The Godfatter, Part 2

"Malignant Narcissism builds an Enterprise"

History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI famously denied the existence of organized crime, and the Kefauver hearings of 1950–51, though dramatic, produced no actual convictions. In 1957, Senator John L. McClellan of Arkansas chaired Senate hearings on organized crime and labor racketeering, and a young Robert F. Kennedy served as chief counsel (a young Barry Goldwater was a committee staffer). Eventually, RICO (the racketeering statute) and WITSEC (witness protection) were enacted in the same piece of legislation — the Organized Crime Control Act of 1970. The Johnson Presidential Commission on Crime in America laid the legislative table. The acronym RICO was taken by LBJ from a mobster character in the 1930 film Little Caesar in order to draw from the reliable well of racism in Congress and gain passage. Attorney General RFK made an aggressive push for the laws, but LBJ couldn’t get it done, and it was Richard Nixon who signed the RICO Act. Nixon honored Hoover at the signing, but the inside story is that Nixon and others feared Hoover was using the bureau’s power over information to intimidate presidents and Congress. The new laws were designed to work around the FBI, not empower it. This was Nixon, a crime boss in his own right, cracking the whip on Hoover.

Hoover has no modern parallel. A closeted gay man who wore women’s cologne (forgivable in an era when homosexuality was not only socially ruinous but also a federal crime), he was reported to cross-dress as “Mary” at Plaza hotel parties hosted by Roy Cohn (himself a closeted gay man who spent much of his career persecuting other gay people). Perhaps the young Donald Trump attended some of those Plaza fetes. Cohn, who served as an aide to Joe McCarthy during the red-baiting era and got thousands of federal employees fired for no good reason, also represented mob figures such as Joseph “Joe Bananas” Bonanno and was on the mob’s payroll. No surprise, then, that Hoover assigned just four of the FBI’s personnel in New York City to investigate organized crime, compared to nearly 400 FBI staff assigned there to investigate communists. The mob grew largely unmolested for decades while Hoover’s G-Men chased phantoms. Think Antifa.

Both Hoover and Cohn used insinuation, innuendo, guilt by association and sensationalism while being simultaneously blackmailed by the same weapons. After McCarthy’s fall from grace, Cohn reinvented himself as New York’s preeminent fixer. He advised everyone from Catholic archbishops to Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Gambino family boss Paul Castellano. He helped an upstart Ozzie publisher named Rupert Murdoch connect with power brokers and future heirs like the young Donald Trump, already in bed with and laundering money for the Russian Vory in Little Odessa, Queens.

The architects of the 1970 Act gave new powers to DOJ prosecutors and the U.S. Marshals Service rather than entrusting them to the FBI. That created its own power center. RICO has since been used by prosecutors to move against Wall Street firms, anti-abortion protesters, street gangs, and even, eventually, political figures.

Several states enacted similar laws. In Georgia, two illegal activities are sufficient to demonstrate an enterprise. So long as individuals act with a common purpose and scheme and follow that pattern to achieve an illegal objective, that is sufficient to support a RICO charge. In 2023, Fani Willis charged Trump and co-defendants with 161 separate acts in furtherance of the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election. Georgia’s DOJ dismissed the case when Trump was re-elected, but he was the first former president ever indicted, facing 91 counts across four cases. He was convicted of 34 felonies in New York and was the subject of RICO there and in Florida for his criminal family enterprise — all before being re-elected and watching all prosecutions against him evaporate.

Cohn, lest we forget, was disbarred shortly before his death from AIDS.

Who shot Kennedy? Who elected Trump? What dots connect major crime and oligarchs in different countries? It really all comes down to money, doesn’t it? Money is its own religion, with its own high priests and deities.

 

 

An explosion in downtown Tel Aviv, Israel. (Xinhua/Chen Junqing)

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#RestorationGeneration.

Even when humans are locked in a cage, the Earth remains beautiful. Therefore, the lesson for us is that human beings are not necessary. The air, soil, sky and water are still beautiful without you. So, when you step out of the cage, please remember that you are guests of the Earth, not its hosts.

We have a complete solution. We can restore whales to the ocean and bison to the plains. We can recover all the tremendous old-growth forests. We possess the knowledge and tools to rebuild savannah and wetland ecosystems. Coral reefs rebuilt with biorock build beaches faster than the seas are rising. It is not too late. All of these great works of nature are recoverable. We can have a human population sized to harmonize rather than destabilize. We can have an atmosphere that heats and cools just the right amount, is easy on our lungs and sweet to our nostrils with the scent of ten thousand flowers. All of that beckons. All of that is within reach.

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