History of the Sicilian Mafia - Essay Example

A mafia was a person who would not comply with the rule of the central government, but remained suspicious about it. At the end of 19th century, mafia groups advanced and formed private armies that would force landowners to pay money for the protection. Eventually, this group developed and became bigger to form the current-hostile criminal organization called the Sicilian Mafia (Varese, 2011). The American mafia, formed in 1920, does not have some link to the Sicilian Mafia. However, the Sicilian Mafia and the American Mafia share a system of loyalty and conduct, which guides the behaviour of their members.

Mafia-type Organizations Today, the term Mafia, refers to any organized illegal group. The mass media describes the mafia as a worldwide evil that controls all illegal activities (Allum 2007, p. 125). For example, they involve in drug trafficking, sale of radioactive substances and arms dealing. The Sicilian mafia has enjoyed the legacy of the most successful Mafia in the world due to it long-standing duty in the civilization and its complexity. The strength of the Sicilian mafia emanates from the ability of the group to grow and spread to national, international and transnational levels, and still maintain its novel cores in the Sicilian community.

The Sicilian Mafia continued to unite innovation and continuity of its traditional activities (Dickie, 2011). For example, the group continues to extort people, but today they use sophisticated methods that are technology-aided. They also select activities that will yield the group the most economic benefits. After the Second World War, both the American mafia and the Sicilian mafia groups linked in trafficking drugs, but they retained their autonomy. For the past couple of decades, the Sicilian Mafia has extended to numerous regions of the globe, and it covered all continents.

This has enabled the group to deal heroin with Turkey, Asiatic clans, Middle East and France (Allum 2007, p. 127). Today the group trades Cocaine in the company of Cartels of Latin-America. Sicilian Mafia utilizes the global channels to launder money to tax havens from Switzerland. Several illegal organizations, which are similar to the Sicilian mafia, are also there in Italy, and the organizations include Camorra and the Sacra Corona Unita among others. There are also other global-historical groups like the Japanese Yakusa the Russian Mafia and the Chinese Trieds, which formed in line with the Sicilian Mafia (Jamieson 2008, p.57). It is not likely to settle on the precise amount of earnings that are obtained from organized crime activities.

However, illegal capital is always above 500 billion dollars per annum. Most of this capital is obtained from arms deals, extortion and drug trafficking. Currently the illegal market has grown in complexity due to well articulated illegal deeds, as well as, the increased number of criminal groups (Jamieson 2008, p.59). This implies that no single Mafia Group enjoys the privilege of monopolizing the area of crime profession. There are many factors that facilitate the growth and development of criminal groups in society.

However, the most pertinent include capitalism globalization, economy financialization and acquittal of circulation of assets. Further, drugs prohibition in many countries of the world makes the Mafias the only means of trafficking drugs (Jamieson 2008, p