An Offer You Can't Refuse: the History of Organized Crime in the United States
Ryan Pettengill
39 episodes
3 days ago
An Offer You Can't Refuse is a podcast that focuses on the history of organized crime in the United States. It employs an academic approach to its study in that it places organized crime within the broader context of American history.
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An Offer You Can't Refuse is a podcast that focuses on the history of organized crime in the United States. It employs an academic approach to its study in that it places organized crime within the broader context of American history.
"Bigger than U.S. Steel": Mainstreaming Crime in the Postwar Era
An Offer You Can't Refuse: the History of Organized Crime in the United States
36 minutes 14 seconds
2 years ago
"Bigger than U.S. Steel": Mainstreaming Crime in the Postwar Era
In Episode 25, Pettengill moves on to examine the post-World War II era. Specifically, he notes how the world of organized crime began to resemble the postwar economic order. Similar to how corporate giants like Hershey or Anheuser-Busch, flush with cash from their wartime profits, crushed their competition through ruthless takeovers and consolidations, Chicago's Outfit absorbed the "neighborhood gang" when Lenny Patrick assassinated Benjamin Zuckerberg in 1944. Further to the East, Russell Bufalino streamlined everything from illegal gambling to "friendly" labor relations. Pettengill sees the postwar period as a critical turning point for the mob as crime was no longer connected to "place" in the same way it had been in the early and mid-twentieth century.
An Offer You Can't Refuse: the History of Organized Crime in the United States
An Offer You Can't Refuse is a podcast that focuses on the history of organized crime in the United States. It employs an academic approach to its study in that it places organized crime within the broader context of American history.