The Los Angeles crime family is an Italian American criminal organization based in California, as part of the American Mafia (or Cosa Nostra). Since its inception in the early 1900s, it has spread throughout Southern California. Like most Mafia families in the United States, the L.A. crime family gained power bootlegging during the Prohibition Era. The L.A. family reached its peak in the 1940s and early 1950s under Jack Dragna, who was on The Commission, although the L.A. family was never bigger than the New York or Chicago families. Since his death the crime family has been on a gradual decline, with the Chicago Outfit representing them on The Commission.
In the late 1970s, Aladena "Jimmy the Weasel" Fratianno became the second member in American Mafia history to testify against the Mafia. In 1981 a biography of Fratianno was published, The Last Mafioso by Ovid Demaris, which along with his court testimonies is the source for a lot of information on the history of the family. Since the 1980s, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO Act) became a highly effective law in convicting mobsters and shrinking the American Mafia. Like all families in the United States, the L.A. Mafia only holds a fraction of its former power.
The current family is small compared to other families and is involved in fraud, extortion, loan sharking, illegal gambling, drug trafficking, and legitimate businesses. Although not having to share power with other Mafia families like New York's Five Families, never having a strong Italian-American population in the region leaves the family to contend with the many street gangs in the "Gang Capital of America". The Los Angeles crime family is the last Mafia family left in the state of California.
Read more about Los Angeles Crime Family: Origins and Predecessors, History, Current Position and Leadership
Famous quotes containing the words los angeles, los, angeles, crime and/or family:
“Local television shows do not, in general, supply make-up artists. The exception to this is Los Angeles, an unusually generous city in this regard, since they also provide this service for radio appearances.”
—Fran Lebowitz (b. 1950)
“It is hereby earnestly proposed that the USA would be much better off if that big, sprawling, incoherent, shapeless, slobbering civic idiot in the family of American communities, the City of Los Angeles, could be declared incompetent and placed in charge of a guardian like any individual mental defective.”
—Westbrook Pegler (1894–1969)
“Many people I know in Los Angeles believe that the Sixties ended abruptly on August 9, 1969, ended at the exact moment when word of the murders on Cielo Drive traveled like brushfire through the community, and in a sense this is true. The tension broke that day. The paranoia was fulfilled.”
—Joan Didion (b. 1935)
“There’s no scandal like rags, nor any crime so shameful as poverty.”
—George Farquhar (1678–1707)
“Diamonds may have been a girl’s best friend in an era when a woman’s only hope of having a high family income was to marry a man who was well-off, but today, marketable skills that will enable a woman to command a good income over her lifetime are a better investment.”
—Grace Baruch (20th century)