# President's Commission on Organized Crime, America's Habit: Drug Abuse, Drug Trafficking, and Organized Crime (March 1986)

Canonical: https://mobfiles.org/items/pcoc-americas-habit-1986/

The 1986 report of the President's Commission on Organized Crime on drugs and organized crime, with a section on "La Cosa Nostra and the French Connection" and a case study of the "Pizza Connection." Read from a microfiche scan.

The report was read through the Internet Archive's scan of a microfiche copy, whose OCR is imperfect. Two passages are used here.

**"La Cosa Nostra and the French Connection"** (printed pages 105–106). The report traces heroin trafficking as "big business" in New York City to the 1920s, says La Cosa Nostra joined the trade by the late 1930s and took control of it after the war, and says that when Italy banned heroin manufacture in the early 1950s, Turkish morphine base was refined in Marseilles and shipped to Montreal or Sicily, an "arrangement, popularly known as the 'French Connection.'" It states: "During the peak French Connection years, the LCN controlled an estimated 95 percent of all of the heroin entering New York City, as well as most of the heroin distributed throughout the United States," and that the arrangement collapsed in 1972, when Turkey banned opium production. The 95 percent figure is the Commission's estimate, footnoted to a secondary book; other footnotes cite the 1963–64 Senate narcotics hearings. The OCR prints the period of the monopoly as "the 1980's through the early 1970's," which cannot be right as printed; the page image has not been checked.

**"The Pizza Connection"** (about printed page 130; the page number is inferred from the nearest page markers). A footnote says the case study was compiled "from trial transcripts and the indictment in United States v. Catalano." The report says that members of La Cosa Nostra "allegedly cooperated with the Sicilian Mafia" in importing heroin worth over $1.6 billion, that "In April, 1984, 38 individuals were indicted," and that "factions of the Sicilian Mafia operate in the United States independently of the American La Cosa Nostra." Its count of 38 differs from the 35 defendants of the superseding indictment in the Second Circuit's [Casamento opinion](/items/courtlistener-us-v-casamento-887-f2d-1141/); this archive uses the court's figures.

## Sources

- Internet Archive, microfiche scan of the Government Printing Office print: https://archive.org/details/micro_IA41152657_0382