Answered by Pieter Buis on April 9th, 2020

Sewers could be a step backward in terms of sanitation

The Dutch city of Leiden and the English city of London both experienced high and low points for the same reason but at different times. Lets call it a tale of two cities.

Leiden

Leiden is one of the older cities in Holland and for a long time the second largest city after Amsterdam.

It was founded on the banks of the Old Rhine which, as the name suggests, was the the route the Rhine had towards the sea before it changed course southward.

The Romans had a fort called Matilo as part of the Limes on the spot where Leiden would arise.

In the Middle Ages a settlement reappeared on the spot as a possession of the Bishop of Utrecht by the name of Leithon.

By early 15th century the city cannot have had more than 5000 inhabitants but it would experience a boom in population. Just prior to the siege of Leiden in the late 16th century it had 16.000 inhabitants and by the 1660s this had risen to 62.000 people.

Above: The population for the cities of Leiden and Haarlem, note that Amsterdam experienced a similar burst of expansion between 1560 and 1630 due to the influx of skilled workers from the Southern Netherlands.

It is home to the oldest university of the Netherlands which was granted by William of Orange for the valiant defence during the Siege of Leiden

. The city also used to be one of the big textile producing cities of the 17th century. It was where the Pilgrim moved to before heading to the New World.

As William Bradford (governor)

would write:

For these & other reasons they removed to Leyden, a fair & bewtifull citie, and of a sweete situation, but made more famous by ye universitie wherwith it is adorned, in which of late had been so many learned man. But wanting that traffike by sea which Amerstdam injoyes, it was not so beneficiall for their outward means of living & estats. But being now hear pitchet they fell to such trads & imployments as they best could; valewing peace & their spirituall comforte above any other riches whatsoever. And at length they came to raise a competente & comforteable living, but with hard and continuall labor. – Of Plymouth Plantation

Above: Leiden in the year 1649 after some rapid expansion of the city had taken place.

It was probably a good thing the Pilgrim left for Plymouth when they did because shortly after they left Leiden turned to shit.

Quite literally.

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Leiden was founded on the banks of the old Rhine which provided the city not only with an easy means of transport (thanks to all the canals) but also with a source of relatively clean drinking water. As such the people in charge of Medieval Leiden had drawn up quite a list of ‘common sense’ rules to make sure the cities water was clean. In fact a lot of building codes were also quite stringent.

For example wooden buildings and thatched roofs were forbidden. Houses had to be constructed with brick or stone and roofed with slate or tile in an effort to prevent city fires.

Houses were built on regular plots of land from the 14th century onward and archaeological evidence suggests nearly all excavated plots possessed a private cesspit, most of them high quality brick lined ones.

Not unsurprising since a Leiden bylaw of 1463 mandates ‘every house [including those] that are rented must have a privy at its disposal’. Crucially the law also stipulated that “the privy should be a stand-alone facility, meaning that an overflow or sewer that drained into the nearest canal was prohibited.”

The ‘cesspit law’ passed in Leiden reveals that in the late mediaeval period there were three stakeholders, each with different interests when it came to sanitation management: the local government, tenants, and housing developers or landlords. Whenever municipal legislators spoke out in favour of this ordinance, all arguments referred to the public interest of having high-quality water in the town’s canals and to its importance for the social and economic infrastructure. The accumulation of dirt and sludge in canals, which were the main transport routes, was considered harmful to the local economy. Moreover, the blocked waterways hampered the drawing of water from the canals for extinguishing fires (Hamaker, 1873: 148–49; Huizinga, 1911: 316).

This was not solely a local concern: along with stench and contamination, the by-laws of other towns in north-western Europe also frequently mention ‘traffic hindrance’ as a reason for similar laws (Jørgensen, 2010b: 37). Apart from these practical considerations, draining human waste into the canals was also believed to harm the common good (Jørgensen, 2010a). Polluting and clogging the town’s arteries (i.e. waterways) would threaten the urban body or body social (Rawcliffe, 2013). The emergence of cesspits and the policy of the city fathers in the water-rich towns of the Dutch coastal provinces can be regarded as material evidence of a utilitarian principle being applied. This principle of the needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few was expressed in the form of policies and statutes employing such terms as res publica and bonum commune communitatis (Stein et al., 2010).

…

Landlords were responsible for providing cesspits for all of their housing, regardless of the rental rate, and the ordinance stated that if landlords failed to fulfil their obligation, tenants should notify the city fathers. More specifically, the law stated that any tenant who moved after 1 May into a house that had a privy draining directly into a canal should report this within a month.

Cesspits which did not drain into the canals kept the quality of the surface water at an acceptable level. Furthermore if properly built with a brick lining they should not pollute the groundwater at great distances. People made sure to built wells at some distance from cesspits.

However when you look at their estimated date of usage it appears people stopped using cesspits around or about the time the population boomed.

The reason for this trend is quite simple to explain.

Capitalism and the needs of the few outweighed the needs of the many. The migration of skilled workers from the Southern Netherlands to the North boosted the textile production of Leiden. At the same time the landlords who were supposed to pay for the emptying of cesspits found the cost associated onerous.

Already quite early the Textile barons had managed to suppress wages of the workers.

By 1500 wealth inequality in Leiden (and to a lesser degree in Haarlem) was considerable by international standards (Van Zanden, 1998: 38). The close collaboration between the richest textile entrepreneurs (drapers) and the city council in implementing a repressive pay policy was typical for Leiden at that time; it meant that fullers, tuckers, dyers, and weavers had an extremely low earning potential in contrast to the wealthy textile barons at the top (Brand, 2008: 100–03). The Armenrapport (Poverty Report), written in 1577 by Leiden’s talented stadssecretaris (town clerk) Jan van Hout (1542–1609), reveals that the extreme poverty in Leiden was caused by textile entrepreneurs who were solely motivated by becoming ‘rich, powerful, and great and never cared about paying their craftworkers a fair wage but forced their workers into a position of slavery’ (Kaptein, 1998: 150; see Van Maanen, 2010 for the background to the Poverty Report).

But with the huge influx of skilled workers from the South the housing situation became more pressing.

The unprecedented, large, and rapid demographic rise affected everyday life for Leiden’s inhabitants, most notably in the continuous shortage of housing (Noordam, 2003: 43–45; Van Maanen, 2009: 54–57; Van Oerle, 1975: 430–34). Dwellings were being constructed — in Leiden the housing stock rose by 182 per cent within twenty-five years (1581–1606) — but the demand for cheap housing continued to outpace supply (Daelemans, 1975: 187). Many families lived in shared accommodation (Posthumus, 1939: 161). The few available records of rental rates for houses in Leiden suggest that between 1581 and 1619 average rents rose by 240 per cent (Posthumus, 1939: 208).

Textile barons wanted to harness the large influx of skilled labour for their enterprise and needed to have the workers housed. The landlords struggled to accommodate this flood of immigrants in part due to extensive building codes. Building houses in brick and tile is more expensive than wood. Furthermore brick lined cesspits needed to be emptied out every couple of years which cost the equivalent of a month or three worth of rent, not something the landlords were eager to cough up.

Above: a brick lined and domed cesspit in the Netherlands

It seems these two powerful interest groups got the city government to ease building regulations.

Shortly before the year 1600 cesspits were increasingly discarded and replaced by brick sewers. Unlike cesspits these did not need to be periodically emptied since they drained straight into the canals, for landlords this meant less money spend on sanitation. Needless to say I find the modern notion that sewers were the superior option or somehow the hallmark of modernity an odd one.

The building codes also went out of the window along with the requirement that work be done by certified professionals.

The local government of Leiden, consisting mainly of textile entrepreneurs, were ready to welcome as many skilled textile workers from the southern Netherlands as possible. Leiden did not want them to go elsewhere, to Amsterdam or Haarlem (Posthumus, 1939: 159). Prior to the extension of the town boundaries in 1611, the town council of Leiden had repeatedly called for expanding the town; indeed they regretted that too few workers (arbeytsluyden) were settling locally, ‘owing to a lack of appropriate housing’ (‘door gebreck van bequame huysinge’; Van Oerle, 1975: 350). In the seventeenth century the top textile entrepreneurs constantly pressed for an expansion of the town to provide housing for their workers (Posthumus, 1939: 977).

Eventually, obstructive regulations governing house construction were lifted, and contrary to mediaeval regulations, the building of timber dwellings was permitted (Daelemans, 1975: 200). The town council gave free rein to the housing industry to remedy the shortage as soon as possible.

By 1640 the shortage was still severe. So many inhabitants lived intra muros ‘that no dwellings were unoccupied and there were no vacant areas where anyone might live properly’ (‘datter geen huysen off plaetsen ledich staen, waer yemandt bequamelick soude mogen wonen’; Posthumus, 1939: 976). Large dwellings were demolished to be replaced by ‘small hovels’ (‘kleine krotties’; Posthumus, 1939: 977). The town council even took the exceptional measure of removing the builders’ monopoly. It was no longer necessary for bricklayers, carpenters, and other craftsmen to be members of a guild to ply their trade. The town council assumed that foreign artisans and ‘cobblers’ would work with greater speed than guild members (Posthumus, 1939: 977–78).

Many of the new plots were bought by carpenter/mason housing developers who started building sewers en masse. In short the industrialists governing the city of Leiden turned it into a slum. A reeking slum at that.

The shit and piss of some 62.000 citizens was deposited in the nearly stagnant canals of Leiden. In 1633 Jan Pietersz Dou was send to research the problem of the limited flow of the canals and attributed it largely to all the sewers draining into the canals. In 1670 Adam Thomasz Verduyn wrote that fish had completely disappeared from the river and canals owing to the incredible pollution.

He called the city a ‘stinck-gat’ (stink-hole) and said the entire city reeked like a ‘gemeen privaet’ (common privy).

Solutions to this self induced problem were already suggested in the 1590s with windmill operated pumps to pump out the dirty water being one of them. Closing the sewers up again was suggested but not implemented. Only in the 1680s did a provision come into effect which had the outlet of the sewers discharge below the lowest water level in the canals in an effort to improve the smell.

However literally shitting up the city was not just something which killed all the fish or made the city smell like a reeking privy, it brought some serious health consequences with it.

As Adam Thomasz Verduyn, calling himself a friend of the people, wrote in 1670 the cities brewers continued to draw water from the extremely polluted canals because they couldn’t be bothered to source fresh water beyond the city limits. As he so elegantly put it in 17th century Dutch they [the brewers of Leiden]:

‘Geven zij den luyden haer vuyle pis, met dreck en water gemenght, te drincken’

‘Give the people their dirty piss, mixed with shit and water to drink’

Needless to say these malty piss and shit cocktails weren’t too healthy. In 1669 between June and December some 40.000 of the cities 62.000 people fell ill and 1900 died. This disease was:

‘ontstaen door het brack, stinckent water en bier daeruyt gebrouwen’

‘caused by the smelly brackish water and the beer brewed from it’

The likely culprit based on symptoms shown by the inhabitants was Cholera, though the European rather than the Asiatic form of the disease. The situation wasn’t adequately resolved until the 19th century when better water supplies, the closing of sewers and filling of canals was pushed through by the sanitation movement.

Interestingly enough the city of Haarlem only 27 kilometers north of Leiden managed to avoid a similar fate. While Haarlem did have a textile industry the most important industry was brewing. Beer from Haarlem was exported to other cities in the Netherlands but also to other European countries. Given its chief position and economic importance the Brewers managed to successfully petition the city government to ban and persecute any who tried to built sewers. Furthermore they fought other industrial groups such as linnen bleachers who they reckoned polluted the water in the city canals. As such Haarlem remained a much cleaner and healthier city until the 19th century.

All of the above information and citation is from Roos van Oosten’s paper ‘The Dutch Great Stink: The End of the Cesspit Era in the Pre-Industrial Towns of Leiden and Haarlem’. Additionally she published a much more extensive book called ‘De stad, het vuil en de beerput : De opkomst, verbreiding en neergang van de beerput in stedelijke context ’. Both of them are interesting reads although I can imagine they might be covering something of a niche interest

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London

It is often said history repeats itself first as tragedy, then as farce. This is more or less what happened in London as they followed Leiden down the path of pollution and Cholera. London has a history that goes back way further than Leiden but in terms of sanitation it is frighteningly similar.

It sits at a convenient crossing point of the Thames and was developed into a proper city by the Romans.

Medieval London had several public toilets one of which I believe was on or about London Bridge. The more usual way of disposing waste however were cesspits like in Leiden. Judging by the Nuisance Law these could be lined or unlined, the lined cesspits being allowed to be constructed closer to neighbouring properties.

Water came from multiple sources. The brewers used water from the Thames and when the tide was particularly strong it is said the ale could taste salty. London was also famed for some springs and wells built to tap into them, in the 15th century one writer particularly lauds some wells just outside the city limit in the north. These wells continued to supply large parts of London well into the 19th century.

The shallow wells of London were an ancient and a popular institution. Although the value of these well-waters was said to be popularly estimated by the brilliancy with which they sparkled, their flavour was also important in their popularity. The notorious Broad Street pump, for example, was so much to one lady’s taste that she regularly had its water brought to her home in Hampstead.

In 1245 the city government also started work on the Great Conduit

which was a series of pipes that brought in water from the Tyburn spring 4.3 kilometers away to Cheapside inside the city. For a generous sum people could also get a private line from this great conduit to their homes. The diameter of those pipes not being allowed to be very thick for fear that the pressure would drop too much.

In 1582 a Dutchman or German by the name of Peter Morice

constructed one of the first pumps within the city limits. A waterwheel set in the strong current under London Bridge powered pumps which pumped up the water and piped it to customers.

Above: A slightly newer version (circa 1700) but using the same principle as the Morice pump.

The Great Fire of London

(which also convinced the city government that thatch and wood were not ideal building materials) destroyed this device but Peter’s Grandson built a replacement. It was described as follows:

The three waterwheels worked a total of 52 water pumps; the wheels could turn in either direction and so be driven by the flowing and ebbing tide; and the pumps were designed to force 132,120 gallons an hour to a height of 120 feet.

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Just prior to the demolition [in 1822], the waterworks, supplied 10,417 houses with 26,322,705 hogsheads per annum, at a rental cost of £12,266.

Similar pumping stations were erected by a number of water companies in the course of the 17th and 18th century. By the late 18th century around four fifth of Londoners had water piped straight into their homes. In addition an aquaduct called the New River (England)

was constructed to provide London with fresh water. It is believed the Thames was as clean as it is today well into the late 18th century which explains why piped water was so popular. The piped water however was not continuous but only operated during several hours each day and not on Sundays. This meant that people had to resort to storage cisterns in their homes or public wells when the taps weren’t on.

Unlike Leiden which has a huge network of canals London had an issue with drainage. The Northern part is a relatively low lying area which had many smaller rivers drain into it.

When more and more houses started being built along with paved roads the ability of rainwater to permeate into the ground was also hampered. All of this necessitated a sewer system to drain the excess water.

Let it be known though that it was absolutely verboten for people to hook up their cesspits or latrines to this set of sewers. A certain 14th century Alice Wade being fined for doing exactly that. Like in Leiden it wasn’t considered good for the public to drain latrines into surface water.

Unfortunately for the Londoners this happy situation was about to change.

For one London like Leiden experienced a veritable population boom. It was just under a million in 1800 but rose to 2.3 million by the 1850s. This population boom of course went hand in hand with the increasing prevalence of slums, I don’t suppose Victorian slums need much of an introduction.

One way to deal with the increase in waste was to built ‘better’ cesspits

As more houses and tenements were built, and as population densities became higher in the early years of the nineteenth century, more cesspools were sunk, and were sunk deeper. By the 1840s, cesspools were being deepened to the first stratum of sand, that is 6 to 10 feet. At this level, the cutting generally carried the cesspool into a spring, which relieved it of liquid refuse. This, of course, was very economical, since the cesspool did not need emptying so frequently, and, as one observer pointed out, instead of having a wagon to carry liquid refuse away, one could make do with a cart because the refuse was solid.

However, the new cesspool techniques often had serious consequences for local water supplies, since the permeation of springs by cesspool matter became swifter and greater. In Paradise Row, Rotherhithe-inaptly named, since it was unsewered-a new cesspool was put in about 1840. It was made as deep as possible-“to suit the present levels”-and before long there was trouble. The first effect was to drain the wells, but then, some time later, as the cesspool began to fill, discoloured and foul-tasting water flowed back into the wells. Similarly, in Battersea, the cesspools of a new estate of six houses permeated the wells within a matter of days. In both cases, the residents turned to the local company for water. By 1844, throughout south London, it was said, ancient and celebrated springs were being abandoned by the inhabitants. The pumps, however, remained, and were used by poor passers-by, who did not know their reputation.

In some Dutch cities there were laws against digging cesspits to the water table for exactly this reason. Semi-permeable brick cesspits also being banned in some cases. It is unlikely that people in London did not realise digging deeper cesspits could pollute well water so to it seems more like an economical decision. The new cesspits were cheaper to operate since the fluids drained and if it polluted local wells then the locals would just have an extra incentive to switch to piped water.

But it wasn’t just cesspits that ruined the wells. A new invention, laudable as it may have been, turned the Thames in an open sewer.

While a modern sounding Flush toilet was invented in 1596 the design wasn’t entirely practical yet. Back then most houses didn’t have piped water and furthermore the connection to a drain was open leaving bad smells and noxious fumes to rise up out of the toilet. This was only remedied in 1775 when Alexander Cumming

patented the S-trap

Above: the S-Trap now found on most household drains

So by the late 18th century London possessed both piped water and the possibility to install adequately built flush toilets. Of course the question is where you’re gonna send all that sewerage too.

The solution seems to have been childishly obvious.

In 1815 the law which banned people from connecting their household drains to the sewer system (which as mentioned earlier was to facilitate the drainage of rainwater) was repealed. From then on people could hook up their newfangled flush toilets to the existing sewer system which duly emptied millions of gallons of raw sewage straight into the Thames.

The evidence points to a deterioration in the condition of the Thames between about 1815 and 1830, which became more rapid between 1830 and 1850. Leslie Wood, in his study of the history of the river’s pollution, is of the opinion that the quality of the Thames water in the later eighteenth century was not very different from what it is today, but that by 1850 the river had become “putrid, noisome and dead”.

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In 1828, it was calculated that between 139 and 145 sewers were discharging effluent into the Thames, mostly within a limited area: all the city’s major outfalls entered the river between the King’s Pond sewer at Vauxhall Bridge and the Black Ditch at Limehouse. From about 1830 on, things got progressively worse, as the water-closet became an accepted facility. By the 1840s, the London water companies were commonly providing “high service”-that is, to the upper floors of houses-which was used principally for the flushing of closets, and closets were widely used in wealthy and newly-built districts.

The smell of that giant open sewer called the Thames could get very bad during the summers and in a time when the miasma theory was widely accepted it was thought to be dangerous to health.

The scientist Michael Faraday

described the situation in a letter to The Times

in July 1855: shocked at the state of the Thames, he dropped pieces of white paper into the river to “test the degree of opacity”. His conclusion was that “Near the bridges the feculence rolled up in clouds so dense that they were visible at the surface, even in water of this kind. … The smell was very bad, and common to the whole of the water; it was the same as that which now comes up from the gully-holes in the streets; the whole river was for the time a real sewer.”

Efforts to clean up the river were attempted just as the people of Leiden tried to clean the canals but not to the best effect. In 1857 the smell got so bad the government poured chalk lime, chloride of lime and carbolic acid

into the Thames to make the smell more bearable.

The following year it got even worse. The stink was so bad it Westminster nearly shut down.

The stench from the river had become so bad that business in Parliament

was affected, and the curtains on the river side of the building were soaked in lime chloride to overcome the smell. The measure was not successful, and discussions were held about possibly moving the business of government to Oxford or St Albans. The Examiner

reported that Disraeli, on attending one of the committee rooms, left shortly afterwards with the other members of the committee, “with a mass of papers in one hand, and with his pocket handkerchief applied to his nose” because the smell was so bad.

The disruption to its legislative work led to questions being raised in the House of Commons. According to Hansard

, the Member of Parliament (MP) John Brady informed Manners that members were unable to use either the Committee Rooms or the Library because of the stench, and asked the minister “if the noble Lord has taken any measures for mitigating the effluvium and discontinuing the nuisance”. Manners replied that the Thames was not under his jurisdiction.

Four days later a second MP said to Manners that “By a perverse ingenuity, one of the noblest of rivers has been changed into a cesspool, and I wish to ask whether Her Majesty’s Government intend to take any steps to remedy the evil?” Manners pointed out “that Her Majesty’s Government have nothing whatever to do with the state of the Thames”. The satirical magazine Punch

commented that “The one absorbing topic in both Houses of Parliament … was the Conspiracy to Poison question. Of the guilt of that old offender, Father Thames, there was the most ample evidence”.

At the height of the stink, between 200–250 long tons (220–280 short tons) of lime were being used near the mouths of the sewers that discharged into the Thames, and men were employed spreading lime onto the Thames foreshore at low tide; the cost was £1,500 per week.

But it gets worse.

Remember how we noted that the bulk of London households had access to piped water? That water was provided by eight water companies, four of which were exclusively supplied by water from the Thames drawn up within the city limits with the rest using a mix of water from the Thames, Lea and Ravensbourne, all of them likewise polluted.

The companies didn’t use filters either until the 1850s.

In effect these companies were serving the Londoners their own sewage. Not that people were unaware of this. As a complaint against one of these companies from 1828 attests they served:

through iron tubes, unto the habitation of seven thousand families, to be used daily at the breakfast table; in the composition of bread, pastry, soups, broths; and in the boiling of meats, poultry, pulses-a fluid, saturated with the impurities of fifty thousand homes-a dilute solution of animal and vegetable substances in a state of putrefaction-alike offensive to the sight, disgusting to the imagination, and destructive to the health.

Above: A satirical impression of the state of the water in London. A women drops her tea cup as she espies the microbes in her water with a microscope (circa 1828)

In 1848 John Snow

tried to establish the link between the Cholera outbreaks that ravaged London and the filthy water supply which added to the general sentiment that something ought to be done against all this. However this was not effected before recurring cholera outbreaks killed tens of thousands of Londoners.

Only during the second half of the 19th century were these issues resolved. Water companies had to move their water intake further upriver outside of city limits. Private cesspits were banned, public wells were closed but perhaps the most important thing was the construction of the first Modern sewer by Joseph Bazalgette.

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That’s one of the key things I went people to remember. Often when we read about ancient or more recent civilisations possessing sewers we think of them as modern sewers rather than the historical sewers they actually were.

We like to think of London and Leiden switching from cesspits to sewers as a step ahead in the right direction, a sign of modernity and improved sanitation. I hope this answer has convinced you that was not actually the case.

History is not an inexorable march of progress or linear improvement. Sometimes newfangled inventions or profit seeking landlords literally shit up the environment and cause health problems. Sometimes a decent but not perfect situation deteriorates and as shown above people might not take action until they’re pretty far up shit creek.

It might be worthwhile to make a comparison between the early sewers of London and Leiden but unfortunately I know a lot less about the Roman sewage system. Though the fact that the Cloaca Maxima, like the London sewers, was initially designed to drain water and only later hooked up to latrines does not give me the impression the Tiber smelled much better than the Thames.

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Answered by Allen Lobo on Jan 16th, 2019

It is amazing today to think how until as recently as the early 1980s, there was complete denial of there even being any such thing as “The American Mafia”.

No, not as a bunch of criminals (that part was plainly obvious), but as a formal hierarchical organization. Like a corporation and not merely some loosely affiliated goons or street gangs.

Now what made this chutzpah even more astounding was just how much power this organization held and how deeply it had infiltrated legitimate structures in American society – such things as labor unions and pension funds. All of that for decades, all while its members denied that any such thing as the Mafia even existed in America!

Then two killer operations took a wrecking ball to this “Murder Inc.” in the early and mid 1980s.

Spearheaded by two men who absolutely savaged this criminal syndicate.

And the best part?

They were both Italian Americans.

• An FBI agent named Joseph Pistone.
• A federal prosecutor named Rudolph Giuliani.

The former infiltrated it from within and sowed the seeds of demoralization.

The latter waged unrelenting war on it and didn’t stop until he had finally decapitated this sick organization.

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JOE PISTONE

For half a century starting in the early 1930s, the infamous “Five Families” of New York – Genovese, Lucchese, Gambino, Colombo and Bonanno – dominated the criminal landscape with impunity. Everything from the old games of union rackets, gambling, prostitution and loan sharking to the new business of narcotics. New York City was the epicenter of the Mafia, the “premier league” so to speak, with the other cities like Philadelphia and Vegas affiliated to one or more of the five major families.

Then in 1976, Joe Pistone, an FBI agent, infiltrated the Bonanno crime family as an associate with the alias “Donnie Brasco”.

This was an operation which was as lengthy as it was mortally dangerous. It lasted no less then six whole years. The vast majority of those days with him living, eating and sleeping with professional cold killers and in the knowledge that the slightest mistake might be his last one.

But he pulled it off so spectacularly that he became pals with Dominic Napolitano (a.k.a. “Sonny Black”), a captain (capo) and rising star in the family. Sonny was a fascinating gangster really, a down-to-earth leader both respected and loved by his subordinates (for example, he carried his own luggage and put on no airs) but unmistakably capable of violence. He had already signaled his appetite for power in brutal fashion by whacking three other ambitious captains (Giaconne, Indelicato and Trinchera) in an all-out war for domination of the Bonanno family after the infamous street assassination of its boss, Carmine Galante.

It is important here to point out that to infiltrate a crime family as a LEO in such fashion was a bloody big deal in itself. But to then actually manage to become one of the most trusted men of the guy who might very well become the next godfather? Well, that was just something else.

FBI surveillance snap of Pistone (left) with Sonny Black (right) when the former had infiltrated the deepest circle of the Bonanno family.

Pistone was successful enough that Sonny Black proposed his name for membership. He was going to become a ‘made man’, when the plug had to be pulled on the operation because the price for entry was that he’d have to pop a rival gang member (Bruno Indelicato) something a LEO cannot do. At that point the whole thing was aborted.

But it is impossible to exaggerate the importance of just how much delicate insider information he had collected by then on the whole structure of the organization and of the five families. It would be like trying to find business intelligence on Apple Inc. and then being invited to dozens of their secret C-suite level meetings – for years.

When the FBI finally shut down the operation and told the crime family that they’d been had for suckers, it wasn’t merely a monumental embarrassment but sent shock waves through the spines of all of the families. The repercussions were bad enough that the Bonanno family were cast out by the four others (Sonny was assassinated with his hands then chopped off in symbolic fashion).

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RUDY GIULIANI

This fellow started waging all-out war on the Mafia as soon as he stepped in as the Attorney for the Southern District of New York in 1983. It’s like he just couldn’t wait to finish them off.

While Pistone had gotten his hooks into the belly of the beast, Giuliani would now employ those hooks in large measure to ruthlessly and systematically rip out its guts. This guy in the picture above in his neatly pressed shirt and neatly combed “schoolboy” look may appear about as intimidating as your local pharmacist, he certainly isn’t anything like what you’d picture a bounty hunter to be.

But it’s a classic case of looks being deceptive, Giuliani was thoroughly predatory when it came to the Mafia, in turning the tables on them from being the hunters to the hunted.

As a brief side note, he would go on to become famous for cleaning out street crime by gangs and petty criminals in NYC as its mayor in the latter half of the 90s (after that city being reduced to one of America’s most dangerous ones in the 80s). But few are aware of the debt owed to this man for breaking the back of the most vicious and longstanding criminal organization which this nation had ever seen. It would be no exaggeration to say that he will go down as the American Mafia’s greatest and most hated enemy in its history, surpassing the likes of Elliot Ness and Bobby Kennedy. A supreme badge of honor for a man of the law that for all of his flaws, nobody can ever take away from him.

He astutely realized that it would not be enough to take out a handful of Mafia soldiers or even crew captains because they’d just be replaced in a sort of revolving door and the business would be run by their compatriots on the outside of the prison system until they got out. Kind of like tag team wrestling.

No, Giuliani wasn’t interested in messing around.

He intended to go straight for the biggest game – the heads of the bosses of ALL of the five families.

The turning point came when he realized that the only decade old law now in place called RICO (The Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act) could be employed against the Mafia.

RICO in brief provides prosecutors with a massive stick to beat down heads of any criminal organization by

• Needing only proof that they ordered someone to do the crime even if they weren’t physically involved in the actual act.
• Civil lawsuits where you go after them and take away all the money and influence that they have (keep in mind that the Mafia at the end of the day doesn’t kill for fun, all gangs are about money, they’re what I sometimes like to term as “businessmen and bankers with guns”).

The job was now to get evidence that there was such a formal structure within the five families and that these heads ran the whole racket.

Well, Giuliani first went off to the FBI and amassed some serious manpower to get this thing done. Not just agents but technical staff to do all of what they had planned.

They then bugged the properties of the heads of at least three families.

• Anthony “Tony Ducks” Corallo of the Lucchese.
• Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno of the Genovese.
• Paul “Big Paul” Castellano of the Gambino.

That wiretapping was a tough thing to pull off because you not only need to know who to spy on but also how to get around to planting the bugs. The Mafiosi aren’t idiots that you can just walk up to their house or car on the street and do it. That’s where all of the intelligence from the likes of Pistone and Mafia thugs who were informers on their rivals (most notably Greg “Grim Reaper” Scarpa of the Colombo family, ironically one of the most vicious enforcers in Mafia history) came in handy.

Gregory Scarpa – this sweet motherfucker was so viciously effective as an enforcer and had capacity for such violence that the FBI had employed him at one point. It was to beat down and interrogate KKK goons in their infamous Philadelphia MS killings of civil rights activists in the 60s.

He was done with the job in an afternoon. Yes, let that sink in for a moment.

These bosses were then now caught on audio repeatedly and often separately talking (and thereby corroborating) about all of their crimes and how they ran this racket and that.

They were the Board of Directors in the Mafia, something called “The Commission”, men who made decisions on all important matters whether that be about how to divide up profits or who needs to get whacked.

In early 1985, nine of them were indicted and then put on trial in 1986 – including the godfathers of all of the five families.

Seven of them were put away for life. The other two?

“Big Paul” Castellano (The “Boss of all of the bosses” and head of the Gambino, the largest and most powerful of the five families) was gunned down in December 1985 in arguably the most spectacular assassination in all of the history of the American Mafia. This was unprecedented in terms of its sheer audacity and a sign of how much disorder had been sown in the organization.

Scene of the assassination of Paul Castellano, his corpse on the pavement outside Sparks Steak House in Manhattan. The hit was orchestrated by John Gotti.

Aniello Dellacroce (underboss of the Gambino) died of brain cancer that same month.

You can now well imagine what this did to the crime syndicate. To have all of its heads either locked away or gunned down.

They simply didn’t see it coming.

It would be like having the entire C-suite executives and board of directors of a corporation killed in a plane crash in one fell swoop.

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This wasn’t now merely about replacing the bosses.

It was that the Mafia was exposed as being a real organization run as systematically as a Fortune 500 company and worse still as it being,

• Thoroughly mercenary.
• Without any shame or decency.

This was critical because for decades they’d hidden behind this complete BS about “honor”, “oath of silence” and all of that nonsense. That stuff went right out of the window as Mafiosi started turning on each other like cats in a heated cage.

Every man for himself.

In the 90s there were two high-profile betrayals

• Nicky Scarfo (one of the most psychopathic Mafia bosses and head of the Philadelphia crime family betrayed by his own nephew and deputy (underboss), Phil Leonetti.
• John Gotti, head of the Gambino family who had taken over after whacking Castellano was betrayed by his deputy Sammy “The Bull” Gravano.

The rot had set in so deep that it would culminate two decades later in 2004 in shocking fashion with the most respected “old school” family boss -Joe Massino of the Bonanno – flipping over as an informer to save his skin from the electric chair. Imagine that. The very head of a family throwing his men to the wolves. It was a betrayal of epic proportions, one that took a flamethrower to the already battered integrity of this organization. As a side note, Massino had formerly partnered with Napolitano (Sonny Black) in the aforementioned ambush and assassination of the three Bonanno captains.

What fidelity could now be expected from the family underlings and street soldiers?

They would be fools to then lick up all of that big shit talk about ‘honor’ and ‘tradition’.

Yet another cheap but key calling card which died for good was these criminals accusing anyone who even claimed that there was such a thing as the Mafia as being a racist bigot against the Italian American community. Heck, a godfather like Joe Colombo (after whom the Colombo crime family is named) showboated as a community representative for the Italian Americans, even equating himself with MLK Jr. as fighting for their civil rights (the character ‘Joe Szasa’ in the third part of the Godfather movie series is based in part on Joe Colombo).

But here now in riveting fashion within the Italian American community, you had her best sons destroy her worst ones. With no mercy shown.

Because tell me, as a Mafioso how in hell does your crafty criminal ass even begin to play that victim card when the pack of ruthless hounds out for your blood go by such last names as Giuliani, Pistone, DeVecchio and Salmieri?

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P.S. Below is an interesting look at some of the more common myths (thanks to movies and the media) about the Mafia, as debunked by one of the foremost experts on the organization today, George Anastasia.

“At the end of the day, the Mafia isn’t about pride, it’s about money — how to get it, how to keep it and how to make more of it.”

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/five-myths-about-the-mafia/2017/05/05/f4075da8-306c-11e7-9dec-764dc781686f_story.html?utm_term=.29cf0491d765

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Answered by Franklin Veaux on Feb 11th, 2020

Many. Completely abandoned towns and villages dot the US. A lot of Europeans struggle with just how enormous the US is; if a town grows up around some resource, and then that resource dries up, the people in the town can simply pack up and walk away.

That’s what happened to Bodie, a gold mining town in the California desert settled in the 1800s, then abandoned when the gold ran out.

Bodie is high in the mountains (about 8,000 feet elevation). It’s brutally hot in the summer and completely buried by snow in the winter. There’s no reason to be here if there’s no gold to mine.

Today, Bodie is a little eerie. The dry weather has preserved the place, so it’s just quietly crumbling away.

When the gold ran out, people left, often without packing. Getting stuff up and down the mountain was difficult and expensive.

All the gold mining equipment was left behind. It was far too heavy to be worth hauling back down the mountain, and was only worth its weight in scrap, so they left it. It had already made back its money in the gold it extracted, so there was no point in keeping it.

Even personal effects were left behind, because it was too expensive and too much work to haul it all back.

(All photos mine)

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Answered by Dimitris Almyrantis on Oct 2nd, 2017

Because the ‘standards of our time’ are, as a rule, a serving of steaming manure. They are reflective of nothing, least of all our society or behaviour; a hotchpotch of shiny symbols and airy pretensions taught us by our parents, which the literate do-nothings of any age could have thrown together with equal ease.

I don’t feel the need to look very far at all; in his 1959 book Arabian Sands, the British explorer Wilfred Thesiger (1910–2003) describes his solitary, five-year sojourn in the Empty Quarter of Arabia in the 1940s (himself being only the 3rd Westerner to set foot there). Although he could easily have laid claim to one of the most renowned heritages of progress and arrogance in human history, Thesiger is adamant that the time-warped society he encounters is to be considered on its own terms. For instance, concerning the government traditions of Arabia [this was written before the name Arab was extended to non-Arabians]:

It was obvious that, although [a tribe was situated only miles from the provincial capital], the Sultan of Muscat had little control over them. Arabs rule but do not administer. Their government is intensely individualistic, and is successful or unsuccessful according to the degree of fear and respect which the ruler commands, and his skill in dealing with individual men. Founded on an individual life, their government is impermanent and liable to end in chaos at any moment. To Arab tribesmen this system is comprehensible and acceptable, and its success or failure should not be measured in terms of efficiency and justice as judged by Western standards. To these tribesmen security can be bought too dearly by loss of individual freedom.

Such sentiments are easy to dismiss—much like everything can be, really, with the comfort of an engorged distance. Here is some more of his account, that may shed some light on his opinion:

On previous journeys I had commanded respect as an Englishman, and in the Sudan I had the prestige of being a government official. [The Arabs] at first glance seemed to to be little better than savages… but I was soon disconcerted to discover that, while they were prepared to tolerate me as a source of very welcome revenue, they never doubted my inferiority. They were Muslims and Bedu and I was neither. They had never heard of the English, for all Europeans were known to them simply as Christians, or more probably infidels, and nationality had no meaning for them. They had heard vaguely of [WWII] as a war between the Christians, and of the Aden [colonial] government as a Christian government. Their world was the desert and they had little if any interest in events that happened outside it. They identified me with the Christians from Aden, but had no idea of any power greater than that of Ibn Saud. One day they spoke of a sheikh in the Hadhramaut who had recently defied the government and against whom the Aden levies had carried out some rather inconclusive operations. I realized that they thought that this force was all that my tribe could muster. They judged power by the number and effectiveness of fighting men, not by machines which they could not understand. […]

This did not stop them from asking questions about ‘The Christians’. ‘Did they know God? Did they fast and pray? Were they circumcised? Did they marry like Muslims or just take a woman when they wanted one? How much bride-price did they pay? Did they own camels? Were they tribesmen? How did they bury their dead?’ It was always questions such as these that they asked me. None of them had any interest in the cars and aeroplanes which they had seen in the RAF camp. The rifles with which they fought were all that they had accepted from the outside world, the only modern invention which interested them.

[…] Bedu notice everything and forget nothing. Garrulous by nature, they reminisce endlessly, whiling away with the chatter the long marching hours, and talking late into the night round their camp fires. Their life is at all times desperately hard, and they are merciless critics of those who fall short in patience, good humour, generosity, loyalty, or courage. They make no allowance for the stranger. Whoever lives with the Bedu must accept Bedu conventions, and conform to Bedu standards. Only those who have journeyed with them can appreciate the strain of such a life. These tribesmen are accustomed since birth to the physical hardships of the desert, to drink the scanty bitter water of the Sands, to eat gritty unleavened bread, to endure the maddening irritation of driven sand, intense cold, heat, and blinding glare in a land without shade or cloud. But more wearing still is the nervous tension. I was to learn how hard it is to live crowded together with people of another faith, speech, and culture in the solitude of the desert, how easy to be provoked to senseless wrath by the importunities and improvidence.

With such people he would travel for the next five years in the Rub al’Khali, 650,000 square kilometres (250,000 sq mi, or 120% of France) of scorching sand that would have killed a less prepared group in a matter of hours. The following incident occured after a full month of non-stop march in the desert, by which time they had been reduced to minimal rations and balanced on the brink of starvation—but were so fortunate as to catch a hare.

^ A hare.

Anticipation mounted, for it was more than a month since we had eaten meat… [we threw all our remaining flour in the pot with the hare]. We sampled the soup and decided to let it stew just a little longer. Then bin Kabina looked up and groaned, ‘God! Guests!’

Coming across the sands towards us were three Arabs. [My companions said to one another] ‘They are Bakhit, and Umbarak, and Salim, the children of Mia’, and to me, ‘They are Rashid [our tribe’s people]’ We greeted them, asked the news, made coffee for them, and then Musallim and bin Kabina dished up the hare and the bread and set it before them, saying with every appearance of sincerity that they were our guests, that God had brought them, that today was a blessed day, and a number of similar remarks. They asked us to join them but we refused, repeating that they were our guests.

I hoped that I did not look as murderous as I felt while I joined the others in assuring them that God had brought them on this auspicious occasion. When they had finished, bin Kabina put a sticky lump of dates in a dish and called us [the ‘host’ group] over to feed.

Hospitality is indeed an ‘outmoded’ virtue in modern society, but I hope the point still gets across. The modern student of history, by and large, has never had to live with the practical threat of starvation, inescapable illiteracy, has never had to make a life or death decision for himself or others, and likely has no conception or responsibility for a ‘tribe’ larger than himself and, hopefully, his 2–5 person family. The greatest threat to his well-being is, in all likelihood, the sheer stress imposed by living in the pampered lap of luxury, or the neuroses of a desolate modernity.

Setting this paragon of Humanitas as judge and jury over untold millions whose joys and sufferings he cannot (or will not) fathom has all the grace of an ox in tights. Nothing stops him, of course: indeed, the shelves of any good library groan with the accumulated judgemental drivel of three millenia, and can easily shoulder more. But it sells the human spirit short: when our student of history could, easily, step outside his little box and behold, however momentarily, a greater reality, refusing to do so is tragic.

Incidentally, the author of the previous extracts – Thesiger – used to affect the full manner of a ‘gentleman of the empire’ when, in the last years of his life, he sometimes spoke to roomfuls of university students. This was of course more fiction than fact: that particular ruling class was already a vanishing thing of the past in his youth, and he had never truly been part of it. But the gesture was quite telling when directed to a mass of liberal university students—”I don’t fit in this little room. So do go ahead and judge me – make my day.”

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Answered by Archie D’Cruz on Sept 5th, 2018

Herb Gibson is probably not a name you have heard of.

He had nothing to do with Walmart or Kmart or Target. What this serial business owner did have was an idea:

“Buy it low, stack it high, sell it cheap.”

Sounds familiar? It might be a statement you’d associate with Walmart’s Sam Walton or Kmart’s S.S. Kresge, but Gibson is the man who voiced the concept in 1958—four years before the launch of the Big Three.

It seems a rather obvious philosophy for retail success, but the reason Gibson could not have executed before then was simple: Texas, where he operated 34 distribution warehouses, forbade selling merchandise to individual customers at wholesale prices.

As soon as Texas relaxed that law, he began converting his warehouses into large discount retail establishments. He did so well that the new Gibson’s Discount Centers were soon offering franchises, and by the following year had expanded beyond the state.

One of the towns Gibson’s Discount Center opened was in Fayetteville, Arkansas, where a certain Sam Walton had recently launched his first independent variety store. (He also owned 15 Ben Franklin five-and-dime franchises in other cities, the equivalent of today’s dollar stores).

Walton, in his autobiography Made In America

, recalls that wake-up moment:

“(Gibson)…branched out to the square in Fayetteville and started competing with our variety stores. We knew we had to act. He was the only one discounting out this way, and because I had made all those trips back East, I was probably one of the few out here who understood what he was up to. By then, I knew the discount idea was the future.

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While that was the immediate trigger, there was a broader reason for large discount stores like Walmart and Kmart emerging around the same time.

Dig into the early history of these stores, you will discover that they grew out of the suburbs and Middle America, rather than in the large cities on the East or West Coasts. Why? That had to do with the fallout of the Second World War.

Up until then, the big cities were the magnet for people as it was where the jobs were. When the war ended, the U.S. government suddenly had a problem. Some 15 million G.I.s were headed back from Europe, Asia and the Pacific, and they needed somewhere to live.

Finding affordable housing in the cities had become almost impossible, and with these mostly young soldiers getting married and starting families, a crisis was developing.

Times of great adversity often lead to great opportunity, and large construction firms sensed theirs. Rather than build on expensive city lands, they bought acres upon acres of outlying farms and fields, and began mass-producing homes on them.

Aerial view of Levittown in Long Island, New York, showing hundreds of small, identical houses set along curved streets. Completed around 1950 on 4,000 acres of potato fields, it formed the template for scores of suburban towns across America. Image: Mark Mathosian

, via Flickr.

Crucially, too, for the returning soldiers, President Roosevelt had introduced the GI Bill

, which, among other things, gave them loan guarantees and made the low-cost 25-year (rather than five-year) mortgage the national standard. In many cases, veterans were able to move into their new homes for little or no money down.

It was the perfect recipe for a suburban boom, and by 1960, the percentage of people living in the suburbs had almost caught up to those living in the central cities.

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The explosive growth outside of the cities brought with it opportunities for those willing to think big.

Enter Eugene Ferkauf, who despite his unfortunate-sounding last name, was a rather enterprising New Yorker.

He had started by selling appliances at large discounts from his upstairs loft in 1948. Discounters operated on the fringe of retail at the time, but with the rise of the suburbs, Ferkauf decided to gamble. In 1954, he opened a full-line department store, E.J. Korvette, selling everything from clothes to furniture at well below list prices in the heavily populated New York suburb of Westbury, Long Island.

It was massively successful, and over the next few years, numerous other retailers aped his model, launching 70,000–200,000 square foot discount stores in the suburbs of virtually every major city.

Among them were newcomers to the business like Fed-Mart, Bargain City, Spartan and Unimart, but also several large, respected retailers which launched discount subsidiaries including F.W. Woolworth, L.S. Ayres, and—as the Sixties rolled in—S.S. Kresge (then an 800-store variety chain) and Dayton Co.

You might better recognize those last two by their discount store names, Kmart and Target.

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But let’s get back to Sam Walton.

The rise of discount stores wasn’t lost on him. Indeed, as he notes in his autobiography, he “stole as many ideas from Sol Price (of Fed-Mart) as from anybody else in the business.”

In 1960, as the owner of 15 Ben Franklins, he was already the largest independent variety store operator in the U.S.

And yet, he was deeply dissatisfied. Total combined revenues from all 15 stores was a mere $1.4 million—a pittance compared to the $2 million plus that he learnt a single large store could bring in.

But it was only when Herb Gibson opened his discount center in his backyard in 1959 that Walton knew he had to act.

He had already refined the art of discount retailing with his Ben Franklin franchises. Within three years, he used those lessons to launch the first Walmart in Rogers, near Fayetteville.

Crowds outside Walmart’s first store ahead of its grand opening in 1962. The launch ad, inset, notes “Plenty of Parking”—a definite plus with suburban and rural residents.

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What then was so special about 1962 that Walmart, Kmart and Target (and Kohl’s for that matter) all launched in the same year?

Nothing more than a coincidence, for they were just a few among many that rushed to take advantage of the explosive suburban growth that began in the Fifties.

The discount retail store was, quite simply, an idea whose time had come.

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References and further reading:

Sam Walton: Made In America, by Sam Walton and John Huey

Mall Hall of Fame: Herbert Richard GibsonThe Revolutionists of Retailing (Fortune Classics, 1962)The growth of suburbiaDiscount birthday: Walmart, Kmart, Target hit 50

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Answered by Hazel Lockey on Sept 16th 2019

September 15, 1896, Texas – two trains crash at high speed. Bits of shrapnel are sent hurtling through the air. Two people are killed.

The catch?

It was all staged.

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From 1896 to the 1930s, staged train-wrecks were in fashion.

The particular event which paved the way for the bizarre trend was called the ‘Crash in Crush’. William George Crush, the organiser, set up a temporary town. A railway track was constructed. Forty thousand people turned up to the event. The trains were set up and then began their collision course.

The organisers didn’t realise, however, that the boilers in the locomotives probably wouldn’t make it. Of course, the trains exploded on their collision and train wreckage went flying. Two spectators were killed by the shrapnel. A witness described the event:

‘There was a swift instance of silence, and then, as if controlled by a single impulse, both boilers exploded simultaneously and the air was filled with flying missiles of iron and steel varying in size from a postage stamp to half a driving wheel.’

But this didn’t seem to bother a lot of people – immediately after the crash, the spectators flocked to the destroyed trains to observe the damage that had been done.

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Yes – this set off even more staged train-wrecks. The California State Fair held an event like this in 1913:

‘Fairgoers likely held their breath as two smoke-belching locomotives barrelled toward each other at 25 mph and … kaboom! Onlookers were then allowed to walk up and inspect the considerable damage.’

Joe Connelly was responsible for many of these events. Sometimes he would add dynamite to the railway tracks, with the railway cars soaked in gasoline, to make it even more impressive.

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It seems like such a strange trend, with nearly a hundred of these deliberate train crashes taking place – but nevertheless, proved to be highly popular.

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Sources:

Train Crashes Staged as Entertainment

For 40 Years, Crashing Trains Was One of America’s Favorite Pastimes

The violent history of train-wreck publicity

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