Mafia

The Mafia are an organized crime network of Italian origin in North America and Europe, one of the main organized crime groups in the world.

European Mafia
In Europe there is the Sicilian Mafia (the original group), the Neapolitan Camorra, and the youngest faction, the Nuovo Mafia. In the state of Italy, both the Sicilian Mafia and Camorra have become legitimate political parties. The Sicilian Mafia from Palermo rules the islands of Sicily and Sardinia, plus the southwestern tip of Italy. They have kept the corporations mostly out of Sicily. In turn the Camorra from Naples rules the rest of southern Italy and has basically sold itself to the corporations. Recently a new group emerged in Italy, called the Nuovo Mafia which is an anti-corporation resistance group that finances its operations via robberies, kidnapping for ransom, and the drug trade.

The Mafia organizations in Europe are involved in a variety of criminal activities. Which include smuggling, the drug trade, gambling, protection rackets, and so on. In the Mediterranean Sea there are a number of Mafia groups participating in the extensive smuggling in that area. Unlike the Triads who are concerned about their communities and invest a lot of their profits back into the community, some of the Mafia groups act like the Yakuza and Sudams showing no concern for their communities and focused only on profit.

American Mafia
The Mafia's origins trace back to the Sicilian clan-families known as the Cosa Nostra. Because the Mafia was thought of as a myth for years, they were able to consolidate their power and adopt a cloak of secrecy. In the United States, the Mafia is the most powerful organized crime network. It makes the majority of its money via semi-illegal activites and is the least visible and expected.

It is organized into Families, each of which owns a specific city. A family may have in its employment hundreds of "wiseguys". It's led by a Don (Godfather) who is always male, and his successor is either his oldest son or the closest and eldest of his male relatives. Ruling the families is a Commission of Dons, who try to put as much distance between itself and illegal dealings. It assigns the positions and cities within the Mafia and settle any major disputes between the families.

The Mafia provides their community and others with a variety of services and goods such as desperately needed loans, "discounted" surplus "goods", settling domestic disputes, and so on. Which has bought them the support of their community. It's rackets consist of loansharking and gambling, money laundering and stock fraud, and of course labor unions. The drug trade is still frowned on in the Mafia.

Major Mafia Groups

 * Sicilian Mafia (Italy)
 * Camorra (Italy)
 * Nuovo Mafia (Italy)
 * Mafia (United States)

Trivia
In reality, the Mafia did not stay out of the drug trade (unlike the lore in Cyberpunk and in various movies, a lore created by the Godfather movie). A few of the families (e.g. Chicago Outfit) banned it's members from being involved in the drug trade, though those families still taxed the drug traffickers. Most of the Italian families were either directly involved in heroin trafficking (e.g. Bonnano Family of NY City) or they financed "independent" heroin traffickers who gave the dons a cut of their profits. Including the Luchesse family which forbid Henry Hill (whose life inspired the movie "Goodfellas") from getting into the drug trade.

The Mafia has been in decline since the 1970s and is on its last legs today in the United States. It's only in Europe where the Italians continue to be a major player, one of the two dominant organized crime networks (the other one being the Russians) and one of its major drug traffickers (especially the Calabrian N'drangheta). In the United States, the Mafia has only one stronghold left in which it is still at the top of the pyramid, New York City. It has a few outposts elsewhere in the Midwest and the Northeast (Boston, Detroit, Buffalo, and the suburbs of Chicago). A far cry from the two dozen families of the 1970s and its nationwide reach. The decline began with the rise of the Latino and Black syndicates in the big cities in the 1970s along with the growing drug trade under the control of the Colombians and Chinese. By the 1990s, the Mexican drug cartels began to slowly displace the Italians at the top and in the mid-levels it was the Chicano prison gangs, white biker gangs, and various ethnic groups (Dominican, Jamaican, Chinese, Russian, etc).

Today, the Mexican drug cartels command the heights of the American underworld and have done so since the start of the century. The Chicano prison gangs (e.g. the Mexican Mafia, otherwise known as "La Eme") dominate organized crime in California and the Southwest (Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, & Nevada), as well in the prison systems of those states. Latino and black street gangs dominate the streets of every major city, and occasionally it might be a Southeast Asian street gang (e.g. Tiny Rascal Gang) or in the poor rural white areas a white street gang (e.g. Simon City Royals).. Mostly white biker gangs dominate parts of the South, the Rockies, the Great Plains, and the Midwest. Depending on the city there might be a Russian, Chinese, Dominican, Vietnamese, Jamaican, Nigerian, or Cuban syndicate but rare is the Italian syndicate and even rarer is the Irish, Jewish, Polish, or Greek crime family (who traditionally have been affiliated with the Italians).

Mafia in the Real World

 * Wikipedia: Organized Crime in Italy
 * Wikipedia: American Mafia
 * Havocscope: Black Market Crime in Italy
 * Stratfor: Organized Crime in Italy