The Cosa Nostra Candy Store: Organized Crime and the Waste Collection Industry
9.25.20
Every city has its perennial problem that arrests the imagination of its politicians and press. London has its food. Paris, its Chanel №5-doused tourists. Rome, its menacing seagulls. And New York? New York has its garbage.
Few people have known what to do with New York’s trash. There is a practical reason for this: most cities hide their waste in a maze of alleyways, but New York was too pragmatic to build any. Let them see the garbage: we are New York tough.
Peter Stuyvesant suggested tossing it along strategic points along the shoreline to expand the island. Robert Moses preferred to use it as a buffer zone for his parks. Now we just hand it off to the Finger Lakes.
Here at Limited Liabilities, we’re planning to highlight a number of topics on the waste industry in the coming year because 1) it is a recurring, increasingly pressing problem, and 2) no one has really solved it yet.
But if there was ever a group that understood why “trash is gold,” it was the Cosa Nostra: New York’s collection of five Mafia families who ran one of the biggest garbage cartels in world history. This year, as the coronavirus breathes new life into the Italian Mafia’s commercial holds, we look back at one of their earliest ventures: the monopolization of the New York waste management industry for the better half of the 20th century.
An Influx of Sicilian Refugees
When Mussolini took power in Italy in 1925, he didn’t receive a warm welcome from the Sicilian Mafia. Sicily’s identity was shaped by centuries of invasion thanks to its strategic position in the Mediterranean Sea. Those that survived the sieges were left with an unusual contempt for government and developed into tight-knit alliances defined by blood relations. Hardly fertile ground for a fascist dictator.
And so, Mussolini expunged them. Outraged that he couldn’t travel through a Sicilian town without deferring to a Mafia member for protection, he dismissed the Mafia as semi-feudalists and vowed that he would “no longer [tolerate] that a few hundred criminals should oppress a magnificent population.”
Unwittingly, he handed New York’s Cosa Nostra its greatest infusion of foot soldiers and new leadership seen in decades. One of these esteemed arrivals was Salvatore Maranzano, aka “Little Caesar,” an old-world Mob boss who “delighted in lecturing his unschooled, barely literate minions on classical literature and the virtues of his idol, Julius Caesar.”
Competition among the Sicilian cohort and American-born borgatas was so fierce in the 1930s that Maranzano took to traveling around town in a custom-built Cadillac with metal-plated sides and bulletproof windows. He shared the backseat with a swiveling machine gun, two large-caliber handguns, and a dagger. This daily get-up soon grew taxing, and Maranzano teamed up with Lucky Luciano, an ambitious young mafioso, to take out their greatest competitor, “Joe the Boss” Masseria, while playing a game of cards. As the New York Daily News reported it, he died “with the ace of spades, the death card, clutched in a bejeweled paw.” (It may have been staged, but still made for an unforgettable photoshoot).
Roman Legion Meets U.S. Steel
Together, Maranzano and Luciano outlined the corporate-like power structure that would make the Mafia nearly impenetrable for over six decades. Maranzano brought his romantic vision of Roman legions, imperial hierarchies, and pagan blood-rituals. From this sprang the pecking order still in place today: boss, underboss, capo (captain), soldier, and finally, the lowly associate.
Accompanying this hierarchy came a number of honor-based moral codes: submit to the boss, don’t lust after other members’ daughters or wives, never kill another member of the mafiosi, resist wearing the color red (a sure sign of rats), etc. But above all, you must obey omertà. Omertà was the code of silence, drawn from the Sicilian proverb, “He who is deaf, blind, and silent will live a hundred years in peace.”
New initiates, “made men,” who achieved the highly coveted leap from associate to solider, swore to omertà during their initiation ceremony. Each initiate was pricked on the trigger finger, spilling their blood onto a picture of a saint. The unlucky saint was then incinerated while the initiate swore, “May I burn, may my soul burn like this paper, if I betray anyone in this family or anyone in this room.”
Luciano was less enamored by mystical rites and more interested in protecting upper management. He insisted on the addition of a consigliere, a skilled diplomat who served as an advisor to the families. But his greatest contribution was the creation of the Commission, essentially a national board of directors that established general policies, regulations, and territories for every family across the states.
The Commission provided the Mafia with national scope and cooperation, cementing its role as America’s preeminent criminal association. By the early 1960s, the Mafia had so many lucrative enterprises — carting, construction, gambling, prostitution, and narcotics — that Meyer Lansky, the “Mob’s Accountant,” casually remarked to his wife, “We’re bigger than U.S. Steel.” Actually, this was a gross understatement. The Justice Department conservatively estimated that the Mafia’s profits eclipsed those of the ten largest industrial organizations combined. That put them at roughly $7 billion to $10 billion in a year.
Carting: The Cosa Nostra Candy Store
“Control the flow of garbage, and just as surely as if you owned the supply of fresh water or electricity, you had an entire metropolis by the jugular,” Rick Cowan, Takedown: The Fall of the Last Mafia Empire
The carting industry — colloquially known as waste management — was the Mafia’s greatest money maker since Prohibition. Carting had always attracted Italian immigrants: few people were clamoring for the job and it was one industry that didn’t have the luxury to discriminate. But the five New York Mob families — Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese — first stepped into carting en masse in 1956, when the city closed a long-standing loophole that allowed businesses operating in residential blocks to have their garbage hauled for free by the New York Department of Sanitation (DSNY). Overnight, 50,000 businesses were up for grabs, and the Mafia was there to seize them.
The city was divided into territories divvied out to the families. Customers were treated as assets and routinely traded. Each family had a property-rights system, in which individual stops were “owned” by haulers. Haulers price-rigged the system by presenting customers with equally outrageous rates. The owner of the customer would submit the lowest estimate to win the contract. If anyone tried to underbid the original owner, it was considered stealing. These rights were enforced by four trade waste associations (controlled by the Mob) through firebombing, threats, and, on occasion, murder.
The cartel contained over 100,000 customers which were distributed to as many as 300 carters. Most of the carters were small, family-owned businesses with fewer than five trucks and less than ten employees. Most of these were unionized employees who were members of the Teamsters Local 813 unit — a union long-ago infiltrated by the Gambino family. Together, these machinations resulted in a 1.5 billion-dollar annual business. In 1981, the Department of Justice conservatively estimated that the “Mob Tax” for commercial customers in New York was at 35% above market rate, culminating in $45 million of additional costs annually.
The FBI Gains New Arsenal
For decades, the FBI was so ineffective at taking down the Mafia that New York detectives often referred to it as “Famous But Incompetent.” Instead of tackling the organization, the FBI targeted individuals — usually insignificant underlings — who proved to be uncooperative witnesses. At the time, electronic surveillance of citizens was illegal (imagine!), so bugging mobsters wasn’t an option.
That strategy all changed with Robert Blakey. A devout Roman Catholic attorney, Blakey was thoroughly scandalized by the blood rituals he heard accounts of during his stint with the Justice Department. In 1966, he was recruited to work for an anti-Mafia study group sponsored by President Johnson. There, he had the epiphany that Mafia families were more comparable to well-managed, complex industrial associations than gangs. “They were the mirror image of American capitalism,” Blakey marveled. “They were aping it.”
He drafted RICO — short for Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations — which would one day take down Cosa Nostra. RICO’s brilliance is that it attacked the entire organization rather than individuals. Prosecutors could now indict and convict large groups of mobsters by proving that they were an engaged in a pattern of crimes conducted on behalf of an enterprise. For the first time, a boss could face jail time if it was proved that he was linked to the organization.
Ironically, RICO was also part of the same bill that toppled Richard Nixon by expanding immunity for witnesses testifying in front of Congress. “When Nixon signed the bill, he handed the document to John Mitchell, the attorney general, and said, ‘Go get those crooks,’” Blakey remembered. “And who were the most prominent people brought down by the act? Richard Nixon and John Mitchell.”
Waste Industry Due for Another Rehaul
New York politicians’ dreams of efficiency for the carting industry never came to fruition. To the contrary, in the twenty years since control was wrested from the Cosa Nostra by RICO, traffic conditions have never been worse. With mafia turf organizing principles long gone, multiple trucks now cross the same route: in some parts of the city, fifty carters might service the same neighborhood. It’s no wonder none of us can sleep anymore: on some blocks, garbage trucks race by 400 times a day.Workers’ conditions are so bad that drivers dream of getting a job at the tame DSNY, coveted for its overtime and mandated work-life balance. Unfortunately, DSNY isn’t known for its cost-savings techniques: it costs $431 per ton (for collection and disposal) as opposed to a private carter’s cost of $185 per ton.
Over half of trucks pulled for inspections are found unsafe, and competition drives many workers to put in 12+ hour days, six-days a week. “We replaced the old mafia with a corporate mafia,” said Mr. Campbell, the latest president of Teamsters Local 813, a dying breed in the new flood of non-union companies.
In late 2019, Mayor De Blasio took a leaf out of the Mafia’s book and signed a new law that will carve the city into 20 commercial waste zones, reduce truck traffic by 60 percent, and cut carbon emissions by half. The move outraged many industry groups who are concerned that the decision will destroy many small carters at the benefit of large commercial owners.
While the mayor has three years to enact his reforms, nothing is likely to come close to the customer satisfaction levels once achieved by the Mob. “This was a system that worked for everybody,” said one New York old-timer. “Except maybe the New York Times.”
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