Mafia has been in drugs since the beginning. Don Vito Cascio Ferro, the Sicilian bigshot who spent some of the early years of the last century in NYC, set up the first drug pipelines from Europe and the Middle East to the East Coast of NYC. For decades, drugs were a relatively small, but highly lucrative, part of the Mob's take. And, as long as the victims were racial minorities, jazz musicians and others that society didn't care about, penalties were relatively small. The law was content to take bribes and look the other way.

The explosion of drug use in the Sixties ruined many young white kids, including sons and daughters of police, judges and politicians. Penalties got very stiff. This created a dilemma for the Dons. The Mob is a pyramid scheme: part of every associate's take gets to the boss. If they allowed drug trafficking, they'd be at the mercy of someone who'd get caught and rat them out in return for a lighter sentence. But if they enforced a ban on drug sales, they'd be cutting themselves off from a big source of income.

So, they reacted with typical Mob hypocrisy: They declared death for anyone caught dealing drugs. But, as long as the drug dealers weren't caught, no problem--what they didn't know wouldn't hurt them. That's where the myth that "Mafia doesn't do drugs" originated.