In the early hours of December 21, 1935, New York mayor Fiorello LaGuardia walked into the Bronx Terminal Market with a cadre of cops. As the police played a horn fanfare, he hopped onto the back of a vegetable truck and addressed the assembled farmers and peddlers. Starting December 26, New York City would institute a total ban on the sale, display, or possession of a commodity that posed a “serious and threatening emergency to the city.” This substance, at the time available in any city market, was controlled by “a monopoly of doubtful legality” (in other words, the mafia). To control its price and distribution, these criminals were engaged in violence and intimidation that the tough-on-crime mayor wanted to root out.
The product in question was the small, or baby, artichoke, a food introduced to the city just decades earlier and especially beloved by its Italian Americans and Italian immigrants.
Even then, some observers found LaGuardia’s claims about a vast artichoke underworld bizarre. “It is impossible not to conclude the world today is a bit mad,” a reporter covering the ban for the New York Herald Tribune wrote.
But LaGuardia was right. By 1935, the Sicilian American mafia had controlled the American artichoke market for at least two decades, wresting millions of dollars from growers, distributors, and consumers. And this was just one of their food-based rackets. Many other agromafia operations, which profited from citrus fruits, olive oil, avocados, and more, persisted or emerged over the following decades. In fact, there is a good chance that you—regularly and unwittingly—eat foods that have passed through artichoke cartel-like operations.
Artichokes have been a hot commodity in the Mediterranean since the age of antiquity, especially among Italians. (In the first century, Romans pickled artichokes in honey and feasted on them year round.) But artichokes are finicky plants, thriving only in specific climes. So while early Americans—including George Washington and Thomas Jefferson—cultivated and appreciated artichokes on a small scale, a U.S. industry only emerged around 1900, when Italian immigrant farmers in northern California realized the region’s potential for artichoke cultivation. Today, around 99 percent of American commercial artichokes come from California, mainly from Monterey County.
Realizing that Italian immigrants would pay a pretty penny for artichokes, Californian farmers sent their produce east to Boston, New York, and Philadelphia. By 1935, Monterey County’s choke market grossed about $666,000 per year, or $12.5 million in 2020 dollars.