Across the country, Saint Valentine’s Day is thought of as one of the great romantic date nights… unless you grow up as a Chicago Italian, in which case a very different kind of event comes to mind.
At 10:30 AM on February 14, 1929, at a usually quiet garage located at 2122 N Clark Street, one of the most memorable and defining dates in Chicago history occurred, when seven mobsters of the North Side Gang were killed by four other mobsters from a rival gang who were impersonating Chicago police officers.
The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre is remembered as a cultural moment, one that defines 1920s Chicago. It has long been cited by libertarians in their argument against prohibition, and has been a treasure trove for Hollywood screenwriters ever since.
But in truth, the Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre is more relevant, more current today than it may appear. Such events still happen, every week, in America‘s big cities and border towns… because the lawlessness of that era has resurfaced, and, truth be told, for many of the same reasons.
Throughout the 19th century, and on through today, large swaths of Sicily and the southern provinces of Italy have been held in the grip of violent, powerful organized crime mobs, cumulatively known as the Mafia, the Camorra, and the Black Hand.
During the great immigration waves of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, America was flooded with immigrants from that region, among others. Most of these immigrants were good people, but mixed in were many who were either mafiosi themselves or lowlifes open to the lifestyle of crime after their arrival.
We had in those days formal processes for vetting immigrants – health inspections at Ellis Island, for example, to ensure that we didn’t knowingly import people with communicative diseases. But such facilities didn’t have the resources to catch most criminals.
If only we had had the kind of technology then that we do today. We could have turned back the Salvatore Ammatunas, the Genna Brothers, so many of the organized crime figures who already had long criminal records in Europe before their arrival. But we had no DNA tests then, no computer databases to share arrest records and fingerprints between countries. So they got in, hidden amongst the multitudes of honorable immigrants, and they did untold destruction here (not least to the reputation of the millions of decent people who shared their ethnicity).
Today we have the same multitudes of immigrants… even more so, in unbelievable numbers, far beyond our capacity to assimilate. And now, as then, most of these multitudes are probably good, decent, honorable people, hoping to live a productive and prosperous life in the United States.
But even though we have the technology today to filter out at least the known criminals, we are not allowed to do so. One side of the aisle, in particular, continually opposes any efforts to use modern technology to seal the borders and vet the flow of immigrants.
One side of the aisle has openly declared that “borders are a thing of the past,” that the flow of all people, from healthy to sick, from honest to criminal, should be unimpeded by our nation’s government. That one side of the aisle welcomes everyone into the United States, whether they want to work or loaf, whether they believe in the American Way or hate it, whether they come to help us prosper or they come to plunder and destroy.
So it is that today, inexcusably, our cities are terrorized by crime gangs… even more violent, even more destructive, even more politically connected, then the mafiosi of old.
MS-13, the Trinitarios, the African Pride, Zoe Pound, the KPGs… our nation is under attack by not only homegrown crime gangs but far too many imported ones as well. They stake out territory in our cities, from public housing tenements to whole neighborhoods, pushing their drugs, running their prostitution and human trafficking rings, and flouting their disrespect for our criminal justice system, as they have learned how to manipulate and evade it.
Today’s crime gang operates like a large business: it situates its operations in areas most friendly to it, recognizes which loopholes exist for which employees. We Americans don’t like to prosecute children, so they have their youngest members commit the crimes most likely to result in capture. We Americans can’t agree to let the feds cooperate with our cities, so they have illegal aliens commit the gun crimes in which fingerprints would make a difference.
Sometimes, they use one branch of government against another: hiding out in sanctuary cities, so the feds can’t get them… or even using the feds to deport known killers to get them out of the country before local prosecutors can catch them.
As a result, America’s big cities – Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, and more – are in a death spiral, with plunging property values, fleeing residents, and shrinking business communities, leaving the cities with an ever dwindling tax base to fund an ever costlier welfare state and criminal justice system.
Crooked immigrants certainly aren’t the only cause of this crime. We have plenty of homegrown killers, pushers, and gang leaders as well. We would have plenty of them, even if the borders were shut today.
But those homegrown criminals are the criminals we are stuck with, the ones we can’t help having. Why on earth do we invite even more to come from outside? Why haven’t we closed off our borders by now, and taken advantage of technology in this fight?
We have the tools: cooperation with many other countries, well-trained experts at every level of law-enforcement, and electronic tools supplied by an information age that often makes identification a snap.
There is simply no excuse for this country to be terrorized by foreign crime gangs anymore. None.
But the gang wars continue, especially in our big cities, with drive-by shootings and other gang hits on an almost daily basis, wounding or killing thousands of innocents in the crossfire. All in cities that simply no longer have the resources or energy to deal with it.
Even worse, the Democrat politicians in those cities now advocate such insanity as zero-bail release for captured criminals, zero-prison-time sentencing for those convicted, and even publicly announced non-prosecution thresholds. Our cities today actually go so far as to declare that they will no longer bother to prosecute robbers, as long as they keep each individual theft below some arbitrary number.
For 90 years, we grown accustomed to seeing organized crime in our movie theaters and television sets, and we understand it as well as we understand our own communities. We know what the threat is; we know how severe and destructive it is to our country, and we know what we need to do to control it.
Close the borders. Build the wall. Enforce the law. Cooperate with law enforcement in friendly countries. Use modern technology to identify, prosecute, and incarcerate the criminals.
It’s not hard; it shouldn’t even be controversial.
But only one side of the aisle today wants to control crime. Only one side cares about safe streets.
More is at stake in this election year than speeches, tweets, and news cycles. Our nation itself is under assault, and truth be told, one side of the aisle is on the side of the assaulters.
Copyright 2020 John F Di Leo
John F Di Leo is a Chicagoland-based trade compliance trainer, writer, and actor. His columns are regularly found in Illinois Review.
John’s grandfather emigrated from Calabria after World War I, to teach music, play piano, and conduct symphony orchestras in the New World. Sadly, not all of his countrymen had such pure motives… And, truth be told, such is the risk with all immigrant groups, no matter their country of origin.
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