Today, we resume with the third installment of Andy DiLigio’s “Inside The Norwegian Mob”.<\/p>\n
\nInside The Norwegian Mob<\/strong><\/h2>\n
Andy DiLigio<\/strong><\/p>\n
After Bj\u00f8rn and Gerda\u00a0Hjertel\u00f8ven 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.\u00a0 The Italian, Irish, Jewish and other gangs made boundless money, and secured unlimited political power, second-hand, for Hjertel\u00f8ven and his small, ultra-secretive band of Norwegian co-conspirators.\u00a0 \u00a0By 1910, Hjertel\u00f8vens 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.\u00a0 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 Hjertel\u00f8ven’s mediterranean minions.<\/p>\n
And whenever one of the Italian or Irish gangs got to be\u00a0 “too big for its britches”, as Hjertel\u00f8ven used to say, he’d engineer a bloody gang war that’d eviscerate both gangs’ leaderships.\u00a0 In the rare more dire situations, Hjertel\u00f8ven 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.<\/p>\n
But Bj\u00f8rna\u00a0Hjertel\u00f8ven’s greatest, most ingenious work was yet to come.<\/p>\n
New York was getting too small for him.\u00a0 He needed to expand the family’s horizons.<\/p>\n
In 1917, as\u00a0the US lurched into World War I (in which Hjertel\u00f8ven’s three sons, Lars, Berndt and Knud all served), Bj\u00f8rn and Gerda\u00a0Hjertel\u00f8ven took a trip via railroad (coach class, naturally) to Bemidji, Minnesota, ostensibly to visit Bj\u00f8rn’s sister Helge.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
And who was, as it happened, the son of Jon Einartson Vraalstad, a Norwegian immigrant.\u00a0 “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.<\/p>\n
The details of the meeting are long lost to history –\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
The investment of time paid off immediately.\u00a0 Mobsters took over the illegal booze trade, kept in line behind the scenes by by Hjertel\u00f8ven’s constant gang wars.<\/p>\n
And as the Hjertel\u00f8ven 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.<\/p>\n
By 1920, with an organized crime empire that had exploded outward from New York with federal help, Bj\u00f8rn Hjertel\u00f8ven sent his sons forth to manage the rapidly growing empire.<\/p>\n
Knud moved to rural Lindstrom, Minnesota, and opened a dairy farm – largely to provide land under which the family could bury hoards of cash.<\/p>\n
Lars decamped for Chicago, and – per the norm for Norwegian mobsters – took an exceedingly modest cover job with the government.<\/p>\n
Berndt moved to New Jersey, where he opened a small bar in rural Monmouth county.<\/p>\n
But before any of that, Bj\u00f8rn Hjertel\u00f8ven changed the family name, anglicizing it to “Hartelowen”.<\/p>\n
And it was as “Hartelowen” that the family (not “the Family”; too ostentatious) consolidated their iron grip on organized crime in America.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
Thursday – the entirely-Norwegian-instigated rise and fall of Al Capone.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Today, we resume with the third installment of Andy DiLigio’s “Inside The Norwegian Mob”. Inside The Norwegian Mob Andy DiLigio After Bj\u00f8rn and Gerda\u00a0Hjertel\u00f8ven 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-geekery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6867"}],"version-history":[{"count":13,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6867\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6870,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6867\/revisions\/6870"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shotinthedark.info\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}