Pod Insights American Scandal Mafia Cops | The New Underworld | 5 About this episode For decades, the Mafia was the face of organized crime in America. But while the mob's power has faded, organized crime itself has become more global, more sophisticated, and harder to track. Virginia Commonwealth University criminologist Jay Albanese has spent decades studying how criminal organizations adapt and survive. In this conversation, he explains how law enforcement weakened the traditional Mafia, how criminal enterprises shifted from controlling neighborhoods to trafficking across borders, and why he believes corruption remains one of the most important challenges facing modern societies.
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0:00 Lindsay Graham? Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. From Audible Originals, I'm Lindsay Graham. And this is American Scandal. For much of the 20th century, organized crime in the United States was almost synonymous
0:45 Lindsay Graham? with the mafia. A small number of powerful families dominated cities around the country, and their influence ran through gambling, labor, and local politics. Today, those families still exist, but they are a shadow of what they once were, and the organized crime landscape is far more complex and far more powerful. Criminal activity now moves through gangs that stretch across borders, through cyber operations that never touch a physical street corner, and through networks that can sit uncomfortably close to legitimate businesses and even state governments. My guest today is Jay Albiniz. He's a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and one of the country's leading scholars on organized crime, criminal justice, and corruption.
1:27 Lindsay Graham? He's advised the United Nations on transnational crime and spent decades studying how criminal organizations form, adapt, and survive. Our conversation is next.
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2:52 Lindsay Graham? Jay Albinis, thanks for speaking with me today on American Scandal.
2:55 Speaker 03 Thank you, it's great to be here.
2:57 Lindsay Graham? Now, the mafia certainly had a heyday, and the creation of RICO laws is often credited as one of the keys to weakening the mafia. But I'm just wondering how much of the credit for the mafia's decline is due to law enforcement action versus maybe economic, technological, or social changes?
3:15 Speaker 03 Yes, it's a very difficult thing to sort out. The mafia clearly is not the force it once was, and the law enforcement effort of the 80s and 90s, which was clearly the most significant law enforcement effort against organized crime in the history of the US. A lot of it was made possible by the racketeering laws, which passed in 1970, but was used for the first time, to my knowledge, in 1980. It's a long, complicated law, but it enabled law enforcement to be much more effective in the way that rather than going after somebody for illegal gambling or conspiracy and the usual offenses, if the prosecution can prove that they were engaging in, you know, three
3:58 Speaker 03 or more crimes over a period of 10 years, I could prosecute you as a criminal enterprise. And that could dramatically increase the penalties of up to 20 years in prison. So the stakes went up dramatically. And given all the changes in contemporary society and technology since the year 2000, there is no single group. In the modern world and organized crime. And that's due to all the changes that have occurred over the last generation. So you're correct in saying, you know, the mafia is not what it once was. And perhaps will never be what it once was. But, you know, I think, you know, rumors of its demise are premature. Let me just give you a quick example, just from the past year.
4:40 Speaker 03 In New Jersey, right, a big case, thirty nine defendants with multiple locations of illegal poker games in the rear of legitimate restaurants. And there was also an illegal online sports book involved. And of course, it was associated with members of the Lucchese crime family. These are all very traditional organized crime activities. Illegal gambling, extortion by having to, you have to threaten sometimes people to make them pay. And then you have to do something with the illicit proceeds, right? You can't go to a car dealership with ten thousand dollars cash and put it down toward a car anymore. All right, because we have money laundering laws. So money laundering has become a separate art in itself to disguise the source of illicit proceeds.
5:23 Speaker 03 So when I see this case, which again, happened just a year ago. I said, well, this is about as traditional organized crime as it gets. So the structure has changed. That is, there's many more legitimate characters and businesses involved in this. So there's fewer mob guys, but more business people. In this Jersey case, there was some councilman of some town in New Jersey who was in on it. But the underlying activity is pretty much what it's always has been.
5:49 Lindsay Graham? Let's dive into some of the other changes that might have affected the mafia's, for lack of a better word, effectiveness as an organization. How about recruitment or maybe lack thereof? Are younger people less interested in getting involved in organized crime? Certainly, in the popular conception, this was almost a neighborhood job opportunity.
6:08 Speaker 03 Yes, it was. You might recall the opening line of Goodfellas when Henry Hill says, as long as I can remember, I always wanted to be a wise guy. Because in many of these working class urban communities, especially in New York and Chicago and the big cities, the people driving the nicest cars, wearing the nicest clothes, who Everybody would be very accommodating toward were the guys who were affiliated with the mob. And so that became sort of a alternative pathway, you know, to success. And when you look at the history over the 60s, 70s, 80s, you know, you had people who would say, well, okay, I got caught by the cops
6:50 Speaker 03 running an illegal gambling enterprise, maybe some extortion, and I got a sentence of five years. There were lots of people willing to do the five years. I'm a stand up guy. I'll protect the family, protect the enterprise. Well, as time goes on into the 80s and 90s, there are fewer people willing to do that. That is the younger people saying, hey, look at, you know, I'm your friend. We commit crimes together. But I'm not going to do time for you. And then you combine that with the racketeering laws that had sentences of 20 years. You say, well, maybe I'll do a few years for you, but I'm not, nobody's doing 20 years for you. So you have many more people saying, well, I'm not going to play this game.
7:33 Speaker 03 So that the hold of that tradition of the mob, we have so many people who are interrelated. Aunts, uncles, friends, even in the mafia cops case, as you know, the two detectives at the center of that case. Both of their lives before they became cops involved close associations and sometimes relatives who had strong connections with mafia figures. So all of that is tied together. As time went on, there were fewer young people with that Italian family tradition that you do anything for the family. People increasingly said, hey, I'll do it if it's good for me, but I'm not going to be doing time for somebody else.
8:12 Lindsay Graham? I'm glad you brought up our two protagonists or antagonists in this story. Luis Appolito, as you mentioned, did come from a mafia family, but he went on to become a police officer of some ill repute. But why would his ties to organized crime not be a red flag for law enforcement?
8:30 Speaker 03 Great question. I've often thought about that. You know, the two detectives, I mean, Karakappa, right? He was a childhood friend of Tommy Bellotti. Tommy Bellotti was probably the closest person to Paul Castellano. He was Paul Castellano's driver and Castellano was of course head of the Gambino crime family. And at the very end, Castellano was going to make Bellotti his underboss. So that, to me, that should come up as a major red flag on a background check. I just don't understand that. And then you look at Appolito and his ties were even stronger. I mean, his father was an enforcer for the Gambinos. His uncle was a captain in the Gambino family. So you have all of this mixed together and you say, these guys might have had a career doing something.
9:14 Speaker 03 Maybe they, I don't know, maybe they could have gone to law school and become a mob lawyer or something. I don't know. But a police officer, yeah, you, it is shocking that somehow they made it to become detectives in the NYPD.
9:28 Lindsay Graham? I think you could perhaps invent a story in which these individuals with their mafia ties decide to rebel against that tradition and become police officers. But that wasn't the case for these two gentlemen. There were repeated warnings about both detectives' allegiance and behavior, but repeatedly dismissed. Is this unique in this time and place in the New York Police Department? Is there some sort of code that even the fledgling cops get looked after by other cops?
9:57 Speaker 03 Back in that day, I think it was more the case. I mean, look at the case of Frank Serpico, the same kind of thing. And there it was, accepting payoffs rather than mafia-related crimes. But it was the same kind of thing where you said, God, it took a long time for what was clear corruption to come to light. I mean, for a while there, every 20 years, there was a major corruption investigation in New York. That has slowed down. I attribute that to the professionalization of policing. But, you know, there are some bad people everywhere and, you know, that's the way it is. And when you look at, you know, the mafia cops, what is shocking was the extent to which they engaged in criminal behavior.
10:40 Speaker 03 I mean, they were actually involved in homicides, which is rare. Most of the other corruption, if you look over the years, has been involved with, you know, taking money and payoffs from suspected criminals.
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12:00 Speaker 06 Journalist Daphne Caruana Galizia spent her life exposing powerful people. Then, in 2017, she was killed in a car bombing. I'm Stephen Gray, and for the past nine years, I've been trying to find out who wanted her dead. That search took me to Malta through secret companies, organized crime, and eventually to one of the island's richest and most powerful men. Now, after years of waiting, this trial has finally happened. But when the verdict came in, the case took a turn that almost no one had expected. In a brand-new update to the multi-award-winning podcast Who Killed Daphne? I'm returning to Malta to find out how we got there and where the search for the truth goes next.
12:42 Speaker 06 Listen to the new episode of Who Killed Daphne wherever you get your podcasts, and you can hear the full six-part investigation from the beginning, ad-free with Audible. Join Audible today by downloading the Audible app and by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
13:07 Lindsay Graham? Let's discuss where the mafia is today. If its dominance has faded, what might have replaced it? Who are the major players in organized crime today? And where are they?
13:17 Speaker 03 For me, the major difference from the days when the mafia controlled things to now has been territory. You control territory. So if I wanted to run some illegal game or a prostitution ring or whatever it was in that area, I better have you on board. And normally you would say no, or you would allow me to do it for some piece of the illegal enterprise. So it's very territorial based. And what has happened now, the nature of organized crime has changed. For example, now if somebody said, well, what one word characterizes organized crime? Today, I would say that one word would be trafficking. All right. It's moving stuff around.
13:59 Speaker 03 So whether you're in the human trafficking, sex trafficking, labor trafficking, drug trafficking, trafficking in antiquities, endangered animals, all kinds of stuff, all of that stuff has to move across borders. So it's changed the nature. So that whole territorial part of traditional organized crime is much less important. For example, I asked a university class, I said, okay, how many of you have ever been to New York on a field trip when you were in school? Everybody's been to New York on a field trip. And I said, okay, when you go there, there's always guys with a blanket on the sidewalk selling fake purses or whatever, stuff like that. Where do those purses come from?
14:43 Speaker 03 This guy on the sidewalk had nothing to do with those purses. Where did they come from? All right. So then you show them the data. And there's been some great empirical studies by academics and NGOs and a few governments showing that the vast majority, and these are counterfeit Louis Vuittons and all these high-end purses, the vast majority of them are made in Southeast Asia. Most are made by people working in sweatshop conditions. It's human trafficking. It's underage workers, the whole. Thing. Those purses are then shipped to countries with money like North America and Europe especially. Well, how do they get them there? Well, you have counterfeit labeling, you have bribery at the border.
15:25 Speaker 03 You have all the ways to scam it in to get it into the country. Then when it gets into the country, you need people to distribute these. And then there are people around and they find dudes willing to sell his stuff on the street. And you have a whole distribution network. So the guy selling them on the sidewalk in New York is getting a very small piece of the action. But my point, and my point to my students and to any regular person is that by buying that purse, you are in fact funding a transnational criminal enterprise that begins in Southeast Asia and ends with you on the streets in New York.
16:04 Lindsay Graham? So if these more traditional revenue streams for the mafia still exist, gambling and extortion, are they the prominent forms of crime for organized criminals across the world? Or has it moved, like you perhaps mentioned, to newer forms like trafficking?
16:20 Speaker 03 Yeah, absolutely. Trafficking in everything has become like a virus around the world. People like banned and stolen property, guns, animals, all kinds of stuff. And then, of course, now we have trafficking in information, whether it's social security numbers, whether it's patient records that a hospital will pay a fortune for me not to release. And there are sites all over the internet. If you go on the dark web, you can buy almost anything you want. And you see some of these cybercrime cases, some of the people participating in the scheme have never met one another. And then along the way, somebody invented cryptocurrency, which for me is simply a way to hide a transaction.
17:02 Speaker 03 And so then you would say, well, why would any regular person need to hide a transaction? Well, you'd only need to do it if you, of course, were doing something illegal. So that enables the dark web, that enables me to pay somebody in some other country through crypto. I could never do it otherwise without having the bags of cash problem. And this stuff is very hard. You know, a whole new set of enforcement skills is required. You know, this is taking some time to develop, but you know, I think we're better than we were 20 years ago. If you were looking 20, 30 years ago and said, well, I'm gonna make money and I don't care how I make it, you would have to have a physical presence somewhere. You have to rob from people, steal from people.
17:45 Speaker 03 I ask students in my university class, I said, how many people here ever carry cash? Not a single hand goes up. They don't carry cash. I said, how many of you carry a wallet? Almost nobody carries a wallet anymore, right? It's all on their phone and their phone is password protected. This is why pickpocketing has gone out of style because if I grab what's in your pocket, it gets me nowhere. So I would argue people are just disposed to steal as they were 100 years ago, but the opportunities have changed dramatically. Now, if you're disposed to stealing to get ahead, you can sit in your pajamas at home. All you need is a wifi connection.
18:26 Speaker 03 So you could do it at the coffee shop and not even have to pay for the wifi and send spam emails to people. Investment schemes, romance schemes, all the things that we all know and hear about. So the new communications technology that we've been spoiled by has given the criminally minded people opportunities to exploit and I never have to leave my house. I never have to get out of my pajamas.
18:52 Lindsay Graham? Well, let me pose a question to you. If it does seem that it's easier to become a criminal in the modern age, what would you prefer? Would you rather investigate the Gambino family in 1985 or a modern transnational cyber fraud network today?
19:08 Speaker 03 Yeah, it makes you long for the old days. Law enforcement was easier back then because of the physical presence needed. You know, when you think back to, you know, the three Gotti trials and all of the big mob cases of the eighties and nineties, you know, wiretapping and informants were at the center of all of that. Cause when you look at major drug trafficking cases, most of them started at the Bottom, somebody gets grabbed and they inform their way up the chain. Well, now with these transnational schemes, you don't even know who's up the chain. You've never met the person, you know, you've got some contact information, which has, you know, long since expired, and that's the end of it. So it's just much more difficult to make a case now than it was back then.
19:53 Speaker 03 And this is why you need people with cyber skills. You need all kinds of skills that were not relevant back in the day.
20:07 Lindsay Graham? By 1779, Benedict Arnold had sacrificed more for the revolution than almost any other man in America. One of George Washington's most effective commanders, he had nearly lost a leg in the Second Battle of Saratoga. But in return, Arnold believed he had been humiliated by Congress and cheated of his glory by lesser men, so he decided to make them pay. Hi, I'm Lindsay Graham, the host of the podcast Americans Scandal. We bring to life some of the biggest controversies in U.S. history: presidential lies, environmental disasters, corporate fraud. In our latest series, Benedict Arnold turns his back on his comrades in the Continental Army and secretly defects to the British. With the help of his wife, he plots to hand over the most important colonial fortress
20:51 Lindsay Graham? to the enemy and doom the revolution he once served. Follow American Scandal wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible on the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts.
21:08 Speaker 07 Journalist Tristan Redmond goes where no son-in-law should ever go. Deep into his wife's family history, digging up the cold case of who murdered her great-grandmother. Because, I should mention, he thinks the murderer might actually be the beloved family patriarch. For the best bingeable series, like Ghost Story, listen to the Audible True Crime Podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
21:35 Lindsay Graham? You've called corruption the biggest problem in the world. Why is that?
21:40 Speaker 03 Yeah, that's because it creates every other problem. When the UN and many other groups internationally have ranked the problems of the world, right? We live in a world of limited resources, so we should spend time on the most important problems. And they rank them. They go through them all, whether it's climate, or poverty, or inequality, or disease. And you can give them all metrics and rank them. But when I look at all those, corruption either caused the problem, or made the problem much worse. In every single case. And the corruption, sometimes it's governmental corruption, sometimes it was private sector corruption, sometimes it was malfeasance, sometimes it was non-feasance,
22:20 Speaker 03 failure to act when action was required. So that's to me, why corruption is the most important problem, and the one that we should be going after proactively all the time. Because corruption rarely results in a complaint to the police, right? These always require proactive investigations, involving following the money, following people doing suspicious things. And law enforcement and prosecution agencies have to be very patient, because these cases take time to build. And in all the cases, it's people in positions of authority abusing their position for personal gain. Usually it's money, sometimes it's power and influence, but the motives are much more similar than they are different.
23:03 Lindsay Graham? Now, in the last few years, the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers have also exposed how global financial systems help hide wealth and enable corruption and organize crime. What do you think these revelations tell us about how the modern illicit economy works?
23:21 Speaker 03 One, it shows that even in quote-unquote "non-corrupt" locations around the world, there are still people engaging in self-dealing. That violates laws against corruption, bribery, nepotism, obstruction of justice, all the offenses in the orbit of corruption. So it just shows it exists everywhere. But when you read about the Panama Papers and the others, to me, the most interesting thing I always look for, what it took for them to get this information. Usually it takes months and months and months, sometimes years, of digging to get information and to put it together. And when the government isn't doing it proactively, well, then it's up to civil society.
24:04 Speaker 03 And when you look at the cases you mentioned, they were brought by journalists by and large. And, I mean, take the big picture. There's only three segments of society. There's the government with the power, there's business with the money, and civil society, where the vast majority of people are. We rely on the government to protect our rights. We rely on business to provide an economy that people can all work and make a living. And when those are not working well, when they're corrupt, when they're self-dealing, and they're ignoring civil society or persecuting or exploiting civil society, well, then you need civil society to rise up. And so when I see something like the Panama Papers, I said, this is civil society making noise.
24:49 Speaker 03 This is civil society saying, this is happening. And of course, with those cases, some actual criminal cases were made. But the point is, you can't just rely on the government and business to make things better. Civil society is the biggest segment of society, and they have a loud voice, and they're responsible for making a bunch of very important cases, all usually involving corruption.
25:13 Lindsay Graham? Now, another element that has become more and more modern is the integration of geopolitics with organized crime. During the Cold War, organized crime was often very separate. There was no real national identity to the mafia, other than heritage, their Italian or Sicilian heritage. Today, though, things like sanctions evasion and cyber operations are criminal organizations that are sometimes state-led. So are criminal organizations just becoming geopolitical actors in their own right?
25:43 Speaker 03 Yeah, although I'm not sure it's criminal organizations. I did a study that came out last year looking at this corruption organized crime link. Normally, traditionally, organized crime is viewed as corrupting government. And where organized crime is the predator and government is the victim. I looked at a whole bunch, several hundred, corruption and organized crime cases, but specifically cases that involve some element of corruption to see what the relationship was. Because if organized crime was corrupting government, well, then you would see cases that involve extortion, intimidation, threats, things like that. All right, people from the outside saying, do this or else.
26:25 Speaker 03 And when you looked at hundreds of cases, and this was not only the US, but also international cases, that almost never came up. The overwhelming majority were cases where people in positions of power were using organized crime to carry out their goals. In other words, to enforce debts, to punish competitors they didn't want in the market. And it was much more of a bribery type relationship where they were working together to accomplish a self-interested goal, usually of making money or consolidating power. So I don't see the criminal organizations at sort of the source of all this. They are enablers, they're facilitators, but I see the corrupt actors in government and business being the drivers.
27:09 Lindsay Graham? So with all the changes in organized crime, its methods, its aspirations, its availability to individual actors, how has law enforcement been able to keep up?
27:19 Speaker 03 It's difficult. You know, law enforcement is not an easy job. Just to give a local example, we have career fairs for the students all the time. And one of them, we had the Dallas Police Department coming 2,000 miles to Virginia to our career fair. So I talked to the Dallas PD guy, I said, what are you guys doing in Virginia? We just can't get a big enough applicant pool just by staying local. So there's two issues, right? A number of people interested in that kind of job, which is obviously a very, very fascinating job, but it's a hard job, right? But then two, yeah, it's a moving target, right? You know, you could argue, and I have argued that, you know, larceny was the characteristic crime of the 20th century.
28:02 Speaker 03 That is, I would take your property when you were away or weren't looking. That was clearly the most common offense. And in the 21st century, the most common crime, of course, is going to be fraud. That is, I can't take your money because, well, one, I can't get access to it. You're not carrying it. What I need is your information. That's what I need. So you have many more crimes of fraud, which is basically is larceny by trick. I'll trick you out of your thing. So that's why we have all these romance scams and labor scams and all these kinds of things, human trafficking, recruitment scams. So to make these cases, it takes surveillance, it takes information gathering, it takes
28:44 Speaker 03 police officers who can in fact talk to anybody on the street and have a conversation. You know, it's really a fairly unique set of skills. You need people with a dedication to public service and, you know, people who are assigned to cases that matter.
29:00 Lindsay Graham? Well, Jay Albinis, thank you so much for talking with me today on American Scandal.
29:05 Speaker 03 I was pleased to be here and thanks so much for the conversation.
29:08 Lindsay Graham? That was my conversation with criminologist Jay Albinis. He's a professor at Virginia Commonwealth University and has written or edited more than 20 books on organized crime and corruption.
29:23 Lindsay Graham? From Audible Originals and Airship, this is episode five of Mafia Cops for American Scandal. In our next series, a fan favorite. On January 28th, 1986, the space shuttle Challenger broke apart 73 seconds into its flight. All seven crew members aboard were killed, including schoolteacher Krista McAuliffe, the winner of a competition to become the first educator in space. But the Challenger disaster was not a freak accident. Long before Krista McAuliffe was even chosen to become an astronaut, a series of design errors and ignored warnings had set NASA on a course for tragedy.
30:03 Lindsay Graham? American Scandal is only possible because of listeners like you, so thank you. And don't miss an episode. Be sure to follow American Scandal on Audible or wherever you get your podcasts. And Audible subscribers can binge new seasons of American Scandal early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. And to find out more about me, including my other podcasts, my live show, the history tours I'm arranging, and all sorts of other things, go to historyishuman.com. That's historyishuman.com.
30:37 Lindsay Graham? American Scandal is hosted, edited, and executive produced by me, Lindsay Graham for Airship. This episode was produced by John Reed, senior producer Andy Beckerman, managing producer Emily Burke, audio editing by Molly Bach, music by Thrum, sound design by Gabriel Ghul. Executive producer for Airship is William Simpson. Executive producer for Audible is Jenny Lauer Beckman. Head of creative development at Audible, Kate Navin. Head of Audible Originals North America, Marshall Louie. Chief content officer, Rachel Giatza. Copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC. Sound recording copyright 2026 by Audible Originals LLC.
31:22 Speaker 03 Hi, I'm Kenya Barris. And I'm Malcolm Gladwell. We're back for season two of our Audible Original podcast, The Unusual Suspects. We'll sit down with extraordinary guests from the worlds of art, film, literature, comedy, and wellness to hear from their unexpected stories of success. And who do we have this season? Well, we'll talk with Grammy-winning artist Anderson Paak, athlete Rich Roll, portrait artist Amy Sherald, Oscar-winning director Ron Howard, legendary writer David Sedaris, and many more. These conversations are more intimate than last season, wouldn't you say? I would. Listen to season one of The Unusual Suspects wherever you get your podcasts, and sign up for a free trial Audible to listen to season two in the Audible app or by subscribing to Apple Podcasts.
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