13. Trying to Intimidate US Law Enforcement Seriously Backfires on Early Italian Mafia
Most people assume that the Italian-American mafia had it its roots in New York City. After all, NYC is home of the Five Great Crime Families and the Godfather, and was the destination of millions of Italian immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In reality, however, America’s first Italian mafia emerged deep in the heart of Dixie, in New Orleans. The favored destination of southern Italian immigrants for much of the nineteenth century was not America, but Argentina and Brazil, whose culture, languages, religion, and climate were more agreeable to Italians.
New Orleans became a secondary destination of Italian immigration during the 19th century, because of its extensive traffic with the aforementioned South American countries. Some of the new arrivals were not exactly honest citizen types. As the New Orleans Times reported in 1869, that city’s Second District was overrun with “well-known and notorious Sicilian murderers, counterfeiters and burglars, who, in the last month, have formed a sort of general co-partnership or stock company for the plunder and disturbance of the city.” One of the greatest mistakes committed by those early Italian criminal immigrants was to assume that they could intimidate American law enforcement the same way they had intimidated law enforcement back in the Old Country.
