The headline in The New York Times that morning in 1984 was macabre, if unintentionally hilarious: “Unknown Arm of Sicilian Mafia Is Uncovered in the United States.”

The arm in question was not a body part but rather an overseas cell of the Italian criminal underworld operating alongside its better-known American counterpart — the Bonanno family in Brooklyn. Through neighborhood fronts around the country, the Italians had been masterminding the billion-dollar heroin pipeline that became known as the Pizza Connection.

What Americans didn’t know at the time was that five years earlier a pair of F.B.I. agents operating out of a hole-in-the-wall on Queens Boulevard had stumbled on the trail that led to the cell — and to a storied Italian-American law enforcement partnership that eventually destroyed the invincibility of the Mafia on both sides of the ocean and built a sturdy alliance that continues to this day.

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Now, law enforcement experts wonder if there are lessons that can be applied to the escalating crisis in Mexico, where close to 500 police officers and soldiers have died at the hands of warring drug gangs since 2006. Is there something in the way the Americans and Italians worked together that could be applied to a partnership with the Mexicans? Certainly it is in the interest of the United States to seek such an alliance to stop the flow of drugs, guns and crime across the border, just as the Italian alliance helped stop that flow across the Atlantic. Indeed, President Bush has been pushing Congress to approve the first $500 million installment of a crime-fighting aid package to Mexico. Last week, American border governors met in Mexico with President Felipe Calderón to rally support for the effort and praise him for focusing on the drug lords.

And for its part, Mexico, struggling with a problem that seems to get bloodier and more intractable with each passing week, might well benefit from the expertise and experience of American law enforcement.

But the hurdles are high. Trust was a cornerstone of the American-Italian collaboration, and as hard as that trust was to gain, it could be even harder to achieve closer to home. With the trust built, though, the Italian collaboration thrived. For a start, investigators on both sides shared crucial intelligence. Equally crucially, Americans conducted operations that the Italian police lacked the legal authority to do in their own country — making drug buys, for example, and eavesdropping and conducting electronic surveillance. Perhaps most important, the Americans were able to guard endangered informers in the Federal Witness Protection Program.

Full article here.