The history of Italian Mobsters - Essay Example

Why is this so? Where does this image of the gangster come from? Why as a "monster" type are we both attracted and repulsed by his (or less often her) screen presence?” (Florida State University, 2011). Indeed, the Mob's heroic reputation was a major part of the censorship of the early Hays Code (Florida State University, 2011). The Italian mob were complex social agents: They were both ruthless social parasites and community guards, representatives of Italian communities and their secret shame, successful businessmen and criminals.

The Italian mafia were far from alone: In The Ethnic Myth, Steinberg (1991) points out that at one point one sixth of the organized crime in New York was Jewish! But it is true that the Italians were powerful in New Jersey, New York, Chicago and Las Vegas. La Cosa Nostra was a Sicilian institution, but in America, its start and success had to do with one factor: Prohibition. “The Prohibition era of the 1920s gave rise to the organized crime syndicate in the United States. Federal efforts to enforce prohibition, including raids on speakeasies, were countered by well-organized bootlegging operations with national and international connections.

A particularly notorious gang of the times was Al Capone's mob in Chicago. There were also gangs in Detroit, New York and other cities. Wars among gangs, producing grisly killings, frequently made headlines” (US History, 2011). The FBI traces the history of La Cosa Nostra from Sicily: “These enterprises evolved over the course of 3,000 years during numerous periods of invasion and exploitation by numerous conquering armies in Italy. Over the millennia, Sicilians became more clannish and began to rely on familial ties for safety, protection, justice, and survival.

An underground secret society formed initially as resistance fighters against the invaders and to exact frontier vigilante justice against oppression. A member was known as a “Man Of Honor,” respected and admired because he protected his family and friends and kept silent even unto death. Sicilians weren’t concerned if the group profited from its actions because it came at the expense of the oppressive authorities. These secret societies eventually grew into the Mafia” (2011). It is important to note, though, that not all of the people in La Cosa Nostra in America were native mobsters in Sicily.

Rather, the social form was transplanted because of new conditions. It was difficult for immigrants to eke out a living in the America of the early 1900s. Prohibition made an obvious opportunity emerge: The distribution, production and consumption of alcohol would be the business model. As the Nevada Observer (1987) put it in their comprehensive time line of La Cosa Nostra (LCN), “Although organized crime had existed in the United States prior to this time, it was the bonanza of Prohibition which enabled the small, but powerful, LCN to capitalize upon its international contacts, its reputation for ruthlessness, and--above all--its rigidly disciplined structure of cooperating gangs to establish the position of unrivaled eminence it holds in the American underworld today”.

But La Cosa Nostra didn't end with Prohibition. Once the organizations were created, it was too easy to use them for all sorts of other enterprises.