The Mob, Faux-tism, and the Rising Cost of Compliance
2nd February 2021
Severian applies some history.
Let’s take a closer look at yesterday’s example of “butt smuggling,” the now-hilarious contemporary term for the Mob’s cigarette racket in the late Sixties / early Seventies. This is exactly the kind of un-glamorous scam that will never make it into the movies, but which keeps Organized Crime afloat, and to which the Feds will soon be forcing us at an ever-increasing pace.
In the late Sixties, you’ll recall, a combination of cash-strapped state governments (places like Illinois were already feeling the pinch of a few decades’ worth of total Democratic control) and Health Nazis slapped egregious taxes on smokes. It turns out that the tax stamps are easy to forge, cigarette trucks are easy to hijack, and when all else fails, smuggling is pretty easy, too. It’s a low-margin, high-volume sort of racket, but it’s profitable — sure, you don’t make $10K per kilo (or whatever) like you do selling coke, but you don’t run coke’s ludicrous risks, either, since while some squarejohn citizen type might well rat you off to the fuzz for selling drugs, he’s much likelier to ask you for a pack when he finds you’re smuggling cigarettes…