Assessing the Effectiveness of Organized Crime Control Strategies ...

“headhunting” strategy is predicated on the assumption that OC operations are too complex to be
proven in court.
According to the President’s Commission on Organized Crime (1986:205), there have been no
rigorous assessments of the headhunting strategy. However, there is evidence that the US
government incapacitated many OC leaders during the 1980s. By 1985, about two-thirds of the
alleged Mafia bosses in the US were under indictment or convicted (President’s Crime
Commission, 1986:47). In 1984 alone, a total of 2,194 OC indictments occurred, almost all of
which involved alleged Mafia members (Lyman and Potter, 1997:435). By 1988, 19 bosses, 13
underbosses, and 43 captains had been convicted (Albanese, 1996:120). Furthermore, the prison
sentences imposed on high-ranking OC figures during the 1980s tended to be very lengthy
(Albanese, 1996:120).
Lyman and Potter (1997:435) question whether these efforts at decapitating and otherwise
disrupting leading OC groups can be declared a success:
The problem with all this activity is that the government has failed to produce even a
scintilla of evidence that any of these prosecutions have resulted in a diminution of
organized crime’s illicit ventures. The federal government simply has no measures
of the amount of harm caused by organized crime with which to measure such an
impact... But other indicators seem to suggest that organized crime is alive and quite
healthy despite these law enforcement efforts.
Lyman and Potter then provide several examples of major prosecutions of syndicates and their
leaders that have either failed to reduce the volume of illicit activities, spawned other networks
that have replaced the targeted group, led to restructuring within the affected group, triggered the
revival of a group that had ceased operating for a decade, and that have even facilitated OC by
eliminating less efficient operators.
Former US Attorney and New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani (1986: 104) has added:
the traditional prosecutorial model of attacking organized crime—the conviction and
temporary incapacitation of the heads of a crime family for discrete crimes—has not
greatly diminished the family’s power and ability to survive, if not flourish. No
doubt, the unenviable record of short term success in prosecuting the leaders while
leaving intact the infrastructure of organized crime weighed heavily on the Congress
in 1970 as it considered remedial legislation.
Hoffman (1987:95 in Bynum) reinforces this point by stating that, “As the history of
enforcement efforts against organized crime indicates, demands still remain for illicit goods and
services after leaders are incapacitated; opportunists in criminal groups merely take the place of
those locked up.”
Mastrofski and Potter (1987:283) provide a number of examples of the manner in which OC
networks adapt to the incapacitation of the leadership of a particular group. One illustration
involves a major gambling operation in Philadelphia. Prosecutions directed at this operation in
Research and Statistics Division / Department of Justice Canada | 21