The Mafia in America Today. Myth or Truth?

The American Mafia has been immortalized in movies, television, novels – as always, the idea of a gang of criminals living by a special code of honor is seductive. Even though we know that the Mafia were thugs who lived through the death and terrorization of others, we can't stop being fascinated.

It has a long history. The Mafia, the Cosa Nostra in Italian, was originally a secret society formed around 1850 in Sicily. It was exported to the United States before the turn of the century, as Italian immigration primarily to the northern East Coast became heavy. Like a slow-burning cancer, the American Mafia lay dormant for decades, primarily limiting its activities to the Italian community and nearby neighborhoods. But during Prohibition, gang activity began to profit from the lucrative trade in liquor. The Mafia followed suit, cutting deals with major crime heads for their share of the profit. Another bump in the American Mafia occurred in the late 1930s and the 1940s, when the fascist influences in Italy began to prosecute the organization, seeing them as a rival to their power. Many Sicilian Mafia at the time fled to the United States.

Building on that success, the Mafia became more powerful; in some areas, the Mafia were looked to before the government. Not until the FBI stepped in during the 1970s and 1980s did their influence start to decline – yet today they are still the largest and most powerful criminal organization in the United States. They control most of Chicago's and New York's organized crime. And though the criminal justice system keeps lopping off heads, more grow in their place.

How It Was Named

The Mafia have had their name for almost a century and a half. It came from the play I mafiusu di la Vicaria, or The Beautiful People of Vicaria, a play about criminal gangs in Palermo written by Giuseppe Rizzotto. The word "mafiusu" means something along the lines of bold, fearless, proud, but in Sicily also signified a bully.

"Mafia" was a term that primarily came from what outsiders called the new Sicilian gangs, and was imported from news reports in Italy about them. It can be seen, in many ways, as related to the idea of machismo in Hispanic culture – but, of course, machismo does not have the purely negative connotation!

Because the state of Italy didn't seem to offer much to poor Sicilians, they began to turn to the Mafia for help, seeing them as heroes rather than predators. It is almost certain that this is why Italian-Americans also idolized the American Mafia, and perhaps the beginning of their romantic view.

Members of the Mafia itself called it Cosa Nostra, "our thing." This term wasn't known widely until the 1960s, when inner members of the group began to turn against the Mafia and to law enforcement.

Rise And Fall of the American Mafia

The Mafia were originally a New York City phenomenon, beginning with small and insular Italian neighborhoods that law enforcement mostly ignored, and moving to citywide and ultimately international organization. The first record of the Mafia was in retaliation against the Black Hand, a group that were vandalizing Italian and other immigrant areas in New York. The Italians organized a retaliatory gang that exterminated the Black Hand. But as will happen with gangs, they filled the vacuum themselves. They first extorted extortion money, then began robbing and vandalizing those who would not pay. Soon enough, neighborhoods paid.

A total of twenty-six families rose up in the American Mafia. The central New York City families were the Bonannos, Colombos, Gambinos, Genovese, and Luccheses. Each family was controlled by a Don (Italian for "lord"), who controlled the family through a carefully-structured chain of command. Only Italians were eligible for upper levels, and only family members could be the Don. On lower levels, though, people of other national and ethnic origins could work for the family.

This structure made it extremely difficult for the FBI and other law enforcement organizations to infiltrate the Mafia organization. Ultimately, they turned to capturing lower-level members, who would turn in their bosses, who would turn in their bosses – the chain, over time, would lead to the Don. For each of these levels, the FBI needed to  break their prisoners – a job that grew more difficult with each level up. And the Mafia began to kill off state's witnesses and/or their families, making it much more difficult to get to the bottom of the chain.

But slowly, over decades, the FBI started finding their main criminals, and busting them. They developed the RICO act, making just belonging to the Mafia illegal, and then the witness protection program made it much more difficult for the Mafia to kill their traitors. The fact that the American Mafia strictly forbade, in most families, the killing of state authorities was helpful to the FBI, ensuring that they could prosecute the criminals openly. But the nail in the coffin may have been the reduced population of distinct Italian-American communities; members were assimilated into the melting pot that is America, or left, or died. New Italian immigration slowed to a trickle.

Though the Mafia is still dominant in American organized crime, their influence had continued to decline up until about 2001. We may be seeing a resurgence, however; the FBI's attention has turned away from prosecuting the Mafia and toward rooting out and eliminating terrorism in the United States. Though the Five Families of New York have been heavily pursued lately, there is evidence that the Mafia may be experiencing a resurgence.

It is also possible that the FBI are using the Mafia as they have in the past: to root out foreign enemies. There is documentation that the FBI used the Mafia in an attempt to assassinate Fidel Castro in the 1960s. There has been speculation that they are doing the same in the United States today to try to root out terrorists, a threat to Mafia interests as much as to general American interests. We will probably find out, in another forty years or so, whether this is true.