By Diego Gambetta
In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia.
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996. 346p.
By John Dickie
Hailed in Italy as the best book ever written about the mafia in any language, Cosa Nostra is a fascinating, violent, and darkly comic account that reads like fiction and takes us deep into the inner sanctum of this secret society where few have dared to tread.In this gripping history of the Sicilian mafia, John Dickie uses startling new research to reveal the inner workings of this secret society with a murderous record. He explains how the mafia began, how it responds to threats and challenges, and introduces us to the real-life characters that inspired the American imagination for generations, making the mafia an international, larger than life cultural phenomenon. Dickie's dazzling cast of characters includes Antonio Giammona, the first "boss of bosses''; New York cop Joe Petrosino, who underestimated the Sicilian mafia and paid for it with his life; and Bernard "the Tractor" Provenzano, the current boss of bosses who has been hiding in Sicily since 1963.
New York; Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 400p.
By Joe Pieri
This book reveals a shocking and sensational story: the mafia and the huge syndicates it controls have infiltrated the government in Italy, the US, the highest levels of the Catholic Church, and in modern times, are even implicated in the murder of an American president and the pope. At lower levels of criminality the mafia is omnipresent - from prostitution, gambling and boot-legging during the Prohibition era in the 1920's, to the present day control of drug trafficking in Europe and America. The annals of the mafia are bloodstained and littered with corpses, both of the mobsters themselves and the law-abiding citizens and legislators who have tried to resist their intimidation. Peopled with compelling characters, Pieri rattles through the tangle of rackets, feuds, business affairs and political chicanery that satisfies our fascination with the criminal underworld.
Edinburgh: Birlinn, 1990. 182p.
By Mark Ungar
Because of the increasingly organized and lethal nature of criminality in Latin America and Caribbean (LAC), OC policy may be the single most important safeguard for regional security. Nearly every current report, in fact, stresses OC’s increasingly threatening impact “on the economic and sociopolitical environment of the region” as it fuels manifestations of criminal violence such as “trafficking of persons, exploitation of natural resources, threats to protected areas, forced displacement, criminal governance, robbery, physical aggression, extortion and kidnapping,” according to UNDP. A recognition of the tandem growth of OC’s forms, though, does not mean a policy-relevant understanding of them. Such an understanding requires disentangling these crimes’ many overlapping sources, removing embedded layers of methodological obstruction, and attuning responses with OC practice. This multiple challenge, though, first requires stepping back to re-evaluate existing paradigms in at least three ways that this report discusses. First is to question existing OC data, since much of it is suspect, biased, or incomplete – reflecting the misalignment of institutional process and policy goals. Second is the ways in which OC draws its power from a multitude of local, national and regional links among non-state, economic, and state agencies that, like dark matter, are omnipresent but largely invisible. Third is a need to widen and re-examine physical and geographic space.
Miami: Florida International University, Jack D. Gordon Institute for Public Policy, 2021.
By Center for the Study of Democracy
Extortion racketeering has been long pointed out as the defining activity of organised crime. Although in recent years this crime has not been among the top listed organised crime threats in the strategic EU policy documents, it still remains ever present in European countries. The seriousness of the phenomenon has been recognised at the EU level and the crime has been listed in a number of EU legal acts in the field of police and judicial cooperation in criminal matters.
The report Extortion Racketeering in the EU: A six country study of vulnerability factors analyses extortion racketeering forms and practices in six EU member states. The analysis disentangles the risk and the vulnerability factors for enterprises in two business sectors – agriculture and hospitality – as well as in the Chinese communities. Drawing on the results of the analysis, the report suggests new policies for tackling extortion racketeering in the EU.
Sofia, Bulgaria: Center for the Study of Democracy, 2016. 351p.
By InSight Crime
Drug traffickers today realize that their best protection is not a private army but anonymity. This is the story of “Memo Fantasma” or “Will the Ghost,” who started life in the Medellín Cartel, funded the bloody rise of a paramilitary army, and today lives the high life in Madrid. He has helped move hundreds of tons of cocaine yet has no arrest warrants, and nobody is looking for him.
Washington, DC: InSight Crime, 2020. 50p.
By Lavinia Piemontese
This paper proposes a new approach for quantifying the economic cost of hidden economies. I specifically apply the method to the case of mafia racketeering in Northern Italy, and in so doing, provide the first explicit estimate of the economic cost of mafia spread in this area. I show both theoretically and empirically that acts of extortion imposed on certain firms are linked to resource misallocation. I quantify the share of output that the mafia extorts from firms, which ranges between 0.5 and 5 percent of firm-level output for the taxed firms. I then consider what these estimates imply and find that between 2000 and 2012, the Northern Italian economy suffered an aggregate loss of approximately 2.5 billion Euros. Quite remarkably, only one-fourth of this cost consists of the aggregate transfer to the mafia. The remaining three-fourths corresponds to the contraction of production due to misallocation.
Lyon, France: University of Lyon, 2021. 56p.
