3 supporting points, 5 paragraphs, 1 crazy idea﻿

3 supporting points, 5 paragraphs, 1 crazy idea

10/2/2016

OVERVIEW: As we begin thinking about what the personal essay is both in terms of the genre and historically, it's worthwhile to think about the academic essay--a different beast entirely.

The question is this: what has the academic essay done to personal essay? And does the academic essay share anything with the personal essay?

I think that there are some obvious answers to this, but I think that it is possible that the truth of things is more complex and harder to articulate than what we might first imagine. So to start our next project in our class, we are going to reverse engineer The Crooked Ladder by Malcom Gladwell.

DETAILS: Post to this discussion your 5 paragraph essay version of Gladwell's essay. You can copy sentences directly out of Gladwell, or you can rewrite the essay wholesale. Or you can do some combination of both. Post your essay to this site by clicking on the "comments" button. There are two of them located on the page--top right and bottom left.

Folks should post by the end of what would have been our regularly scheduled class time on Monday, 2 October 2016.

After that, please read your classmates 5 paragraph essays. Comment on at least three of them. Identify what you notice about what happens to the argument, the style, the voice of the author. What happens to how persuasive the piece is? What happens to the role of information? You are welcome to comment on other aspects of what you notice, but be sure to try to make some observations about these big issues as well. You can reply to any essay by hitting, you guessed it, the "reply" button located at the bottom of each post.

In class, we'll talk about your comments as we move forward with your own academic writing. As I think about this assignment, I of course want to use our work to help refine and thicken our understanding of the history of the essay, but I also want this particular assignment to help you, as individual thinkers and writers, consider what you want your own academic, scholarly voice to sound like--because it doesn't have to sound all stiff and awful. I want you to leave this capstone experience writing bravely.

62 Comments

Tori Gervais

10/2/2016 05:29:26 pm

Francis Ianni’s book A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime was inspired by the life and times of Philip Alcamo, a member of the Lupollo family in New York. The Lupollo family was notorious for their involvement in organized crimes, like loan-sharking operations, bootlegging, and gambling. The family’s enterprise eventually grew to encompass eleven businesses totaling tens of millions of dollars in assets. Ianni’s book A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime reveals the way in which a group of immigrants were able to transcend their humble origins by climbing the “crooked ladder” of social mobility.

Instead of portraying the Lupollo’s as criminals, Ianni demonstrates the ways in which they innovated in order to find alternative ways to pursue the American Dream. Being among the poorest and the least skilled immigrants of the era, the Lupollo family sought out crime, given that it was of the few options available for advancement. Under their circumstances, the crooked ladder of criminal activity was not rebellion, but rather an attempt to join into legitimate society. As opposed to the Godfather movies in which mafia families conceived in crime were never able to escape it, the Lupollos were able to provide opportunities for their children, allowing them to pursue master’s degrees, become lawyers, and ride horses.

In the 1970’s, Ianni observed a similar pattern being repeated in New York City as the city’s demographics changed. The Lupollos’ gambling operations in Harlem had been taken over by African Americans. However, the organized crime now involved drugs as opposed to bootleg alcohol as the currency of innovation. Ianni initially predicted that these newcomers would climb the ladder to respectability just as their predecessors had done, maintaining that organized crime was a functional part of the American social system and should be viewed as one end of a continuum of business enterprises with legitimate business at the other end.

However, Ianni soon observed that the crooked ladder no longer promised access to mainstream society, legitimate jobs, or success. Instead, the young men and women involved in twentieth century drug dealing almost always fell victim to drug addiction, arrest, or gang involvement that left many dead. The role of law enforcement in each era played a large role in the outcomes of these individuals, and ultimately is the differentiating factor between innovators and criminals. Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost 70 percent. In the previous era, police had turned a blind eye allowing the crooked ladder to work as well as it did. However, in the late 1980’s, corruption became the main target of police officers, making organized crimes harder to commit, and nearly impossible to rise out of.

The pioneers of American capitalism were not graduated from Harvard’s School of Business Administration, but rather generated their fortunes by shady speculations and a not inconsiderable amount of violence. They ignored, circumvented, or stretched the law when it stood in the way of America’s destiny and their own. However, the changed circumstances of newly crowded urban environments and the rise of law enforcement have hindered the evolution of gangster to business man, resulting in a generation of young criminals who no longer have the opportunity to rise above organized crime in order to integrate into society.

Jeff Loiselle

10/3/2016 08:52:01 am

I like where you went with this, especially your first paragraph. I too found it to be really difficult to get across Gladwell's main, and I think unstated "Big Picture" point, which I believe to be the role of race and policing. I think you undermine that point by adding the bit about urban areas being "newly crowded." I'm not so sure that's the case.

The tone of your essay, like mine and the others, seems to be more information driven. Five paragraphs isn't much to convey so much information. Gladwell's original piece weaves around a few narratives, which is next to impossible in such a small space.

I think that the style is trending more towards a single thesis, a straightforward narrative, and one that doesn't allow for much interpretation. Again, that's nothing you did, just the limitation on the form.

khristal depina

10/3/2016 09:13:00 am

I think whats interesting on your take in the tone and structure of the essay. At first it felt like a academic essay in which you were reporting what has been told in this essay but then we the speakers tone change as you bring up Ianni. I think even though you did this in a way you still matched the speaker in the original essay which is pretty cool. The argument is still strong and your persuasiveness relies on facts rather personal thoughts that help aid and make your essay a compelling argument. I noticed that you made the point that organize crime is nearly impossible now due to the crack down on corrupt police offers. I never noticed this twist in the original essay and its interesting that you caught this and made it your own.

Cailin Doty

10/3/2016 09:35:54 am

Your approach -a complete rewrite of the essay- was helped by the combination of original words and info taken from Gladwell, resulting in an informative and essay that was structured well, persuasive, and to the point.

I agree with Jeff and Khristal that you had a more academic, informative tone to it. This style reminds of those timed essays one would write for a final or a quiz.With only 5 paragraphs, you managed to pick and choose which parts were most important, no meandering and weaving different narratives like Gladwell.

Gerard Sweeney

10/3/2016 01:40:48 pm

As far as professions go criminal is one of that goes back as long as free will is present, and it's only evolved to become a “family” oriented profession. If you were a criminal so were your kids, friends, enemies, whoever. It is a despicable way to make a living but crime isn’t forever, or as sociologist james O’Kane says it is just the “crooked ladder of social mobility”.

Throughout recent history we can find two radically different groups who have both tried to climb the crooked ladder with varying success. The parties of Phil and Ianni and Goffman, Mike and Chuck. Phil was from old money and took Ianni under his wing and taught him and told him of the streets and beauty they can bring as well, never hovering on the bad. Goffman, Mike and Chuck weren’t so lucky. They were of the stories Phil never really told Ianni, the bad. The hardened and struggling, the hotshots and hot blooded, the wronged and dead.

When crime is involved it's also relevant to the police. A young cop who was on duty while Goffman, Mike and Chuck were enemies of the state wrote about her 18 months on the force saying “I watched the police break down doors, search houses and question, arrest, or chase people through houses fifty-two times. Nine times, police helicopters circled overhead and beamed searchlights onto local streets. I noted blocks taped off and traffic redirected as police searched for evidence… seventeen times. Fourteen times during my first eighteen months of near daily observation, I watched the police punch, choke,kick, stomp on, or beat young men with their nightsticks.” This passage gives us a really clear look into the types of brutality that would help shape the men involved in crime. When society sees you like a fire that must be stomped out you end up fighting back with the same ferocity that wishes to end you, which ended up taking Chuck's life.

But that doesn’t mean crime is all bad. The socialist Daniel Bell put it best when discussing the founding fathers and all the sketchy deals they did when “winning the west”. That is to say that pioneers of America aren’t those with clean hands but those willing to dirty their hands. Crime doesn’t pay in the moment but it can have real impacts on how each and everyone of us lives. Just look at the abolition of prohibition, without criminals doing terrible things to continue their life within the drink we wouldn’t be able to have cupcake vodka.

In the end, without the crooked ladder of social mobility it would be rather improbable to advance as a society. Because it is by seeing how wrong is done that we can learn what right truly is and how to go about obtaining it, no matter how slow the process. I would like to thank Al Capone for saving us from a dry future.

I tried my best to channel my 8th grade MCAS self to become plain bread.

Stephanie Dawber link

10/5/2016 09:25:14 am

I like how you introduced the family role in how criminals and gangsters evolve and grow into their illegal ways and business practices.
Also, I liked your perspective about social mobility. I found this to be interesting because it revealed that in your opinion, not all crime is "bad." Overall, this is a really great summary of "The Crooked Ladder".

Stephanie Dawber link

10/5/2016 09:27:36 am

This is a really great summary and perspective of "The Crooked Ladder."
Your essay made me look at the story in a different perspective and made me change my views.
I like how you introduced capitalism and greed. This is a large part of the cultivation of the criminal.
Overall, I found this essay to be interesting because it revealed & condensed the story of the criminal.

Stephanie Dawber link

10/2/2016 05:50:10 pm

Six decades ago, Robert K. Merton argued that there was a series of ways in which Americans responded to the extraordinary cultural emphasis that their society placed on getting ahead. The most common was “conformity”: accept the social goal (the American dream) and also accept the means by which it should be pursued (work hard and obey the law). The second strategy was “ritualism”: accept the means (work hard and obey the law) but reject the goal. Many Americans—particularly those at the bottom of the heap—believed passionately in the promise of the American dream. They didn’t want to bury themselves in ritualism or retreatism. But they couldn’t conform: the kinds of institutions that would reward hard work and promote advancement were closed to them. So what did they do? They innovated: they found alternative ways of pursuing the American dream. They climbed the crooked ladder.

When Francis Ianni moved to New York to take a position at Columbia University, he asked Uncle Phil if he could write about the Lupollo clan. Phil was “neither surprised nor distressed,” Ianni recounted, but advised him that he should “tell each member of the family what I was about only when it was necessary to ask questions or seek specific pieces of information.” And for the next three years he watched and learned—all of which he memorably described in his 1972 book, “A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime.”

“A Family Business” was the real-life version of “The Godfather,” the movie adaptation of which was released the same year. The moral of the “Godfather” movies was that the Corleone family, conceived in crime, could never escape it. “Just when I thought I was out,” Michael Corleone says, “they pull me back in.” The moral of “A Family Business” was the opposite: that for the Lupollos and the Tuccis and the Salemis and the Alcamos—and, by extension, many other families just like them—crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins. It was, as the sociologist James O’Kane put it, the “crooked ladder” of social mobility.

One of the dominant organized-crime figures on Long Island during the nineteen-seventies and eighties was a former garment manufacturer named Salvatore Avellino, and Avellino’s story is an example of the crooked ladder in action. It is a good bet that Ianni’s Lupollos dealt with Avellino, because they were in the garbage business and Avellino was the king of “carting” (as it was known). On the other hand, Chuck and Mike were criminals: they were complicit in the barbarism of the drug trade. But, in the Mertonian sense, they were also innovators. Goffman describes how they craved success in mainstream society. Selling crack was a business they entered into only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them. In Chuck’s case, his mother had a serious crack habit. He began dealing at thirteen in order to buy food for the family and to “regulate” his mother’s addiction; if he was her supplier, he figured, she wouldn’t have to turn tricks or sell household possessions to pay for drugs. Chuck’s criminal activities were an attempt to bring some degree of normalcy to his family.

They didn’t think of themselves as ordinary criminals. That was Merton’s and Ianni’s point. The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. “The pioneers of American capitalism were not graduated from Harvard’s School of Business Administration,” the sociologist Daniel Bell wrote, fifty years ago. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.

Shae Ramsey

10/3/2016 09:04:09 am

A big issue in fitting this personal essay into the academic format is that there are so many narratives in Malcolm Gladwell's essay that it is difficult to keep them all when a writer drops it down to five paragraphs. This is a perfect example of that problem. Stephanie, you beautifully elaborate on the mobster culture and Gladwell's point (piggybacked off of other writers and statistics, of course), that mobsters, left alone, grow into more "proper" citizens.

However, this full, well-painted picture of Ianni's Lupollo family comes at a cost to Goffman, Mike, and Chuck. Their snippets come in late; you depict their circumstances, but I feel that one of Gladwell's big pictures is *why* they don't get a chance to domesticate their crime, how law enforcement has interfered.

You set up Ianni's book wonderfully, but Alice Goffman gets neither her first name nor her book; we get the circumstances without the setup. Some things have to be sacrificed, and I feel like a lot of people are focusing on the mob more than Goffman's kids. I do love the transition between the two you have, comparing the king of carting to kid-criminal-inventors.

Jeff Loiselle

10/3/2016 09:04:46 am

I think it's interesting that when asked to narrow a large, challenging piece, that we all seem to start in the same place, then go in different directions from there. With only five paragraphs, well, four, after the obvious first paragraph, you're forced to choose a single narrative when multiple narratives exist.

Your tone is more information driven, unlike Gladwell, who's more conversational, given the time he has to work and unpack his argument.

You pick up on the big picture argument, which is that we don't allow for criminals to grow out of that behavior. I'm seeing that a few of the essays missed the context, which is the current backdrop of policing in America. Why are these people being treated differently, Gladwell is asking. It's extremely difficult to get that across in so few lines. It requires time to work around the subject.

I also think that Gladwell is intentionally working around his big picture idea because so many recoil at the idea of unequal policing in America. If he hits it head on, many will reject the essay out of hand because of their biases. He's trying to work around these biases.

khristal depina

10/3/2016 09:19:35 am

I think its interesting that you kept all the original people mentioned in the first essay to conclude that "Gangsters left to their own devices grow up and goes away". I noticed that your essays arguments revolves around this idea of conformity and how these pioneers broke away from this social confirm. I think your opening and how you show this rebellion really makes this essay persuasive. You took on a different approach than the original to show this rebellion and I think it helped a lot. Also, you take the reader back in time to argue a point that was made. By doing this you set your essay around this idea and prove that Ianni was right in the end.

Christina Vasquez

10/3/2016 10:31:59 am

I find it interesting that you picked and chose which paragraphs from the essay to include in yours, however, since a 3.5 essay is very limited in itself, their has to be a point to the essay or else it falls flat. I wanted to, at least, see some of your ideas contributing to Gladwell's ideas.

Cailin Doty

10/3/2016 01:21:02 pm

While Gladwell's essay in its entirety was interesting, it was very long winded, jumping to different focal points. Granted, Gladwell's format allowed him to take extra time to explore different avenues while a 3.5 essay needs to be constrained.

Even though the Italian gangsters were introduced first, the way you rewrote the essay gives more focus to Goffman's findings. In contrast, Gladwell's original essay bounced back and forth exploring different mob members while the only other modern criminals he writes about are just the one's Goffman shadowed.

Brendan McRae

10/2/2016 05:55:31 pm

Many Americans—particularly those at the bottom of the heap—believed passionately in the promise of the American dream. They didn’t want to bury themselves in ritualism or retreatism. But they couldn’t conform: the kinds of institutions that would reward hard work and promote advancement were closed to them. So what did they do? They innovated: they found alternative ways of pursuing the American dream. They climbed the crooked ladder.
The point of the crooked-ladder argument and “A Family Business” was that criminal activity, under those circumstances, was not rebellion; it wasn’t a rejection of legitimate society. It was an attempt to join in. The moral of “A Family Business” was the opposite: that for the Lupollos and the Tuccis and the Salemis and the Alcamos—and, by extension, many other families just like them—crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins. It was, as the sociologist James O’Kane put it, the “crooked ladder” of social mobility.
This is one of the questions at the heart of the sociologist Alice Goffman’s extraordinary new book, “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.” Chuck and Mike were criminals: they were complicit in the barbarism of the drug trade. But, in the Mertonian sense, they were also innovators. Goffman describes how they craved success in mainstream society. They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to find themselves thwarted. Selling crack was a business they entered into only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them. In Chuck’s case, his mother had a serious crack habit. He began dealing at thirteen in order to buy food for the family and to “regulate” his mother’s addiction; if he was her supplier, he figured, she wouldn’t have to turn tricks or sell household possessions to pay for drugs. Chuck’s criminal activities were an attempt to bring some degree of normalcy to his family.
When read alongside Ianni, what is striking about Goffman’s book is not the cultural difference between being an Italian thug in the early part of the twentieth century and being an African-American thug today. It’s the role of law enforcement in each era. Chuck’s high-school education ended prematurely after he was convicted of aggravated assault in a schoolyard fight. Another boy called Chuck’s mother a crack whore, and he pushed his antagonist’s face into the snow. In a previous generation, this dispute would not have ended up in the legal system. Until the nineteen-seventies, outstanding warrants in the city of Philadelphia were handled by a two-man team, who would sit in an office during the evening hours and make telephone calls to the homes of people on their list. Anyone stopped by the police could show a fake I.D. Today, there are computers and sometimes even fingerprint machines in squad cars. Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost seventy per cent.
The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.

Brendan McRae

10/2/2016 06:00:18 pm

Many Americans—particularly those at the bottom of the heap—believed passionately in the promise of the American dream. They didn’t want to bury themselves in ritualism or retreatism. But they couldn’t conform: the kinds of institutions that would reward hard work and promote advancement were closed to them. So what did they do? They innovated: they found alternative ways of pursuing the American dream. They climbed the crooked ladder.

The point of the crooked-ladder argument and “A Family Business” was that criminal activity, under those circumstances, was not rebellion; it wasn’t a rejection of legitimate society. It was an attempt to join in. The moral of “A Family Business” was the opposite: that for the Lupollos and the Tuccis and the Salemis and the Alcamos—and, by extension, many other families just like them—crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins. It was, as the sociologist James O’Kane put it, the “crooked ladder” of social mobility.

This is one of the questions at the heart of the sociologist Alice Goffman’s extraordinary new book, “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City.” Chuck and Mike were criminals: they were complicit in the barbarism of the drug trade. But, in the Mertonian sense, they were also innovators. Goffman describes how they craved success in mainstream society. They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to find themselves thwarted. Selling crack was a business they entered into only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them. In Chuck’s case, his mother had a serious crack habit. He began dealing at thirteen in order to buy food for the family and to “regulate” his mother’s addiction; if he was her supplier, he figured, she wouldn’t have to turn tricks or sell household possessions to pay for drugs. Chuck’s criminal activities were an attempt to bring some degree of normalcy to his family.

When read alongside Ianni, what is striking about Goffman’s book is not the cultural difference between being an Italian thug in the early part of the twentieth century and being an African-American thug today. It’s the role of law enforcement in each era. Chuck’s high-school education ended prematurely after he was convicted of aggravated assault in a schoolyard fight. Another boy called Chuck’s mother a crack whore, and he pushed his antagonist’s face into the snow. In a previous generation, this dispute would not have ended up in the legal system. Until the nineteen-seventies, outstanding warrants in the city of Philadelphia were handled by a two-man team, who would sit in an office during the evening hours and make telephone calls to the homes of people on their list. Anyone stopped by the police could show a fake I.D. Today, there are computers and sometimes even fingerprint machines in squad cars. Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost seventy per cent.

The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.

Tori

10/3/2016 11:04:02 am

I liked that you pulled the crooked ladder motif from the original essay and chose to make it the meat of your thesis. The "compare and contrast" style of your 5 paragraph essay is clear and to the point, sans all of the original essay's narrative and side stories. I know that by forcing a text to fit the parameters of a five paragraph essay, a lot can be lost in translation. However, you did a good job of including the main gist of the original essay in a way that was informative without being dry.

Nick Swan

10/5/2016 07:28:43 am

I agree that you did an excellent job condensing the essay while leaving important points intact. I also like how you pointed out that climbing the ladder to success and trying to get an education legitimately is incredibly difficult, and that, in this case, selling crack allowed the family to actually feel like a family and survive is definitely an important statement to this work.

Tabby

10/3/2016 11:44:30 am

This is a really well boiled down 3.5 essay of "The Crooked Ladder". The lead up comparison played into your point about the law enforcement's role in how criminals and gangsters could and more than likely would evolve and grow out of their illegal ways if left to their own devices. Your emphasis on the role of society and law enforcement in almost controlling how criminals adept was particularly interesting to bring forth. Squashing "The Crooked Ladder" from its fluffed out 11 pages into the 5 paragraphs was a difficult challenge, but I believe that you did well!

Stephanie Dawber link

10/5/2016 09:23:02 am

I like how you introduced the law enforcement's role in how criminals and gangsters could and more than likely would evolve and grow out of their illegal ways if left to their own devices.
Also, I liked your perspective about society vs. law enforcement. I found this to be interesting because it revealed how criminals evolve. Overall, this is a really great summary of "The Crooked Ladder".

Zachary Enos

10/2/2016 07:43:57 pm

Crime in America is on the rise. With many famous crime films like "The Godfather", crime is invested into many lives without anyone knowing what to do with it. But, these are just fictional stories told in a theater. Francis Ianni writes about the non-fiction side of criminal activities in America in his 1972 book, "A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime". In the book, he details how a business syndicate family was able to climb the "crooked ladder" instead of pursuing the American dream that everyone wishes to.

"A Family Business" was the real-life version of "The Godfather", the movie adaptation of which was released the same year. But Ianni's portrait was markedly different from the romanticized accounts of Mafia life that have subsequently dominated popular culture. There were no blood oaths in Ianni's account, or national commissions or dark conspiracies. Danni gives little evidence that the four families had any grand criminal ambitions beyond the illicit operations. Instead, the Lupollo's clan was engaged in a quiet and determined push toward respectability.

The moral of the "Godfather" movies was that the Corleone family, conceived in crime, could never escape it. "Just when I thought I was out", Michael Corleone says, "they pull me back in." The moral of "A Family Business" was the opposite: that for the Lupollos and the Tuccis and the Salemis and the Alcamos- and by extension, many other families just like them- crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins.

When Ianni's book came out, there was widespread speculation among Mafia experts about who the Lupolllos really were. One guess was that they were descendants of the crime family. If that is the case, then the origins of the Lupollos were distinctly unsavory. During Prohibition, the Lupollo gang moved into bootlegging, further forcing them to find their own ways of climbing the ladder.

That's why the crooked ladder worked as well as it did. The crooked-ladder theorists looked at the Mafia's evolution during the course of the twentieth century, however, and reached the conclusion: that over time, the criminal vocation was inevitably domesticated. Ianni didn't romanticize what he saw. He didn't pretend that the crooked ladder was the principal means of economic mobility in America, or the most efficient. It was simply a fact of American life.

khristal depina

10/3/2016 09:24:06 am

I like how you open up with the idea of crime in American being high on the rise. You made an assertion about crime and how society perceives it to me. Your reference of the god father in the beginning here really shows society's beliefs in what crime appears to me. But I like how your essay focuses primarily on Ianni and his book. Even though you left the other references found in the original essay your essay still makes a compelling argument and details more of the mission Ianni set out to prove with his book. Your style and voice takes on the form of a journalist and I felt like I was reading a review about Ianni and this book. Either way cool job.

Christina Vasquez

10/3/2016 11:04:20 am

I was hoping someone would talk talk about the essay's connections with The Godfather and pop culture. The examples you take from "The Crooked Ladder," made sense to your argument and nicely focused on a concise point of view.

Nick Swan

10/3/2016 11:27:48 am

I completely agree that the crooked ladder is simply a fact of American life. The system that seems to operate here works against those whom are not born into wealth or are already somewhat well off. For immigrants with little to no money, working their way up legally yields less results than crime will. If we look at businessmen, like for example company owners and, dare I say it, Trump. They run their business and from the outside, it seems legitimate, but once investigated or explored, they tend to find ways to go around the law to build their wealth. Pertaining back to the mafia, films seem to romanticize and exaggerate what really goes on within an organization or family. That violence, greed, and the need to kill encompass what they are all about when in fact it is the complete opposite. It's just the way they find to climb the ladder.

Cailin Doty

10/3/2016 01:36:18 pm

What I find interesting about your rewrite is that you just focused on just Ianni's work and the reality vs fantasy of mob lifestyle rather instead of trying to tie in Goffman's work too. In the original, so much of the focus goes to Ianni, would taking out Goffman's research and changing a few words really change Gladwell's argument?

Cailin Doty

10/3/2016 05:18:56 am

In 1964, the anthropologist Francis Ianni was introduced to Philip Alcamo. People called him Uncle Phil, and he was, in the words of the person who made the introduction, “a business leader from New York City and an outstanding Italian-American.” Uncle Phil fascinated him. When Ianni moved to New York to take a position at Columbia University, he asked Uncle Phil if he could write about the Lupollo clan. And for the next three years he watched and learned—all of which he memorably described in his 1972 book, A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime. Ianni’s portrait was markedly different from the romanticized accounts of Mafia life that have subsequently dominated popular culture. Instead the Lupollo clan was engaged in a quiet and determined push toward respectability.

He didn’t pretend that the crooked ladder was the principal or most efficient means of economic mobility in America. It was simply a fact of American life. He saw the pattern being repeated in New York City during the nineteen-seventies, as the city’s demographics changed. “Things here in Brooklyn aren’t good for us now,” Uncle Phil told Ianni. “We’re moving out, and they’re moving in. I guess it’s their turn now.” The newcomers, he predicted, would climb the ladder to respectability just as their predecessors had done. It had happened before. Wouldn’t it happen again? This is one of the questions at the heart of the sociologist Alice Goffman’s book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. The story she tells, however, is very different.

When Goffman was a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania, she began tutoring an African-American high-school student named Aisha. Through Aisha, she met a group of part-time crack dealers and was soon drawn into their world. She asked them if she could follow them around and write about their lives. They agreed. At the center of Goffman’s story are two close friends: Mike and Chuck. They were criminals, complicit in the barbarism of the drug trade. Goffman describes how they craved success in mainstream society. The problem was that on 6th Street crime didn’t pay. Often, Chuck and Mike had no drugs to sell: “their supplier had gotten arrested or was simply unavailable, or the money they owed this ‘connect’ had been seized from their pockets by the police during a stop and search.” If they did have drugs, the odds of evading arrest were small. The police saturated 6th Street.

When read alongside Ianni, what is striking about Goffman’s book is not the cultural differences, it’s the role of law enforcement in each era. The Lupollos routinely paid the police to leave them in peace, as did the other crime families of their day. They got the benefit of law enforcement’s “blind eye.” That’s why the crooked ladder worked as well as it did. The granddaughter could end up riding horses because the law left her gangster grandfather alone.

The idea that, in the course of a few generations, the gangster can give way to an equestrian is perhaps the hardest part of the innovation argument to accept. We have become convinced of the opposite trajectory: the benign low-level drug dealer becomes the malignant distributor and then the brutal drug lord. The blanket policing imposed on 6th Street is justified by the idea that Mike and Chuck will get worse. The crooked-ladder theorists looked at the Mafia’s evolution during the course of the twentieth century, however, and reached the opposite conclusion: over time, the criminal vocation was inevitably domesticated. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. Old Giuseppe Lupollo was given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not.

Shae Ramsey

10/4/2016 06:26:23 pm

Cailin, how did you get both the great setup and the driving point in one short essay? Everyone all over the place is struggling to get both narratives into their essays. You did a fantastic job of grabbing the most vital passages without going for the stats-heavy sections. You held onto the perfect transitory passage between the two narratives, with the question "Wouldn't it happen again?" and all of the text that follows. If this has to be pruned down to a couple hundred words, I think this is the method.

Jeff Loiselle

10/3/2016 08:31:45 am

Six decades ago Robert K. Merton argued that there was a series of ways in which Americans responded to the extraordinary cultural emphasis that their society placed on getting ahead. The most common was “conformity”: accept the social goal (the American dream) and also accept the means by which it should be pursued (work hard and obey the law). The second strategy was “ritualism”: accept the means (work hard and obey the law) but reject the goal. There was also “retreatism” and “rebellion”—rejecting both the goal and the means. It was the fourth adaptation, however, that Merton found most interesting: “innovation.” Many Americans—particularly those at the bottom of the heap—believed passionately in the promise of the American dream. They didn’t want to bury themselves in ritualism or retreatism. But they couldn’t conform: the kinds of institutions that would reward hard work and promote advancement were closed to them. So what did they do? They innovated: they found alternative ways of pursuing the American dream. They climbed the crooked ladder.

In 1964 the anthropologist Francis Ianni sought to document The fourth method, innovation. Ianni didn’t romanticize what he saw. He didn’t pretend that the crooked ladder was the principal means of economic mobility in America, or the most efficient. It was simply a fact of American life. During Prohibition, the Lupollo gang moved into bootlegging. The vehicles that were used in the liquor trade became the basis for a trucking business. Gambling money went to family bankers, who directed the funds to Brooklyn Eagle Realty and other legal investments. “After the money from gambling is ‘cleansed’ by reinvestment in legal activities,” Ianni wrote, “the profit is then reinvested in loan-sharking.

He saw the pattern being repeated in New York City during the 1970s, as the city’s demographics changed. The Lupollos’ gambling operations in Harlem had been taken over by African Americans. In Brooklyn, the family had been forced to enter into a franchise arrangement with blacks and Puerto Ricans, limiting themselves to providing capital and arranging for police protection. What Alice Goffman’s extraordinary new book, On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City tells us, is very different.

Goffman describes Chuck and Mike, who were inner city criminals: they were complicit in the barbarism of the drug trade. But in the Mertonian sense, they were also innovators. She describes how they craved success in mainstream society. They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to find themselves thwarted, like the Lupollo’s before them. Selling crack was a business they entered into only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them. The difference, however, is the role of law enforcement in each era. Until the 1970s, outstanding warrants in the city of Philadelphia were handled by a two-man team, who would sit in an office during the evening hours and make telephone calls to the homes of people on their list. Anyone stopped by the police could show a fake ID. Today there are computers and sometimes even fingerprint machines in squad cars. Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost 70 percent. Chuck and Mike never had the opportunity the Lupollos did.

When read alongside Ianni, what is striking about Goffman’s book is not the cultural difference between being an Italian thug in the early part of the twentieth century and being an African American thug today. The Lupollos, of course, routinely paid off the relatively few police to leave them in peace, as did the other crime families. That’s why the crooked ladder worked as well as it did, and why it does not work as well today. Subsequent generations could rise into regular society because the law—whether from indifference, incompetence, or corruption—left their gangster grandfathers alone.

Brendan McRae

10/3/2016 01:22:45 pm

You have extracted 5 of the most essential paragraphs from Gladwell's essay, and you have maintained a logical structure in doing so. The arguments are easy to follow in this essay, but they have lost the full weight they once had, which is exactly what we would expect from this exercise. This reads as a good bare bones version of the original, but the artistry has been sacrificed, a fate that couldn't be avoided.

khristal depina

10/3/2016 08:49:20 am

Khristal Depina

"Bad people" stretched the law when it stood in the way of American destiny and their own. But they were also the law when it served their purposes. In America our judgment is blinded by this imaginary line of the good people and the bad people. The good don’t steal but everyday you see the American dream drifting away slower and slower from their worn fingertips. On the other hand, these so called bad people make the American dream happen. I didn’t believe until I met Ianni. He was in his early forties and his fascination with the judiciary system, American dream began because of Uncle Phil and Crime.

"Just when I thought I was out they pulled me back in" is the first line coming from the Mafia that we think of when we think of crime but Ianni proved different. He was fixated on writing this book, a goddamn book about crime in New York City that surfaced around the 1970's. His first infatuation were the Lupollos, people who Uncle Phil shared information about while they waited in the congressional waiting room. Just like Uncle Phil these people were Italian and not the come to my pizzeria and eat your spaghetti type. They were bosses as they indulged themselves in crime. The Lupollos started gambling, then bootlegging, to trucking, garbage collection, food products and real estate. They sound like ordinary people right? Wrong. They were schemers and just like that they moved themselves from Little Italy to a row house in Brooklyn, to Queens, until their family business became a enterprise with million of dollars in assets. They weren't the Mafia but they bended the law to make their American dream real.

Ianni wouldn’t stop and he dragged me along as he drenched himself in research and spying. He discovered that the great waves of nineteenth and early twentieth century European immigrants to American who innovated where the Irish gangsters to the Jewish gangsters then Italians turn. He called this the crooked ladder, im pretty sure he stole the idea from someone just

obsessed as him. In Iannis word's "The point of the crooked ladder argument was that criminal activity, under those circumstances, was not rebellion, it wasn’t a rejection of legitimate society. It was an attempt to join in. Boy, I bet the feds would have a ball with this one.

Speaking about the feds, Ianni believed that these so called mobsters bought the feds out, well for their protection of course. Without these protection how else were they suppose to survive and avoid prison time. The Lupollos routinely paid the police to leave them alone and they were granted this blind eye. This blind eye allowed the business to flourish but during the 1970's there was a boom of races who dived into this time currency. He furthered his research finding that African Americans and more began to sell drugs and loan sharking occurred. There was also a boom of more police officers in Philly, 70 percent. The point is everyone wanted in but the smart ones like the Lupollos and future mobsters to follow like Avelino hid in plain view. The ordinary thief is outside the legitimate economy but Avellino and others integrated into the legitimate economy. They were granted the blind eye and fulfilled their American dream by bending the rules.

Ianni convinced me. He really did. It was toward the end of the Lupollo study that I became convinced that organized crime was a functional part of the American social system and should be viewed as one end of a continuum of business enterprises with legitimate business at the other end. The pioneers of American capitalism were not grads from Harvard but they began with the early settlers and followed with the mobsters found here in the heart of New York.

Christina Vasquez

10/3/2016 11:26:46 am

Your tone of voice was what got me reading. The way you blended your remarks with the writing of Gladwell made it sound like you were the one doing the research. You even had the tone of voice like a mobster which had me laughing.

Shae Ramsey

10/3/2016 08:52:29 am

Six decades ago Robert K. Merton argued that there was a series of ways in which Americans responded to the extraordinary cultural emphasis that their society placed on getting ahead. The most common was “conformity”: accept the social goal (the American Dream) and also accept the means by which it should be pursued (work hard and obey the law). Many Americans—particularly those at the bottom of the heap—believed passionately in the promise of the American dream. But they couldn’t conform: the kinds of institutions that would reward hard work and promote advancement were closed to them.

They innovated: they found alternative ways of pursuing the American dream. Crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble beginnings. Fast-forward two generations and . . . the grandchildren of the loansharks and the street thugs would be riding horses in Old Westbury. [Times have changed, however, and sociologist Alice Goffman’s book, “On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City” illustrates that this cycle is now broken. In the modern world, the crooked ladder has given way to a Sisyphean climb. Those now at the bottom of the heap face a changed law enforcement and altered societal opinion that leave a criminal forever a criminal.]

What is striking about Goffman’s book is not the cultural difference between [organized crime] in the early part of the twentieth century and being [a] . . . thug today. It’s the role of law enforcement in each era. . . . Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost seventy per cent. In the previous era, according to Goffman, the police “turned a fairly blind eye” to prostitution, drug dealing, and gambling in poor black neighborhoods. But in the late nineteen-eighties, she writes, “corruption seems to have been largely eliminated as a general practice, at least in the sense of people working at the lower levels of the drug trade paying the police to leave them in peace.” That’s why the crooked ladder worked as well as it did. The granddaughter could end up riding horses because the law—whether from indifference, incompetence, or corruption—left her gangster grandfather alone.

The idea that, in the course of a few generations, the gangster can give way to an equestrian is perhaps the hardest part of the innovation argument to accept. We have become convinced of the opposite trajectory: the benign low-level drug dealer becomes the malignant distributor and then the brutal drug lord. The blanket policing imposed on [city streets] is justified by the idea that, left unchecked, [low-level dealers] will get worse. Their delinquency will metastasize.

The crooked-ladder theorists looked at the Mafia’s evolution during the course of the twentieth century, however, and reached the opposite conclusion: that, over time, the criminal vocation was inevitably domesticated. [Now, however, the crackdown on criminals in law enforcement and our own perspective has closed these methods of amorelation. We regard the mob with awe, but leave those at the bottom of the heap forever enmeshed in petty drugs trades and decorated with gunshot wounds.]

Jeff Loiselle

10/3/2016 09:14:42 am

Excellent distillation. Nailed it. Distillation is a good word to describe what's happening in our five paragraph essays.

I think you get what Gladwell is trying to do because of your use of the word "petty." He's drawing a parallel between drugs and alcohol. It's really tough to draw out the big picture argument with so few words, and I think the use of petty really helps, as we think of alcohol as petty in a way.

Your tone is much like a few others, including mine. It's a narrow story arc, and one that I think is very difficult to replicate Gladwell's argument, much less convince anyone of the inherent racism and policing issues in America.

I think that it's a challenging essay, and one that requires a fair bit of understanding about what's going on in America to fully appreciate. Gladwell is saying a lot of things in his essay without really saying them directly, which is next to impossible to get to work in so few words.

Brendan McRae

10/3/2016 01:05:26 pm

The selections that you have chosen from Gladwell's essay are certainly among the most important, and you have strung them together seamlessly. I enjoyed your periodic authorial intrusions into this 3.5 essay. They serve to bring further clarity and unity to what would otherwise be a train wreck. You have retained the general gist of Gladwell's essay, but some of the unavoidable casualties of this stripped down version are the loss of Gladwell's full voice and carefully measured arrangement. This of course is no fault of your own, but rather the purpose that this assignment seeks to prove.

Jenna Curren

10/3/2016 03:22:15 pm

You really nailed the presence of the American dream within this essay, even as it seems to be the antithesis of the American dream. I didn't even consider the implications of the mafia's presence upon the interpretation of the white picket fence America so frequently sought after. In fact, I didn't even consider the American dream in relation to this essay until you pointed it out. Now, it seems so obvious, I can't believe I missed it. Thank you for a new and interesting perspective!

Zachary Enos

10/4/2016 08:12:22 pm

Wow! Your response definitely shows you spent some careful time looking through the text to find the perfect examples of what to include in a short essay. I think your way of adding the actual text was smart. Most people did what you said as a body paragraph as their intro paragraph. But, I think the way you did it in a body paragraph makes more sense and is better this way.

Christina Vasquez

10/3/2016 09:08:58 am

The American Dream is a lie. A very good lie. For a long time, it was thought that families from other countries that were struggling for freedom would come to America to better themselves. These families thought that they could make a better life for their children, that they would have opportunities to succeed from the life that they couldn’t have. The reality sets in when they get to America and find out that they were wrong. “The Crooked Ladder” written by Malcolm Gladwell compares and contrasts two famous works of non-fiction: A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime by Francis Ianni and On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City by Alice Goffman. These two works explores the same ideas but their focus is on different subjects and “The Crooked Ladder” ties them all together. Gladwell points outs that the most crime in America in our early history has been associated with immigrants and minorities.
“Just when I thought I was out . . .they pull me back in” (qtd. in Gladwell 100). A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime focuses on four Italian families. They worked their way up the crooked ladder by bootlegging, gambling money, and loan-sharking. Gladwell had compared them to the real live version of The Godfather. Gladwell writes, “The most common was ‘conformity’: accept the social goal (the American dream) and also accept the means by which it should be pursued (work hard and obey the law)” (100). Their was not many opportunities given to the foreigners that came to this country, and because of that, they had to survive the other way, the other side of the law. As time changes, a new generation gets into the life of organized crime. However, these have changed. Crime is not associated with what you do but rather who you are.
On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City is a more modern look on crime today. The crime has escalated into selling drugs, and it’s sad that the people who sells drugs thinks that there is nothing else for them to do, like it was their birth right. Gladwell points out, “Selling crack was a business they entered into only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them” (104). The life of a young African American male is still hard and they are always judge by the color of their skin. Half of the time, it is drilled into their heads that young, black men, cannot live up to anything. It has come to the point that even young children knows what’s going on, “Goffman sometimes saw young children playing the age-old game of cops and robbers in the street, only the child acting the part of the robber wouldn’t even bother to run away . . .” (105). Another major role on why the system is the way that it is, is because the role of law enforcement.
When the Italian families were in control of their respectable cities, they paid the cops to leave them alone. Nowadays, the police will search you just because you wear a hoodie. Many factors contribute on the difference between then and now. It could have been because the Italian families were smarter than the police. It could have been because organized crime stayed within the family, and now, it gets harder to have trust in other people because they only think about themselves. Technology plays a part as well. However, just like young African American males are drilled since birth that there is nothing to look forward to; the law enforcement is drilled to stop people on the streets because they look different.
Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Crooked Ladder” compares and contrasts two stories on crime and race, and the non-existence in the American Dream.

Tabby Danyow

10/3/2016 11:00:28 am

Crime is not a new development, it didn’t suddenly spring up in the past twenty years. It has been around, arguably, for as long as people have been interacting with one another. Society’s handling of crime, however, has been changing, adjusting, and improving with our knowledge of how crime works and with the advances in technology. Immigrant families turned to crime more often because it provided a way to move up the social ladder. The change in our handling of crime is most apparent when noting the change between the prosecution of Italian mafia members in the mid-1920s and modern day African Americans. By contrasting these two distinct but very similar criminal groups, the change in police procedure has made the ability to climb the “crooked ladder” of social mobility much different today than in the 1920s.

Anthropologist Francis Ianni studied the inner workings of the Italian mafia in New York City. Unlike our idea of mafia through media portrayals such as The Godfather, Ianni’s findings were of family centered criminals who attempted to make their illegal jobs as honest as possible. Their goal isn’t to make America’s Most Wanted List or become any sort criminal mastermind or role model. In fact, according to Ianni, the family he observed, the Lupollos, lived in great modesty. There were “no blood oaths,...national commissions or dark conspiracies,...no splashy gunplay” (99) in the real life version of the mafia. The Lupollos were involved in modest crimes such as loan sharking, gambling, bootlegging (during the prohibition); these profits were “cleansed” through legal outlets (such as reality) that the Lupollos also had going. All of this was toward one specific goal: becoming respectable citizens and members of society. Or, in other terms, to provide a good life for their families and move up in social standing. The children rode horses and went to good schools, the adults were lawyers, physicians, and stockbrokers. Because the mafia had a good handle on their business and they were keeping order within the streets, paired with the lack of technology and non-corrupt police, it was easy for them to keep operating for years and years. The impact the police had them was minimal at best.

Sociologist Alice Goffman found the exact opposite happening for modern day African Americans. Although motivations between the 1920s Italian mafia and the modern day so-called gangsters are almost exactly the same, the police have taken a completely opposite approach to handling them. Even taking into consideration that the African Americans that Goffman studied were distributing drugs, the drastic difference in police involvement is hard to overlook. Chuck and Mike, the two welcomed Goffman into their world, regular jobs never worked out, no matter what they tried. Chuck had started dealing crack at thirteen to regulate his mother’s addiction (being her dealer was a two-part plan: regulate her addiction and keep her from “turning tricks” and selling household items) and continued in a desperate attempt to have some sort of normal life within his family. African Americans feared for their life every day, something that the Lupollos probably never even considered being afraid of. The danger of dying at the hand of police was so real that the three of them –Goffman, Chuck, and Mike- would text one another every half hour to make sure no one had died.

The advancement in technology has had a large part to play in the police’s ability to be involved with criminals such as Chuck and Mike. Squad cars come equipped with computers and fingerprint machines that make identifying anyone easy, unlike the before when anyone could show a fake and be free to continue on their way. The Lupollo family was also able to bribe their way out any attempts at arrest, Ianni made note that “no immediate member of the Lupollo clan had ever been arrested” (106) which is a stark contrast to the numerous arrests and warrants filed against Chuck and Mike, ending with them being imprisoned. The theory that left unchecked, criminal vocation would eventually relax and fade out was ignored in favor of the opposite: the idea that even the lowest drug runner would eventually become a malicious drug lord. Because of this idea police blanketed streets that were similar to Chuck and Mike’s just waiting to grab whoever looked guilty enough. This made climbing the social ladder, which was what they were attempting to do, nearly impossible. There is no way for the modern African American gangster to have the same opportunity for social mobility through criminal activity as the Italian mafia had in the mid-1920s.

The comparison between Ianni’s observations of the Italian mafia and Goffman’s study of African American gangsters may seem arbitrary but provide a useful link to show how police has changed and in turn affected immigra

Tabby

10/3/2016 11:36:11 am

So my last paragraph didn't get posted? Unclear why but here it is:

The comparison between Ianni’s observations of the Italian mafia and Goffman’s study of African American gangsters may seem arbitrary but provide a useful link to show how police has changed and in turn affected immigrant’s social mobility. Through a lack of technology and bribery, the Italian mafia was able to quietly and peacefully go about their criminal activity, allowing their family’s to reap the benefits. Good jobs were gotten and their children had bright opportunities opened for them. As technology advanced and the attitude towards small crime changed, African American gangsters had this pathway ripped away from them. Although their goal was the same, family financial safety and opportunity to move higher up on the ladder, African Americans have a much larger obstacle blocking the path than the Italians ever had. In this way, African American gangsters have been robbed of their chance to strive for greatness and provide the best life possible through whatever means necessary for their families.

Jenna Curren

10/3/2016 11:14:43 am

Gladwell normalizes the crime-ridden life of the Italian mafia by normalizing it as a necessary career choice. By classifying the underground world of crime as a necessary part of success in American society, the actions of the mafia become less severe in the eyes of the reader. It is an endless cycle that repeats through every generation. To express this point, Gladwell compares the life of African-American thugs to Italian thugs of an earlier era.

The lifestyle of the Italian mafia is frequently compared to the Godfather movies that dominated pop culture. The families involved in the world of crime reap the benefits of luxurious lifestyles: "That's why the crooked ladder works as well as it did. The granddaughter could end up riding horses because the law - weather from indifference, incompetence, or corruption - left her gangster grandfather alone" (107).

The lifestyle of the African-American thug is sharply contrasted to the lifestyle by described by Gladwell. Those involved with the Italian mafia made it out alive, more often than not. As exprienced by Goffman, The same luxury was not afforded to African American high school students of the same lifestyle. They were frequently robbed of their money during the stop and frisk movement meant to eliminate the flow of drugs on the streets. Years after the fact, Goffman and her friend would identify more than half of their high school classmates as deceased or in prison.

The youth is largely impacted by the shift in the way the crime and punishment is handled by law-enforcement. Young men of a certain age and demographic are tracked outside of funerals for those who were "murdered on the street" (105). These young men favored medical treatment offered by the underground health facilities that opened as a result of law enforcement congregating on hospitals. The same police officers that were once paid by the Italian mafia to be left in peace pursued this new wave of criminals aggressively.

Ultimately, Gladwell highlights the similarities of the American crime world to the world of American capitalism. It's impossible to ignore the familiar feeling of the mafia's actions when considering the birth of America and those who bore her. "The early settlers and founding fathers... ignored, circumvented, or stretched the law when it stored in the way of America's destiny and their own – or word themselves the law when it serves their purposes" (110). The Italian mafia adopted the same mentality and found success, while the African American and Puerto Rican franchises met no such victory.

Brendan McRae

10/3/2016 12:53:52 pm

You did an excellent job condensing Gladwell's fully constructed arguments into a measly 3.5 paragraph essay. You achieved the most that one can hope for in this aim a clear, coherent essay that makes its case. The tone, style, and craftsmanship of Gladwell's essay is lost entirely, but that is inevitable in a reductive exercise as such.

Nick Swan

10/3/2016 11:17:46 am

Anthropologist Francis Ianni, in the year 1964, was introduced to “a business leader from New York City and an outstanding Italian American” named Philip Alcamo; also known as Uncle Phil. Ianni was fascinated with Uncle Phil and his involvement in organized crime and decided to follow him around for a few years to document everything he heard, learned, and had seen for his book, A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime. Unlike The Godfather, which gives a romanticized view of the mafia life, the Lupollo clan, which Ianni followed and studied, were modest, quiet, and did not have any secret missions or dark conspiracies. Ianni’s journeys, as he studies Uncle Phil and the clan itself, he reveals that the public’s view of mafia and mob culture is skewed by media portrayals, through exaggeration in film and literature.

The methods and means in which these immigrant families made a living through illegal operations allowed them to be able rise from their humble origins, to climb the crooked ladder and achieve the well mentioned American Dream. Though, the Italians were not the first to do this. The first pioneers of American went against laws of the country to better themselves; they still do this to rise above everyone else. When it came to immigrant families and the mob culture, the Irish were the first to come around to it, followed by the Jewish gangsters, and finally succeeded by the Italian mob. It is described as being a functional part of the American social system and should be viewed as one end of a continuum of business enterprises with legitimate business at the other end. It wasn’t just exclusive to them though.

In the 1970’s, African Americans pushed their way in and took over gambling operations in Harlem. They were following this idea of the crooked ladder, and Ianni was not ignoring that. Ianni also puts down the misconception that once you are involved in crime, or born into it, you will never escape it. Yet, Ianni wrote, Fast-forward two generations and, with any luck, the grandchildren of loan sharks and street thugs would be riding horses in Old Westbury. Descendants of these mob families would likely be somewhat better off, but influence from mobs or staying involved with criminal activity would be a less likely factor.

Though, as much involved in criminal activity as they were, many of them were not sent to jail or convicted of crimes, mostly because authorities turned a blind eye to them. That’s why the crooked ladder was effective and worked. The granddaughter could end up riding horses because the law-whether from indifference, incompetence, or corruption- left her gangster grandfather alone. The mafia ran an organized system, rather than stomping out competition or trying to do a complete takeover, they built relationships and kept steady deals to keep an equilibrium, one that was peaceful and profitable.

The mafia was liked by some business owners and they liked having them around because it solidified business relationships. Though, this builds on wanting to blend in with society. The gangster, left with his own devices, grows up and goes away. Also, mentioned in Goffman’s epilogue, “The early settlers and founding fathers built up fortunes, and often did so by shady speculations…They ignored, circumvented, or stretched the law when it got in their way”. In the end, the mafia, gangsters, and even successful pioneers became overly wealthy and successful through a buildup of some business, never very legal, allowing them to chase after the American dream by climbing up not a straight ladder which most of us try to do, rather a crooked one.

Hailley Crete

10/3/2016 11:35:15 am

You did a great job talking about Ianni's role in studying the mafia. The theory that the Mafia was glamorized by the media is present in your work and you give background information, describing their work as "a functional part of the American social system". That being said, I'm wondering why there is no mention of Goffman until her quote in the last paragraph. I feel that her views really shape the essay for what it's trying to come across - racism and bias in the American social, law, and class system. The comparison of Ianni and Goffman's books is what made the thesis of the essay, to me, anyway.

Zachary Enos

10/4/2016 08:18:25 pm

I think your choice of paragraph placement was smart. It showed careful editing and cutting to get the "perfect" 5 paragraph essay from the longer essay we had as a model. Your intro was one of the smarter intros I have seen from the essays that have been posted. It has a thesis and full evidence for that thesis. Well done!

Hailley Crete

10/3/2016 11:26:07 am

The Crooked Ladder
His name was Philip Alcamo. People called him Uncle Phil, and he was, In the words of the person who made the introduction, Francis Ianni, “a business leader from Ney York City and an outstanding Italian American”. Ianni changed names and identifying details in his published work. The Lupollos were not really called the Lupollos, of course; nor was Uncle Phil really named Philip Alcamo. He started a gambling operation and moved into bootlegging; during Prohibition, the business branched out into trucking, garbage collection, food products, and real estate. Francis Ianni, in his 1972 book, A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime argues in favor of the “crooked ladder”, meaning that crime in the Family Business was not rebellion; it wasn’t a rejection of legitimate society. It was an attempt to join one.
A pattern repeated in in New York City during the 1970s, as the city’s demographics changed. When Anne Goffman, author of On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City, was a sophomore in college, she began tutoring an African American high school student named Aisha, who lived in a low-income neighborhood that she calls 6th Street, not far from campus. Goffman had taken an apartment close by and lived in the neighborhood for the next six years, profiling the lives of people who, in many ways, were the modern-day equivalents of old Giuseppe Lupollo, in his earliest days on the streets of Little Italy. Goffman became close with Mike and Chuck, who lived in the neighborhood, and would text one another every half hour, to make sure each was still alive. Chuck and Mike were criminals: they were complicit in the barbarrism of the drug trade, but they were also innovators.
When read alongside Ianni, what is striking about Goffman’s book is not the cultural difference between being an Italian thug in the early part of the twentieth century and being an African American thug today. It’s the role of law enforcement in each era. In the previous era, according to Goffman, the police “turned a fairly blind eye” to prostitution, drug dealing, and gambling in poor black neighborhoods. The Lupollos, of course, routinely paid the police to leave them in peace, as did the other crime families of their day. Betwee 1960 and 1970, 536 mobsters were arrested on felony charges, but only 37 ended up in prison. That’s why the crooked ladder worked as well as it did.
The idea that in the course of a few generations the gangster can give way to an equestrian (if you’re white) is perhaps the hardest part of the innovation argument to accept. We have become convinced of the opposite trajectory: the benign low-level drug dealer becomes the malignant distributor and then the brutal drug lord. The blanket policing imposed on 6th street is justified with the idea that, left unchecked, Mike and Chuck will get worse. Their delinquency will metastasize. The crooked ladder theorists looked at the Mafia’s evolution during the course of the twentieth century, however, and reached the opposite conclusion: that over time, the criminal vocation was inevitably domesticated.
Ordinary thieves act covertly. They hide their identity from the person whose money they are taking. The ordinary thief is outside the legitimate economy. Those immediately involved in the business like having the Mafia around as a referee, because it proved to be such a reasonable business partner. Ianni expresses the idea that the Mafia was a legitimate business practice that heavily affected the economy and was secretly encouraged by the government, while Goffman believes that the same type of crime that occurs in urban neighborhoods is dealt with through “ruthless tactics” by law enforcement.

Kelci

10/3/2016 12:08:58 pm

You've broken down Gladwell's essay nicely. You bring up the points of both the Lupollo family and Mike and Chuck really well as well as the evolution of the crooked ladder.

Nick Swan

10/5/2016 07:25:03 am

I like how you took this reading and flipped it to focus solely on the crime aspect. I did not think to look at what the theorists said about the domestication of criminals, in the sense that who they are and what they ultimately becomes extremely secretive, which I think skews our views on how the Mafia and mobs used to work. The police turned a blind eye to the business the mafia did because, like you said, it helped the economy and was probably encouraged by the government, possibly because they were gaining money from their operations. Though, now that things have done a 180, those practices no longer exist out in the open, for good reasons.

Kelci Sylvia

10/3/2016 12:04:04 pm

While Malcolm Gladwell’s essay jumps around into a few different narratives he paints a picture of organized crime from its beginnings. Underneath all of that is a tale of his book A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime. The most important family he mentions is the Lupollos, brought to his attention by a man named Philip Alcamo. The Lupollo’s were really name that and Philip Alcomo wasn’t his name either, when talking about organized crime, you had to hide these things from people.
The head of the Lupollo family was named Giuseppe. He came over the the US and landed in New York City. He began a loan shark business and later on a gambling operation that would grow to be worth millions. While many say that the Lupollo family was the real life Corleone family, of Godfather fame, almost all of the extended family did not involve themselves in organized crime.
While the Lupollo’s had a long run they soon were overshadowed by other ethnicities and other methods of organized crime. Where the Lupollo's dealt with loans and bootleg alcohol New folks came into New York City to deal drugs. Alice Goffman’s book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City tells this new story.Her story focuses on two gentlemen named Chuck and Mike. The book is much darker than Gladwell’s.
Goffman’s Chuck deals drugs to help his mother put food on the table. Mike. Spends time on the run from the police. A big part of the book is how the police treat these young men. They’re beaten and brutalized and forced to run for their lives.

Shae Ramsey

10/4/2016 06:14:22 pm

Kelci, you set up this essay's essence as a book review very well, I think. However, this is still very inductive; you lead us to the answer, but you don't have a strong point or thesis. Even at the end, you provide the evidence that suggests that the mobster culture and modern drug-runner culture are not and can never be equal, but you don't quite make that final thrust. I prefer your version as opposed to a dry academic essay, though. Your rendition and how it follows the story tone makes me wonder whether it is better, or more effective, to a have a thesis and then see the evidence or to follow along and--by the time the reader reaches the argument, they kind of have to agree.

After all, Thomas Browne kind of does that, and by the time he makes his nihilistic argument, he's already browbeat us into agreement!

John B

10/3/2016 05:57:30 pm

Crime exists. It also used to exist. Crime today and crime in the past aren't much different. But the end results are. Modern policing has changed the landscape of crime, it used to be that crime could be used as a way to eventually integrate into society. We can see this at work in Francis Ianni's look at the Italian mob in the 1970s, A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime. Compared to the modern era, we get a very different picture. The Italian mob has been supplanted largely by African Americans, but they are not able to integrate back into society the ways Italian criminals were. Alice Goffman provides an intimate portrait of the modern drug trade in her book On the Run: Fugitive Life in an American City. By analyzing the content of these two books, we can see that crime used to be a means to achieving the American dream and a good life, to be discarded when no longer necessary. But modern means of policing have halted this process, almost guaranteeing that any foray into crime results in a lifetime of it, with no opportunity for social advancement.

Despite popular portrayal of gangsters in movies and television, Ianni gives little evidence that the four families of his book had any grand criminal ambitions beyond the illicit operations they ran out of storefronts in Brooklyn. Instead, from the earliest days in Little Italy, the Lupollo clan was engaged in a quiet and determined push toward respectability. The origins of the gang are fairly dark. The gang was founded by Morello and Saietta: members of the Black Hand, the name given to bands of Southern Italian immigrants who engaged in crude acts of extortion—threatening merchants with bodily injury if protection money wasn’t paid. Saietta was thought to be responsible for ordering as many as sixty murders; people in Little Italy, it was said, would cross themselves at the mention of his name. During Prohibition, the Lupollo gang moved into bootlegging. But legitimate operations were already a goal: the vehicles that were used in the liquor trade became the basis for a trucking business. Gambling money went to family bankers, who directed the funds to Brooklyn Eagle Realty and other legal investments. The next generation became even more legitimate. By 1970, Ianni calculated, there were forty-two fourth-generation members of the Lupollo-Salemi-Alcamo-Tucci family—of which only four were involved in the family’s crime businesses. The rest were firmly planted in the American upper middle class. For the Lupollos and the Tuccis and the Salemis and the Alcamos—and, by extension, many other families just like them—crime was the means by which a group of immigrants could transcend their humble origins.

At the center of Goffman’s story are two close friends: Mike and Chuck. Goffman immersed herself in the 6th Street community. Her school friends dropped away. Chuck and Mike—and occasionally another friend of theirs, Steven—eventually moved in with her, sleeping on two couches in the living room. She lived through a war between her friends on 6th Street and the “4th Street Boys.” One day, Mike came home with seven bullet holes in the side of his car. (“We hid it in a shed so the cops wouldn’t see,” she writes). And ultimately, Chuck did not survive. Chuck and Mike were criminals: they were complicit in the barbarism of the drug trade. However, they craved success in mainstream society. They tried to get an education and legitimate jobs, only to find themselves thwarted. Selling crack was a business they entered into only because they believed that all other doors were closed to them. Unfortunately, on 6th Street crime didn’t pay. Often, Chuck and Mike had no drugs to sell: “their supplier had gotten arrested or was simply unavailable, or the money they owed this ‘connect’ had been seized from their pockets by the police during a stop and search.” And, if they did have drugs, the odds of evading arrest were small. The police saturated 6th Street. Each day, Goffman saw the officers stop young men on the streets, search cars, and make arrests. Many young men in the neighborhood lived their lives as fugitives. Mike spent a total of thirty-five weeks on the run, steering clear of friends and loved ones, moving around by night. The young men of the neighborhood avoided hospitals, because police officers congregate there, running checks on those seeking treatment for injuries. The police would set up a tripod camera outside funerals, to record the associates of young men murdered on the streets.

When read alongside Ianni, what is striking about Goffman’s book is not the cultural difference between being an Italian thug in the early part of the twentieth century and being an African-American thug today. It’s the role of law enforcement in each era. Chuck’s high-school education ended prematurely after he was con

John B

10/3/2016 06:03:09 pm

victed of aggravated assault in a schoolyard fight. Another boy called Chuck’s mother a crack whore, and he pushed his antagonist’s face into the snow. In a previous generation, this dispute would not have ended up in the legal system. The tools available to law enforcement are far greater: In the 1970s, The Federal Witness Protection Program did not yet exist; federal wiretaps weren’t admissible in court. Only the F.B.I. was properly equipped to tackle organized crime, and under J. Edgar Hoover the bureau saw targeting Communism and political subversion as its primary mandate. Until the nineteen-seventies, outstanding warrants in the city of Philadelphia were handled by a two-man team, who would sit in an office during the evening hours and make telephone calls to the homes of people on their list. Anyone stopped by the police could show a fake I.D. Today, there are computers and sometimes even fingerprint machines in squad cars. Between 1960 and 2000, the ratio of police officers to Philadelphia residents rose by almost seventy per cent. In the previous era, according to Goffman, the police “turned a fairly blind eye” to prostitution, drug dealing, and gambling in poor black neighborhoods. The Lupollos, of course, routinely paid the police to leave them in peace, as did the other crime families of their day. They got the benefit of law enforcement’s “blind eye.” However, such a practice is exceptionally rare today. Ianni observed that “no immediate member of the Lupollo clan had ever been arrested.” When Chuck went through his high-school yearbook with Goffman, he identified almost half the boys in his freshman class as currently in jail or prison.
The idea that, in the course of a few generations, the gangster can give way to an upper-class equestrian may be hard to accept, yet this is exactly what history, and Ianni's book, shows. Yet somehow, we have become convinced of the opposite trajectory: the benign low-level drug dealer becomes the malignant distributor and then the brutal drug lord. The blanket policing imposed on 6th Street is justified by the idea that, left unchecked, Mike and Chuck will get worse. Their delinquency will metastasize. Looking at the the evidence presented by Ianni, we reach the opposite conclusion: that, over time, the criminal vocation was inevitably domesticated. The gangster, left to his own devices, grows up and goes away. A generation ago, we permitted that evolution. We don’t anymore. The old Lupollos were given that opportunity; Mike and Chuck were not. Several decades of being “tough on crime” has taken away the natural outgrowing, and replaced it with intermittent prison stays, and lead to stagnation in poor African-American communities.

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