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Serious Problems Ahead
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17501 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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7 / 1990 |
1,983 Words |
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Joseph D. Douglass, Jr.
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Claire Sterling's Octopus: The Long Reach of the International Sicilian Mafia is one of several excellent studies of the drug problem published within the last year or so. Three others are Desperados by Elaine Shannon, which focuses on the corruption of Mexican officials and their role in the murder of DEA agent Kiki Camarena; Kings of Cocaine by Guy Gugliotta and Jeff Leen, which examines the growth of Colombia's Medellin cartel and the cocaine epidemic; and Deep Cover by Michael Levine, which is an inside account of DEA mismanagement and the lack of serious Washington interest in winning the war on drugs. Sterling's book differs from the others because she draws attention to the worldwide reach of organized international crime.
Confused Accounts
Among international criminals, Sterling maintains, the Sicilian Mafia is on the top of the heap. Other criminal organizations, such as Colombia's Medellin cartel, the American Mafia, the Turkish Arms-Drugs Mafia, the Chinese Triads, and the Japanese Yakuza, do business with the Sicilians and defer to them in certain key areas. Indeed, only the Sicilians network is capable of moving both heroin and cocaine in massive quantities across oceans and continents.
While the roots of the Sicilian Mafia extend back over a hundred years, Sterling explains, the major international growth of the organization, which parallels its rise to dominance in heroin trafficking, began in October 1957, when Sicilian and U.S. Mafia heroin operations were coordinated at a meeting held in Palermo, Sicily. The Sicilian Mafia's overseas expansion into the United States and Latin America - especially Venezuela but also Mexico and Brazil - accelerated in the 1960s. The extension of its reach through the Middle East to the Far East solidified in the 1970s. Its world-wide heroin sales increased through the 1980s and may still be climbing.
Why has the Sicilian Mafia risen to such heights? One of the reasons, Sterling suggests, is that many respected intellectuals and politicians have refused to acknowledge its existence. Because the Sicilian Mafia operates without written records and, thus, written evidence against it has not turned up, some chose to believe it was a fiction. Others discounted tales of the Sicilian Mafia because they were put off by the prejudice toward Sicilians these stories generated. In the mid-1980s, when vicious wars between rival families produced the pentiti, defectors whose lives testified to the Sicilian Mafia's existence, it became impossible for serious scholars to continue to treat it as a fiction. Still, it is questionable how seriously the organization will be taken.
Sterling asserts that it was not only popular but official disbelief that a worldwide criminal conspiracy could exist that allowed the Sicilians to construct their international heroin network. In the spring of 1988, there was a major crackdown on heroin dealers in America, "the largest arrest ever to take place in the history of mankind," said the FBI. "The Mafia's drug connection has been dismantled," announced an FBI spokesman in Washington. This was the famous Pizza Connection case. However, as Sterling cautions, the FBI did not race the Mafia's cross-country pizza parlor circuit or determine who was moving heroin into the country.
The flow was disrupted for no more than a brief interlude.
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