Mafia Italiennes aux USA

In May 1929, in the midst of the Prohibition era, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky founded the crime syndicate. At the head of this ultra-violent organization, they controlled the traffics, racketed bars and shops and put New York in a regulated section. A story worthy of a black novel.

With its oceanfront boardwalk, postcard beaches and roaring palaces, Atlantic City (New Jersey) resembles the American version of Deauville. In May 1929, the seaside city welcomed some men with flashy elegance who rode in Cadillacs, smoked big cigars and appeared accompanied by blondes with too much makeup. Lucky Luciano, 31, rising star of the New York underworld, brought together the main mafia leaders from major cities of the United States, such as Al Capone, the boss of Chicago. Objective: to convince them to join forces and rationalize their methods. In short, to adapt to the old traditional mafia system, the modern management principles that made the fortune of the great capitalists of the time, such as Henry Ford. As foolish as it may seem, this new Organization, as Luciano calls it, is going to take over New York and a large part of the country. In this liberal American democracy, cited as an example all over the world, it is going to racket all legal and illicit activities with impunity, buy the complicity of politicians, judges and police, and impose silence on the administration and the press. This silence will be such that, in the 1930s, "the very term mafia will be banned from official reports," reports John Seaton, specialist in secret and criminal organizations, in his book Gangsters and mafia, the five families of New York (ed. Original Books, 2011).

CHAPTER 1 Luciano, the terror of Five Points

Lucky Luciano, "Lucky", whose real name is Salvatore Lucania, is a pure product of Italian immigration and the American dream. In 1906, he was 9 when his family from Sicily landed in New York to settle in the Jewish neighborhood of Lower East Side, southeast of Manhattan. Arrested a first time at the age of 11 for shoplifting, little Luciano meets two other boys who will also make a name in the underworld of the time: Al Capone, the future boss of Chicago, and Meyer Lansky, whom he will consider all his life as his "blood brother". The young delinquents make their debut in the Five Points Gang, a band that takes its name from an old slum, south of the city.
The American mafia was born almost at the same time as the United States. As early as the nineteenth century, immigrants who landed in New York grouped themselves according to their nationality of origin, their culture and their religion. They left Europe, hunted by famine (Irish), poverty (Italians) or persecutions (Jews). Most of them fail at Five Points, an area of ​​unhealthy housing, sweatshops and gambling dens. This coexistence exacerbated by misery gives birth to the first gangs which, writes John Seaton, "served both as an army in intercommunal wars and a necessary police force." These gangs clash in bloody battles to defend their identity and their interests but also to monopolize the most profitable trades and keep them in control.
At the beginning of the XXth century, Five Points had been eradicated by the municipality, the different communities scattered in neighborhoods which will mark durably of their traditions and their folklore. The Irish settle mainly in West Side, Jews and Italians in Brooklyn, Lower Side and Harlem. In Little Italy, a few streets dominated by Italians in the south of Manhattan, rages a Sicilian immigrant, Ignazio Saietta, renamed "the Wolf" because of his cruelty. He engages in extortion, racketeering, blackmail, murder, kidnapping for ransom and he takes a percentage on gambling, illegal betting and prostitution. But he brings the specific touch of the traditional Sicilian mafia: a strict hierarchy, codes, discipline, or the omerta (the law of silence) whose transgression is punishable by death. His sadism - it is said that he tortures his victims with a soldering iron - and the violence of his "men of honor", young mobsters who make terror prevail among the population, ensure him a sinister popularity. The New York press does not speak mafia. It evokes a mysterious Black Hand, an image name that then serves as a generic for all the underworld.
In the shadows, however, the Sicilian Mafia is indeed weaving its web. From this period are constituted the five great historical families, all from the islande, who still today control organized crime in New York, the Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Lucchese. Strong of several thousand "soldiers", also called "freedmen", they gather other smaller families who owe allegiance to them. They are then run by old-fashioned patriarchs, baptized sponsors, donations or, ironically, mustache petes ("old mustaches"). These capi (chiefs), allies in an organization with the name voluntarily vague, the Cosa Nostra ("our thing"), will develop new forms of crime, such as the "racket of work". This business of taxing unions on the pretext of protecting them against bosses was proved to be very profitable at a time when American workers were increasing their strikes to obtain wage increases and better working conditions.

CHAPTER 2 Prohibition: A boon for gangs

In 1919, the American Congress, under the influence of the Puritan leagues, voted the 18th amendment of the Constitution. The manufacturing, sale or purchase of alcohol are now prohibited in the United States. Not only will this measure result  to be impossible to enforce, but it will give a tremendous boost to all the gangs that are converting into the smuggling of wines and spirits, the bootlegging. While bars known as “speakeasy”, the underground bars that serve alcohol multiply - more than 30,000 in 1927 - are being mushroomed in New York, the bootleggers are ruthlessly waging war.
In the movies, this inter-war mafia has the romantic features of James Cagney in The Public Enemy (film directed by William Wellman, 1931) or Paul Muni in Scarface (Howard Hawks, 1932), who play desperate to find a place in the sun, arms in hand. This Hollywood vision of the underworld, through rough, psychopathic and sadistic gangsters, only partially accounts for its real power. In reality, the "octopus", as it will be called, is gaining power through terror and corruption. A man stands out: Arnold Rothstein. The son of wealthy Jewish immigrants, one of the first gangsters to wear silk suits, soft hats and polished moccasins, brought in large quantities of alcoholic beverages from Europe, the Caribbeans and Canada. But at the time, noted the investigative journalist William Reymond in his book Mafia SA (Flammarion, 2001), "the first enemy of the mafia is not repression but internal competition," and his illegal merchandise were often attacked by rival gangs. To cope, Rothstein then recruits a small army.
Two ambitious boys will quickly take the lead in his organization, Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, his real name Maier Suchowlansky, a Jewish immigrant born in Poland in 1902. Lansky has apprenticed with great killers like Bugsy Siegel and Lepke Buchalter, legendary figures of the Yiddish Connection. Luciano is affiliated with the Sicilian family of Giuseppe Masseria. But unlike other Sicilians who watch suspiciously anything that does not come from Palermo or Corleone, Luciano, pragmatic, believes that organized crime does not have to take into consideration ethnic or confessional origins. He claims "only one race, one religion, that of the dough".
Thanks to the traffic of alcohol, Luciano and Lansky earn considerable sums. They live in palaces overlooking Central Park, the upscale neighborhood of Manhattan, and go to the Cotton Club to listen to jazzman Duke Ellington. They frequent the politicians, whose campaign they finance. And they generously water the police and judges (the chief of the New York police at the time receives an envelope of 20 000 dollars a month, twenty times the salary of a worker), which explains the long impunity of which they will enjoy. Some newspapers, however, begin to protest against these bootleggers as "an apocalyptic scourge, destroyer of modern society."

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