So wehn did the mafia begin?
Is it still around?
I thought they were all in jail.
What do they control?
Omerta 
John Gotti, imprisoned since 1992, has had his throat cancer come back aggresively and is fighting for survival.
Do you mean the Mafia in the US? Because in Italy, their influence has been on a sharp decline over the last 10 years.
The Cosa Nostra is being mocked publicly, now even by the Italian Government that once feared them. In fact, an official Mafia Museum was opened in the Sicilian town of Corleone (yes, THAT town) last month.
The MAFIA is all just a myth. It stands for the Mothers And Fathers Italian Association (like a PTA).
Ciao
I wouldn’t say that the Mafia ever had a beginning, but rather an evolution. Sicily has been a battleground for thousands of years, mostly between outsiders (one grusomely funny story involves a Carthagenian general, irritated at the snooty Athenian colonists, put any to the sword who couldn’t quote a few lines of good poetry after all. In such an environment of chaos between overreaching tyrannies, the people on the bottom make their own corrupt but practical way. In this same manner the Russian mafia can trace its origins back to the war orphans of the Time of Troubles in the 17th century, and Japan’s Katuza to the 100-year civil war that ended with the Tokugawa Shogunate. This is why the Irish Americans always made lousy gansters - their source of opression was traditionally only from one side: England, so they never cultivated the art of playing both sides against the middle.
Making plane reservations to Palermo as I type this.
This is a subject of great interest to me. It is hard to separate myth from reality-I remember a few years ago, when mario Puzo was interviewed on NPR. In the interview, he admitted that most of the stuff in his novel (“THE GODFATHER”) was made up in his own head.
The really weird thing is-since the book and movie came out, more and more mafiosi have been trying to emulate the (phony) traditions of the fictional Don Corleone!
I think that the old Mafia is dying out in the USA-witness the demise of John Gotti. The New England branch of the Mafia hasn’t been the same since Raymond Patriarca (Jr.) has been put away 9in Federal prison).
However, as with any vacuum , new (and much worse) criminal organizations ahve been moving in. For example, the Jamaican “posses” are deadly, and the "russian
" mafia is equally as bad-they don’t leave any witnesses-justkill everybody at a crime scene!
And, DO NOT underestimate the scicilian mafia-the control Palermo.
Really, I have always thought of ‘mafia’ to be a term no different than ‘gang’ except that the members were (generally speaking) 1) Italian 2) older (not punk kids) and 3) had crime as their main profession. In reality, I think there are certainly modern day ‘mafia’ groups that are intimidating and powerful and still do ‘crime’ as their major profession.
I do however, believe that they are no longer Italian, are likely doing almost entirely white collar crime, and good at covering their tracks. They also probably much more carefully blend legal business with illegal ones for laundering money and probably perpetuate a lot of crime via on-line schemes. Certain in the blue collar world, I would think they would still play a role in traditional vice businesses like pornography and alcohol distribution, and lets not forget union management.
Then again, maybe I’m just a sucker for good De Niro movies about the Mob.
I have a dictionary! Oh. wonderful has zee date:
Ma•fia "ma-fe-e, "ma-\ noun [Mafia, Maffia, a Sicilian secret criminal society, fr. It dial. (Sicily)] (1875)
1 a : a secret criminal society of Sicily or Italy
b : a similarly conceived criminal organization in the U.S.; also : a similar organization elsewhere <the Japanese Mafia>
c : a criminal organization associated with a particular traffic <the cocaine Mafia>
2 often not cap : a group of people likened to the Mafia; esp : a group of people of similar interests or backgrounds prominent in a particular field or enterprise : clique
©1996 Zane Publishing, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
handy, I believe that date refers to the earliest known usage of the term, not the beginnings of the secret criminal societies to which the term was first applied.
Use the word and you are known to be an outsider. Those inside, we prefer to call it “cosa nostra” which loosely translates as “you wanna be found floating in the Hudson, huh?”
I asked Lynn’s Cousin Vinnie if there really was an Italian or Sicilian Mafia. His answer was “Hey, who’s saying shit like that? Lemme know their names”.
A 100% Italian-American born and raised in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn weighing in here. While I saw plenty of anecdotal evidence about the M-word growing up in the old neighborhood, I’ll just pass along this excerpt from American Heritage Mag’s recent (July/Aug. 2000) “How America Met the Mob” article (by Jack Kelly):
"…One element of this stew of corruption, vice, and violence was a faction known as the Mafia. In Sicily the word referred to an attitude that included defiance of authority, loyalty to kin, and the settlement of disputes by vendetta or by the arbitration of a village strongman. It was a state of mind that had developed over centuries of misrule by Spanish and Bourbon conquerors. “Mafia” was also applied to bands of brigands that terrorized local peasants, at first at the behest of landowners, then for their own benefit. They established a solid base of power in Sicily during the last quarter if the nineteenth century.
In America, Mafiosi mainly extorted money from vulnerable Italian innigrants, a technique known as the “black hand.” The public was suspicious of this secret, alien society but saw no cause for general alarm.
The onset of Prohibition in 1920 marked the continental divide in the history of organized crime. Lacking the will to enforce the Volstead Act, Congress effectively assigned an entire industry to the underworld. Prohibition served as the gangsters’ higher education, demanding as it did management skills, cooperation, planning, and high-level political contacts. It moved the gangs far beyond their neighborhood haunts. It eroded public respect for the law and turned street thugs into millionaires. By the mid-1920’s the gang, rather than serve the politicians as minions, were giving orders to mayors and congressmen…"
“I believe that date refers to the earliest known usage of the term, not the beginnings of
the secret criminal societies to which the term was first applied.”
No one would really know the date anyway, thus, the origin date of the word is still the best approximation.