The stitches that bind America's fabric of history have been sawn with illegal threads. Organized crime has been woven into the society of the United States of America just as baseball and apple pie. The only difference is that this ethos of society has been swept under the rug and said to be taboo until recently. When this, America's dirt, is brought to light it is unclaimed and looked down upon as if its silent partakers were totally innocent. In this research paper I will attempt to answer the question, is organized crime a product of America or is America a product of organized crime.
In order to answer this question there must be a clear understanding of the definition of organized crime. Organized crime has been defined in different ways by many different law enforcement agencies and researchers. There is no one individual definition, which fully exposes all the diminutions of the phenomenon. These organizations do have attributes that assist in giving a descriptive understanding of what organized crime actually is as a function of society. The motivations of these crime units are not social doctrine or changing society, but the motives of these groups are simply money and power. Some may agree that these are the same things that have fueled America since the beginning. Another infamous characteristic of an organized crime group involves violence. In the environments of the organized crime units" violence is readily available and routinely used as a resource. This gives these groups leverage to successfully pursue their goals. Again this sounds a great deal like the means in which America was founded, by brut force.
A prime example of the comparisons to American and organized crime comes from John Jacob Astor's quest to be the best. Astor arrived form Germany penniless and died the richest man in America; in today's value he was worth seventy-eight billion dollars (Klepper et al.