US Mafia, Short History & Key Players

Brief History

The Mafia is a secret criminal organization that wields great economic and political control over large segments of Sicilian society and operates both criminal and legitimate enterprises in the United States. It is believed to have originated during Sicily's late Middle Ages, beginning as separate bands of strong-arm enforcers hired by local landowners. It eventually evolved into a network of autonomous groups governing in rural areas, ruling a peasantry that received little effective government from a succession of distant, often foreign, royal rulers.

In its present form, the Mafia is a loose alliance of many small local groups, each bound by kinship (or a kinship relationship that is assumed when a man becomes a member) and by the Mafia code of omerta, which requires absolute silence about Mafia activities and absolute obedience to the hierarchical Mafia authority. Until recent years--and despite the efforts of the Italian Fascists to destroy the organization in the 1920s and '30s--the Mafia flourished in the Sicilian countryside. When the Fascists fled Sicily during the Allied invasion of World War II, the Mafia--the only remaining governing structure--worked closely with U.S. forces. Today it dominates much of the business and industry in Sicily's cities.

With the Sicilian immigrations of the late 19th century, the Mafia began to operate in several large U.S. cities. During the period of Prohibition (1920-33) it monopolized the trade in bootleg liquor and controlled loan sharking, gambling, and prostitution. Competing Mafia families established mutually recognized territories, reaching agreement by negotiation or by intimidation. By the mid-1930s the Mafia had taken on the institutionalized structure that is now typical of organized crime in the United States.

Although the name Mafia (or the title Cosa Nostra, "our affair") is often used to encompass the entire spectrum of organized crime, the true Italian-descended Mafia is now only one component of a much larger criminal establishment.

The Ten Mafia Families

There are ten mafia families. The information here is about 5 years old. Some are still existing and some have changed because of murders and arrests.