Nicky Santoro arrives in Las Vegas as the mafia's muscle and in no time builds his own crew of robberies and beatings. He climbs the criminal ladder fast — but his out-of-control violence starts drawing the police, scaring off the money and endangering the whole organization. And then the ladder spits him out: his own bosses beat him and bury him alive in a cornfield. Santoro reveals the less obvious face of the criminal subculture: that it, too, is an order, and it punishes whoever breaks it.
// The theoryOrganized crime as order
Cloward and Ohlin distinguished three subcultures according to what the neighborhood offers. The criminal one emerges where an organized adult underworld exists: there crime is a career with hierarchies, apprenticeships and promotions — and, above all, with rules. For crime to work as a stable business it needs discretion, discipline and integration with the conventional world (bought cops, friendly judges, clean money). Violence, in this subculture, is not an end: it is a tool used in moderation, because scandal is bad for business.
There lies Santoro's tragedy: he has the ladder —he got into the organization, he rose— but he behaves as if he were in the conflict subculture, the one of violence for its own sake. He steals on his own, kills over trifles, stages a spectacle that fills the newspapers and draws the FBI. He breaks the golden rule of organized crime: don't bring the heat. His crew of goons is effective as muscle, but incompatible with the quiet business that makes everyone rich. Santoro mistakes climbing the ladder for setting it on fire.
The subculture that represses its own violence
What separates the criminal subculture from the conflict one is, paradoxically, the control of violence. Where there is a stable criminal ladder, the organization represses the gratuitous outbursts that put the business at risk: blood is administered, not spilled. Santoro is the element the structure cannot tolerate — too violent for a machine that needs discretion. His execution is not betrayal: it is the criminal subculture protecting itself, eliminating the rung that threatened to bring the whole ladder down. In organized crime, as in any business, whoever ruins the brand is expendable.
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// The subjectThe man who only knew how to climb by force
Santoro lacks neither ambition nor a ladder: he lacks a brake. His only method for rising is muscle, and it works until it stops working. He believes being feared is the same as being powerful, and he does not understand that true mafia power —that of the bosses who order him killed from Kansas City— is invisible, patient and boring. Here Santoro illuminates a fine nuance of the theory: having access to the illegitimate opportunity does not guarantee knowing how to use it. The criminal ladder demands an apprenticeship —discipline, calculation, loyalty to the order— that Santoro never served. He climbed by fists, and by fists he was brought down. His violent energy, which in a neighborhood without a ladder would have made him a conflict king, in the criminal subculture turned him into a problem to be solved.
The economist Diego Gambetta put it with textbook coldness: the mafia is, above all, an industry of private protection, and like any supplier it needs a stable, predictable reputation. Spectacular violence is poison for that business, because it frightens the clients and wakes the State. That is why the mature underworld monopolizes and rations force: Santoro's, loud and unpredictable, is not an excess of the mobster but the negation of what makes a mafia profitable. The organization does not bury him out of cruelty, but out of commercial hygiene.
Nicky Santoro
// The crackSubcultures so pure?
The Santoro case exposes the weak point of Cloward and Ohlin's scheme: in real life subcultures are not pure. Santoro is neither «criminal» nor «conflict» in a clean state — he is both at once, an enforcer with structure and with fury, and that mix is the norm, not the exception. The theory classifies too neatly neighborhoods and people that, in fact, overlap. Even so, its central intuition holds: the same violent individual produces different results depending on the structure he falls into. Santoro inside the mafia order is a danger that must be eliminated; the same Santoro on a lawless corner would be, simply, the one in charge.
Criminal order is no less order
Santoro forces a counterintuitive idea: organized crime, however harmful, works as an order with rules, and those rules include containing violence. Understanding this matters for criminal policy: dismantling a stable mafia does not always reduce violence — sometimes it ignites it, by breaking the structure that kept it in check and opening the door to the conflict subculture, that of gang wars without a brake. Cloward and Ohlin warn that not all criminal ladders are alike, and that toppling one without offering anything in return can trade Fisk for a thousand Santoros on the loose. The vacuum fills too — and rarely with peace.
Three key takeaways
- The criminal subculture (Cloward and Ohlin) is an order with rules: crime as a stable career demands discretion and repressing the gratuitous violence that ruins the business.
- Santoro has the ladder but behaves as if in the conflict subculture: his violence draws the heat and threatens everyone. His own people execute him — the structure protecting itself.
- The crack: subcultures are not pure (Santoro is criminal and conflict). But his thesis holds: the same violent man yields different results depending on the structure; and breaking a criminal order can spike the violence, not calm it.
Sources · further reading
- Cloward, R. A. & Ohlin, L. E. (1960). Delinquency and Opportunity. Free Press.
- Pileggi, N. (1995). Casino: Love and Honor in Las Vegas. Simon & Schuster.
- Sutherland, E. H. (1939). Principles of Criminology. Lippincott.
- Merton, R. K. (1938). «Social Structure and Anomie». American Sociological Review, 3(5).
- Gambetta, D. (1993). The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection. Harvard University Press.
Case-file questionsFrequently asked questions
¿Quién es Nicky Santoro?
Nicky Santoro («Nicky») es un villano de Casino, analizado en KRIMINIS con la lente de la criminología. Nicky Santoro arrives in Las Vegas as the mafia's muscle and, in no time, builds his own crew of robberies and beatings.
¿Por qué Nicky Santoro se convierte en villano?
Casino and differential opportunity: Nicky Santoro climbs the mafia ladder on muscle alone, until his unchecked violence threatens the business and his own bosses bury him alive. The criminal subculture has rules too — and whoever breaks them, even from the inside, falls.
¿Qué teoría criminológica explica a Nicky Santoro?
El caso de Nicky Santoro se analiza desde la Oportunidades diferenciales. Cloward and Ohlin's criminal subculture is not chaos: it is a stable structure that needs order, discretion and integration with the conventional world for crime to work as a career. Nicky Santoro, in Casino, is the rung that breaks that logic: an effective enforcer whose uncontrolled violence threatens the business, draws police heat and ends up executed by his own people. His fall shows that even organized crime imposes rules, and that the criminal subculture is distinguished from the conflict subculture precisely by repressing the gratuitous violence Santoro could not rein in.
