Cosa Nostra-That's Italian For "Our Headache"

Crime does not pay when pretty much every sin comes for free. The grindings of this law explain the penury and even the desperation that afflict the affairs of the Mafia these days.

The Mafia has always existed to serve the personal habits that society outlaws as vices. But those make up a market continuously shrinking. Let any vice get itself popular enough and some state somewhere will license and tax it. The Mafia's pitiful efforts to penetrate legitimate business are only a tardy response to legitimacy's insistent incursion upon its hereditary domains. Organized crime was generally driven from the whiskey trade when Prohibition was repealed; the Mafia discovered Las Vegas and then had it stolen by its accountants, bit by bit. The lieutenant of Carlo Gambino who was caught selling dirty movies in his Staten Island meat market could hardly hope to compete with the capital and the imagination of Denmark. Nothing is safe from outsiders; the most admired pizza establishment in New York City turns out to be named Goldberg's.

The kingdom of the organized illicit has been reduced to street gambling and loan-sharking. We need no better witness to the uncertainties of such enterprises than Angelo "Ray" DeCarlo of Mountainside, New Jersey, who cannot afford to retire at the age of 68 after years of service crowned by the rank of a Mafia capo and a claim to pieces of at least two mayors and of so many policemen that it must be as hard for him to count as it seems to be to trust them.

One of his juniors asks him, "Ray, who's been winning all the money in the numbers business?"

"The detectives. The ice," DeCarlo answers.

We need no rebuttal more crushing for the notion that mafiosi do not pay taxes. The Jersey City Police Department's license fee for dice games reached a level so excessive that the FBI agents recording the conversations in DeCarlo's command center must have wondered about their status as a law-enforcement elite when they set down his complaints:

"DeCarlo said that everybody is trying to make a connection; and, as a result, you have to pay so much for it you can't make any money. [He] cited Hudson County as an example and said Bayonne Joe [Zicarelli] ruined Hudson County. Ray claimed that formerly, protection in the county cost $500 a month, until Zicarelli started paying everyone and now the price is $5000 a month, which keeps you from making any money."

New York City, of course, is priced out of the market, demanding, as it does, the care and feeding of 7000 policemen ("You'd have every sergeant in that precinct calling you up"); and even Jersey City ("the best department in the world") has become too expensive for middle-income Mafia families and has forced them to flee to the suburbs.

"Carteret [population 23,000] is the only town that's OK right now," Ray DeCarlo says. "Perth Amboy [population 40,000] is too big. You'd have fifty cops and all the detectives coming around to get on the payroll. You got to have a little town like Carteret, with about ten or fifteen cops. You put about ten of them on the payroll for a sawbuck a week, you can handle them."

Yet emigrations from urban blight are not often enough rewarded with the find of such a nest of simple folk; every country constable seems all too sophisticated about the going rate these days. A dice game is proposed for New Brunswick; Ray DeCarlo explodes when he hears the police department's service charge.

"Twenty-five hundred dollars a month, and you don't even know if you can get a crap game started down there. People who are handling these things are asking enormous prices, so you can't get no money at them. Who's going to open for them? Now, you know what you got to pay the state [troopers]? You got to pay the state at least $1500 a month. You guys are crazy if you think you can't lose money at a crap game."

All in all, the New Jersey police seem never to have been better at enforcing the law than when their greed forced the price of their favors too high for the lawbreakers to meet. For Ray DeCarlo, the Sixties were a continuous confrontation with the agony and delusions of power: In 1962, he thought he had purchased a new state-police official; by 1963, the policeman was only a bitter thought:

DeCarlo: "Do you know what this [man] wants?"

Louis Percello, one of his branch managers: "He wants $1000 [a month] for Long Branch and $1000 for Asbury."

Carmine Persico, another of his branch managers: "For each town?"

DeCarlo: "Yeah. Each town. And for the whole county, he wants to make a different price.... He's no good. He knows every racket guy in the state. We'd have been better off with a dumb guy."

The police official whose perfidy was the subject of these moralizings left office with a reputation horridly spotted by the FBI's recordings of them; yet we owe him the compliment that an imagination too ambitious to conceive of any limit to extortion made him at least as effective a barrier to wrongdoing as the most passionate commitment to duty could have done.

The FBI has lately yielded up the records of its long eavesdropping on the business offices of Simone Rizzo "Sam the Plumber" DeCavalcante of Elizabeth, New Jersey, Angelo Bruno of Philadelphia and DeCarlo, three Mafia nobles who, if they are below the throne, are certainly closer to it than anyone whose name has been mentioned within the hearing of strangers. Thanks to these transcripts, we know more about their lives and have to believe less in their legend than we ever have before.

The FBI's transcripts of the DeCavalcante (2220 pages, $95) and the DeCarlo (1888 pages, $150) conversations have been photostated by Replica printers, of Elizabeth, New Jersey. Both are worth the price. Yet, the money market being tight, the thrifty may be forced to choose one or the other. Which you choose will depend on your taste. The DeCavalcante transcripts introduce us to a gentleman trying to maintain his standards in a bad profession; it thus deals largely with manners and will appeal to those to whom novels appeal. Ray DeCarlo, on the other hand, is an industrial manager contending with a trade recession; his discourses will be most useful to persons who enjoy market analysis, money and banking, economic history and other dismal sciences.

To recognize these conversations as an unprecedented resource is not, of course, to accept them as either unguarded or honestly intended. We can no more expect a businessman to be candid with partners, customers and employees than we can a policeman with a jury. But there are different kinds of lies: the constipated lie to, say, the Internal Revenue Service and the expansive lie to the companions of one's daily life. The second sort of lie is the only one useful to sober inquiry: There is a great deal to be learned about a man from the fantasies he tells his friends and even more from the fantasies he tells himself. These anxious boasts and diminishing illusions provide only the thinnest cover for the revelation of men too frequently near the ragged edge, with more to fear from the tax collector than to hope for from their own depredations, and more nearly victims than oppressors of honest people.

The lesson of the Mafia experience seems, in fact, to be that he who deals with respectable Americans walks on water. No matter how many cops you pay, there will always be one you overlook. The dice game on Staten Island is closed down by a police raid:

Ray DeCarlo: "[And we] were paying the borough and everybody else."

Monk Marrone (a lieutenant): "It's a new captain in there."

Jack Panels (another lieutenant): "He's been there three weeks. He came in from Harlem."

DeCarlo: "That's the end of that game. Close that game forever. No more crap games.... This is the last crap game we're going to have."

To go with the untrustworthy nature of the people you buy, there is the additional trouble of the untrustworthy nature of the things you buy. There is a persistent myth that, granted the cooperation of the police, any proprietor of a numbers bank might as well own the telephone company. The irony of this notion is suggested by one lament from Joe Ippolito, whose loyalty to Sam DeCavalcante, his Mafia boss, had been rewarded with the gift of a lottery franchise:

Ippolito [said] that he is making $700-$800 a week in his mason business. Ippolilo claims that lie is doing better at the mason business than with the numbers.... Ippolito claimed lie lost $1300 one day and $1200 the next, paying off hits, and believes that his numbers business is on the decline.... He would give up his numbers in a minute if DeCavalcante would let him. Ippolilo says he owes $50,000 to various people and DeCavalcante will not let him give up the numbers until he repays all the money he owes. Ippolito says he sweats out all day to six P.M., when he finds out what the day's number is.

Joe Ipp must have been flattered, if hardly gratified, when a Federal grand jury indicted him last January as one of the paladins of what it called "a $20,000,000 gambling ring."

The Mafia's clutch at legal enterprises may then be, more often than not, an effort less to disguise the profits than to conceal the losses from its illegal ones. DeCarlo's numbers bank in one New Jersey county did so poorly that he had to direct the harshest economies; He cut in hall his payments to the police, and "Even the detective told us when we told him, 'We were wondering how you could pay us that much.'" Sam DeCavalcante owns a plumbing-supply business and plainly cherishes it as insulation against the vicissitudes that are so much more frequent than the rewards of being a Mafia overlord.

"Bob, we're doing real good here," he tells his cousin. "I don't know how long it's going to last, but we're doing OK. If I can continue for two or three years. I will be able to show $40,000 or $50,000 legitimately and can walk out. Then my family situation will be resolved."

As long ago as 1961, when the FBI was still only a helpless eavesdropper upon his affairs, Ray DeCarlo, except for wist fully wondering where he could steal the azalea bushes to landscape his headquarters, was ready to abandon as profitless all crime except usury.

His friend Sammy Sinatra comes upon him saying goodbye to a customer. "We're getting away from all gambling," DeCarlo tells Sinatra and the FBI afterward. "The best racket in the (continued on page 272) Cosa Nostra (continued from page 194) world is the Shylock racket. This guy that just left [borrowed] $60,000. We get $200 for every $10,000 a week. That's $1200 a week. At the end of a year, you got your money back and he still owes $60,000."

But if loan-sharking were that secure an enterprise, the Chase Manhattan Bank would certainly have thought of it; some legislature would docilely have approved five-percent-a-week-interest "high-risk emergency loans"; and Mafia collectors deputized by David Rockefeller would be working over garment manufacturers in every alley on Seventh Avenue. But the defect of loan-sharking is that its customers have no sense of honor; they either stiff the creditor or drive him to dangerous criminalities. Three years after consummating the arrangement that was supposed to ensure him $60,000 a year, perpetually renewable, Ray DeCarlo was heard to wail that the other party had stuck him for $150,000. It is impossible to withhold sympathy from those professional criminals who innocently enter into contract with persons as immoral as they are. The taint of debtors as a class is perfectly illuminated by the instance of Jimmy W., a brokerage clerk who borrowed $5000 from Sonny Franzese and then, true to his white-collar heritage, defaulted on his pledge. He suggested that Franzese's collector take it up with his wife. ("I know she can get it, but she won't do it for me; maybe you can bust her head a little.") Franzese treated this proposal with the repugnance natural to any good family man and offered, instead, to let Jimmy W. depart in peace if he would fence a few stolen securities. Jimmy W. went at once to a district attorney and contrived the entrapment of his creditors, earning at once relief from his debts and the gratitude of honest men.

"You should never depend on a legitimate guy standing up to pressure," Ray DeCarlo often reminds his juniors. "A racketeer, no matter what a rat he is, will never squeal on anyone."

But that is a lesson his students or, for that matter, their teacher cannot afford to absorb. These are days when a mafioso can hardly depart one prison without, before he can hail a cab, being snatched at the curb by a police car and carried off to another. And the cause of these misfortunes, most of the time, is a dishonorable debtor. The Mafia credit department has to provide services exquisite beyond even the advertised solicitude of conventional bankers: When a saloonkeeper cannot afford to pay $30,000 owed him, Sam DeCavalcante has to hire the torch to burn down his debtor's restaurant on the promise he can collect something from the insurance. Antonio Corallo is stuck for a $40,000 loan to the New York City water commissioner; he has no way to collect except to find a contractor who will bribe his debtor; and he goes to prison for corrupting a public servant. The few resources of men who go to loan sharks do not include good faith; any collector accurately if indelicately describes the conditions essential to dealings with such persons when he tells the customer that his collateral is his eyeballs.

Such beginnings make inevitable the moment when the loan shark cries out, as Ray DeCarlo once did, "What the hell, are people supposed to take your money and just cheat you?" The creditor has no recourse then but mayhem. "Anything that keeps going all the time eventually you get grabbed," DeCarlo noticed once; and he became a proof of that axiom when loan-sharking at last brought him a 20-year sentence for laying violent hands upon the late Louis Saperstein, who had owed him $115,000. Saperstein had been a labor racketeer so brazen that he had even gone to prison for it; nonetheless, the prosecution in this case chastely called him an insurance broker, which amounts to describing Dick Turpin as a sportsman who enjoyed riding at night. But then, nothing launders a man faster than the process by which he is presented to jurors as the innocent victim of some mafioso he has cheated.

All in all, the desperation of the Mafia's search for legitimate investments must come from the knowledge that, without them, it will have to depend on those illicit ones that lead to penury. We ought, then, to understand the terror that besets Sam DeCavalcante when he learns that Lawrence Wolfson, his plumbing-supply partner, is using his fearsome reputation to persuade contractors that, if they buy from the firm, DeCavalcante will protect them from troubles with the building-trades unions, as the FBI recorded for us:

[DeCavalcante] criticized Lawrence Wolfson for his aggressiveness in "grabbing people" on union matters. Subject pointed out the danger of being charged with extortion if they continue this activity. He noted that he feels very strongly about jeopardizing their legitimate business ... [and] has strictly forbidden Larry to start any more deals between contractors and labor officials.

He knew his priorities, after all.

• • •

The Sicilian spirit, faithfully preserved against every adulteration by exile, explains both the Mafia's survival in America so far and the blight that has fallen upon it now. Sicily is almost the last ornament of Western civilization whose inhabitants retain a character and a bearing that would not surprise those who described their ancestors centuries ago. The Palermo from which the Jate Joseph Profaci fled in the Twenties was a medieval city, and Profaci's ghost can hardly be blamed for having inhabited a medieval personage.

Sicily's inhabitants have endured most of their history under foreign conquerors--up to and including the Italians. And any people whose past has been a succession of ravishments by invaders has an excuse for assuming that all property is theft, all government the imposition of larcenous aliens, and every native's proper habitat the burrow of the underground.

The Sicilian character has been exegeted down the ages most often by its oppressors; and those libels sound strikingly like what prosecuting attorneys say about mafiosi these days--or, for that matter, what members of the Society say about their brothers, too.

"Juan de Vega [their 16th Century Spanish viceroy] was fascinated to discover that some Sicilians genuinely preferred to use corruption and violence even where honest means would have attained the same end more cheaply," Denis Mack Smith tells us in A History of Modern Sicily.

That spirit still stirs in Ray DeCarlo, all of whose soldiers know that he can't resist a salesman who tells him the goods are stolen: "Someone said that DeCarlo would buy anything if it was swag, even if it was only worth 15 cents. Si Rega quoted Charlie Romano as saying that DeCarlo would buy a barrel of sand in the Sahara desert if the price was right."

Even the rich Sicilian assumed that there was never a good reason to pay any debt; the Palermo riots of 1647 were started by tradesmen indignant because the aristocracy would not pay its bills.

The Sicilian habit of never cooperating with the police was noticed by foreign governors as early as the 18th Century, when an Austrian complained that for a Sicilian to be a witness for the prosecution "brought unspeakable disgrace even on the most abject member of society." Once, Sam DeCavalcante, then only a soldier, attempted to persuade Angelo Bruno, the Philadelphia family boss, to forgive another soldier who had for years carried the stain of having signed a confession to the police after they had seized numbers slips in his house. "No friend of ours is supposed to sign a statement with the police," Bruno goes on grimly insisting. DeCavalcante can only offer as extenuation the condition that the suspect's wife had been caught with the slips and that the raiding party threatened to arrest her unless he confessed himself solely responsible. "We're all married, Ange," DeCavalcante finally implores. "What man will let his wife go through an embarrassment standing alone with detectives, being questioned?" In his youth, Bruno coldly replies, the police had caught him and his wife in the same situation. "I gave them $700 to take me alone. But I didn't sign no statement."

The climactic act of every public uprising in Palermo's history has been to set fire to the police records. The cooperation--indeed, the competition--of policemen with criminals was always as sedulous as the citizens' resistance to policemen: The Duke of Osuna, a Spanish viceroy, introduced a series of unthinkably drastic civic reforms in 1611; but even he did not dare do more than suggest that persons with criminal records be barred from the police force. We can appreciate what an outrage to a lasting national tradition any such proposition was when we reflect that, when revolutionary Palermo ousted its Neapolitan oppressors in 1820, one of its first acts as a liberated city was to commission as people's policemen a number of convicted murderers. In 1849, having learned at least this lesson about the people's will, the restored Neapolitans installed a distinguished bandit as the chief law officer in the suburb of Misilmeri.

What Sicily's history produced was a society with no sense of the future and no concept of enterprise except to pillage the land or to drive its men, women and children as donkeys are driven. No one who witnessed the workday in the sulphur mines needed seek any farther to explain the Sicilian distaste for the appearance of hard labor. "Violence is the only prosperous industry," wrote Baron Franchetti, a Turin investigator, in 1876; he had summed up the history that is the tribal memory of the Mafia.

Violence was also the only prosperous industry of the Middle Ages. Reading about the Mafia brings continuous recollection of what we have been told about the passionate and dangerous world of 500 years ago. Scholars who exaggerate the perils to us of criminal and subversive groups have a tendency to move from there to overrating the dedication, the commitment and the honor of those who join them. The Mafia gets as much respect from its enemies as Ray DeCarlo wishes he would get from the policemen he pays to be his friends. Consider this summary of the Mafia code solemnly offered us by Dr. Donald Cressey of the University of California. What is all this except the code of chivalry in the Middle Ages?

The first article of the Mafia code, Dr. Cressey says, is "extreme loyalty to the organization and its governing elite." Or, as Roland said to Oliver, "Here we must hold for our king. A man should suffer for his Lord, endure heat and cold, though he lose his hide."

Dr. Cressey's second Mafia principle is "extreme honesty in relationships with members." In other words, as Parzival tells us, "False comradeship is fit for hell-fire."

The third article of the Mafia code is secrecy. As in what J. Huizinga, in The Waning of the Middle Ages, described as "the chain of Pierre de Lisingnan's Sword-order [which] was made of gold 'S's' which meant 'Silence.'"

Dr. Cressey's last Mafia rule expects "honorable behavior which sets members off as morally superior to outsiders." Or, as the old prince Gurnemanz said to Parzival: "You seem a mighty Lord. Mind you, take pity on those in need; be kind, generous and humble."

The rules of chivalry had, of course, very little relation to real life in the Middle Ages and not much more to their romances. We would have trouble imagining tricks dirtier than those Tristan and Isolde played on King Mark unless we remembered the tricks Lancelot and Guinevere played on King Arthur. The ideal suffers a similar violation by the real when we approach the intimacies of Mafia family life and hear Sam DeCavalcante talk about his sworn vassals: "Lou Lorasso is a cockroach.... Corky can't seem to settle down. He sent me a message saying he's going to start stealing again.... I have to keep Danny Noto in the family because he's a moneymaker." His troops turn out, in fact, to make no more faithful servants than the lives they have lived would lead us to expect; they make untrustworthy lieutenants, lethargic soldiers, wandering husbands; at the end of a day of trying to repair their delinquencies and stifle their scandals, DeCavalcante can only wearily decide: "In the end, the father of the family is left with the whole mess."

The Middle Ages, if seldom ethical, were continually violent in principle. To read their histories and be reminded of days where executions went on almost uninterrupted is to begin to suspect that the Mafia murder may have purposes as aesthetic as practical: "The cruel excitement and coarse compassion raised by an execution formed an important item in the spiritual food of the common people," Huizinga tells us. "They were spectacular plays with a moral.... During the Buigundian terror in Paris in 1411, one of the victims ... being requested by the hangman, according to custom, to forgive him, is not only ready to do so with all his heart, but, begs the executioner to embrace him. 'There was a great multitude of people, who nearly all wept hot tears.'"

Some of the same mixture of sentiment and the cruelty infuses the ritual of Mafia executions, whose amenities have been neglected of late but are still talked about with nostalgia and a certain bitterness toward coarsened modern habits. We can sense the proprieties of the good old customs in that decree of the Mafia's governing council, made necessary by the untidy disposal of Cadillac Charlie in Youngstown, which forbids the use of hand grenades in the future. Old men are proudest of those moments of chivalry when they acted upon the duty of punishing the sinner without embarrassing him:

Sam DeCavalcante: "Ray, you told me years ago about the guy where you said, 'Let me hit you clean.'"

DeCarlo: "That's right. And the guy went for it. There was me, Zip and Johnny Russell. So we took the guy to the woods. I said, 'Leave him alone, Zip.' I said, 'Look'--Itchie was the kid's name--I said, 'You gotta go, why not let me hit you right in the heart and you won't feel a thing?' He said, 'I'm innocent, Red, but if you got to do it....' So I hit him in the heart and it went right through him."

The final echo of the Middle Ages sounds from that mingling of the superstitious with the cynical that the faithful bring to the contemplation of the Mafia's governing commission and which makes their conception of Brooklyn sound like what Rome must have been to the 15th Century. Even from New Jersey this Holy Office is a distant mystery, its Bulls reaching there as attenuated as Rome's must have to Flanders but, in this case as in that, no less sacred for being almost rumor.

Every provincial bishop approaches this college of cardinals to pray and seems, as happened in the Middle Ages, to remain to scoff. Joseph Bonanno, a Brooklyn family boss, is suddenly unfrocked by his fellow judges on the commission, and Sam DeCavalcante is drawn into the affair with vague credentials as a diplomat. At first, he approaches the sacred precinct with a reverence duly hyperbolic:

"When foe defies the commission, he defies the whole world."

But then he watches and listens to those presences whose grandeur is the soul of the Mafia myth that is as respected in the editorial chambers of The New York Times as it is in any Jersey City candy store. Afterward, he can come home seeing only their warts:

You take Ange Bruno. What the hell does he know? He don't say two words.... Jerry Catena wets his pants when they talk.... Now, where's a guy even like Chicago [Samuel Giancana], where does he fit on the commission? You hear this guy talk and he's a nice guy. You can enjoy his company. But he's a jokester. "Hit him, hit him!"--that's all you hear from the guy.... Joe Columbo sits like a baby next to Carl [Gambino] all the time. He'll do anything Carl wants him to do.

Home from the pilgrimage, Sam DeCavalcante can only reflect to Frank Majuri, his underboss:

"You know, Frank, the more things you see, the more disillusioned you become. You know, honesty, honorability, all those things...."

Historians tend to notice that the fundamental change in the medieval man began when he recognized that he no longer believed, in what had been the age of faith.

• • •

The Mafia found its home in America because it had the luck to be accompanied here by an unchanged and unspoiled slice of Sicily. The first great influx of southern Italian immigrants found higher wages and steadier hours, but also indignities rather like those they had known in Sicily and Calabria. Here, as there, they were labor of the sort whose prime use is to be driven; and to drive them, Americans found other Italians, the ethnic identity of him who beats and him who is beaten being a principle of equality established in America with Emancipation; the driver, whom his victim would have called the gabellotto in Sicily, he called the labor boss here. The first successful American mafiosi--the Bufalinos in Scranton are one conspicuous family whose inheritance comes from that period--were these labor bosses; and their technique, the collection of small profits in perpetuity, remains at once the simplest and the most secure the Society has ever devised and the envy of those successors who were bemused by more distant and illusory horizons. "Do you know how they steal in Hoboken?" Ray DeCarlo asks. "Every man on the dock has to chip in a dollar a week. Eight hundred men--that's $800 a week."

That was the Mafia the older Italo-Americans remember and not entirely without affection, since it reminded them of home--the Mafia that sold them their jobs, levied its tax on the artichoke market, governed the wheels at church festivals and would, no doubt, have kidnaped for ransom if its constituency had encompassed anyone who could pay up. Its writ was not then conceived as running beyond the limits of our Italo-American enclaves; and the Mafia has clung closer to dependence on that original base than the persistent myth of its broader ambitions would suggest. When Vito Genovese, the defunct boss of bosses, was at the crest of his majesty, his estranged wife provided us with something unique in Mafia studies: a peek into his portfolio. By far the largest source of his income turned out to be from the New Jersey overseas branch of the Italian lottery, a business so ethnically unassimilated that its tickets were printed in Italian and the winning number drawn from the clearinghouse totals of banks in Bari and Naples. Just before the last World War, Joseph Profaci was reputed to be this country's largest importer of olive oil and a major processor of tomato paste. But, as Italo-Americans became less Italo and more American, Genovese's lottery lost more and more of its cultural appeal; and as the American diet became ever more Italianate and the pizza commenced displacing the hot dog, the major food packagers invaded Profaci's market and debased his products below the point where any man of Old World tastes could compete with them.

The Mafia's only successful foray into New World culture was during Prohibition, having begun as a response to the Italian community's traditional appreciation of wine as a diet staple and then widening its scope when all America awoke to discover its own appreciation of whiskey as a diet staple. Those few mafiosi with real property deserving the respect of their bankers built it up during Prohibition or, more precisely, upon its repeal, because they happened to have liquor stocks extensive and potable enough to be sold to legitimate distributors. Frank Costello, to take a rare case, is a certifiably wealthy man who has reached the eminence, alone in the Society, of being able to afford the care and feeding of uncountable and unproductive Irishmen. There is the legend that Costello was able to sell his bootleg stocks for $3,000,000. If he invested it half as well as the Rockefellers did their three billion dollars, his share of the national wealth would have outlived the New Deal's war on the rich, as large as it was in 1933.

His ownership of capital sets Costello apart from most of his brothers who. whatever their revenues, were debarred by the post-Depression tax structure from ever coming close to his property titles. The repeal of Prohibition was the first incursion of a rapacious Government on a Mafia enterprise; and it would never find one that could provide anything like the share of the gross national product that the whiskey business had. Every now and then, in a triumph of nostalgia over reality, an old mafioso gets arrested for bootlegging.

Repeal caught the Society in those labor-cost problems that have tormented it off and on ever since. Under Prohibition, it had acquired a work force toward whose welfare it has ever since demonstrated a sense of duty unusual in American enterprise. Ultimate though its system for breaking a man's contract may be, the Mafia never lays anyone off. It represents, in fact, the oldest welfare system in this country, antedating the New Deal and still offering unemployment benefits--$150 a week to the families of employees in jail, for example--considerably in advance of any standards yet achieved by our Social Security laws.

Scrabbling to find payrolls large enough to feed this hungry multitude at a fair labor standard has been an incessant struggle for the Mafia ever since repeal and it has carried on ever farther down the social scale. One result has been a detectable shift in the function of the Mafia-controlled labor unions, whose managers used to be able just to extort but have now been distracted by the new and pressing responsibility of providing jobs for soldiers inexperienced at even the imitation of an honest day's work. When you have persuaded a contractor to hire an unemployed ziganette dealer as a stonemason, you've left yourself a very small option for going back and shaking him down for cash thereafter.

Those scholars who have placed the imprint of the academics upon the notion of the Mafia's dominance of the economy would have a hard time explaining the pre-eminence in DeCavalcante's empire of Local 384 of the hod carriers' union. Local 384's position as a jewel in any Mafia boss's crown is indicated by the station of Joe Sferra, its business agent, as a capo-regime in the DeCavalcante family and by the anxiety with which Carl Gambino, that great prince, solicited DeCavalcante to open its hiring hall to some of the worthier of his own soldiers who were out of work. It is curious, faced with so much evidence of all this scheming to seize the high privilege of carrying brick, to be assured by Dr. Cressy that "the profits [of the Mafia] are huge enough that any given member is more likely to be a millionaire than not."

Sferra's management of Local 384 even produced a protocol dispute with John Riggi, another capo-regime of DeCavalcante's. "Sam, I came to you yesterday," Riggi said, "because I felt that as an amico nos and a capo-regime, I'm not getting the respect I deserve from Joe Sferra." The issue turned out to be Riggi's father, himself a loyal soldier, who had been groaning under the burden of the hod. Riggi had asked Sferra to find his father an easier assignment and had been refused. "I feel offended as an amico nos." Riggi explained, "that I can't go to my friend and get a favor for one of my soldiers.... I did what I did because of my father, who has lived a dog's life for three years." These are the problems of millionaires?

The shrinkage of the market and the expenses of its private welfare system quite a while ago impelled the Mafia's commission to close its books against the admission of new members. At that point, Albert Anastasia, a Brooklyn family boss, seems to have had an idea that might have saved the Society if it had not been inhibited by pride.

Anastasia began selling Mafia memberships for $40,000 apiece to young men beginning careers that they were deluded into thinking would be advanced by that credential. When the commission heard about this venture, it ordered Anastasia executed; and none of his survivors seems to have come up with a sound commercial idea since.

So the Society drifts downward, stubbornly enforcing its monopoly over goods and services that fewer and fewer people want to buy. Heroin is the only criminal staple to have lately enjoyed an increase in demand; even though we can hardly believe the disclaimers of the Mafia captains that they reject such traffic as immoral, there is every evidence that they think it too risky for indulgence in any except moments of acute fiscal desperation. They have made so little effort to organize the market that Michael Tabor, a former addict redeemed by the Black Panthers, can say that he has observed no instance of successful black capitalism except in portions of the heroin trade.

The Mafia must have been America's first conglomerate, and that contribution to our economic history may have been a factor in its ruin. An institution with too many businesses risks not having time for the proper management of any.

The Mafia, to be sure, goes on believing in the Mafia almost as stubbornly as do the journalists, the novelists and the academicians who constitute the industry of alarming us about it; the faith of witches and witch-hunters alike is proof enough of witchcraft. The talk in the Society's office is still about the great riches of its paladins, but the riches are always somewhere else. Every soldier in Chicago, we are informed--as we would be everywhere except, probably, in Chicago--makes $1000 a week. "Listen," DeCavalcante tells an underboss, "if we don't join these big outfits and try to make a buck, we're dead."

But every now and then, reality breaks through, as in this cri de coeur from Anthony Russo, as he sits in his modest little duchy of Long Branch, New Jersey, and hears the crash of great kingdoms around him:

Sam, do you know how many guys are safecracking? What are they going to do? Half these guys are handling junk. Now, there's a [Mafia] law out that they can't touch it. They have no other way of making a living, so what can they do? All right, we're fortunate enough that... we didn't have to resort to that stuff. What are the other poor suckers going to do? Pretty soon, we'll have all the mob over here [in New Jersey]. Guys are coming over here, asking to be put on [work gambling games] and they're friends of ours, so I put them to work, because I can't let them starve to death. Sam, pretty soon I may have to say no to them, because I got to look out for myself.

The ragged actuality of this Grande Armée of the popular imagination may be the most plausible reason its soldiers seem lately so indifferent to the goal of a marshal's baton. The members of its governing commission are older on the average than sitting Justices of the United States Supreme Court: Buffalo's Stefano Magaddino is 80; Brooklyn's Carl Gambino, 68; and Detroit's Joseph Zerilli, in his 70s. Only Brooklyn's Joseph Golumbo and Philadelphia's Angelo Bruno are younger than 60. None of them retire and the few who die do so peaceably.

Vacancies on this high bench have recently tended to remain unfilled; the full commission had nine members in the early Sixties; four have since departed and there is some evidence that their places are still empty. The command of the late Chief Justice Vito Genovese appears to have been diffused among Michael Miranda, Gerald Catena and Thomas Eboli, all older than 65; Thomas Lucchese left no securely identifiable heir. Joseph Bonanno's family has been without a boss since he was deposed; the suspicion is that no one wants the job. Chicago's Sam Giancana, who, being in his 50s, represented what promise there was of a fresh generation on the court, tossed up the whole thing in 1966 and took off for the Argentine, leaving the management of his city-state to the vibrant youth of Paul Ricca, 72, and Anthony Accardo, 64.

This is largely an assemblage of personages who made their debuts in the police files of the early Twenties. If they were guarding any golden bough, some hungry junior ought successfully to have challenged one or another of them for its possession by now. Succession to Mafia command was regulated by the gun well into the Forties. But now it has been 13 years since a family boss has died anywhere but in bed. The last to get into difficulty with his comrades was Joe Bananas, who defied the whole world for two years and then settled in Tucson. The explanation of this anomaly in Mafia studies is that the Society governs itself more rationally and peacefully than it used to. It still kills people and in rather messy ways. But it kills for reasons of administration, as a management discharging unsatisfactory workmen; the difference is that no one bothers to plot against the man above him on the ladder; and when the middle-level executive is that free of ambition, we ought to suspect that there isn't much left in the firm worth coveting.

Even so, we worry about the Mafia more now in its wither than we ever did in its flower. That is the normal progress of public agitation. The less we need the Mafia to serve our vices, the more essential it becomes to serve our sense of virtue. Our national history has continuously been that no improper conduct is to be noticed unless it is also exotic. For generations, the reform impulse was directed at whiskey and straight sex; but now alcoholism and adultery have become so general that virtue fixes its outrage on junkies and queers. No sinner need fear abuse once his sin becomes the sin of the majority.

We have also arrived at a time in our development when nearly every American cheats, lies or steals to some degree; there can't be many people left who could tell the whole truth to the Internal Revenue Service and not starve in the streets thereafter. The more pervasive the sin, the more intense the necessity to focus on criminals whose cultural difference from the rest of us makes it possible for us to go on thinking of crime as un-American. No American politician can run for office blaming the voters; he has to find an alien whose entire fault it all is.

Now we begin to run out of mafiosi, a resource we shall appreciate only when they are all gone, when the last of them has his elevation to boss of bosses announced in the papers and is thereupon seized and chained by the last prosecuting attorney lucky enough to attach such an ornament as train to his ascending chariot. The growth industry imperiled by the Mafia's ruin is not organized crime but organized crime fighting. The cop who cooperates with the Mafia dies a retired cop; the district attorney who fights it can hope to die a governor emeritus. The good scores are made not by belonging to but by exposing the Mafia. Even Ray DeCarlo has come at last to understand that. In 1962, the radio brought him word that Charles Luciano was dead in Naples--Charley Lucky, the grand architect of the American Mafia's structure, the prime minister who has a place in its history like Cavour's in the forging of Italy United.

What was Ray DeCarlo's first reaction to this news?

"Ray bemoaned the fact that Charley had missed the opportunity to make $200,000 for his life story."

Ray DeCarlo and Charles Luciano both had to grow old before they suddenly understood where the money had been all along.