Organized Crime & Government

I watched Peaky Blinders Season 6 this weekend (great show). It hit me while watching that some of what may be lost in history lessons due to WW2 is that members of organized criminal organizations had seats in the highest levels of our government in quite recent history. A mobsters son was elected as President in 1960 which is crazy if you really think about it. That was only 60 years ago.

Pablo Escobar was almost president too no?

A lot of mobsters are philanthropists. People love to be loved.

Organized crime pretty much functions as an unrecognized government funded by taxes aka protection money. Eventually they might become the government like in the United States where a handful of powerful human traffickers founded the greatest nation in history.

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Like I said, we’ve already been there. We’re doing better now right? I feel like people say things like it’s worse than it’s ever been and they have no idea what they’re talking about.

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One theory of Kennedy’s assassination was that Joe made a deal with the mob to deliver Illinois in return for JFK going easy on the mob. RFK aggressively pursued organized crime and that along wirh JFKs refusal to invade Cuba (Baby of Pigs was in the works prior to his taking office) did not endear JFK to the mob.

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I tried to follow up on that. This was my first Google hit:

“As his biographer, I would have loved to have discovered that he was a bootlegger,” says Nasaw. “It would have given me all sorts of great stories. I tracked down every rumor I could find and none of them panned out. It became really clear that all of the stories about his bootlegging were just farcical.”

That was an interesting read. Thanks!

Skips over the Pantages Theater buyout, in which he hired a girl to accuse Mr Pantages of rape.

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Yeah they never pinned bootlegging on Al Capone either.

My hypothesis on why insider trading is illegal is to put people in jail that are suspected of worse crimes but for which there isn’t sufficient evidence.

Could it be that the skills required to become a successful organized criminal translate well to government?

You could just as well say the skills translate well to private enterprise which is what organized crime is.

According to the enterprise perspective, organized criminal groups form and thrive in the same way that legitimate businesses do: they respond to the needs and demands of suppliers, customers, regulators and competitors. The only difference between organized criminal groups and legitimate business is that organized criminals deal in illegal products and services, whereas legitimate businesses normally do not (Smith, 1980; Smith, 1990).

You could just as well have said “yes.” You didn’t need to cite sources to confirm my assertion.

Russia is an example of a country run as an organized crime enterprise and Putin is an example of such a leader. When you have a government with separation of powers your claim is dumb.