National Crime Syndicate

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The National Crime Syndicate is a term used by journalists, law-enforcement officials, and some historians to describe informal cooperation among organized crime figures in the United States during the Prohibition era and the mid-20th century. Rather than a single, centralized organization, the term generally refers to loose, pragmatic alliances among Italian-American and Jewish-American criminal organizations and other criminal groups engaged in bootlegging, gambling, and related illicit activities. While mid-20th-century media accounts and congressional investigations—most notably those conducted by the Kefauver Committee—often portrayed the Syndicate as a national confederation with leadership and enforcement mechanisms, later scholarship has questioned whether such an organization ever existed in a formal sense. Many historians argue that the concept reflects contemporaneous efforts to explain inter-ethnic criminal cooperation rather than evidence of a durable, structured criminal body.

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