Organized Crime and American Power: A History

 

Michael Woodiwiss

 

2001, 468 p.

Toronto, Buffalo, London: University of Toronto Press

ISBN: 0-8020-4700-9 (cloth) $ 70.00

ISBN: 0-8020-8278-5 (paper) $ 29.95

 

 

The study of organized crime is a multidisciplinary endeavor. British historian Michael Woodiwiss in his book “Organized Crime and American Power” underscores the potential importance of the political sciences.

 

Organized crime, from a political scientist’s point of view, can be an interesting object of study in various respects. First of all, ‘organized crime’ is a construct that defines and legitimizes criminal policy. Secondly, organized crime may be conceptualized as a facet of politics where crime networks and power elites overlap or where organized criminality becomes an instrument of politics. Thirdly, organized crime in the sense of criminal milieux and criminal subcultures can be construed as ‘primitive states’ (Skaperdas/Syropoulos 1996) in their own right. Michael Woodiwiss focuses on the first two aspects within the context of U.S. history. He defines organized crime as systematic criminal activity for money and power and applies this definition rigorously to the rich and powerful.

 

In the first chapter, Woodiwiss details the systematic criminal activity involved in the establishment and expansion of the United States from the Colonial period until the end of the Civil War. These criminal activities included commercial crime and large-scale official corruption. Chapter 2 focuses on organized criminal activity directed against African Americans in the Southern States after the Civil War. Woodiwiss alleges that racism and xenophobia set limits to the understanding of organized crime in the late 1800s and early 1900s. While crime began to be associated with the masses of poor immigrants and black migrants filling the cities, violence, combined with electoral and financial fraud, restored white supremacist rule to the South. Chapter 3 details how American businessmen used bribery, corruption, and violence to break unions, beat off competition and steal national resources. In chapter 4, Woodiwiss investigates how between the 1890s and 1920s ‘organized crime’ became synonymous with local political corruption that protected vice and intemperance. Chapter 5 describes the emergence of a new understanding of organized crime in the post-Prohibition era that shifted attention away from defects in the system and towards the perception that organized crime was a separate association of gangsters. Chapter 6 surveys organized criminal activity in the labor and corporate sectors of the U.S. economy during the second half of the 20th century. In chapter 7, Woodiwiss examines the illegal drug trade and the ‘drug abuse industrial complex’ that has emerged during efforts to control it and argues that the profits from drug trafficking long ago nullified the impact of honest law enforcement, while the anti-drug crusade has effectively been institutionalized as a never-ending project that seems to benefit few outside of the public and private professionals who administer it. The final chapter deals with the relation between organized crime and U.S. foreign policy. Woodiwiss highlights the promotion of organized criminal activity in the interest of foreign policy objectives, for example the CIA involvement in the Southeast Asian drug business in the 1960s and 1970s, and in contrast the American war on drugs with the ensuing ‘Americanization’ of international law enforcement.

 

Woodiwiss concludes that the conventional understanding of organized crime, which centers around gangsters and Mafia-type organizations who infiltrate and corrupt the national and even international economic and political systems, is inadequate. Organized criminal activity, he argues, was never a serious threat to established or evolving economic and political power structures in the United States but more often a fluid, variable, and open-ended phenomenon that complemented those structures.

 

Michael Woodiwiss is not the first one to point out the inconsistencies, contradictions and hypocrisy characterizing the conventional American perception of organized crime. But no one until now has presented a similarly comprehensive account of the conceptual, social and political history of organized crime in the United States. Apparently it took a British author and a Canadian publisher to make such a book.

 

"Organized Crime and American Power" is well written and well researched, despite some minor inaccuracies, for example the claim that the political use of the phrase ‘organized crime’ "increased dramatically" in 1933 and 1934 (p. 236), when it actually almost completely vanished from the public vocabulary.

 

A less appealing aspect of the book is that Woodiwiss at times appears overzealous in trying to make his point. For example, Woodiwiss describes Prohibition as a complete failure that simply resulted in a transfer of the once-legitimate income of brewers, distillers and saloonkeepers to gangsters and crooked businessmen (p. 184). With this judgment he ignores findings that point to a substantial reduction in alcohol consumption under the Volstead Act (see Kenney & Finckenauer, 1995:157). Another example is Woodiwiss’ discussion of the structure of the Italian-American Mafia and its official perception. Like other authors highly critical of the official view, Woodiwiss refers to the LCN-structure only reluctantly and only in passing and concentrates on criticizing the government for depicting the Mafia as a centrally organized conspiracy of foreigners. In so doing, Woodiwiss is at risk of oversimplifying the official views on organized crime and also unduly neglecting the empirical evidence on the ‘Cosa Nostra’. At one point, for instance, Woodiwiss quotes a Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) agent with claiming, in 1946, that the Mafia was a national organization who’s leaders meet annually to agree upon policies for the control and correlation of their various criminal enterprises. In Woodiwiss’ eyes this is the false allegation of a centrally organized structure (p. 244). On the other hand, he approvingly quotes a comment from Time magazine on the Apalachin meeting of 1957 in which the Mafia is characterized as a loose trade association of criminals in various cities who had matters of mutual interest to take up (p. 257). There is really not that much of a difference between the two assessments. In fact, before the background of the available data on the structure of the ‘Cosa Nostra’, both statements are not very far from the truth. In the end, Woodiwiss’ tendency to regard every government statement on organized crime as the expression of one specific politically motivated conception stands in the way of a better appreciation of the complex and contradictory processes involving various institutional actors with conflicting views that shaped the understanding of organized crime during the 1940s and 1950s and in later decades.

 

In sum, Michael Woodiwiss presents a stimulating discussion of the socio-political context of organized crime as a construct and as an empirical phenomenon, making “Organized Crime and American Power” a good introduction to the subject, although many essential aspects, such as the inner workings of criminal networks, criminal subcultures and illegal markets, are not dealt with in great detail. In this regard, “Organized Crime and American Power” is a necessary supplement to the existing organized crime literature.

 

Klaus von Lampe

 

 

References

 

Kenney, D., and J. Finckenauer (1995), Organized Crime in America, Belmont et al.: Wadsworth.

Skaperdas, S., and C. Syropoulos (1996), ‘Gangs as primitive states’, in: G. Fiorentini and S. Peltzman (eds.), The economics of organised crime, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.