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347 Annals Am. Acad. Pol. & Soc. Sci. ix (1963)

handle is hein.cow/anamacp0347 and id is 1 raw text is: FOREWORD Organized crime is still with us-bigger and better than ever. It is bigger in its gross take and better in its refined manner. The evidence is contained in the pages that follow and in the leads to further sources in the copious footnotes. Over many decades, the phenomenon of organized crime in America has intrigued a mixed assortment of thinkers and doers: cops and columnists, crime commissions and investigatory commissions, social workers and sociologists, lawyers and law- makers, political reformers and political scientists, psychoanalysts and anthro- pologists, scholars of the behavioral and misbehavioral conduct of our conforming and nonconforming society. Their areas of interest fall into three major cate- gories: theory, practice, prevention. And it is into these three sections that the following essays are assorted. The three essays under Theory by Woetzel, Sellin, and Bloch represent three different though not necessarily contradictory approaches. Woetzel offers a gen- eral overview of organized crime in America today, based on a study sponsored by the Ford Fund for Public Affairs Research, and then digs for the taproot of the underworld in the contradictions between our mores and our morality. Mo- rality is what we preach publicly; mores is what we do privately. We feed our conscience by writing morality into law; we feed the underworld by putting our mores into practice. Sellin describes organized crime as a business enterprise, involved in an illegal undertaking or carrying on a legal trade by illegal means. The gangsters sub- scribe to the tenets of American entrepreneurship, albeit in their perverted way. Bloch focuses on the juvenile-delinquent gang, for many generations the reservoir of fighting manpower for the underworld. His provocative essay calls for new investigations that would relate the gang to the total culture rather than solely to the frictions arising between an impoverished subculture and an affluent dominant culture. The section on Practice contains five regional pieces that discuss the standing, style, and new enterprises of organized crime today. The Chicago story, as told by Virgil Peterson, sees the modern syndicate as the direct lineal descendant of the old Capone empire: less ostentatious, more subtle, and just as ruthless. Dwight Strong, focusing on New England, describes the growth of organized crime from 1933 to the present in that area, noting that the Yankee pattern is more refined but just as virulent. New York's Attorney General, Louis Lefkowitz, discusses an area of more recent penetration by the underworld syndicates; namely, the stock market. Alvin J. T. Zumbrun centers on gambling in Maryland, a business grossing about $50,000,000 a year in that area, conducted with the assistance of millions of our almost-law-abiding citizens and composing the backbone of organized crime in America today. George Edwards, Police Commissioner of Detroit, tells a first-person story, a blow-by-blow description of a new chief carrying through a cleanup while maintaining maximum respect for the liberties of the civilian. The author brings to his piece the point of view of a man who stepped down from the Michigan Supreme Court for his constabulary assignment out of a sense of profound conviction that the very tough law-enforcement tangle of Detroit could be handled within the framework of our traditional freedoms. ix

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