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On the history, theory, and practice of organized crime: The life and work of criminology’s revisionist “Godfather,” Joseph L. Albini (1930-2013)

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Abstract

Joseph L. Albini (1930-2013) is a central figure in the historiography and criminology of organized crime and one of the leading revisionists critical of the traditional, centralized paradigm of organized crime rooted in the structural-functional approaches dominating sociology from the 1940s to 1980s. Albini argued that the Mafia was a socially-constructed entity that took on a life above and beyond its actual manifestations, thereby serving a vital role and function in political and social discourse in the United States. Albini used interdisciplinary theoretical perspectives and a mixture of social scientific and historical research methods to analyze data derived from a breadth of documentary sources and underworld and upperworld informants.  This allowed Albini to deconstruct the historical and contemporary mythologies about a centralized national Mafia and to develop an alternative framework to evaluate organized crime in its complex and ever-evolving manifestations. Albini also advanced innovative critical criminological approaches that influenced the work of his contemporaries and scholars of later generations. Albini’s later work 1) explored the impact of globalization on organized crime including transnational alliances between career criminals, terrorist networks and the security apparatuses of various nation states and 2) developed a conceptual framework, the organized crime matrix, to explain organized crime as a structure of everyday life across time and space.

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Notes

  1. Later published in-part or in-whole in McIllwain (1997, 1998, 1999, 2004a, 2004b). Joe was kind enough to review each of these works before they were published and reflect his influence on me as a scholar.

  2. Interestingly, Kesey used the term “The Combine,” a play on the term “The Combination” then commonly used as another term for the Mafia, to define the authorities whom used both coercive and subtle methods, from violence to bribery, to control their mentally ill charges. Years later, Albini observed that many mentally ill patients that he provided care to and interviewed in mental institutions often believed the Mafia/Combination was out to get them.

  3. As Joe later observed, “we must understand that Valachi was not presented to the American public for his knowledge. He was presented to further solidify in the minds of the American public a mental picture of the ominous, evil, secret society that had taken over America” (Albini 1997a, 65).

  4. Indeed Kempton’s review was selected for Oxford University Press’ respected The Oxford Reader: Varieties of Contemporary Discourse (Kermode 1971) eighteen months later.

  5. Puzo humorously recalled, “The worst thing [Sinatra] called me was a pimp….I do remember him saying that if it wasn't [for the fact] that I was so much older than he, he would beat the hell out of me. I was a kid when he was singing at the Paramount, but OK, he looked 20 years younger. What hurt was that here he was, a northern Italian, threatening me, a southern Italian, with physical violence. This was roughly equivalent to Einstein pulling a knife on Al Capone. It just wasn’t done. Northern Italians never mess with Southern Italians except to get them put in jail or deported to some desert island” (Puzo 1972, 27).

  6. A comedic example of this popular culture fallout was represented on Johnny Carson’s Tonight Show on NBC on November 12, 1976 when insult-comedian Don Rickles interrupted Frank Sinatra’s interview with Carson and pretended to bring important news about Sinatra’s alleged Mafia connections on the East Coast (Carson 1976).

  7. Albini’s social-psychological approach reflected of a larger distinction between American and British scholars studying moral panics at the time (Thompson 1998). Indeed, even Becker and Erikson’s analysis was not leveled at capitalist society as a system of production, so much as the power of control agents, professions and interest groups.

  8. An ethnicity trap is “when organized crime is defined in terms of the nature of the groups that engage in it, rather than the nature of the organized crime activity itself, and how and why various groups specialize—or fail to specialize in certain activities” (Albanese 1996, 145).

  9. This process reflects broader trends faced by networks in the legitimate world as they embrace decentralization and “the chaos imperative” (Brafman and Beckstrom 2005; Brafman and Pollack 2013).

  10. Historically speaking, this is not a new set of challenges. Consider the examples provided in Lauren Benton’s (2010) study of law and geography in European Empires between 1400 and 1900.

  11. Structural holes are “holes in the structure of the market” that provide the opportunity “to broker the flow of information between people, and control the projects that bring together people from opposite sides of the hole.” The concept is based on the Nobel Prize winning economic theory created by Ronald S. Burt. For a summary, please see Burt (2001). For the criminological application of structural hole theory to organized crime, please see Morselli (2005, 2008, 2010).

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Acknowledgments

Dr. McIllwain would like to thank Theresa Albini, Frank Scarpitti, Tom Mieczkowski, Michael Woodiwiss, and his unnamed reviewers for their assistance in making this article possible.

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    Jeffrey Scott McIllwain

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McIllwain, J.S. On the history, theory, and practice of organized crime: The life and work of criminology’s revisionist “Godfather,” Joseph L. Albini (1930-2013). Trends Organ Crim 18, 12–40 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12117-014-9236-6

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