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March 19, 1996
There may be a lot of empty chairs.
"The Cleveland family is gone," said Ralph Salerno, former organized crime chief for the New York City Police Department. "There were 25 families (nationwide), and most are gone. The largest left is New York, and it is just a shadow of what is was."
Last week's indictments of 17 suspected leaders of the Metro Detroit Mafia was the latest in a series of government attacks on crime families across the country. In the past year, heads of crime families in at least eight cities have been indicted or convicted.
But New York's well-known mob fighter said the biggest blow to the Mafia hasn't come from any federal crackdown. Rather, traditional crime families have become the victims of changing times, drugs and political action committees.
"It (the indictments) is really anti-climactic," Salerno said. "This is the mopping-up operation."
In many ways, the story of the Metro Detroit area mob is the story of the rise and fall of the Mafia in America, from feared organization to fading anachronism.
This area's mob family "rated pretty high" in the pecking order of La Cosa Nostra, Salerno said. In contrast to cities with warring families fighting for power, the local mob was dominated by one family, who held an iron grip on gambling and loansharking in the city beginning in the 1930s.
Metro Detroit's place in the Mafia hierarchy was solidified in 1957, when there were two arranged marriages between members of the Detroit Mafia family and New York mob families, Salerno said.
By Salerno's account, it was the Detroit mob that catapulted Jimmy Hoffa to the presidency of the Teamsters. In return, the family allegedly got a cut of the union's pension funds.
Power and influence began to drift away from the Mafia by the 1970s, thanks in part to something called the political action committee.
Mob families used to be able to buy influence with politicians with generous, back-door contributions, Salerno said. Today, with political action committees throwing huge sums of money at politicians, gangster money isn't necessary.
"You can buy a big thick book that tells you about all the PACs in the country," Salerno said.
Suddenly, politicians could crack down on the Mafia without losing campaign contributions.
By the 1980s, the mob was a throwback to a time when even thugs had a code of ethics.
The family suddenly was competing with a new breed of crime organization, one based on the quick profits of cocaine.
Keith Corbett, head of the U.S. Justice Department's Organized Crime Strike Force in Detroit, said there are no allegations that the Detroit area mob became deeply involved in drug dealing.
"If they (the families) tried to (get into the drug trade), they would find a form of competition they had not experienced since the 1920s," Salerno said. "The young criminals have no rules at all. If your wife is with you in the car, they'll kill her, too. "
As the mob's traditional power base moved from Detroit to the suburbs, the family lost influence.
"They had a problem recruiting," Salerno said. "At one time, young Italian men wanted to be in the family. Now, all the young Italian men want to be Lee Iacocca."
Corbett is not so quick to bury La Cosa Nostra.
"People have been claiming the death of the mob for years," he said. "Organized crime has a history in this country dating back almost a hundred years. It's somewhat unrealistic to expect it to disappear."
Corbett said most of the Metro Detroit mob's money comes from illegal gambling and shaking down others who run illegal gambling.
"Gambling is still an incredibly lucrative market," Corbett said. "The lottery and the (Windsor) casino only increased illegal gambling.
Salerno disagrees. Most of the mob bosses he knows are retired and live near him in southern Florida.
"This is the twilight of the Godfathers," Salerno said. "In short order, they'll be able to say the same thing about Detroit as they do about Cleveland -- there's nothing left anymore."