American Mafia

It also remains heavily active in Chicago and has a significant and powerful presence in other Midwestern metropolitan areas such as Kansas City, Detroit, Milwaukee, Cleveland, and St. Louis.

"[citation needed] Emigration from southern Italy to the Americas was primarily to Brazil and Argentina, and New Orleans had a heavy volume of port traffic to and from both locales.

Mafia groups in the United States first became influential in the New York metropolitan area, gradually progressing from small neighborhood operations in poor Italian ghettos to citywide and eventually national organizations.

Kelly recruited some street hoodlums who later became some of the most famous crime bosses of the century - such as Johnny Torrio, Al Capone, Lucky Luciano and Frankie Yale.

While not explicitly related to Mafia involvement, the murder rate during the Prohibition era rose over 40% — from 6.8 per 100,000 individuals to 9.7 — and within the first three months succeeding the Eighteenth Amendment, a half-million dollars in bonded whiskey was stolen from government warehouses.

Gangs hijacked each other's alcohol shipments, forcing rivals to pay them for "protection" to leave their operations alone, and armed guards almost invariably accompanied the caravans that delivered the liquor.

[46] In New York City, by the end of the 1920s, two factions of organized crime had emerged to fight for control of the criminal underworld — one led by Joe Masseria and the other by Salvatore Maranzano.

The Mafia thrived by following a strict set of rules that originated in Sicily that called for an organized hierarchical structure and a code of silence that forbade its members from cooperating with the police (Omertà).

[29] This allowed crime families to make inroads into very profitable legitimate businesses such as construction, demolition, waste management, trucking, and in the waterfront and garment industry.

[51] In addition they could raid the unions' health and pension funds, extort businesses with threats of a workers' strike and participate in bid rigging.

[52] However, when Batista was overthrown following the Cuban Revolution, his successor Fidel Castro banned U.S. investment in the country, putting an end to the Mafia's presence in Cuba.

Local law enforcement agencies did not have the resources or knowledge to effectively combat organized crime committed by a secret society they were unaware existed.

The event (dubbed the "Apalachin Meeting") forced the FBI to recognize organized crime as a serious problem in the United States and changed the way law enforcement investigated it.

Several Mafia members associated with the Lucchese crime family participated in a point shaving scandal involving the Boston College basketball team.

[59][60] Another one of the areas of the economy that the Mafia was most influential was Las Vegas, Nevada, beginning just after World War II with the opening of the first gambling resort, The Flamingo.

[61] Many credit the Mafia with being a big part of the city's development in the mid-20th century,[62] as millions of dollars in capital flowing into new casino resorts laid the foundation for further economic growth.

[64] The RICO Act has proven to be a very powerful weapon because it attacks the entire corrupt entity instead of individuals who can easily be replaced with other organized crime members.

A high-profile RICO case sentenced John Gotti and Frank Locascio to life in prison in 1992,[65] with the help of informant Sammy Gravano in exchange for immunity from prosecution for his crimes.

[41][66] Aside from avoiding long prison stretches, the FBI could put mobsters in the United States Federal Witness Protection Program, changing their identities and supporting them financially for life.

Naval Intelligence entered into an agreement with Lucky Luciano to gain his assistance in keeping the New York waterfront free from saboteurs after the destruction of the SS Normandie.

In his report, twelve years later, William B. Herlands, Commissioner of Investigation, made the case for the U.S. government talking to top criminals, stating "The Intelligence authorities were greatly concerned with the problems of sabotage and espionage…Suspicions were rife with respect to the leaking of information about convoy movements.

[107] In 2007, Linda Schiro testified in an unrelated court case that her late boyfriend, Gregory Scarpa, a capo in the Colombo family, had been recruited by the FBI to help find the bodies of three civil rights workers who had been murdered in Mississippi in 1964 by the Ku Klux Klan.

Similar stories of Mafia involvement in recovering the bodies had been circulating for years, and had been previously published in the New York Daily News, but had never before been introduced in court.

[112][113] Allegedly, the meeting was held to discuss various topics including loansharking, narcotics trafficking, and gambling, along with dividing the illegal operations controlled by the recently murdered Albert Anastasia.

[116] Local and state law enforcement became suspicious when numerous expensive cars bearing license plates from around the country arrived in what was described as "the sleepy hamlet of Apalachin".

One of the most direct and significant outcomes of the Apalachin Meeting was that it helped to confirm the existence of a nationwide criminal conspiracy, a fact that some, including Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, had long refused to acknowledge.

[122] On June 22, 1962, using a pipe left near some construction work, Valachi bludgeoned an inmate to death who he had mistaken for Joseph DiPalermo, a Mafia member who he believed had been contracted to kill him.

[132] On July 1, 1985, the original nine men, with the addition of two more New York Mafia leaders, pleaded not guilty to a second set of racketeering charges as part of the trial.

On January 20, 2011, the United States Justice Department issued 16 indictments against Northeast American Mafia families resulting in 127 charged defendants[143] and more than 110 arrests.

[148] Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, The Godfather became a huge success, both critically and financially (it won the Best Picture Oscar and for a year was the highest-grossing film ever made).