It is difficult to estimate exactly how much wealth narcotics trafficking adds to the coffers of the American Mafia. But narcotics profits, alone, guarantee the organization’s enduring wealth and power. And these profits are regarded as the real source of funds for buying the Mafia’s political and police protection.
J. Edgar Hoover can legitimately be faulted for failing to go after the Mafia and organized crime, but his dogged efforts to keep the FBI out of narcotics investigations is strangely logical. He wanted to keep the reputation of the FBI simon-pure, something he knew would be impossible because corruption and bribery was virtually inevitable in policing the narcotics field.
According to a recent government estimate, the average heroin junkie needs about 50 milligrams of the drug each day to satisfy his cravings. Figuring the average cost at $65 a day, a habit costs $24,000 a year. Many experts consider such figures as much too conservative. But using those figures for a minimum 100,000 hardcore addicts, also a conservative figure, the heroin racket adds up to at least a $2.5 billion business. Add to this the massive trade in marijuana (with at least 10 million regular pot users) and cocaine (considered “safer” than heroin by most users) and the total dollar figure in the narcotics business is clearly staggering.
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Of course, the cost to the narcotics dealers is penny ante compared to the rewards. By the 1970s, it was said that the return on capital invested made drug smuggling the most prosperous industry in the world. In 1960, a kilo of heroin was obtainable in Marseilles, France, where it was manufactured from morphine base, for about $2,500.
In New York, it brought $6,000 a kilo wholesale—and over $600,000 on the street. By 1980, a kilo of grade four heroin cost about $12,000 from the supplier and brought a quarter of a million dollars in New York at wholesale prices. Cut with quinine and milk sugar, the heroin sold for several million dollars at street prices. No legitimate business, even Arab cartel oil, could come close to that.
This bottom-line figure made it obvious that the Mafia’s so-called No Narcotics Rule was sheer nonsense. No criminal organization that accepts the murder of human beings as a routine part of business could pass up such profits on the grounds of “honor” and “morality.” Mafia leaders who attempted to proscribe narcotics dealing were either lying or deluding themselves. There was and is no way to keep their criminals out of crime’s most lucrative business.
