Here is a brief excerpt from an article written by Malcolm Gladwell for The New Yorker during which he explains how Italian mobsters climbed up the so-called “social ladder” by way of crime. For black criminals, the story has changed. To read the complete article, check out others, and obtain subscription information, please click here.

Credit Illustration by Leslie Herman.

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In 1964, the anthropologist Francis Ianni was introduced to a man in a congressional waiting room. His name was 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 was in his early sixties, twenty years older than Ianni. He was wealthy and charming and told Runyonesque stories about the many characters he knew from the old neighborhood, in Brooklyn. The two became friends. “He spoke the lobbyist’s language, but with a genial disdain for Washington manners and morals,” Ianni later wrote. “He was always very good in those peculiar Washington conversations in which people try to convince each other how much they really know about what is going on in the government, because he generally did know.”

Ianni was by nature an adventurous man. He had two pet wolves, called Remus and Romulus. He once drove his young family from Addis Ababa to Nairobi in a Volkswagen microbus. (“I cannot tell you how many times we broke down,” his son Juan recalls. “I remember my father fixing the generator by moonlight, and the nuts and bolts falling into the sand.”) Uncle Phil fascinated him. At dinners and social functions, Ianni met the other families in the business syndicate whose interests Uncle Phil represented in Washington—the Tuccis, the Salemis, and, at the heart of the organization, the Lupollos. 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. 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.

The Lupollos were not really called the Lupollos, of course; nor was Uncle Phil really named Philip Alcamo. Ianni changed names and identifying details in his published work. The patriarch of the Lupollo clan he called Giuseppe. Giuseppe was born in the eighteen-seventies in the Corleone district of western Sicily. He came to New York in 1902, with his wife and their two young sons, and settled in Little Italy. He imported olive oil and ran an “Italian bank,” which was used for loan-sharking operations. When a loan could not be repaid, he would take an equity stake in his debtor’s business. He started a gambling operation, and moved into bootlegging; during Prohibition, the business branched out into trucking, garbage collection, food products, and real estate. He recruited close relatives to help him build his businesses—first, his wife’s cousin Cosimo Salemi, then his son, Joe, then his daughter-in-law’s brother, Phil Alcamo, and then the husband of his granddaughter, Pete Tucci. “From all accounts, he was a patriarch, at once kindly and domineering,” Ianni wrote of Giuseppe. “Within the family, all important decisions were reserved for him…Outside of the family, he was feared and respected.” The family moved from Little Italy to a row house in Brooklyn, and from there—one by one—to Queens and Long Island, as its enterprise grew to encompass eleven businesses totaling tens of millions of dollars in assets.

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. There was no splashy gunplay. No one downed sambuca shots at Jilly’s, on West Fifty-second Street, with Frank Sinatra. The Lupollos lived modestly. Ianni gives little evidence, in fact, that the four families had any grand criminal ambitions beyond the illicit operations they ran out of storefronts in Brooklyn. Instead, from Giuseppe’s earliest days in Little Italy, the Lupollo clan was engaged in a quiet and determined push toward respectability.

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. A handful of the younger members of that generation were in private schools or in college. One was married to a judge’s son, another to a dentist. One was completing a master’s degree in psychology; another was a member of the English department at a liberal-arts college. There were several lawyers, a physician, and a stockbroker. Uncle Phil’s son Basil was an accountant, who lived on an estate in the posh Old Westbury section of Long Island’s North Shore. “His daughter rides and shows her own horses,” Ianni wrote, “and his son has some reputation as an up-and-coming young yachtsman.” Uncle Phil, meanwhile, lived in Manhattan, collected art, and frequented the opera. “The Lupollos love to tell of old Giuseppe’s wife Annunziata visiting Phil’s apartment,” Ianni wrote. “Her comment on the lavish collection of paintings was [begin] manga nu Santa (not even one saint’s picture).”

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.

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Here is a direct link to the complete article.

Malcolm Gladwell has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1996. Previously, he worked at the Washington Post. In 2001, he was awarded the National Magazine Award for profiles, for his New Yorker piece “The Pitchman,” about Ron Popeil. He is the author of three New York Times best-sellers: The Tipping Point, Blink, and Outliers; a collection of his New Yorker articles titled What the Dog Saw, and, most recently, David and Goliath.