Heather Cox Richardson:

From CAFE and the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is Now & Then. I’m Heather Cox Richardson.

Joanne Freeman:

And I’m Joanne Freeman. A big part of what makes Now & Then special is, you, our listeners. And that’s why we’d really like your help to plan for our future by filling out a short survey.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Your responses will help us understand who’s listening, what kinds of content you’re interested in and how we can reach even more people.

Joanne Freeman:

So go to cafe.com/survey. That’s cafe.com/survey and let us know what you think, because we are very intrigued to see your thoughts. Heather, we’re going to do something a little bit different this week, right?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Indeed. We are going to be joined for part of our episode today by a colleague of ours from the CAFE, network, Elie Honig. He is the host of the six episode CAFE podcast, Up Against The Mob. And if you remember, when we first advertise that we both thought it might be a good idea to do an episode on the mob and heavens, here we are.

Joanne Freeman:

Here we are. Very exciting. For those not in the know, Elie’s show explores his experiences prosecuting the mob during his 14 years as a federal and state prosecutor in New York and New Jersey.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So he’s actually the perfect person to have on this show in order to work through some of our ideas about today’s associations and the roles of those associations in American society, some of which are great, some of which are not so great and some of which are downright bad. But before we take on the modern meaning of a mob, it’s worth going back and walking through the associations in American history and their relationship to the government and to democracy and how they got us to this particular moment.

Joanne Freeman:

As always, we’re going to follow a trail to get you too, today. So we have indeed been, and have recently said that it would be great to do an episode on the mob. The way we want to approach that today is as you just suggested, Heather, by thinking about associations, meaning clubs or fraternal organizations or groups that come together for one reason or another, often having to do with power, with politics, with practicalities and with pretty fierce loyalties to the group itself.

Now, if you think back to January 6th, we certainly had a focus on those kinds of groups that were involved in that day’s insurrection, some of them coming as group members to take part in that day’s events. And certainly it’s not the first time we’ve thought about those kinds of groups. But they had a targeted motive at that time. And so we’ve certainly been thinking about them in a more targeted way. Recently, we’ve also just come out of an election, which in one way or another highlights the fact that we’re talking, we’re swimming actually, amidst these groups of people with pretty fierce loyalties to each other, with such fierce commitments to the ideas that they believe in, that some of them have, let’s call it an intriguing relationship with the law, that that intriguing relationship can involve politics and or society and or culture. And in one way or another, these associations are powerful and have been important in American society. Changing how that works over time, changing their form, but really being fundamental to the ways that Americans operate in American society, and organize themselves.

Now, when we first thought about this topic, as I was just mentioning to you Heather, a moment ago, what I thought of, because, of course, I’m an early American political historian, I thought about early American political characters who were struggling to figure out essentially how to associate to get things done. And the reason I mentioned this at the outset is the United States was so spread out over such a vast area, and the population was so spread out that it was very hard for people to figure out how to get things done. And there’s a fascinating letter that Jefferson sends out, Thomas Jefferson before he’s president, not that long before, in which all he wants to do is send information, a pamphlet around to different people who agree with his politics. And he can’t figure out how to do it.

And in this letter, he’s essentially saying, there are these clubs, I know there are these clubs and they meet in different places. And maybe we could use the clubs and we could send the information to the clubs, and then the clubs could talk to their members. And somehow or other we could do something in an organized manner. What fascinates me about that letter is there you see someone creating what eventually becomes a political party, but it shows how important associations and associating in this way can be to basic practicalities throughout American history.

Heather Cox Richardson:

When we first started talking about doing an episode of the mob, you know I’m fascinated by the mob. And we started talking about what we could do. And the idea, I think of the popular appeal of studying the mob, of learning about the mob is this idea of the secret organization that’s on the other side of the law. And they’re part of dramatic, I won’t necessarily say romantic but dramatic moments in American history. So if you recall, the first thing I said is, “Oh, early 18th century, 19th century pirates. We’ll put in pirates.” And you said, “No, we’ll put in Tocqueville.”

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. Tocqueville. But that is what I thought about for a very specific reason. Alexis de Tocqueville, he came to the United States in 1831. And he was interested in studying what becomes the title of the book he publishes, Democracy in America. And one of the things he very famously notices is associations in the United States. And by that he means all of the groups and societies and fraternal organizations and clubs, all of the ways in which Americans seem to cluster in these little groups, all over the nation. He doesn’t see anything like it in other countries. And in his mind, it makes great sense in the United States, partly because the nation is so spread out and there are so many individuals existing as individuals in this vast space that association seem necessary. He thinks it’s a fundamental part of democracy, because it’s about people choosing to assemble on their own to accomplish things. But most interestingly, as far as today’s episode goes, in one way or another, he thinks that these associations are acting in a way that is in the place of government.

So he says, “A government could take the place of some of the greatest American associations, but what political power would ever be in a state to suffice for the innumerable multitude of small undertakings that American citizens execute every day with the aid of an association?” And he goes on to talk about how in France or in England, the state is doing a lot of things and individuals don’t have as much freedom to cluster in these groups, but in the United States, a more democratic government, this is part of how the nation functions.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Isn’t this actually also what James Madison talks about in Federalist 10, and why there will not be the danger of having a democracy turn into tyranny in the United States of America, because of the associations all over the country, will cancel each other out?

Joanne Freeman:

Well, he certainly believes that there will be all of these interests and groups. He doesn’t necessarily use the word associations or clubs, but it’s right, it’s the same idea. There’ll be all of these interests and groups bouncing up against each other and competing for what they want, and that that actually is fine. That’s a healthy thing. And in a sense, all of that bouncing around and competing will be one thing among many that can hold the nation together, because it’ll get bound up in the democratic process.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But this goes south really fast.

Joanne Freeman:

Yeah. Well, it does. And it does partly because Americans begin to really organize in what come to be, yeah, you’re not yet really in the first decade of the government. But what we’re moving towards at first is political parties, as interest groups, not as mechanisms of government, per se, but as interest groups.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But how do you define the difference between a political party and an association? Because there’s a difference between some of these groups that at least we’ve talked about off mic here, and the Whigs.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, I mean, initially, they didn’t hold political parties apart. They thought about committees of correspondence during the revolution, they thought about Democratic Republican clubs. They thought about all of these things as little organizations doing something that seems suspicious, and thinking back to the revolution, that can overturn governments.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it’s not just political organizations in the early 19th century-

Joanne Freeman:

Right. Correct.

Heather Cox Richardson:

… is what I’m going for, you could also have an organization of people who don’t want alcohol, all sorts of different things. So you’ve got all these little things running around, and generally, they’re secret.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, so that’s the thing, many of them are not secret. Some of them are secret. Maybe one of the most famous secret organizations in early America that continues on for quite some time is the Masons, the Freemasons. That’s an organization, a fraternal organization that does originally go back to stonemasons, but ends up being a fraternal organization that members take an oath. It’s a secret organization, there are secret rituals and they’re pledged to commit good acts to help society, to be loyal to each other. So it’s a secret club of loyalty and rituals that in their mind as long as they’re not breaking the law, its members are bound together to work together towards good of one kind or another.

Now, that doesn’t sound very suspicious. It doesn’t sound like something to be wary about. But in fact, particularly in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the Masons drew up a lot of criticism, there was a lot of suspicion because they were secret, they seemed elitist, they seemed potentially undemocratic. No one quite knew what they were doing because they were secret. So people worried about corruption. There were oaths and ceremonies that for some people seemed weirdly, maybe religious and maybe not. And that drew up a lot of suspicions as well. So although the Masons themselves felt that they were a brotherhood, they were bound together in loyalty and that they were doing a good thing. So for example, during the Civil War, Masons often were loyal to each other across enemy lines, they were being loyal to brother Masons.

For all of those reasons, some people looked on them as this conspiracy bound, maybe semi religious secret group that was dangerous. And ultimately, that fear gives birth to a short lived political party, the Anti-Mason Party, which tells you exactly what they were focused on.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I don’t think it’s insignificant that the Masons were originally a European institution. So there is that sense that there’s somehow the old world coming to take over the new world. But I have to laugh as you say this, because I was teaching class on Monday and we were talking about things that students have always wondered about. And I actually texted Joanne, because some students said to me, “Is it true that every president has been a Mason?” And I was like, “I know a number have, but I don’t know how many.” So I texted Joanne and said, out of the blue, and you must have thought we’d completely gone off the deep end. And she said-

Joanne Freeman:

I thought you were in deep research. I thought you were in deep research for this episode.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We’re at the point in the semester where the students are relaxed, and so really we’re having great conversations, but that one came out of the blue to me. And interestingly enough, the presidents who are known to be Masons, again, it’s a secret organization, included Washington, James Monroe, Andrew Jackson, James K. Polk, James Buchanan. I had no idea we had so many presidents named James. Andrew Johnson, James Garfield, William McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft, Warren Harding, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Lyndon Johnson and Gerald Ford.

Joanne Freeman:

And what’s interesting too about that, is the last book I worked on had a character who was a leading Mason, was die hard true to the Masons. And he comments… He’s there, he’s a clerk in Congress for a bunch of presidents. And he comments that James Buchanan was the first president that he ever saw wearing, at a presidential ceremony, a Masons apron. And he was struck by it.

Heather Cox Richardson:

He wore at the presidential?

Joanne Freeman:

At some kind of event. This guy, his name is Benjamin Brown French, he’s a clerk. He says, “The first president I ever saw wearing a Mason apron,” and of course, he’s moved and amazed by this, I don’t think it drew a lot of commentary, which in and of itself is interesting. But again, it shows you, we’re talking about associations versus government. Now we’re talking about presidents who are Masons. So it does show you the amorphous, I don’t want to call it a complication, the blurry line here between what these associations are doing and how they’re perceived by the public.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But it does raise the question of the relationship between these associations and the government. I mean, the idea that a president was wearing the insignia of a secret order in public is really mind boggling. And yet the relationship between associations and the government was clear from the very beginning, because obviously politicians like Thomas Jefferson wanted to go ahead and use the voting ability of those organizations in order to get elected.

Joanne Freeman:

Right. And an early political organization along these lines is Tammany Hall, which starts out as a Democratic Republican organization, and it’s a club and it has members and they meet and they also have rituals that are associated with their membership and their sachems, their chiefs of their various orders. So in a sense, again, it has some of the seeming insignia of what an association is.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And that’s interesting because they are deliberately picking up what they consider to be symbols of indigenous history.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, right. Because what they are saying without saying it is we are a tribe, we are bound together we are a people joined, not necessarily in blood, but that’s the implication there. So yeah, they’re using indigenous American symbols, rituals, ideas as a statement of the kind of organization that they are.

So while the Masons are held suspect, because people are afraid that somehow rather that secret society is doing something that may affect politics, Tammany actually is about politics and political power. And they are using organization, they’re using association, really, to work with votes.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And they’re going to be instrumental in the coming development of the Democratic Party around Andrew Jackson. They throw their weight behind Jackson in the 1820s and become associated with the Democratic Party, the New Democratic Party, not the old Democratic Republicans from when they organize in the 1780s, but the 1820s. They have gone then from being a secret society into being a public political party, and lost the association that they are somehow doing something secretive or something that shouldn’t be allowed, they’re actually part of the formation of the current day Democratic Party. Which is really interesting, because that’s the 1820s.

And I’m fascinated by the idea of associationism in the late 19th century, because the Civil War changes the relationship between individuals in the government. And of course, with the Civil War and the new money and the new rise of cities and the new railroads, you get the rise of industrial society. But without any corresponding government efforts to ameliorate the terrible labor conditions or the dangers and the poverty that are associated with industrialization. So of course, if somebody loses an arm, for example, there’s no unemployment insurance, there’s no disability insurance, there’s nothing that’s going to happen to your wife and children, except perhaps having to beg in the streets or turn to sex work or whatever, to be able to continue to feed themselves.

And after the Civil War, we get an unbelievable explosion of associations. At the turn of the century, between 1865 and 1900, 20% of American men belong to at least one secret society. So from about 1870 to about 1920, those secret societies are the center of social life. And they provide insurance for people’s deaths, they provide coverage for a wife and dependent children. They provide connections, they provide jobs, they do all sorts of things that essentially provide a basic social safety net, at the same time, they also provide entertainment.

Joanne Freeman:

So they’re partly born of need and become these social organizations.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Born of need and born of postwar entertainments. So one of the things that always amuses me is that before the war, we have actually two organizations in America, we have the Masons and we have the Odd Fellows, both of which are British. But after the war, there’s this, as I say, this explosion and you get these very serious organizations that try and help the members out. You also get ones that are organized around jokes or organized around theater or organized around all these other different causes. And I just have to read some of the names here, we have after the Civil War, in addition to things like the Knights of Pythias, which is based on the story of friendship between Damon and Pythias, and the Protective Order of Elks, we also have the Order of Chosen Friends, the Protective and Benevolent Order of Beavers, the Jolly Bachelors, the Supreme Tribe of Ben-Hur, the United Ancient Order of Druids, the Improved Order of Deer and the Order of The Owls, who had a sacred nest, I’m sorry, I made it that far. Who’s sacred nest was in Rhode Island.

There’s also the fact that, especially with the rise of cities and the rise of new people coming into the cities and the rise of races moving around in the country, you’re going to want these organizations to help each other out. They’re benevolent organizations, for the most part. And the names I gave you so far, were names of generally White organizations, but this is also the same era that gives us organizations like Alpha Phi Alpha, which is the oldest Black fraternity in the country and pledges itself to manly deeds, scholarship, and love for all mankind in 1906. And there again, people consider their fraternities and their sororities sisterhoods or brotherhoods, that are, in a sense, a ticket of belonging to a certain club going forward.

Joanne Freeman:

I mean, in a sense, although they may or may not be swearing oaths, that’s a serious bond of trust. Brotherhood or sisterhood, that’s what’s beneath that idea. It’s a bond of trust that can overcome, as you’re suggesting, newness. You’re moving around and you’re right, that the more movement there is, the more there’s going to be a need for these societies. Also, they’re oaths of character that mean you can trust people and in any organized activity, whether it’s criminal or not, that kind of trust, that kind of loyalty is key.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and that brings up the obvious relationship here in the late 19th century between organizations like Tammany and the government. Because there is, with the rise of urban areas, the need for poor people coming in from the countryside or of immigrants coming in from other countries, to have the basic social services that the government doesn’t yet provide. And they turn at that point to organizations. And in the case of New York, for example, they turn to Tammany Hall, where the politicians are going to make sure for example, that their kids have food if they lose a leg in an industrial accident. Or that they’re going to have a Thanksgiving turkey, that was a big deal, to go ahead and make sure that people had, that’s in the early 20th century, are going to have food on holidays. And especially that they’re going to have jobs.

So the way that works is that Tammany Hall, which is running the city by the late 19th century, and there are machine governments all over the country, are going to make sure that the people in their districts have jobs. And even if it’s, for example, some sort of a somewhat make work job for somebody who’s been disabled, they’re going to make sure that people have jobs. And they do that by turning to the contractors, for example in the city and saying, “Hey, if you will employ all these people, I will go ahead and make sure to cover your contract expenses.” So we get extremely expensive, for example, plastering contracts in courthouses that are built in New York City in the late 19th century, because you’re not only paying for the plaster and the workers to put up the plaster, you’re paying for all the other people who are tagging along on that job to be employed.

Joanne Freeman:

And the community, the organization that makes that possible, that finds the workers that brings them together in that way. So you’re paying, in paying that worker, you’re paying a lot more. Now, let me also ask you a question, I believe it’s true in the very way that you’re talking about these organizations that are supplying things that government doesn’t, the late 19th century is also the period when the law is beginning to catch up to this idea. Isn’t this a period when tort law, when there are all of these things being born in the law as the legal systems try and catch up to the fact that people are losing arms and legs and that there’s all of this stuff happening in the late 19th century that the law hasn’t even entirely caught up to that yet?

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yes, it absolutely hasn’t. And it’s not going to until about the 1890s. And then it’s going to do so not so much about injuries, workplace injuries, but rather the way that women are being injured by this new industrial society. But this relationship between the associations like Tammany, and we’re going to see them in the early 20th century in places like Louisiana under Huey Long, Matthew K. in Philadelphia, there are all kinds of places where people have these relationships between associations and the government, in which the people who are part of the association and running the government are using two different kinds of money to go ahead and provide jobs and services for the people that they’re protecting that are in their organization.

And one of the sources of that money is taxpayers through contracts. So for example, that courthouse that I’ve mentioned in the 1870s in New York City, they spent more than $360,000 for a single carpenter, for a month’s work. Oh, come on. A good year’s salary in 180 for a semi skilled worker was about $300. That’s a year’s salary. So the idea that they paid one guy $300,000 for a single month of work is… I mean, they called him the prince of carpenters.

So there’s taxpayers. And from that, we get the explosion of the idea that the government providing services for ordinary Americans is somehow a drain on taxpayers. So that’s one angle of it. But we’re not actually going that direction today, we’re going to the other side of where these machines get funding. And that’s where we’re going to end up with the mafia.

Joanne Freeman:

Before we launch there, though, I do want to make a point that I think is going to help lead us there. And that is, we started out by talking about organizations serving needs. We then talk about needs and organizations pulling in more money in the service of bigger goals and bigger groups, and now we’re talking about, we haven’t used the C word, but if you’re talking about $300,000 to one carpenter, you’re beginning to bump up against corruption. And I raise this because what we’re talking about here is a bundle of things that are bound together in an interesting way, loyalty, community, need, services and perhaps to push to an extreme, the question of when does all of that behavior, which may seem on the up and up, when does that move, when does that become something akin to corruption?

Heather Cox Richardson:

So this is really interesting, we have talked about this before, and I used the word corruption of the body politic. And you and I argued about what the body politic was, but the idea of corruption of the governmental system by having voters turn up to put in office people who are going to have these extraordinarily inflated contracts to go ahead and build a courthouse or whatever, is in the late 19th century thought of as being an example of the wrong kind of voter. They’re voting for a redistribution of wealth, as people said, and that was a corruption of what should be a good, clean, democratic system.

But now there’s that other kind of the place that people like Tammany Hall got money. And that was one of the ways that they raised money to go ahead and provide the services that their supporters needed, was by accepting bribes or payoffs from crime within the city. So for example, in the late 19th century, in urban areas across the country, the people in charge of the cities were willing to go ahead and take payoffs from the criminals who are running gambling organizations or prostitution rackets, and they would make sure that when those people who were members of those criminal gangs were arrested, either they got let off or they were let off when they came in front of certain judges who had also been part of the machine.

So by the 1870s, you’re starting to see a link between this idea of the association, it’s helping out the immigrants, helping out the people coming in from the countryside and organized crime. And that’s a different kind of corruption. And the two of them often seem to go hand in hand, because it’s the same urban machines that are engaging in both of them.

So while there’s this murky area between associations and helping the immigrant communities and the payoffs from the criminal gangs in cities, there’s a really big change in the 1920s. And that big change is spurred by prohibition, because all of a sudden, when it becomes illegal for people to produce and distribute alcohol, that creates this incredible pot of money, this incredible pot of money among the criminal gangs, especially those in places like New York and Chicago and Kansas City and some of the other big cities that are moving alcohol. And they begin to move this alcohol that is now illegal.

Joanne Freeman:

Part of what’s happening here, though, along the lines of what you’re saying is, all along, we’re talking about serving small groups of people. When you get into prohibition and alcohol, you’re talking about something that is not just about small societies, you’re talking about something that people want. In a broad sense, we’re talking about massive populations of people wanting alcohol, so of course, there are big pots of money, we’ve changed the whole nature of who’s being served.

We’ve changed the nature of who’s being served. We’ve also changed the scale. So rather than having a small gang in Chicago, for example, you now have gangs across the country that are going to need to organize and to become a system by which they can go ahead and make sure that they’re not undercutting each other, make sure that they’re cooperating in some fashion. And this, of course, is going to give us the rise of organized crime. And organized crime is really the changing of this system of small gangs within the cities that are doing payoffs to the government, into a big system of organized crime.

Joanne Freeman:

I think it’s interesting, at first just thinking about that phrase, organized crime, because I think the assumption is, it’s organized criminals. But the point you just made, Heather, is an important one, which is organized meaning it is a larger group of people working so that they’re not working against each other. They’re organizing their efforts so that they can bank what they need to bank, they can get what they need to get in. They’re not competing against each other. So organized crime means more than it might seem on the surface.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But I also love the idea that you’ve gotten so big as a criminal, that you have to go white collar. You have to be like, “I don’t know how to hide my money anymore, I need an accountant.” Which sounds really unromantic. But so much of the crime that matters on a scale, like on a national scale is crime that requires white collar professionals to be helping it.

When we look at the history of the mob, the person we really point to as the man who turns the loose organization of a group of gangs into a national organization, we look at Lucky Luciano. And Luciano was an immigrant from Sicily in 1906 and very quickly turned to shoplifting and extortion and mugging. And he became part of New York’s rising mafia organization. And the mafia come to America from Sicily in about 1875 and was engaged in smaller criminal gang activity, but it’s really under Luciano that it becomes part of this large organization.

So Luciano figures out that the different criminal organizations in a number of different cities need to stop fighting amongst themselves and start to cooperate. Luciano organizes the National Crime Syndicate which tries to keep peace between all the different criminal organizations across the nation and very deliberately, and its board of directors included both the Jewish and Italian immigrant groups in the country. And quickly they move to control not only alcohol, but also prostitution and loan sharking, labor unions and narcotics. And they became a large, powerful organization. But while most people probably haven’t heard of Luciano, the person that they have heard of is Al Capone. And Al Capone is parallel, if you will, to Luciano.

Joanne Freeman:

So in Chicago, there’s Al Capone, who along with a colleague, Johnny Torrio, creates a group, a criminal out group which is called, I was going to say a criminal outfit, called the Outfit. And they are operating in Chicago, they’re doing bootlegging, they’re running brothels, they’re dealing with illegal gambling in Chicago and downtown and on the south side, they make deals with other Chicago gangs to share some of the spoiling there, but then you end up getting competition. This is a lack of organization, gang shootouts during what become known as the Chicago Beer Wars from 1922 to 1926, with mobsters killing hundreds of their own, police officers killing hundreds of gangsters.

Heather Cox Richardson:

And this all comes to the public’s attention in a really big way. On Valentine’s Day, 1929, Capone allegedly ordered four of his gunmen to dress up as police officers and to pretend to intercept a delivery of bootleg whiskey at his rival, Bugs Moran’s headquarters. But the Capone people lined up Moran’s operatives, and they executed them with machine guns, they killed seven of them. And this just horrifies people, not only because there are so many people executed, but also because these were gangsters dressed up as police officers. And all of a sudden this idea that you can’t really tell who the good guys are. And you can’t really tell who the bad guys are goes ahead and it tangles into this whole idea of Luciano’s National Crime Syndicate to make people really concerned that this National Crime Syndicate is in fact working with American politicians.

And so by the 1950s, there is a drive in the country to get rid of the role of organized crime, which is how it’s known. But often people use a shorthand and simply say the mafia, but organized crime from our political system. And in 1951, Estes Kefauver, who was a Democratic senator from Tennessee, really pushes on the idea of trying to get the National Crime Syndicate out of politics.

And when they have these hearings about the role of organized crime in government, about 30 million people watched the hearings, and they are really, unbelievably dramatic to watch. Because first of all, the judges at the hearings are behind bulletproof glass, because they’re not at all convinced, nobody’s going to try and kill the judges. And then second of all, as these alleged gangsters are being cross examined, they refuse to say anything. I mean, talk about a secret organization, one of them won’t even say if the sun is shining. He won’t say absolutely anything. And people are really horrified. Although at the end of the day, the Kefauver Hearings actually turn up the idea that perhaps the mob is not that deeply involved in the American government, although it certainly was tangentially involved in all the ways we’ve talked about. But he expected there to be this huge, “Wow, this is a really big deal,” when in effect, they didn’t actually manage to nail many people on their involvement in the government.

Joanne Freeman:

But I do want to also make another point here, which is important and will continue to be important is that some of what we’re talking about here, throughout the trajectory that we’ve been tracking here, Heather, is public awareness of what’s going on beyond the people in the organization, what that awareness does, what affects it, what drives people to respond to what they’re seeing and how that shapes awareness of organized crime, willingness to accept the existence of organized crime and willingness to resist and cut it out of its power base of government.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, and that’s a really interesting question, because one of the things that shows up in the Kefauver Hearings and that often shows up in the arrest or even some of the murders that show up in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s among people who are part of organized crime is that the people who get arrested and the people who get called out are obviously the low hanging fruit. And the people who are actually calling all the shots all have plausible deniability because they didn’t pull the triggers. They didn’t use the language that says, “Hey, go kill that guy.” “Will no one rid me from this meddlesome priest?” Is more their style. And that makes people recognize that the relationship between that brotherhood associationism and the hierarchies within it actually can have the potential to undermine our American legal system, and perhaps our American government.

Joanne Freeman:

And that sometimes the person with the most power can be a person with some pretty extreme goals in mind and is protected by that system that is linking people together with that kind of loyalty.

So we’re talking about organized crime, not only becoming more powerful, but really becoming more of a business. And in that sense, becoming more powerful and more organized. And so we are moving in a direction when there needs to be more action taken against it, if there’s going to be any way to counter it. And that brings us to our friend, Elie Honig, who is the host of the CAFE podcast, Up Against The Mob, who is here to join Heather and I, to talk about the ways in which in more modern times, government has confronted organized crime and the ways in which in modern times, organized crime has operated. So Elie, welcome.

Elie Honig:

Joanne, Heather, thank you for having me. I’m thrilled to be here. This is a very special CAFE Vox crossover episode. But I truly am a real fan of your podcast. I love it. I listen to it religiously. I learn from it. So thank you, and I’m thrilled to be with you.

Heather Cox Richardson:

So now it’s our turn to learn from you. Can you walk us through what Congress did after the Kefauver Hearings and how they set up the ability of the legal system to get the big fish as well as the little fish in things like organized crime?

Elie Honig:

There’s a fascinating history here, and it’s fairly recent, I guess, as our criminal laws go. So the RICO statute. First of all, RICO, what does that mean? Where did that come from? It stands for Racketeer, Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act. Now this was passed by Congress in 1970, largely specifically with an intent to go after organized crime and powerful people.

Now, RICO. There is an interesting little historical, I guess, legend or urban legend about the name. It is widely believed that they… Congress is really good at these crazy acronyms, the Patriot Act, they can twist anything around to get to any word they want. But the prevalent legend is that RICO is based on a character played by an actor named Edward Robinson in a famous or then famous 1930 movie called Little Caesar. Now, the drafter of the law, a guy named G. Robert Blakey has never confirmed nor denied that that was his intent. All he said publicly is it was a functional title. But I mean, come on, it’s got to be. They could have called it ICRO, it could have been…

Joanne Freeman:

Well, let me add to this.

Elie Honig:

Yes.

Joanne Freeman:

Let me add to this.

Elie Honig:

I’m skeptical.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, and I’m not going to necessarily tell you not to be skeptical. But this to me seems even more plausible. So in my digging around to prepare to be chatting with you, what I discovered was the TV series, The Untouchables, which I believe starts in 1959, that the Capone family, the initial episodes were focused on Eliot Ness in the Department of Justice going up against Capone and his men. So apparently, the Capone family sued CBS and Desilu Productions for the way that they were being portrayed in that, and in response, they added a character to the show named Rico. And his job, he was a law enforcement guy, an Italian American law enforcement guy who was on the right side doing the good work. So when I read that, I just thought, “Doesn’t that seem like an even more plausible explanation for the letters strung together in RICO?”

Elie Honig:

It makes more sense because it’s a law enforcement tool. Congress passed it to help prosecutors. So this is one of those things that maybe is best left unsolved, to quote Spinal Tap.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. And I’m over here thinking it was probably a typo. But can you actually walk us through what that is? Because you hear it thrown around all the time. And how exactly does it work?

Elie Honig:

It’s a great question, because people always say, “Hit them with RICO. Yeah, rah, rah.” But I don’t know that people always understand exactly what it means. Let me start with this, as a prosecutor, RICO can be a little bit of a pain in the ass. It’s a lot of extra work, you have to prove things you wouldn’t ordinarily have to prove. You have to prove first of all the existence of what we call a racketeering enterprise. The most obvious example is the mob, the Gambino family, the Colombo family, etc. However, it does not have to be a mob family. It does not even have to be an illegal organization. And over the years, we’ve seen prosecutors get more creative in how they’ve applied RICO laws. We’ve seen RICO applied to city governments, the entire city of Atlanta government was once charged as a RICO enterprise, as labor unions, as legal and illegal enterprises. All you need is a group of people who are associated in fact. So you have to prove that.

Then you have to prove what we call a pattern of racketeering activity and that means two or more crimes that are connected to one another as crimes and also connected to the organization itself. So you have to prove more here. But if you can do those things as a prosecutor, you get this really potent weapon because it enables you to do a couple of things that are really important.

One, you can charge crimes that normally would be too old to charge. I’ll give you one specific example from my days. There was a 1987 double murder committed by a Gambino family, at the time associate, now a made guy. He drove a motorcycle and had a gunman on the back and gunned down two people, one of whom was an innocent bystander and the other of whom was a rival in the drug trade. And shot another woman 11 times, and she lived by the way. So this all happened in 1987. Here we are in 2010, we want to charge it, we think we have enough proof now. But it’s too old under the federal laws, we couldn’t charge it. However, if you can show that that racketeering enterprise, the Gambino family committed one act recently enough, then you can pull in all that old stuff, and we had this guy on recent gambling, loan sharking, who cares stuff. But it gave us a hook to charge that 1987 double murder. So that’s one advantage.

Another advantage is, the federal law says you can charge certain state laws if they’re related to a RICO enterprise. So again, an example, assault, just a beating. Normally, that’s not going to be federal. But if it’s related to the Gambino family, then it becomes federal under RICO. So that’s two.

And the third is, it expands your geographic reach. So for example, I did a big long trial against the Genovese family where 99% of what they did was not in the Southern District of New York, where I worked, it was mostly in the Eastern District of New York, Brooklyn, Queens. But there was literally one phone call made by one guy from a 212 phone in Manhattan one time. And because of that, RICO, enabled us to charge all of it, all of it in our Southern District.

But here’s probably the most important thing that it enables you to do, it really is a big help if you’re going after a boss. Because what it says is, it’s enough to find this guy guilty if you prove that he was part of the enterprise, the family or whatever corrupt organization you have, and he knew, knew about two or more crimes being committed. That’s not normally enough. If you’re going to charge a normal conspiracy charge, you have to prove some active participation, some affirmative act, just knowing about something is not enough. But RICO says if this guy was part of a big racketeering organization, knew that the organization was involved in two or more crimes, and you can prove those crimes, then you can convict that person. And so it can be really useful in going after powerful boss types.

Heather Cox Richardson:

How do you prove that they knew about it?

Joanne Freeman:

That was going to be what I was thinking.

Elie Honig:

Ideally, you get a cooperator, who can say, “I had discussions with him, I told him we were doing this.” Well, really, ideally, you get a tape. You get a wiretap, you get someone who’s wired up, I mean, famously, the way they took down John Gotti Sr. was they had wiretaps in his apartment and his social club. But there is a certain element of, come on folks, he had to know. I mean, it’s not the strongest argument, but you try to layer that in, you say, “Look, the guy’s making money hand over fist, he doesn’t have a legitimate job. No, he’s not a plumber,” to use the famous historical example, John Gotti Sr. famously, when he was being processed claimed he was a plumber. And so common sense factors into it as well.

Joanne Freeman:

So that’s a remarkably powerful tool. So what is the initial impact of that? Given everything that you just told us, what does that do to organized crime?

Elie Honig:

So historically, it took a little while for RICO to really hit its stride. But the person who really gets credit for launching it and it feels so strange to say this now, is Rudy Giuliani. And I have to consciously remind myself that for all the craziness around Rudy Giuliani and for all his dangerous conspiracy theorizing now, he was once a very well-known, respected prosecutor. He was a high ranking official in DOJ. He was the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York in the mid ’80s. And he was criticized at the time for grabbing the mic and the podium and taking all the credit and there’s something to that.

But under Rudy Giuliani’s command, the SDNY indicted and took down all five heads of all five New York mafia families, which is a remarkable achievement. And Rudy Giuliani largely launched himself off of doing that, but they went out and they had a series of famous cases, the most famous of which was called the Commission because they formed a group where the five bosses would communicate with each other, and the SDNY in the ’80s took them all down, really in one fell swoop. And it was a remarkable achievement.

What’s happened since then, is, in some ways, the expansion of RICO, like I said, prosecutors have gotten more creative in the ways that they’ve charged it, but also at the same time, it’s been pulled back a little bit. It’s become a little more difficult to penetrate RICO because it’s an arms race. The mob bosses get wise to it and they adjust and then law enforcement adjusts and back and forth. So it’s had an up and down history.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I find it just fascinating how the legal system goes after people like bosses, who if they’re being smart never actually say, “Yes, go commit that crime.” Can you walk us through that a little bit more?

Elie Honig:

It’s one of the most difficult things that we have to do as prosecutors because the best boss is the most powerful bosses, certainly in the mob and I was a mob prosecutor for many years. They learn to interact with as few people as humanly possible and to say and do as little as humanly possible. They don’t touch these things. You’re never going to find a mob boss on the scene of a murder. I mean, if you watch The Sopranos, Tony Soprano is they’re shooting people, that’s not reality. That’s not the way it works. Mob bosses will be nowhere near.

The more realistic depiction to me, and I just saw this the other day is, there’s the famous scene in Goodfellas, where the boss, Paul Cicero, the Paul Sorvino character, is at the barbecue, and he just sits there, and someone comes over and whispers one thing into his ear, and he just nods, and that’s it. That’s much more realistic the way bosses work because they know that A, everyone under them understands what the job is, and B, they limit their communications to as few people as possible, and when they do communicate, they say as little as possible. So bosses do have a lot of built in advantages, and RICO really can help prosecutors penetrate that. And I’ve learned that myself, because I’ve used RICO to go after bosses in that way.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Well, let’s push that a little bit, though. What about corporations or perhaps political figures?

Elie Honig:

The same law applies, you can apply RICO to a corrupt corporation, to a corrupt political organization, it’s a little bit of a heavier lift, because it’s easy to stand in front of a jury and say, “The Genovese family is obviously a corrupt organization.” It’s a little harder to say, “The city of Atlanta,” to use a real life example, the city of New York, the such and such corporation, but they usually get there. I did a RICO case involving a union, you say, “Look, we’re not saying the union itself is a criminal organization. We’re saying these people infiltrated, used it for criminal purposes.”

But to me, Heather, your question raises what’s an interesting dilemma that prosecutors have, at least a principal dilemma. Which is, do you go after the person or do you go after the crime? We like to think in our system that you have the crime, and then you find the person. That you don’t start with the person and then find the crime. That’s how it should be, I think most people would say, but I would always say I beg to differ in the mafia context. Because once you join the mafia and get fully sworn in, you are by profession a criminal. And so we would say, “Hey, we have this guy, he’s rising through the ranks, he’s becoming more powerful. He’s going to be a boss, he is a boss.” And we would say, we would have these conversations with the FBI and with each other, “Do we have anything on him? Is there any way we can hit him? Is there any way we can nail him?” I don’t really mush care what it is.

I mean, obviously, you want to get him on the most serious crime that he’s committed, but you can’t always do that. And so you go, “Well, what do we have?” And sometimes you just end up with a boss and you have a loan sharking and extortion charge, you know we did much more, but if that’s what you can prove, and lock him away for five years or eight years, you go for it. So there’s an interesting theoretical principle conversation about is that right? I argue that in the mob context, it is.

Joanne Freeman:

Well, that’s the key. In the mob context, you started out your explanation by saying, “Okay, so these people are part of criminal organizations, and thus…” So getting back to what Heather asked, so then what happens in the messier cases?

Elie Honig:

Yeah. And look, I think Donald Trump is an example of this. Is it legitimate for prosecutors to say, “He has presided at the head of, arguably two corrupt organizations.” One would be the Trump Organization and two would be his campaign slash presidential administration. And I think we’re well versed on what the, at least potential crimes are that those organizations committed, writ large. And so is it legitimate to go after someone like that, who is openly and notoriously committing crimes, we all know the Fifth Avenue thing that Trump said, although he was more talking about the strength of his political support, really than bragging about committing crimes. And I think that’s an interesting moral question for prosecutors.

My view is, I actually draw a distinction here between, unfortunately, the potential federal prosecutions of Donald Trump for abuses of office which don’t seem to be going anywhere and the DA’s investigation, which does maybe, maybe seem to be going somewhere. To me, I think there’s a better justification for trying to reach accountability and impose consequences for the abuses of presidential office. The obstruction of justice on Muller, the Ukraine scandal, which I’ve written and maintained there was criminality there, election interference and January six.

I think it’s a harder argument to say, “Well, someone’s got to nail this guy for something. And even if it was a fraud that he committed unconnected to his presidential administration, before he was there with the Trump Org, someone just nail this guy just because he’s got to be nailed.” I don’t quite buy into that piece of it. So that’s the principal distinction I draw.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But you have written about how former President Trump behaved like a mob boss in the Ukraine scandal by pressuring Volodymyr Zelensky, who was the newly elected president of Ukraine. Tell us about that. Is that the kind of evidence you would look at for something like a RICO charge against him?

Elie Honig:

It is, it is. As you said, this is in the Ukraine context, which of course led to the first impeachment. Yeah, the language that Trump used in that is, I mean, it’s right out of the mob playbook, you almost couldn’t think of a better example. The famous line, I would like you to do us a favor, though. It’s part of the beauty of being the boss, which is, you can say things that are not maybe on their face, you’re not reciting the exact terms of the statute. But everyone around you understands what’s being said, everyone around you understands the consequences of defying you.

And what I wrote that piece in reaction to was when poor President Volodymyr Zelensky came out and said, “Well, I felt no pressure.” I mean, of course, he felt pressure. We’re withholding $391 million in foreign aid, which is 10% of their military budget, Ukraine, while they’re in a hot war with Russia. And it just brought to mind, I compared it, in the article, some of my mob victims, who would rather than tell the truth and cooperate with us would say, “No, no, no, I paid him $500 a week, I paid them $500 a week. Not because I felt pressure, but just because they were good people and I wanted to.” And it would be like, it was frustrating.

But there comes a point where you don’t have to accept that. And we put some of those witnesses on the stand and then argued to a jury, you saw this guy, you saw how afraid he was, obviously he’s not paying them just because they’re good people or just because he feels like it. He’s paying them because he’s scared to death.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We’ve been talking a lot in this episode about the relationship between associations and family, all of which apply here. And the fact that they seem to get into trouble when they start to influence the government. And here we have all those things wrapped together, but at literally the highest levels of government. So it’s a little bit unthinkable.

Elie Honig:

It is. I mean, look, it’s easy to say, “Indict Trump, indict Trump.” On the other hand, an actual federal indictment of Trump is a massive and very risky undertaking for whoever does it. I mean, you have to play it out, you’re going to have the first ever, if anyone ever indicts him, you’re going to have the first ever indictment and likely trial of a former president. That would be unprecedented. You would have just unimaginable amounts of political scrutiny, media scrutiny, it would be an enormous gamble for the prosecutor who brought those charges and enormously difficult.

On the flip side, if you sign up to be a prosecutor, sometimes you have to do difficult things. And I’m not on board with prosecutors, and all indications thus far, Merrick Garland is going down the road of, “No, too messy, too dirty, not interested.” We’ve seen no public indication that he’s doing anything. I don’t think that’s the job of the prosecutor. I think prosecutors have to do difficult things sometimes. So we’ll see. We don’t know everything that’s going on. But that’s what I can read so far.

Heather Cox Richardson:

We’ve been talking about associations in American history and how they were fundamentally a part of the way people conceived of the way Americans organized themselves and talked about how those interfaced either for good or for bad with the US government. You’re now talking about how the legal system reacts to criminality. At the end of the day is the issue the associations? Is the issue of the legal system? Or is the issue the political system that has permitted, in the case of a former president, what certainly seems to be the overtaking of our government by a corrupt organization? Where’s the solution? I guess is where I’m going.

Elie Honig:

I think it’s a combination of all those things. Starting with the associations.

Heather Cox Richardson:

That’s totally cheating, we need one thing.

Joanne Freeman:

That’s historianesque, is what that is.

Elie Honig:

I’m going to give you this, I’m going to say the gold medal winner here is the will, the spine, the backbone, whatever you want to call it, the courage of prosecutors. I think bottom line, that’s what it comes down to. Now, like I said, I’m not going to sit here and tell you it’ll be easy or convenient to charge Donald Trump because he has these institutional protections, a lot of which flow from the associations himself. Because he has always been part of associations, of large groups of people where he gets to preside as the boss, he has all these built in advantages. He’s a wealthy man, he has all the benefits that wealth bring you in our criminal justice system. He’s powerful, people are afraid of him. He has insulation because the way these associations are structured, this pyramidal structure, where he sits alone at the top and he has people willing to carry out his orders, his instructions, he has the benefit that he doesn’t even need to tell people to do things, to lie for him for example. Michael Cohen lied to Congress and said, “Well, Trump didn’t exactly tell me to lie. But I fully understood what was expected of me.” Roger Stone, similar situation was convicted of lying to Congress and it was clear that maybe Trump didn’t ever say, “Hey, Roger, I need you to lie.” But he said, “I understood.”

So they have all of these institutional advantages that are, by the way characteristic of our criminal justice system, beyond Donald Trump, but he happens to pull together a lot of threads all at once. But ultimately, if this goes unaddressed, and if there is zero accountability in the criminal consequences, I will blame Merrick Garland, first and foremost, because he’s had the cleanest shot at this. And by the way, I don’t limit that to Donald Trump. I’ve been critical of the way Merrick Garland has charged a lot of the January six rioters. A lot of them are getting away with misdemeanor charges for trespass in that kind of… All of them committed felonies. All of them committed obstruction of Congress. All of them, I argue, committed sedition. Yet we’re seeing a lot of them get away with no jail time.

Joanne Freeman:

It strikes me, and I agree with you that there’s a lot at stake here and it’s problematic in a lot of ways. But we’re looking at, in the modern, in the current situation, with Trump and those supporting him, we’re looking at an association of sorts, an organization of sorts, with a pattern of behavior that is intensely profitable, even just on the scale of power. So given all of those things together, it makes perfect sense that you’re saying, if you don’t hold those people accountable associating, behaving that way, again, for the purpose of getting that kind of power, it’s replicable, not in the exact same way, but it’s a virtual invitation.

Heather Cox Richardson:

But so, now I have to ask you, Joanne, do you think Tocqueville was right or wrong?

Joanne Freeman:

About associations.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Yeah. About them being the heart of America. I mean, if in fact, they’re perverting our democracy, oopsie poopsie.

Joanne Freeman:

I got an oopsie poopsie out of you.

Heather Cox Richardson:

I knew you’d appreciate that.

Joanne Freeman:

I always appreciate that. I’m going to be a total historian here and say that he was right and wrong. Is he right in saying-

Heather Cox Richardson:

What is with you people today?

Elie Honig:

Hey, I chose the winner. I chose the winner.

Joanne Freeman:

You did, you did. But I would say on the one hand, is Tocqueville right about saying that associations in one way or another are at the heart of America, are ways of bridging, actually, you mentioned this Elie, at the outset, about time, patterns allow you to bridge time and distance. That that’s what the RICO law lets you bridge. That these organizations, associations are powerful and are significant and play an important role in a dispersed, widespread Democratic republic like our own, so they’re useful, but for that reason, they can also be dangerous. That gives them power, that gives them reach, that makes them hard to unroot, to take apart. So I think it’s actually their importance that can lead to some of the ways in which they become extremely dangerous and hard to counter.

Heather Cox Richardson:

Wow. This is really not where I expected to end up when we started with Tocqueville. I was actually feeling really hopeful about all this. And now I feel like I’m way better informed, but perhaps not so hopeful. That being said, it was an incredible joy to have you here, Elie. Thank you so much for coming in, and finally explaining who to us what on earth RICO really was and whether or not we can expect to see it in the news. It sounds pretty much like not, but thank you for being here.

Joanne Freeman:

Thank you. Thank you so much.

Elie Honig:

Thank you both for having me. I’m glad that we could finally connect Tocqueville to the mob.