Today, we resume with the third installment of Andy DiLigio’s “Inside The Norwegian Mob”.

Inside The Norwegian Mob

Andy DiLigio

After Bjørn and Gerda Hjerteløven got married, in 1895, the Norwegian crime syndicate grew to unprecedented power and influence in New York, by quiet but ruthless control of its proxies in the Italian and Irish organized crime syndicates.  The Italian, Irish, Jewish and other gangs made boundless money, and secured unlimited political power, second-hand, for Hjerteløven and his small, ultra-secretive band of Norwegian co-conspirators.   By 1910, Hjerteløvens had made millions, and concealed it with the same quiet but ruthless effieciency he did everything else; he subtly exploited their Italian/Irish leaderships’ taste for the ostentatious high life to distribute money to a cleverly-hidden network of modest, Norwegian-owned businesses – bakers, tailors, bartenders, gun merchants, pasta wholesalers and the like – in the most ingenious, bulletproof money laundering scheme in all of history.  Indeed, it wasn’t for nothing that North Dakota – heavily settled by Norwegians covertly linked to the mob – became the world’s largest source of the durum wheat used to make pasta; it both laundered money and exerted control over Hjerteløven’s mediterranean minions.

And whenever one of the Italian or Irish gangs got to be  “too big for its britches”, as Hjerteløven used to say, he’d engineer a bloody gang war that’d eviscerate both gangs’ leaderships.  In the rare more dire situations, Hjerteløven would subtly invoke government sanction, using his iron-clad Scandinavian passive-agression to turn the other non-Scandinavians’ own brutality and aggression against the more dem0nstrative, overtly-aggressive non-Scandinavians.

But Bjørna Hjerteløven’s greatest, most ingenious work was yet to come.

New York was getting too small for him.  He needed to expand the family’s horizons.

In 1917, as the US lurched into World War I (in which Hjerteløven’s three sons, Lars, Berndt and Knud all served), Bjørn and Gerda Hjerteløven took a trip via railroad (coach class, naturally) to Bemidji, Minnesota, ostensibly to visit Bjørn’s sister Helge.  But the trip included a side-jaunt to Granite Falls, during the 1917 Congressional recess, to visit Andrew Volstead, who was at the time one of Minnesota’s congressional delegation, and the chair of the House Judiciary Committee.

And who was, as it happened, the son of Jon Einartson Vraalstad, a Norwegian immigrant.  “Volstead” had been born Vraalstad or Vrolstad, and had anglicized his name before attending Saint Olaf College in Northfield – which has long been one of the great incubators of the Norwegian mob.

The details of the meeting are long lost to history –  if, indeed, the Norwegian mob’s legendary secrecy allowed them into history at all – but in the subsequent session, Volstead introduced the “Volstead Act”, which passed the following December, and was ratified as the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution within two years, prohibiting the production, distribution or sale of alcohol.

The investment of time paid off immediately.  Mobsters took over the illegal booze trade, kept in line behind the scenes by by Hjerteløven’s constant gang wars.

And as the Hjerteløven boys came home from the First World War, Prohibition had made their family the richest, most powerful and most feared family in the world – although virtually none of the world knew anything of it.

By 1920, with an organized crime empire that had exploded outward from New York with federal help, Bjørn Hjerteløven sent his sons forth to manage the rapidly growing empire.

Knud moved to rural Lindstrom, Minnesota, and opened a dairy farm – largely to provide land under which the family could bury hoards of cash.

Lars decamped for Chicago, and – per the norm for Norwegian mobsters – took an exceedingly modest cover job with the government.

Berndt moved to New Jersey, where he opened a small bar in rural Monmouth county.

But before any of that, Bjørn Hjerteløven changed the family name, anglicizing it to “Hartelowen”.

And it was as “Hartelowen” that the family (not “the Family”; too ostentatious) consolidated their iron grip on organized crime in America.

Thursday – the entirely-Norwegian-instigated rise and fall of Al Capone.

This entry was posted by by Mitch Berg on Tuesday, December 8th, 2009 at 1:00 pm and is filed under Geekery. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.