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SEIFFE:  Apalachin In The Tropics

Thurdsday, December 20, 2007

By Ralf Seiffe

In November 1957, sharp-eyed, state trooper Edgar Croswell, patrolling rural Tioga County in upstate New York, noticed an unusual number of very expensive, out-of-state cars cruising Highway 17.  He investigated the apparent destination of the gas guzzlers, the estate of a soft drink bottler from Buffalo by the name of Joe Barbara.  Suspicious, the trooper contacted other local law enforcement agencies and set up an ad-hoc road block near Barbara’s house in Apalachin, New York.  Soon thereafter, Croswell and his colleagues flushed more than 100 flashily dressed and expensively shod mobsters into the nearby woods.  The lawmen gave chase and managed to snare more than 50 crooks from all over the country including Carlo Gambino, Vito Genovese and Joseph Bonanno. 

No serious charges were leveled against the gangsters but “Apalachin” proved a disaster because it incontrovertibly proved the existence of a national, organized crime organization.   This failed meeting marks the apogee of La Cosa Nostra in the United States because J. Edgar  Hoover’s FBI--which had previously denied the very existence of any national crime syndicate--could no longer maintain that fiction. After the exposure of Apalachin, the government was forced to take steps to dismantle the mob and over time, the feds have mostly succeeded.  New laws specifically designed to combat organized crime, effective eavesdropping, the dispersal of the Italian Americans into the great American melting pot, the demise of the criminals themselves and very hard work by federal agents have reduced the mafia to irrelevance. 

Half a century later, one wonders if there is someone with the perceptive powers of Trooper Croswell in Bali.  If so, the recently concluded conference on global warming must have been just as suspicious as those long-ago events in Upstate New York.  The unusual number of private jets converging on his island must have looked as odd as the fleet of Cadillac clippers did in New York’s farm county.  The hundreds of Blackberry bureaucrats from all over the world would puzzle him too, just like the out-of-place gangsters in sharkskin suits puzzled Trooper Croswell fifty years ago. 

But beyond these surface coincidences, these two meetings had similar purposes.  In Apalachin, participants assembled to decide how to manage their joint enterprise and to expand their parasitic activities in their respective territories. Crime bosses exist to organize the naturally occurring supply of criminals, extracting a “street tax” on the burglars, bookmakers and pimps. In this way, they take an interest in the proceeds of crime without exposing themselves to danger, enforcing their will with murder and extortion. 

That’s not much different than the Bali, climate conference delegates who met to tie the coercive power of government to the naturally-occurring phenomenon of global warming.  For the planet’s bureaucrats and professional doomsayers, these weather cycles present a great opportunity to create a permanent, parasitic grip on the entire world’s economy with audacity that would dumbfound the old-time mobsters.  Their first step was to attempt to extort $80 billion from the First World—more than half of it from the United States.  They failed, but the prospect of succeeding in this pursuit was apparently worth the permanent exposure as hypocrites that their private jets revealed.   They will be back because there is so much control at stake. 

This analogy will offend true believers in human causes of global warming but the South Seas conferees with the fancy titles have much more in common with the men sporting those scary nick-names than they may be willing to admit.  Like “No Nose” or “Joe the Barber”, climate change advocates do not tolerate viewpoints that conflict with their own.  Stifling debate and terrorizing academics are much more sophisticated techniques than the garrote or the lupo but they are just as effective—and for the very same reason.   Crime bosses insulate themselves from the actual wrongdoing and this new breed relies on the United Nations to provide them anonymity and cover as they creep towards eliminating national sovereignty.   The deep bureaucratic language in their reports is as opaque as omerta. 

Ralf Seiffe advises business start-ups and product launches from Chicago, Illinois and is a political analyst and columnist for the Illinois Leader and Illinois Review.

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