Free Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires by Selwyn Raab

new breed of mafiosi became expert in marshaling small armies of smugglers, truckers, cargo handlers, and gunmen. The young millionaire mobsters also became adept at laundering money to dodge tax-evasion problems, and learned how to bribe and manipulate political and police contacts to forestall law-enforcement headaches.
    The Chicago meeting was a success. A power structure was in place. The nation’s Mafia leaders tacitly agreed to assemble every five years at a national crime forum—much like a political party convention or a religious synod—to fraternize and review mutual concerns.
    Within the new Luciano and Bonanno families, their ranks had enlarged as a by-product of the Castellammarese War and the need for reinforcements in a costly campaign. While the Luciano plan and the Commission united all of the country’s borgatas in generally recognized rules and concepts, there were regional distinctions about membership. Joe Bonanno refused to subscribe to the idea of his borgata as a melting pot for all Italians. Only men of full Sicilian heritage, he insisted, could be faithful to Cosa Nostra culture and obligations.
    None of the families would permit the utterance of the name
Mafia
to identify their organizations. The New York families adopted Cosa Nostra (the Mafia code name in Sicily), Chicago called itself “the Outfit,” Buffalo chose, “the Arm.” Others, especially in New England, preferred the neutral sounding “the Office.”
    Eventually, among mafiosi the most popular mode for identifying a “made man” was the simple expression, “He’s connected.”
    As the gangsters dispersed from Chicago, most of them realized that Prohibition—the lush money machine—was on its deathbed. A majority of the publicand most politicians wanted to rescind the law as unenforceable, unpopular, and a corruptive influence on law-enforcement agencies. The worsening Depression provided another anti-Prohibition argument for the new administration in 1933 of President Franklin D. Roosevelt; supporters of “Repeal” contended that it would revive the legitimate alcohol industry and generate thousands of new jobs.
    In December 1933, the Twenty-first Amendment to the Constitution was adopted, repealing the Eighteenth Amendment that had outlawed the production and sale of alcoholic beverages. On the first night that the thirteen-year dry spell ended, in New York tens of thousands of revelers poured into Times Square in a spontaneous celebration. The huge throngs required the emergency mustering of almost the entire city police force of 20,000 officers for crowd control.
    The five New York Mafia families were prepared for the cosmic change. Prohibition had enriched them so handsomely that they had sufficient startup money and muscle to bankroll new rackets and crimes or to simply take over existing ones from rival ethnic Irish and Jewish gangsters. As an example of the Mafia’s financial resources, movie producer Martin Gosch said that Luciano told him that his gross take from bootlegging alone in 1925 was at least $12 million, and that after expenses, mainly for a small army of truck drivers and guards and bribes to law-enforcement officials and agents, he cleared $4 million in profits.
    Prohibition was barely in its grave before the New York Mafia was feasting from a smorgasbord of new and expanded traditional crimes: bookmaking, loan-sharking, prostitution, narcotics trafficking, robberies, cargo hijackings, and the numbers game. “Racket” became the popular term for these new Mafia endeavors. The use of “racket” as slang to describe an underworld activity can be traced back to eighteenth-century England. Its exact derivation is unclear, though it might be related to alternate definitions of racket: a clamor, a social excitement, dissipation, or gaiety. In the mid- and late nineteenth century, the term came into use as a raucous private party held by Irish-American gangs in New York. To subsidize their