| As a reporter, columnist, and author who has written extensively about organized crime for more than three decades, my primary beat has been what is referred to by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as “traditional organized crime.” In official court documents, the FBI identifies the organization as La Cosa Nostra (LCN). Most Americans know it as the Mafia—the long-entrenched network of Italian-American criminals that has been personified in recent years on television in the award-winning HBO series, The Sopranos, and in movie classics such as The Godfather and Goodfellas.
In New York, where I have been based throughout my career, and elsewhere, I have also reported about other ethnic organized crime groups, including some that have worked hand in glove with the mob. These include gangsters whose lineage was Russian, Asian, Irish, Cuban, and African American. I have also written about Colombian, Mexican, and Dominican drug dealers, as well as other ethnic gangs with no alliances with the Mafia, such as the Jamaican Posse and the BTK, a violent Vietnamese gang.
In 1997, I traveled to Hong Kong and interviewed a “semi-retired” 53-year-old member of one of 15 triad societies based in the former British colony that was returned to China the following year. The veteran gangster described how he drank wine mixed with blood of chickens whose necks were broken during a four-hour-long induction ceremony four decades earlier, when he was 14. I learned that triad rules and structures were similar to those of the LCN. The boss, called a dragon head, was a “438.” The number-two man, the mob equivalent of an underboss, was an incense master, or 443. The lowest inducted member, a blue lantern, or 49, is the equivalent of a mob soldier. |