Can Asian Americans join the Italian Mafia?
Are you looking for a new line of work?
No. To be an “official” member of the Mafia you have to be of Italian ancestry. The Mafia has many non-Italian “associates” who work with/for them, but they are not regarded as actual Mafia members.
I don’t know why Asian-Americans would join the Italian Mafia when they have their own organized crime groups that have far eclipsed the Italian Mafia in terms of their power and influence.
I believe the Italian ancestry requirement is restricted to the father’s side of the family. A Mafia member must also be Caucasian, which would seem to rule out the offspring of a father of Italian ancestry (albeit born in the US) and a mother of Asian origin, i.e. an Asian American as posited by the OP.
So the answer is still negative.
Yes. Henry Hill (the main character of Wiseguy/GoodFellas) was unable to become a full member because his father was Irish, even though his mother was Italian.
Generally both parents have to be of Italian ancestry, although that’s not always true, which is probably one of the reasons that John Pappa was never made.
**Ken Eto ** aka Tokyo Joe was pretty high up in the ranks of the Chicago mob until they decided he was no longer useful to them and attempted a mob hit that went awry. He survived 5 bullets to the head (:eek:) and the 2 who botched the job wound up in the trunk of a Cadillac at O’hare airport.
There are plenty of non-Italians who work with the Mafia as associates, and some may reach important positions, but they are not “made men,” actual members of the Mafia itself.
Well, if Wikipedia is to be believed, the Chicago Outfit did/does allow non-Italians.
If you look at the lists at the end of the articles, Guzik, Eto, and Humphreys are all listed as “associates,” not as made men. Thus they were not full-fledged members of the Mafia. So the article actually bears out what I said.
Even in the Chicago Outfit all the made men listed are Italian, including Jack McGurn, whose real last name was Gibaldi, and Richard Cain, who had an Italian mother (though he breaks the rule that the father must be Italian, since his father was Irish.)
Ken Eto was associated with the Chicago Outfit which does things differently than the New York families. The official bosses were 100% Italian but there were people like Ken Eto, Lenny Patrick, Gus Alex, Murry Humphreys etc. with a lot of clout in the Chicago Outfit. This would have never happened in New York or probably in other parts of the country. The Chicago people don’t do all of those traditional Mafia type rituals when they induct a new member that many of the other families do. In fact they don’t even call themselves Cosa Nostra. Eto was not part of the top hierchy, but he was in an influential position as far as gambling in the Hispanic and Chinese communities even though he was Japanese.
The predominantly Italian Chicago Outfit did rule the local Chinese underworld which was controlled by the On Leong Tong. Ken Eto and a guy named Joe Wing were intermediaries between the Outfit and the On Leong. The Italians took a piece of the Chinatown gambling profits.
In New York, the Italians since at least the 30s, took a piece of the narcotics rackets from two Chinatown tongs, the Hip Sing and the On Leong. The only time the Asian mob ever went against the the Italians was in San Francisco, but this was a rarity.