gangster

gangster, member of a criminal organization that systematically makes money from such activities as gambling, prostitution, narcotic trafficking, and industrial extortion. Although there exist throughout the world professional criminals that work with associates on a particular job or series of jobs, the gangster is a member of a permanent, highly structured organization.

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The popular image of the gangster was formed during the Prohibition Era (1920–33), as the U.S. underworld battled over markets controlling the illegal manufacture and distribution of liquor. Gang murder became commonplace, especially in New York and Chicago, where more than 2,000 killings between 1920 and 1930 were ascribed to gang warfare. The manner as well as the number of these killings made them notorious. Usually they were carefully rehearsed and involved sophisticated techniques for stealing and disguising the “get-away” car; for obliterating all means of identification from the murder weapons; for luring the victim into a defenseless situation (as when one killer shook hands with the victim to prevent his reaching for a gun, while associates opened fire); and for disposing of the body, The most famous gang shooting was the Saint Valentine’s Day massacre in Chicago on February 14, 1929. The murderers, members of Al Capone’s gang, disguised themselves as policemen and induced seven men associated with the gang of Bugs Moran to stand against a garage wall with their hands raised and then shot them down. Because such killings were carefully planned, and also because the criminals had influence with local political leaders, gang murderers were rarely identified, still less often prosecuted, and almost never convicted. In Chicago, for example, between 1927 and 1930 there were 227 killings and only two convictions.

Gangsters lived more openly in the United States during the 1920s than at any time before or since. Lurid weddings and funerals of prominent gangsters were attended by leading politicians. Capone enjoyed an income of more than $20,000,000 a year, maintained a seven-ton armoured sedan, a suite of 50 rooms in a Chicago hotel, a clerical staff of 25 persons to manage his varied enterprises, and a villa in Florida. The notoriety of the gangster in the era of national Prohibition, however, should not obscure the fact that the foundations of criminal power had been laid earlier, nor the fact that after Prohibition was repealed organized crime was no less ruthless. At least as early as the 1850s in New York and the 1870s in Chicago, systematic cooperation between criminals and politicians had become habitual. In return for campaign contributions and the intimidation of voters, the politician protected the criminal in the courts and winked at the existence of gambling and prostitution. The extortion of money—called “protection”—from a business by threats of bombing or otherwise disrupting it was solidly established on the docks of New Orleans and in the gambling houses of Chicago before the turn of the century. Gang murder, too, was common before the prohibition era. In one building on 108th Street in New York, 23 murders took place between 1900 and 1917. Then, as later, organized gangs divided the great American cities into “territories,” in each of which a particular gang monopolized the income from vice and extortion. The typical gangster came from a low-income neighbourhood (particularly the lower east side of New York) and served an apprenticeship in petty crime before gaining access to the more lucrative branches of criminal activity.

The main lasting effect of the Prohibition Era on gang activity was the development of more highly centralized and better disciplined criminal organizations, sometimes called syndicates. Effective bootlegging required notification by radio of incoming liquor shipments from Canada or the West Indies; elaborate arrangements for distribution (for example, by infiltrating the labour unions of longshoremen and truckers); collaboration with liquor distillers inside the United States; and agreement as to quotas and prices among the different smuggling organizations. Crime on this scale was, as Dion O’Bannion of Chicago put it, “big business without high hats.” Following the examples of legitimate business concerns, the distributors of illegal liquor reached out to control its manufacture. Specialists in gambling invested in the manufacture of slot machines and fought for possession of a national wire service that circulated race track information. Moreover, the 1920s witnessed the rapid invasion by gangsters of loosely-organized legitimate businesses, such as building, garment manufacture, cleaning and dyeing, and food supply. Louis Lepke, the dominant figure in these industrial "rackets," extracted $1,000,000 a year from the New York garment industry alone. In 1930 the U.S. Bureau of Internal Revenue estimated the profits of the criminal organizations in which Capone participated as $25,000,000 per year from gambling, $10,000,000 from prostitution, $10,000,000 from narcotics, and $50,000,000 from the illegal liquor trade.

This vast expansion in the scale and complexity of criminal activity led, in the late 1920s and early 1930s, to the formation of a national organization. It has been compared with a cartel among legitimate business firms in that each gang apparently agreed not to intrude on business controlled by other gangs. Henceforth differences were to be arbitrated rather than settled by anarchic violence. It was agreed, apparently, that approval at the national level should be required for all gang murders. Thereafter, Lepke’s Murder, Inc., carried out murder contracts for the national organization all over the United States, accounting for perhaps 1,000 killings in the 1930s. Top-ranking gangsters were eliminated only after judgment by their peers sitting as a court: this procedure, according to informers, was invoked in the killing of Arthur (“Dutch Schultz”) Flegenheimer in 1935, Bugsy Siegel in 1947, and Charley Binaggio in 1950.

Congressional committees in the 1950s and 1960s conducted extensive probes into gang activities, but the power of the U.S. gangster was not broken by investigations, indictments, or occasional prosecutions. By the late 20th century, however, the power of gangsters in organized crime had been largely diminished by aggressive prosecutions and the defections of Mafia lieutenants who had become government witnesses.