The Business of Crime by Humbert S. Nelli

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The Business of Crime by Humbert S. Nelli

The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States, written by Humbert S. Nelli, contains the history of Italian criminal organizations in the New World, between 1880 and 1930. The book is divided into three main parts. The first chapter, From Italy's South to America's South, contains the political, social, economic, and cultural background of Italians before they entered in the New World. Also, it describes the beginning of criminal organizations, and the national wide impact created with the murder of Chief Hennesy (October 15, 1890). The second chapter, The Immigrant Era, describes the Italian involvement in syndicates activities, and discusses the widely publicized Black Hand extortion, which was "neither the most significant nor the most lucrative" form of crime. The last chapter, Flowering of the Italian Syndicates, studies the effects produced by the federal laws enacted to prohibit the manufacture and sale of alcoholic beverages and the Depression of the 1930s over the "Italian-American criminal entrepreneurs".

In order to analyze the book, the report is divided into six different parts. The first part states the author's thesis, and the second one presents examples that substantiate his hypothesis. The third and the fourth parts evaluate the author's arguments and the sources used by him. The fifth part compares the material presented by Nelli's book to similar material in the textbook America Past and Present. Finally, the last part presents a conclusion about the book based in the previous parts.

Part I

Humbert S. Nelli maintains that "the distortions in facts and the repetition of my...

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The author argues that even though immigrant criminals attempted to transfer their institutions and their traditions into the new land, the process of transferring their cultural package over the ocean limited their success; even the familiar institutions change in that process. In fact, "the patterns and character of the institutions were altered by conditions, opportunities, and limitations present in the new environment" (137). Also, the low concentration of Italian immigrants populations in some cities (except New York) limited the lucrative opportunities of extortion activities that flourished in Sicily.

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