1. This narrative is adapted from Sean Patrick Griffin, “Philadelphia’s ‘Black Mafia’: Assessing and Advancing Current Interpretations”, Crime, Law and Social Change, forthcoming 2003.
2. See Alan A. Block, “History and the Study of Organized Crime”, Urban Life: A Journal of Ethnographic Research, vol. 6 (January 1978), pp. 455–474, “Organized Crime: History and Historiography”; James D. Calder, “Al Capone and the Internal Revenue Service: State-sanctioned Criminology of Organized Crime”, Crime, Law and Social Change, vol. 17, no. 1 (1992), pp. 1–23; John F. Galliher and James A. Cain, “Citation Support for the Mafia Myth in Criminology Textbooks”, American Sociologist, vol. 9 (May 1974), pp. 68–74; Gordon Hawkins, “God and the Mafia”, The Public Interest, vol. 14 (1969), pp. 24-51; James A. Inciardi, Alan A. Block and Lyle A. Hallowell, Historical Approaches to Crime: Research Strategies and Issues (Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, 1977); William H. Moore, The Kefauver Committee and the Politics of Crime (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1974); Jonathan Rubenstein and PeterReuter, “Fact, Fancy and Organized Crime”, Public Interest, vol. 53 (1978), pp. 45–67; and Dwight C. Smith, The Mafia Mystique (New York: Basic Books, 1975).
3. See, for example, Howard Abadinsky, Organized Crime sixth edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2000); Frank E. Hagan, Introduction to Criminology: Theories, Methods, and Criminal Behavior (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002); Philip Jenkins and Gary Potter, “The Politics and Mythology of Organized Crime: A Philadelphia Case Study”, Journal of Criminal Justice, vol. 15 (1987), pp. 473–484; William Kleinknecht, The New Ethnic Mobs: The Changing Face of Organized Crime in America (New York: The Free Press, 1996); Don Liddick, The Mob’s Daily Number: Organized Crime and the Numbers Gambling Industry (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999); Michael D. Lyman and Gary W. Potter, Organized Crime second edition (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 2000); Gary W. Potter and Philip Jenkins, The City and the Syndicate: Organizing Crime in Philadelphia (Lexington, MA: Ginn Custom Publishers, 1985); Gary W. Potter, Criminal Organizations: Vice Racketeering, and Politics in an American City (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1994); and Rufus Schatzberg and Robert J. Kelly, African American Organized Crime: A Social History (New York: Garland, 1996).
4. I have not taken the time to examine “second generation” articles and books that are based upon works relying on the Commission reports. For example, George F. Cole and Christopher E. Smith, Criminal Justice in America third edition (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 2002), discuss organized crime among various ethnic groups based on Kleinknecht’s The New Ethnic Mobs, and the Commission’s reports are not mentioned or cited. Thus, the Commission’s findings are likely more widely utilized than I have illustrated.
5. Pennsylvania Crime Commission (PCC), A Decade of Organized Crime in Pennsylvania: 1980 Report; Annual Report (1988);