February 5, 2005
La Cosa Nostra is today much less powerful and pervasive than it was in the past. A loss of political influence has accompanied its general decline. In its heyday, the LCN exercised its political influence mostly at the local level, through its connections with the political machines that operated in certain U.S. cities such as New York, New Orleans, Chicago, Kansas City, and Philadelphia. With the demise of those machines, and with the advent of political reforms stressing open and ethical government, many of the avenues for corrupt influence were substantially closed. Today, the LCN exercises political influence in certain selected areas and with respect to certain selected issues. For example, it has attempted to influence the passage of legislation regulating legalized gambling in states such as Louisiana. With respect to police and judicial corruption, again there is much more evidence of this in the past than there is today. In the past three years, there have been a handful of corruption cases involving law enforcement and one or two involving judges that are linked to La Cosa Nostra families. In Chicago, for example, a federal investigation of corruption in the courts (and city government more generally), led to 26 individuals -- including judges, politicians, police officers, and lawyers -- pleading guilty or being convicted at trial in 1997. In one of the most notorious cases in recent years, in Boston a former FBI supervisor admitted (under a grant of immunity) to accepting $7,000 in payoffs from two FBI mob informants. The two mobsters were major figures in the New England Cosa Nostra. A second FBI agent was subsequently convicted in the case in 1999. The two FBI agents were charged with alerting the informants to investigations in which they were targets, and with protecting them from prosecution. There has never been any evidence that La Cosa Nostra has had direct representation in the Congress of the United States, nor in the U.S. executive or diplomatic service. Neither is there any evidence that it has ever been allied with such armed opposition groups as terrorists, guerrillas, or death squads. In this respect, the LCN exemplifies one of the traditional defining characteristics of organized crime in that its goal is an economic rather than a political one. Where there has been political involvement, it has been for the purposes of furthering economic objectives. CRUSHING TRADITIONAL ORGANIZED CRIME GANGS
Law enforcement, and particularly federal law enforcement, has been tremendously successful in combating La Cosa Nostra over the past 10 years. Crime families have been infiltrated by informants and undercover agents, and special investigating grand juries have been employed in state and local jurisdictions. Especially effective use has been made of investigative and prosecutorial techniques that were designed specifically for use against organized crime, and in particular against La Cosa Nostra. These latter techniques include electronic surveillance, the witness protection program, and the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. The RICO statute has clearly been the single most powerful tool against the LCN. There are now state RICO statutes as well as the federal one. RICO enables law enforcement to attack the organizational structure of organized crime and to levy severe criminal and civil penalties, including forfeitures. It is the threat of these penalties that has convinced many made members of the LCN to become informants and/or to seek immunity from prosecution in return for becoming a cooperating witness. They are then placed in the witness protection program. Civil remedies have included the court-appointment of monitors and trustees to administer businesses and unions that had been taken over by the LCN, to insure that these enterprises remain cleansed of corrupt influences. Two of the latest weapons against La Cosa Nostra penetration of sectors of the legitimate economy are regulatory initiatives. As such, they are not law enforcement approaches per se, but rather administrative remedies designed to expand a local government’s ability to control public services such as waste hauling and school construction. The first instance involves the creation of a regulatory commission. New York City, for example, created the Trade Waste Commission that ended the LCN cartel in the waste hauling industry in that city through a process of licensing, investigation, competitive bidding, rate setting, and monitoring . Other jurisdictions are now following suit. The second example is the creation of a private inspector general. These inspector generals are hired in industries that have historically been controlled by organized crime, and in this case the LCN. An example is the school construction industry in New York City for which a School Construction Authority had already been created. This SCA then utilized a private inspector general to monitor its contractors, to establish corruption controls, and to report back to them on contractor conduct. Jacobs calls this “one of the great contemporary innovations in organized-crime control” (Jacobs, 1999).
La Cosa Nostra is a high priority for the FBI and for law enforcement in New York City. Elsewhere, however, it is a low priority, with attention being characterized by experts as “hit and miss” because of a belief that “things are under control.” The FBI pays the most attention to transnational organized crime, with state/local law enforcement paying very little attention. Because La Cosa Nostra is mainly a domestic operation, there is little international cooperation in its investigation and prosecution.
