Long before the real life Al Capone and the fictional Michael Corleone from The Godfather, there was the Black Hand, and once powerful but now nearly forgotten gangsters who laid the foundations for the Italian-American mafia. Referred to by its members as Cosa Nostra, or “our thing”, the Mob grew out of the Sicilian Mafia and the Italian Camorra. It dominated organized crime in America after it wrested various illegal activities from rival Irish, Jewish, and other gangs. Its rise is largely due to its ability to exploit Prohibition. It successfully operated large scale bootlegging operations, and adapted after Prohibition’s repeal by settling into labor racketeering, gambling, narcotics, prostitution, and other activities. Below are twenty fascinating but lesser known facts about the Italian-American Mafia’s rise.
20. The Decline of the Mob
In the 1980s, the Department of Justice and FBI took a wrecking ball to the Mob. It was a drastic change, after decades of kid gloves treatment and denials of its very existence by longtime FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover. As a result, the Italian-American Mafia today is a mere shell of what it once was. From a tight-knit and disciplined nationwide crime behemoth, the Mob’s activities are now confined mostly to the northeastern US and Chicago. Its ranks are riddled with informers, and its members go in fear of the ever present threat of imminent indictments and lengthy jail sentences hanging over all Mafiosi. In its heyday, however, the Mob had been was one of the world’s most powerful criminal enterprises.
