VL-IV: Chap7- Mafiosi- friends or foes?

[kelber at mindspring.com]

The Wayvones are lovable mobsters, and we learn that DL is an old friend of Ralph Wayvone:

Ralph W. to DL, after she warns him that Brock Vond's on the loose:

"'Hey -- I got nothing to do with pot growers, all right?  You know that.  As soon as I saw all this drug hysteria coming, I diversified on out
of that whole market.  Plus, it's a Republican Justice Department, come on.  I'm copacetic with these people.'"

So Ralph is pals with both the Republican establishment and the pot-growing counter-establishment.  If selling pot gives you a counter-culture respectability, how about selling heroin?  A slippery slope.

I bring this up because I was watching Mario and Melvin Van Peebles' flick Panther (2005)the other night. The admittedly not-rigidly-fact-based film has a scene where a rep from COINTELPRO meets with a mafia guy and makes plans for the mob to saturate the ghetto with heroin as a means of killing the incipient radicalism in the community.  Whether or not this is historically accurate, it's a conspiracy theory that rings true.  There's some documentation out there that COINTELPRO enlisted the help of the mob on occasion.  The mafia has an odd kinship with the left, in terms of government harassment.  But it's also at odds with the left, in its ties with Big Business and Republican-ism.

There's a heroic sheen to the pot or coca grower -- simple back-to-the-land farm-folk, minding their own business and being harassed by the Government.
The bad guys are the big distributers, who bring violence into the equation. Small is Beautiful.  In that sense, how does Ralph W. come out as a good guy (assuming that any friend of DL's has their heart in the right place, or at least, like Frenesi, used to)?  Is it a case of "the enemy of my enemy is my friend?"

Laura