Claire Sterling's Octopus lays bare the Sicilian Mafia's worldwide criminal network. The Sicilian organization commands the heights of the international underworld. Smuggling both drugs and arms in alliances with the Turkish Arms Drugs Mafia, Colombia's Medellin cartel, the American Mafia, the Chinese Triads, and the Japanese Yakuza, with connections as well to the Bulgarian government and a variety of terrorist groups, the Sicilian Mafia spans the globe.
Sterling convincingly explains how the Sicilian Mafia has risen to prominence, pioneered heroin trafficking, and insinuated itself into North America.
On July 14, 1975, Christopher Joseph Cardi, a 43-year-old Chicago mob member who was the nephew of local crime family capo Willie Messino, was shot nine times with a .45 caliber weapon as he left Jim's Beef Stand in suburban Melrose Park with his wife and three children. He was executed just three weeks after he had been paroled from prison, where he had served four years on a heroin trafficking conviction.
To federal agents investigating the mob in Chicago, the killing came as no surprise. Indeed, it underscored one of the hard, if unevenly applied, rules of behavior enforced by the American Mafia. "There is no question that Cardi was killed because he got involved in drug pushing," said Bill Roemer, a retired FBI expert on organized crime and the author of Roemer: Man Against the Mob and an upcoming historical novel, War of the Godfathers. "Fifteen years ago in Chicago, that was something that just wasn't allowed."
Although it has not been unusual for federal agents to find, and sometimes infiltrate and dismantle, American mob families with a connection to drug trafficking, there has always been an effort on the part of the American Mafia to distance itself from such activities. "That should not be construed as a sign of some type of morality," said Roemer. "It has nothing to do with right and wrong."
The historical distaste for drug trafficking can be understood as a business decision, federal crime experts say. To survive, the mob knew ultimately it would have to live within the society, like a tumor taking its sustenance from the host body. That could only be accomplished through a vast web of corruption fueled by bribes to elected officials, law enforcement officers, and judges. "The mob depends entirely on corruption," said one federal agent. "As long as public officials can rationalize that the criminals they are taking bribes from are only involved in prostitution, illegal gambling…it makes taking the bribes easier." The agent said that American mob leaders were concerned that getting involved in drug trafficking would bring the scrutiny and resulting outrage that would make it impossible to keep their illicit operations in the shadows.
John Cummings and Ernest Volkman, veteran crime reporters and authors of Goombata: The Improbable Rise and Fall of John Gotti and His Gang, make a slightly different analysis of the American Mafia's position on drugs. They also report that officially, the Mafia prohibited its members from dealing in narcotics and threatened offenders with death.
This "stern dictum" was, however, part of "an elaborate disinformation effort" aimed at convincing a public that by and
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