Mafia
The Mafia is a complex and historically significant criminal organization, primarily associated with individuals of Italian and Sicilian descent. Originally rooted in Sicily during the nineteenth century, the Mafia emerged as a means of social control and protection, using intimidation and violence to govern local communities. When Sicilian immigrants arrived in the United States, elements of this organized crime extended their influence, particularly during the Prohibition era of the 1920s, when illicit activities surged. The Mafia is often characterized by its hierarchical family structure, with roles including boss, underboss, and soldiers, and is known for its code of silence, or *omertà*.
The organization is linked to a range of criminal activities, including extortion, drug trafficking, and corruption, and has posed significant challenges to law enforcement due to its secretive nature and community ties. While the Mafia's prominence has waned in recent decades, it continues to exist, with estimates suggesting around 3,000 members and associates in the U.S., particularly in regions like New York and Chicago. Additionally, its international connections, especially with organizations in Italy, remain notable. The portrayal of the Mafia in popular culture, through films and television shows, has shaped public perception, often highlighting its dual image of glamour and danger.
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Mafia
IDENTIFICATION: Elusive Italian American criminal organization
SIGNIFICANCE: The Mafia has exerted a powerful influence on American society thanks to its wide-ranging criminal activity.
One of the most significant challenges faced by the US criminal justice system is the ongoing commission of criminal activity by large, organized groups. Such organized crime is generally distinguished from isolated, individual criminal actions as well as categories such as war crime and political crime, although various categories may often overlap or interconnect. The Mafia represents such a challenge to law enforcement.
Mafia is sometimes used as a general term for any syndicated criminal unit defined by its own ethnicity, rituals, and rules (such as “the Russian mafia”). However, the word originally referred to and remains most closely associated with the powerful, tightly structured criminal organization whose members are of Italian or Sicilian descent. Also known as La Cosa Nostra (“our thing”), particularly when referring to the Sicilian Mafia, the Italian American Mafia originated in Sicily and other parts of southern Italy no later than the nineteenth century. The early Sicilian Mafia was an assembly of extortionists, conflict resolvers, and local strongmen who maintained control of Sicilian villages through intimidation and violence as well as providing the services of social control and protection from bandits. When Sicilians and other Italians immigrated to the United States in the nineteenth century, elements of the Mafioso did as well. With the advent of Prohibition in 1920, the Mafia and other ethnic gangs expanded greatly in power and influence. That era saw a rise in the cooperation among various Cosa Nostra members, as well as Jewish and Irish gangs. Gangsters of the Prohibition era flourished in New York, Chicago, and other cities.
An American Mafia emerged, and the origins of what is understood today as the Mafia lie in the Castellemmerese war of 1931. This conflict pitted the entrepreneurial "young turks" against traditional Sicilian "Mustache Pete" bosses. The result of this conflict was a sharp departure from the feudal Sicilian organization and an expansion into national syndication, driven by profit and structured by a supposed code of conduct and ritual that added to the mystique of the Mafia. This code, which includes omerta, or sworn silence about the Mafia’s activities, was not always followed by its members. However, the structure of the Mafia that emerged from this event still presented a formidable wall of secrecy that challenged law-enforcement attempts to investigate Mafiosi. These gangster traditions set the standard for organized crime in the 1930s, a period often considered the heyday of not only the Italian American Mafia but similar groups as well.
Most famously, the New York Mafia was organized around five powerful families: Colombo, Bonanno, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese. The "family" structure (encompassing loyalties rather than blood relations) would become a key element of Mafia organization. The basic structure consists of a boss, an underboss, one or more caporegimes (also known as capos) reporting to the underboss, soldiers reporting to each caporegime, and a network of other associates. Significant and well-known Mafia figures during and after the Castellemmerese War included Salvatore Maranzano and Charles "Lucky" Luciano in New York City and Al Capone in Chicago.
The media seized on the perceived glamour and danger of the gangster lifestyle, with many films and other works both glamorizing and warning against the influence of organized crime. Such portrayals, often dealing in exaggerated stereotypes, strongly influenced the public perception of the Mafia, and continued to do so throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. For example, writer Mario Puzo chronicled organized crime in The Godfather (1969), introducing many to the Italian heritage of the Mafia. In 1971 the book was adapted as a highly influential film by director Francis Ford Coppola which spawned two sequels. Mafia films and television programs remained highly popular in subsequent decades; for example, The Sopranos, which ran from 1999 to 2007 and told the story of New Jersey mobster Tony Soprano, became a massive critical and popular success over the course of its six seasons.
Among the criminal activities that have been attributed to the Mafia are extortion, corruption, contract bid-rigging, operating prostitution and gambling rings, robbery, witness tampering, narcotics distribution, murder, and white-collar crimes such as insider trading and fraud. Almost any activity or scheme that will make money and identify a soldier as a “good earner” has been tried. The Mafia has represented challenges to the criminal justice system with its intimidation of witnesses, jury tampering, corruption of officials, and the refusal of members and citizens alike to cooperate with law-enforcement investigations.
Law-enforcement efforts that have relied upon infiltration, informants, electronic surveillance, and the powerful Organized Crime Control Act of 1970 and subsequent Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act of 1970 dented the Mafia’s former power and influence. Subsequent decades saw the arrest and prosecution of a number of prominent organized crime figures, including John Gotti, who ran the powerful Gambino family in New York from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s, and James "Whitey" Bulger, an Irish American mobster and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) informant who evaded capture until his arrest in 2010.
Still, the American Mafia remained a formidable and troublesome challenge to US society and the criminal justice system into the twenty-first century. In the late 2010s, the FBI estimated that the Italian American Mafia had roughly 3,000 members and associates throughout the country, with the organization's presence concentrated in New York City, New Jersey, New England, and a few other large cities such as Chicago. Arrests in 2023 indicated that ties between the Mafia in Italy and the American Mafia remained strong. Authorities reported many members of the Mafia spent time in both countries.
Meanwhile, despite the waning influence of some traditionally powerful Mafia groups, other organized criminal groups maintained operations throughout the US and around the world and, in some cases, even expanded. For example, by the 2020s, the 'Ndrangheta, which first emerged as a loose alliance of criminal families in the Calabria region of southern Italy, had grown to become one of the most dangerous and powerful mafia organizations in the European Union. At that time, the 'Ndrangheta was estimated to earn about US$50 to $100 billion annually due to its extensive global operations, which included drug smuggling, extortion, money laundering, construction, and a number of other ventures. In Mexico, the power, organization, and influence of the country's various drug cartels also drew comparisons to earlier Mafia organizations.
Bibliography
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Dash, Mike. The First Family: Terror, Extortion, and the Birth of the American Mafia. Random House, 2009.
Lupo, Salvatore. The Two Mafias: A Transatlantic History, 1888–2008. Palgrave, 2015.
"Mafia Org Chart." Federal Bureau of Investigation, www.fbi.gov/file-repository/mafia-family-tree.pdf/view. Accessed 23 Feb. 2023.
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