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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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