Reddit reviews Wiseguy: The 25th Anniversary Edition

Traditional sources of mafia revenue such as loan sharking, protection rackets, numbers, or prostitution did not tend to catch the eye of the middle class. Customers for those services did not tend to vote. Penalties for those crimes tended to be light.

By contrast, narcotics could and did devastate middle class families. College students became heroin addicts. Accordingly, politicians made the penalties for narcotics trafficking much higher. They tended to levy the penalties at the federal level, where it was much more difficult for mafia families to corrupt law enforcement officials and the judiciary.

If you were a made man facing five years in state prison for illegal gambling, you would keep your mouth shut, observe omerta, and do your time. You'd be out on parole in less than two years and you'd do your time under easy conditions. If on the other hand you were facing thirty federal years for heroin trafficking, you would take your chances with Witness Protection and testify against everyone you knew. Chances for federal parole were more limited (and since 1987, non-existent, as Congress then ended federal parole). You would be doing those thirty years in a maximum-security facility. Odds were good you'd die in jail.

The larger, more sophisticated mafia families foresaw this. They tended to be richer, enjoying a larger slice of the traditional revenue, so they could afford to forego narcotics revenue. They tended to have larger networks of law enforcement and judicial officials, so they were used to lighter sentences for traditional mafia offenses. By contrast the smaller, more marginal families were scrappers. They were used to taking risks to make similar money because that was their only choice.

The way Henry Hill described this in Wiseguy is exceedingly accurate. The movie version, Goodfellas, is pretty accurate also. The US attorney prosecuting Henry Hill for narcotics in Goodfellas was a real, recently retired, US attorney.

Edit: a comma.