| MOBSTERS aka Bootleggers, Racketeers, Organized Crime vs OUTLAWS aka Bandits, Armed Robbers, Kidnappers |
NOW WE'LL EXPAND ON THAT A LITTLE...
Using the terms gangster and public enemy to describe both Al Capone the racketeer and John
Dillinger the outlaw reflects a popular misconception of criminals, which also bedevils the U.S.
legal system. The confusion lies in the failure to distinguish between consensual crime and
violent crime, and to recognize that the strategies for combating one are largely ineffective
against the other.
Capone was in the business of supplying illegal goods and services to willing consumers.
This is consensual crime – too often called “victimless” -- which involves violence only to the
extent that the business itself is unlawful and any territorial or personal disputes require
settlement "out of court." Laws against gambling, prostitution, drunkenness, drugs, private
sexual acts and even illegal firearm ownership are hard to enforce because the only
complainants are the law enforcers themselves; so long as the crime goes undetected, there is
no "victim" in the legal sense of the word, only customers. As Capone once complained,
"When I sell liquor, they call it bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake
Shore Drive, they call it hospitality."
Robbery, on the other hand, is by definition a crime of violence from which unconsenting
victims seek the protection of the law. Dillinger was a professional criminal whom the police
and the press could declare a "public enemy" (a term wrongly ascribed to the FBI), but he was
not a gangster in the style of Al Capone. More precisely, he was an outlaw -- indeed, among
the last of the outlaws in the Jesse James tradition: a fugitive whose survival depended on
avoiding recognition and capture. Outlaw (or bandit) gangs were not “racketeers” but raiding
parties.
It's true that the criminal community in the 1920s and early '30s had not yet clearly divided
into separate populations. The neighborhood bootlegger might be more an adventurer than a
career criminal, but he did business with professionals, including gunmen, and some who
normally were robbers also did their share of bootlegging. So whether they worked together or
not, the gangsters and outlaws often knew each other socially from frequenting the same
taverns and roadhouses, and from patronizing the same doctors, lawyers, bail bondsmen,
mechanics and fences who constituted an underworld support group. Professional courtesies
and services were readily exchanged (unless the bandits generated too much “heat”) and some
criminals divided their time between armed robbery, kidnapping, and working for a crime
"syndicate" trying to control a specific territory or a labor union.
Following this little lectures gangsters and outlaws who achieved notoriety in one type of
crime instead of (or more than) the other. But their notoriety, like the crimes listed in the
chronology, commonly reflected the public's perception of the problem rather than actual crime
conditions. Some bandits robbed between fifty and one hundred banks during Prohibition,
when the country was preoccupied with bootleggers and beer wars, and the police had not yet
developed an effective criminal-identification system. Al Capone went to the brand-new
Alcatraz federal prison not for killing anyone in a robbery but because had become the Babe
Ruth of American Gangsters and the U.S. Government wanted to show off. Nearly all the
other inmates were prominent armed robbers and kidnappers. With Repeal and the increasing
police professionalism promoted by the newly-formed FBI, public excitement shifted to the
new national game of cops 'n' robbers--outlaws whom the Bureau could readily name, widely
publicize, and then track down or kill (partly to demonstrate the inability of local police to deal
with "auto-bandits."
Ironically, it was Prohibition that had hampered local crime control by closing the joints
where criminals routinely congregated, and where police and their informants could easily keep
tabs on thieves, burglars and robbers. Following Repeal, it was the FBI's preoccupation with
interstate banditry and new law enforcement technology that enabled local racketeering to
expand into nationally organized crime.
The country's first "public enemies" were locally-organized criminals spawned chiefly by
Prohibition and so-named by the Chicago Crime Commission. After Repeal and the arrival of
federalized crime control, they became the handful of newsworthy kidnappers and bank
robbers whose careers were as short as they were colorful, thanks to the New Deal Justice
Department’s J. Edgar Hoover. So the criminal celebrities who earned a place in the history
books as “Pretty Boy” or “Machine Gun” or “Baby Face” did not necessarily represent the
type or extent of lawlessness occurring at the time they were making news. Virtually forgotten
are the earlier outlaw gangs who thrived in the Twenties and made only local news as the
unidentified gunmen who could hold up the town bank and make good their escape.
Just to make it easy, think of Prohibition-era Gangsters and Depression-era Outlaws as the type
of criminals on the public's attention was focused during the Roaring Twenties, under President
Hoover, and the Crash of 1929, which led to the election of FDR who empowered the FBI to
pursue bank bandits as well as kidnappers.
Dillinger the outlaw reflects a popular misconception of criminals, which also bedevils the U.S.
legal system. The confusion lies in the failure to distinguish between consensual crime and
violent crime, and to recognize that the strategies for combating one are largely ineffective
against the other.
Capone was in the business of supplying illegal goods and services to willing consumers.
This is consensual crime – too often called “victimless” -- which involves violence only to the
extent that the business itself is unlawful and any territorial or personal disputes require
settlement "out of court." Laws against gambling, prostitution, drunkenness, drugs, private
sexual acts and even illegal firearm ownership are hard to enforce because the only
complainants are the law enforcers themselves; so long as the crime goes undetected, there is
no "victim" in the legal sense of the word, only customers. As Capone once complained,
"When I sell liquor, they call it bootlegging; when my patrons serve it on silver trays on Lake
Shore Drive, they call it hospitality."
Robbery, on the other hand, is by definition a crime of violence from which unconsenting
victims seek the protection of the law. Dillinger was a professional criminal whom the police
and the press could declare a "public enemy" (a term wrongly ascribed to the FBI), but he was
not a gangster in the style of Al Capone. More precisely, he was an outlaw -- indeed, among
the last of the outlaws in the Jesse James tradition: a fugitive whose survival depended on
avoiding recognition and capture. Outlaw (or bandit) gangs were not “racketeers” but raiding
parties.
It's true that the criminal community in the 1920s and early '30s had not yet clearly divided
into separate populations. The neighborhood bootlegger might be more an adventurer than a
career criminal, but he did business with professionals, including gunmen, and some who
normally were robbers also did their share of bootlegging. So whether they worked together or
not, the gangsters and outlaws often knew each other socially from frequenting the same
taverns and roadhouses, and from patronizing the same doctors, lawyers, bail bondsmen,
mechanics and fences who constituted an underworld support group. Professional courtesies
and services were readily exchanged (unless the bandits generated too much “heat”) and some
criminals divided their time between armed robbery, kidnapping, and working for a crime
"syndicate" trying to control a specific territory or a labor union.
Following this little lectures gangsters and outlaws who achieved notoriety in one type of
crime instead of (or more than) the other. But their notoriety, like the crimes listed in the
chronology, commonly reflected the public's perception of the problem rather than actual crime
conditions. Some bandits robbed between fifty and one hundred banks during Prohibition,
when the country was preoccupied with bootleggers and beer wars, and the police had not yet
developed an effective criminal-identification system. Al Capone went to the brand-new
Alcatraz federal prison not for killing anyone in a robbery but because had become the Babe
Ruth of American Gangsters and the U.S. Government wanted to show off. Nearly all the
other inmates were prominent armed robbers and kidnappers. With Repeal and the increasing
police professionalism promoted by the newly-formed FBI, public excitement shifted to the
new national game of cops 'n' robbers--outlaws whom the Bureau could readily name, widely
publicize, and then track down or kill (partly to demonstrate the inability of local police to deal
with "auto-bandits."
Ironically, it was Prohibition that had hampered local crime control by closing the joints
where criminals routinely congregated, and where police and their informants could easily keep
tabs on thieves, burglars and robbers. Following Repeal, it was the FBI's preoccupation with
interstate banditry and new law enforcement technology that enabled local racketeering to
expand into nationally organized crime.
The country's first "public enemies" were locally-organized criminals spawned chiefly by
Prohibition and so-named by the Chicago Crime Commission. After Repeal and the arrival of
federalized crime control, they became the handful of newsworthy kidnappers and bank
robbers whose careers were as short as they were colorful, thanks to the New Deal Justice
Department’s J. Edgar Hoover. So the criminal celebrities who earned a place in the history
books as “Pretty Boy” or “Machine Gun” or “Baby Face” did not necessarily represent the
type or extent of lawlessness occurring at the time they were making news. Virtually forgotten
are the earlier outlaw gangs who thrived in the Twenties and made only local news as the
unidentified gunmen who could hold up the town bank and make good their escape.
Just to make it easy, think of Prohibition-era Gangsters and Depression-era Outlaws as the type
of criminals on the public's attention was focused during the Roaring Twenties, under President
Hoover, and the Crash of 1929, which led to the election of FDR who empowered the FBI to
pursue bank bandits as well as kidnappers.
| This is a happy MOBSTER (a "gangster" given to consentual crime) recreating in public at a Chicago baseball park, without fear of arrest and backed up by a few bodyguards to protect him from rival "gangsters" (it's okay here) who might wish to break the law by doing violence to him! |
| This is an unhappy OUTLAW, Buck Barrow, member of the Bonnie & Clyde bandit "gang" (given to violent crime), lying on the ground mortally wounded following a shoot-out with their pissed-off pursuers at Dexfield Park in Iowa. The freaked-out lady is his wife, Blanche, whose second cousin has a dandy website. |
COP
FBI AGENT
| OKAY... See if you can distinguish between the Consentual Criminals and the Bank Robbers. Answers will be found in the COMPLETE PUBLIC ENEMIES ALMANAC by William J. Helmer and Rick Mattix |
| Let's try to get this straight, because the term "gangster" is applied willy-nilly to almost every lawbreaker who doesn't hold public office (except, of course, in Chicago). For our purposes, for clarity, for history, and, mainly, in The Complete Public Enemies Almanac, where we distinguish between the two. THE MOBSTER is a "consentual" criminal who provides the public with illegal goods and services like bootlegging, gambling, and houses of ill repute. He can walk the streets, head high, even swagger, immune from arrest, unless some unbribed authorities can prove something. Al Capone never killed nobody, once he became a big-gang leader and a pioneer of Organized Crime.
Which is not to say there weren't plenty of thieves, burglars, fences, safe-crackers, hired gunmen, drug-dealers, extortionists, embezzlers, con men, and other nogoodniks, including bad cops, as well as mobsters who also robbed banks, robbers who turned to bootlegging, and--God forbid--the occasional corrupt politician in cahoots with wicked lobbyists and dishonest businessmen. But here we distinguish between the urban gangster/mobster who was largely into "consentual" crime and the small-town robber/outlaw who engaged in crimes of violence. HOWEVER: It's still okay to refer to either type of criminal as a "gangster" in casual conversation so long as we keep the real distinction straight, because their may be a pop quiz... |
AND THESE ARE OUTLAWS...
THESE ARE MOBSTERS...
COMMOMN THUG
So what's the big deal as to the difference between a mobster and an
outlaw?
The big deal is that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a great itch to
chase violent criminals who robbed banks and were therefore easy to
shoot or to prosecute; but he had to be hammered into acknowledging the
very existence of nationally-organized criminals whose lawbreaking was
"consentual" (meaning no complainant except the cops themselves) and,
he insisted, were therefore a problem for local authorities.
Besides, he didn't want his G-men getting corrupted by
politically-protected racketeers who in modern times have become the
respectable but gutless white-collar blood-sucking con-men who know
how to get stinking rich by cooking the books and screwing up huge
corporations, as soon as they've sold their shares--once they've
out-sourced everything to the goddam Chinamen and...and...well, I see
we're getting a little carried away here....
outlaw?
The big deal is that FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a great itch to
chase violent criminals who robbed banks and were therefore easy to
shoot or to prosecute; but he had to be hammered into acknowledging the
very existence of nationally-organized criminals whose lawbreaking was
"consentual" (meaning no complainant except the cops themselves) and,
he insisted, were therefore a problem for local authorities.
Besides, he didn't want his G-men getting corrupted by
politically-protected racketeers who in modern times have become the
respectable but gutless white-collar blood-sucking con-men who know
how to get stinking rich by cooking the books and screwing up huge
corporations, as soon as they've sold their shares--once they've
out-sourced everything to the goddam Chinamen and...and...well, I see
we're getting a little carried away here....
| "They're all croaked!" is not the right answer. |
