One of the continuing sins of the American Establishment has

been a marked proclivity to indulge in self-deception when

confronted by some of the more unacceptable evils that afflict the

nation. There is a canon of beliefs by which the Establishment

lives and works that the consensus considers beyond challenge.

Included in this catechism are sacred dogmas of the uniqueness of

American freedom and democracy: that "only in America," as the

Bruce Springsteen song goes, can an individual rise from poverty

and obscurity to great wealth and prominence and that the various

forms of tyranny and oppression that have afflicted most other

nations on earth "can t happen here."

Yet it is precisely because the self-deceivers blindly insist that

a given social evil "can t happen here" that it often does happen

here m by default because of the absence of concern and action

that would have prevented the evil from flourishing.

The power and influence of the Mafia in the United States is a

case in point. No less a member of the Establishment than J.

Edgar Hoover, who ran the Federal Bureau of Investigation for

forty-eight years, publicly proclaimed time and again that there

was no such thing as organized crime in America. It was not

until a made member of a Mafia crime family, Joseph Valachi,

broke his vow of silence in September, 1963, by testifying before

a Senate committee about the structure, code, and criminal

activities of the Mafia in America, that Hoover came reluctantly to

admit that such a phenomenon as organized crime did exist in the

United States.

Until recently few Americans in positions of leadership could

face the affront to their cherished beliefs that the Mafia s rise to

vast power and influence represented. It could not happen here

but it did: the emergence of a brutal criminal tyranny within

American society based on the willingness to commit murder to