ORGANIZED CRIME A MATTER OF SUPPLY AND DEMAND

I grew up in Ontario in the 1970s. One day, I stepped into a local
diner. There were six guys playing cards inside, all of them with
necklines that went straight from the ear to the shoulder, plus a sad
skinny guy with a filthy apron on.

He told me they had no sandwiches. I asked for a coffee. He said the
coffee was no good. I asked for a Coke. He said, "No Coke." I was
looking straight at plainly visible cans of Coke when I asked.

It was dead quiet and all the men were staring at me-and, in
particular, at the camera hung around my neck. "We're not really open
for business," the cook said, escorting me to the door.

About once a year, the daily paper trumpeted the bagging by the local
police of another Mafia crime boss. There would be weekend feature
stories about how crime was down as a result of the renewed combat
waged by police against the Mafia. There would be pictures of the
mayor smiling. I seem to remember, one year, him handing the chief of
police one of those huge 10-foot-long cheques, but my memory could be
playing tricks.

One of my high school acquaintances worked weekends for his father as
a mob enforcer, threatening to break knees (but never actually having
to, so far as I know). Another student was the son of the local MLA.
For cheap entertainment, I used to go down to the court house and roam
the halls, looking for posted dockets promising juicy criminal cases I
could drop in on.

Between these three sources, I came to understand how the criminal
underground economy worked. The police would do the mayor a favour
whenever the mayor needed to show the citizenry he was tough on
crime-like two months before elections, for instance. They would hold
press conferences telling the papers that crime is suddenly out of
control, then a month later, they would make a splashy arrest of some
mob boss. In exchange, the mayor would raise the police budget handsomely.

The mob bosses would do the police a favour whenever the police needed
to help the mayor with one of these "high-profile" arrests, and hand
over to them one of their brain-dead recruits they didn't need
anymore. In exchange, the police would look the other way if they came
across a poker game or a wayward truckload of plywood.

The mayor would do the mob bosses a favour whenever they played well
with the others, and hand them a city contract for waste removal or
cement pouring. In exchange, the bosses would make sure the mayor got
a real cutey for his overnight "business trip" to Ottawa, or some
other, similar gift.

If one was not involved in crime, all of this was completely
invisible. The reporters at the local paper were either blind or had
their own arrangements, about which I knew nothing. The criminal
underground economy, in places where it is established and no border
skirmishes are taking place, is mostly involved in supplying those
activities integral to all modern societies, but which are publicly
denigrated by grandstanding hypocrites.

In 1970s Ontario, there were no casinos or lottery tickets, there were
no "wink-wink, nudge-nudge" massage parlours, pot was not sold in
stores, and to buy beer, you had to fill out an application form. The
mob supplied what society wanted but would not shame itself by seeking
openly. Gambling, prostitution, pot and booze have been the
traditional mainstays of so-called organized crime of whatever stripe
for decades.

Demand for these things is unaffected when police crack down on
whomever is currently supplying them. A true police crackdown only
succeeds in shifting supply contracts to new players, and everyone-the
political party bosses, the crime bosses, and the police bosses-knows
it.

Just like the alarming spikes in crime followed by the splashy arrests
of mobsters in my hometown, recent trumped-up police warnings about
the Hells Angels don't signal a renewed effort by police to combat
crime. It's all just another in a very long series of plays by police
to win bigger budgets from governments.

In a month or so, they'll trot out some big bad captured gangster and
parade him around in public. Next day we'll see the mayor smiling at
us from the pages of the paper while he hands over one of those huge
cheques to the police chief. It's a win-win-win situation, and it's
one of the oldest cons in the book.