There's no such thing as the mafia

La Cosa Nostra is the name Italian mafia members call themselves, but mafia itself, I believe, is more a generic term for organized crime (often times very unorganized).
I seen da bodies floatin' off Revere Beach.

Mafia is just a type of organised crime. There's different groups that are important and a lot of small groups that no one knows of.

The term originally came from the Sicilian mafia in Italy. The American mafia, which I think originated from the Italian one, is the Cosa Nostra. But there's also the Japanese and Russian one etc. In Europe when you use the term Mafia they usually mean the Sicilian one (but even in Italy they have at least 3 or 4 different groups that work independently and aren't connected) and in America the American one.
In Russia for example (as far as I know) there's no big organisation but rather a lot of small independent groups that work very aggressively and violently.

Supposedly J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI during the Italian mob's heyday in the US, claimed they didn't exist.

Some argue it's because he himself was either blackmailed and bribed. Although historians claim there's no evidence of either ... would there be?

An Italian Parliamentary investigation in 1964 supposedly found no secret society operating in Sicily. Of course, if you have a vested interest in something, such as receiving either bribes or threats yourself, you're not likely to look too hard.

http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=PZE8UkGerEcC&dat=19760901&printsec=frontpage&hl=en

One thing that is true is that 'organised crime' isn't restricted to Italians and wasn't even back then. There were plenty of Jewish and Irish criminal gangs as well. However the organisational structures - when there are any - are a lot more fluid and less cohesive than is presented in the popular media.
Since there's always fierce competition for turf and for who gets to be top dog, personnel are bound to change frequently.

Some operations are fairly small, and restricted to one family, albeit a large enough one to 'staff the operations', as it were. I've an ancestor who was a rum-runner and afaik it was restricted to him and his younger siblings (Catholic family, so there were lots of those )

There's definitely a mafia.

I lived in Italy for several years and, even as a clueless foreigner, some things were pretty obvious. For one, they have an entire branch of the police dedicated to combatting the mafia. Walking down the street and seeing a sprawling building called "Anti-Mafia Headquarters (in Italian, obviously)," is kind of a shock.

I also remember at one point (circa 2000-2001) there were a bunch of news reports about the mafia stealing massive quantities of water in the south and then selling it at a premium to the local farmers, who were already dealing with a drought (the crime was discovered when a pilot flying overhead spotted a couple of lakes where there shouldn't have been lakes). Seriously, stealing a lake? That's some super-villian shit right there.

The most direct evidence I saw of the Mafia though, was when I was traveling through Puglia (a region in southern Italy). I was enjoying the ride through olive orchards and vineyards when we passed one vineyard that looked like it had been hit by a tornado. All the little frame things were knocked over, and it was just generally trashed. My companion on that trip was a local and I asked him what had happened. I thought perhaps there had been a nasty storm and this vineyard was just the last one to repair the damage. His response? "The mafia."

If we had been in public, he probably would have waited to tell me until we were someplace private. Just talking about the mafia can get you in trouble.

No one actively involved in the mafia ever admits the existence of the mafia. Its just something you dont do, especially with outsiders. Luckily lots of mafia defectors have spilled their guts, so there are plenty of books and movies on the subject.

In America you can find references to the mafia going all the way back to the 1880s. Back then they operated by sending threatening letters in red ink to the people they wanted to intimidate (almost always fellow Italians). The term "organized crime" goes back even further. Even though the Italians eventually gained a monopoly over the term, they didnt invent organized crime. Starting not long after the Civil War, gangs in big cities gradually began organizing and becoming more sophisticated. By the turn of the century, New York was dominated by huge gang "empires" like the Whyos, the Monk Eastman gang and the Five Pointers, which were really just "supergangs" made up of lots of smaller gangs organized under one leader. Some of these leaders, like Monk Eastman, became the first celebrity gangsters and influenced how other gangsters talked and dressed. Jews and the Irish dominated in that era. The Italians didnt become dominant until prohibition.

snafu1056 said:

No one actively involved in the mafia ever admits the existence of the mafia..

Click to expand...

True, and politicians and judges who take cash bribes or make 'decisions' after a 'talk' don't tend to leave evidence behind either. A former Canadian cabinet minster who blogs about real estate bubbles now, and derides conspiracy theories, had written at some point that backroom deals and handshakes are the norm.

So anyone not finding paper trails of some sort and then pointing to the absence of that and using it as 'proof' that something doesn't exist is at best being either naive or disingenuous.

"I also remember at one point (circa 2000-2001) there were a bunch of news reports about the mafia stealing massive quantities of water in the south and then selling it at a premium to the local farmers, who were already dealing with a drought (the crime was discovered when a pilot flying overhead spotted a couple of lakes where there shouldn't have been lakes)."

Thats nuts. That needs to be a movie.