Organized Crime in Chicago

Beyond the Mafia

Robert M. Lombardo

• Publisher: University of Illinois Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780252094484
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book provides a comprehensive sociological explanation for the emergence and continuation of organized crime in Chicago. Tracing the roots of political corruption that afforded protection to gambling, prostitution, and other vice activity in Chicago and other large American cities, Robert M. Lombardo challenges the dominant belief that organized crime in America descended directly from the Sicilian Mafia. According to this widespread "alien conspiracy" theory, organized crime evolved in a linear fashion beginning with the Mafia in Sicily, emerging in the form of the Black Hand in America's immigrant colonies, and culminating in the development of the Cosa Nostra in America's urban centers. Looking beyond this Mafia paradigm, this volume argues that the development of organized crime in Chicago and other large American cities was rooted in the social structure of American society. Specifically, Lombardo ties organized crime to the emergence of machine politics in America's urban centers. From nineteenth-century vice syndicates to the modern-day Outfit, Chicago's criminal underworld could not have existed without the blessing of those who controlled municipal, county, and state government. These practices were not imported from Sicily, Lombardo contends, but were bred in the socially disorganized slums of America where elected officials routinely franchised vice and crime in exchange for money and votes. This book also traces the history of the African-American community's participation in traditional organized crime in Chicago and offers new perspectives on the organizational structure of the Chicago Outfit, the traditional organized crime group in Chicago.

1

EXPLAINING ORGANIZED CRIME

The competing alien conspiracy and ethnic succession explanations for the emergence of organized crime in America are based upon two separate but related theories of crime: cultural deviance and social disorganization. Although they are both mainstream theories, their classification is often a difficult task. Cultural deviance theory, for example, has been explained at both the micro and macro levels, and there are two variants of social disorganization theory. To add to the confusion, there is also what has come to be known as Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay's “mixed” model of delinquency, combining both social disorganization and cultural deviance.¹ All of these are associated with the Chicago School of sociology, which emerged from the University of Chicago in the early 1920s. This analysis follows the paradigm developed by the Chicago School. Both cultural deviance and social disorganization theory are reviewed in this chapter as possible explanations for organized crime in Chicago and other American cities.

Cultural Deviance

The alien conspiracy argument is based upon cultural deviance theory. If we follow the imagery portrayed in Mario Puzo's book The Godfather, we see a picture of a Sicilian immigrant family who brought the traditions of the Mafia to America, which they accepted as a legitimate means of obtaining the fruits of the new world.² Young Michael Corleone, the U.S. Marine Corps hero, who at first showed distaste for criminal activity, was celebrated when he turned away from the values of the larger society and joined the “family business.” Michael's entrance into organized crime marked his acceptance of the cultural norms to which he had been socialized and, therefore, to which he owed his allegiance.

Cultural deviance is a middle-range theory grouped under the positivist paradigm. Cultural deviance argues that every person is identified with a social group that has developed its own norms of conduct. In cultural deviance theory, norms are never violated. Criminals are well-socialized members of the groups to whose cultural codes they invariably conform. What appears to be deviance is simply a label applied by outsiders to the conforming behavior endorsed by one's own group. People act, for the most part, in accordance with the rules of the group to which they belong.³ If these rules are in conflict with those of other cultural groups, who have the power to incorporate their values into law, crime occurs. The cause of crime is culture conflict—that is, variation in cultural values defining crime.

Pure cultural deviance theory argues that conflict exists when divergent rules of conduct govern a person's situation in life. There are two types of culture conflict. Primary group conflict occurs when members of one cultural group migrate to another area. Because immigrants often bring divergent religious beliefs, norms, and systems of values, culture conflict is inevitable. For example, William F. Whyte found a discrepancy between middle-class values and immigrant morality in an inner-city Italian community.⁴ In the Boston neighborhood of “Cornerville,” gambling was seen as normal conduct even though by the standards of the larger society it was considered illegal. Secondary culture conflict occurs with the evolution of different subcultures and value systems within the same society. The secondary culture conflict argument has often been used to explain the development of street gangs in modern society.

Francis Ianni provided a real-life example of cultural deviance theory as it pertains to organized crime in his study of one of New York's five crime families. He states that the members of Italian American organized crime “share a common culture and organize their universe and respond to it in ways which are considered culturally appropriate.” This shared culture is internalized as a code of implicit rules of behavior that members learn to use as part of these groups. This code is manifested in their actions, since it defines the equation through which they perceive the objective world and make culturally acceptable decisions about how to behave. Ianni believes that many of the attitudes and values that supported the entry of Italian immigrants into organized crime came with them from their mother country, where Mafia practices have existed since the mid-1800s.⁵

Despite its popularity, support for the alien conspiracy/cultural deviance explanation for organized crime in America is sparse. There is, however, a body of research that focuses on the Sicilian Mafia as a cultural form and a de facto method of social control in the absence of effective state government and not a criminal organization in the American sense of the word. In particular, the historical Mafia was a phenomenon associated with the large agricultural estates of western Sicily and their relationship to the commercial markets in Palermo, the island's capital. The managers of these estates, the gabellotti, established a system of control in their own agricultural districts that facilitated cattle rustling, smuggling, and the monopolization of the citrus market, which ultimately extended to the Conca d'Oro, the agricultural region that surrounded Palermo. These activities, though illegal, hardly provided the necessary basis for the organization of gambling, prostitution, and labor racketeering in American society.⁶

There is even less support for the existence of the Black Hand. The alien conspiracy view argues that the Black Hand was a transitional step between the Mafia in Sicily and the Cosa Nostra in American society. Modern research, however, has established that the Black Hand was not a criminal organization, but simply a crude method of extortion used to blackmail wealthy Italians and others for money. Blackmailers would simply send a letter stating that the intended victim would come to harm if he did not meet the extortion demands. The term Black Hand came into use because the extortion letters usually contained a drawing of a Black Hand or other evil symbols. The Black Hand was nothing more than a method of crime, like armed robbery or safe cracking. There was no international association. There was no central organization. There was no connection to the Camorra or Mafia. There was, however, the press, which through its Mafia interpretation turned Black Hand crime into an international criminal conspiracy.⁷

Social Disorganization

While little research has been conducted to support the cultural deviance explanation for the emergence of organized crime, a substantial body of inquiry exists to support the social disorganization explanation. Social disorganization theory would have us look at the fictional Corleone family as just another immigrant group who came to America at the turn of the last century looking for the economic benefits provided by the Industrial Revolution. Coincident with this rapidly increasing immigration and industrialization was an assumed increase in the complexity of social life. The proponents of social disorganization theory hypothesized a relationship between this increased social complexity and higher rates of deviance, particularly in urban areas. These theorists, borrowing ecological notions, saw society as a complex whole whose parts—communities, institutions, and associations—were interdependent and maintained some sort of equilibrium in which people agreed with one another about values, and this agreement was reflected in a high degree of social organization. When this consensus became upset and traditional rules of conduct were brought into question, social disorganization occurred.

The basic premise of the social disorganization approach is that deviance is most likely to increase in periods of rapid social change. In explaining deviance it is important to remember that social change disrupts not only routine ways of living but also traditional methods of regulating behavior. As a society becomes more heterogeneous, primary relations are subject to strain, which in turn leads to a decrease in social control. The old forms of control represented by the family and the local community become undermined and their influence greatly diminished. According to social disorganization theory, all members of society are thought to have certain similar basic values. Criminality results from community conditions that prevent these values from being attained. Social disorganization theory can be divided into two variants, strain and control explanations.⁸

Strain theory seeks to explain what happens to people when the controls imposed by social life are relaxed or no longer function, as in periods of great social change. Under ordinary conditions, normative restrictions are clear and most people adhere to them. But when society becomes disorganized, the mechanisms that define these restrictions become weakened and “normlessness” results. Emile Durkheim referred to this social condition as anomie and argued that as anomie increased in a society, so would the rate of suicide. Man's activity lacked regulation and, therefore, led to suffering and death.⁹

Robert Merton applied Durkheim's concept of anomie to deviant behavior, arguing that anomie arises from an incongruity in society between emphasis on the importance of attaining valued goals and the availability of legitimate institutionalized means to reach these goals. According to Merton, the most efficient available means to attain socially defined goals, whether legitimate or not, is acceptable. The stress on culturally defined goals in the absence of the necessary means to obtain them invites “exaggerated anxieties, hostilities, neurosis, and antisocial behavior.” Strain is overcome, according to Merton, through four types of deviant activities: innovation, ritualism, retreatism, and rebellion. It is innovation that is the major concern of the criminologist. The innovator, not being able to achieve success via conventional or legitimate avenues of opportunity, achieves success through the violation of social norms.¹⁰

Strain theory explains organized crime as a mechanism by which an individual or group can obtain the socially approved goals of wealth and power through “innovative” or illegal means. In fact, Merton wrote, “Al Capone represents the triumph of amoral intelligence over morally prescribed ‘failure’ when the channels of vertical mobility are closed or narrowed in a society that places a high premium on economic affluence and social ascent for all its members.”¹¹

It is because of such normal goals as independence through a business of one's own and such moral aspirations as the desire for social advancement and prestige that Daniel Bell argues that in the complex and ever-shifting structure of urban society the rackets are one of the crooked ladders of social mobility in American life.¹² Strain theory, like cultural deviance theory, assumes that people are religiously devoted to following the dictates of their culture. In cultural deviance theory, crime is normative. In strain theory, crime is the result of exposure to a cultural ideology in which failure to orient oneself upward is regarded as a moral defect and failure to become mobile is proof of it.

Ruth Kornhauser argues that it is ironic that strain theory traces its history to Emile Durkheim, because she believes he is a control theorist. Durkheim stated that when a society is disturbed by some painful crisis or experiences some abrupt transitions, it is momentarily incapable of exercising its influence. It could be argued, therefore, that deviance is the result of an absence of restraint upon aspirations and not the stress caused by an absence of legitimate means to attain these aspirations.¹³

Control theory assumes that deviant acts result when an individual's bond to society is weakened. The strength of this bond is the foundation of social control. Its weakening is the result of the failure of the controlling institutions of society to properly function. This failure is brought about by social disorganization—the weakness or breakdown of established values and norms—that destroys social order and hence social control. Simply put, social disorganization leads to a lack of control, which leads to crime.

Frederic Thrasher developed the first control version of social disorganization theory. Studying gang delinquency, he stated, “Gangs represent the spontaneous efforts of boys to create a society for themselves where none adequate to their needs exists.”¹⁴ This effort results from the failure of the normally directing and controlling institutions of society to function efficiently in the boy's own experience and is indicated by disintegration of family life, inefficiency of schools, formalism and externality of religion, corruption and indifference in local politics, low wages and monotony in occupational activities, unemployment, and the lack of opportunity for wholesome recreation. The causal structure of Thrasher's model is as follows: social disorganization leads to a lack of social control, which leads to gang formation and crime.

Following this line of reasoning, weak controls not only account for variation in the occurrence of criminality but also explain the existence of organized crime. Whether those engaged in organized criminality are products of a disorganized area or simply operate there, a weak community will not be able to provide resistance to their activities. The literature provides ample evidence of the inability of communities to combat organized crime. Daniel Bell, Alan Block, and John Gardner all document the existence of organized crime in communities whose elected officials and mechanisms of social control have been corrupted through an established interdependency between machine politics and organized criminality.¹⁵

The development of social structural explanations for organized crime and other deviant phenomena can be traced to the work of Robert Park, Ernest Burgess, and Roderick McKenzie.¹⁶ These authors were best known for their ecological approach to the study of urban social structure. They hypothesized that human nature and human institutions were related to the spatial relationships of human beings. As these spatial relationships changed, the physical basis of social relations became altered, thereby producing social and political problems. Their studies of Chicago showed that a number of factors, often economic in nature, determined the patterns of land use, which in turn underlay the social structure of the various areas of the city.

The human ecologist saw land as a scarce commodity, with different locations having different values. As a result, land became a market commodity subject to the laws of supply and demand. Because of the cost of land and specific functional needs, different areas became associated with particular human activities.¹⁷ For example, the central focal point of a city, the downtown area, provided the minimum travel distance from all points within the city and, as a result, became the central business district. For industry, large tracts of land located near waterways, railroads, and other means of transportation were often more important than proximity to the city's center, leading manufacturers to set up shop where these resources were available.

Park, Burgess, and McKenzie maintained that the typical process of land use within a city could best be illustrated by a series of concentric circles that may be numbered to designate both the successive zones of urban extension and the types of areas differentiated in the process of expansion.¹⁸ In Chicago this typology located the downtown area in Sector I. Encircling the central business district was an area in transition, which was being invaded by business and light manufacturing (Sector II). Land values were high in this sector because of the expectation of industrial development. As a result, residential buildings expected to be sold were left in a state of disrepair and rented cheaply. This area stretched from the central business district as far west as Halsted Street along the north and south branches of the Chicago River. Rooming houses, unskilled workers, and settlements of foreign-born populations inhabited the resulting slums. Workers who were employed in Sector II and second-generation immigrant settlements inhabited the third area (Sector III). Beyond this zone was a residential area of high-status apartment housing and single-family residential homes (Sector V). Still farther was the commuter zone (Sector VI), the suburban and satellite city area.

Park, Burgess, and McKenzie argued that the growth of the city resulted from the influx of unskilled labor into the second zone, the zone in transition. As these immigrant groups became more fully integrated into the economic structure of the city, they moved progressively outward to more attractive and costly areas. Because of the economic forces at play, each of these zones maintained its own peculiar characteristics despite the influx of various racial and national groups. Because they maintained their characteristics and invariably impressed their effects on those who settled there, they were referred to as “natural areas”—areas that were the result of natural forces and not the result of human intentions.¹⁹

The works of Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, as well as other early human ecologists, have important implications for the study of deviant behavior. The area closest to the central business district (Zone II) was the least attractive to residents and thus was characterized by high rates of population turnover. Residents moved out as soon as they were economically capable. This rapid transition made it difficult to form strong formal and informal ties among the residents. Anonymity and isolation characterized social relations in the area. No one knew who his neighbors were and no one cared what they thought. Consequently, social control was weakened, resulting in a breakdown of standards of personal behavior and a drifting into unconventionality. Following this line of reasoning, deviant behavior can be seen not as an offshoot of dominant patterns of propriety, but rather as the normal pattern resulting from the social life of certain areas of the city.²⁰

Shaw and McKay

Building upon the work of Park, Burgess, and McKenzie, Clifford Shaw and Henry McKay found that regardless of changes in the ethnic makeup of a community, the relative distributional pattern of delinquency remained stable over time. This finding resulted in the formulation of their famous cultural transmission hypothesis. Shaw and McKay argued that the spatial distribution of delinquency in a city is a product of larger economic and social processes characterizing the history and growth of the city and of the local communities that comprise it. T...