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Fascinating Facts About the Birth of the Italian-American Mafia

Khalid Elhassan February 13, 2025 17 min

Mafia - Lucky Luciano, who midwifed the birth of the modern Italian-American Mafia — Lucky Luciano, who midwifed the birth of the modern Italian-American Mafia. The Mob Museum

13. One Thing Mussolini Did Right: Crackdown on the Mafia

Mussolini was often a buffoon and failure, but he did manage to crush organized crime in Italy. Controversia

Just as Prohibition produced a business boom for organized crime in the US in general, and the Italian-American Mafia in particular, Benito Mussolini and his Fascists came to power in Italy. No Italian government before had managed to keep the Sicilian Mafia and the Camorra in check. Nor did any Italian government since. Mussolini crushed them. Farcical buffoon he might have been, but that was one thing the Italian dictator pulled off. The Sicilian Mafia and Camorra throve, and still do, in Italy’s corrupt political culture. They worked the system and mastered its intricacies, subverted politicians, police, and judges by bribes or threats, and bent them to their will until organized crime became a state within the state. The Fascists did not share power or tolerate challenges, however, and Mussolini was neither concerned with nor constrained by legalities in dealing with the Sicilian Mafia and Camorra.

Written by

Khalid Elhassan

A lifelong history buff, I developed a particular passion for WW2 history as a child, when I spent hours listening to my grandfather, enraptured, as he recounted his wartime experiences in the British East African Campaign and with the British 8th Army in North Africa.

I graduated with a history BA from George Mason University, then went on to get a JD from the University of Virginia School of Law. After lawyering for a decade, I moved to sunny Rio de Janeiro and a less demanding career, opening a tourism agency in Copacabana.

A big chunk of my free time is spent blogging (you can follow me on Quora https://www.quora.com/profile/Khalid-Elhassan ) or freelance writing, mostly about my favorite subject, history.