Posts Tagged ‘Mafia’
“Ritual and ceremony in their due times kept the world under the sky and the stars in their courses. It was astonishing what ritual and ceremony could do.”*…
The estimable Henry Farrell, responding to thoughts from Adam Tooze (here and here) and Paul Krugman (here) in trying to make sense of what happened in Davos last week, draws on the thinking of Michael Chwe’s Rational Ritual: Culture, Coordination and Common Knowledge (on why a game theoretic account of why ritual is important) to suggest that Europe and Carney disrupted Trump’s ceremony of self-anointment…
… I take two lessons from his book. First, that Davos fits very clearly into his definition of `ritual.’ Second, that rituals are important because they create common knowledge.
What we have seen at Davos over the last few days was an effort by the Trump administration to create new common knowledge in the world, an agreement that Trump was in charge, and that politics revolved around him. That effort has failed because of pushback from politicians, both Europeans who were furious at Trump, and Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney who gave a quite extraordinary speech. However, the result is most certainly not a decisive victory for Europe, Canada, and the other forces allied with them. Instead, it is one significant moment in a longer story of struggle and contention…
… Rituals often take place in consecrated places. British kings are crowned in Westminster Abbey. They also often take place at a particular time of the year (see churches and organized religion, passim). So it is not at all a stretch to see the Davos meeting as a ritual that is held in the same overcrowded place at much the same time every year. Like many rituals, its boredom and its ceremony go hand in hand. For many years, Davos’s most obvious social purpose was to reinforce the consensus about globalization, in predictable ceremonial language. Its very dullness and lack of surprise was a side effect of its power.
That was then; this is now. I don’t think that it is at all implausible to see Trump’s planned descent on Davos this year as a version of a royal progress (see Stacie Goddard and Abe Newman on “neo-royalism”). Swooping into Davos, and making the world’s business and political elite bend their knees, would have created collective knowledge that there was a new political order, with Trump reigning above it all.
Business elites would be broken and cowed into submission, through the methods that Adam describes. The Europeans would be forced to recognize their place, having contempt heaped on them, while being obliged to show their gratitude for whatever scraps the monarch deigned to throw onto the floor beneath the table. The “Board of Peace” – an alarmingly vaguely defined organization whose main purpose seems to be to exact fealty and tribute to Trump – would emerge as a replacement for the multilateral arrangements that Trump wants to sweep away. And all this would be broadcast to the world. Adam’s combination of stage, convening and acting would provide a means to shape the collective understanding of a global audience that Trump was now in charge.
That, of course, is not what happened. First, the Europeans were finally pushed to the point where they pushed back. As Belgium’s prime minister put it, “Living as a happy vassal is one thing, existing as a miserable slave is another.” It was clear that the Europeans were finally becoming willing to retaliate against Trump. That in turn had consequences for business.
As Adam suggests, businesses are unwilling to visibly step up to oppose Trump one on one. But businesses are not only individual participants in the ceremony. They are also members of a vast and depersonalized audience, via the anonymizing mechanism of the market, and, as Chwe suggests, it is the collective understanding of the audience that is most important. Just as the ouija board allows individuals to express their desires without being held accountable to them (thanks to the ‘ideomotor effect’ so too, the invisible hand of the market moves the planchette of stock prices in ways that no business can be held accountable for. When stock markets fall, even at the prospect of trade conflict between Europe and the United States, politicians pay attention. “Market fundamentals” (a loaded and problematic term) provided a very different understanding of the shared consensus than the one Trump sought to impose.
Second, Carney’s speech laid out an entirely different understanding of what was happening, and what had gone before. In his words:
Let me be direct: We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition. Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons. Tariffs as leverage. Financial infrastructure as coercion. Supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.
… from Chwe’s more immediate perspective, what is more important than the vision of the past and future is where Carney said it and how he framed it. If you are planning a grand coronation ceremony, which is supposed to create collective knowledge that you are in charge, what happens when someone stands up to express their dissent in forceful terms?
The answer is that collective knowledge turns into disagreement. By giving the speech at Davos, Carney disrupted the performance of ritual, turning the Trumpian exercise in building common knowledge into a moment of conflict over whose narrative ought prevail…
… He wasn’t telling people anything that they didn’t know as individuals. He was, instead, turning that private knowledge into a putative collective understanding that countered the alternative collective understanding that Trump wanted to impose upon the world…
… The ceremony was disrupted by European threats of retaliation, which in turn led the market audience to express its unhappiness, and by Carney’s quite deliberate and self-conscious effort to crack the illusion of inevitability.
That does not mean that the Trump political project has been defeated. It is going to be very hard for Europe and Carney to build a viable counter-consensus. Already, Trump is looking to discipline Canada and seize back control of the narrative. What we have seen was a battle, not a war. But to appreciate the weapons that the battle was fought with, and understand the prize that was contended for, it is really helpful to emphasize the relationship between ritual and collective expectations. Chwe’s book is the clearest account of this relationship that I know of…
Eminently worth reading in full: “Davos is a rational ritual,” from @himself.bsky.social.
[Image above: source]
* Terry Pratchett, Pyramids
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As we grapple with geopolitics, we might send illicit birthday greetings to Frank Costello; he was born Francesco Castiglia on this date in 1891. Having gotten his start in bootlegging during Prohibition, Costello became the head of the the Luciano crime family. a position he held (albeit for a few years in the 1950s remotely, as he served a federal prision sentence for tax evasion) until his retirement in 1957 after he had survived an assassination attempt ordered by Vito Genovese.
Costello had an “unusual” relationship with the man who could/should have been his primary antagonist, J. Edgar Hoover.
During the 1930s, Hoover persistently denied the existence of organized crime, despite numerous organized crime shootings as Mafia groups struggled for control of the lucrative profits deriving from illegal alcohol sales during Prohibition, and later for control of prostitution, illegal drugs and other criminal enterprises. Hoover [protested that] was reluctant to pursue the Mafia as he knew that organized crime investigations typically required excessive man hours while resulting in a relatively small number of arrests. He also feared that placing underpaid FBI agents—who had a starting annual salary $5,500 in the mid 1950s—in close contact with wealthy mobsters could undermine the FBI’s reputation of incorruptibility.
Many writers believe Hoover’s denial of the Mafia’s existence and his failure to use the full force of the FBI to investigate it were due to Mafia gangsters Meyer Lansky and Frank Costello‘s possession of embarrassing photographs of Hoover in the company of his protégé, FBI Deputy Director Clyde Tolson. [E.g., here] Other writers believe Costello corrupted Hoover by providing him with horseracing tips, passed through a mutual friend, gossip columnist Walter Winchell. Hoover had a reputation as “an inveterate horseplayer” and was known to send Special Agents to place $100 bets for him. Hoover once said the Bureau had “much more important functions” than arresting bookmakers and gamblers…
– source
“Whosoever is delighted in solitude is either a wild beast or a god”*…
… and, whichever, rich 18th century British landowners wanted one. As Shoshi Parks explains, they hired men who agreed to live in isolation on their estates for as long as seven years…
The Honorable Charles Hamilton, an 18th-century British aristocrat and member of Parliament, was explicit in his advertisement. The ornamental hermit he was recruiting to live in the sprawling gardens at his Painshill estate in Cobham, England, must be silent, never speaking to the servants who brought him his daily meals. He must wear a goat’s hair robe and never cut his hair, nails or beard. Shoes were out of the question.
If and only if the hermit fulfilled the terms of his contract, living in solitary contemplation without stepping foot outside of the estate for seven years, he would be rewarded with £500 to £700 (around $95,000 to $130,000 today). Mr. Remington (first name unknown), the man hired to fill the role, lasted just a fraction of that time. Three weeks after arriving, he was discovered drinking at a local pub—or so the legend goes.
Remington was one of a handful of men to cash in on—or, in his case, fail to cash in on—England’s 18th-century ornamental hermit craze. The short-lived trend, which peaked between roughly 1727 and 1830, was one of the most memorable to come out of the era’s shift from perfectly pruned, geometrically aligned gardens to wild, untamed ones in which “the irregularities and asymmetry of nature were charmingly inspirational,” says Todd Longstaffe-Gowan, a landscape architect and the author of English Garden Eccentrics: Three Hundred Years of Extraordinary Groves, Burrowings, Mountains and Menageries.
Aristocrats outfitted their new landscape gardens with unexpected, whimsical elements like caves, mountains, aviaries and menageries. But the hermitage, a secluded retreat for a real or imagined hermit that could look like anything from a grotto to a treehouse, eclipsed them all. “By 1750, if you only put in one structure in your garden, it would have been a hermitage,” says Edward S. Harwood, an art historian at Bates College in Lewiston, Maine.
Hermits, or individuals who withdraw from society to focus on spiritual, philosophical or intellectual pursuits, have served as a source of mystical power and curiosity for much of human history. Paul of Thebes and Anthony of Egypt, both saints born in the third century, are widely considered the first Christian hermits. Some early hermits lived in complete seclusion, while others were regarded as oracles whose access to the divine could provide ordinary Christians with insight, prophecies and medical cures, says Robin Darling Young, a historian at the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.
By the Middle Ages, “hermits were thick on the ground,” says Harwood. Famous medieval figures who lived at least part of their lives in isolated introspection include Pope Celestine V, who resided in a cave before assuming leadership of the church in 1294, and the 14th-century anchoress Julian of Norwich, who wrote the oldest surviving English language text known to be authored by a woman. But the one-two punch of the 16th-century Protestant Reformation, which delegitimized the monastic and ascetic traditions to which many hermits belonged, and the 17th- and 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, which favored scientific reason over spiritual learning, “largely eliminated” the practice as a form of religious devotion, says Darling Young.
During England’s Georgian period, which spanned 1714 to 1830, a new form of hermeticism took shape. Combining Enlightenment ideals with more traditional elements of a reclusive lifestyle, the ornamental hermit “became a representation of the aspiration to the simple life, the life of rural retirement characterized by philosophical and scientific curiosity,” writes historian Gordon Campbell in The Hermit in the Garden: From Imperial Rome to Ornamental Gnome. These individuals—whether real or imagined—resided in garden hermitages, structures “predominantly used as architectural feature[s] to draw the eye in the landscape,” notes the United Kingdom’s National Trust…
More on the remarkable practice of using real people as garden decorations: “Ornamental Hermits Were 18th-Century England’s Must-Have Garden Accessory,” from @smithsonian.
* Aristotle
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As we get away from it all, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that labor leader James “Jimmy” Hoffa disappeared from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He was never seen nor heard from again (and was declared dead on July 30, 1982). While it is generally believed that he was murdered by the Mafia, with whom he worked closely as leader of the Teamsters Union, his legacy and the circumstances of his disappearance continue to stir debate.
“It’s morally wrong to allow a sucker to keep his money”*…
Rachel Browne with the telling story of how a Montreal copywriter swindled victims out of $200 million by pretending to be a legendary psychic…
Patrice Runner was sixteen years old, in Montreal in the 1980s, when he came across a series of advertisements in magazines and newspapers that enchanted him. It was the language of the ads, the spare use of words and the emotionality of simple phrases, that drew him in. Some ads offered new products and gadgets, like microscopes and wristwatches; some offered services or guides on weight loss, memory improvement, and speed reading. Others advertised something less tangible and more alluring—the promise of great riches or a future foretold.
“The wisest man I ever knew,” one particularly memorable ad read, “told me something I never forgot: ‘Most people are too busy earning a living to make any money.’” The ad, which began appearing in newspapers across North America in 1973, was written by self-help author Joe Karbo, who vowed to share his secret—no education, capital, luck, talent, youth, or experience required—to fabulous wealth. All he asked was for people to mail in $10 and they’d receive his book and his secret. “What does it require? Belief.” The ad was titled “The Lazy Man’s Way to Riches,” and it helped sell nearly 3 million copies of Karbo’s book.
This power of provocative copywriting enthralled Runner, who, in time, turned an adolescent fascination into a career and a multi-million-dollar business. Now fifty-seven, Runner spent most of his life at the helm of several prolific mail-order businesses primarily based out of Montreal. Through ads in print media and unsolicited direct mail, he sold self-help guides, weight-loss schemes, and, most infamously, the services of a world-famous psychic named Maria Duval. “If you’ve got a special bottle of bubbly that you’ve been saving for celebrating great news, then now’s the time to open it,” read one nine-page letter that his business mailed to thousands of people. Under a headshot of Duval, it noted she had “more than 40 years of accurate and verifiable predictions.” The letter promised “sweeping changes and improvements in your life” in “exactly 27 days.” The recipients were urged to reply and enclose a cheque or money order for $50 to receive a “mysterious talisman with the power to attract LUCK and MONEY” as well as a “Guide to My New Life” that included winning lottery numbers.
More than a million people in Canada and the United States were captivated enough to mail money in exchange for various psychic services. Some people, though, eventually began to question whether they were truly corresponding with a legendary psychic and felt they had been cheated. In 2020, after being pursued by law enforcement for years, Runner was arrested in Spain and extradited to the US on eighteen counts, including mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy to commit money laundering, for orchestrating one of the biggest mail-order scams in North American history…
Read on: “The Greatest Scam Ever Written,” from @rp_browne in @thewalrus.
* W. C. Fields
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As we tread carefully, we might spare a thought for Meyer Harris “Mickey” Cohen; he died on this date in 1976. After a career as a boxer, Cohen joined the mob, moving around the country and rising through the ranks until he was a close associate of Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel in Los Angeles. In 1950, Cohen was investigated along with many other underworld figures by a U.S. Senate committee known as the Kefauver Commission. As a result, Cohen was convicted of tax evasion in June 1951, and sentenced four years in prison.
On his release in 1955, Cohen became an international celebrity. He ran floral shops, paint stores, nightclubs, casinos, gas stations, a men’s haberdashery– he even drove an ice cream van on San Vicente Boulevard in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles. In 1957, TIME magazine wrote a brief article about Cohen’s meeting with Christian evangelist Billy Graham. Cohen said: “I am very high on the Christian way of life. Billy came up, and before we had food he said—What do you call it, that thing they say before food? Grace? Yeah, grace. Then we talked a lot about Christianity and stuff.” Allegedly when Cohen did not change his lifestyle, he was confronted by Christian acquaintances. His response: “Christian football players, Christian cowboys, Christian politicians; why not a Christian gangster?”
In 1961, Cohen was again convicted of tax evasion and sent to Alcatraz. He was the only prisoner ever bailed out of Alcatraz– his bond signed by U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren. After his appeals failed, Cohen was sent to a federal prison in Atlanta, Georgia. In 1972, Cohen was released from the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary, where he had spoken out against prison abuse. He had been misdiagnosed with an ulcer, which turned out to be stomach cancer. After undergoing surgery, he continued touring the United States and made television appearances, once with Ramsey Clark.
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it”*…
It seems that money can trump sin, at least in the professional services arena in Italy…
We investigate if organized crime groups (OCG) are able to hire good accountants. We use data about criminal records to identify Italian accountants with connections to OCG. While the work accountants do for the OCG ecosystem is not observable, we can determine if OCG hire “good” accountants by assessing the overall quality of their work as external monitors of legal businesses. We find that firms serviced by accountants with OCG connections have higher quality audited financial statements compared to a control group of firms serviced by accountants with no OCG connections. The findings provide evidence OCG are able to hire good accountants, despite the downside risk of OCG associations. Results are robust to controls for self-selection, for other determinants of auditor expertise, direct connections of directors and shareholders to OCG, and corporate governance mechanisms that might influence auditor choice and audit quality.
“Does the Mafia Hire Good Accountants?“
Commenting on the report, Cory Doctorow (@doctorow) notes…
The authors suggest that when the mafia chooses an accountant, they have to choose between two mutually exclusive strategies:
I. Hire a stupid accountant that you can trick into signing off on dirty books; or
II. Hire a smart accountant who can turn your dishonest business into one that is honest on paper, even if that erodes your profits.
The authors make a compelling case that the mafia choose the second strategy. What’s more, they show that even accountants with known mob connections have no trouble finding non-criminal clients (“it is disheartening the Mafia can hire seemingly good accountants who appear to suffer no adverse reputation effects from their Mafia ties”).
Perhaps that’s because the mafia is so crucial to both the Italian and global business world: the authors quote a 2017 ISTAT study that says that 12% of Italian GDP is mafia activity and a 2011 UNODC study that attributes 3.6% of global GDP to Italian mafia groups.
But it would be a mistake to think that just because the mafia has clean books that it runs good businesses. Businesses that are run or colonized by mobsters aren’t good firms – they pay poorly, produce low-quality goods and services, and engage in a variety of crimes and regulatory violations.
This is a fascinating and clever analysis, though it’s short on recommendations. The most concrete policy proposal the authors advance is for police to maintain a public registry of accountants under investigation for mafia ties, and to bar those accountants from practicing until they are cleared…
* Upton Sinclair
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As we deconstruct the devil’s due, we might note that today is Groundhog Day, rooted in Pennsylvania Dutch lore that if a groundhog emerging from its burrow on this day sees its shadow due to clear weather, it will retreat to its den and winter will persist for six more weeks; if it does not see its shadow because of cloudiness, spring will arrive early.
While the tradition remains popular in the 21st century, studies have found no consistent correlation between a groundhog seeing its shadow and the subsequent arrival time of spring-like weather.
“I think I can safely say that nobody understands quantum mechanics”*…
But we may be getting a little bit closer…
It’s not surprising that quantum physics has a reputation for being weird and counterintuitive. The world we’re living in sure doesn’t feel quantum mechanical. And until the 20th century, everyone assumed that the classical laws of physics devised by Isaac Newton and others — according to which objects have well-defined positions and properties at all times — would work at every scale. But Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr and their contemporaries discovered that down among atoms and subatomic particles, this concreteness dissolves into a soup of possibilities. An atom typically can’t be assigned a definite position, for example — we can merely calculate the probability of finding it in various places. The vexing question then becomes: How do quantum probabilities coalesce into the sharp focus of the classical world?
Physicists sometimes talk about this changeover as the “quantum-classical transition.” But in fact there’s no reason to think that the large and the small have fundamentally different rules, or that there’s a sudden switch between them. Over the past several decades, researchers have achieved a greater understanding of how quantum mechanics inevitably becomes classical mechanics through an interaction between a particle or other microscopic system and its surrounding environment.
One of the most remarkable ideas in this theoretical framework is that the definite properties of objects that we associate with classical physics — position and speed, say — are selected from a menu of quantum possibilities in a process loosely analogous to natural selection in evolution: The properties that survive are in some sense the “fittest.” As in natural selection, the survivors are those that make the most copies of themselves. This means that many independent observers can make measurements of a quantum system and agree on the outcome — a hallmark of classical behavior.
This idea, called quantum Darwinism (QD), explains a lot about why we experience the world the way we do rather than in the peculiar way it manifests at the scale of atoms and fundamental particles. Although aspects of the puzzle remain unresolved, QD helps heal the apparent rift between quantum and classical physics.
Only recently, however, has quantum Darwinism been put to the experimental test…
How do quantum possibilities give rise to objective, classical reality? More on one possible explanation, quantum Darwinism– and on the three experiments that have have begun to vet the theory: “Quantum Darwinism, an Idea to Explain Objective Reality, Passes First Tests.”
* Richard Feynman
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As we ruminate on reality, we might recall that it was on this date in 1975 that Jimmy Hoffa disappeared from the parking lot of the Machus Red Fox restaurant in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, a suburb of Detroit, at about 2:30 p.m. He was never seen or heard from again.
Hoffa had served as President of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters from 1957. Long suspected of mob ties, he was convicted of jury tampering, attempted bribery and fraud in 1964, and sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1967… from whence he continued in his union office until 1972, when he was pardoned by President Richard Nixon on the condition that he resign Teamsters office. Out of jail, he began to plot an attempt to reverse this condition and return to power. Before he could make much progress, he disappeared. He was declared legally dead in 1982. While there has never been an official explanation of Hoffa’s demise, it is widely believed that he was killed by the Mafia, which was uncomfortable with his efforts to disrupt the power structure of the Teamsters (over which they has reestablished control).
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