A New Mob

The September convictions of four aging Mafiosos shattered the internal framework of the infamous Chicago Outfit mob, effectively reducing the once powerful beast to a wounded serpent recoiling in desperation. However, the Windy City has hardly been fully relieved of its historical struggle with organized crime.

According to the Chicago Division of the FBI, a string of Eastern European mafias is rapidly expanding criminal activity, filling a gap in the crime scene left open by the waning influence of the traditional Sicilian Outfit.

FBI spokesman Ross Rice said these “nontraditional” enterprises, which consist of Russian, Polish, and Balkan gangsters, have warranted more scrutiny, adding to the bureau’s already constant surveillance of the Outfit.

“They don’t contribute to crime as much [as the Outfit], but there are emerging problems,” Rice said. “We feel that we’ve been able to investigate and monitor them successfully and even deter their growth.”

In terms of the number of ongoing investigations of traditional versus nontraditional organized crime, Rice said the FBI doesn’t keep such statistics.

Assistant Director of the FBI’s Criminal Investigative Division, Grant D. Ashley, first detailed his concern over the growing national trend in his October 2003 congressional testimony to the U.S. Senate, citing 245 cases of Eurasian organized crime that year alone.

Assigning an exact number to the current membership and activities of these criminal organizations is extremely difficult, according to James Wagner, the President of the Chicago Crime Commission and a retired FBI agent who battled organized crime for nearly three decades. Although exact data remains unavailable, he predicted that the trend would continue.

FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., maintained that it logged no “affiliations” during arrests, meaning that gauging the number of charges per criminal organization would inevitably be a thorny and mistake-prone process.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the number of persons allowed to immigrate to the United States skyrocketed. According to The Encyclopedia of International Organized Crime, non-immigrant visas soared from 3,000 in 1988 to 129,500 in 1992. Additional data from the 2005 publication indicates that 350,000 Russian émigrés now reside within the United States, up from 75,000 in 1995.

Author Carlo DeVito noted that many émigrés with expired visas were involved in criminal enterprises in their homeland and are now continuing such corrupt practices within the states.

With already substantial Russian and Polish populations, Chicago became a natural flocking site for immigrating groups who wanted to “migrate to their own,” as Chicago Police Department Detective Patrick Walsh put it.
“[The trend] is at its peak now,” Walsh said. “The Immigration Customs Enforcement is looking into it, and they are tightening up on a lot.”