Organized
Crime and American Power: A History
Michael Woodiwiss
Toronto & London: University of Toronto Press, 2001.
$35.00, 470 pages, ISBN 0-8020-8278-5.
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld
Herbert Asbury
New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2001.
$14.95, 370 pages, ISBN 1-56025-275-8.
Le Crime organisé à la ville et à l’écran
1929-1951
Romain Huret
Neuilly : Atlante, 2002.
15 euros, 258 pages, ISBN 2-912232-30-9.
Georges-Claude Guilbert
Université de Rouen
Michael Woodiwiss is a senior lecturer in the School of History, Faculty
of Humanities, at the University of the West of England, in Bristol.
Organized Crime and American Power: A History is an impressively
researched and somewhat original book, since Woodiwiss has chosen
to understand the phrase “organized crime” as “systematic
criminal activity for money or power”. Such an interestingly
broad definition is notably opposed to the restricted definition usually
adopted by US officials. As its title indicates, the book shows that
“legal and criminal justice systems [have long shown] a great
deal of latitude to certain kinds of organized criminal activity”.
In chapter I, “Old World Antecedents and the Rise of American
Power”, Woodiwiss examines the precursors of today’s organized
crime; he looks at ancient Rome, medieval European society and moves
on to the nineteenth century, before studying the criminal aspects
of the peopling of North America, including slavery. Empire building
goes hand in hand with land theft, customs racketeering, and general
corruption. The Civil War and the urbanization of America are no less
connected to crime. Woodiwiss’s assertions are in no way naïve
or exaggerated; as he writes, he does not “make the sweeping
claim that such historical processes as early capitalism, European
and American expansionism, and Atlantic slavery were in themselves
organized crime”. He is no raving conspiracy theorist either
(Joe Kennedy is nowhere to be found, and Jack appears on two pages
only).
Chapter II, “Whitewash: Racism, Xenophobia, and the Origins of
‘Organized Crime’ in the Unites States”, is less general
and concentrates on a strange omission: the South is not featured
in most books on organized crime. Woodiwiss explains that racism is
central in Southern organized crime (and in “mainstream American
thinking in general”), dating back to the Civil War era: “secrecy
oaths, intimidation, the killing of witnesses, death squads, corrupt
networks, and illegal enterprise”. He looks at the way facts
were distorted from the beginning, so that the xenophobic general
public became convinced between the 1890s and the 1920s that foreign
criminals, immigrants, were vastly more numerous and more threatening
than white American criminals: the origin of Mafia mythology.
Chapter III, “Organized Crime and Corporate Power, 1865-1950”
offers a study of the way American tycoons managed to concentrate
power in industry and commerce, resorting to bribery and occasionally
violence to appropriate national resources, smash up unions and annihilate
competition. At the beginning of the twentieth century, US authorities
made efforts to clean up industry and business, but this “did
not lead to a diminution of corporate power and influence on American
society, and in the long run made little impact on the extent and
destructiveness of organized business crime”. The practices of
legendary businessmen such as Cornelius Vanderbilt, Jay Gould, John
D. Rockefeller or Andrew Carnegie are examined, as well as class conflicts,
unions’ efforts, mining disasters, etc. The corruption linked
to railroad construction makes particularly good reading (“watered
stock” and suchlike), as well as the passages about the “myth
of the Molly Maguires”, the culture of professionalism and industrial
racketeering. Large-scale bribery and other types of corporate crime
did well until the fifties, and “until the 1960s and 1970s few
criminologists chose to risk their careers by stepping outside the
prevailing pro-business consensus and exposing pervasive organized
crime in business”.
Chapter IV, V, VI and VII are respectively entitled “America’s
Moral Crusade and the Organization of Illegal Markets, 1789-1950”,
“Organized Crime and the Dumbing of American Discourse, 1920
to the Present”, “Industrial and Corporate Racketeering,
1950 to the Present” and “Drugs: Private Enterprise and
Government Bounty”. They are as far as I can judge as impeccably
researched as the preceding chapters. Woodiwiss’s thematic slant
seems appropriate and makes a not unpleasant change to the usual chronological
approach. Chapter VIII, “American Power and the Dumbing of Global
Discourse, 1945 to the Present”, begins with a reminder of the
“new world order” after the war. Only the US had “become
richer rather than poorer because of the war”, the war had accelerated
the collapse of the old empires of France and Britain, and outside
the USSR and its satellite states, the world was there for the taking:
“American influence ensured that this unstable world was largely
open to trade”. Woodiwiss then proceeds to gather indications
of the complicity of American officials and corporations in international
organized crime, before moving on to the hypocritical and useless
Americanized international drug control policies. Basically, the idea
is that in the past fifty years government officials have done little
to put an end to those organized criminal activities that serve the
interests of the US as far as foreign policy purposes are concerned.
In spite of the US-led international anti-drug measures, marijuana,
cocaine and heroin “remain relatively easy to produce, process,
and sell in most places in the world […]”, writes Woodiwiss.
Anyone with a modicum of street-smartness can verify this easily in
any city in the western world: drug dealers are everywhere. “Traffickers
have, of course, exploited the massive increase in demand for drugs
over the past forty years, but public officials and professionals
such as accountants, bankers, and lawyers have also profited greatly
from the illegal trade.”
Organized Crime and American Power is a book for anyone who
wishes to lose what elements of naïveté remained in his
appreciation of America as a superpower, without falling into the
trap of “diabolization”. It is also a scholarly book that
can be used in the context of university courses on the subject(s):
as the title indicates, it tells as much about crime as it does about
the US. Far from Godfather clichés, Organized Crime
and American Power can actually inspire whoever might be, professionally
speaking, in a position to combat crime.
Governments, whether individually or jointly, would have few problems
combating organized crime if it really was dominated by a relatively
small number of supercriminal organizations. They would eliminate
the leadership of these organizations and that would be the end of
the problem. However, as the Americans have found, orchestrating the
downfall of Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Tony Salerno, John Gotti, and
the rest did not see the end of the messy reality of American gangsterism,
let alone the much more pervasive, multifaceted, and nebulous problem
of organized crime. [387]
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld is
a classic. It was first published in 1928. Herbert Asbury (1891-1963),
writing as an original historian and observer more than as a sociologist,
psychologist or criminologist, examines a century of old-style “organized
crime” and gangsterism in the various neighborhoods of New York.
The book remains utterly fascinating to read. Plus ça change…
gang wars are well documented, and strangely reminiscent of today’s
gang warfare in New York or Los Angeles, although some of the narratives
have a sort of endearing freshness about them that you wouldn’t
find in a similar effort in the present day. The early gangs emerged
in the nineteenth century in places like the Five Points or the Bowery,
which saw the rise of colorful individuals like Bill the Butcher,
and the combination of the material and Asbury’s style make his
account as gripping as a thriller.
The Gangs of New York: An Informal History of the Underworld has
been used as the basis for a movie by Martin Scorsese, entitled Gangs
of New York, starring Daniel Day-Lewis, Leonardo DiCaprio and
Cameron Diaz, which will be released in the US in December 2002. I
hear Scorsese took a few liberties with the gangs’ history, notably
as far as chronology is concerned, but it will be interesting to see
what remains of Asbury in the movie; the much-circulated trailer is
encouraging. The prolific Asbury is also the author, among dozens
of books, of the famous Carry Nation (1929), and of Gem
of the Prairie: An Informal History of the Chicago Underworld
(1940). This leads me to the Agrégation / CAPES syllabus. These
words might not mean much to our international readership; they designate,
roughly, French post-BA competitive exams that among other advantages
secure at least a teaching job in a secondary school. This year, one
of the questions is “Organized Crime in Fact and on Film: United
States, 1929-1951” (1951: Kefauver Hearings). Naturally, as gangsters
didn’t suddenly spring up in 1929 (year of the Wall Street Crash
and of the Valentine’s Day Massacre, year before the release
in 1930 of Little Caesar, the first important movie on the curriculum),
the students might be tempted to read The Gangs of New York.
They might also be tempted to read Organized Crime and American
Power: A History, for obvious reasons.
If they prefer to concentrate on solid bases, to begin with, I strongly
recommend David E. Ruth’s Inventing the Public Enemy (1996),
Annick Foucrier’s Les Gangsters et la société
américaine (2001), and Le Crime organisé à
la ville et à l’écran: Etats-Unis, 1929-1951,
by Sophie Body-Gendrot, Francis Bordat and Divina Frau-Meigs (2001).
I also recommend Romain Huret’s Le Crime organisé à
la ville et à l’écran: 1929-1951 (2002). This
book is tailored for Agrégation and CAPES students: a historiographical
introduction, followed by general aspects of organized crime in American
cities, organized crime on American screens, and a thematic listing.
Gangsters, violence, innocence, corruption, etc. Then come topographical
tips (Chicago, New York, streets, nightclubs, jails…), a series
of criminal figures (Al Capone, Frank Costello, Lucky Luciano, and
all the others), and a series of screen criminal figures (notably
James Cagney and Paul Muni). Huret concludes with a suitable filmography,
an undersized chronology, an adequate bibliography, a very helpful
glossary (containing words phrases like “doughboy” and “street
Arab” not necessarily familiar to our French students) and an
index.
