The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

At first, older ‘godfathers’ – like Carlo Gambino – were willing to wait and see what came of it all. They had always hated publicity, but Colombo’s seemed to be of the right kind. But things began to go wrong in December 1970, when Colombo’s bodyguard Rocco Miraglia was arrested outside the State Supreme Court. He was carrying a black attache case, which Colombo insisted belonged to him and contained papers of the Civil Rights League. Intrigued by his obvious concern, the FBI agents examined its contents, and found that it appeared to contain accounts of various financial transactions involving huge sums of money, and relating to various well-known Mafia figures, such as Carlo Gambino. The Mafia suddenly found itself again the subject of police harassment. And Colombo’s League was blamed.

On 28 June 1971, Colombo stood up in front of a vast audience at Columbus Circle to review the results of the League’s first year. As he moved through the cheering crowd towards the rostrum, shots rang out and he dropped to the ground; the man who had fired them was a negro photographer, Jerome Johnson. Within seconds, Johnson was dead, shot by a Colombo bodyguard (who was never identified). Colombo recovered after five hours of brain surgery, but his active role as a capo was over; he was paralysed.

One of the chief suspects behind the Colombo shooting was Joe Gallo, the lone ‘individualist’ who had gone to jail in 1961 and who came out ten years later. Gallo had spent his years in prison trying to make things difficult for the authorities, alleging persecution and being persecuted as a consequence. Back in his old territory, South Brooklyn he had immediately underlined his lack of respect for Joe Colombo by tearing down posters for the Civil Rights League and ordering Rocco Miraglia out of the district.

Ten years in jail had made Gallo decide that he was sick of being a gangster. After seeing a film called The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight – a spoof on the Mafia – he telephoned one of its leading actors, Jerry Orbach, and introduced himself. As a result, he became the friend of the Orbachs, and was soon being introduced to their society friends. Mrs Marta Orbach was impressed by his intelligence and his wide reading – he talked about Sartre, Camus, Céline, Kafka and Wilhelm Reich. ‘He needed people who were as bright as he was,’ Mrs Orbach said. The result was that Joey Gallo suddenly found himself a social celebrity. His new friends insisted that this was not the usual morbid interest in gangsters, but because he impressed them as genuinely intelligent and perceptive.

In March 1972, Gallo married a pretty divorcee with a young daughter. On 6 April he went to eat in a restaurant in Mulberry Street, which was on Joe Colombo’s territory. It was either an act of rash bravado, or an indication that he felt he had nothing to fear – in spite of being chief suspect in the attempted assassination at Columbus Circle. The following evening, Gallo was rash enough to return there to celebrate his forty-third birthday; he had his new wife and stepdaughter with him. A Colombo henchman who was in the restaurant when the party arrived hurried out to a telephone. Joe Yacovelli, the Colombo family ‘counsellor’, agreed that it was time to punish these incursions. Half an hour later, three men walked into the restaurant and began shooting. Gallo was killed by the first bullet, although it took him some time to die.

Although more gang murders followed Joey Gallo’s death – there were sixteen within a short period – his assassination seems to mark the end of an era. The Mafia had come to America more than ninety years earlier, when Giuseppe Esposito arrived in New Orleans from Sicily, and for the next fifty years it stamped its own vicious brand of individualism on American life. With the Luciano takeover and the formation of the Syndicate, it became a business organisation; but the men behind it still belonged to the old tradition of ruthless individualism. By the time of Colombo’s shooting, most of these figures were either dead or in ‘retirement’. Meyer Lansky had been forced to leave the country on tax evasion charges; Carlo Gambino had succeeded in avoiding a deportation order by collapsing with a heart attack. The new leaders of the Mafia have grown up in the Syndicate, and have acquired the mentality of members of a national corporation. Even if Gallo had decided to ‘go straight’ – as he insisted he had during the final months of his life – he would have remained a disturbing anachronism. He was a walking affront to the Organisation Man mentality. His death underlines a paradox: that in less than a century, the Mafia – a word that once signified contempt for authority – has itself turned into precisely the kind of authority it once rebelled against.

It seems equally paradoxical that, in this century of scientific crime fighting, the Mafia should have defied every attempt by the authorities to destroy it. The solution is that, where there are vast sums of money to be made, the wealthy criminal has no shortage of allies amongst the authorities. And by the 1970s, drug smuggling had become one of the world’s most prosperous industries. In 1960, a kilo of heroin cost about $2,500 in Marseilles, where it was manufactured from morphine base; in New York, it sold at about $6,000 a kilo wholesale, and at over $600,000 street price. By 1980, a kilo of grade four heroin cost about $12,000 from the supplier, and was worth a quarter of a million dollars in New York at wholesale prices. ‘Cut’ with mannite or lactose powder, its street price runs to many millions. No other business in the world provides such profits.

In 1962, a swoop by the New York Narcotics Bureau (dramatised as ‘The French Connection’) dealt a crippling blow to the Marseilles drug traffic. Palermo, the original home of the Mafia, became the centre of the world’s drug traffic. Sixty per cent of America’s heroin came through Palermo. The result is that between 1973 and 1983, Palermo has become one of the richest cities in Italy. One result is that in the 1980s, Palermo has had an average of two gang murders per week.

Anybody who took an anti-Mafia stand was in danger. In 1982, the victims included two judges, two police chiefs and a leading Christian Democrat politician. And at this point, the Mafia apparently overreached itself. Pio La Torre, the Sicilian Communist Party leader was a relentless campaigner against the Mafia and a member of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission; he had sponsored a bill to give the police special powers to deal with the Mafia, including access to private bank accounts and tapping telephone conversations. The ‘La Torre law’ failed to reach the statute book. On 30 April 1982, La Torre was ambushed and shot to death.

General Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the policeman who had defeated the Red Brigades, was appointed prefect of Palermo. When he arrived with his new young wife, he had a foreboding that he would be killed.

Dalla Chiesa pressed hard for the La Torre law to be passed, but the government dragged its feet. In a country as poor as Italy, it could be politically dangerous to destroy an industry that brings wealth.

Then on 3 September 1982, Alberto Dalla Chiesa was shot dead, together with his wife and his police escort. The result was that the Church launched a violent campaign against the Mafia; the Pope denounced it on a visit to Palermo. And the ‘La Torre law’ was passed by a guilt-ridden Parliament. The result has been Italy’s most successful campaign against the Mafia so far. In November 1982, sixty-five defendants came to trial in Palermo in what became known as the Spatola trial – after Rosario Spatola, the alleged Mafia ‘accountant’ whose multi-million-dollar ‘laundering’ operations had been opened to investigation by the new law. But with at least twenty backroom heroin refineries in Sicily capable of producing half a billion dollars’ worth of heroin a week, it seems doubtful whether even the anti-Mafia law can get to the root of the problem.

Compared to America and Italy, there is something engagingly amateurish about organised crime in Britain. After the trial of the Kray twins in 1969, it was revealed by their defence counsel that, at one point, the twins went to New York and tried to make some business arrangement with the Mafia, explaining that they ruled London, that the police were in their pay, and that they were immune from arrest. The Mafia sent an envoy to London – who was promptly arrested in the Mayfair Hotel and placed in Brixton jail to await deportation. ‘I thought you told me you ran this place?’ he said with disgust when the twins came to see him in prison.

Gangsterism came to Britain after the First World War; by the end of the 1920s, the slums of most major cities had their mobs of criminal hooligans. But the kind of gang warfare described in No Mean City has more in common with the present-day violence among gangs of Mexican teenagers in Los Angeles than with the American Mafia. That is to say, it is essentially a phenomenon of ‘territory’ – the ‘overcrowded rats syndrome’. Overcrowding heightens tension; tension heightens aggression. In a ‘normal’ social situation – without overcrowding – the dominant five per cent naturally find various outlets for their need for self-expression, from daydreaming to competitive sport. But in a society that teems with aggression, even the intelligent find themselves unable to ignore the challenge; their self-respect demands the ability to respond aggressively to aggression. So normal competition comes to express itself through violence.