But by dint of his unfathomable brilliance, Trump will save us. 🙄
With US President Donald Trump ever more eager to push the limits of the powers of his office, the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision to rule illegal the bulk of his totemic tariff agenda is a reassuring demonstration of enduring checks and balances in American democracy. Trump’s decision to invoke the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act last year, citing a “large and persistent” trade deficit and a supposed fentanyl “crisis”, to justify sweeping import duties was dubious from the start. Besides, as the justices noted, although IEEPA enables the executive to “regulate” imports, this does not extend to tariffs.
The connections in this one interview. Virginia Giuffre reveals Epstein trafficked her to Andrew. She’s hit by a bus then “commits suicide.” The interviewer’s mother gets kidnapped and is still being held for ransom. And today, Andrew was arrested.
BREAKING: An explosive deposition clip just surfaced of Les Wexner revealing that Jeffrey Epstein claimed he was the financial adviser to Élie de Rothschild and the Rothschild family in France. Wexner says he personally verified it: "Well specifically, I talked to Élie de Rothschild. I mentioned that earlier. So he represented their whole family." Wexner also describes Epstein boasting that he advised Google’s founders, Google’s chief technologist, and Jeff Bezos — but admits he never confirmed those claims. Beyond Élie, documents show Epstein helped facilitate a $45 million DOJ settlement involving Ariane de Rothschild and the Edmond de Rothschild Swiss private bank. How deep were Epstein’s financial ties to the Rothschild family?
From Robin Hood to Al Capone, Ryan Gingeras explores how our enduring fascination with the ‘everyman’ bandit built a global criminal empire
Ryan Gingeras grew up hearing Mob folktales courtesy of his grandfather Charley, who worked in a tough bar in the Bronx after serving in the Second World War. Among the dubious regulars was Willie Moretti, an underboss of the Genovese crime family. One day, a man known only as “The Beak” rang the bar and asked for Moretti, who was too drunk to take the call. So, The Beak told Charley to pass on a message: “Deliver the five large, or Willie’s going for a dip in the Hudson in cement shoes.”
Years later, having binged on mafia films, Gingeras worked out that Moretti was probably the inspiration for Luca Brasi, the Corleone enforcer in The Godfather who ends up “sleeping with the fishes”. Whether Moretti heeded The Beak’s message is unknown, but it certainly left an impression on the young Gingeras, who has been fascinated by mafias ever since.
Hence his ambitious new book, Mafia: A Global History, which takes in organised criminals everywhere from Noo Yawk’s goodfellas through to the Chechen mob and the Medellín cocaine cartel, via Ned Kelly, Jamaican Yardies and the Yakuza. We visit the French Connection drug labs that, in the middle of the 20th century, channelled heroin from Turkey to New York; we tour speakeasies, brothels and drug dens in 19th-century San Francisco and 1950s Beirut.
Early mafias, Gingeras says, were little more than gangs of roving bandits, and probably included the likes of Robin Hood. He and his Merry Men, it seems, probably weren’t that charming after all. The first 13th-century ballads, we learn, suggest that he was just another violent highwayman, apparently fond of beheading his victims. While he may well have targeted the rich, “it is far less clear whether he stole or killed for the benefit of the poor”. The idea of his being a medieval social-justice warrior, Gingeras explains, doesn’t arise until the 16th century, when the men of Sherwood Forest were repackaged as “champions of the common people”. Then, as now, the public couldn’t help but have a sneaking admiration for those who take on the system. As Gingeras puts it: “This kind of bandit, like the gangster or mafioso of popular media today, is the everyman.”
Early nation states, he points out, were practically mafias themselves. The basic social contract, whereby citizens lay down their arms in exchange for protection by a sovereign, is itself a grand form of “protection” racket, the only difference being that taxes sound nicer than an extorted “tribute”. Back in those more lawless times, sovereigns often co-opted local brigands as lieutenants anyway, capitalising on the fear they inspired.
An early example, Gingeras says, was Ali Pasha, a powerful Albanian bandit whom Lord Byron met on his Mediterranean travels. Pasha was by then an Ottoman-appointed governor, despite being, in Byron’s words, “a remorseless tyrant, guilty of the most horrible cruelties”. From the perspective of Turkey’s Ottoman sultans, who didn’t need him to do much except keep order, he was a canny appointment. “Having the likes of Ali Pasha on the government’s side,” Gingeras writes, “was better than gambling that he could somehow be defeated or crushed.”
As governments grew stronger, old-school banditry died out. Roads, railways and the telephone network opened up the forests, deserts and mountains that had served as the outlaws’ hideouts. But the more rules the modern state imposed on people’s lives, the more there was money to be made by breaking them – particularly in the markets for booze, prostitution and drugs.
A watershed moment was Thomas De Quincey’s 1821 book Confessions of an English Opium-Eater. Much as De Quincey intended it as a cautionary tale, temperance-minded Victorians noted how much fun he suggested it could be to get stoned. The book, Gingeras says, became “a milestone for the movements that compelled states to punish anyone found dealing in ‘dangerous’ intoxicants”. From this was born the first war on drugs, with the Hague Convention of 1912 restricting the trade of both morphine and cocaine. Contrary to the claims of many drug-legalisation campaigners today, these steps weren’t taken to protect the business interests of alcohol sellers, but they, in tandem with Prohibition in the US from 1920 to 1933, did give mafias worldwide a fresh shot in the arm, and led to the first use of the term “organised crime”.
American mafias would become as powerful as corporations. (Gingeras likens Al Capone to “a hyper-malevolent Henry Ford”.) Post-war, they grew even more so: in the socially permissive 1960s, the black market for narcotics boomed. By 1988, American organised crime was making an estimated $25bn in profit a year – more than Exxon, then America’s largest firm.
At the same time, drugs helped to dissolve the old mafia codes of “family ties, trust, loyalty, obedience”, sparking violence that made the old mafia bosses look as respectable (in Gingeras’s phrase) as “company men at IBM”. And America’s modern mobsters, in turn, were mere children compared with the new cartels in Colombia and Mexico, whose feuds would wipe out not just individual mobsters but their entire families.
Well-armed, well-financed and ruthless, today’s cartels are as hard to tame as medieval bandits were. The European market for cocaine alone is now worth several billion pounds a year; much of it arrives in industrial quantities via Dutch and Belgian ports. Gingeras doesn’t cover this, but the cartels importing the drugs have also started to flex their muscles, bribing customs officers and threatening law-enforcement officials; in November, eight people were arrested for a plot to kill Brussels’s chief prosecutor. Some modern nation states have even become mafias themselves: take Venezuela, whose erstwhile leader, Nicolás Maduro, was last month arrested by the US on cocaine-trafficking charges – entirely plausible, whether a convenient pretext or not.
In general, Gingeras writes well and joins the historical dots. For instance, the drug chemists of Marseille who ran the “French Connection” heroin labs in America later set up cocaine-processing plants in Colombia. But covering so many mafias, or mafia-like groups, in 400 pages means a lot of jumping around, with some characters reduced to pencil sketches. And while a collective history may have its place, it’s up against classic books from Honor Thy Father, Gay Talese’s insider look at the Bonanno family, to Roberto Saviano’s Italian mafia exposé Gomorrah. Nonetheless, for those who want to know how mafias began – especially those as fascinated by it all as Gingeras – this book may prove to be an offer they can’t refuse.
★★★☆☆
Mafia: A Global History is published by Simon & Schuster at £25. To order your copy, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books
A globe-trotting history of organised crime from the Mafia to the Yakuza
HISTORY
Mafia: A Global History
Ryan Gingeras
Simon and Schuster, $37.99
Mafia: A Global History
Ryan Gingeras
Simon and Schuster, $37.99
American professor and historian Ryan Gingeras charts a steady course between academic respectability and formulating the odd unexpected sentence that will rock you on your heels. Try this for an original thought: “Young states are often born resembling a protection racket. Demands for taxes, tribute or spoils are among the essential features of a proclaimed state.”
“Mafia” is a term that appears to have existed in post-Renaissance Italy, although Gingeras admits that after the arrival of many North African Muslims in Sicily over the centuries, it may actually be derived from an Arabic root meaning “braggart”. To his credit, he rejects a semantically restrictive view of the term and generally treats it almost as a synonym for any form of gangsterism – practicing the dark arts of violence to satisfy one’s greed or, in the most notorious cases, bloodlust. Ned Kelly earns his rightful place in this pantheon.
His more expansive definition allows the author of Mafia to bring the creation of an entire generation of criminal confederates in Stalin’s Russia within his purview. And that is surely justified on scale alone: “Between 1934 and 1952, an estimated 18 million Soviet citizens were interned in the country’s massive gulag system.”
Unfortunately for the Russian people, the rise of oligarchs and a recognisable “Russian Mafia” after the fall of communism enabled a British reporter to announce that by 1994 Moscow had become “the world’s crime capital”, with “more mafia victims per week than in the worst days of Chicago, more casinos than Las Vegas per head of population, [and] more prostitutes and massage parlours than anywhere else” on the globe.
Long before they were called mafia (capitalised or lower-case), they were known as bandits or, in medieval England, highwaymen. In the Middle Ages, and indeed in ancient times, bandits roamed the countryside. Ironically, civilisation – in its technical sense of city-building – is to blame for mafiosi replacing banditry. As Gingeras says: “The dual forces of industrialisation and urbanisation created increasingly difficult environments for bandits to survive [in].”
Brigandage can be spurred on by the disintegration of a state: China’s triads flourished in the anarchic vacuum created by the breakdown of the imperial state in the early 20th century. Or, paradoxically, by the opposite tendency, the formation of a state. Naples’ camorra and Sicily’s Mafia were both borne aloft by the revolutionary forces that unified the Italian nation – in 1861, not 1860 as the author twice mistakenly asserts. (That incorrect dating of an important historical event is one of several to mar an otherwise exemplary work. To cite but two, Egypt wrested its independence from Britain in 1922, not 1919, and Mikhail Gorbachev came to office in 1985, not 1986.).
In Japan, as Gingeras adroitly points out, the yakuza had long operated unobtrusively “but matured alongside Japan’s reinvention as a nation state”.
Apart from a wholly understandable focus on the history of Mafia activities in America, Gingeras gives special (and equally understandable) weight to its machinations in Italy.
We are reminded how the brave mafia-hunting judge Giovanni Falcone was assassinated, and of just how unequal a battle it is when the state – which might be presumed in favour of upholding the law – cultivates criminal operatives. In the 1970s Silvio Berlusconi hired the services of a Sicilian gangster to guarantee his safety. “As Italy’s three-time prime minister, he raised eyebrows when he watered down anti-Mafia laws and declared magistrates who fought organised crime mentally disturbed.”
In Mexico, nine decades of one-party rule proved an ideal seedbed for fascist actions when the government’s will was thwarted. The eagerness of new president Felipe Calderon (in office from 2006 to 2012) to unleash the Mexican Armed Forces in built-up areas, though ostensibly aimed at stamping out cross-border drug traffic, “resulted in an orgy of violence unlike anything the country had seen since 1910”.
The predominant tenor of this impressive book is not doom and gloom but sober realism. Mafias will be with us until men turn into angels. Gingeras also records what the global community has achieved in its fight against darkness. On the cusp of the new millennium, the United Nations convened a conference in Sicily’s main city, Palermo, where governments of 120 countries inked a fresh Convention against Transnational Organised Crime.
The Italian government was in self-congratulatory mode, boasting that it had the Cosa Nostra on the run. Maybe so, but Gingeras adds, without the need for further comment, that the meeting took place under the watchful gaze of 10,000 security officers
