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The beginning of the end for the mafia was when drugs came involved in mafia business. The mafia made a pretty tidy racket doing some rather laughably mundane things prior to the hard drug trade. One such racket was stealing tanker trucks full of gas and using them to refill mafia owned gas stations. The gas stations would sell the gasoline without having to pay the taxes or purchase the gasoline. Rackets like this would bring in anywhere from \$15,000-\$20,000 a month. That's good money, but its not "beat somebody to death with a baseball bat and ditch their corpse in the harbor" levels of income. People usually don't start committing heinous impossible to ignore crimes like torture followed by murder and mutilation over numbers like that.

What's more, when the big Dons started getting locked up by these new harsher sentences the guys who replaced them were not very smart. The real dons were replaced by street thugs in fancy suits. When you give a guy whose job qualifications are "breaks kneecaps real good" and "scares store owners into paying their protection payment without a fight" several million dollars and the reigns to a few hundred guys just like him things get... messy. Once the officers and bosses got locked up and the soldiers started running things is when the crazy over the top violence and endless cycle of back stabbings happened. You can't run an organized criminal enterprise that violently and get away with it for long. Thanks to mandatory sentencing decapitating their actually qualified leadership they started killing each other over the drug money they were making like feral dogs fighting over a steak, or got arrested for multi decade long sentences.

The beginning of the end for the mafia was when drugs came involved in mafia business. The mafia made a pretty tidy racket doing some rather laughably mundane things prior to the hard drug trade. One such racket was stealing tanker trucks full of gas and using them to refill mafia owned gas stations. The gas stations would sell the gasoline without having to pay the taxes or purchase the gasoline. Rackets like this would bring in anywhere from \$15,000-\$20,000 a month. That's good money, but it's not "beat somebody to death with a baseball bat and ditch their corpse in the harbor" levels of income. People usually don't start committing heinous impossible to ignore crimes like torture followed by murder and mutilation over numbers like that.

What's more, when the big Dons started getting locked up by these new harsher sentences the guys who replaced them were not very smart. The real dons were replaced by street thugs in fancy suits. When you give a guy whose job qualifications are "breaks kneecaps real good" and "scares store owners into paying their protection payment without a fight" several million dollars and the reins to a few hundred guys just like him things get... messy. Once the officers and bosses got locked up and the soldiers started running things is when the crazy over the top violence and endless cycle of back stabbings happened. You can't run an organized criminal enterprise that violently and get away with it for long. Thanks to mandatory sentencing decapitating their actually qualified leadership they started killing each other over the drug money they were making like feral dogs fighting over a steak, or got arrested for multi decade long sentences.

The beginning of the end for the mafia was when drugs came involved in mafia business. The mafia made a pretty tidy racket doing some rather laughably mundane things prior to the hard drug trade. One such racket was stealing tanker trucks full of gas and using them to refill mafia owned gas stations. The gas stations would sell the gasoline without having to pay the taxes or purchase the gasoline. Rackets like this would bring in anywhere from $15,000-$20,000 a month. That's good money, but its not "beat somebody to death with a baseball bat and ditch their corpse in the harbor" levels of income. People usually don't start committing heinous impossible to ignore crimes like torture followed by murder and mutilation over numbers like that.

One of the biggest death knells to the Mafia rose out of the War on Drugs. Mandatory Minimum Sentencing. Believe it or not there was a time in our history not too long ago when getting caught committing various felonies only netted you 3 to 4 years in the clink. You could get caught with a bunch of stolen goods, or illegal weapons, or hard drugs, or even murder and not actually get all that much time in prison for it. The new much harsher sentences created by Mandatory Sentencing meant that once a made man was nabbed by the cops he might be taken off the streets for decades. This really harmed to mafia's ability to maintain and pass on power. Previously getting arrested was just an inconvenience, albeit a major one. Now it was a career ending event.

Again, up until very recently in police history the cops weren't really very well armed. They didn't need to be. A .38 special K-frame revolver is more than enough to handle some punk with a switchblade or a .25 auto pocket pistol. Today'modern police are basically a military organization complete with huge budgets, machine guns, hard core organization, and nation wide data (intelligence) sharing and collecting. This largely happened in response to the crime waves sparked by hard drugs hitting our streets, which largely happened because the mafia realized they could really make a ton of money selling the hard stuff and started the first major drug smuggling operations on our shores.

The beginning of the end for the mafia was when drugs came involved in mafia business. The mafia made a pretty tidy racket doing some rather laughably mundane things prior to the hard drug trade. One such racket was stealing tanker trucks full of gas and using them to refill mafia owned gas stations. The gas stations would sell the gasoline without having to pay the taxes or purchase the gasoline. Rackets like this would bring in anywhere from \$15,000-\$20,000 a month. That's good money, but its not "beat somebody to death with a baseball bat and ditch their corpse in the harbor" levels of income. People usually don't start committing heinous impossible to ignore crimes like torture followed by murder and mutilation over numbers like that.

One of the biggest death knells to the Mafia rose out of the War on Drugs. Mandatory Minimum Sentencing. Believe it or not there was a time in our history not too long ago when getting caught committing various felonies only netted you 3 to 4 years in the clink. You could get caught with a bunch of stolen goods, or illegal weapons, or hard drugs, or even murder and not actually get all that much time in prison for it. The new much harsher sentences created by Mandatory Minimum Sentencing meant that once a made man was nabbed by the cops he might be taken off the streets for decades. This really harmed to mafia's ability to maintain and pass on power. Previously getting arrested was just an inconvenience, albeit a major one. Now it was a career ending event.

Again, up until very recently in police history the cops weren't really very well armed. They didn't need to be. A .38 special K-frame revolver is more than enough to handle some punk with a switchblade or a .25 auto pocket pistol. Today, modern police are basically a military organization complete with huge budgets, machine guns, hard core organization, and nation wide data (intelligence) sharing and collecting. This largely happened in response to the crime waves sparked by hard drugs hitting our streets, which largely happened because the mafia realized they could really make a ton of money selling the hard stuff and started the first major drug smuggling operations on our shores.

This Means That The Police Never Militarized

What's more, when the big Dons started getting locked up by these new harsher sentences the guys who replaced them were not very smart. The real dons were replaced by street thugs in fancy suits. When you give a guy whose job qualifications are "breaks kneecaps real good" and "scares store owners into paying their protection payment without a fight" several million dollars and the reigns to a few hundred guys just like him things get... messy. Once the officers and bosses got locked up and the soldiers started running things is when the crazy over the top violence and endless cycle of back stabbings happened. You can't run an organized criminal enterprise that violently and get away with it for long. Thanks to mandatory sentencing decapitating their actually qualified leadership they started killing each other over the drug money they were making like feral dogs fighting over a steak, or got arrested for multi decade long sentences.

This Means That The Police Never Militarized