Abstract
The word “Mafia” disappeared from the American public debate between the two world wars, returning to the spotlight around 1950–51, when Democrat senator Estes Kefauver, chairman of the Special Senate Committee on organized crime, used it emphatically. The new political and cultural context encouraged this revival, yet it had direct causes: first—the growing influence of the Italian component inside the world of American organized crime; second—the growing influence of the Mafia in Sicily; and third—the activism of Sicilian-American gangs in smuggling narcotics from Europe to the United States. The three causes were different and not necessarily connected and, in fact, it was difficult to connect them within a realistic view. Events, investigations, and debates during the 1950s clarified to some degree the nature of the phenomenon to which the term “Mafia” (or afterward, during the 1960s, “La Cosa Nostra”) referred in the United States. But what remained quite unclear was the nature of the transatlantic link between the two Mafias, American and the Sicilian, which, in my view, is the most important question.
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Notes
W. H. Moore, The Kefauver Committee and the Politics of Crime (1950–1952), Columbia, University of Missouri Press, 1974, p. 117;
D. Valentine, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs, New York, Verso, 2006, p. 86.
B. Andrews, “Myth of Luciano’s Aid to the War Deflated by US Action on Drug,” in New York Herald Tribune, February 22, 1947.
E. Kefauver, Crime in America, Turin and Garden City, Doubleday, 1951.
See also R. Carter, “The Strange Story of Dewey and Luciano”, in The Daily Compass, September 4, 1951.
We are aware of them thanks to R. Campbell, The Luciano Project: The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the U.S. Navy, New York, McGraw-Hill, 1977.
The book is S. Feder and J. Joesten, The Luciano Story, New York, McKay, 1954. One finds Joesten’s remarks in a text entitled A Statement Concerning the Book “the Luciano Story,” January 7, 1955, in GWP.
E. Permutter, “Lucky Luciano’s Story: Prison and Politics,” in New York Times (henceforth NYT), February 14, 1954.
F. Sondern, Jr., Brotherhood of Evil: The Mafia, with a forward by Henry J. Anslinger, New York, Farrar, Straus and Cudahy, 1959.
V. W. Peterson, The Mob: 200 Years of Organized Crime in New York, Ottawa, IL, Green Hill, 1983, pp. 268–69.
D. Bell, The End of the Ideologies, Glencoe, Free Press, 1964, pp. 115–17 and 126 ff.
See also D. C. Smith, The Mafia Mystique, London, Hutchinson, 1975, in particular p. 141 and pp. 185–86, according to which the McCarthy Committee might be compared to a “Puritan board of Inquiry.”
L. Bernstein, The Greatest Menace: Organized Crime in Cold War America, Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
J. Bonanno, A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno, with Sergio Lalli, New York, St. Martin Paperbacks, 2003, confirms that the meeting was organized by Stefano Magaddino.
Bernstein, The Greatest Menace, p. 9; Robert F. Kennedy, The Enemy Within, New York, Harper & Brothers, 1960, pp. 324–25.
E. Perlmutter, “Valachi Names 5 as Crime Chiefs,” in NYT, October 2, 1963.
D. Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931, New York and London, Routledge, 2009, cit.
Nino Calderone’s (Pippo’s brother) testimony in P. Arlacchi, Men of Dishonor, Inside the Mafia, an Account of Antonino Calderone, New York, Morrow, 1993 [p. 158 of the original Italian edition].
D. Gambetta, Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection, Cambridge, MA, Harvard University Press, 1993.
R. T. Anderson, “From Mafia to Cosa Nostra,” in The American Journal of Sociology, November 1965, pp. 302–10.
E. Perlmutter, “Mafia Wields Sinister Power,” in NYT, September 29, 1963.
S. Raab, Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2005, p. 36.
H. Abadinsky, The Mafia in America: An Oral History, New York, Praeger, 1981, pp. 93–140.
V. Teresa, My Life in the Mafia, New York, Doubleday, 1973, p. 86.
De Cavalcante Tapes, The FBI Trascripts on Exhibit in Usa v. De Cavalcante, New York, Lemma Publishers, 1970, p. 1. 13 and p. 3.12.
G. Wolf and J. Di Mona, Frank Costello: Prime Minister of the Underworld, London, Hodder and Stoughton, 1974, p. 12.
P. Maas, The Valachi Papers, New York, Putnam, 1968.
D. Cressey, Theft of the Nation: The Structure and Operations of Organized Crime in America, New York, Harper & Row, 1969.
N. Pileggi, Wiseguy: Life in a Mafia Family, London, Corgi Books, 1987, pp. 40–41.
Pistone’s Testimony in United States v. Salerno, p. 102. But see also his autobiographic book: J. D. Pistone, Donnie Brasco, My Uncovered Life in the Mafia, New York, New American Library, 1987.
P. Reuter, Disorganized Crime, Cambridge, MA, MIT University Press, 1983, p. 159 and in general chapters 1 and 7.
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© 2015 Salvatore Lupo
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Lupo, S. (2015). Looking for and at the Enemy. In: The Two Mafias. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491374_6
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