Italian and Jewish Mobsters in the 1900s.

Salvatore Luciana, the son of Antonio and Rosalie Luciana, came with his family to New York from Lercara Friddi, Italy in 1906. Meyer Lansky was a Jewish boy, born in Poland. Lansky and his family immigrated to New York in 1911. Both of these young boys grew up to be infamous mobsters who were two of the top leaders of organized crime in New York.

There were two social causes in particular that helped to create Sicilian and Jewish mobsters in the early 1900s. The first is the discrimination of immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were extremely poor and many could not speak or write English. The mobsters (in this essay) were drawn into crime because of the poor conditions in which they lived, their desperation for acceptance from society and their exposure to crime. The second is the Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States, Prohibition, a law that inadvertently financed criminals.

When Sicilian immigrants first came to A...