The ANNOTICO Report

The Wall Street Fraud Scandals of these last 10 years, by modern Robber
Barons, have resulted in the greatest transfer of wealth ("theft") from the
lower and middle class, to the upper class in the history of the US, and
yet there is no overwhelming media outcry, and so little prosecution.

These blatant Accounting Distortions, and the Joint ORGANIZED Conspiracy
of Audit Firms, Legal Firms, Brokerage Firms, Financial Firms, were a
travesty of such proportion that it is difficult for the mind to
comprehend!!

Likewise little Effort is expended in "exposing" the Corporate Oligarchies
of "buying and owning" the government on every level!!!!

Yet the FBI will put disproportionate resources on the Prosecution of the
"crippled" and "impotent" Italian American Mafia, and it's numbers, loan
sharking, gambling, prostitution activities.

This all while Gangs of Every Ethnicity have entire Neighborhoods and
Cities paralyzed in fear, and fully under their control, through
assassinations, drive by shootings, intimidation, extortions, or financial
strangulation, while "dumping" drugs on the streets of American Cities,
that rival that of the British Empire "dumping" opium in China in the early
1800s that took China 150 years to recover from!!! etc. <<
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~dee/CHING/OPIUM.HTM >>

It seems like the Priorities of the FBI are determined by what will get
Headlines, not what is a serious threat to our Communities!!!!!

Below, Dona De Sanctus, Deputy Executive Director addresses the symbiotic
relationship between Law Enforcement and the Media to unjustifiably and
unfairly "demonize" Italian Americans.

THE TRUTH ABOUT ORGANIZED CRIME
By Dona De Sanctis

How many Italian Americans have ever been on the FBI’s Most Wanted List?

I raised that question recently with some friends when the conversation got
around to stereotyping. Most of them, including several Italian Americans,
didn’t believe my theory that television and the movies shape the average
person’s perception of Italian Americans.

To prove my point, I asked everyone to guess what percentage of the names
on the FBI’s Most Wanted List have been Italian since the list began in
1950. Their estimates ranged from 30 percent to 70 percent. The correct
answer is five percent. In fact, only 26 names on the list of nearly 500
fugitives over the past 55 years have been Italian.

Why did they think the number was so much higher?

AN ALIEN CONSPIRACY

No doubt their immediate connection of Italian Americans with crime is due
to the stereotypes offered up by the U.S. entertainment industry, but the
roots go further back in American history to a popular theory in
criminology called “the alien conspiracy.”

According to this theory, organized crime began in Sicily in the 1860’s and
was imported to America with the Great Migration that brought an estimated
5 million Italian immigrants to America between 1880 and 1923.

The alien conspiracy theory also proposes that U.S. organized crime is
made up of 25 or so Italian crime families that have divided the country
into different geographical areas or fiefdoms that they control. These
include the West Coast with Las Vegas; the Mid-West with Chicago, Cleveland
and St. Louis and the East Coast with New York, Philadelphia and Boston,
among others.

Many scholars of criminology, however, believe the alien conspiracy theory
is an oversimplification of the very complex and multi-ethnic nature of
crime, according to Michael Lyman and Gary Potter in their exhaustive
study, Organized Crime.

For one, crime experts point out that virtually every large American city
had well-developed organized crime syndicates long before the first wave of
Italian immigrants hit these shores at the turn of the last century.

They also note that during the 20th century, organized crime bosses
included many Irish, Polish, Russian and Jewish immigrants and their
children, who, along with Italian hoodlums, built empires based on
organized crime.

ORGANIZED CRIME = MAFIA ????

The federal government and principally the FBI have used this alien
conspiracy theory to impress the general public and especially those
political leaders who control law enforcement budgets and regulate police
powers that it is doing its job in investigating, arresting and
incarcerating dangerous criminals. Labeling organized crime as
Italian-based and “Mafia” helped enormously.

This equation of Organized Crime = Mafia gained even greater national
prominence in 1950 with the notorious Kefauver Committee hearings on
organized crime, which were televised.

Despite any direct evidence, the committee concluded that an international
criminal conspiracy from Sicily, called “the Mafia” was solely responsible
for organized crime in the United States. The Kefauver Committee’s
findings have long been discredited, but they have left their mark on the
American psyche.

Their influence is especially notable in the national news media which for
years has put an Italian face on crime with its sensationalized coverage of
organized crime as strictly a Mafia affair. The reason is simple: the
Mafia sells newspapers and attracts large television viewing audiences
because Americans are fascinated by this secret society.

With discouraging regularity, for example, the New York Times runs stories
about aging Italian American mobsters on page one above the fold while
television news programs offer up retrospectives on John Gotti or Joe
Adonis—especially on Columbus Day.

“As a result, many public perceptions of organized crime have been skewed
toward the belief that it is solely an Italian American phenomenon,” Lyman
and Potter conclude.

The result of this over-simplification is that Al Capone’s name is as
familiar today as it was 58 years ago when he died in 1947, while scarcely
anyone has ever heard of Capone’s contemporaries Arnold Rothstein, whom
many consider the true father of organized crime; Charles “King” Solomon,
who ruled in Boston or Morris Kleinmann, who led the Cleveland mob.

Teen-agers today know the names of Lucky Luciano, Carlo Gambino and Vito
Genovese, but ask them who was Meyer Lansky, “Legs” Diamond, “Bugsy” Moran
or Dutch Schultz and you will be met with blank stares.

Thanks to Hollywood and television, kids know all about the fictitious
rituals of the Mafia, but nothing about the practices of the very real
enforcement arm of organized crime called “Murder, Inc.”, founded by Lansky
and his pal Bugsy Siegel and made up of professional killers who traveled
the country murdering total strangers on orders from crime bosses from the
1920’s through the 1940’s.

Even fewer people have heard of Pablo Escobar, co-founder of Colombia’s
Medellin Cartel or know anything about the new generation of mobsters. As
William Kleinknecht points out in his book, The New Ethnic Mobs
“a wave of new ethnic crime groups has diluted the power of the Mafia over
the last two decades and revolutionized organized crime.”

These include the Chinese, Vietnamese, Russian, Hispanic, Jamaican and
African American syndicates that thrive in U.S. cities and suburbs coast to
coast while Mafia “legends” like John Gotti and Carlo Gambino lie in their
graves and their successors are hemorrhaging power.

CONCLUSION

No one would dispute that Italian Americans participated in organized
crime. Like families, every ethnic, racial and religious group has its
black sheep, but the actual number of Italian Americans in crime syndicates
past and present is much smaller than the public’s perception.

The U.S. Justice Department, for example, estimates that about 5,000 people
currently belong to organized crime syndicates in the United States. Even
if all 5,000 were of Italian descent, that percentage would constitute
.0025 percent of all the Italian Americans – less than one quarter of one
percent.

Clearly, gangsters of Italian heritage have been given too much credit for
putting the organization in organized crime. This misperception has tarred
the image of an estimated 26 million men and women of Italian heritage in
the United States.

When I asked that same group of friends what percentage of Italian
Americans in the work force today were educated professionals in such white
collar jobs as corporate executives, doctors, lawyers, teachers and
administrators, they estimated 10 to 20 percent. The real figure,
according to the U.S. Census Bureau is 66 percent. Why didn’t they guess
that?

Dona De Sanctis, Ph.D., is deputy executive director of the Order Sons of
Italy in America (OSIA), the oldest and largest national organization in
the U.S. for men and women of Italian heritage. Contact her at
ddesanctis@osia.org or call (202) 547-2900.