Lupara wrote: ↑Sun Jul 19, 2020 11:40 am
451: Unavailable due to legal reasons
Please do copy-paste.
Two recent federal indictments have hinted at the existence of a Mafia family in Buffalo. Don’t believe it.
That entity, a vast empire that stretched into Canada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and New England, died decades ago. It died when Stefano Magaddino, the head of the empire centered in Buffalo, lost power; when sources of revenue from bookmaking, gambling and labor racketeering dried up; when the sons and grandsons of old-time mafiosi lost interest; and the federal government finally took notice and cracked down with the help of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act.
Still, federal prosecutors and law enforcement officials today find it convenient to label a suspect as as a “made member,” and to refer to La Cosa Nostra, the national crime syndicate Magaddino helped form and once headed. Only now, to avoid the word “Mafia,” they claim suspects with vowels at the end of their names who know each other belong to “Italian Organized Crime.”
What an insult, to try to dredge up a past best forgotten and, thankfully, long since gone by the wayside. If the subjects names ended in “ski,” would it then be Polish Organized Crime, or if they ended in “stein,” Jewish Organized Crime? It is especially harmful for such categorization in light of the turmoil the nation has been undergoing stemming from racial discrimination.
In my years as a journalist I reported often on the inner workings of Magaddino’s crime family and the efforts by federal law enforcement agencies and prosecutors to eradicate them. I understand the allure of the word “Mafia,” which, unfathomably, conjures mystique, violence, even romanticism. I have shelves filled with books linked to the subject. And the entertainment industry certainly has taken notice. Witness the popularity of the Godfather or the Sopranos.
But it’s wrong, terribly wrong, for officials to still pin the alleged wrongdoing of a few on an entire class of Americans. Perhaps their reasoning can best be explained by a noted Buffalo defense attorney who told me years ago for a story I was writing on the demise of the Buffalo Mafia:
“If your job was to go into the forest and count the trees, would you come back and say there are no trees?”
There are no trees labeled Cosa Nostra, Mafia, or even Italian Organized Crime in Buffalo. It’s time those charged with maintaining law and order and putting criminals behind bars recognize that.
Lee Coppola is the former dean of journalism at St. Bonaventure University.