The havoc wreaked by organized crime in the United States is usually thought to be intramural. Gangland killings and the occasional internecine war seem remote from the ordinary concerns of the public. This may account for the enormous entertainment value Americans have found in the machinations of the Italian American Mafia (also called La Cosa Nostra—“our thing”) and other crime syndicates. Francis Ford Coppola’s screen adaptations of Mario Puzo’s stories of family life in the mob, beginning with The Godfather in 1971 became cultural icons. Not only did the first two films in Coppola’s trilogy sweep the Academy Awards in 1971 and 1974, but they contributed to constructing the myth and image of organized crime in the United States.

Tapes of telephone conversations and private conversations collected by informants wearing “wires” revealed the extent to which Hollywood shaped the self-concepts of mobsters like John Gotti, who was known in the New York media both as the Teflon Don (though he was eventually brought down by the testimony of his associate, Sammy “the Bull” Gravano) and the Dapper Don (Newsday sent a fashion reporter to the last of Gotti’s three major trials). For instance, the use of “godfather” to refer to the leader of a Mafia family was invented by Puzo, and adopted by real-life Mafia leaders, formerly known as “capo” (head or chief). The paramount Mafia leader would be known as the capo di tutti capi, the chief of all chiefs.

But the entertainment value of the Mafia and other interstate criminal syndicates, like the Los Angeles based gangs Crips and Bloods, is balanced by the heavy economic and social costs of organized crime. The image of a brutal, but righteous mob leader, like the fictional Don Vito Corleone protecting his family and friends, began disappearing after the Second World War, when the old “mustache Petes” were swept aside by capos and consiglieres using modern business techniques backed by violence. The old code of silence in the Mafia, “omerta,” was broken first by Joe Valachi in 1963 before the McClellan Committee in the United States Senate and a number of times since. Mafia underlings looking for a good deal from prosecutors found little reason to protect what was no longer a family, but a murderous corporate enterprise.

By 1975 the National Conference on Organized Crime estimated that the annual cost to the American economy of organized criminal activity was in excess of $50 billion. Some 1990s estimates were double the 1975 figure. Even much higher dollar estimates do not encompass the huge losses caused by mob commerce in illegal drugs, including designer drugs like methamphetamine (“crystal meth”), or mob support of prostitution, illegal gambling and loan sharking.

As the mob has diversified into a variety of illegal businesses by providing cash and protection for illegal entrepreneurs, it continues infiltrating legitimate businesses as well.

Intergenerational control of materials and solid-waste hauling—later including the illegal disposal of toxic wastes—several construction trades and related unions and construction companies themselves have been carefully documented in New York City and other metropolitan areas. The New York State Organized Crime Task Force found mob control so pervasive in New York City’s construction industry in the 1980s that not a single yard of concrete was poured in the city without the mob taking a cut of the profit. The result, as in so many other mobinfluenced businesses, was an extortionate price for concrete, often twice as high as it was in other places.

The reaction to the ascendancy of organized crime in legitimate and illegal businesses was a new federal law, the Racketeer Influence and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO).

Long recommended by legal scholars and prosecutors, Congress passed RICO in 1970 as part of the Organized Crime Control Act. A number of states followed RICO with similar statutes that allowed them to reach conduct that was not covered by the extremely broad definition of interstate commercial impact that was required to trigger federal penalties.

Law-makers had learned what everyone else in American society had absorbed from the entertainment and publishing industries: organized crime had become an integral part of the American economy. It was providing goods that people wanted and protecting illicit businesses that had huge markets. It would take extraordinary measures to unravel mob involvement in American life. RICO was such a measure. By defining a criminal enterprise as any individual or organization responsible for a “pattern of racketeering activity” and then defining that pattern as two or more acts of racketeering within ten years, RICO enabled federal prosecutors like Rudolph Giuliani to attack the Mafia head on. Since the passage of RICO, the leadership of all five Mafia families based in New York has been indicted, convicted and jailed, including the Teflon Don.

The reaction to the pervasive influence of the Mafia has produced such a broad law that a number of conventionally respectable enterprises may now be labeled criminal enterprises. Prosecutors in Florida have used RICO against tobacco companies, and its civil provisions have been upheld in suits against anti-abortion protesters who block access to clinics.

While RICO has been effective against organized crime, mob influence has expanded as a variety of ethnic groups break the hold of the old Italian American families. Recent cases involved criminal syndicates among Mexican, Vietnamese, Colombian and Chinese immigrant groups in the United States.