Atlantic City Conference

The Atlantic City Conference held in 1930 was a historic summit of leaders of organized crime in the United States. It is considered by most crime historians to be the earliest organized crime summit held in the US. The conference had a major impact on the future direction of the criminal underworld and it held more importance and significance than the Havana Conference of 1946 and the Apalachin meeting of 1957. It also represented the first concrete move toward a National Crime Syndicate.

Some historians believe that representation at the conference was not representative of the ethnic make-up of the US criminal element, being that the delegations consisted of mostly Italian and Jewish crime leaders. Because of the lack of a substantial Irish delegation, a conclusion was made that this could have been the beginning of underworld domination by Italian and Jewish crime groups. The Irish still possessed an influential presence in America's criminal and political worlds and had a number of dominant crime leaders in New York, Boston and Philadelphia that were not invited and eliminated soon afterward, leading some to believe it was decided the Irish were to be left on the fringes of the underworld.

Crime leaders at the conference allegedly discussed the violent bootleg wars in New York and Chicago, systematic elimination of various Irish-American gangsters presently dominating underworld activities and influencing politics in the largest cities across US, diversification and investment into legal liquor ventures, expansion of illegal operations to offset profit loss from the probable repeal of Prohibition, and reorganization and consolidation of the underworld into a National Crime Syndicate.

Read more about Atlantic City Conference:  The Conference, The Future of Organized Crime, Atlantic City Delegates

Famous quotes containing the words atlantic city, atlantic, city and/or conference:

    Tell [the next Miss America] she is taking on a great responsibility. A responsibility to herself, to her people, to the Miss American Pageant, the people of Atlantic City, her state and her nation. Tell her the country and the world will judge America by her.
    Colleen Kay Hutchins (b. c. 1932)

    The battle of the North Atlantic is a grim business, and it isn’t going to be won by charm and personality.
    Edmund H. North, British screenwriter, and Lewis Gilbert. First Sea Lord (Laurence Naismith)

    A sturdy lad from New Hampshire or Vermont who in turn tries all the professions, who teams it, farms it, peddles, keeps a school, preaches, edits a newspaper, goes to Congress, buys a township, and so forth, in successive years, and always like a cat falls on his feet, is worth a hundred of these city dolls. He walks abreast with his days and feels no shame in not “studying a profession,” for he does not postpone his life, but lives already.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    The peace conference must not adjourn without the establishment of some ordered system of international government, backed by power enough to give authority to its decrees. ... Unless a league something like this results at our peace conference, we shall merely drop back into armed hostility and international anarchy. The war will have been fought in vain ...
    Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (1877–1965)