When Criminals Play the Racism Card

Imagine, if you will, an ethnic group in America often being identified for its association with criminal activity. Members of this ethnic group arrived in America and moved to neighborhoods that contained folks from their home country. They used their strange dialects like a secret code to communicate with each other and to avoid detection from law enforcement. They committed crimes that benefited themselves, the other folks in their ethnic group, and friends and family they left behind in their country of origin. They dealt with politicians who either turned a blind eye to the illegal activity or, in some cases, directly profited from the proceeds of the group’s criminal endeavors. When confronted for the criminals’ deeds, they complained of racism and profiling.

Of course, I’m talking about Italian-American organized crime (what did you think I was talking about?). The American Mafia, AKA La Cosa Nostra (a bastardization of the Italian words for “Our Thing”) was an illegal force to be reckoned with. At its height in the 1960s and 1970s, the Mafia controlled labor unions, imported and sold massive amounts of illegal narcotics, and dominated large swaths of American businesses such as commercial construction, the garment industry, and others.

Politicians and law enforcement turned a blind eye to the maleficence the Mafia committed. In some cases, they did this because they feared political backlash for targeting a minority group. Sadly, some in politics and law enforcement were “on the take,” Mafia slang for taking bribes to look the other way. In places like New York and Chicago, Mafia gangsters held influence over Senators, Congressmen, Governors, Mayors, Judges, and others.

When honest legislators, prosecutors, and law enforcement took steps to go after the Mafia, they were met with cries of racism by some in the Italian-American community. They formed groups to protect their criminal interests that actually flew the false flag of protecting Italian Americans from racism.

Case in point, the Italian-American Civil Rights League, formed in 1970 by Joe Colombo to combat racism towards Italian Americans. It is important to note that Joe Colombo was the head of the Colombo crime family, one of the “Five Families” in New York that made up the ranks of the Mob in the Big Apple. The Colombos were known for being arguably the most violent of the five families. Their members fought each other in an internal power struggle for decades that resulted in the deaths of hundreds of people, many innocent people with no connection to the mob, throughout the latter half of the 20th century.

In fact, Joe Colombo was shot and killed at an Italian-American Civil Rights rally in New York in 1971. The assassin, a subject sent by the rival Colombo soldier, Joe Gallo. If you’ve seen the movie The Irishman, you know the rest of the story.

Another good example of a criminal hiding in plain sight, hiding behind his ethnicity, was the Dapper Don himself, John Gotti. Gotti was the head of the Gambino crime family in the 80s and 90s. He hailed from the Ozone Park area of the New York borough of Queens, where he had his base of power. Gotti was truly a horrible human being, a murderer who killed with his hands and by ordering his underlings to kill as well.

When a neighbor accidentally killed Gotti’s son in a car accident, an accident actually caused by Gotti’s son Frank, Gotti made the man “disappear.” John Favara, a law-abiding man whose only issue was the car accident, was killed, dismembered with a chainsaw, dumped into a barrel, and dropped into the ocean, never to be heard from again. One alternate version of the story is that Favara was put in a vat of acid. Either way, an incredibly violent end for an innocent man.

Gotti gained the other nickname of “Teflon Don” by avoiding criminal prosecution through numerous criminal trials. For many years he avoided convictions by bribing and/or intimidating jurors. His luck ran out in 1992 when he was convicted of murder, loan sharking, illegal gambling, tax evasion, obstruction of justice, and other crimes. He was sentenced to life.

So, how did many of the Italian-American residents of Ozone Park respond? They cried racism, saying that the cops only went after Gotti because he was Italian! They said the neighborhood was safer when he was there (unless, of course, you ran over one of his kids). They said the charges were false and that he had been framed.

Never mind that he extorted businesses, restaurants, and bars in Queens and elsewhere, including those run by other Italian Americans, and murdered his enemies in the very same streets; sold heroin to their children; assaulted or killed anyone who would be foolish enough to go against him. Gotti was treated like a hero, and his neighbors lamented the fact that there would be no free 4th of July fireworks show that year, an illegal display Gotti paid for.

When reporters descended on the neighborhood and spoke with Gotti’s neighbors, they all expressed how much they liked him and, in most cases, denied he had ever been involved in any sort of criminal activity whatsoever. He was just another Paisan framed by the racist Feds because his name ended in a vowel.

I’m 100% Italian. My father’s people hail from Calabria; on my Mom’s side, Naples. My relatives were honest people who lived, in some instances, in mob-controlled (or, at a minimum, mob-influenced) neighborhoods. I became a cop and fought crime and, if I’m being completely honest here, find it totally pathetic and nauseating that any of my fellow Italian Americans would side with and support criminals based on a mutual ethnic background.

This is a cautionary tale for anyone who goes to a default mode of crying racism any time members of an ethnic group are accused of something illegal.

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Nick Perna is a Police Officer with the Redwood City Police Department in Northern California. He has spent much of his career as a gang and narcotics investigator. He is a member of a Multi-Jurisdictional SWAT Team since 2001 and is currently a Team Leader. He previously served as a paratrooper in the U.S. Army and is a veteran of Operation Iraqi Freedom. He has a master’s degree from the University Of San Francisco.

As the Voice of the Veteran Community, The Havok Journal seeks to publish a variety of perspectives on a number of sensitive subjects. Unless specifically noted otherwise, nothing we publish is an official point of view of The Havok Journal or any part of the U.S. government.