Infamnia. Vices to Virtues

In 1931, under the leadership of Charles Luciano, the heads of the American Mafia families gathered in Chicago to reorganize the American Mafia on a corporate basis.  Prior to that, the American Mafia was organized, sort of, on an old world monarchical basis, sort of, in which heads of various Mafia families would attempt to unite the American Mafia under the leadership of a dictatorial boss, called the capo di tutti capi.  That is, the head of all the heads.

 Charles Luciano

Luciano, whom we of course usually know as "Lucky", wasn't just lucky.  He was a business genius.  The organization of the Mafia on corporate lines, with a commission acting as the board of directors and Luciano as the first chairmen was brilliant.  It didn't solve all of the Mafia's problems, to be sure, but it sure made its operation easier, and coming just as Prohibition was ending, it couldn't have come at a better time for the American mob.

The Commission not only organized the mob, but it organized the criminal activities of the mob.  The Mafia's activities were (and probably still are. . . the Commission is known to have last met in 1985) varied, but it was classically concentrated in three areas, those being; 1) Prostitution, 2) Gambling,  and 3) Drugs.

Now, again, I'm not saying that the Mafia left every other criminal activity alone, but it was focused on these three over the decades.  And the third one, we would note, was actually the source of violent debate in the Mafia, as to the morality of engaging in the activity.

Now that may strike the reader as odd, and indeed it is odd, but consider the mindset of the group.  Yes, this was crime, but it was a type of crime that was rationalized in in its purveyors.

All of these activities feed on human weaknesses.  Indeed, in the modern parlance, we are told that you can be addicted to any of these. There are sex addicts, pornography addicts, gambling addicts, and certainly there are drug addicts.  All of this is tragic.  But if you are of a cold hearted view, these are all vices that their users have fallen into due to their human weaknesses.

I'm not endorsing that view, but I'm noting that a person can rationalize it, and the Mafia did.  The Mafia didn't want its members using prostitutes.  It didn't want its members taking drugs. And it didn't want them gambling.  It figured that people of lower moral and personal character would fall into these vices, however, and therefore there was no real harm in being the party selling them.  It was just vice. That is, if people of low moral character are going to go to prostitutes, and if women of low moral character are going to sell themselves, why not be there to be the seller?  If people of low moral character are going to take drugs, well why not be the ones selling them?

Looked at that way, the Mafia is sort of a libertarian radical free market business organization.  Sure, all of that stuff is against the law, but people are going to buy it anyway so the law doesn't really matter, right?

Well, the law of course always matters, but the mob was right that people were always going to buy.  The law really served to discourage and take the edge off of these activities, rather than prevent them wholesale, as preventing them was always an acknowledged impossibility.  That's true, however, of most laws.  Most criminal activities can't be fully prevented, only reined in somewhat.

All of these activities adopted by the Mafia are quite unique, compared to other things.  They aren't like theft, or extortion, or the like, even if they may be associated with them. For one thing, they all travel together, making adopting them criminally somewhat easy. Where you find prostitution, you will find drugs.  Where you find gambling, you will find prostitution and drugs.

And they are all uniquely addictive.  People don't become addicted to other criminal activities they way they do, on a close personal basis, to these three.  

And now they've all become incorporated into American society.

And that should give us pause.

Just last week Hugh Hefner died. Hefner made his living by being a successful pornographer and pornography is a species of prostitution.  The women who appeared and still appear in its slick magazine have prostituted their images, offering them up for imaginary sex for a few bucks for the men who buy the magazines. Hefner's genius was in the portrayal, and the ugliness is in the reality. That it was s success, and that American culture has reduced nearly the entire female population into the same category as the prostitutes, and that's what they've become by appearing in the magazine, who appeared there, is a huge blight on our society and part of a massive current social problem.

Gambling has come out of the backroom and has built at least a couple of cities of false glamour.  Now, I'll admit that I don't feel that individual acts of gambling are immoral. But let's also not hide that its effects can be very destructive. Also, and given as I don't gamble its easy for me to say this, it's just weird, although its something that goes back, in an unorganized form, into antiquity.  Perhaps the original unorganized nature of it should be its default setting, if possible.  A Distributist view of gambling, per se.

And drugs. .. well, think of big weedy Denver.  Like gambling, they've gone mainstream, and all the vice that goes with it will simply keep on keeping on.

And we wonder why things seem so messed up.

Well, consider poor Charles Luciano.  A business genius who had to spend his declining days back in his country of birth, Italy.  And not a statute to such a leading light in contemporary American culture anywhere.