The Crooked Ladder

Ethnic organized crime is a phenomenon that has been largely ignored by social scientists and historians, and dismissed as a subject not to be taken too seriously by those researching the mobility patterns of their own ethnic ancestors or current minority newcomers. This book represents a ground-breaking attempt to describe how some members of ethnic minorities have utilized organized crime as one vehicle of upward mobility, advancing from lower-class status to middle-class power and respectability.
O'Kane illustrates the criminal road to prosperity as a process of displacement and succession: each group competes with and eventually eliminates its more established predecessor from the upper echelons of organized crime. This historical criminal succession mirrors the upward mobility of the Irish, Jews, and Italians in the larger, conventional noncriminal realm. Arguing that African-Americans, Asians, and Hispanics are pursuing similar criminal routes as previous ethnic groups, O'Kane takes issue with contemporary social scientists who view the current plight of minorities as unique in American social life.
Street-gang violence and drug wars are analyzed in The Crooked Ladder as part of a deeper historical tradition whereby "out groups" gradually become "in groups." The author demonstrates how the situation of minorities today differs only in degree, not in kind from previous ethnic minorities and that the grandchildren of today's drug kings and racketeers will be tomorrow's doctors, lawyers, and corporate executives. In his compelling argument for this scenario, O'Kane avoids the despair of so many observers who view the current malaise of contemporary minorities as hopeless and irredeemable. As a fundamental rethinking of the American ethnic experience with crime, The Crooked Ladder will be essential reading for social historians, sociologists, and criminologists.

James M. O'Kane is professor of sociology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey