American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power - Hardcover

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Thomas Reppetto is a former Chicago commander of detectives and has been the president of New York City's Citizens Crime Commission for more than twenty years. He is the author of NYPD: A City and Its Police, a New York Times Notable Book. He lives in New York City.

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Reppetto's history of the American Mafia, from its humble turn-of-the-century beginnings in small Italian neighborhoods to the 1950-1951 Senate's Kefauver hearings on organized crime that made the mob front-page news, seeks to set the record straight about one of America's most mysterious organizations. Though Reppetto, a former cop, acknowledges that the American Mafia was an outgrowth of the Sicilian and Neapolitan criminal guilds, he finds only a loose connection between the American Mafia and its old country counterparts. Citing the bad business practices of killers like Al Capone, Reppetto makes it clear that it was the mob's political ties, especially to the Tammany groups in Manhattan and the mayor's office in Chicago, and not murder and mayhem, that made rich men of many Italians (as well as Poles, Irishmen and Jews) who came to America with nothing. Without condoning their tactics, Reppetto makes a strong case that the men who laid the foundation for a national "syndicate" were empire builders along the lines of the Astors and Vanderbilts, and that the Mafia's decline since the 1950s is as much a reflection of the lack of new, strong mob leadership as it is a result of less political protection and a federal crackdown that stemmed from the mob's newfound notoriety. Though this book doesn't answer every question about the Mafia in America, it does present a thought-provoking depiction of the mob devoid of the sensationalism prevalent in many other portrayals.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

I doubt that the corporate rogues who fill our headlines today will leave footprints in the sands of crime that are worth going back to inspect 50 years from now. They just aren't as colorful as the Mafia entrepreneurs Thomas Reppetto reintroduces in his new book, American Mafia. The mob was the scum of America's melting pot, with little education and no moral code. But as Reppetto points out, its members had a kind of tribal code and enough moxie that by the end of the 1930s, with their best years lying ahead, the dozen leaders of the national crime syndicate were very rich, were welcome in much of what passed for high society and had considerable influence in politics and commerce.

Of course, they ordered many hundreds of murders and controlled most of the illegal gambling, prostitution and bootlegging in the country. But sometimes, in their darkly creative moments, they shaped society more openly. Who, in the 1940s, picked William O'Dwyer to be mayor of New York, made Frank Sinatra the nation's most popular entertainer, dominated Cuba's administration and founded modern Las Vegas? The Mafia's top dogs, that's who.

We begin this sinister and bloody sewer tour toward the end of the next-to-last century, but it really gets interesting in the 1920s. Our good guide, Reppetto, gained his smarts as a Chicago commander of detectives and the longtime president of New York City's Citizen Crime Commission. Be prepared for an absolute deluge of evil, and killers with nicknames like "The Enforcer" and "Cherry Nose."

Along the way, you get a kind of underworld social register. Chicago's mobsters weren't as classy as New York's. Al Capone was just a rich thug who sometimes murdered with a baseball bat. New York had such "chic" mobsters as Charlie "Lucky" Luciano, who lived like a prince, and Arnold Rothstein, who -- from his table at Lindy's, the Broadway in-spot noted for its cheesecake -- ruled a world of crime until executed for failing to pay a $300,000 gambling debt.

Although Frank Costello scored a miserable 97 on a prison IQ test, he was shrewd enough to be considered the most important crime figure in America in the late 1940s. He told congressional investigators, "I love this country." All mobsters should have loved it, says Reppetto. "At the beginning of the 1920s they were petty hoodlums confined to ethnic colonies in the big cities. Now they controlled an empire."

To get that control, they simply bought police and politicians. In Chicago it cost them probably $20 million annually. In one 15-year stretch, the city had 765 gangland murders, but police were too busy counting their bribes to pay much attention.

During Prohibition, Fiorello LaGuardia, one of the few honest politicians Reppetto mentions, "estimated it would take 250,000 cops to enforce the law in New York city and another 250,000 to police the police." When rum runners dropped off their hooch on a Long Island beach, friendly cops would be there to protect it.

By the 1930s, Italians, such as "Lucky" Luciano, ran most of the big gangs nationwide. But there were some important Jews, such as Rothstein, Meyer Lansky and "Dutch" Schultz (born Arthur Flegenheimer, he took his nom de guerre from an old boxer).

Lucky, Dutch and Thomas E. Dewey, the celebrated New York district attorney, were central to what I consider the most exciting drama in the book. Dewey, politically ambitious, wanted to take down one of the biggest bosses, so he targeted Schultz. But Dewey lost the first court battle, and before he could try again, Schultz was murdered in a wonderfully gory intergang shootout. As for why it took place, Reppetto's own theory conflicts with a fascinating legend, but all agree Luciano had helped set it up. That was a mistake, for now he became Dewey's target.

Which brings us to the way justice could stack a deck. Sure, Luciano deserved prison for all sorts of major crimes, including murder. But Dewey couldn't prove the heavyweight stuff, so he got Luciano convicted of pimping, of all things, and Lucky had to move from his ritzy Waldorf penthouse to New York's bleakest prison, supposedly to stay for an incredible 30 to 50 years. He stayed 10 years, at which time he was pardoned by then-Gov. Dewey -- on the condition that he be deported to Italy (although he snuck back in again) -- who offered an excuse for his compassion that was as contrived as the pimping charges.

Dewey isn't the only one Reppetto leaves you wondering about. There's also Harry Truman, political protégé of another sort of mobster, J. Edgar Hoover, who seemed blind to the Mafia, plus other leaders who were too cozy with, or indifferent to, "the boys."

Reviewed by Robert Sherrill

Copyright 2004, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

There's no one better equipped to tell this story than Reppetto, president of the Citizens Crime Commission of New York City and former Chicago commander of detectives. Dispelling popular myths about the American Mafia perpetuated by the media and entertainment industry, Reppetto casts new light on the history of the mob's evils. Instead of one Mr. Big, there was a highly organized business network. Reppetto's evenhanded analysis of the Mafia's key men and their powerful opponents creates drama and suspense. But if you're not familiar with mobster rule, the sheer wealth of names, details, and assassinations can overwhelm. Overall, there's an immediate lesson to be learned: the government can't collect legal taxes from illegal money, so you're safe. For now.

Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

In the eighteen-eighties, the legendary New York police detective Thomas Byrnes outlined a simple solution to the mafia problem: "Let them kill each other." For Reppetto, such a view reflects dangerous illusions about the mob's foreignness and insularity. Immigrants didn't import organized crime, he writes; "they found it here when they arrived." If Italians bested other ethnic groups, it was because they were, in this respect, the better assimilationists. His clear-eyed study portrays a Mafia that managed to be both national in scope and—despite investigators' hunt for an elusive "Mr. Big"—surprisingly decentralized. Reppetto covers the usual suspects, like Luciano and Capone, but is particularly fascinated by the intersection of mob life with the establishment. He believes that the Mob boss Frank Costello uttered a basic truth about his business when, in 1951, he told the Kefauver committee, "I love this country."
Copyright © 2005 The New Yorker

Former police detective Reppetto provides a narrative history of organized crime in the decades from the 1880s to the 1950s. Reppetto adopts an appropriate tone of contempt for characters familiar from the lore--Johnny Torrio and Al Capone in Chicago, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky in New York--while he separates the savviest among them from the merely thuggish. In the process, Reppetto duly recounts sensational incidents (e.g., the St. Valentine's Day Massacre) but embeds them within an analytical framework as he discusses the transition from gangs tied to individuals (Capone) to more businesslike setups (Lansky). Reppetto underscores the Mob's infiltration into city governments, which kept "business" predictable and elections rigged. Occasionally, someone on the take, such as New York mayor Jimmy Walker, would be exposed, but the efforts of honest cops and prosecutors, such as Eliot Ness (whose legend is overrated, opines Reppetto) and Thomas Dewey, never crippled the syndicates. The mordantly humorous Reppetto makes a perfect guide to Mob history. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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From American Mafia :

With the Lupo Morello gang now implicated in the barrel murder case, the investigation got going in earnest. The police had found a small crucifix, sawdust and cigar stubs, and a perfumed handkerchief with a note written in Italian. Police detective Petrosino translated the note as "come at once," suggesting that a woman had lured the victim to his death. An examination of the dead man's stomach revealed evidence of a recently consumed Sicilian meal. Familiar with Morello's restaurant-known for a floor littered with sawdust and cigar butts-Petrosino deduced that the victim had been killed there, and then taken by horse-drawn wagon to the Lower East Side. Yet he had no evidence to back up a murder charge in court: there was a surplus of defendants and a scarcity of evidence. The case was handled in the standard procedure of the day: arrest the suspects, then find the incriminating evidence. And, as often happened, the police came up short, despite the best efforts of the indomitable Petrosino.