Black Mafia : ethnic succession in organized crime Francis A. J. Ianni.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 371-373) and index.

At a time of shrinking opportunities for traditional fieldwork, it is a sign of vitality and growth when anthropologists are able to apply the concepts and research methods of the discipline to the study of contemporary social institutions in the United States. Ogbu{u2019}s 1974 study of a California school system and Spradley{u2019}s 1970 report on skid row alcoholics are recent examples of the applicability and importance of anthropology as a means of understanding our own culture. Francis Ianni{u2019}s use of anthropological field methods in the study of organized crime in America for the National Institute of Law Enforcement has drawn wide attention through the publication of Black Mafia and its reviews in newspapers and national magazines. Black Mafia is popular anthropology which illustrates serious issues of responsibility and accountability facing contemporary anthropology. Ianni wanted to show that black people are taking over control of organized crime from Italians as part of a pattern of ethnic succession through which the Italians took over from the Jews, and the Jews from the Irish. To do this he employed local exparticipants as observers to document criminal activities in predominantly black New York neighborhoods, and charted 2networks3 of selected cases. The sensational narratives of pimps, lottery operators, and drug dealers may make interesting reading, but as data they are as suspect and unconvincing as the book{u2019}s uncritical assumptions of ethnic succession. However, the greater problem lies in the book{u2019}s characterizations of the ghettoized, nonwhite community. Ianni finds crime in these neighborhoods to be a 2community ethos3 and the criminal something akin to Mao Tse-tung{u2019}s fish in a sea of 2supportive co-ethnics3 (pages 106). The book not only deals with criminality as an inherent feature of a black culture of poverty (2for many blacks the prison setting is the first community experience3 [p. 89]), but warns that black ethnic pride may become the organizational principle around which something like a 2Black Mafia3 may develop. But black people, he suggests, might not stop simply at replacing Italian organized crime as such, but go on to organize a broad revolutionary social movement (pages 326). Black New Yorkers have been suspected of plotting this movement for as long as they have been here in any numbers; and its history is ominous. In the early 1700s when the black population of colonial New York reached as high as 24% of the total, suspicions of black conspiracies haunted white citizens and rumors of blacks organizing brought court-ordered executions and intensified restrictions and surveillance. If there is to be an anthropology of crime, its researchers must face the most difficult questions of responsibility to host communities. Studies which purport to reveal illegal activities cannot guarantee protection of their individual informants simply by altering names since researcher and all field notes are subject to subpoena in investigations and court actions. Nor can researchers protect against consequences to the community in general when their published findings excite popular indignation and fears.