Organized Crime.
For one, crime experts point out that
virtually every large American city
had well-developed organized crime
syndicates long before the arrival of
Italian immigrants at the turn of the
last century. They also note that during the 20th century, organized crime
bosses included many Irish, Polish,
Russian and Jewish immigrants and
their children, who, along with Italian hoodlums, built empires based on
organized crime.
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The federal government, and principally the FBI, has used this alien
conspiracy theory to impress the average citizen as well as political leaders,
who control law enforcement budgets
and regulate police powers, that it is
doing its job investigating, arresting
and incarcerating dangerous criminals.
Labeling organized crime as “Mafia”
has helped enormously.
THE KEFAUVER
HEARINGS
The equation Organized Crime
= Mafia gained even greater national
prominence in 1950 when Senator
Estes Kefauver, a Democrat from
Tennessee, held a series of televised
hearings on organized crime. They
lasted 15 months with sessions in 14
cities and were seen by an estimated
30 million Americans in homes, bars
and even movie theaters.
Despite any direct evidence, Kefauver’s committee concluded that an
international criminal conspiracy from
Sicily, called “the Mafia,” was solely
responsible for organized crime in the
United States. Kefauver and his hearings have long been discredited, but
they left their mark on the American
psyche.
Adonis—especially on Columbus Day.
“As a result, many public perceptions
of organized crime have been skewed
toward the belief that it is solely an
Italian American phenomenon,” Lyman and Potter conclude.
Meyer Lansky co-founded
“Murder, Inc.”, a network of
contract killers.
Teen-agers today know the names
of Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gambino
and Vito Genovese, but ask them
who was Meyer Lansky, “Legs” Diamond, “Bugsy” Moran or Dutch
Schultz and you will be met with
blank stares.
Arnold Rothstein, one of the “founding fathers” of organized crime, is
also believed to have fixed the 1919
World Series.
Their influence is especially notable
in the national news media, which
since then has put an Italian face
on crime and given sensationalized
coverage of Mafia figures. The reason
is simple: the Mafia sells newspapers
and attracts large television viewing
audiences because Americans are fascinated by this secret society.
With discouraging regularity, for
example, The New York Times runs
stories about aging Italian American
mobsters on page one above the fold
while television news programs offer
up retrospectives on John Gotti or Joe
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The result of this over-simplification is that Al Capone’s name is as
familiar today as it was 64 years ago
when he died in 1947, while scarcely
anyone has ever heard of Capone’s
contemporaries Arnold Rothstein,
whom many consider the true father
of organized crime; Charles “King”
Solomon, who ruled in Boston; or
Morris Kleinmann, who led the
Cleveland mob.
Bugsy Siegel, son of Jewish
immigrants, helped make Las
Vegas a Mecca for vice.
Thanks to Hollywood and television, kids know all about the fictitious
rituals of the Mafia, but nothing about
the practices of the very real enforcement arm of organized crime called
Murder, Incorporated, founded by
Lansky and his pal, Bugsy Siegel, and
made up of professional killers, who
traveled the country, murdering total
strangers on orders from crime bosses
from the 1920’s through the 1940’s.
Even fewer people have heard of
Pablo Escobar, co-founder of Colombia’s Medellin Cartel or know
anything about the new generation
of mobsters. As William Kleinknecht
points out in his book, The New Ethnic Mobs, “a wave of new ethnic crime
groups has diluted the power of the
Mafia over the last two decades and
revolutionized organized crime.”
These include the Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Hispanic, Jamaican
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that has tarred the reputation of millions of law-abiding Italian Americans.
Proof of that damaging image came
when I asked that same group of
friends to guess what percentage of
Italian Americans are educated and
working in such white-collar jobs as
doctors, lawyers, teachers and business
executives. They estimated between
10 and 20 percent. The real figure,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau,
is 66 percent.
The FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C. where Mafia mania persists.
and African American syndicates that
thrive in U.S. cities and suburbs coast
to coast while Mafia “legends” like
John Gotti and Carlo Gambino lie in
their graves as their successors hemorrhage power.
CONCLUSION
An estimated 30
million Americans watched
the “Kefauver
Hearings” in
1950-51, some
in movie theaters
like this one.
(Photo - M. Rougier/Life).
The U.S. entertainment, advertising and news industries have misrepresented Italian Americans for decades,
but the facts speak for themselves about
who and what we really are. Now
we need to get those facts before the
American public. Where do we start?
Dona De Sanctis, Ph.D., is editor-inchief of Italian America magazine.
Contact her at ddesanctis@osia.org or
call (202) 547-2900.
No one would dispute that Italian
Americans participated in organized
crime. Like families, every ethnic,
racial and religious group has its black
sheep, but the actual number of Italian Americans in crime syndicates past
and present is much smaller than the
public’s perception.
The U.S. Justice Department, for
example, estimates that about 5,000
people currently belong to organized
crime syndicates in the United States.
They belong to many ethnic groups,
but even if all 5,000 were of Italian
descent, that would constitute .0003
percent of the nation’s estimated 16
million to 18 million Italian Americans – less than three hundredths of
one percent.
Clearly, gangsters of Italian heritage have been given too much credit
for putting the “organization” in
organized crime – a misperception
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14 The “alien conspiracy” is portrayed in this early 20th c. newspaper
cartoon on Italian immigrants-as-mobsters.
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