Search results
worthpoint.com
- The Mafia, at its core, is about one thing: money. Throughout its history, the Mafia has controlled everything from the street-corner drug trade to the highest levels of government. Its members operate outside the law, yet become accepted and sometimes feared parts of the neighborhoods and cities they inhabit.
people.howstuffworks.com/mafia.htm
Mafia, hierarchically structured society of criminals of primarily Italian or Sicilian birth or extraction. The term applies to the traditional criminal organization in Sicily and also to a criminal organization in the United States.
- Normans
Norman, member of those Vikings, or Norsemen, who settled in...
- Cosa Nostra
Other articles where Cosa Nostra is discussed: Mafia:...
- Bootlegging
Bootlegging helped lead to the establishment of American...
- Five
Five Families, moniker given to the five major Italian...
- Syndicated
7 of the World’s Deadliest Plants. 7 Famous Child Prodigies....
- Hierarchy
hierarchy, in the social sciences, a ranking of positions of...
- Racketeering
When the RICO Act was introduced, racketeering charges...
- Saracens
Saracen, in the Middle Ages, any person—Arab, Turk, or...
- Normans
Glorified by movies and television, hounded by law enforcement, marked for death by their enemies, these mobsters live violent and often brief lives. The Mafia is, in its own right, a family. To become a family member means to accept secret rituals, complicated rules and tangled webs of loyalty.
- The Mafia’s Sicilian Roots
- The Mafia on The Rise in Italy
- The Mafia in The 20th Century and Beyond
For centuries, Sicily, an island in the Mediterranean Sea between North Africa and the Italian mainland, was ruled by a long line of foreign invaders, including the Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, French and Spanish. The residents of this small island formed groups to protect themselves from the often-hostile occupying forces, as well as from other reg...
In 1861, Sicily became a province of recently unified Italy. However, chaos and crime reigned across the island as the fledgling Italian government tried to establish itself. In the 1870s, Roman officials even asked Sicilian Mafia clans to help them by going after dangerous, independent criminal bands; in exchange, officials would look the other wa...
The Mafia’s influence in Sicily grew until the 1920s, when Prime Minister Benito Mussolini came to power and launched a brutal crackdown on mobsters, who he viewed as a threat to his Fascist regime. However, in the 1950s, the Mafia rose again when mob-backed construction companies dominated the post-World War IIbuilding boom in Sicily. Over the nex...
- 4 min
Today the 'Ndrangheta, originating in the southern Italian region of Calabria, is widely considered the richest and most powerful Mafia in the world.
Jul 15, 2015 · Originating in Italy, the mafia is one of the oldest organised crime groups in the world. European criminal intelligence agency Europol’s threat assessment listed four Italian mafia-type...
Oct 22, 2009 · The American Mafia, an Italian-American organized-crime network with operations in cities across the United States, particularly New York and Chicago, rose to power through its success in the...
Italian mafia: How crime families went global. Italian police have carried out a spate of anti-mafia raids, arresting dozens of suspects near Naples, Rome and Agrigento in Sicily. Illegal drugs...