Mafia Madness

History of the Italian mafia - modern day mafia aesthetic

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Welcome

Welcome to Mafia Madness👋👋! This page will talk about the history of the Italian Mafia🍝 and its branching to The United States 🇺🇸. We will take an in-depth look at their way of living, how they made money, and their involvement with politics and strong business people. The mafia has done so much in the past that they have movie representations🎥 🎞, music made about them🎙, and current media has romanticised them making Tiktok⚔️, Wattpad stories📚, and thousands of Pinterest boards.

I am doing my project on the Italian mafia because in all their madness there is an inspiration that can be taken from them. The Italian mob started as a small group of protection for Sicilians, then developed into a worldwide phenomenon that we know today. My Family is also half Italian and I have a heritage connection to the mafia.

Welcome to mafia madness, learn and enjoy🍝

Benvenuto nella follia Mafiosa, impara e divertiti 🍝

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Section 1

The next few posts in this section will highlight the history of the Sicilian mafia 🔫 and jump into other powerful💪🏽 mafia groups around Italy🍝

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Cosa Nostra

The Italian Mafia began in Sicily during the mediaeval era as a hidden organisation dedicated to overthrowing the rule of various foreign laws over the island. At the crossroads of the 18th and 19th centuries, they started demanding money from the landowners in exchange for guarding their crops. These private armies grew to be some of Sicily's most powerful people. They isolated the population of the island and developed the Mafia's private legal system, which was governed by a strict moral code. This code was founded on the principle of omertà, or the obligation to never seek legal retribution or assist in criminal investigations.

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Luigi

Luigi Barzini said the reason that Sicily is ungovernable is that Sicily's history of foreign leaders has left the people unwilling to trust and believe that they should write their own laws.

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N’Drangheta

 The FBI claims that the 'Ndrangheta was founded in the 1860s when a group of Sicilian criminals formed a base in the Aspromonte Mountains of Italy. The Maxi Trial was a criminal proceeding in Palermo, Sicily, against the Sicilian Mafia. In the years after World war ii, the 'Ndrangheta spread beyond southern Italy, as members led the 10 thousand Calabrians who went north.

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Sacra Corona Unita

Sacra Corona Unita is Italian for "United Sacred Crown.", often known as the fourth mafia criminal organisation from the Apulia region in southern Italy. First capitalizing on the region's rich wine and olive oil trades, the group expanded its business to cigarette smuggling, arms trafficking, drug trafficking, human trafficking, money laundering, extortion, and political corruption.

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The Black Hand Gang

From the 1880s to the 1930s, the Black Hand in New York City was a loose organisation of Italian-American profiteers. The Black Hand was developed in the 1750s in Naples, Italy, and migrated to the United States in the 1880s as a result of Italian immigrants. To accomplish its objectives, the Black Hand used physical threats, arson, kidnapping, and murder, as well as terror tactics. It was weakened after the 1929 assassination of Frankie Yale and was eventually extinct by the 1930s.

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Section 2

Section 2 will dive into Italy's 🇮🇹 immigration to America. This will also talk about the 1920 prohibition🍺, the cities controlled by the mafia, mob families👨‍👩‍👦‍👦, new gangs formed🔫, and wars between the Irish🇮🇪mob and the Italian🇮🇹mob.

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Immigration

Sicily was already hit by a series of agricultural crises, causing the grain and citrus exports to collapse. The discovery of sulphur in America greatly weakened Sicily's position in the global market. In the late 1800s, significant numbers of Italian immigrants arrived as relatively unskilled labour to help power a rising industrial economy. The cities with the highest population of Sicilians were New York, Chicago, Boston, New Orleans, and San Francisco, where low-wage occupations were common.

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The Prohibition

In an attempt to tame rebellious Americans, Prohibition outlawed the manufacture and sale of alcohol.  The experiment had several unexpected results, the most damaging however was that it encouraged organised crime and the rise of the American Mafia. They would offer security for speakeasies, defend illegal breweries and rum-running activities from enemy gangs, and pay off any suspicious cops or politicians to look the other way. It wasn't long until the mobsters were making ridiculous sums of money, and leaders and policemen were carrying out the instructions.

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Mob Family Structure

New York City was governed by five criminal families, with another nineteen family groups distributed around the country. The Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese, and Lucchese families of New York City became well-known, and each was given its Godfather's name. Around this time, the American Mafia families became known as the La Cosa Nostra. Cosa Nostra means "our thing" in Italian. The chiefs of the most powerful families formed a commission that acted largely as a legal entity. Each family is managed by a "boss," or "don," whose authority is only subject to the panel's inspection.  The face of organised crime transitioned timeously. 

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Bonanno Crime Family

The Bonanno crime family is one of the "Five Families" of the American Mafia in New York City. Joseph Bonanno was the founder of the historical Bonanno family, which dates back to the 1890s. For much of the 1970s and 1980s, the family was in chaos. The family's boss, Joseph Massino, became an informant in 2004, and the family became weak. In 2015, the family has around 500 associates and roughly 110 made members.

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Colombo Crime Family

The Colombo criminal family is the youngest of the "Five Families" of the American Mafia in New York City, having been created in 1928 by Joe Profaci. Carmine Persico was noted for leading the family through three civil wars. Conflict, as well as countless convictions and betrayals, shattered the Colombo family, making it the weakest of the Five Families.

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Lucchese Crime Family

The Lucchese crime family was created in the early 1920s by Gaetano Reina and is one of the Five Families of the New York American Mafia. Under Tommy Gagliano's leadership, the family was peaceful from the 1930s through the 1950s, and the family operated in the Bronx, Manhattan, and New Jersey. Tommy Lucchese became the family's boss in 1951, and it grew to be one of the Council's most powerful families, siding with the Gambino crime family to rule New York City's crime. The family stole $6 million in cash and jewellery from the German terminal at JFK International Airport in 1978.

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Genovese Crime Family

The Genovese crime family is an American Mafia organised criminal gang. Giuseppe Morello formed the family in 1931, and it quickly rose to become the most powerful Mafia family, rivalling the Gambino crime family in terms of legacy. In 1957, the Genovese family was renamed after Don Vito Genovese, and the Genovese family made a living off of gambling, bank fraud, real estate, prostitution, fraud, extortion, and labor union corruption. The family has remained into the 20th century thanks to its members' loyalty to the omerta code of honour.

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Gambino Crime Family

The Gambino family was founded in 1930 by the merging of the D'Aquila and Morello gangs, and they were named after Carlo Gambino, the boss from 1957 to 1976. Apart from Carlo, the family's most well-known leaders were Albert Anastasia, Paul Castellano, and John Gotti, the first two of whom were assassinated by their men. During the 1980s and 1990s, the family was weakened by a series of FBI betrayals, when several senior mobsters entered Witness Protection and testified against other mob leaders. The family had up to 200 made members and up to 3,000 associates in 2015.

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The Chicago Outfit

The Chicago Outfit is a Chicago-based Italian-American organized crime group that controls organized crime in the Midwest. In 1910, James Colosimo founded the family, and he went on to become a well-known pimp. In 1920, his servant Johnny Torrio assassinated him so that the family could enter the bootlegging business during Prohibition, and Torrio's ambitious henchman Al Capone would lead the gang to become Chicago's most powerful through a series of gang fights and murders. Capone was arrested for tax evasion in 1932. By the 2000s, the Outfit had declined, soon becoming a thing of the past.