Harvard University Press Blog

“Operation Sting” and the Creation of Crime Itself

Among the general public, the rise of mass incarceration in America is usually attributed to Ronald Reagan’s “War on Drugs.” In From the War on Poverty to the War on Crime, though, historian Elizabeth Hinton reveals that the nation’s prison problem is the outcome of a historical process that began under the Johnson administration during a period known more for its civil rights legislation and social welfare initiatives than for criminalization of the urban poor. Those Great Society programs were entangled with a set of assumptions about African Americans, poverty, and crime that underwrote the passage of the 1965 Law Enforcement Assistance Act, which authorized the infusion of federal money to “modernize” local law enforcement. By the mid-1970s, the federal government had embraced a new tactic, granting urban police departments money to purchase and fence stolen goods as a means of attracting criminals. As Hinton reveals in the passage excerpted below, what started as one outrageous setup in Washington, DC, soon spread across the nation, and these carefully orchestrated sting operations quickly evolved into an attack on black petty thieves and came to involve the creation of crime itself—a central feature of the rise of the carceral state.

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The Washington, DC, Police Department’s sting effort was the most elaborate and the most contrived of those supported by this federal funding. In the summer of 1975, Washington police lieutenant Robert Arscott had set up a small fake fencing operation masquerading as the consulting firm “Urban Research Associates.” The undercover officer who manned the operation in downtown Washington sat behind a desk with a hidden camera and a tape recorder, hoping that thieves who had recently lifted office equipment would attempt to sell the stolen merchandise to the Urban Research Associates outfit. But amid the highest unemployment rate since 1941, the façade attracted more job seekers than criminals. The police department promptly shut down Urban Research Associates.

For its next attempt, the DC Police Department used federal and local funds to purchase an unheated warehouse near Langdon Park in the segregated northeast side of the District as a more convincing space for illegal transactions. Beginning in fall 1975, law enforcement purchased $2.4 million worth of stolen property with $67,000 in government funds. The project, called “Operation Sting,” involved the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, and the Law Enforcement Assistance Act (LEAA). After only five months, the initiative succeeded in its implicit purpose: to round up hundreds of small-time crooks, nearly all of them unemployed black men. The undercover police officers and federal agents posing as Mafia “dons” gave themselves Italian names straight out of the then-recent Godfather films, including “Angelo Lasagna,” “Mike Franzino,” “Tony Bonano,” “Rico Rigatone,” and “Bohana LaFountaine.” None of the officers were of Italian descent, but they interspersed terms like “Ciao” and “Arrivederci” as they played these roles.

Operation Sting created a demand for crime by providing crooks with a market on which to sell stolen goods. Word quickly spread that the fencing outfit, known to its customers as PFF Inc (for “Police-FBI Fencing Incognito”), was tied to the Mafia and would pay the highest prices in town. The petty thieves furnished PFF Inc with typewriters, adding machines, radios, and television sets, and then went back out to steal more items for the “dons.” If no valuable material goods were to be found, the crooks went after their neighbors’ mail, bringing stolen housing and welfare checks and credit cards. As their employer, PFF Inc provided the thieves with a steady and continuous source of income as long as they could deliver the plunder.

The One King Lear

King Lear exists in two early texts: the Quarto (1608) and the Folio (1623). Each text is abridged: the Quarto lacks 100 lines which are found in the Folio, and the Folio lacks 300 lines which are found in the Quarto. Fortunately, the missing sections are different and complementary. While other Shakespeare plays have texts that differ between the Quarto and Folio, only Lear has two interdependent versions that interlock perfectly. For over two hundred years editors made the obvious decision to reunite them in one single text, the basis for all modern productions of King Lear.

Then, in the 1980s, a revisionist movement appeared, in which a group of influential scholars argued that the two texts represented different versions of King Lear, that Shakespeare personally shortened the Folio text because he was dissatisfied with his original play. The two-text theory has since hardened into a new orthodoxy.

But now, on the very eve of the 400th anniversary of the death of the Bard, one of the world’s most eminent Shakespeare scholars is challenging the two-text consensus. In The One King Lear, Sir Brian Vickers seeks to settle, once and for all, the puzzle of the relationship between the two different editions of Shakespeare’s greatest play. At stake is the way King Lear is read and performed.

Vickers argues that the cuts in the Quarto text are too insignificant to have meaningfully shortened the play, but were instead meant materially, carried out by the printer because he had underestimated the amount of paper he would need. Paper was an expensive commodity in the early modern period—indeed, the second most expensive item on a printer’s account book—and printers counted the lines in a manuscript before ordering their supply.

Through presentation of the moment-by-moment mechanics of typesetting, along with detailed analysis of other Shakespeare Quartos, Vickers reveals the methods that printers used to save space, such as setting verse as prose, replacing “and” with an ampersand, and, as a last resort, omitting quantities of text. All these methods are found in the 1608 King Lear, and many times more frequently than in any comparable Quarto. For Vickers, it follows that the passages missing there were not subsequently added by Shakespeare, as the revisionists claim, but had been cut in the printing house.

As for the Folio, whereas the revisionists made claims that Shakespeare cut the text in order to alter the balance between characters, Vickers sees no evidence of his agency. In effect, some cuts removed passages of a reflective or descriptive nature that were probably made by the theatre company to speed up the action. Others ruin important plot lines and character development: whoever cut the Folio text cropped the end of speeches, the end of scenes, and omitted a whole scene necessary to the action. It could not have been Shakespeare. What he wrote is what Vickers restores: a fully integrated and incomparably powerful tragedy.

Georgetown and the Human Scale of Slavery

Like Harvard, Clemson, the University of Virginia, and other institutions of higher learning on either side of the Atlantic, Georgetown University has been grappling with the pivotal importance of slavery to its past. Here at Harvard, a donation from the slaveholder Isaac Royall Jr. helped to establish the law school; at Georgetown, the sale in 1838 of 272 of the school’s slaves infused the institution with funds necessary for its continued operation. As Georgetown historian Adam Rothman told the New York Times for a cover story this past Sunday, “the university owes its existence to this history.”

Rothman, the author of 2005’s Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South and Beyond Freedom’s Reach: A Kidnapping in the Twilight of Slavery, published last year, is a member of Georgetown’s Working Group on Slavery, Memory, and Reconciliation. The group has been working to document this past through means including the creation of the Georgetown Slavery Archive, a digital repository providing access to the material, and has convened events to involve the university community in discussions of how best to acknowledge and recognize Georgetown’s historical relationship with the institution of slavery.

At one such event, held yesterday in honor of D.C. Emancipation Day, Rothman spoke about that 1838 sale, and plantations run by the Jesuits at the university’s helm. In the course of his presentation, Rothman noted the challenge of engaging with documents that tell only one side of these stories: “What we so often lack,” he said, “is the perspective of enslaved people themselves.”

Beyond Freedom’s Reach is an effort to make one such perspective known. The book tells the true story of a newly freed New Orleans woman’s quest to rescue her children, who’d been kidnapped and enslaved in Cuba by her own former owners. Rose Herera’s years-long fight to bring her three children home demonstrates how a focus on individual lives can challenge many of our notions of how societies actually functioned on the ground. As Rothman notes, the book is part of a broader effort to force recognition of the humanity of those who stories like that of Georgetown may represent as mere lines on ledgers:

Historians have tended to write about slavery in the aggregate rather than to delve deeply into the experiences of particular enslaved people. This approach is understandable. It is usually impossible to construct substantial life histories of individual slaves from the meager scraps of archival material that typically document their existence. The exceptions are usually those extraordinary figures, such as Frederick Douglass, who escaped slavery, achieved literacy, and became politically active in the antislavery movement. Recently, however, historians adopting the techniques of “microhistory” have illuminated the lifeworlds of lesser-known figures: the odyssey of a pair of West African dignitaries ensnared in the Atlantic slave trade; the family saga of a woman from Senegambia who was enslaved and freed in St. Domingue and whose descendants turned up in Louisiana, Mexico, Cuba, and Belgium; the religious revival sparked by a freedwoman in the Dutch Caribbean who preached among enslaved Africans and people of African descent; the liaisons of the Hemingses of Monticello; the career of a North Carolina slave who fought in the Union army and went on to become a legislator. Using microhistory to examine Atlantic slavery and emancipation is to view a hurricane through a pinhole. One cannot see the whole violent storm through a small aperture, but what can be seen comes across with great clarity and vivid detail on a human scale, which can lead to new insights into how people actually lived.

When yesterday’s D.C. event turned to the topic of reconciliation, Rothman shared his opinion that no degree of memorialization is sufficient. Through his work, though, he makes clear that the ultimate impossibility of a righting a historical wrong shouldn’t stop us from trying.

Wealth Managers and the One Percent

World leaders have fallen in the days since the massive “Panama Papers” leak, but, as Brooke Harrington explains in a piece for the Atlantic, most of the activity detailed in those documents is perfectly legal. And Brooke Harrington would know. A sociologist at the Copenhagen Business School, Harrington spent two years training to join the ranks of the world’s elite wealth managers, all purpose financial fixers who do the work behind Mossack Fonseca’s spilled secrets. She tells their stories and details the ways of offshore banks, shell corporations, and trusts in Capital without Borders: Wealth Managers and the One Percent, coming this fall.

As she writes in the Atlantic, the world’s richest people pay wealth managers to help them hide money and defeat the purpose of laws and policies without strictly breaking them:

What Mossack Fonseca and its counterparts all over the world really provide is the expertise that allows their clients to stay just on the right side of the law—or far enough into the legal grey zones that the clients have a real chance to prevail if they end up in court. That’s why many of the people who have seemingly been exposed by this leak will likely never face charges of any kind… When the firm writes that “we have a strong compliance record” and “we are responsible members of the global financial and business community,” they are not lying through their teeth, as some might suspect. Keeping clients out of legal trouble is a core element of their business model: that is how they earn their money. If they, or firms like them, were to lose their reputations for keeping clients on the right side of the law, the clients would take their business elsewhere.

And there’s always an elsewhere to take it—the wealth management industry’s main professional society has roughly 20,000 members. Indeed, despite the sheer volume of the Mossack Fonseca leak, what’s there is the work of just one company in just one place. In the course of her study, Harrington conducted interviews with sixty-five practitioners in eighteen countries. While many wealth managers may project a buttoned-down, old school sensibility—the better with which to woo old money—a quaint scene this is not.

Wealth managers take full advantage of the decades of work done removing restrictions on the international flow of capital, but one of their most valuable services is ensuring the free movement of their clients themselves, through the world and even, in a sense, through time. Here’s Harrington in a piece from last year:

Tax avoidance—the perfectly legal practice of minimizing one’s tax obligations—is really the least of the wonders that wealth managers achieve for their clients. They can also help clients swap nationalities when holding the passport of a particular country means submitting to undesirable requirements. Remember when the Facebook founder Eduardo Saverin renounced his American citizenship for a Singaporean passport? Classic wealth-management strategy. And thanks to the expanding number of practitioners, U.S. citizenship renunciations are at an all-time high, and growing. Finally, wealth managers can give their clients a kind of financial immortality, in the form of inheritances tied to the performance of certain duties by the heirs, such as going into the family business or producing grandchildren.

The underlying point to Harrington’s work is that the massive accumulation of wealth, rising inequality, the reign of global plutocrats—these things don’t just happen on their own. They require work, and they require workers. Those workers and their clients are now catching some sunshine through the haze of the Panama Papers. Harrington’s work may leave some burnt.

The Disfiguring Force of Populism

In Democracy Disfigured: Opinion, Truth, and the People, political theorist Nadia Urbinati defends democracy not from its critics, but from those who claim to be its champions. “The societies in which we live,” she writes, “are democratic not only because they have free elections and more than one political party competing but also because they promise to allow for effective political competition and debate among diverse and competing views.” The disfigurations of the body politic she identifies are not changes to the essential form of government, but instead alarming mutations to the functioning of government by means of opinion. One of those disfigurations, populism, is a political power grab masquerading as a movement of the people, and it’s one that plays an ever-growing role in the arena of democracy. In the post below, Urbinati diagnoses the disfiguring force of populism at work today.

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Today many countries witness waning confidence in core democratic institutions such as parties, parliaments, and elections. Shrinking party membership and increasing estrangement between politicians and voters testify to disillusionment with representative democracy. Politicians are regularly accused—not unjustifiably—of having lost touch with ordinary people’s concerns and made politics into an insipid mainstreamism that chooses to neglect society’s most grave needs and concerns. This anti-political practice is primed to damage democracy, as recognizable proposals are needed that encourage citizens to participate.

There is some truth in the general complaint that politics has become a strategy via which a narrow self-referential elite consolidates its power in part by discouraging people’s participation. Populism follows a cycle of electoral abstention and apathy. These are the side effects of mainstreamism, which is at the origin of citizens’ mistrust in party politics, the growth of anti-party sentiments, and the attraction of the populist rebuff of “practical democracy.” A complex category hard to synthetize in a clear-cut definition, populism can emerge from this malaise. When elected politicians and citizens become two separate groups, when people witness gross violations of social equality in the general indifference of their representatives while the most powerful have more voice in politics, it may very well happen that people distrust politics.

It’s critical to understand populism as a symptom, rather than a cure. It is context sensitive, to be sure. In the United States, where the term was coined in the late nineteenth century, populism developed along with political democratization and was never followed by a regime change—this explains why it was met positively, and is still regarded as such by historians and political theorists. In Latin America populism emerged in the age of social modernization, yet it won the support of the people both in opinion and on the ballot when the people enjoyed already universal suffrage and were de jure democratic although de facto on the verge of a dictatorial change or facing the prospect of being ruled by an economic oligarchy. In Western Europe, finally, it merged with nationalism, justified xenophobic ideologies, and promoted Fascist regimes based on mass propaganda and Caesaristic leadership.