Thom L. Jones
Introduction
These are stories about organized crime, mostly concerning the secret organization that is known as the Mafia. About the people who lived and died by the strange protocol that governed and controlled their lives.
Hardly anything in the last fifty years has fascinated the public more than the Mafia. Literally hundreds of books have been devoted to the subject and one movie in particular-The Godfather- has so interpreted the Mafia as an institution within our society, that many people actually believe this is how it is. Including a lot of the actual members themselves, according to law enforcement intelligence.
Across New York, in bars, restaurants and cafes, it would not be unusual for big, pinky ringed hoodlums to spend the evening feeding quarters into juke boxes to hear the theme from the movie being played over and over again. Mobsters were observed by police squads, acting out mannerisms and adopting postures seen in the movie. The line between reality and legend got lost in translation, so to speak.
Originally from Sicily, the American version emerged as a result of the great diaspora from southern Italy, the land known as the Messogiorno, stretching from Naples down to the boot and across to Sicily, from 1850 until 1913. Among the millions of decent hard-working people who traveled to America, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of criminals from the teeming slums of Naples, the mountains of Calabria and the cities and towns and countryside of Sicily. Some of these men at some stage, formed themselves into criminal groups, often based on family ties or geographical allegiances and set themselves up across America, wherever large groups of Italian immigrants had settled. Antecedently, they were parasites living off their own people. And then they grew into a national crime confederation over the years that reached puberty through the years of Prohibition and matured from the 1930's through to the 1950's into the biggest criminal cartel the United States had ever experienced.
The Mafia's historical beginings in America can be traced back perhaps 130 years. In Sicily, who knows? Perhaps 200 years, maybe beyond, three, or four hundered years or more in one form or another.
There has also, always been a significant difference in the way the American and Sicilian Mafia deviated in their basic philosophy. In Sicily they grew to power over the last fifty years through a combination of enormous political control over the Social Democratic Party and a ferocious appetite to achieve any objective through violence on a level never before experienced in Italy, at least in modern times. They would not hesitate to kill judges,senior police officers, politicians, journalists, children, anyone who got in there way.
In America on the other hand, the mob went about it's business quietly and discreetly, to the point that hardly anyone knew of it's real existence prior to the disclosures of the 1951 Kefauver hearings and then their exposure by Joseph Valachi in October 1963. I can not think of one example where the American Mafia deliberately went after and killed a judge, senior police officer or politician in the United States. They did however get close to having a representative in the White House.
I'm not going to write about the way the mob controls and manipulates unions or the construction industry or ports, or in the case of Italy, governments. These columns will instead cover the people who made up the American and Sicilian Mafia, sories from the streets, you could say.
About the Italian-American hoods with funny names like 'Joe the Wop' or 'Willie Potatoes' and the deadly Mafiosi of Sicily, men like Luciano and Totò and some of the hundereds of others who would, and in fact did, kill innocent children who got between them and their ambition.
I`ll concentrate on the minutia of the mobsters themselves, the rank and file, and sometimes, the bosses, the hoods who scammed and stole and murdered their way through a kind of lifestyle that at times, must have seemed like being lost and abandoned in the trenches of Flanders Fields.
As i follow the tortuous path of the turnip-headed hoodlum with fists of ham prowling the streets of Brooklyn, or the sleek black-haired, suntanned killer culling the streets and countryside of Siclily, I'll try and remember those words from the immortal Sherlock Holmes:
........There we come into those realms of conjecture where the most logical minds may be at fault.
And do my best to present you with the facts, only the facts. But hopefully, in an interesting and readable way
© Thom L. Jones 2008
Hardly anything in the last fifty years has fascinated the public more than the Mafia. Literally hundreds of books have been devoted to the subject and one movie in particular-The Godfather- has so interpreted the Mafia as an institution within our society, that many people actually believe this is how it is. Including a lot of the actual members themselves, according to law enforcement intelligence.
Across New York, in bars, restaurants and cafes, it would not be unusual for big, pinky ringed hoodlums to spend the evening feeding quarters into juke boxes to hear the theme from the movie being played over and over again. Mobsters were observed by police squads, acting out mannerisms and adopting postures seen in the movie. The line between reality and legend got lost in translation, so to speak.
Originally from Sicily, the American version emerged as a result of the great diaspora from southern Italy, the land known as the Messogiorno, stretching from Naples down to the boot and across to Sicily, from 1850 until 1913. Among the millions of decent hard-working people who traveled to America, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands of criminals from the teeming slums of Naples, the mountains of Calabria and the cities and towns and countryside of Sicily. Some of these men at some stage, formed themselves into criminal groups, often based on family ties or geographical allegiances and set themselves up across America, wherever large groups of Italian immigrants had settled. Antecedently, they were parasites living off their own people. And then they grew into a national crime confederation over the years that reached puberty through the years of Prohibition and matured from the 1930's through to the 1950's into the biggest criminal cartel the United States had ever experienced.
The Mafia's historical beginings in America can be traced back perhaps 130 years. In Sicily, who knows? Perhaps 200 years, maybe beyond, three, or four hundered years or more in one form or another.
There has also, always been a significant difference in the way the American and Sicilian Mafia deviated in their basic philosophy. In Sicily they grew to power over the last fifty years through a combination of enormous political control over the Social Democratic Party and a ferocious appetite to achieve any objective through violence on a level never before experienced in Italy, at least in modern times. They would not hesitate to kill judges,senior police officers, politicians, journalists, children, anyone who got in there way.
In America on the other hand, the mob went about it's business quietly and discreetly, to the point that hardly anyone knew of it's real existence prior to the disclosures of the 1951 Kefauver hearings and then their exposure by Joseph Valachi in October 1963. I can not think of one example where the American Mafia deliberately went after and killed a judge, senior police officer or politician in the United States. They did however get close to having a representative in the White House.
I'm not going to write about the way the mob controls and manipulates unions or the construction industry or ports, or in the case of Italy, governments. These columns will instead cover the people who made up the American and Sicilian Mafia, sories from the streets, you could say.
About the Italian-American hoods with funny names like 'Joe the Wop' or 'Willie Potatoes' and the deadly Mafiosi of Sicily, men like Luciano and Totò and some of the hundereds of others who would, and in fact did, kill innocent children who got between them and their ambition.
I`ll concentrate on the minutia of the mobsters themselves, the rank and file, and sometimes, the bosses, the hoods who scammed and stole and murdered their way through a kind of lifestyle that at times, must have seemed like being lost and abandoned in the trenches of Flanders Fields.
As i follow the tortuous path of the turnip-headed hoodlum with fists of ham prowling the streets of Brooklyn, or the sleek black-haired, suntanned killer culling the streets and countryside of Siclily, I'll try and remember those words from the immortal Sherlock Holmes:
........There we come into those realms of conjecture where the most logical minds may be at fault.
And do my best to present you with the facts, only the facts. But hopefully, in an interesting and readable way
© Thom L. Jones 2008
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