Critically review themain factors which led the Italian Mafia to become Transnational in the post-World War 2 period - Essay Example

atives (with the connivance of the American army), growing in size, experience and ambitions to the monstrous organisation that had challenged the supremacy of the Italian government in the 1980s. The paper also argues that the Sicilian Mafia, as well as the US Mafia, had lost most of their former importance amid the organised crime worldwide, gradually replaced by organisations like the ‘Ndrangheta’. Even though the origin of the Sicilian Mafia is hard to be traced either because of its secretive nature or due to the lack of historical records, it’s thought to have originated among the inhabitants of late 19th century Sicily, allegedly as a secret society intended to protect its members against the powerful aristocracy and the mainland Italian state as well.

As Dickie stated, the Mafia’s early activity was centred on the lucrative citrus production and export industry around Palermo. (Dickie 2004, pp 27-33) In 1925, under the dictator Benito Mussolini, Cesare Mori was commissioned as prefect of Palermo with extraordinary powers to suppress the Mafia. After a violent campaign on an unprecedented scale, which included holding women and children of Mafiosi as hostages, the ‘iron prefect’ had been recalled to Rome and the Fascist press proclaimed an unconditional success.

Many members of the Mafia fled to the United States, with Carlo Gambino and Joseph Bonnano among them, who would later become powerful mafia bosses in New York City. As Antonino Calderone said of the period: ‘The music changed. Mafiosi had a hard life…After the war mafia hardly existed anymore.’(Dickie 2004, pp 176) In the United States, during the 1920s, the organised crime had thrived on the blessed soil of the Prohibition. Numerous gangs – Jewish, Irish, Italian, etc., along with the Sicilian families held their own ground in the lucrative alcohol smuggling, even though the Sicilians having their headquarters in East Harlem continued practicing on their countrymen the