As with most of the other contexts we have considered so far, the existence of crime economies cannot be separated from their representation, and nor can the control strategies directed against them. The representation of the social threat posed by crime economies has generated a symbiotic relationship with political reaction, which through its discourse has tended to universalise crime economies and at the same time distance them from the state.This will be tested in the following case-study.
In popular crime culture two interconnected images are paramount:the crime family and organised crime.In many respects these crime scenarios have created a demonology and a romance repects with racist and class overtones.The economic reality of crime family structures and crime organisation has been largely overlooked within the mythology of organised crime.Taking the mystique of the mafia as a case-study, the reasons behind this obfuscation process become apparent.
Mafia is not an enemy which is outside the state and the instiitutions:on the contrary, it nonpenetrates and permeates and permeates them...Mafia is not a hidden power despite the ostrich-like use which is made of the word.Mafia is manifest power.Until the 1970s the Mafia was perceived by researchers, the media and the public as a conspiracy of national crime syndicates.That syndicate most frequently visited and represented comprised a largely invisible and omnipotent government of desperate expatriate Italians monopolising almost every organised operation of the underworld: The Kefauver Committee hearings of 1950-51,the Appalachian meeting of underworld figures in 1957, the McClellan Committee hearings of 1958,the Valachi papers, Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather”,and the Report of the United States President’sCommission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice (1967), powerfully reinforced those beliefs
In Theft of a Nation (1969),Cressey argues for the reakity of such a conspiracy theory of the Mafia syndicate, and its essentially family focused institutional structure. Alan Block (1978), in a detailed analysis of the origins of cressey’s thesis,identifies as the source of its structural representation of the US Mafia the somewhat hazy recollections of Joseph Valachi. By the time Valachi elaborated on his limited local experiences as a New York mobster, the populist media, and even serious writers, were ready to universalise his experience to national proportions. The organisational dimensions of the Mafia, and the all-pervasive social threat which it posed, were fast becoming ‘fact in the mythology of organised crime. ‘Thus the myth of the “Godfather” was born, striking all as real because it conformed so perfectly to everyone’s fantasy
Like the almost continuous parliamentary inquiries in Italy since unification, the representation of the Mafia menace in the US had specific political origins. Moore (1974) describes how the activities of the Kefauver Crime Committee dominated the headlines in 1950-51 and swayed both professional and popular opinion toward an interpretation that major aspects of organised criminal activity were controlled and administered by a nation-wide conspiracy. The language and direction of the committee’s operations helped establish its chairman, in the public view of the day, as a symbol of bold, non-partisan action for controlling organised crime. Kefauver sought to exploit community concern about organised crime, fermented by print journalists and anti-gambling forces, in order to identify himself with a popular cause and promote the ideological purity of the political interests which he represented. The committee itself did little in the way of independent investigation, but merely dramatised the views of citizens’ crimes commissions, journalists and the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, each of which had a vested interest in a simple Mafia stereotype. Investigative and enforcement interests were comfortable with ‘comic strip’ villains to fight and expose. Any failure to destroy the ‘mob’ could similarly be explained against a background of secret societies, codes of silence and brotherhoods of crime. Moore estabishes that although there was some evidence that organised crime figures from major cities occasionally conferred and invested jointly, the committee tended to exaggerate the degree of centralised planning within the underworld, and misread its own evidence in finding a cohesive national conspiracy.