Fifty Years Later: Did the 1967 Task Force Correctly Describe the “Threat” of Organized Crime?

• In Event: IASOC Presents the Mark Haller Memorial Panel: A Look Back at the 1967 Organized Crime Task Force Report

Abstract

The 1967 Organized Crime Task Force Report may be remembered primarily for four contributions to the
understanding of organized crime and its control: a formal definition of organized crime, centered on “24 groups …. (whose) membership is exclusively men of Italian descent…”, buttressed by an assertion that “organized crime crime flourishes only where it has corrupted local officials“; and the attached consultant papers of Donald Cressey, describing the defined organized crime in structuralist terms, and Robert Blakey, assessing evidence gathering issues in organized crime cases. A fifth contribution, widely overlooked, is the rationale for the report, a description of the threat that organized crime then posed to American institutions and a free society. This paper examines that rationale in its original context and its significance a half-century later in the light of recent Supreme Court rulings on the definition of political corruption.

Author

• Dwight C Smith, Retired