The American Mafia is a clique-based conspiracy to commit larceny, theft, and extortion, predicated on coercion and the corruption of public officials. To call Mafia gangs families is a misnomer, but the idea of a family, or borgata, took root long ago. Thus, we have Louis Ferrante's Borgata -- Rise of Empire: A History of the American Mafia, Volume 1 -- the first of three. In it, a former Mafioso has written a commendable history rather than a tell-all book, which is what we usually get from reformed Mafiosi. This book is a good read partly because Ferrante is articulate, educated, and writes well, unlike most Mafiosi who tell their stories. The book contains a lot of new material, and Ferrante's take on various criminal happenings is often thought-provoking.
Mostly this book is a history of the New York Mafia and various offshoots of it, but Ferrante begins with a history of the Sicilian Mafia. Not much of this material is new, but it provides an interesting fit with what follows. Ferrante finds the beginnings of the American Mafia with Sicilian immigrants who settled in New Orleans just after the Civil War. Here a discrepancy arises, for Borgata is not the first book on American Mafia origins. Mike Dash, in The First Family (Random House), traces American origins to some Sicilian counterfeiters in New York in the 1890s, led by the murderous Giuseppe Morello. Dash's extensive research does not square with what Ferrante says about Morello. Ferrante has Morello subservient to Ignazio Lupo (the Wolf), while Dash calls Morello the first American godfather and the founder of New York's first Mafia family, which merely included Lupo. Whatever, in the beginning, according to both accounts the Sicilians preceded the Italians and often competed with them, sometimes violently, but together they provided the seeds from which the American Mafia germinated.
As expected, Ferrante covers the Castellammarese War, and I thought there was nothing new to be learned here. I was wrong. Especially noteworthy is Ferrante's coverage of Lucky Luciano. Luciano's double-dealing and organizational innovations are well known, but he comes across now as far more formidable and conniving a manipulator, and far more politically astute and duplicitous, than has been heretofore recognized. The result was that Luciano, through finagling, treachery, and ruthlessness, pretty much settled the Castellammarese War on his own terms. This opened the curtain for the Golden Age of the American Mafia, which lasted until the RICO prosecutions seventy years later.
Thus was born the legend of Charlie Lucky. This man, who was almost illiterate, who admitted he had never pulled a trigger, and who was nowhere near as vicious as many of his contemporaries, became one of the three most respected and influential Mafiosi in the history of American organized crime. Of the other two, Meyer Lansky gets extensive treatment here, but Chicago's John Torrio gets none. Luciano is now remembered much better than he was treated in life. He survived ten years in a New York penitentiary, lifelong banishment from the United States, where he wished to live, and he was deposed and cast aside by the reigning Mafia dons late in life. But every American Mafioso since 1933 walks in his shadows.
As a result of the Castellammarese War, New York's five Mafia families took hold of organized crime in the city, established respective turfs, and spread their tentacles. But naturally there were jealous dissenters who broke the unwritten rules, and rebels who wouldn't heel to the ruling Commission Luciano had established. Of course they had to die. So, the second half of the book is mostly a catalogue of Mafia murders. I found myself rooting for every one of them. Wouldn't the world be better off without sociopathic killers? But eventually I got bored reading about the carnage, and now I look forward to the next volume, which I hope contains a treatment of the Chicago Outfit. Much has been written about the Capone years, but there have been ninety years since then, about which we know much less.
Louis Ferrante, harboring the knowledge of someone who has been deep in the Mafia's weeds, demolishes numerous long-standing mistakes that have endured about Mafia people and events. This is refreshing and informative. His frequent sarcastic humor provides an extra treat for the reader. The publisher, Pegasus Books, is to be commended for re-discovering the lost art of editing. If the rest of the series is as good as this book, Ferrante and Pegasus can count on having produced the most important literary work on organized crime in a generation.
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