Mafia, the

Mafia, the A clandestine network based on family ties and criminal bonds such as bribery. It emerged in Sicily during the eighteenth century in response to foreign rule, neglect, weak government authorities, and the persistence of feudalism. Its success was based on the network's infiltration of police, administration, and justice, which transformed it into the real de facto source of authority and power. Its cohesion has been based not so much on strong organization as on the development of a particular subculture marked by certain types of behavioural codes, such as omertà (‘silence’) and vendetta (‘revenge’). The persistence and the rapid expansion of the Mafia in liberal Italy after unification (1860–1922) was implicitly encouraged by the central Italian state in order to weaken the old southern landed elites over which it found it difficult to exercise control. In this sense, the Mafia became Rome's agents in Sicily and other parts of the extreme south, while the central government did little to stop its illegal activities. Despite the anti-Mafia rhetoric of Fascist Italy, it was not so much overcome, but rather integrated into the structures of the Fascist movement. Hence it re-emerged after World War II and resumed its compromise with the Italian state for some decades, acting as an intermediary between central government and the southern Italian locality in politics, economy, and society. However, its spread to the central government bureaucracy in Rome and even into northern Italy heightened public concern and brought it to the top of the political agenda of the 1980s. The central state's inability to cope with the problem, and the sheer extent of the Mafia's involvement with the political and administrative establishment was one of the central reasons for the collapse of the Italian political system 1992–3 (tangentopoli). According to official estimates published in 2000, the Mafia controlled around 15 per cent of Italy's economy.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century large-scale emigration from southern Italy had transported the Mafia to the USA. There, it reached its peak in the 1930s during the Prohibition period where it controlled the illegal trade in alcohol in its centres of New York and Chicago. It had extensive links into federal and state legislature, while enjoying the effective protection of the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover, who refused to recognize its existence. Despite subsequent attempts to strike against the Mafia, the American authorities were unable to overcome it and it continued to be at the heart of organized crime. In addition, the Mafia and other Mafia-type organizations have stepped in to fill the power vacuum left by the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and of Communist state authority in other former Eastern Bloc countries. Its control of the economy has been a significant hindrance to economic reform in these countries.