-Caveat Lector- an excerpts from: On The Take - From Petty Crooks to Presidents William J. Chambliss©1978 Indiana University Press ISBN 0-253-34244-9 ----- An amazing book. Quite interesting. Documents a national system of pay-off and corruption. In print or can be found used. Highly recommended. Om K --[1]-- CHAPTER EIGHT The Enemy Is Us IN THE MIDDLE AGES, when Anglo-American criminal law was being formed, there was no pretense of applying the law uniformly across class lines. When prostitution, gambling, public intoxication, drug use, and the like were made criminal, it was not intended nor was it the practice to apply these laws indiscriminately to all social classes. The upper classes were free to gamble, engage prostitutes, or take drugs without fear of interference from the state. In time the emerging commercial, mercantile, and industry-owning classes sought to use the state as a means of equalizing their position vis a vis the heretofore dominant landed aristocracy. The law was one of the means through which this struggle was resolved. By insisting on the right to a trial by jury, by establishing an adversary system of justice, by creating a set of social relations built around contractual obligations, the emerging class of businessmen and manufacturers was able to bring the landed aristocracy to heel; at least the two ruling classes were made more or less equal in the law. The lower classes were of course excluded from this equality. The necessity of paying an attorney for protection in the courts assured that neither the aristocracy nor the nouveau riche would have to share state power with the working classes. Thus was a solution forged: but so too were the seeds of conflict planted by that solution. Relying on the moral,,' principle of equality before the law and depicting the state, .as a value-neutral organ for settling disputes gave rise to endless criticism from those who observed that "some are more equal than others." This process is lived over and over in the history of law: a solution is forged which attempts to resolve conflicts that' arise out of basic contradictions in the structure of social relations created by the political and economic forms of the era. The solution, however, creates social relations which themselves generate further conflicts reflecting underlying contradictions which generate further attempts to resolve the contradictions. The first laws prohibiting gambling, bribery, official corruption, vice, prostitution, drug use, and usury were each in their turn an attempt to resolve problems stemming from contradictions. Some were intended to help control the "teeming masses of urban dwellers who walk the streets. seeking money by any means fair or foul." Others, such as' anti-opium laws, came as a consequence of international competition as it developed into a worldwide, allencompassing economic system. Laws against usury are illustrative. They helped stabilize, the banking industry by reducing competition. Laws were enacted that established legal limits to the amount of interest that could be charged. They solved a problem of competition among moneylenders, helped stabilize financing for both industry and banking, made life more predictable and monopolies better able to form in the banking industry. At the same time, usury laws opened up the possibility for people to operate illegally. If the banks could not charge excessively high rates of interest, then they would not loan to people who were highly risky. Alas, risky people have as much need for money as those with good credit. Not being able to get credit in a bank does not reduce one's desire to borrow, but it may increase one's willingness to pay higher than legally allowable interest. Enter the usurer. For the usurer can charge excessively high interest and therefore make a profit even from customers who are a greater risk than banks will accept as borrowers. Result: a structurally induced illegal business is created as soon as the solution to competition and "chaos" in the banking industry is solved by establishing legal limits to interest. All, of course, done with the best of intentions. Notice, however, that those who engage in usury face a number of administrative problems not faced by banks. Most important is the fact that usurers, because they are engaged in illegal acts, cannot turn to the state and ask that the law be invoked to force debtors to pay back what they have borrowed. Usurers thus, in order to protect their investments and guarantee their profits, must establish their own law-enforcement arm. They must employ a staff of people who are capable of "persuading" those who have borrowed but failed to pay back their debts that it is better to pay the debts than to have them hanging over their heads. Usurers utilize many of the same techniques that the law employs in the service of banks: they confiscate property, threaten to expose the person to public shame, and if none of these are effective they resort to corporal or at times even capital punishment. The latter is of course utilized only as a means of demonstrating to other wouldbe renegers that it is unwise not to pay your debts. The same principle, need it be said, underlies the justification for capital punishment when it is imposed by the state on people who presumably have committed acts that are "beyond the tolerance limits of the community." The acts vary; the problem that gives rise to them is identical, namely, that some people are not living up to the standards others with more power think they should. To keep the heresy from spreading, a life is taken. It is ironic that those who are least likely to be able to afford the high interest of usurers are those most likely to have to turn to them for loans: the poor as well as the rich are protected from being charged more than the legal limit on interest by banks and licensed financiers. It is an ironic manifestation of political economic contradictions that the laws that keep many illegal activities from being rampant in the "better neighborhoods" have the effect of concentrating them in precisely those parts of the city where the people are most likely to be already disillusioned by "The System," that is, in the slums. Thus a further contradiction: laws which were not initially intended to be enforced against the rich result in pushing illegal businesses into areas where the poor and working classes live and are thereby exposed to the hypocrisy of the law in everyday life. Other Networks, Other Times Robert Winter-Berger was for five years a lobbyist in Washington. On one of his frequent visits to the office of John McCormack, Speaker of the House of Representatives, the back door to the Speaker's office suddenly burst open and Lyndon Johnson, President of the United States, exploded into the room. Winter-Berger in Washington. Pay-Off reports: Johnson disregarded me, but I can never forget the sight of him, crossing the room in great strides. In a loud, hyster-ical voice he said: "John, that son of a bitch is going to ruin me. If that cocksucker talks, I'm gonna land in jail." By the time he had finished these words he had reached the chair at McCormack's desk, sat down, and buried his face in his hands. Then I knew why he had come here, and I realized how desperate the situation must be. To the best of my recollection at that shocking moment, McCormack said: "Mr. President, things may not be that bad." He got up and went to Johnson and placed a hand on his shoulder. "Jesus Christ!" Johnson exclaimed. "Things couldn't be worse, and you know it. We've talked about this shit often enough. Why wasn't it killed, John?" When Johnson looked up at McCormack, I could see he was crying. He buried his face again. "We tried, Lyndon;' McCormack said. "Everybody did." Johnson said: "I practically raised that motherfucker, and now he's gonna make me the first President of the United States to spend the last days of his life behind bars." He was hysterical. "You won't," McCormack said helplessly. "How much money does the greedy bastard have to make?" Johnson said. "For a lousy five thousand bucks, he ruins his life, he ruins my life, and Christ knows who else's. Five thousand bucks, and the son of a bitch has millions." "We all make mistakes," McCormack said, glancing at me. "How could he have known, Mr. President?" "He should have given him the goddam machines," Johnson said. "He should have known better. Now we're all up shit creek. We're all gonna rot in jail." "We'll think of something," McCormack said. He rubbed Johnson's shoulder. "Please. Calm down. Control yourself." In a burst, Johnson said: "It's me they're after. It's me they want. Who the fuck is that shit heel? But they'll get him up there in front of an open committee and all the crap will come pouring out and it'll be my neck. Jesus Christ, John, my whole life is at stake!" "Listen, Lyndon," McCormack said, "remember the sign Harry had on his desk-THE BUCK STOPS HERE? Maybe we can make this buck stop at Bobby." "You have to," Johnson cried out. "He's got to take this rap himself. He's the one that made the goddam stupid mistake. Get to him. Find out how much more he wants, for crissake. I've got to be kept out of this." "You will, Lyndon:' said McCormack. "You will." The President moaned. "Oh, I tell you, John, it takes just one prick to ruin a man in this town. just one person has to rock the boat, and a man's life goes down the drain. And I'm getting fucked by two bastards-Bobby and that Williams son of a bitch. And all he wants is headlines." "It'll pass, Lyndon," McCormack said. "This will pass Johnson got angry. "Not if we just sit around on our asses and think we can watch it pass. You've got to get to Bobby, John. Tell him I expect him to take the rap for this one on his own. Tell him I'll make it worth his while. Remind him that I always have." "All right, Lyndon ."[17] Johnson had gone through this tirade with scant notice that Winter-Berger was in the room. When he finally took note of him, he asked McCormack if he was "all right." Assured that Winter-Berger was all right and a friend of Nat Voloshen, a major Washington lobbyist, Johnson asked Winter-Berger to take a message to Voloshen: "Tell Nat that I want him to get in touch with Bobby Baker as soon as possible-tomorrow, if he can. Tell Nat to tell Bobby that I will give him a million dollars if he takes this rap. Bobby must not talk. I'll see to it that he gets a million-dollar settlement. Then have Nat get back to John here, or to Eddie Adams later tomorrow, so I can know what Bobby says. Bobby Baker, the "motherfucker" Johnson had "practically raised," began his Washington career at age fourteen as a page for the Senate. By 1955 he had been hired by Johnson, then Senate majority leader, as his secretary. His salary was nine thousand dollars a year, and his net worth, he stated, was eleven thousand dollars. By 1963, only eight years later, his personal fortune had grown to over two million dollars. Presumably another million was added when he "took the rap" and did not implicate the President. Baker's rise to fortune came by selling favors and influence and information and by investing in businesses owned and managed by racketeers: among them the vending machine business, which was in the end his downfall. Among the racketeers Bobby Baker was closest to was his and Lyndon Johnson's neighbor, Sam Levinson, one of Meyer Lansky's closest associates and a partner with Lansky in Las Vegas holdings. Levinson contributed $250,000 to Hubert Humphrey's 1968 Presidential campaign against Nixon. The crimes for which Lyndon Johnson thought he might be the first President to end his term of office in prisonthe crimes he was willing to pay Bobby Baker one million dollars to conceal-were never disclosed. Abe Fortas, one of Johnson's appointees to the U.S. Supreme Court, was less fortunate, and, when his links with a notorious financial wheeler-dealer in Florida were revealed, Fortas had to resign from the Supreme Court. It is even possible that had Baker revealed even part of what he knew about Johnson's involvement in criminal acts, they would have paled what is publicly known now about Richard Nixon's involvements. Richard Nixon continued the Johnson tradition of selling favors and protecting investments for those who supported him politically. The textile industry contributed over $400,000 to Nixon's reelection campaign and the oil industry over five million just one day before the law went into effect requiring public disclosure of campaign contributions. For their contribution the textile industry won a tariff on the importation of textiles from Japan which assured them of a high stable price for their products for years to come. According to columnist, Jack Anderson, in 1972 the president of McDonald's hamburger chain contributed $250,000 to Nixon's election and won in return an exemption of high school employees from the minimum wage law-an exemption personally written in by President Nixon and one which exempted most of McDonald's employees in the race to cover America with hamburgers. (In 1968 he contributed only $1000.) The milk industry contributed a million dollars to Nixon's campaign and was rewarded with a boost in milk prices during a period when prices on everything were frozen to curb inflation. ITT promised to contribute $400,000 to underwrite the expenses of the Republican National Convention. The Department of justice subsequently dropped an antitrust suit against ITT. As Richard Kleindienst said: "I am not a prophylactic sack with respect to the White House."[18} Meanwhile, as assistant attorney general, Kleindienst, it will be remembered, was one of the principal people in the Justice Department giving the green light for the U. S. attorney in the state of Washington to investigate and expose the organization of illegal businesses there. He was not, however, quite so concerned about such phenomena elsewhere. During his confirmation for U.S. attorney general, when John Mitchell resigned to take over the management of Nixon's reelection campaign, it was revealed that Kleindienst had cleared a U. S. attorney, Harry Steward, who had been charged with obstructing investigations into corruption in San Diego: Nixon territory. [19] Nixon, Johnson, Kleindienst, Mitchell: these men are not aberrations in an otherwise well-working machine. They are merely acting out roles that emerge time and time again. Lincoln Steffens was not writing about 1900, and I am not writing about 1970. The story is told over and over. George Washington started us off by unashamedly using the office of the Presidency to enhance his personal fortune. During the administration of Ulysses Grant the Union Pacific Railway directors were caught pocketing money from government bonds, and Grant's vice-president was implicated in the plot. During Grant's second term of office, frauds totaling some seventy-five million dollars were unveiled, and Grant's secretary of war (who was forced to resign) as well as his personal secretary were involved. In the 1840s Martin Van Buren was reported to be so corrupt that there were songs written eulogizing his willingness to sell anything he controlled. Warren Harding was perhaps less fortunate than his predecessor or those to follow, since his administration's scandal ("Teapot Dome") has become a pseudonym for political corruption (perhaps soon to be replaced by "Watergate"). The Teapot Dome Scandal was only one of many rumored during Harding's administration, and he was spared much of the torture of the scandal by his well-timed death. The scandal involved the leasing of government land at Teapot Dome, Wyoming, to the oil magnate H. D. Sinclair. In the end, the secretary of the interior, Albert B. Fall, was proven to have personally benefited substantially from this and other land leases. Fall was eventually tried, convicted, and sentenced to jail (one year) for having accepted a bribe. President Roosevelt's administration was relatively free from scandal, although this is probably more a result of the crises (Depression and World War 11) during that administration acting as a smokescreen than the purity of the politicians. Harry Truman's administration saw a White House military general, Harry H. Vaughn, accepting a deep freeze in return for using his influence. Donald Dawson, a close Truman aide, was implicated in a scandal involving the misuse of public funds and influence by the Reconstruction Finance Corporation. The Internal Revenue Service was involved in yet another Truman-era scandal which culminated in a conspiracy trial against Truman's former appointments secretary. Sherman Adams, one of Eisenhower's closest associates, was found to have accepted numerous gifts (among them a vicuna coat) from Bernard Goldfine, who was at the time trying to influence the Federal Trade Commission. Sher-man Adams ultimately resigned as Eisenhower's special assistant. On the state and local levels corruption of police and politicians is revealed with a regularity that is as certain as physical laws. On August 3, 1974, the Knapp Commission, which had been investigating rumors of corruption in the New York City Police Department, reported: We found corruption to be widespread. It took various forms depending upon the activity involved, appearing at its most sophisticated among plainclothesmen assigned to enforce gambling laws.... Plainclothesmen, participating in what is known in police parlance as a "pad," collected regular biweekly or monthly payment's amounting to as much as $3,500 from each of the gambling establishments in the area under his Jurisdiction, and divided the take in equal shares. The monthly share per man (called the "nut") ranged from $300 and $400 in midtown Manhattan to $1,500 in Harlem. When supervisors were involved they received a share and a half... The Commission found evidence that payoffs were widespread (though not always so well organized) in the other divisions of the New York Police Department as well. Frank Tannenbaum wrote in Crime and the Community: It is clear from the evidence at hand-that a considerable measure of the crime in the community is made possible and perhaps inevitable by the peculiar connection that exists between the political organizations of our large cities and the criminal activities of various gangs that are permitted and even encouraged to operate.[20] Just as criminal liaisons between law, economics, and politics are a mainstay of buying and selling public favors, so are they also a mainstay of regular business practices. The Far East and African sales manager for a leading European business-machine manufacturer explained to me how he sells his company's products by bribing government officials. In some countries the bribes are exorbitant; in some they are "a reasonable five or ten percent," but everywhere, whether selling to government, large corporations, or retail outlets, the principle is the same: the people who give you large orders expect and receive a bribe. An example of a particularly exorbitant (but not unusual) transaction consummated by the above-mentioned sales manager was the sale of one million dollars worth of business machines to the Congolese government. To secure the sale it was first necessary for him to meet and wine and dine the fifteen top government officials who would have to approve the order. Once the order was placed, the company kicked back $250,000 to the fifteen people, including the minister of finance, the purchasing agent, and so forth. To mark the final irony, the machines were unusable as delivered since the order did not include requisition of an auxiliary machine necessary for the base machine to be operative. No one complained; the company was delighted not just by the size of the order ($750,000 after kickback) but also because the corrupt nature of the purchase enabled the company to double its usual price and thus vastly increase its profits. And of course the sales manager received credit for making a very impressive sale. Only the farmers and workers whose taxes supplied the funds were harmed by the transaction. Kickbacks, bribes, collusion, and corruption are as much a part of corporate business as they are a part of crime networks everywhere. So too are public lies and disclaimers of businessmen and politicians caught in the act. In 1967 and 1968 the top executives and accountants of Lockheed Aircraft, with the complicity of high-ranking officers of the Air Force, falsified public reports of the cost of overruns on the C-5A airplane. Complicity of the Pentagon was purchased by the favors Lockheed does for the high-ranking officers, including, perhaps most significantly, the prospect of high-paying jobs in the aircraft industry upon retirement from the service. Investigative agencies such as the FBI and the IRS are co-opted in similar if not identical ways. Retired FBI agents become "special investigators" or are employed by banks, corporations, or state governments at high-paying jobs. Meat inspectors for the U.S. Department of Agriculture are systematically bribed by the meat industry through extra pay for overtime, free meat, and a variety of smaller "courtesies."[21] Those who do not accept the bribes or who push too hard to enforce meat-processing requirements are isolated, fired, or in some cases even criminally charged for malfeasance of office. We could of course go on indefinitely with such examples but the point would be the same: there is an inherent tendency of business, law enforcement, and politics to engage systematically in criminal behavior. This is so not because there are too many laws but rather because criminal behavior is good business, it makes sense, it is by far the best, most efficient, most profitable way to organize the activities and operations of political offices, businesses, law enforcement agencies, and trade unions in a capitalist democracy. It should not surprise us, then, that crime networks in the larger cities of the nation are ubiquitous. City after city has been exposed and particular network members purged, usually the least powerful ones: the owners of the taverns, gambling halls, whorehouses, and businesses that produce illegal goods and services. Occasionally the cleanup includes some political and law-enforcement people, normally lower-level, relatively powerless ones in the political economy of the city, state, or nation. Occasionally higherlevel people are implicated, even at times the President of the United States. At the turn of the century the cities were New York, Philadelphia, Minneapolis, St. Louis, Kansas City, and Chicago. In the last ten years scandals have broken in New York, Seattle, Portland, Newark, Philadelphia, Chicago, Detroit, and Miami, to name but a few. Like the persistent "white-collar crime," nothing changes as a result. Networks come and go but the process by which they are produced goes on and the consequences remain the same. Whether it is Meyer Lansky or Santo Trafficante, Lyndon Johnson or Richard Nixon, the network remains in control of large segments of America's political economy. By now it should be clear that the logic of capitalism is a logic within which the emergence of crime networks is inevitable. Capitalism is based on the private ownership of property. Property is acquired by selling products, providing services, or selling one's labor. By law most of the products and services which can be exchanged for money at a profit are legal-that is, the state has decreed that it is permissible for people to buy, sell, and exchange these goods and services. At one time in American history most of the products and services which support the crime industry were legal: gambling, high-interest loans, even prostitution and heroin. Thomas Jefferson himself established a brothel near the University of Virginia for Virginia's young intelligentsia to have a readily available outlet for their sexual urges. In time some commodities and services came to be defined as illegal. But the demand for these things did not disappear with their transference from legality to illegality, nor did the profits to be had. Indeed, in some cases the profits increased as a consequence of their newly established illegality. Marketing procedures had to be adapted to the fact that these things were now illegal-new methods of collecting debts for example-but the process remained the same. Businessmen and politicians and entrepreneurs invested in, coordinated, and managed these (now) illegal industries in the same way they had managed them when they were legal. Capitalism provides the basic conditions, but it is the organization of politics in the U.S. that joins the capitalist mode of production to make the ground fertile for crime networks. The key feature of American political organization that combines with markets and profits in illegal goods and services to create networks is the peculiar necessity for American politicians to spend vast sums of money in order to get elected to office. Only recently has it been necessary for politicians to declare the size and sources of their campaign contributions. The results of their declarations are staggering. Richard Nixon admits to spending over sixty million dollars on his 1972 Presidential campaign. Disclosures of unreported campaign contributions suggest that even this figure may be a gross underestimate of the actual amount spent. Nelson Rockefeller is reported to have spent over sixty million dollars in his campaign for the Presidential nomination and the governorship of New York. An American politician must obtain an incredible amount of money if he or she is to be successful. Sources of funds are or course limited. Individual donors giving ten and twenty dollars cannot begin to provide the necessary funds. Especially desperate are those politicians who would run on a platform that does not appeal to the interests and ideology of the wealthiest people in their area. Thus a great irony results: it may even be that the politicians most likely to be vulnerable to the influence of crime networks are those who espouse the more egalitarian, working-class, or populist economic and political principles. So far as election to public office in the U.S. is concerned, money is everything. In 1974, out of thirty successful candidates for the Senate, twenty-eight of them spent more money than their opponents. Crime networks with access to billions of dollars in untaxed, unreported, and unaccountable funds are a valuable source of money to oil capitalism's political machinery. In the natural course of events some politicians will come to cooperate more fully than others, some will come to compete for a larger share of network profits, and some will come to reap the profits for their personal as well as their political use. Still others will grow dependent on the money to finance campaigns and occasionally to meet "personal emergencies." Through it all the crime network becomes an institutionalized, fixed, and permanent link in the chain of a nation's political economy. That is what has happened in America. That is why crime networks persist year after year with only the faces and methods of operation changing. Nor have other capitalist countries escaped the plague. In 1969-70 1 researched the relationship between illegal and legal businesses in Nigeria and found essentially the same sorts of interrelations between politics, business, and systematic violation of the law that one finds in America. What is perhaps more surprising, given our biases, is to discover that crime networks are also pervasive throughout Europe and Scandinavia. In 1975-76, a team of sociologists- lawyers from Sweden and I researched illegal businesses there. Despite the constant claims by the Swedish National Police to the contrary, we discovered an immense and highly organized consortium of businessmen with international connections and local penetration of politics that was firmly entrenched in the illegal enterprises of drug trafficking, gambling, usury, and even the ancient shakedown of "legitimate" business for "protection." This is not to deny that there are differences. For some purposes the differences may be more important than the similarities: the extent to which the police are corrupt from the top to the bottom may vary from place to place. The variations, however important they may be, should not obscure the fact that the systematic organization of illegal activities for profit is as characteristic of capitalism as bureaucracy is characteristic of the modern state. Is this to say that capitalism alone creates the networks? Hardly. I did not research systematically in Eastern Europe, but I was not on land ten minutes in Poland before I was offered the opportunity to exchange U.S. dollars on the black market for ten times the official rate. Stories of high-level payoffs and corruption abound. A large percentage of people in Poland report that they have to pay bribes to obtain official favors. Whether these isolated facts add up to a crime network and the systematic penetration of the political economy by the organization of illegal activities for profit is only guesswork, but it is suggestive of that possibility. Does this weaken the argument that it is the structural characteristics of capitalist democracies (especially the contradictions that inhere in these political economies) that create and sustain crime networks? Not at all. Cigarette smoking causes lung cancer but other things cause lung cancer as well. The kind of "socialism" that is extant in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe shares with Western capitalism many essential features: a rigid class system, the use of money for exchange, and the alienation of workers from the product of their labor, to mention only a few. It may be that these essential characteristics are fundamental. Unfortunately we lack the systematic comparisons with other countries to be very confident about such speculations. What can be done? The answer depends on the question implied. To stop gambling, drug taking, prostitution, and usury would require a change in the political economy possible only through revolution. At the moment, that possibility seems rather remote. We must then lower our sights substantially and recognize that, as Murray Morgan said with respect to prostitution in Seattle in the early days of that city's checkered history, "where demand was so sustained and so obvious somebody was certain to try to hustle up an adequate supply." As long as providing things that are heavily in demand is illegal, then, given the political economy of capitalist democracies, crime networks of one sort or another are inevitable. Thus, to eliminate or at least reduce the magnitude and change the character of crime networks requires first and foremost the decriminalization of these things. There are already some clear lessons to be learned from other countries. Years ago Great Britain placed the problem of opiate addiction (heroin, morphine, etc.) squarely in the hands of the medical profession. While the results of this move have not been to abolish completely traffic in opiates in Great Britain, the extent to which the enterprise is profitable, the degree to which the market has been controlled, and the general effectiveness of the program have kept crime networks from forming around the illicit traffic in opiates in Britain in anything like the same way they have formed around opiates in the United States, France, Sweden, and The Netherlands-to mention but a few countries. The proposal that heroin use should be decriminalized and medical doctors permitted to prescribe heroin for addicts has been made time after time. After an extensive inquiry into the subject, the American Medical Association and the American Bar Association proposed that this policy be "seriously considered" over twenty years ago. Opposition by the federal agencies responsible for enforcing the laws (whose agents benefit directly and indirectly from the existence of crime networks) has meant certain defeat for such proposals. We may, however, be in a somewhat better position with respect to the possibility of legalizing gambling. As the economic recession—inflation we are presently witnessing puts pressure on state and federal governments to increase tax revenues, gambling is more and more attractive as a source of untapped revenue. In other words, there are some powerful interests (the state itself) capable of legalizing gambling in order to increase their own revenues. When this happens we would be naive to suppose that the networks that have previously profited from the gambling would suddenly be replaced by legitimate businessmen. The networks, it must be remembered, are already populated by legitimate businessmen. The management would not change but legalized gambling would provide taxes, a reduction of associated illegal actions dictated by the illegal nature of crime networks, and a somewhat greater ability to oversee network activities. In short, we could expect to have the government and its bureaucracies relate to the organizations which supply gambling in much the same way they relate to other businesses. Is it better to have ITT buy my congressman and lobby for its own peculiar selfinterests, or is it better to have Meyer Lansky and Company doing it? Perhaps it makes no difference in the long run. I suspect that at least having a small amount of tax benefit that goes into welfare or education or roads is better than the present situation. It seems quite certain that if drugs and gambling were decriminalized, crime networks as we have known them since the turn of the century would disappear. The fortunes made in these illegal enterprises could then become respectable in the same way that the fortunes of the robber barons-the Mellons, Rockefellers, Vanderbilts, and Kennedys—have become respectable. It would then be possible for us to see, in another generation or two, those who inherit the wealth of Meyer Lansky, David Beck, and Jimmy Hoffa running against a Dupont, a Rockefeller, a Mellon, a Heinz, or a Kennedy for President of the United States. That may not be progress, but it is consistent with historical precedent. Whatever changes might be forthcoming, one fundamental truth must be grasped: It is not the goodness or badness of the people that matters. The people who ran (or run) the crime network in Seattle were (and are) not amoral men and women. On the contrary, they are for the most part moral, committed, hard-working, God-fearing politicians and businessmen. It seems paradoxical perhaps that someone could kill, threaten, and coerce people to protect himself and still adhere to a set of moral principles to which "all of us" adhere. But from his point of view he may be protecting far more important things than merely his own skin. He may be protecting an ideology for which he stands. He may be protecting the community from being taken over by people whose ideas are, from his viewpoint, bound to lead the community and the nation down the road to ruin. "The Fourth of July oration is the front for graft," Lincoln Steffens wrote. It is often the sincere belief of the grafters that they are also performing a public service and living up to the principles of the Fourth of July oration. The people in the crime network in Seattle and those who cooperated with it were simply acting within both the logic and the values of America's political economy. They were operating to maximize profits, to protect their investments from competition, to expand markets, and to provide services and goods demanded by "the people." These are all the logical implications of a capitalist economy. These-or closely related-ideas also become values. Profit is a value: something intrinsically worth striving for. Being shrewd, pragmatic people, they know that whatever value one chooses to stress inevitably involves a compromise with some other values. Profit may necessitate compromising strict adherence to the law, but then so does mere survival in the realities of political life. You use whatever resources you can to maximize profits and increase capital. Whenever possible, you also operate to help your friends and business associates. These are values which all persons in crime networks share with many if not most other contemporary Americans. The members of crime networks fought for the protection of these values; some even died for them. Not surprisingly, they were willing to violate many laws—"mere technicalities"—to live up to the logic and values of their world. pps. 169-188 ----- Aloha, He'Ping, Om, Shalom, Salaam. Em Hotep, Peace Be, Omnia Bona Bonis, All My Relations. Adieu, Adios, Aloha. Amen. Roads End Kris DECLARATION & DISCLAIMER ========== CTRL is a discussion and informational exchange list. Proselyzting propagandic screeds are not allowed. Substance—not soapboxing! These are sordid matters and 'conspiracy theory', with its many half-truths, misdirections and outright frauds is used politically by different groups with major and minor effects spread throughout the spectrum of time and thought. That being said, CTRL gives no endorsement to the validity of posts, and always suggests to readers; be wary of what you read. CTRL gives no credeence to Holocaust denial and nazi's need not apply. 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