# Statement of Attorney General William French Smith to the President's Commission on Organized Crime, New York, 23 October 1984 (National Archives)

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/nara-179030980-attorney-general-smith-statement-1984/

The Attorney General's prepared statement to the President's Commission on Organized Crime, linking organized crime's "international phase" to drug trafficking and reporting 41 indictments in a heroin ring after an arrest in Spain that April.

The typed statement is headed as the Attorney General's statement to the President's Commission on Organized Crime, New York City, October 23, 1984, and opens with thanks to "Judge Kaufman, and members of the Commission." The Attorney General says he is there to announce that "the federal government has now achieved its greatest successes ever against the traditional organized crime families entrenched for so long in our major cities."

He says organized crime "has entered a new historical phase -- its international phase," that "This development is directly related to drug trafficking," and that "Today, the distance between New York and Palermo is no greater than that between New York and Chicago." He reports: "last April Spanish authorities arrested a notorious Sicilian Mafia drug trafficker and fugitive from Italy," which led to arrests and searches in Illinois, Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Jersey and New York and in Italy and Switzerland, and that "So far, 41 individuals have been indicted in connection with their involvement in a heroin trafficking ring that laundered more than $54 million in banks in the Bahamas and Switzerland."

The statement names no one in that passage. The [FBI's history page](/items/fbi-history-pizza-connection/) dates Gaetano Badalamenti's arrest in Madrid to April 8, 1984, but the statement does not say it means him, and its count of 41 differs from the thirty-five defendants in the indictment the Second Circuit describes in [Casamento](/items/courtlistener-us-v-casamento-887-f2d-1141/). This archive does not reconcile the two.

## Sources

- National Archives Catalog: https://catalog.archives.gov/id/179030980
- PDF of the statement (National Archives): https://catalog.archives.gov/medialz/electronic-records/rg-060/AttGen/10-23-1984.pdf