Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party (23 page)

“Then one night I was sitting in the restaurant and at the end table was Big Ed Stash, a professional assassin who was the Capone mob’s top executioner. He was drinking with a bunch of his pals and he was saying, ‘Hey you guys, did I ever tell you about the time I picked up that redhead in Detroit?’ and he was cut off by a chorus of moans. ‘My God,’ one guy said, ‘do we have to hear that one again?’

“I saw Big Ed’s face fall—mobsters are very sensitive, you know, very thin-skinned. And I reached over and plucked his sleeve. ‘Mr. Stash,’ I said, ‘I’d love to hear that story.’ His face lit up. ‘You would, kid?’ He slapped me on the shoulder. ‘Here, pull up a chair. Now, this broad, see . . .’ And that’s how it started.

“We became buddies. He introduced me to Frank Nitti, known as the Enforcer, Capone’s number two man, and actually in
de facto
control of the mob because of Al’s income-tax rap. Nitti took me under his wing. I called him the Professor and I became his student.

“Nitti’s boys took me everywhere, showed me all the mob’s operations, from gin mills and whorehouses and bookie joints to the legitimate businesses they were beginning to take over. Within a few months, I got to know the workings of the Capone mob inside out.”

PAYING TOO MUCH FOR MURDER

Alinsky had no problem with the mob murdering people; in fact, he argued with mobsters about the most cost-effective way to get the job done. “Once, when I was looking over their records,” Alinsky recalled, “I noticed an item listing a $7500 payment for an out-of-town killer.”

Alinsky approached Frank Nitti. “I called Nitti over and I said, ‘Look, Mr. Nitti, I don’t understand this. You’ve got at least 20 killers on your payroll. Why waste that much money to bring somebody in from St. Louis?’

“Frank said patiently, ‘Look kid, sometimes our guys might know the guy they’re hitting, they may have been to his house for dinner, taken
his kids to the ball game, been the best man at his wedding, gotten drunk together.

‘But you call in a guy from out of town, all you’ve got to do is tell him, Look, there’s this guy in a dark coat on Sate and Randolph; our boy in the car will point him out; just go up and give him three in the belly and fade into the crowd.

‘So there’s a job and he’s a professional, he does it. But if one of our boys goes up, the guys turns to face him and it’s a friend, right away he knows that when he pulls that trigger there’s gonna be a widow, kids without a father, funerals, weeping—Christ, it’d be murder.’”

Alinsky recalls that when he stuck to his guns about using a local guy and saving money, even a hardened criminal like Nitti was shocked and regarded Alinsky as “a bit callous.” We might expect the student, Alinsky, to be shocked by the callousness of the high-level mobster, but in fact it is the high-level mobster who is shocked by the callousness of Alinsky.

Alinsky admired how the Capone gang could shake down various merchants and commercial establishments and essentially extort from them or rob them at will. He summed up the effectiveness of the Capone operation. “They had Chicago tied up tight as a drum. Forget all that Eliot Ness shit; the only real opposition to the mob came from other gangsters, like Bugs Moran or Roger Touhy.”

Alinsky wasn’t a mob operative himself, so he didn’t get to enjoy the full rewards of being a member. “I was a nonparticipating observer in their professional activities,” he says, “although I joined their social life of food, drink and women. Boy, I sure participated in that side of things. It was heaven.” Heaven! Here Alinsky gets to witness, and partly participate, in the fruits of crime. He’s “in,” and he’s hooked.

I’m reminded here of the opening scene in the movie
Goodfellas
where young Henry Hill watches the mobsters at their revelries. How cool they seem, how brazen in their disregard for the law. Right away he decides that that’s the life he wants. It’s a better life, Hill says, than even being president of the United States.

Resolving to become a professional shakedown artist himself, Alinsky became a student of mob extortion. One could say that he sets his
sights on becoming a kind of Don Fanucci. Fanucci, you’ll recall, is the Black Hand in the movie
The Godfather
. He forces immigrant businessmen to pay him protection money but it’s not so much protection against other gangsters—it’s protection from Fanucci himself.

Fanucci is not a reckless shakedown man. He realizes that the Italian immigrants in New York at the turn of the century are a violent lot. He has to be careful with them, and this requires that he not take too much. He only wants, he emphasizes, a small portion of the take, enough to “wet his beak.”

We meet Fanucci in the novel because he intends to collect from Vito Corleone and his two friends Tessio and Clemenza after the three of them have pulled off some petty robberies. Fanucci approaches Corleone almost gently. “Ah young fellow,” he says, “People tell me you’re rich. But don’t you think you’ve treated me a little shabbily? After all, this is my neighborhood and you should let me wet my beak.”

Corleone does not answer. Then Fanucci smiles and unbuttons his jacket to show the gun he has tucked away in the waistband of his trousers. Then he moderates his demands. “Give me five hundred dollars and I’ll forget the insult.”
⁶
Fanucci was merely doing what worked for him. Most people paid his ransom; they figured it was better than tangling with Fanucci.

THE LITTLE LIGHT BULB

There was only one problem with Alinsky’s career goal to emulate criminals like Capone and Fanucci in their shakedown schemes: shakedown men sometimes get knocked off. In
The Godfather
, Fanucci tries to shake down Vito Corleone and his two accomplices and gets murdered. Organized crime is high risk, high reward.

Alinsky wanted to figure out how to keep the reward but reduce the risk. He intended to emulate the mob’s shakedown operations without getting killed. He said to himself, “Here I am, a smart son of a bitch, I graduated cum laude and all that shit.” He knew he could figure a way. “And then,” he says, “it came to me, that little light bulb lit over my head.”

Basically, Alinsky realized that the answer was: politics. In politics, you can extract money from people without getting knocked off. In politics, there is such a thing as
legal
theft. What better way to wet your beak? So Alinsky moved on to politics, yet he patterned his political operations on what he had learned from the Capone gang. In a revealing quotation, Alinsky told
Playboy
, “I learned a hell of a lot about the uses and abuses of power from the mob, lessons that stood me in good stead later on, when I was organizing.”

For Alinsky, politics is the art of intimidation from the outside. This is basically what a community organizer does. As Alinsky explains, a community organizer must first identify the target, which may be a local business, a national retail chain, a public school system, even the mayor’s office. The target must have resources, or money, or jobs to hand out. Extracting those benefits without working for them now becomes the organizer’s mission.

Power, Alinsky writes, never gives in without a fight. The only way to get stuff from the people who have it is to make it easier for them to give it to you than to fight you. “Very often the mere threat,” Alinsky says, “is enough to bring the enemy to its knees.” Getting the target to the point of submission—forcing it to pay up—is the supreme challenge of a political organizer.

Before attempting the extortion, the organizer must recruit allies. In Alinsky’s words, “To f*ck your enemies, you’ve first got to seduce your allies.” These allies may be unions, disgruntled workers, 1960s leftists, activist clergy, homeless bums, inner-city gang members, professional malcontents, anyone you can get. Alinsky’s strategy was to convince these people that their wants and demands—more money, more power—did not represent mere selfish claims but rather moral entitlements. They had a
right
to this stuff.

Moreover, they should not consider themselves to be asking for gifts or charity. Rather, as Alinsky candidly put it, “They only get these things in the act of taking them through their own efforts.” In a sense, Alinsky empowered people to become his co-conspirators in theft while feeling very good about themselves in doing so.

Sometimes Alinsky was able to recruit effective allies in unlikely places. Although a nonpracticing Jew, Alinsky struck up a working alliance with powerful people in the Catholic Church. While the church in that city was politically liberal, Alinsky knew that many priests wanted to stay away from the kind of hardball extortionist politics that he had in mind. He also decided that he could not bring them into his fold with an appeal to Christian charity.

Alinsky explains, “Suppose I walked into the office of the average leader of any denomination and said, ‘Look, I’m asking you to live up to your Christian principles, to make Jesus’ words about brotherhood and social justice realities.’ What do you think would happen? He’d shake my hand warmly and said, ‘God bless you, my son,’ and after I was gone he’d tell his secretary, ‘If that crackpot comes around again, tell him I’m out.’

“So in order to involve the Catholic priests, I didn’t give them any stuff about Christian ethics, I just appealed to their self-interest.” Basically Alinsky told them that if they backed him he would make sure that more money flowed in their direction through government grants for the church and donations for its charitable activities.

“Now I’m talking their language,” Alinsky crowed, “and we can sit down and hammer out a deal. That’s what happened in Back of the Yards, and within a few months the overwhelming majority of the parish priests were backing us, and we were holding our organizational meetings in their churches.”

A RESENTMENT ORGANIZER

While the church helped Alinsky in Chicago, he realized that on the national scale the biggest challenge was to recruit and radicalize members of the white middle class. This, he frequently said, was the largest and most powerful group in the country. Consequently it could apply strong political pressure to extract benefits both from government and from corporations. At the time Richard Nixon was courting the middle class, and many people considered that group to be politically conservative. But Alinsky felt confident that he could make headway with it.

Of the white middle class, he said, “Right now they’re frozen, festering in apathy, living what Thoreau called lives of quiet desperation. They’ve worked all their lives to get their own little house in the suburbs, their color TV, their two cars and now the good life seems to have turned to ashes in their mouths. Their personal lives are generally unfulfilling, their jobs unsatisfying, they’ve succumbed to tranquilizers and pep pills, they drown their anxieties in alcohol, they feel trapped in long-term endurance marriages, or escape into guilt-ridden divorces.

“They’re losing their kids and they’re losing their dreams. They’re alienated, depersonalized, without any feeling of participation in the political process, and they feel rejected and hopeless. Their society appears to be crumbling, and they see themselves as no more than small failures within the larger failure. All their old values seem to have deserted them, leaving them rudderless in a sea of social chaos. Believe me, this is good organizational material.”

The way to win recruits from this group, Alinsky writes, is not by solving these people’s problems but by aggravating them. In Alinsky’s words, “The despair is there; now it’s up to us to go in and rub raw the sores of discontent.” This is done by directing people’s frustration not against government but against business. “We’ll show the middle class their real enemies: the corporate power elite that runs and ruins this country.”

What has this corporate power elite done that is so reprehensible? For Alinsky, this is the wrong question. The real question was a very simple one: Who has the money?

Alinsky realized he could recruit allies and direct their hatred to the corporations by appealing to motives such as envy, resentment, and hatred, but all packaged in the rhetoric of equality and justice. He had no illusion that any of this was related to actual justice.

For Alinsky, justice is a province of morality, and morality is a scam. Morality is the cloak of power. Activists appeal to the language of morality but recognize that it is a mere disguise. As Alinsky puts it, “Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times. . . . In action, one does not always enjoy the luxury of a decision that is consistent with one’s
individual conscience. . . . You do what you can with what you have, and then clothe it with moral garments.”
⁷

In his book
Reveille for Radicals
, Alinsky takes up the fashionable liberal cause of “reconciliation.” He proclaims the very idea totally unrealistic, “an illusion of the world as we would like it to be.” In the real world, Alinsky says, “Reconciliation means that one side has the power and the other side gets reconciled to it.”
⁸
Alinsky was determined to have the power on his side, so that his opponents would become reconciled to being shaken down by him.

Alinsky’s contempt for traditional morality can also be seen in the way he admiringly cites Lenin. “Lenin was a pragmatist,” he writes in
Rules for Radicals
. “When he returned from exile, he said that the Bolsheviks stood for getting power through the ballot but would reconsider after they got the guns.”
⁹
What Alinsky meant by this is that activists should invoke principles like free speech and equality under the law in order to protect themselves, but once they come to power they should ignore these principles and not extend them to their opponents. Modern progressives seem to have taken this lesson to heart.

RIPPING OFF THE GOVERNMENT

While Alinsky attempted to direct middle-class frustration against private corporations, he was not above targeting the government for his shakedown schemes. He gleefully described the way he forced Chicago mayor Richard Daley to give in to some of his extortionist demands. Daley was a very powerful man who regarded Chicago as his personal domain. In this, Alinsky found Daley’s Achilles’ heel.