Organized crime/ movie or novel - Coursework Example

Goodfellas and the Italian Mafia The Italian mafia has been the of many a movie or television show, its secrets and family history a constantsource of fascination and even entertainment. Its involvement in the drug trade however, is nothing to laugh at, as the history of the Mafia’s involvement in drugs tells a long tale of violence, corruption and profits. This was depicted in the movie “Goodfellas”, a movie directed by the famed director Martin Scorsese and released in the United States in 1990.

It tells the story of the Lucchese crime family in the blue-collar neighbourhood of East New York, Brooklyn, and a group of three mobsters who live a life of drugs, violence and robbery.Many of the themes in the movie are consistent with the depiction of the American mafia in the reading of Abadinsky (2010). One of these themes for example is the Italian origins of the Mafia. The movie was set, in fact, in an Italian-American community with a young boy, Henry Hill, growing up idolizing the Lucchese family and running odd jobs for them.

According to Abadinsky (2010) “The Mafia was imported by Sicilian immigrants, who reproduced it in the cities in which they settled, as a ritual brotherhood consisting of loosely linked but otherwise independent and uncoordinated families organized hierarchically”. It is said that the Mafia in the United States began when Giussepe Esposito relocated to the United States from Sicily. He moved to New Orleans, where he oversaw a flourishing Sicilian criminal operation. (Lyman, 2011). Seeing that America presented huge opportunities, the Mafia kept on growing.

In the 1920s, the Mafia families had control over virtually all criminal enterprises, and they purchased impunity by corrupting high-level police and government officials. The 20s was the period of the Prohibition, and the Mafia gained immense wealth through bootlegging, or the smuggling of prohibited liquor. They then spread out and engaged in other business, most notably drug trafficking. The Pizza Connection was a large-scale investigation undertaken in the 1980s that revealed just how big the drug operations of the Sicilian Mafia were and how they have managed to penetrate the American markets.

According to Lyman, “the breadth of the investigations expanded worldwide, with Mafia members identified in such countries as Brazil, Canada, Spain, Switzerland, Italy and the United States. So vast was the investigation that it took federal investigators one full year to try the case.”The Mafia earns its keep from the illicit trade, usually drugs. This was another theme articulated in the movie, where Henry Hill entered into one drug deal after the other, and in fact ended up caught by narcotic agents and sent to jail, but not before cocaine had taken its toll on his nervous system and left him a psychological wreck.

The Mafia’s history with illicit products traces itself to the Prohibition, as Abadinsky confirms (page 60-61) where they took advantage of the liquor ban to sell bootlegged alcohol. Then they take advantage of corruption within the system to ensure that their business is protected. Says Fiorentini and Peltzman (1997), “the mafia creates monopolies in local enterprises, controls entry and maximises revenue by extracting monopoly profits as protection payments; new investment may be discouraged and old investment driven out.

”(word count: 537)ReferencesAbadinsky, H. (2010). Organized Crime, 9th ed. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth.Fiorentini, G. and Peltzman, S. (1997). The economics of organised crime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Lyman, M. D. (2011). Drugs in Society: Causes, Concepts and Control. (6th Ed.), Burlington, MA: Anderson Publishing.