So far the distinction between crime and economy and crime economies might be drawn between structure and process. Traditionally, when considered along with economy, crime is talked of as an illegitimate component part. In this way the ‘economic’ propensity of crime can be overlooked. Enterprise theory, which has been successfully turned towards understanding organised crime, de-emphasises considerations of from and structure in favour of process and outcome. Greater emphasis on these will re-orient much of the popular moral panic generated by mythologies such as the Mafia
As with most of the other contexts we have considered so far, the existence of crime economies cannot be separated from their representation, and nor can the control strategies directed against them. The representation of the social threat posed by crime economies has generated a symbiotic relationship with political reaction, which through its discourse has tended to universalise crime economies and at the same time distance them from the state.This will be tested in the following case-study.
In popular crime culture two interconnected images are paramount:the crime family and organised crime.In many respects these crime scenarios have created a demonology and a romance repects with racist and class overtones.The economic reality of crime family structures and crime organisation has been largely overlooked within the mythology of organised crime.Taking the mystique of the mafia as a case-study, the reasons behind this obfuscation process become apparent.
Mafia is not an enemy which is outside the state and the instiitutions:on the contrary, it nonpenetrates and permeates and permeates them...Mafia is not a hidden power despite the ostrich-like use which is made of the word.Mafia is manifest power.Until the 1970s the Mafia was perceived by researchers, the media and the public as a conspiracy of national crime syndicates.That syndicate most frequently visited and represented comprised a largely invisible and omnipotent government of desperate expatriate Italians monopolising almost every organised operation of the underworld: The Kefauver Committee hearings of 1950-51,the Appalachian meeting of underworld figures in 1957, the McClellan Committee hearings of 1958,the Valachi papers, Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather”,and the Report of the United States President’sCommission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967), powerfully reinforced those beliefs
In Theft of a Nation (1969),Cressey argues for the reakity of such a conspiracy theory of the Mafia syndicate, and its essentially family focused institutional structure. Alan Block (1978), in a detailed analysis of the origins of cressey’s thesis,identifies as the source of its structural representation of the US Mafia the somewhat hazy recollections of Joseph Valachi. By the time Valachi elaborated on his limited local experiences as a New York mobster, the populist media, and even serious writers, were ready to universalise his experience to national proportions. The organisational dimensions of the Mafia, and the all-pervasive social threat which it posed, were fast becoming ‘fact in the mythology of organised crime. ‘Thus the myth of the “Godfather” was born, striking all as real because it conformed so perfectly to everyone’s fantasy
Like the almost continuous parliamentary inquiries in Italy since unification, the representation of the Mafia menace in the US had specific political origins. Moore (1974) describes how the activities of the Kefauver Crime Committee dominated the headlines in 1950-51 and swayed both professional and popular opinion toward an interpretation that major aspects of organised criminal activity were controlled and administered by a nation-wide conspiracy. The language and direction of the committee’s operations helped establish its chairman, in the public view of the day, as a symbol of bold, non-partisan action for controlling organised crime. Kefauver sought to exploit community concern about organised crime, fermented by print journalists and anti-gambling forces, in order to identify himself with a popular cause and promote the ideological purity of the political interests which he represented. The committee itself did little in the way of independent investigation, but merely dramatised the views of citizens’ crimes commissions, journalists and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, each of which had a vested interest in a simple Mafia stereotype. Investigative and enforcement interests were comfortable with ‘comic strip’ villains to fight and expose. Any failure to destroy the ‘mob’ could similarly be explained against a background of secret societies, codes of silence and brotherhoods of crime. Moore estabishes that although there was some evidence that organised crime figures from major cities occasionally conferred and invested jointly, the committee tended to exaggerate the degree of centralised planning within the underworld, and misread its own evidence in finding a cohesive national conspiracy.
Moore distinguishes two interpretations of organised crime in the US; one socio-economic, one conspiratorial. The latter was significantly and effectively promoted by Kefauver. In so doing the committee ignored the sociological literature on which the former perspective relied. Moore observes that the Kefauver committee,s evidence did not support its conclusions: ‘Its work was a study in misdirection, the strengthening of old myths that should have been laid to rest. The real failure of the Committee, however, was not so much its conclusions but its hesitancy, for essentially political reasons, to consider opposing judgements or significant alternative interpretations of the nature of organised crime’(ibid.:280).
More recent critical writing on the Mafia has turned its attention to the reality and the mystique of this phenomenon. While not arguing away the existence of certain criminals of Italian ancestry with a strong sense of kinship and a heritage of defying authority, it has been the images of the Godfather ruling over international networks of organised crime which have been called into question. Such images of the Mafia are not the product of historical accident. As Smith (1975) indicates, the ‘Mafia’ has staked out an enormous claim on the American public’s attention, a public appetite which in turn has been abundantly accommodated by congressional committee hearings ,the press, popular fiction, the movies and so on.
Law-enforcement agencies, in America in particular, continue their investment in such claims. For example, the US Department of Justice, in its recently published national strategy, Attacking Organised Crime (1991), identifies, from information supplied by its ninety-four judicial districts, La Cosa Nostra as its most serious crime problem (ibid:5).The organized crime strategic plan of the New Jersey District elaborates on this :
[I]n the universe of organized criminal groups, the racketeering activities of the LCN [La Cosa Nostral] are the most protracted and sustained, the most impacted and entrenched, the most expensive and profitable, the most corrosive and deleterious to legitimate sectors of society, the most insinuating and subversive to government, the most resistant to enforcement efforts generally, and the most resilient in the aftermath of any single enforcement effort (ibid:7)
But why the creation of this mystique? Smith sees the explanation as resting with the community’s preferred perception of organised crime and the state’s justification for its contron. The Mafia fantasy supports the community’s need for a distinction between the ‘real criminal’ and the rest for society (see Box, 1983). Such a distinction was shaped into a series of firm expectation about Mafia-style organized crime. By simplifying and generalizing organized crime under the guise of this Mafia mystique, the true complexity and all-pervasive influence of capitalized criminal activity at all levels of American commercial and economic life is obfuscated. For Smith, the Mafia image was produced through a mixture of real events and media reporting. Promoters of this image needed to create super-criminals to account for the state’s failure to control the criminal activity such persons were said to organize, and to justify further expansion of the crime control mechanism to achieve future success.
Indicative of the rationalism which characterized writings on the Mafia in the 1970s, Smith concludes that so long as we imagine exotic enemies in our midst we are never going to understand the actual social significance of organized crime which such villains are said to monopolise. Smith’s attitude towards the social relevance of the Mafia mystique, consistent with a more realistic definition of organized crime, depends on a broad re-evaluation of community priorities. It is his view that organized crime is the product of forces that threaten values, not the cause of them. If society countenances violence, considers personal gain to be more important than equity, and is willing to bend the law in the pursuit of wealth, power and personal gratification, then society itself will always be receptive to illicit enterprise, Whether condoned, ignored or condemned. Such enterprise will become a reality whenever groups of people are selective law enforcement, violence or corruption in pursuit of their own wealth and power. Even the processes and institution may go to create an environment which will eventually facilitate their development (see Fine lay, 1990).
The new these about the nature of organized crime and the Mafia role within it argue that for as long as organized crime is understood as an alien conspiracy dominated by ethnic groups its operational existence will remain mystified: ‘The old conspiracy theory fails to quash the “symbolic” relationship among the reciprocal services performed by professional c