This is from a mass arrest of mafia bosses, who were all gathered in the same place to discuss the mafia. No one believed that these guys were actual criminals.
heres a newspaper article about the 1957 mass arrest
— eigenrobot (@eigenrobot) March 1, 2023
it spends its entire length ridiculing the notion that a mafia exists immediately after the heads of the mafia have been arrested en masse at a gathering and while they are all locked in the same jail pic.twitter.com/HZaeELqMWB
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Wait, 1957?! After the high time of the Mafia was already in the 20s?
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Of course not, this was years after Al Capone had been imprisoned and died. It was all a very public. No one was really denying the existence of Italian gangs. I really hate it when Twitter midwits read some random old texts out of context and think that makes them historians.
Anyway, the denial was mainly about their scale and whether they were working together on a national level. J. Edgar Hoover (the director of FBI) was publicly downplaying Mafia.
We know he was knowingly lying, the feds were pretty good at tracking those people. Notably, the US intelligence worked with Lucky Luciano during WW2, using him to protect US ports from sabotage, and also to contact Mafia in Italy to help organize resistance to Mussolini. As a reward he was released from prison and deported to Italy.
Speaking of Lucky Luciano, when the DEA (back then it was called FBN) learned about the Havana Conference and Luciano being in Cuba, they threatened to sanction the country if they won't kick him out.
Clearly, the other US government agencies were well aware of the Mafia operations and treated it seriously. And it was a big topic in the media. Random example: the 1957 assassination of Albert Anastasia, a Mafia hitman, was a front-page news in New York Times. The "old mafia myth" article quoted by the OP is from 1959.
So why was Hoover/FBI downplaying it? We don't really know. There are several hypotheses 1) He was being blackmailed for being gay 2) He was corrupt 3) He was dumb 4) He was doing this for PR. There isn't much evidence, so it's all speculation.
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This is a really long way of saying you don't frick.
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