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Mafia and Organized Crime

Organized crime is both a group of people with some kind of formalized structure, engaging in sustained illegal activity primarily for profit, and the crimes they commit. The Mafia itself is a particular Italian organized crime culture that originated in Sicily and then spread into North America. However, the word Mafia has become both a popular expression for any organized crime gang and a term of art for a specific form of organized criminality adopting a quasi-state role.

Organized Crime

Organized crime is more than just crime that is organized. After all, almost any crimes committed by more than one person and with premeditation will involve a degree of coordination. Nor are any particular offenses to be considered organized crimes as such—organized crime groups carry out the same illegal acts as any person, but what is significant is that they do so in a sustained way, typically operating with a degree of hierarchy and specialization, as a criminal enterprise, often using threats, violence, and corruption to further their ends.

Officials often characterize these criminal groupings by native ethnicity: as well as the Italian Mafia or Cosa Nostra, there are such well-known examples as the Japanese yakuza, Jamaican Yardies, and Russian vory v zakone (thieves within the code). However, while many criminal cultures derive from a particular country or ethnicity, these definitions rarely help explain their distinctive characteristics. Furthermore, very few gangs feel required to confine their recruitment to any particular nationality. From the first, for example, Italian American gangs recruited criminals from the Irish and eastern European Jewish communities, and the yakuza—regarded as one of the most homogeneous of contemporary criminal phenomena—have begun to accept Vietnamese members.

Thus, one more accurately defines organized crime, not by its membership or even by its crimes, but by the manner in which it carries out its activities, operating as a criminal enterprise with a degree of process and longevity. As Gerard Lynch put it, “organized crime is as organized crime does” (1987: 687).

Mafia

While the public may use the term Mafia as a synonym for organized crime, this usage is inaccurate. On one level, one ought to use it specifically for Sicilian or Sicilian-origin organized crime groups, given that even within Italy, the Mafia is only one of several regional organized crime structures (the other main ones being the Neapolitan Camorra and the Calabrian ‘ndrangheta). However, some scholars have made a convincing case that the term can also be used to describe a particular form of organized crime exemplified by the Sicilians. According to Pino Arlacchi, alongside its direct criminal enterprises, a Mafia engages in three particular activities: providing nonstate protection, repressing not just its own enemies but those of the social mainstream (to give it a degree of legitimacy), and mediating between legitimate and illegitimate actors.

Diego Gambetta, though, focused on the issues of nonstate protection, asserting that a Mafia does not sell security just from its own predation but also from other gangs and even from the state or commercial rivals. This form of organized crime is thus a symptom of a state that is unable to meet the needs of its citizens. It creates a “market opportunity” for criminals and as a result may also allow them to assume some degree of legitimacy because ordinary people regard them as somehow “on our side” (as opposed to the hostile, alien, or useless state).

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