Mafia Wipeout: How the Feds Put Away an Entire Mob Family_图书大全
Mafia Wipeout: How the Feds Put Away an Entire Mob Family
ISBN: 9780944007525
定价: 190.00
内容简介
One of the continuing sins of the American Establishment has
been a marked proclivity to indulge in self-deception when
confronted by some of the more unacceptable evils that afflict the
nation. There is a canon of beliefs by which the Establishment
lives and works that the consensus considers beyond challenge.
Included in this catechism are sacred dogmas of the uniqueness of
American freedom and democracy: that "only in America," as the
Bruce Springsteen song goes, can an individual rise from poverty
and obscurity to great wealth and prominence and that the various
forms of tyranny and oppression that have afflicted most other
nations on earth "can t happen here."
Yet it is precisely because the self-deceivers blindly insist that
a given social evil "can t happen here" that it often does happen
here m by default because of the absence of concern and action
that would have prevented the evil from flourishing.
The power and influence of the Mafia in the United States is a
case in point. No less a member of the Establishment than J.
Edgar Hoover, who ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation for
forty-eight years, publicly proclaimed time and again that there
was no such thing as organized crime in America. It was not
until a made member of a Mafia crime family, Joseph Valachi,
broke his vow of silence in September, 1963, by testifying before
a Senate committee about the structure, code, and criminal
activities of the Mafia in America, that Hoover came reluctantly to
admit that such a phenomenon as organized crime did exist in the
United States.
Until recently few Americans in positions of leadership could
face the affront to their cherished beliefs that the Mafia s rise to
vast power and influence represented. It could not happen here
but it did: the emergence of a brutal criminal tyranny within
American society based on the willingness to commit murder to
