The Nacirema Dream

The Godfather is the I Ching. The Godfather is the sum of all wisdom. The Godfather is the answer to any question. What should I pack for my summer vacation? “Leave the gun, take the cannoli.” What day of the week is it? “Maunday, Tuesday, Thursday, Wednesday.” And the answer to your question is “Go to the mattresses.”

— Joe in “You’ve Got Mail” (1998)

What is so American about the mob?

I have two random things that are tenuously linked that lead me to this question: Nacirema and Nicholas Calvo. The former being the subject of anthropologist Horace Miner in his 1956 ethnography, and the latter is a subcontractor hauling debris out of Ground Zero as part of Port Authority’s $250 million effort to rebuild the so-called east bathtub at Ground Zero.

So what, you ask.

So, Calvo was a “mob associate” of the Genovese crime family. He was arrested last week in the roundup of 87 people on state and federal indictments, ranging from a 1976 murder, to extortion of monies from a Nascar construction site in Staten Island, to bribery of labor officials.

La Cosa Nostra
According to the NYT, the mob is still deeply entrenched in the construction industry. New York’s five families – Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese — still rack up huge profits from ventures such as loan sharking, labor racketeering, securities fraud, gambling, and drugs. They were once bigger, 26 families ruled the country, with their fingers in everything from labor unions to presidential elections. Now, they’ve merged and consolidated into five.

Similar to U.S. corporations post-1970s.

The indictment of 87 mob members and associates allows us a privileged peek into the structure and function of the Gambino family and the national organization of La Cosa Nostra (see Table 1). The NYT linked to it, and I’ve attached it here. It’s a whopping 170 pages, but skim through the first ten to learn that the mob is a blend of bureaucracy and personality.

The members and associates of the Gambino organized crime family of La Cosa Nostra constituted an “enterprise”, as defined by Title 18, U.S. Code, Section 1961(4), that is, a group of individuals associated in fact. It’s an ongoing organization, whose members functioned as a continuing unit for a common purpose of achieving the objectives of the enterprise. The Gambino family engaged in, and its activities affected, interstate and foreign commerce. The Gambino family was an organized criminal group that operated in the Eastern District of New York and other parts of the United States.

The purposes, methods, and means of the enterprise?

The principal purpose of the Gambino family was to generate money for its members and associates. This purpose was implemented by members and associates of the Gambino family through various criminal activities… Although the primary purpose of the Gambino family was to generate money for its members and associates, the members and associates at times used the resources of the Gambino family to settle personal grievances and vendettas, sometimes with the approval of higher-ranking members of the Gambino family.

Table 1: Structure and Function of the Gambino Family

Nacirema
Calvo, one of the 87 arrestees, was employed by Nacirema as a sales executive. Nacirema (based in Bayonne, NJ) is a professional demolition, environmental contracting, waste transportation, and sanitary services company. Their brochure proudly advertises its role in cleaning up Ground Zero, now the epitome of the U.S. used in justifying how when provoked, we attack back.

Our most valuable and honored assignment is undoubtedly being entrusted as the company assigned to the clean up of the World Trade Center site on 9/11. Our reputation in the industry allowed for us to be contacted immediately after the attacks, at 12:00 noon that Tuesday. Our response was immediate and we were in full force and attendance by 7:00 that evening to begin what would be a year long intense clean up project. With a team of over 100 men on site every single day, working two twelve-hour shifts, 24 hours per day, Nacirema was there.

The mob was involved in many industries, but monopolized trucking firms integral to the operation of any type of construction. Isn’t it interesting that in the age of finance capital, the mob would be savvy enough to realize this, and wield its influence on the parts of the production cycle that is so grounded, to control the flow of spice, the passage of raw materials to construction sites, the spaces of new capital.

Horace Miner told us that:

Nacirema culture is characterized by a highly developed market economy which has evolved in a rich natural habitat. While much of the people’s time is devoted to economic pursuits, a large part of the fruits of these labors and a considerable portion of the day are spent in ritual activity.

Gangster Capitalism
I find this all fascinating because, on the one hand, the mob is a throwback to an earlier phase of capitalism, one based on an earlier generation of immigrant networks and family connections. More similar to the shogunate system, where families dominated industry and military, then the board of Yahoo, for example.

John J. Gotti (Teflon or Dapper Don), the boss of the Gambino family until he was incarcerated, fancied himself a Robin Hood. Stealing from the middle class to enrich his family’s coffers? According to his obit:

Mr. Gotti became organized crime’s most significant symbol of resistance to law enforcement since Al Capone in Chicago 60 years earlier. If he spotted detectives on stakeouts, he was known to taunt them by rubbing one index finger against another and mouthing the words: ”Naughty, naughty.”

On the other hand, maybe La Cosa Nostra is an organization of the future, what social networks capitalism will give rise to. Gangster capitalism, described by Sudhir Venkatesh and Steven Levitt in their ethnography of the Black Kings Nation:

Once a disparate collection of neighborhood sets, with loose ties to one another and with little collaboration, local Black Kings factions were now part of an integrated hierarchy that had eerie resonance, structurally and in spirit, to a corporate franchise in which members held offices and specific roles, and each constituent set was tied to the overall organization through trademark and fiduciary responsibilities…

The Black Kings had seized upon corporate ideology at the dusk of the “Fordist climacteric.” Their members were following their consumptive urges precisely at the time in which free market ideology and the romance of the “bootstrap” mentality had produced a new phenomenal form of late capitalism, namely the individual yuppie who consumed with conspicuous and ferocious intent. The gang’s own increasingly lukewarm and erratic embrace of their political lineage– that of youth mobilized for grassroots concerns– in favor of material gain was a sign of the times, what Adolph Reed perceptively called the “triumph of the commodity form over insurgent black politics.”

Fascinating.

Smedley Butler once proclaimed himself a “gangster for capitalism”. A quote from his 1935 book “War is a Racket”:

I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902-1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.