Tuesday, August 13, 2024

Gangs of the World Unite!

 Capitalist Shadows

“Fear City - New York vs. The Mafia,” “How to Become a Mob Boss” and “Get Gotti” are all Nexflix documentaries.  They paint a picture of mobs, Cosa Nostra / Mafia and Medellin crime lords that reveal a somewhat unsurprising reality.  The good ones are all excellent businessmen.  At least while they last, as they eventually all go ‘bankrupt’ – ah, go to jail.  They are mostly men from humble, proletarian beginnings who decide to be involved in an illegal enterprise as a way of making the holiness of holies in our society – big money.  That is what links them to investment banking, Silicon Valley and the capitalist system.  They are striving entrepreneurs at bottom who wield their own guns, not the state's.

Some tender leftists think gangs are some kind of radical opposition to capital and ‘the system.’  That was the feeling among some in Little Italy, in Medellin, in Sicily too, as the gangs cultivated their neighborhoods and cities with largesse. Yet they are not an opposition, but actually violent proponents of private enterprise.

FEAR CITY

“Fear City” is about the top 5 Mafia families in New York during the 1970s and 1980s.  They were the Bonanno, Columbo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese clans. They ran the city secretly, functioning underneath Wall Street, the City Council, the police and the legal capitalists, their dark shadow  They had their mitts in garment, concrete, waste hauling, trucking, the docks, restaurants, strip clubs and night spots, real estate, unions and what have you.  Besides the usual crime businesses – gambling, loan sharking, prostitution, smuggling guns and drugs, porn, shaking down small shop owners, etc. – they specialized in big-time ‘white collar’ extortion, taking 2% off the top of every large construction project in Manhattan, of which there were many.  They killed or threatened whomever got in their way or refused to do business with them. Bodies dropped all over the city. They made billions.  This is a picture of the ‘greatest city on earth’ that does not have a smiley face. New York was not just the home of sophisticated musicians, stage actors and bad painters but actually a load of crude and violent goombahs. 

Noticeably the Teamsters, Laborers and ILA dockworkers around NYC were under their control.  They stole from pension funds, skimmed money out of union coffers, ‘double-dipped' and made deals with the firms if it suited them.  Cheery news for left-wing unionists, right? 

Like any business – and wire taps picked up the gangsters saying they were just like a corporation – the 5 NYC families had organization in the form of “The Commission” – a form borrowed from Sicily.  When Lansky and Luciano formed ‘The Syndicate’ of Italian and Jewish gangs they even traversed ethnic boundaries.  When Escobar realized that a cartel of all the cocaine drug gangs in Columbia worked better than each gang fighting each other, they came to a conclusion far above the sad squabbling of U.S. Left sects.

Both Donald Trump and Rudi Guiliani make an appearance in Fear City. Trump did business with the Commission as a builder, though that is left unsaid. Guiliani was the U.S. attorney for the feared Southern District of New York who successfully used RICO against the Commission.  At one point he admits he could have been a ‘wise guy’ too as a youth.  What is not weird is that both these sleazebags, Teflon Don and Ridiculous Rudi, end up in a political form of a gang, the present Republican Party.  They are even involved in their own Georgia RICO case as defendants. “Naw Yawk” crime sticks.

GET GOTTI

Get Gotti’ focuses on the head of the Gambino crime family – notice the cuddly ‘family’ moniker – John Gotti.  “Family” is what they model themselves on – with a stern ‘fatha.’   Yet Gotti killed his own capo to become head of the family in order to continue his drug business, which the former had forbidden. He dressed well, earning the name “Dapper Don” for his fancy clothes, $2,000 suits and perfect hair. The NY press, that guardian of truth, fell for him after he beat the rap in 3 different trials.  He was portrayed by them as an exciting and clever “Robin Hood” movie star.  Fake tough-guys Mickey Rourke and Anthony Quinn showed up at his last trial in support. You cannot make this shite up. 

The FBI and NY Organized Crime squad used wire-taps to seal his fate and that of the whole Commission.  These were the days of analog phones and long-range cameras.  They would send a ‘repairman’ to fix a phone or cable TV unit or late-night burglars to install bugs in cars, apartments, social clubs and homes. On the wire taps the thugs all sound like a swearing Joe Pesci - although what other kind is there? The 5 Families thought they took precautions but never swept their places for bugs. They never developed a method of talking about business without being heard. Stupid. Now digital methods have replaced the analog ones, which has made it easier for police.

HOW TO BECOME A MOB BOSS

“How to Become a Mob Boss” is narrated tongue-in-cheek by, of all people, Peter Dinklage.  The show covers Chicago Prohibition thug Al Capone; Harlem heroin dealer Frank Lucas; bloody Sicilian Cosa Nostra boss Salvatore ‘Toto” Riina; Dapper Don John Gotti; Boston thug Whitey Bolger and cocaine cartel leader Pablo Escobar.  Each episode details how they were successful for a while, with Bolger probably the cleverest of all of the U.S. bunch.  He made an alliance with the Boston FBI – yeah – that he used to block and jail his competitors in the Italian Boston mob.  He also had an escape plan by secreting money, IDs and disguises away, which worked for 16 years before he was nabbed in Santa Monica. 

All of them used violence, with Rina the most violent, ordering the killing of upwards of a 1,000 people even from his jail cell.  Capone was creative in realizing that after Prohibition was announced, the money was in beer, rum and whiskey.  Lucas developed his own direct heroin connections in Thailand, circumventing the middle-men of the “French Connection” through Marseilles. Most of the heroin addicts in NYC were unsurprisingly in Harlem, so he was no Superfly ‘black hero.’  John Gotti broke all the rules of being a boss - those of keeping a low profile, avoiding personal violence, only killing the right person and not shooting your mouth off. He serves as a ‘what not to do.’  Lastly Escobar sought political power too, but was thrown out of the Columbian government after 1 year.  He realized that you not only had to unite with your allies, buy off police and the judiciary, establish good public relations using charity, fool the press, get an established bank to launder your money, but also get power to change laws. At the end he was one of the richest men in the world. All of these people were parasites on the productive economy, much like legal capitalists.

I retell these tales only to sink the romantic image of gangs held by our more ‘sensitive’ Lefties. As the stories go, it was extremely difficult to indict these people, which took years.  The present state used kid glove methods in a way, obeying every law in order not to undermine a conviction.  However the revolution in Cuba did not use kid-glove methods with the Mafia in Havana.  Remember that.

Prior blog reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 17 year archive, using these terms:  “The Outlaws – One Man’s Rise Through the Davage World of Renegade Bikers,” “Drug War Capitalism,” “Ragged Revolutionaries,” “Central America’s Forgotten History,” “Peaky Blinders,” “The Plot to Kill King,” “Kill the Assassins!” “Mayans M.C.,” “Marx Dead and Alive,”   

The Cultural Marxist / August 13, 2024

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