Copyright 1986 The New York Times Company  
The New York Times
January 12, 1986, Sunday, Late City Final Edition
SECTION: Section 6; Page 26, Column 1; Magazine Desk

LENGTH: 5759 words

HEADLINE: DECLARING WAR ON ORGANIZED CRIME

BYLINE: By Ronald Reagan

BODY:
WATERFRONT EXTORTION IN NEW YORK, MOB WARS in Philadelphia, threats against a Federal prosecutor in Cleveland and the families of F.B.I. agents, attempted bribery of State officials in Louisiana, protection rackets for bookmakers and pornographers in Los Angeles. And in places too numerous to mention all across America: piracy of union pension and welfare funds; toxic wastes spewed out along our highways, according to state investigators, and into our wildernesses; legitimate businesses fronting as fencing networks for thieves and hijackers; corruption of college athletes through sports-rigging schemes; an invisible tax on food purchases and construction costs imposed by illegal syndicates and paid for by American citizens.

This is the face of organized crime in America in the 1980's; far more encompassing and wide-reaching than in the past, but in its essential characteristics not all that different from the face of organized crime a generation or two ago - a point on which I can cite personal experience. Like all too many Americans, I've seen the mob at work.

In the early 1940's, along with many members of the Hollywood community, I watched with deep concern as organized crime moved in on the motion picture industry, largely through a takeover of the stagehands' and projectionists' union, the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees and Motion Picture Operators, and an attempted move on the union to which I belonged, the Screen Actors Guild. Before it was over, two vice presidents of the stagehands' union would split $1 million with the Chicago underworld. They would also be indicted and go to jail. And one of them, Willie Bioff, would eventually be killed by a bomb the mob placed in his truck.

But through the commitment and efforts of people like my friend, Robert Montgomery, then president of S.A.G., the mob's attempted infiltration failed.

Not that things quieted down after that; a few years later it was the Communists who tried to take over S.A.G., at a time when I had succeeded Bob as president of the union. It wasn't long before there was violence; and personal threats followed, and the police advised me to carry a pistol. Since then, I've understood those who argue that the tactics used by mobsters and totalitarian ideologues have a lot in common.

While lawmen, prosecutors and scholars still argue over the exact definition of organized crime, a 1967 Presidential commission perhaps put it best when it suggested the term be applied to groups that have become sufficiently sophisticated to regularly employ the techniques of both violence and corruption to achieve their criminal ends..

Over the years, the techniques and tactics of organized crime have stayed much the same. Recently, jurors in a major American city got an inside glimpse at the boldness and scope of the mob when they heard a mob boss on a clandestinely recorded tape explain to a subordinate why the Federal Government could not prosecute him under antiracketeering laws forbidding infiltration of legitimate businesses:

BOSS: Our argument is we're illegitimate business! SUBORDINATE: We're a shylock! BOSS: We're a bookmaker. We're selling marijuana. We are illegal here, illegal there. Arsonists. We are everything. SUB: Pimps. BOSS: So what? SUB: Prostitutes. BOSS: The law does not cover us, is that right? SUB: That's the argument. BOSS: I wouldn't be in a legitimate business for all the money in the world.

But many of his colleagues in crime sharply disagree, and their dissent accounts for a major change in the modus operandi of organized crime. To an unprecedented extent, the mob has been moving to infiltrate and control legitimate businesses. In the New York area alone, members of the five major mob families have been convicted or are facing trials not just for labor racketeering and extortion but also for criminal infiltration of such businesses as restaurants, food distribution, entertainment, waterfront cargo handling, vending machines, liquor, securities, garbage and toxic-waste disposal, and the trucking, jewelry, garment, construction and real-estate industries.

Yet even as the mob has grown bolder in seeking to corrupt legitimate sectors of our society, there has been another, more hopeful, change, resulting from a new will and energy in Washington: a quantum leap in successful efforts to expose the mob and prosecute its leaders. To cite one example: Our Administration removed the limit on applications for Federal Court-authorized electronic surveillances - one of the most potent legal weapons against organized crime, one gangsters fear the most and once limited to fewer than 100 applications each year. By 1984, Federal investigators had installed 289 bugs and tapes, all duly authorized by judges applying strict statutory criteria.

Today, thanks to tedious but inspired work by F.B.I. agents, the American public is learning about the mob out of the gangsters' own mouths. Hearing the tapes of such conversations as the one just cited, jurors are now convicting top-level mobsters and sending them away for long prison terms at a rate never before achieved. Since 1981, organized crime convictions have quadrupled. The mob boss and his subordinate quoted in the tape above are a good example: both went to trial recently under a 20-count indictment for violating the Racketeer-Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) act. For the first time, we are beginning to exploit fully the statutory weapons Congress provided in the 1970 Organized Crime Control Act, and last year the Federal Government confiscated millions in illicit financial assets.

It's developments like these that prompted me to write this article: I want to present the facts about organized crime, to explain the scope of our Administration's efforts against it, and to illustrate why I think that for the first time in our history we finally have the mob on the run. And I want to explain how I think all of us can help put a permanent end to its widespread influence in America..

NO ONE'S QUITE SURE when organized crime actually began in America -some see its first signs in the urban gangs that sprang up in our large cities in the late 1800's; some say it started with a mobster named Big Jim Colosimo who protected his Chicago rackets by buying influence among judges and Government officials.

After he was gunned down in a restaurant in 1920, one of Colosimo's hired enforcers, Johnny Torrio, took his place. But Johnny Torrio retired early - to make room for someone he had brought in from Brooklyn to help him, a young man by the name of Al Capone.

As Capone became the lord of the Chicago underworld in the Twenties, famous gangsters, like New York's Lucky Luciano and Meyer Lansky, rose to ascendancy in other big cities. Senate hearings years later would show that in 1931 two groups of gangsters set up a national commission - in effect, an underworld government that divided up the country into spheres of influence. The commission settled disputes and negotiated illicit deals ranging from contract murders to influence-buying with Government officials. They called their criminal confederation ''This Thing of Ours,'' or ''la Cosa Nostra.'' While the number of sworn or ''made'' members was strictly limited, la Cosa Nostra accepted many others as members and functionaries in all but the ceremonial formality. The Mafia really is an equal opportunity employer; while it has a restricted inner circle, its auxiliaries include criminals of all faiths, races and nationalities, so long as they are reliable ''earners.''

As the mob grew in size and sophistication, a few dedicated Americans and corruption fighters took it on. And whenever, as President, I've spoken about organized crime I've made an effort to note those names. Among them, Judge Samuel Seabury and Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey, who in the 1930's began to prosecute New York's criminal gangs. There was also Eliot Ness and his small group of Justice Department agents, who, because the Capone mob couldn't stop their investigations by ''touching'' them with bribes or threats, earned fame as ''The Untouchables.''

The first Federal law-enforcement administrator to recognize the signs of a national criminal syndication and sound the alarm was Harry J. Anslinger, Commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics in the Treasury Department. Senator Estes Kefauver in the early 1950's conducted the widely publicized Senate Rackets Investigating Committee hearings that first exposed the syndicates. Senator John L. McClellan used the Senate rackets committee to investigate union corruption and organized crime. It was the McClellan committee that in 1963 first heard the chilling testimony of Mafia defector and former hit man Joseph Valachi. And Robert Kennedy, who in ''The Enemy Within'' had described the arrogance of the mob bosses he had questioned while serving as the young counsel to the McClellan committee, also helped. As Attorney General in the Kennedy Administration, he intensified the struggle against organized crime, an effort later culminating in a concept proposed a few years earlier by the then Attorney General Herbert Brownell. That set up special teams of Federal prosecutors, eventually called organized crime strike forces, which could focus on mob activities in various regions of the country.

And no litany could omit the incalculable good done by crusading editors and reporters whose stories sparked many of the important Government investigations. Among the many were Eugene Methvin of the Reader's Digest, Nicholas Gage of The New York Times and Robert Greene and Thomas Renner of Newsday. And Clark Mollenhoff of The Des Moines Register, a friend from my days as a broadcaster in Iowa, was one of the first to write about union corruption in the early 1950's. It was he who gave the McClellan committee staff members the specifics it needed to conduct its probe. And in 1976 I shared the shock all Americans felt when I read of the murder of an Arizona reporter, Don Bolles, who had worked with extraordinary dedication to expose organized crime's inroads in the Southwest.

But although the revelations of these dedicated Americans brought strong public outcry and a demand for action each time they occurred, efforts to follow up on their work were often poorly planned, badly organized and short-lived..

Now, some cynics - driven perhaps by their own ideological or personal dislike of our society - have suggested that such efforts must always fail. They claim that too many Americans, especially those who call themselves conservatives, have a tendency to preach our country's virtues but turn a blind eye to social ills like organized crime.

I know I have been accused myself of believing in ''Norman Rockwell's America,'' a place where, as portrayed in the artist's famous Saturday Evening Post covers, decent people lead decent lives, and a respect for the laws of the community and the values of our country is the accepted norm.As a small-town boy who's a believer in the innate goodness of this country and her people, I'll readily plead guilty to that charge. But, like most Americans, I have never felt that believing in America means believing that nothing's wrong here or needs changing. In fact, it's always been my experience that the truly important reforms in our society are the work not of Government but of people - patriotic, everyday Americans who work through the private sector to correct injustice or wrongdoing.

The truth is there's never been any question that the American people want the mob put out of business. It's why they've rewarded many crusading prosecutors and reformers with higher elective office. And the remarkable popularity of a television series like ''The Untouchables,'' or a novel and movie like ''The Godfather'' reveals more than just public fascination with a secret society. Down deep, the American people know a criminal confederation exists in our country, that it has incredible power, and they want something done about it.

THAT'S WHY THIS ISSUE HAS ALWAYS SEEMED TO ME A place of common ground for conservatives and liberals, Republicans and Democrats; a place where all Americans could align themselves against a dangerous and all too persistent domestic enemy.

Believe me, nothing was more evident in the first year and a half of our Administration than that such an alliance was necessary. The steady expansion of organized crime into legitimate business as well as its continued and ever deeper involvement into illicit activity like drug trafficking had clearly brought America to the crisis point.

By 1981, drug trafficking through our southeast coastline caused so much violence and corruption it threatened to turn all of south Florida into a latter-day Wild West. Early in our Administration, I appointed a special south Florida task force, under Vice President Bush, to deal with the immediate crisis, but while the task force was highly effective it was still only a stopgap measure, and for only one region of the country.

It was clear to me that much, much more was needed. And not only to combat the escalating drug trade, whose growth, as horrible and destructive as it was, was actually a byproduct of a deeper problem: the tolerance for so many years of a massive criminal underground in America, its nationwide syndicates and its ever-widening infiltration into our lives. As threatening as the drug trade, for example, were those new varieties of organized criminal groups: motorcycle and prison gangs, and Asian or Colombian drug gangs. In my own mind, there has never been any doubt that their growth could be traced to the virtual immunity of the traditional mob to prosecution. In fact, by the late 1970's, the old and new groups were setting up close and expanding ties. For these new gangs, the old-style mob and its arrogant defiance of the law was an inspiration, an example to emulate.

The grim truth was that the underworld's size and power - black marks on our history since the turn of the century - had increased during the last two decades. And this crisis of crime - the continuing strength of the traditional mob after nearly a hundred years, the growing drug empires, the new gangs - prompted me to call the Cabinet into special session at the White House on Sept. 30, 1982.

Attorney General William French Smith, building his case in a quiet, methodical courtroom manner, cited many of these facts I have just mentioned, flipping through page after page of statistics and reading anecdotal evidence about crime, listing its financial and human cost to America. He talked not only about the steady rise in street crime over two decades but the growth and increasing sophistication of regional and national networks of professional criminals. He described the alarmingly successful attempts of these networks to corrupt legitimate businesses, unions, political figures and members of law enforcement and government agencies. He made it clear that career criminals had not only grown bolder in their activities but were continuing to extend their reach ever deeper into law-abiding sectors of our society, buying and bribing their way to the kind of official protection and respectability that would permit them to operate their criminal undergrounds with impunity.

Not long after that Cabinet meeting, the Justice Department concluded an investigation that revealed just this kind of an attempt to permanently corrupt American society when the Department brought an indictment against one of its own.

And on Aug. 10, 1983, a former Federal prosecutor was convicted for bribery and obstruction of justice. During the trial, he was heard on tape-recorded conversations offering to sell Government investigative in-formation to a private detective who worked for a major drug figure. The tape disclosed that the Government attorney revealed sensitive information about Government investigations - and then went on to offer to sell the names of confidential informants.

A portion of the recording went like this:

GOVERNMENT PROSECUTOR: Those are the critical items . . . that's the critical type of information . . . the asking price for all of this is $200,000. [A few moments later, the prosecutor noted how helpful this information could be for a drug dealing operation.] PROSECUTOR: I will say this, that if, if they play their cards right . . . the $200,000 will be nothing, nothing.

PRIVATE DETECTIVE: Uh huh.

PROSECUTOR: It'll be nothing compared to the money profit they'll make.

After hearing about this case, I did something my staff has told me is a sure sign I'm angry; and if there was that tell-tale tightening around my mouth and jaw, I think it's understandable. I was angry; and, really, what decent American wouldn't be? Here was a startling example of the trend the Attorney General had spoken about that day in the Cabinet Room: a Federal prosecutor, a man sworn to protect this country's citizens from criminals, had instead sought to go into business with the underworld figures by soliciting bribes from them.

During my first year in office, I had talked with the Attorney General about such matters, and along with Presidential counselor Edwin L. Meese 3d, a former prosecutor who would later succeed Bill Smith as Attorney General, we had decided that we would reject quick fixes. Instead, we would launch a sustained, long-term frontal assault on organized crime and public corruption.

It was just this kind of program that Bill Smith had outlined that day in the Cabinet Room. First, following the successful example set in south Florida, we would establish 12 regional task forces that would investigate and prosecute the drug cartels and keep a special eye on la Cosa Nostra involvement. Second, we would establish a national commission to hold regional hearings on organized crime, to expose its tactics and structure and come up with recommendations for a national strategy. Third, we would push for a sweeping overhaul of the Federal crime code, an anticrime bill that would give prosecutors and investigators the tools they needed to fight criminal conspiracies. Fourth, the Justice Department would carry out a series of related initiatives: more vigorous prosecution of the mob, including use of the RICO statute, to confiscate more of its financial assets; better interagency cooperation in the Federal Government, and a yearly report by the Attorney General. We also ordered closer cooperation with state and local law-enforcement agencies, including new training programs at a Federal facility in Glynco, Ga., that would focus on the mob's new and more sophisticated tactics. And we would press for additional Federal prison space that would help end the scandalous practice of shortening sentences for major criminals because there wasn't room to incarcerate them.

All of this would mean a considerable commitment of Federal dollars in a period of time when I had urged the Congress to cut the budget. It would mean the addition of more than 1,000 new Federal investigators and 200 new prosecutors. That was more manpower than was currently employed in existing organized crime strike forces. It would be a dramatic addition to our resources that would halt the steady decline in Federal investigative personnel whose number, incredibly enough, had gone down drastically: between 1974 and 1980, the F.B.I. had lost almost 800 agents, or close to 8 percent of its strength, even as the crime statistics were rising rapidly.

This fiscal commitment, however, was not at all inconsistent with my own long-held belief that when Government grows big and bloated and gets into areas where it's neither competent nor wanted, it also tends to ignore its important Constitutional duties. Duties like providing for the national defense, and, in this case, protecting its citizens from criminal wrongdoing. The Federal Government's deficits were not due to too much money being spent for law-enforcement purposes; spending had been dramatically reduced in the 70's as a percentage of the Federal budget, so our plan would be a step toward redressing an imbalance.

AS BILL SMITH CONCLUDED HIS presentation to the Cabinet on Sept. 30, the expected happened: objections were raised over the cost of the plan. I could sense the tension. Members of the Attorney General's personal staff, like Tex Lezar and Kenneth W. Starr, had worked hard on the plan, as had F.B.I. Director William H. Webster and Associate Attorney General Rudolph W. Guiliani, head of the criminal division. (Serving a few years later as our United States Attorney in New York's Southern District, Rudy would conduct widely publicized investigations against New York's top mob families.) I let the discussion go on for a brief while before intervening. I noted that the financial details needed to be worked out with the Office of Management and Budget. But I made it clear that financial considerations could not stand in the way; I approved of this plan and I wanted it.

In announcing the plan before Justice employees in a crowded departmental auditorium on Oct. 14, 1982 I noted: ''It comes down, in the end, to a simple question we must ask ourselves: What kind of people are we if we continue to tolerate in our midst an invisible, lawless empire? Can we honestly say that America is the land with justice for all if we do not now exert every effort to eliminate this confederation of professional criminals, this dark, evil enemy within?''

The program received overwhelming support from Republicans and Democrats in the Congress and from the American people. And it was not long before the 12 regional task forces were up and running, the national commission was fully operational and other initiatives, such as increasing prison facilities, better training for law-enforcement officers, were under way. All except for the anticrime bill. That took a long, tough struggle, but in the fall of 1983, Congress finally acted.

It's starting to pay off now. Organized crime convictions have more than quadrupled since 1981; we are cutting deeply into the infrastructure of the mob by prosecuting major leaders - and not just ''picking off the retired or wounded,'' as one longtime crusader against organized crime, G. Robert Blakey, a professor of law at Notre Dame, said about past Government prosecutions. The Justice Department has cases currently under way against mob leaders in New York's Gambino group, which law-enforcement authorities consider the largest and most powerful underworld organization in the nation, and New York's Colombo group, as well as against leaders in the New England, Milwaukee, Kansas City and Chicago areas.

We're also hitting the mob where it hurts the most: in the pocketbook, using both new and old laws to confiscate its financial assets. Convictions for all drug-law violators also increased 90 percent and convictions of top-echelon organizers and financiers increased 186 percent from 1981 to 1984. During the first seven months of 1984, the latest period for which final figures are available, seizures of cocaine by Federal forces were 216 percent greater than were cocaine seizures for all of 1981. Heroin seizures during the same period were 67 percent greater and marijuana seizures were 8 percent greater.

Conducting extensive hearings in Washington, Miami, New York and Chicago, the President's Organized Crime Commission has also been hav ing a widespread impact. It has exposed many of the new crime gangs, giving local and state law enforcement the information they need to stop these groups before they become as entrenched and as dangerous as la Cosa Nostra. Most important, the commission has investigated and exposed the all too rarely discussed problem of those institutions and professionals -such as corrupt banks, unions or crooked lawyers - whose veneer of respectability helps make them the mainstays of organized crime in America.

In addition to being the first Government body to focus public attention on the willingness of some banking institutions to launder money for the mob, the commission has sent me and Attorney General Meese proposals for new regulations that would prevent such abuses. The commission's final report is not due until March, but al-ready it is helping the public and this Administration to get at the roots of organized crime. Commission attorneys, for example, with the stern backing of a Federal District judge in Chicago, Prentice M. Marshall, succeeded in securing sworn testimony extensively detailing for the first time for the American public the inside story of la Cosa Nostra influ-ence in important aspects of labor racketeering.

Our local and state initiatives are also well under way. We are working far more effectively with their prosecutors and policemen, which has given them new heart in their own long-running fight against local organized crime.

For all these reasons, I think we are now making real progress. The mob's internal structure has been badly weakened by prosecutions; and its methods of operation in legitimate spheres are becoming increasingly exposed.

What we need now is the help of all Americans, so that we can more effectively move forward with our national strategy, to eradicate organized crime's extensive influence in American society. And to do it within the life span of this generation.

F IRST, OUR GOAL must be victory -nothing short of it. When I first discussed an offensive on organized crime, I got some well-meaning advice suggesting we play down the long-term objectives. War on crime announced in other administrations had sometimes fizzled; so there were political risks in boldly stated objectives. But that advice I had to reject. Uncertain trumpets lead to halfhearted crusades; and halfway-wars usually cause more problems than they solve. I think our national policy must be the one I outlined to United States Attorneys at the White House last year: ''We're in this thing to win. There will be no negotiated settlements, no detente with the mob. It's war to the end where they're concerned. Our goal is simple: We mean to cripple their organization, dry up their profits and put their members behind bars where they belong. They've had a free run for too long a time in this country.''

Second, with aroused public opinion and mobilized Government agencies, victory isn't just possible, it's probable.

We can do it. We mustn't listen to those who say the mob will always exist because it serves to gratify illicit impulses that are part of human nature. No Governmental action is going to repeal human nature or fully abolish illegal practices like prostitution, illicit gambling, pornography and so forth. But what can be destroyed is those networks of regional or national racketeers who feed on these practices; the secret confederations and syndicates, the hidden governments that run them and profit from them.

Third, we must never forget that the mob is the criminal community's flagship. What we do against the mob is directly related to fighting other kinds of crime, like burglary, muggings, etc. As I have said before, the street criminal or petty burglar is part of a larger community of career criminals; many have close ties to mobsters or their operations - professional burglars, for example, who use mob fences to peddle their stolen goods. It's time we realized every criminal profits from the climate of corruption and wrongdoing the mob creates.

Fourth, it is at the state and local level, and only there, that the war against crime can finally be won. The Federal Government can do much to break up the interstate rings of career criminals; yet these syndicates will permanently be put out of business only when the illegal revenue they derive at the local level is dried up. Rackets like numbers or sports-betting operations or the pornography trade provide millions of dollars in revenue to crime bosses. Most Americans who play an illegal numbers game at the corner store or place a sports bet over the phone don't realize they're helping to finance a nationwide criminal conspiracy that is using this money to import drugs, buy off politicians and policemen and initiate many other corrupt practices.

Fifth, the public must encourage local and state police agencies to do more to crack down on racketeering. The public should also support police forces as they develop special units to probe organized crime and municipal corruption. For many police departments, which traditionally have concentrated on street crime, these are new areas of responsibility and they need citizen support and involvement to get their plans off the ground. Local police forces should also be encouraged to maintain strong internal affairs units that will protect them from penetration by mob influence or corruption that undermines public confidence. Currently, for example, 19 states, including a number with severe la Cosa Nostra problems, have no legislation authorizing law-enforcement agencies to use court-supervised electronic surveillance, a vital weapon in the war on organized crime. Since 1970, when Congress passed the Organized Crime Control Act, 23 states have adopted their own RICO laws, modeled on Title IX. The latest to do so is Ohio. I believe that the states which have not yet enacted such laws should do so.

Sixth - business and labor - corporations, banks, and unions - must exercise special care to stop the mob's stepped-up efforts to pene-trate them. Sadly, in recent years, many such institutions have not been sufficiently vigilant on this score. Even worse, some of these institutions - when discovered doing business with the mob - launched a vain attempt to protect their reputation and try to obstruct law-enforcement investigations. This, too, must end. And the only way to do it is by a refusal by average Americans to patronize or do business with such institutions.

Seventh - the American people need to constantly remind elected officials that they want appointments of judges and prosecutors who understand the need to protect society from criminal wrongdoing. Our Administration has appointed fair but tough-minded judges to the Federal bench who are aware that the public as well as criminal defendants have rights that need protection. We've seen a real decrease in crime for more than three years in a row now, largely because we are now locking up more career criminals for longer periods of time. And this effort needs to be duplicated many times over at the state and local level. We need responsible but vigorous prosecutions and tough sentences for those who help organized crime, especially those in government, law, business or labor who have betrayed their trust to their fellow citizens. Eighth - our criminal justice system must be protected. Judges and lawyers in particular have a sacred obligation to guard the public against unethical or illegal acts in the courts. Our organized crime commission and many law-enforcement officials have found that improper conduct by lawyers representing mobsters in criminal or business proceedings is one of the mainstays of mob power. (For example, a magazine article exposing one of the mob's legitimate business fronts referred in passing to longtime la Cosa Nostra member Aladema (Jimmy) Fratianno as ''an infamous hit man.'' A mob lawyer and his la Cosa Nostra superiors ordered Fratianno to file a libel suit, which was eventually dismissed. Years later, facing a long jail term, Fratianno became a Government witness and admitted under oath that he had been directly involved in four mob murders and had incriminating advance knowledge in seven others. Fratianno claims his libel suit had been ordered for the obvious purposes of raising the cost of hard-hitting reporting about organized crime and deterring journalists and publishers from doing their duty.

When the courts are misused and lawyers are found involved in improper activities, especially when those activities involve organized corruption, the public should insist that local bar associations discipline their members. Only in this way can public confidence in the integrity of our judicial system be properly maintained.

Ninth - Americans must inform themselves about charges of wrongdoing aimed at public officials. Sometimes innocent officials are subjected to irresponsible charges for strictly political reasons. I've heard of incidents at the local level where the mob and its friends in political life have fed controversy in order to embarrass an official whose integrity has stood in their way in the past. So, too, these same forces will unite to downplay legitimate charges of illicit activity against Government officials who have done them favors and really are guilty of wrongdoing. There is only one solution to this dilemma: an alert public that demands high standards of performance from its public officials, weighs charges of wrongdoing carefully and insists on fairness on all sides but also demands such charges be vigorously investigated.

IN A ROSE GARDEN ceremony on July 28, 1983, when I appointed 19 Americans from all walks of life to the President's Commission on Organized Crime, I reminded them what a Federal judge once said about the mob lords. The judge called them ''hardened, sophisticated criminals who thought of themselves as a group above the law, men who placed loyalty to each other above loyalty to their country and its law-abiding citizens.'' He noted that these men ''wear two faces,'' that they ''cloaked themselves in the respectability of charitable or civic organizations, even as they work to prey on innocent people and undermine the very moral foundations of our society.''

These words, spoken at the sentencing of defendants who participated in a notorious meeting of crime bosses in Apalachin, N.Y., in 1957, are as true today as when they were first uttered by Judge Irving R. Kaufman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, the man I asked to head the President's Organized Crime Commission.

America has lived with the problem of organized crime for far too long. I believe that if the American people will now give their full support to the war now going on against the mob, we can, - in our children's lifetime, perhaps even in our own - obliterate this evil and its awful cost to our nation. It is a cause worthy of America's past and important to her future, and one in which all Americans can play a role.