ABSTRACT
Social observers tend to overlook the route of ethnic organized crime as an important vehicle of upward social mobility for many of America's incoming ethnic minorities. Contemporary established Americans prefer instead a romanticized version of their particular ethnic group's history, complete with sterile, saccharine accounts of the rags-to-riches variety. Female newcomers also desired the success offered by the society, but they are relatively scarce in the world of organized ethnic criminal gangs. Not all the ethnic groups indulged in widespread organized crime. German immigrants, among the largest contingent of newcomers arriving in the mid-nineteenth century, had remarkably little involvement in crime. Italian crime, like Irish, Chinese, and Jewish crime, began in the lower-class neighborhoods inhabited by recent immigrants. Prohibition proved to be the turning point in ethnic organized crime for with it Jews and Italians ascended the ethnic ladder of organized crime while the Irish fell from grace.
