Blood Brotherhoods by John Dickie

Author:John Dickie [Dickie, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781610394284
Publisher: PublicAffairs

Bobby Kennedy’s best-selling account of the investigation he led, The Enemy Within (1960), contained vivid cameo portraits of a series of Italian-American gangsters. One such was ‘labor relations consultant’ Carmine Lombardozzi, who had been ordered to wait in the garage during the Apalachin summit while the other mafiosi decided whether to kill him or merely fine him for covertly pocketing money from a juke-box racket. (They opted for the fine.)

In 1961, when his brother became President, Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General. The investigation and repression of organised crime was a key part of his programme. Where there had been nineteen organised crime indictments in 1960, the total rose to 687 in 1964.

Alongside these law enforcement and political developments, the mafia became a hot topic in American culture. In 1959, ABC began transmitting a drama series, based on Eliot Ness’s The Untouchables, about Al Capone’s Prohibition-era Chicago. The show became a hit, largely because it was studded with thinly disguised references to recent gangland news.

As always, there was a good deal of controversy and sensationalism in public discussion. The Order Sons of Italy in America, an ethnic lobby group that was desperate to play down the mafia issue, managed to get all Italian-American characters removed from The Untouchables in 1961. Deprived of this key element of authenticity, the show declined in popularity and was taken off air in 1963.

At the other extreme, some wrote about the mafia as if it were a centralised, bureaucratic, calculating monster—an IBM of crime. Ever since then, in both Italy and the States, it has made for good journalistic copy to see the mafia as a dark mirror of cutting-edge capitalism, and to see mafiosi as executives with guns. This is an oversimplification with undoubted imaginative power, to both the law-abiding and the outlaw. The Godfather—novel and movie—would later draw part of its insidious glamour from the same idea: ‘Tell Mike it was only business.’ Nothing could be better calculated to make middle-aged, middle-American middle-managers feel dangerous and clever than the suggestion that they and mafiosi are pretty much alike—give or take a few garrottings. Conversely, nothing could be better calculated to flatter a hoodlum’s ego, and impress his young sidekicks, than the suggestion that he is the incarnation of some sleek, lawless ideal-type of the businessman. But if mafiosi are entrepreneurs, then they are entrepreneurs who specialise not in competition, but in breaking and distorting the rules of the market.

The season of intense political and media interest in the mafia in the early 1960s also had a curious side effect: it changed the mafia’s name. In 1962 Joe Valachi, a soldier in the Genovese Family, mistakenly suspecting that he was about to be killed on the orders of his boss, bludgeoned an innocent man to death in prison. He then began to talk to the FBI about the mafia, its initiation rituals and structure as he saw them from his lowly and relatively marginal position in the organisation. A non-Italian speaker, Valachi had heard other members of the brotherhood refer to cosa nostra—‘our thing’.

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