Immigration and Urban Crime

Chapter Opening

In the summer of 1903, a Sicilian-born laborer named Nicolo Cappiello arrived at the offices of the New York City police detective Joseph Petrosino in a state of visible terror. He had been receiving letters, he explained, each one bearing a crude drawing at the bottom of the page: a black hand, sometimes accompanied by a skull, sometimes by a dagger, always by a demand for money. If he did not pay, the letters threatened, his home would be burned, his children harmed, or he himself killed. Cappiello was not unique. In the Italian neighborhoods of lower Manhattan, in the tenement blocks of East Harlem, and in the Italian enclaves of Brooklyn, hundreds of men and women were receiving the same letters, paying the same tributes, and suffering the same silent fear. Most of them never went to the police. The people sending the letters were counting on that.

The phenomenon that terrified Nicolo Cappiello was known as the Black Hand, and it was one of the first recognizable forms of organized criminal extortion to emerge within immigrant communities in American cities. It was not a single organization. It had no formal hierarchy, no unified leadership, no membership rolls. It was instead a method, a criminal technique borrowed from the extortion traditions of southern Italy and adapted to the specific vulnerabilities of immigrant life in the early twentieth century United States. Its practitioners understood something fundamental about their victims: that newcomers to America were isolated, often unable to speak English well enough to navigate the police and courts, deeply distrustful of authority after generations of experience with corrupt and predatory governance in the old country, and profoundly reluctant to draw attention to themselves in a society already deeply hostile to their presence.

The Black Hand was only one part of a much larger story. Between roughly 1880 and 1920, the United States experienced the most massive wave of immigration in its history, as more than twenty million people arrived from southern and eastern Europe, as well as from Asia, the Caribbean, and Mexico. They poured into the port cities of the East Coast and Great Lakes, filling neighborhoods that expanded and changed with each arriving ship. They brought with them the languages, customs, religions, and social structures of dozens of different cultures. They also brought, in some cases, the criminal traditions and criminal personnel of the societies they had left behind.

This chapter examines how mass immigration to American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created the social conditions in which organized crime could take root and flourish. It is important to understand what this examination does and does not claim. The vast majority of immigrants to the United States were law-abiding people who worked extraordinarily hard under difficult and often exploitative conditions. The relationship between immigration and crime is one of the most politically charged and historically distorted topics in American public life, and the historical record requires careful examination rather than either dismissal or exaggeration. What the evidence shows is that a small subset of criminal actors, in some ethnic communities more than others, exploited the specific vulnerabilities that immigrant life created, and that the social structures of urban immigrant neighborhoods, rather than any inherent characteristic of the immigrants themselves, explain why criminal enterprises emerged where they did.

The cities in which these developments took place were themselves changing at extraordinary speed. New York, Chicago, and New Orleans, the three cities that receive the most detailed attention in this chapter, were all undergoing massive transformations in population, geography, economics, and governance. They were also all cities in which political machines had learned to translate immigrant votes into political power, and in which the relationship between crime, politics, and public corruption was intimate, mutually beneficial, and difficult to untangle. Understanding organized crime in immigrant communities requires understanding the political environments in which those communities existed.

This chapter also traces the connections between the criminal traditions that immigrants brought with them from southern Italy and the criminal organizations that would later define the American Mafia. The Sicilian mafia, the Neapolitan Camorra, and the Calabrian 'Ndrangheta, examined in the preceding chapters, all had members who emigrated to the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of those emigrants brought criminal ambitions and criminal skills with them. But the American criminal organizations that eventually emerged were not simply transplants of Italian institutions. They were new formations, shaped by American conditions: the particular structure of American cities, the particular character of American political corruption, the particular opportunities that Prohibition would shortly create, and the particular social hierarchies of American life.

The story of immigration and urban crime is ultimately a story about the relationship between marginalization and criminal opportunity. When large populations are excluded from legitimate pathways to economic advancement, denied police protection, subjected to exploitation by employers and landlords, and offered political representation only on terms set by others, some portion of those populations will seek advancement through alternative means. Understanding this dynamic does not excuse or minimize the harm that criminal activity causes to communities, and to the immigrants themselves who are so often the primary victims of those who exploit their vulnerability. But it does explain why organized crime did not emerge randomly, but in specific places, among specific communities, at specific moments in American history.

Learning Objectives

Guiding Historical Questions

Historical Context

To understand how organized crime took root in immigrant communities in American cities, students must first understand the broader context of industrialization, urbanization, and immigration that transformed the United States between roughly 1870 and 1920. This period, sometimes called the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, was one of the most consequential in American history. The United States became an industrial giant, its economy driven by steel, railroads, coal, oil, and manufacturing. Cities grew at a pace that overwhelmed existing infrastructure, governance, and social institutions. And the population of those cities was dramatically reshaped by the arrival of millions of immigrants from parts of the world that had sent relatively few people to America in earlier generations.

Immigration to the United States in this period can be divided into two broad phases that historians often call the "old immigration" and the "new immigration," though the distinction is somewhat artificial. The old immigration, dominant before about 1880, brought primarily people from northwestern Europe, especially Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Scandinavia. These immigrants, while often poor and subject to significant discrimination, generally shared Protestant Christianity and, in many cases, some degree of cultural and linguistic proximity to the Anglo-American mainstream. The new immigration, which accelerated dramatically after 1880 and reached its peak in the years between 1900 and 1914, brought people from very different regions: Italy, Poland, Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Greece, Romania, and other parts of southern and eastern Europe, as well as from Asia, the Caribbean, and Mexico. These immigrants were predominantly Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Jewish. They spoke languages that most Americans could not understand. They dressed differently, ate different foods, practiced different customs, and brought with them different assumptions about religion, family, and community.

The scale of this immigration was staggering. Between 1880 and 1920, approximately twenty-three million immigrants arrived in the United States. Many of them settled in cities, where industrial employment was concentrated. New York City's population grew from just over one million in 1880 to nearly five million in 1910. Chicago grew from half a million to over two million in the same period. Cities like Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Boston also saw enormous population increases, with immigrants filling particular neighborhoods that became identified by ethnicity: Little Italy, Chinatown, the Jewish Lower East Side, Polish neighborhoods in Chicago, Hungarian blocks in Cleveland. These neighborhoods were not simply cultural communities. They were the organizing units of political, economic, and social life for their residents.

The conditions in which most immigrants lived were harsh by any standard. Tenement housing in cities like New York was overcrowded, unsanitary, and often dangerous. Workers in factories and mines faced long hours, low wages, dangerous conditions, and virtually no legal protections. Child labor was common. Labor unions were weak, frequently suppressed by employers using both legal and extralegal means, and often hostile to recent immigrants whom established workers feared as competition for jobs. Immigrants were subject to exploitation by employers, landlords, labor contractors, and petty officials at every turn. The padrone system, discussed in detail later in this chapter, allowed Italian labor contractors to extract fees and payments from newly arrived workers who had no other way to find employment and housing.

The political environment of American cities was shaped by machine politics, a system in which political organizations, most famously Tammany Hall in New York, traded tangible benefits, jobs, favors, and protection, for votes. Machine politicians were often genuinely helpful to immigrants, providing assistance that no government institution offered: jobs on public works projects, help navigating bureaucracy, intervention with police and courts, and social services at moments of crisis. In exchange, they demanded loyalty and votes. The relationship between machine politics and organized crime was intimate and mutually reinforcing. Machines depended on criminal operators for financial contributions and for the services, particularly gambling and prostitution, that their constituents often wanted. Criminal operators depended on machine politicians for protection from prosecution. The result was a system in which the boundaries between political organization, civic society, and criminal enterprise were blurred in ways that would persist for decades.

Against this background, it is important to understand the specific character of Italian immigration to the United States, since Italian immigrants and their descendants would play the most prominent role in the development of American organized crime, a role that generated enormous stereotyping, prejudice, and historical distortion that persists to the present day. The Italians who arrived in the greatest numbers between 1880 and 1914 came overwhelmingly from southern Italy and Sicily, regions that were among the poorest in Europe and that had their own specific traditions of distrust toward government, reliance on informal social networks, and, in some cases, organized criminal activity. These traditions had deep roots in the history of southern Italy, explored in earlier chapters. What matters for the present chapter is how those traditions interacted with the specific conditions of American urban life.

Not all immigrant communities that produced significant criminal activity were Italian. Irish immigrants had built formidable criminal networks and political machines in cities like New York and Boston in earlier decades. Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe produced criminal organizations operating in gambling, prostitution, and labor racketeering in cities like New York and Chicago. Chinese immigrants in San Francisco and New York organized tong societies that conducted both legitimate community functions and criminal activities. Each of these communities had its own relationship between immigration, marginalization, and criminal organization. The Italian case is examined in greatest detail in this chapter because it laid the foundation for the later American Mafia, but students should understand that the phenomenon of organized crime in immigrant communities was not uniquely Italian.

Chronology Preview

Major People, Groups, and Places

Core Vocabulary Preview

The following key terms appear throughout this chapter. Students should understand each term before proceeding to the main sections.

The Great Wave of Immigration

The immigration that transformed American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was not a single event but a sustained demographic movement of extraordinary scale and complexity. To understand how it created the conditions for organized crime, it is necessary to understand not only its quantitative dimensions but its qualitative character: who the immigrants were, where they came from, why they left, how they traveled, and what they found when they arrived.

The Italian case is particularly important for this chapter. Between 1880 and 1914, approximately four million Italians emigrated to the United States, making Italians one of the largest single immigrant groups of the era. The overwhelming majority of these Italian emigrants came not from the prosperous, industrializing cities of northern Italy but from the impoverished rural regions of the south: Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Basilicata, Abruzzo, and Puglia. These regions, known collectively as the Mezzogiorno, had been among the most economically underdeveloped parts of Europe for centuries. The unification of Italy in 1861 had brought little improvement to the south; in some respects it made conditions worse, as northern Italian governments imposed new taxes and disrupted local economies without providing the investment and development that might have compensated. The southern Italian peasantry faced a combination of agricultural poverty, population pressure, absentee landlordism, and periodic natural disasters, including the catastrophic eruption of Mount Etna in 1910 and the Messina earthquake of 1908, that made emigration seem less a choice than a necessity.

These southern Italian emigrants brought with them a specific worldview shaped by centuries of experience under governments they had learned not to trust. The states that had ruled southern Italy over the preceding centuries, including Bourbon monarchs, Spanish viceroys, and Norman conquerors, had typically extracted resources from the population while providing little in the way of protection, justice, or development. The result was what the Italian-American sociologist Edward Banfield would later controversially describe as "amoral familism," a tendency to trust only family members and close associates while remaining deeply suspicious of outsiders, institutions, and government authority. Whatever one thinks of Banfield's analysis, the underlying observation that southern Italian immigrants brought with them a profound skepticism toward formal legal institutions and a corresponding reliance on informal networks of mutual obligation has significant implications for understanding how criminal activity organized itself in immigrant communities.

The journey itself was a formative experience. Most Italian emigrants traveled in steerage, the lowest class of accommodation in the great ocean liners that carried them across the Atlantic. Conditions were often miserable: overcrowded, poorly ventilated, inadequately fed. The crossing took between two and four weeks. At Ellis Island, immigrants faced inspection by federal officials who could and sometimes did turn people away for medical reasons or other grounds. The anxiety and disorientation of the immigration process reinforced existing tendencies toward mutual reliance within kinship and village networks. People trusted those who came from the same village, the same family, the same town in Sicily or Calabria, because those were the only people they could be sure they knew.

This pattern of chain migration, in which one person from a village emigrated, established themselves, and then helped others from the same village to follow, meant that immigrant neighborhoods in American cities often had a very specific geographic character. A particular block in East Harlem might be populated almost entirely by immigrants from a single town in Sicily. A tenement building might house families who had been neighbors in the same village in Calabria. This hyper-local clustering served genuine protective and supportive functions, allowing immigrants to maintain familiar social networks, find employment through personal connections, and preserve cultural practices. But it also created insular communities that were difficult for outside authorities to penetrate and easy for criminal operators to exploit, precisely because those operators could present themselves as known quantities within the community, people whose background and connections were understood.

The scale of the immigration era also needs to be understood in relation to the physical and institutional capacity of American cities. New York in 1900 was a city of approximately 3.4 million people, and it was growing faster than its infrastructure could accommodate. The tenement districts of lower Manhattan, the Lower East Side, and East Harlem were among the most densely populated places on earth. Housing was inadequate, sanitation was poor, disease was endemic, and city services were overwhelmed. Police forces were understaffed, often corrupt, and frequently hostile to immigrant populations. Courts were backed up and difficult to access for people who did not speak English. The formal institutions that might have provided protection and recourse were, for most immigrants, effectively inaccessible.

Into this vacuum stepped a variety of informal institutions, both beneficial and exploitative. Mutual aid societies, established by immigrants from the same region or village, provided death benefits, sickness insurance, and social solidarity. Catholic parishes organized around ethnic identity provided community, education, and social services. Labor contractors, the so-called padrones, provided access to employment. And criminal operators provided, in their own way, a form of order and security within communities that the formal state could not or would not serve. Understanding this context does not excuse criminal activity, but it is essential for explaining why it found such fertile ground in immigrant neighborhoods.

Jewish and Other Immigrant Communities

While Italian immigrants occupy center stage in this chapter, it is essential to recognize that they were not the only immigrant community in which organized criminal activity developed. Jewish immigrants from eastern Europe, who arrived in enormous numbers in the same period, particularly fleeing the pogroms and persecution that followed the assassination of Tsar Alexander II in 1881 and intensified in the early twentieth century, also produced significant criminal organizations. The Jewish Lower East Side in Manhattan was home not only to the great cultural and intellectual ferment that produced some of the most important figures in American labor, arts, and public life, but also to a criminal underworld centered on gambling, prostitution, and later, labor racketeering.

Figures like "Monk" Eastman and later Arnold Rothstein, both products of the Jewish immigrant milieu of lower Manhattan, would become major figures in the development of New York's criminal underworld. Rothstein in particular, a financial genius who operated as a fixer, loan shark, and gambling kingpin, would play a crucial role in professionalizing and rationalizing criminal enterprise in New York in the 1910s and 1920s, serving as a mentor and financer to many of the figures who would later lead the American Mafia. The relationship between Jewish and Italian criminal operators in New York was not one of simple competition but of complex collaboration, and that collaboration would shape the structure of organized crime in the city for decades.

Chinese immigrants in San Francisco and New York organized around tong associations, which functioned as community organizations providing mutual aid, dispute resolution, and employment assistance, but which also, in some cases, controlled illegal activities including gambling, opium trade, and prostitution. The tong wars that periodically erupted in San Francisco's Chinatown and New York's Chinatown in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were often conflicts over the control of these illegal markets. Chinese immigrants, excluded from most legitimate economic opportunities by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and by systematic racial discrimination, had particularly compelling reasons to develop alternative economic structures.

Irish immigrants, who had arrived in the greatest numbers in the mid-nineteenth century and had by the late nineteenth century established significant political and police power in cities like New York and Boston, had already built criminal networks that predated the new immigration. The transition from the dominance of Irish criminal operators to the emergence of Italian ones is one of the clearest examples of what sociologists would later theorize as ethnic succession in crime, the pattern by which each arriving immigrant group, occupying the lowest rungs of the economic ladder, finds criminal enterprise one of the few available ladders out.

Ethnic Neighborhoods and Criminal Opportunity

The immigrant neighborhoods that emerged in American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were not simply geographic locations; they were social worlds with their own institutions, hierarchies, economies, and informal rules. Understanding how criminal opportunity was embedded in the structure of these neighborhoods requires looking closely at how they worked, who had power within them, and what functions criminal operators served.

The concentration of immigrants from the same region or village in specific neighborhoods, driven by chain migration patterns, created communities with strong internal social bonds and weak connections to the broader American society. These communities were largely self-sufficient in their daily economic and social lives. Residents shopped in stores owned by co-ethnics, attended churches organized around their specific national or regional identity, sent their children to parochial schools that taught in their language, and conducted most of their social life within a world bounded by a few city blocks. This insularity was both protective and limiting. It provided a cushion of familiarity and mutual support in an often hostile environment, but it also meant that residents had limited access to information about and resources in the broader society.

Within these neighborhoods, a particular type of social figure, the community broker or intermediary, occupied a position of considerable informal power. This figure, who might be a mutual aid society leader, a labor contractor, a successful merchant, or a political ward boss, derived power from controlling access to resources that ordinary residents needed: employment, housing, credit, information about navigating American bureaucracy, and connections to political figures who could help with immigration problems, legal trouble, or dealings with city agencies. The key insight is that this intermediary function could be performed by either legitimate or illegitimate actors, and that in the specific conditions of immigrant neighborhoods, the line between the two was frequently blurred.

Criminal operators in immigrant neighborhoods typically combined legitimate and illegitimate activities in ways that made them appear as community figures rather than simply as criminals. A successful Italian immigrant who ran a saloon, operated a small loan business, and helped neighbors with their immigration paperwork was also, perhaps, the person to whom residents turned when they had a dispute that needed resolution outside the courts, or when they needed credit that no bank would extend, or when they faced an extortion threat and needed help. This multiplex role, part legitimate businessman, part informal power broker, part criminal entrepreneur, was not unusual among the figures who built the early structures of organized crime in immigrant neighborhoods.

The physical layout of immigrant neighborhoods also mattered. The density of tenement districts meant that social life was semi-public, conducted in streets, stoops, saloons, and small shops where everyone knew everyone else's business. This made surveillance by outsiders, including police, relatively easy to detect and resist. The same social density that made neighborhoods vulnerable to extortion by those who knew their residents also made them resistant to investigation by those who did not. Police in immigrant neighborhoods often found that witnesses refused to cooperate, not only out of fear, though fear was certainly real, but also out of a deeply held and historically grounded suspicion of law enforcement as an institution.

The relationship between immigrant neighborhoods and the formal economy also created specific criminal opportunities. Immigrants faced discrimination in the formal labor market, were often paid lower wages than native-born workers, were excluded from many craft unions, and were subject to exploitation by employers who knew they had few legal resources to contest unfair treatment. This exclusion from legitimate economic advancement made illegal economic activity more attractive. A young man who could not get a union card, could not rise in a legitimate business, and earned poverty wages in a factory might find that running numbers, collecting for a loan shark, or operating as muscle for an extortionist paid far better and offered at least some prospect of advancement.

The Saloon as Criminal Hub

In the social geography of immigrant neighborhoods, the saloon occupied a central and somewhat ambiguous place. Saloons were among the most important social institutions in working-class urban communities. They provided space for social gatherings, political organizing, job information, and community events. In neighborhoods where apartments were too small and overcrowded for entertaining, the saloon was effectively the community's living room. Politicians held court in saloons, labor organizers met in saloons, news and gossip circulated in saloons. The saloon keeper was often one of the most important social figures in a neighborhood.

The saloon was also, frequently, a site of gambling, prostitution brokering, fencing stolen goods, and information exchange among criminal operators. The same social functions that made saloons valuable community institutions, their openness to all, their hours of operation, their role as informal information exchanges, made them convenient operations for criminal activity. A saloon keeper might run a numbers operation in the back room, take bets on horse races, provide introductions to prostitutes, or simply serve as a location where people could conduct business they did not want to conduct in public. The relationship between the saloon and the political machine was equally intimate: politicians depended on saloon keepers to organize their neighborhoods and deliver votes, and saloon keepers depended on politicians for protection from police interference with their illegal activities.

The prominence of the saloon in the urban criminal ecology of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries explains, in part, the strength of the temperance movement that eventually produced Prohibition. Prohibition's proponents were attacking not just alcohol consumption but a specific set of social institutions, many of them associated with immigrant cultures, that they saw as breeding grounds for crime, corruption, and social disorder. The irony, as later chapters examine in detail, is that Prohibition destroyed the legal saloon while creating vastly larger criminal opportunities through the bootlegging trade, ultimately doing far more to empower organized crime than to suppress it.

The Black Hand

No criminal phenomenon in the history of American immigration is more important, or more widely misunderstood, than the Black Hand. For most Americans in the early twentieth century, the Black Hand was synonymous with the Mafia, and both were synonymous with Italian criminality. In reality, the relationship among these three things is considerably more complicated, and understanding the actual character of Black Hand crime is essential for understanding the later development of organized crime in Italian American communities.

The term "Black Hand" derives from a Spanish criminal practice of the late nineteenth century, in which extortionists signed their threatening letters with a drawing of a black hand. The term entered Italian American criminal vocabulary sometime in the 1890s and rapidly became the standard label for a specific type of extortion crime: the anonymous threatening letter, typically signed with a drawing of a black hand or skull, demanding money from a relatively prosperous immigrant under threat of violence. The targets were typically Italian immigrants who had achieved some degree of economic success: a successful merchant, a labor contractor, a musician or performer, or simply a working man who had managed to save some money. The perpetrators were not, for the most part, members of any organized criminal association, though some were. They were opportunistic criminals who had identified a specific technique that worked.

What made the Black Hand so effective, and what made it so difficult to suppress, was its exploitation of the specific vulnerabilities of Italian immigrant life. Victims faced a set of choices, all of them unpalatable. They could pay the demanded tribute, encouraging further demands. They could go to the police, risking retaliation from the extortionists, exposing themselves to potential immigration scrutiny, and placing themselves at the mercy of a police force they had little reason to trust and that often spoke no Italian. They could try to find protection through their own networks, which typically meant approaching figures in the immigrant community who had sufficient influence and muscle to discourage further attacks, an approach that frequently meant entering into dependencies on people who were themselves operating on the wrong side of the law. Or they could simply try to ignore the threats and hope for the best, a strategy that sometimes worked and sometimes did not.

The cultural practices that the Black Hand exploited were deeply rooted in the experience of southern Italian emigrants. In the villages of Sicily and Calabria, the formal state had historically been an enemy rather than a protector, and the informal rules of community life, including the rule of silence before outside authority, had been essential survival strategies for generations. The code of omertà, silence before the authorities, which would later become associated specifically with the Mafia, reflected this broader cultural suspicion of official institutions. Black Hand operators understood these cultural norms and used them deliberately. Their threatening letters often included explicit references to the dangers of going to the police, and their knowledge that victims were unlikely to report the crimes was the foundation on which their entire operation rested.

The scale of Black Hand crime in the early twentieth century was considerable. New York City newspapers reported hundreds of Black Hand cases annually in the years between 1900 and 1915, and these reports almost certainly understated the actual frequency of the crime, since the vast majority of victims never went to the police. In the densely Italian neighborhoods of East Harlem and lower Manhattan, Black Hand letters were a common feature of life for successful merchants and tradespeople. The same was true in Italian neighborhoods in Chicago, New Orleans, Philadelphia, and other cities with large Italian immigrant populations.

One particularly disturbing feature of Black Hand crime was its tendency to escalate when victims refused to pay. Extortionists who did not receive payment sometimes followed through on their threats, bombing the premises of victims, assaulting them physically, or in some cases killing them. The Italian-language press in New York reported a series of bombings and murders attributed to Black Hand operators in the first decade of the twentieth century. These violent follow-throughs served a dual purpose: they punished non-compliance and sent a message to other potential victims about the seriousness of the threats. The violence associated with Black Hand crime, while less common than the extortion itself, was real and had a genuine deterrent effect on reporting.

Black Hand and the Mafia: Untangling the Relationship

One of the most important historical clarifications to make about the Black Hand is what it was not. It was not the Mafia. The conflation of Black Hand crime with the Mafia was one of the most consequential errors in the history of American understanding of organized crime, and it had deeply damaging consequences both for Italian American communities, who were collectively stigmatized by associations with criminality that applied to only a tiny minority of their members, and for law enforcement understanding, which was distorted by inaccurate models of how criminal organizations actually worked.

The Sicilian Mafia, as examined in Chapter 6, was a specific criminal institution with its own organizational forms, rituals, codes, and geographic roots. Some members of Sicilian Mafia-connected organizations did emigrate to the United States, and some of them did engage in Black Hand extortion as one of their many criminal activities. But the Black Hand was also practiced by criminals with no Mafia connections whatsoever, by small-time extortionists who had simply learned that the method worked in their community. The existence of Black Hand crime did not necessarily imply the existence of a Mafia organization.

American newspapers in the early twentieth century, hungry for sensational crime stories and reflecting the anti-immigrant sentiments of the era, tended to treat every Italian crime story as evidence of a vast Mafia conspiracy. The "Black Hand Mafia" became a staple of tabloid journalism. This conflation served the interests of newspaper circulation but distorted public understanding. It also made it harder to investigate actual organized criminal networks, because the exaggerated image of a unified all-powerful Mafia conspiracy was both more frightening and more false than the actual criminal structures that existed.

The relationship between Black Hand crime and the organized criminal networks that would eventually become the American Mafia is best understood as one of shared cultural context and, in some cases, personnel overlap, rather than organizational identity. Some of the men who engaged in Black Hand extortion in the 1900s and 1910s would later become figures in more formally organized criminal enterprises. The cultural norms and criminal practices established in the Black Hand era, including the norm of silence, the use of violence to enforce criminal obligations, and the exploitation of community trust, would be adapted and formalized by the organized crime structures that emerged in the Prohibition era. But the Black Hand itself was not the Mafia, and most Black Hand operators were not members of any organized criminal society.

Early Criminal Societies

Alongside the diffuse phenomenon of Black Hand extortion, more formally organized criminal structures did exist in Italian immigrant communities in the early twentieth century, and they deserve careful examination. These early criminal societies represent the first clear evidence of the organizational forms that would eventually develop into the American Mafia. Understanding them requires distinguishing between the legitimate social institutions, mutual aid societies, fraternal organizations, regional associations, that served genuine community functions, and the smaller number of criminal associations that exploited community structures for illegitimate ends.

Italian immigrants, like immigrants from other countries, established a remarkable array of formal organizations to serve their community needs. Mutual benefit societies, organized by immigrants from the same town or region, provided death benefits, disability insurance, and social assistance to members who fell ill or lost their income. These organizations, sometimes called società di mutuo soccorso, were genuinely civic institutions that served important functions in communities where formal social insurance did not exist. They also, however, created organizational structures, membership systems, treasury functions, and enforcement mechanisms that could be adapted for criminal purposes. A mutual aid society that assessed dues from members and expelled those who did not pay provided an organizational template that criminal societies could modify for their own ends.

The Morello gang, led by Giuseppe Morello and his brother-in-law Ignazio Saietta, known as "Lupo the Wolf," represents the most clearly documented early organized criminal network in Italian American history. Operating primarily in East Harlem from the late 1890s onward, the Morello gang was involved in a range of criminal activities including Black Hand extortion, counterfeiting of American currency, murder for hire, and various other forms of racketeering. Morello himself had been born in Corleone, Sicily, one of the towns most associated with the Sicilian Mafia's origins, and he brought with him from Sicily both criminal experience and connections to Sicilian criminal networks.

The Barrel Murder of 1903 is one of the most significant events in the early history of Italian American organized crime, both for what it revealed about criminal organization and for its consequences for law enforcement. On the morning of April 14, 1903, the barrel-wrapped body of a man later identified as Benedetto Madonia was discovered on a street in lower Manhattan. Madonia had been stabbed multiple times before being placed in the barrel, and the professional character of the killing, along with certain details of how the body had been prepared, suggested to investigators that the murder had been carried out by individuals familiar with specific criminal traditions from southern Italy and Sicily. The investigation that followed, led by the New York Police Department's Detective Petrosino, ultimately led to the identification of eighteen suspects and provided the first substantial evidence of an organized Mafia-connected criminal network operating in New York.

The Barrel Murder investigation revealed several important features of the early criminal networks operating in Italian American communities. First, these networks were transnational: the suspects had connections that extended back to Sicily and to criminal networks in other American cities, suggesting a degree of coordination and communication across geographic boundaries. Second, the criminal enterprises involved were diverse, extending far beyond the simple extortion of the Black Hand, to include counterfeiting operations that produced fake American currency in quantities large enough to threaten the legitimate money supply. Third, the networks operated within and alongside legitimate businesses, using saloons, grocery stores, and other enterprises as fronts for criminal operations. Fourth, the code of silence that investigators encountered in the community made it extremely difficult to develop witnesses or informants, a structural feature that would persist as one of the greatest challenges law enforcement faced in subsequent decades.

Transnational Criminal Connections

One of the most important features of early Italian American criminal organizations was their transnational character. Unlike criminal enterprises that emerged entirely in American conditions, Italian criminal networks in the United States maintained active connections with criminal organizations in Sicily and southern Italy. These connections served several functions. They provided networks through which criminal personnel could be recruited and transferred between Italy and the United States. They enabled criminal cooperation in enterprises that crossed national boundaries, including the smuggling of people and goods. And they provided a degree of institutional legitimacy within Italian criminal culture: a criminal who could demonstrate connections to the traditional Sicilian Mafia or to Neapolitan Camorra networks enjoyed a kind of credibility and authority that a purely local criminal could not claim.

These transnational connections had significant consequences for law enforcement. American police forces in the early twentieth century had virtually no capacity for international cooperation in criminal investigations. They could not easily access records from Italian police, could not extradite suspects from Italy, and could not monitor the movement of criminals between the two countries. This jurisdictional gap was one of the factors that gave early transnational criminal networks a significant operational advantage over their pursuers.

Joseph Petrosino attempted to address this gap directly. In 1909, he traveled to Italy, specifically to Sicily and Rome, to gather intelligence on Italian criminals who had emigrated to the United States and to establish cooperative relationships with Italian police. The trip ended in his assassination in Palermo on March 12, 1909, making Petrosino the only NYPD officer ever killed abroad in the line of duty. His assassination dramatically illustrated the limits of early law enforcement capacity to address transnational criminal networks, and his death effectively ended the first serious American effort to engage with Italian authorities on organized crime.

New York: The Capital of Immigrant Crime

New York City was the preeminent destination for immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it was therefore also the preeminent site for the development of organized crime in immigrant communities. Its sheer size, the density and diversity of its immigrant populations, its dynamic and corrupt political culture, its enormous legitimate economy, and its role as the primary port of entry for goods coming into the United States from around the world all made New York a uniquely fertile environment for criminal enterprise.

The physical geography of criminal New York in this period was organized around a series of distinct neighborhoods, each with its own ethnic character and its own criminal ecology. The Five Points, the notorious slum in lower Manhattan that had been the center of Irish gang activity from the mid-nineteenth century onward, was giving way by the 1880s and 1890s to a more ethnically mixed and Italian-dominated neighborhood as Irish families moved uptown or out to Brooklyn and the Bronx. The Lower East Side was predominantly Jewish, a dense world of pushcart markets, tenement buildings, and garment factories that also contained a significant criminal subculture centered on gambling, prostitution, and labor racketeering. East Harlem, in the upper reaches of Manhattan, was one of the largest Italian neighborhoods in the world, a community of several hundred thousand people from various parts of southern Italy and Sicily who had created a dense institutional life that included churches, mutual aid societies, Italian-language newspapers, and criminal networks.

The political environment that shaped criminal enterprise in New York was dominated by Tammany Hall, the Democratic Party machine that had controlled city politics for most of the preceding half century. Tammany's relationship with organized crime was not one of simple patronage or protection, though both of those elements were certainly present. It was more fundamentally a system of mutual dependence. Tammany needed money, votes, and the services, particularly gambling and prostitution, that its constituency demanded. Criminal operators needed protection from prosecution, licensing to operate, and political connection. The relationship was transactional and well-understood by all parties.

The ward boss was the key figure in this system. Each of New York's political wards had a Tammany boss who served as the political intermediary between the machine and the residents of his territory. The ward boss provided jobs, favors, and social services to constituents; delivered votes to the machine; and managed the relationships between the machine and the various criminal operators, gambling houses, brothels, and illegal saloons that operated in his territory. Criminal operators paid tribute to the ward boss, in both cash and services, in exchange for protection from police interference. The police, many of whom owed their positions to Tammany patronage, understood that certain operations were protected and acted accordingly.

This system created a specific type of criminal opportunity. The criminal operator who could establish a relationship with the ward boss gained a kind of operating license that made their business significantly safer than it would have been without political protection. Those who tried to operate without such protection faced arbitrary police interference, arrest, and prosecution. The premium on political connection made it important for criminal operators to have the social skills and political savvy to navigate machine relationships, skills that favored certain types of individuals over others. The most successful criminal operators in New York were those who could move comfortably between the immigrant street culture from which they had emerged and the broader political world that controlled their fate.

Within Italian immigrant criminal networks in New York, the period from roughly 1900 to 1920 was one of consolidation and internal conflict. The Morello gang dominated the East Harlem-based Italian criminal world in the first decade of the century but faced challenges from other criminal groups with roots in different parts of Sicily and southern Italy. These conflicts were not simply turf disputes over criminal territory, though they were partly that. They also reflected the organizational tensions of criminal networks that were still in the process of defining themselves: determining what activities they would control, what rules would govern their internal relationships, and what their relationship to the broader criminal world of New York would be.

The counterfeiting operations of the Morello gang illustrate the ambition and sophistication of at least some early Italian American criminal enterprises. The production of counterfeit currency required planning, capital, and specialized skills. The Morello network operated counterfeit currency operations in multiple locations, including a facility in a house in Highland, New York, outside the city. They distributed the fake currency through networks of small businesses and street-level operatives across the city. The operation was eventually uncovered by the United States Secret Service, which had jurisdiction over counterfeiting cases, and led to the prosecution and imprisonment of Giuseppe Morello and several associates in 1909, temporarily disrupting the network.

Chicago: Vice, Politics, and the Levee

Chicago in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was in many respects a more extreme version of the urban conditions that characterized New York. Its growth was even faster, its political corruption more openly acknowledged, its ethnic neighborhoods more clearly defined, and its vice districts more notorious. Understanding Chicago in this period is essential for understanding how the immigration era laid the groundwork for the Prohibition-era criminal revolution examined in the next chapter, which would be centered in Chicago as much as in any other city.

Chicago had grown from a small frontier town in the 1830s to the second largest city in the United States by 1900, a growth driven by its position as the railroad hub of the continent, the center of the meatpacking industry, and the manufacturing heartland of the Midwest. This explosive growth brought with it a correspondingly explosive demand for labor, and Chicago attracted immigrants from virtually every part of Europe: Poles, Germans, Czechs, Hungarians, Greeks, Italians, Jews, and others, who settled in neighborhoods that were as ethnically distinct as those of New York. The Maxwell Street area was the center of Jewish immigrant life; Bridgeport was Irish and later Polish; the Near North Side had a substantial Italian population; the South Side contained large African American communities that had grown during the Great Migration of the early twentieth century.

Chicago's political environment was dominated by a different type of machine politics than New York's Tammany Hall. Rather than a single dominant machine, Chicago had a more fragmented system in which aldermen representing individual wards held considerable autonomous power, and in which the relationship between politicians and criminal operators was managed at the ward level rather than centrally. The two most important aldermen in the development of Chicago's criminal ecology in the early twentieth century were "Bathhouse" John Coughlin and Michael "Hinky Dink" Kenna, who represented the First Ward, which included the city's notorious Levee vice district.

The Levee, located on Chicago's near South Side, was one of the most extensive and openly operated vice districts in the United States. Within a relatively small geographic area, it contained hundreds of brothels, gambling establishments, saloons, and criminal enterprises that operated with the open protection of Coughlin, Kenna, and the politicians and police officials they controlled. The Everleigh Club, operated by the sisters Minna and Ada Everleigh, was by some accounts the most luxurious and expensive brothel in the country, catering to wealthy clients from throughout the United States. Its existence was known to city officials and periodically reported in newspapers, but it operated without legal interference for more than a decade. Less exalted establishments also proliferated, and the Levee became a destination for vice tourists from throughout the Midwest.

The annual First Ward Ball, organized by Coughlin and Kenna, was one of the most audacious displays of the relationship between politics, crime, and urban culture in American history. Held in the Chicago Coliseum, the ball attracted thousands of attendees including criminals, prostitutes, gambling operators, and ward politicians, and was widely understood to be a fundraising event for the First Ward Democratic organization, which used the proceeds to fund political operations. The balls continued for decades, openly reported in the press, tolerated by city government, and treated as a kind of annual civic ritual of vice and corruption. They illustrate, perhaps better than any other single example, the degree to which the boundaries between legitimate political culture and criminal enterprise had been erased in cities like Chicago.

Italian immigrants in Chicago had established neighborhoods primarily on the near North Side, though other Italian communities existed on the South Side and in other parts of the city. The near North Side Italian community, centered around what is now the neighborhood known as River North and the area adjacent to the Loop, was the site of Black Hand activity throughout the 1900s and 1910s. Chicago's Italian criminals were, if anything, more openly violent than their New York counterparts: bombings attributed to Black Hand operators were frequent enough that the Italian neighborhoods of the near North Side were sometimes referred to in the press as the "Bomb Zone." The violence reflected both the intensity of criminal competition and the relative youth of the criminal networks, which had not yet developed the organizational stability that allowed more mature criminal enterprises to resolve disputes through non-violent means.

The figure who would eventually come to define Chicago's criminal landscape, Al Capone, was not yet on the scene in this period. He was born in Brooklyn in 1899 and would not arrive in Chicago until 1919, after the criminal groundwork examined in this chapter had been laid. But the conditions that Capone would exploit during Prohibition, the political corruption, the established vice trade, the immigrant communities with their specific vulnerabilities and criminal operators, were all products of the era examined here.

New Orleans and the Mafia's First Roots

New Orleans occupies a distinctive place in the history of Italian American organized crime, not because its criminal organizations were larger or more powerful than those in New York or Chicago, but because the events of 1890 and 1891 in New Orleans constituted the first major public controversy in American history over the Mafia, and because those events illuminate with particular clarity the relationship between anti-Italian prejudice, criminal reality, and public understanding of organized crime.

Italian immigration to New Orleans was different in character from the Italian immigration to northeastern cities. New Orleans had maintained significant trade connections with Sicily throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in the fruit and agricultural trade, and Sicilian immigrants had been arriving in the city in significant numbers since the middle of the century. By 1890, the city had an established Sicilian community concentrated in the French Quarter and adjacent neighborhoods. Many of these immigrants worked in the fruit trade, on the docks, and in the small businesses that served the port economy. New Orleans also, by all accounts, had a more developed and better-organized Italian criminal network than most other American cities at this date, a network with genuine connections to Sicilian criminal organizations and genuine experience in criminal extortion and conflict resolution through violence.

The assassination of David Hennessy, the chief of police of New Orleans, on the night of October 15, 1890, was one of the most consequential events in the history of American attitudes toward Italian immigration and organized crime. Hennessy was shot while walking home and died of his wounds the next morning. As he was dying, he was reported to have told a colleague that "the dagos did it," a remark that, whether accurately reported or not, shaped the entire subsequent public response to his murder. His death was immediately attributed to the Mafia, and nineteen Italian immigrants were arrested, tried for murder, and, when the jury acquitted or failed to reach a verdict on most of them, lynched by a mob of several thousand New Orleans citizens on March 14, 1891.

The New Orleans lynching was the largest mass lynching in American history, and it was directed at Italian immigrants. It provoked an international diplomatic crisis: Italy briefly recalled its ambassador from Washington, and the Italian government demanded compensation for the families of the victims. It also crystallized public fears about Italian organized crime in a way that would shape American attitudes for a generation. The newspapers that covered the events, both in the United States and internationally, presented the lynching as either an understandable response to Mafia violence or as a monstrous perversion of justice, depending on the political orientation of the publication, but virtually all of them treated the existence of a powerful Mafia organization in New Orleans as an established fact rather than an allegation requiring evidence.

The actual character of criminal organization among New Orleans Italians at this period is difficult to establish with precision, partly because the events of 1890–1891 contaminated the evidence base. What is clear is that there were genuine criminal conflicts within the Italian community, connected in some cases to rivalry between different factions with different Sicilian regional origins. There is also evidence that some Italian criminal operators in New Orleans had genuine connections to Sicilian criminal traditions and had experience with the kinds of extortion and violent intimidation associated with those traditions. Whether this constituted a formal Mafia organization in the Sicilian sense, or simply a collection of criminal actors operating within a common cultural framework, is a question that historians have not definitively resolved.

What is not in doubt is that the Hennessy murder and its aftermath established a template for American public understanding of Italian organized crime that would persist for decades. The template featured a secret, all-powerful criminal organization, the Mafia, operating within Italian immigrant communities, directing criminal activity through a combination of violence and silence, and posing a fundamental threat to American public order. This image was in some ways more frightening and in other ways more reassuring than the reality. It was more frightening because it implied a degree of coordination and power that actual criminal networks did not yet possess. It was more reassuring because it located the source of criminal activity firmly outside the mainstream of American society, in a foreign culture with foreign values, rather than in the structural conditions of American urban life that made criminal enterprise attractive and viable.

Other Ethnic Criminal Networks

While Italian organized crime has received the most historical attention and will continue to be the focus of subsequent chapters in this textbook, the period of mass immigration produced significant criminal networks in several other ethnic communities. Understanding these networks is important both for correcting the impression that organized crime was uniquely or primarily an Italian phenomenon and for understanding the broader social dynamics that shaped criminal enterprise in immigrant communities.

Jewish Criminal Networks

The Jewish immigrant community of the Lower East Side in Manhattan was one of the most densely populated and culturally productive communities in American history. The same social conditions that produced extraordinary figures in labor organizing, journalism, theater, literature, and political life also produced a significant criminal underworld. The concentration of impoverished immigrants in overcrowded tenements, the rapid growth of the garment industry as a major employer, and the specific vulnerabilities created by immigration status and linguistic isolation all created opportunities for criminal enterprise similar to those that existed in Italian immigrant communities.

The most significant Jewish criminal networks in New York operated primarily in gambling, prostitution, and labor racketeering. "Monk" Eastman, whose real name was Edward Osterman, led one of the most powerful street gangs in lower Manhattan in the late 1890s and early 1900s. The Eastman Gang was not specifically a Jewish organization, but it operated primarily in the Jewish neighborhoods of the Lower East Side and derived much of its income from providing muscle for gambling operations, brothels, and political organizations that needed enforcement services. Eastman himself was eventually arrested and sent to prison in 1904, but the criminal networks he had helped build continued under other leadership.

Arnold Rothstein deserves particular attention as perhaps the most important individual figure in the transition from the rough criminal street culture of the immigration era to the more sophisticated, business-oriented organized crime that would characterize the Prohibition era. Rothstein, born in 1882 into a relatively prosperous Jewish family in Manhattan, had no need to turn to crime out of poverty. He was attracted to gambling and criminal enterprise out of a combination of intelligence, ambition, and what contemporaries described as an extraordinary ability to assess risk and human character. By the 1910s, he had become the dominant gambling figure in New York, operating a network of high-stakes gambling establishments and loan-sharking operations that served the city's wealthy and middle-class clientele as much as its working-class communities.

Rothstein's significance for the history of organized crime extends beyond his personal criminal activities. He served as a mentor, financier, and patron to a remarkable group of younger criminals who would become major figures in the American underworld: Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, Frank Costello, and others. His approach to criminal enterprise, emphasizing financial sophistication, political connection, and rational management over the impulsive violence that characterized street-level criminal culture, would profoundly influence how American organized crime developed in the Prohibition era and beyond. His 1928 murder, the result of a gambling debt dispute that ended badly, removed one of the most consequential figures in American criminal history at the height of his influence.

Chinese Tong Organizations

Chinese immigrants in the United States faced the most extreme form of the structural marginalization that affected all non-Anglo immigrant communities. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers and was not fully repealed until 1943, represented the most explicitly racial immigration restriction in American history before the immigration restrictions of the 1920s. Chinese communities in cities like San Francisco, New York, and Chicago were severely limited in their legal rights: they could not become citizens, could not vote, were excluded from most trades and professions, and were subject to periodic violence and harassment with little legal recourse.

Within these severely constrained communities, tong organizations served as both legitimate mutual aid societies and, in some cases, vehicles for criminal enterprise. The tong, derived from the Cantonese word for a hall or meeting place, was originally a fraternal organization providing community services and dispute resolution for Chinese immigrants who could not access American legal institutions. Over time, some tong organizations developed criminal arms that controlled gambling, opium distribution, and prostitution within Chinese communities. The "tong wars" that erupted periodically in San Francisco's Chinatown and in New York's Mott Street area between the 1880s and the 1920s were conflicts between rival tong organizations over the control of these illegal markets.

The tong wars were genuinely violent and genuinely disruptive to the communities in which they occurred. They were also extensively covered, and frequently sensationalized, by mainstream American newspapers, which treated them as evidence of the alien and incomprehensible character of Chinese immigrant culture. The coverage rarely acknowledged the structural conditions, legal exclusion, racial discrimination, and denial of civil rights, that had made criminal organization an attractive alternative to legitimate economic participation for a segment of the Chinese immigrant population. The tong wars gradually subsided in the 1920s and 1930s as law enforcement pressure increased and as community leaders developed more effective mechanisms for resolving disputes.

Irish Criminal Networks

By the period of the new immigration, Irish immigrants and their American-born descendants had been in the United States for several generations and had achieved a degree of political and social integration that the newer immigrant groups had not. Irish political dominance in cities like New York, Boston, and Chicago was well-established by 1880. Irish Americans dominated police forces in most major northeastern cities. Irish political machines, including Tammany Hall in New York, were the dominant political organizations in their cities.

This political integration did not mean that Irish criminal networks had disappeared; it meant that they had evolved. Irish criminal organizations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were less often the street-level extortion and robbery operations associated with the mid-nineteenth century Irish underworld and more often the political machines and vice operations that depended on political protection. The relationship between Irish political organization and criminal enterprise in cities like New York was, if anything, more intimate than the relationship in Italian or Jewish communities, because Irish Americans controlled the political structures that provided protection for criminal operations. A Tammany ward boss who happened to be of Irish origin was not simply protecting criminals from a position of political power: he was often himself a participant in or beneficiary of criminal enterprises, through graft, kickbacks, and direct ownership interests in protected businesses.

The transition from Irish to Italian dominance in certain criminal sectors of New York's underworld is one of the clearest illustrations of the ethnic succession theory. As Italian immigrant communities grew in size and economic presence, and as Italian criminal operators developed both the organizational capacity and the political connections to compete effectively with established Irish operators, a shift in criminal leadership began to occur. This shift would accelerate dramatically with Prohibition, which created new criminal opportunities on a scale that existing criminal networks could not handle alone and that required the formation of new organizational structures cutting across ethnic lines.

Everyday Life in the Criminal Underworld

The history of organized crime in immigrant communities is most often told through the stories of its prominent figures: the gang leaders, the political fixers, the famous crimes. But understanding this history at a human level requires also understanding the everyday lives of ordinary people in the communities where criminal enterprise operated, both those who participated in it and those who were victimized by it. The texture of daily life in immigrant neighborhoods, the work, the family structure, the cultural practices, the spaces where criminal activity intersected with legitimate life, is as important as the organizational history of criminal networks.

For the vast majority of Italian immigrants, daily life in the early twentieth century was defined by work, family, religion, and community, not by crime. Men worked in construction, on the docks, in the garment trades, in small businesses. Women managed households that often included boarders whose rent income was essential to family finances, and many also worked in factories or took in piecework at home. Children attended school, played in streets that were simultaneously playgrounds and marketplaces, and quickly acquired the English that their parents often struggled to learn. The parish church organized the community's spiritual and much of its social life: baptisms, weddings, funerals, feast day celebrations, and the annual festivals honoring patron saints from the old country were all organized through the parish. These were communities of extraordinary vitality and resilience, not communities defined by criminality.

Criminal activity was present in these communities, but it occupied a specific and bounded space within the larger social world. The numbers runner who collected daily bets was a familiar neighborhood figure, someone's cousin or neighbor, but his activity was understood as existing in a different moral category from the mainstream of community life. The saloon keeper who ran a gambling operation in his back room was a known figure in the neighborhood, and his saloon was a genuinely important community institution quite apart from his criminal activities. The young man who ran errands for a local criminal operator was recognizable to his neighbors as someone on a dangerous path, someone to be warned away from, even as the operator he worked for might be respected or feared or both.

The experience of being a victim of Black Hand extortion was one that many immigrants in Italian communities shared either directly or through close connection. Contemporary accounts describe the anxiety and fear that receipt of a Black Hand letter produced: the sleepless nights, the agonized calculation of whether to pay or resist, the consultations with trusted friends and community figures, the desperate search for someone who could provide protection. Some victims went to the police and found either sympathy and assistance, if they were lucky enough to encounter Petrosino or one of his Italian-speaking colleagues, or indifference and inability to help, which was more common. Others sought protection from figures within the community who had the capacity to provide it, entering into relationships of dependency that represented their own form of informal tribute.

The gendered dimensions of criminal enterprise in immigrant communities deserve attention. Criminal activity was overwhelmingly male, both among perpetrators and, though not exclusively, among victims. Women were frequently targets of Black Hand extortion directed at their husbands or fathers, and they lived with the consequences of the fear and financial drain that extortion imposed on their families. Women were also directly victimized by the prostitution trade, which involved not only native-born women but immigrant women as well, particularly those who had arrived without family connections and who were vulnerable to recruitment through deception, coercion, or the manipulation of debt. The "white slavery" panic of the early twentieth century, which exaggerated the extent of organized prostitution networks while raising genuine concerns about the exploitation of vulnerable women, reflects the real intersection between immigration vulnerability and sexual exploitation.

Children who grew up in immigrant neighborhoods with significant criminal activity received a complex education. They observed, from an early age, that certain men in their neighborhood had money, status, and respect that exceeded what their legitimate employment could explain. They saw the deference that local politicians and police officers showed to certain community figures. They learned, through observation and informal instruction, the boundaries between what was talked about and what was not, who could be spoken to about what, and how the informal rules of the community operated alongside and sometimes in contradiction to the formal rules of the law. Some of these children would eventually enter criminal life themselves. Most would not, but they would carry with them a nuanced and often ambivalent understanding of the relationship between criminal enterprise and community life that would persist throughout their adult years.

Chapter Review Checkpoint

This chapter has examined how mass immigration to American cities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries created the social conditions in which organized crime took root. We have traced the development of Black Hand extortion in Italian immigrant communities, examined the early organized criminal networks that began to emerge in New York, Chicago, and New Orleans, and explored the criminal traditions of other immigrant groups including Jewish, Chinese, and Irish communities. We have also examined the role of political machines in enabling and protecting criminal enterprise, the career of Joseph Petrosino as the first major figure in American law enforcement to specialize in Italian American organized crime, and the everyday dimensions of life in immigrant neighborhoods where criminal activity was present but did not define the community's character.

The central analytical framework for understanding this period is the relationship between structural conditions and criminal opportunity. Criminal enterprise in immigrant communities was not the product of any inherent criminal tendency in immigrant cultures, though specific cultural traditions, including the distrust of authority and the code of silence associated with southern Italian communities, shaped how criminal activity organized itself. It was the product of specific structural conditions: economic marginalization, exclusion from legitimate opportunity, political corruption, inadequate law enforcement protection, and the specific vulnerabilities created by immigration status and linguistic isolation. When these structural conditions were present, criminal enterprise emerged. When they changed, as they did for many immigrant communities over successive generations, criminal enterprise declined or transformed.

Research or Library Extension