The roaring twenties was a time of great excess, crime, and secret alcohol consumption. During this time, prohibition was in full force, and nobody could legally purchase an alcoholic beverage. At the same time, the American-Italian Mob was starting to emerge as a powerful group, known for their wealth and influence. In this essay, I will seek to explore how these two events are intrinsically linked, and how the advent of prohibition led to the advent of the Mafia.
While the first Mafia group in the United States was The Black Hand, this group was not actually a group, but rather a “crude method of extortion by which wealthy Italians and others were extorted for money”, named such for the extortion letters sent out. (Lombardo, 1) Despite not being an organized force, the term became synonymous with and assumed to be a name for the Mafia, especially as it became lumped in with other crimes going on in the Italian immigrant community, despite there being no extortion involved in these other crimes. (Lombardo, 2) From 1910 to 1915, “Black Hand” activity skyrocketed, leading to the creation of many small extortion groups and a conflict between New York City and Chicago. (Lombardo, 3) While these crimes vanished almost entirely by 1920 (Lombardo, 12), they made the Italian American community look like a criminal ethnicity, and fed into the later rise of gangsters like Al Capone. (Lombardo, 14)
Around the time the Black Hand was turning infamous, the Prohibition era was starting, and in Italy, Benito Mussolini was gaining power. As a result of this, a wave of Italian immigrants moved to America along with members of the pre-existing Sicillian Mafia. Due to the poor conditions these immigrants lived in, it became more and more common for them to join up with the Mob. To make money, these gangsters began to sell alcohol to the dry and desperate public. While the Italian gangsters were originally just low-level members of their gangs (De Stefano, 55), they were present when the violence began, and soon took control.
In the midst of all this, there was a war brewing between two specific mobs- the Italian-Jewish alliance of Joseph Masseria, or “Joe The Boss” (Sifakis, 87), and the Sicillian Mob, led by Salvatore Maranzano. This was known as “the Castellammarese War'', named after the town many of these Sicillian gangsters had fled from. (De Stefano, 56) With a third faction led by Luciano joining the fray, both leaders would soon be assassinated, with Joseph being shot to death at a Coney Island restaurant, and Maranzano being executed after a peace-treaty with Luciano’s faction. (Sifakis, 88) While Luciano’s group was mixed-race, the war became well known as a war between two Italian Mobs, even if the myths surrounding it were mostly unfounded (De Stefano, 56). As the term “Mafia” was already mainstream, the existence of non-Italian gangsters became less important in the eyes of the community.
The success of the bootlegging market and the myth of the Italian American Mafia meant that a lot of the most infamous gangsters of the time period were Italian American bootleggers. From well-known names like Al Capone, to the family of Russel Bufalino, whose family was still operating in Philadelphia decades after Prohibition ended (Sifakis, 55), Italian American crime and illegal alcohol distribution went hand-in-hand. Chicago alone saw thousands die in the “bootleg wars”, and similar numbers were seen in cities like New York and Philadelphia. (Sifakis, 55) The boom of the industry, combined with the violent and influential nature of the gangs who distributed their alcohol, led to the Mafia being inherently linked to bootlegging and Prohibition-era crime, even in the modern day.
While organized crime has always been a mixed-race ordeal, and Italian Americans were not uniquely involved in bootlegging and mob wars, their prevalence and infamy among the public directly led to the rise of the Italian American Mafia in both belief and reality, dating back to before the Prohibition began and lasting for several decades afterward.
De Stefano, George. An Offer We Can't Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America. United States, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007.
Lombardo, Robert M. “Preface.” The Black Hand: Terror by Letter in Chicago, University of Illinois Press, Urbana, 2010, pp. 1–3.
Sifakis, Carl. The Mafia Encyclopedia. Checkmark Books, 2005.
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