How America Made the Mafia – Foreign Policy

Yet when describing his films, Coppola has insisted they are not docudramas. The Godfather, in his words, was fundamentally a story about the nature of power and capitalism in the United States. Both the fictional Corleone family and their compound, he declared, drew inspiration from the Kennedys and their family home in Hyannis Port.

“Remember,” Coppola cautioned, “[The Godfather] wasn’t a documentary about mafia chief Vito Genovese. It was Marlon Brando with Kleenex in his mouth.”

There is something undeniably cynical about the modern U.S. mafia film, reflecting an uncomfortable observation: Gangsters have played notable roles in the history of the United States. Is it possible, for example, to talk about the United States in the 1920s without mentioning Al Capone or bootlegging? Even a high school class will tell you that the world’s most famous gangster was emblematic of this era.

But organized crime is intertwined with U.S. history in deeper ways, reflecting through a dark mirror the country’s rise to global power. As with so much else, this is a story of the United States bringing international influences together through immigration, transforming them through its own early-20th century politics, and then reexporting them around the globe through media and military force.

A cartoon lithograph shows Uncle Sam scowling at immigrant groups coming into the United States. Published in New York on April 4, 1891.Grant E. Hamilton, Library of Congress

The United States’ first mafia scandal occurred in the spring of 1891, when a New Orleans mob shot and lynched eleven Italian men across the city. Their presumed crime was the murder of the chief of police, David Hennessy. Before his assassination, Hennessy had been investigating an Italian gang referred to in the press as the mafia.

The lynchings stirred heated debate over the country’s permissive attitudes toward immigration and citizenship. Nativists seized upon these stories as confirmation that Italians and other newcomers imported cultures of crime, conspiracy, and radical politics. An occasional offense could be forgiven, as one Mississippi editor put it. “But when foreign groups transport and carry on here their Tongs, mafias, vendettas, class enmities and hostilities, it is a disturbance of such alien … and bloody character that America is not obliged to endure it and should not,” the editor wrote. Despite such objections, the United States remained a destination for millions of turn-of-the-century migrants.

The mafia paranoia of the 1890s did not yield the discovery of similar conspiracies elsewhere. To the extent that Italian migrants did form criminal gangs, most proved fleeting through the turn of the new century. It was the onset of Prohibition that changed this forever. Widespread demand for booze necessitated the building of sustained supply chains linking foreign sources of alcohol to provincial U.S. markets. Those who built these networks came from a variety of backgrounds, though many were immigrants or second-generation Americans.

Increased competition fueled an epidemic of violence through much of Prohibition. By 1933, endemic warfare gave way to greater consolidation and cooperation. Amid a generational changing of the guard, younger gangsters laid the foundations of more permanent outfits. The men who formed the Chicago Outfit and New York’s Five Families were younger and less conservative than their predecessors. Organizationally, some drew upon the culture and structure of Sicily’s Mafia; other were more fluid or permissive of members from different ethnic backgrounds.

To limit friction, these gangsters occasionally convened meetings among a so-called national commission of chieftains in locations across the country. The fruits of this more integrated U.S. underworld was an expansion of illicit enterprise, ranging from organized gambling to extortion and drug trafficking. Ironically, those characteristics that had initially marked the Sicilian Mafia as radical and foreign now bore a greater resemblance to the world of legitimate U.S. business.

In the decades that followed, entrepreneurs within these organizations continued to build ties abroad. Meyer Lansky, the basis for the character of Hyman Roth in The Godfather II, led an entourage of American hoods to invest in casinos and hotels in Havana. In addition to playing a role in the makings of modern Las Vegas, Bugsy Siegel forged partnerships with heroin traffickers in Mexico.

The most enterprising, and least recognized, of these early criminal architects were members of the Bonanno family of New York. Between 1945 and 1960, the Bonannos forged close relationships with smugglers and distributors based in Montreal, Palermo, and Marseille. This international conspiracy, later dubbed the French Connection, became the basis from which many contemporary drug networks grew and multiplied over the next several decades.

The international dimensions of U.S. organized crime were something officials in Washington comprehended from the start. At the turn of the 20th century, U.S. diplomats and activists played a leading role in crafting the first international agreements banning the unlicensed sale of narcotics across international borders. Over time, federal authorities took even more proactive steps to halt the flow of contraband into the United States. In 1930, President Herbert Hoover created the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, grandfather to the contemporary Drug Enforcement Administration. Under its intrepid first commissioner, Harry Ansliger, the bureau built a constellation of offices across the country and around the world.

Anslinger’s approached towards drugs was simple, but ambitious: Ending the narcotics trade necessitated U.S. action abroad. As the United States grew in power and authority in the postwar era, he and his agents actively advised and pressured foreign governments on drug matters. From Mexico to Turkey to Thailand, the U.S. model inspired the creation of local narcotics bureaus.

After Richard Nixon’s election in 1968, U.S. presidents increasingly made counter-narcotics enforcement a central plank of their foreign and domestic policies. Under Nixon, the U.S. Congress also took greater initiative in passing legislation targeting criminal groups. With the United States’ emergence as the globe’s sole superpower, other states followed. With Washington’s help and insistence, outlawing racketeering and money laundering became an international norm.

The force of U.S. global leadership crested in 2000, when 120 nations formally agreed to sign the U.N. Convention Against Transnational Organized Crime. To mark the occasion, Italian officials hosted delegates from the across the world in the town of Corleone, Italy—the birthplace of Marlon Brando’s fictional character in The Godfather.

Joseph Valachi of the Genovese crime family testifies about organized crime and the mafia at a Senate hearing in Washington on Sept. 27, 1963. Warren K. Leffler, Library of Congress

The notion of organized crime itself is rooted in the reformist politics of the late-19th century United States. Rampant concern over prostitution, gambling, and alcohol use led activists to consider these activities as something more than social ills. Like the “machine” administrations of many U.S. cities, purveyors of vice appeared to constitute corrupt systems of “organized crime.” But for 19th-century critics, organized crime was not the domain of any particular type of gang and conspiracy. To their reckoning, crimes such as prostitution and illegal gambling encompassed a number of actors, including politicians.

This attitude began to change by the mid-20th century. The rise of syndicates led by Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, and others compelled many to see the need to focus on the groups responsible for organized crime. Moreover, big-shot bootleggers and their minions tended to come from certain backgrounds; they were very often Italian or Jewish or maybe Irish.

As Washington’s chief counter-narcotics officer, Anslinger seized upon these correlations and embellished them further. When congressional investigators set out to explore the pervasiveness of organized crime in the United States in the 1950s, Anslinger provided lawmakers with hundreds of documents detailing the history, structure, and dealings of crime syndicates across the country. The conclusions of this first official study, released in 1951, left a lasting impression. A “sinister criminal organization known as the Mafia” operated across the country, the report declared. The American Mafia possessed “ties in other nations” and dominated the vice trade, narcotics, and other rackets, according to the report.

A thunderstruck U.S. public heeded and internalized these findings. Up to 30 million television viewers watched the first congressional inquiry into organized crime in 1951, a number far greater than those who tuned into the World Series that year. Subsequent congressional investigations grabbed even more attention.

In 1963, Joe Valachi, a convicted drug trafficker, offered to reveal many of the secrets of the American Mafia to the U.S. Congress. He did not disappoint. He outlined the organizational structure, initiation rites, and hidden histories of its various crime families. Above all, he disclosed what he believed was the American Mafia’s true name: La Cosa Nostra. A book-length survey of these revelations, The Valachi Papers, soon became an international bestseller. It was on the basis of The Valachi Papers, as well as other news accounts, that Mario Puzo composed the plotlines for his novel, The Godfather. Coppola also drew upon The Valachi Papers for inspiration after agreeing to direct the film adaptation of Puzo’s work.

The chain of events linking Anslinger, Valachi, and The Godfather ultimately transformed how much of the world talks about organized crime. In the wake of The Godfather’s release in 1972, prominent underworld figures in France, Mexico, and Turkey ceased calling themselves simply bosses. Many preferred instead to be called godfathers, be the word parrain, padrino, or baba.

Before the publication of The Valachi Papers, mafiosi never referred to their secret society as La Cosa Nostra. After Italian papers printed Valachi’s testimony, Sicilian gangsters appropriate the name without a hint of irony or hesitation. More dramatic perhaps was the degree to which the word “mafia” seeped into vocabularies across the world. Observers at home and abroad increasingly referred to older criminal subcultures, such as China’s Triads and Japan’s Yakuza, as Asian mafias in their own right. As the winds of political change swept Eastern Europe, journalists heralded the dawn of new mafias in Russia and the Balkans.

Gangsters have never been immune to public attention, often shaping their behavior based on what they see in newspapers, theater, or film. Following World War II, members of the Yakuza, for example, happily embraced the look of the Hollywood gangster. Some Mexican cartels require recruits to watch The Godfather trilogy in order to understand both their new profession and its culture of loyalty.

Indeed, it is possible that this sense of a shared culture has helped facilitate greater cooperation between mafia factions around the world. When disparate groups such as the Zetas, Camorra, and Vory come together to exploit illicit business opportunities, they recognize each other as each representing a variant of the mafia tradition.

The influence of the American Mafia has waned mightily over the last half century. But imprint left by U.S. officials, reformers, and artists on the concept of organized crime is as strong as ever. Gangsters certainly played an important part in U.S. history. But it was the United States that made mafias globally relevant.