Killing the Mob summary

In 1934, Hoover raised the stakes. He announced a brand new breed of American felon: the so-called public enemy number one. This label would only apply to one criminal at a time, to America’s most wanted, most dangerous, person. It wouldn’t be lifted until that person was in jail, or dead.

Hoover declared that the first public enemy number one was a bank robber and gangster named John Dillinger. If you met Dillinger in a bar, you might feel drawn to his friendly, positive energy, and never know you were talking to a ruthless murderer. But make no mistake; Dillinger was so notorious that Hollywood even made a movie based on his crimes. In fact, it was the last movie that Dillinger himself would ever see.

In 1942, World War II was in full swing, and the Allies were poised to invade Sicily. But the Mediterranean island wouldn’t be easy to capture; 200,000 Fascist troops lurked in the island's mountains. Who could help the Allies successfully invade the island? Incredibly, the answer was the Mafia.

Decades earlier, the Mafia had fought, and lost, its own war against Fascism. In the 1920s, when Fascist Italian dictator Benito Mussolini came to power, he’d vowed to drive the Mafia out of Sicily. With good reason, too; the Mafia had had a brutal stranglehold over the Sicilian people and economy for as long as anyone could remember.

During the era of prohibition, the mob illegally imported alcohol into the United States and sold it on the black market for hugely inflated prices. But when prohibition ended in 1933, this lucrative income stream dried up. By 1946, it was looking for new ways to make money, and it turned its attention to a harder substance: heroin. 

But the Mafia had rules and procedures that had to be followed before a new direction could be agreed upon. So in 1946, it did what any sensible business would do; it called a board meeting, to decide whether to enter the illegal drugs trade.

By the 1950s, thanks to its activities in the drug trade, the mob’s wealth had climbed higher than ever before. What was US law enforcement doing about this crime wave? Well, according to J. Edgar Hoover, the head of the FBI, there was nothing to do, because he didn’t believe that the Mafia even existed.

In his view, there was no shadowy alliance of Italian American gangsters. Instead, there were only independent criminals running their own illegal rackets. But even if Hoover didn’t believe in organized crime, the American public was about to.

In 1957, Hoover wasn’t interested in pursuing the Mafia, but someone else was. Edgar Dewitt Croswell was a police sergeant in the sleepy little town of Apalachin, in upstate New York. For Croswell, law enforcement wasn’t just a job; it was his whole life. He slept in the local police barracks every night and strove to know each and every criminal in the local area. And there was one criminal in particular that he had his eye on.

His name was Joseph Barbara, and he was a high-ranking Mafia boss who owned a luxurious mansion in Apalachin. After observing Barbara for years on end, Croswell finally had a breakthrough. He learned that Barbara had ordered vast amounts of premium meat from a Chicago butcher for November 14. Barbara had also booked numerous rooms at nearby luxury hotels for that date. Croswell deduced that Barbara was throwing a party. But not just any party. Croswell believed this was a hoopla for America’s most powerful gangsters.

When you think of Hollywood in the 1960s, you might think of stars such as Marilyn Monroe and Kirk Douglas. But the true power in LA’s movie industry was off-screen. And all too often, that power lay with the Mafia. But how and why was the Mafia involved in Hollywood? The answer lies in an American phenomenon that, sadly, is even older than La-La Land: racial discrimination.

In the early twentieth century, many of Hollywood’s film producers had Eastern-European Jewish backgrounds. They had the ambition and the talent to make movies, but they didn’t have the money. That was in part because the banks were too prejudiced to lend to people from these ethnic backgrounds. With few other options, the producers turned to the Mafia for funds. The mob happily agreed, seeing a golden opportunity to skim money off the profits from the movies they’d finance.