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 and/or conference:
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Follow good people and you will learn to be good; follow beggars and you will sleep outside the city gates.”
—Chinese proverb.
“For 350 years we have been taught that reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man and writing an exact man. Football’s place is to add a patina of character, a deference to the rules and a respect for authority.”
—Walter Wellesley (Red)