Abstract
In Italy, the word “Mafia” has been in use since the 1860s to indicate a phenomenon typical of western Sicily: an ensemble of criminal gangs active in both legitimate and illegitimate business.1 In the United States, the term has labeled the Italian ethnic component of organized crime since the Great Italian Immigration of 1894–1914. So, from a historical point of view, it has been used as both a regional reference (in the Italian case) and an ethnic reference (in the American case).
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Notes
D. M. P. McCarthy, An Economic History of Organized Crime: A National and Transnational Approach, London, Routledge, 2011, p. 20.
See for example C. Sterling, Octopus: The Long Reach of the International Sicilian Mafia, New York, Simon & Schuster, 1991.
S. Raab, Five Families. The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence ofAmerica’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2005, p. 12.
Following the line drawn by A. Block, Space, Time, & Organized Crime, New Brunswick, NJ, Transaction Publishers, 1994.
D. Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931, New York and London, Routledge, 2009, a rare exam-ple of a professional historical essay in English language on the American Mafia, does not quote the most important Italian studies, and among them the Italian edition of the present book, published in 2008.
J. Landesco, Organized Crime in Chicago, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1968 [I ed. 1929], p. 221.
D. Bell, “Crime as an American Way of Life,” in The Antioch Review, 13, Summer 1953, pp. 131–54,
was published again in D. Bell, The End of the Ideologies, Glencoe, Free Press, 1964.
D. J. Kenney and J. O. Finckenauer, Organized Crime in America, Belmont, CA, Wadsworth, 1995, p. 255.
N. Gentile, Vita di capomafia. Memorie raccolte da Felice Chilanti, Rome, Crescenzi Allendorf, 1993 [I ed. 1963].
J. Bonanno, A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno, with Sergio Lalli, New York, St. Martin Paperbacks, 2003.
B. Turkus and S. Feder, Murder Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate, London, Gollancz, 1952.
M. A. Gosch and R. Hammer, The Last Testament of Lucky Luciano, Boston and Toronto, Little, Brown, 1975.
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© 2015 Salvatore Lupo
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Lupo, S. (2015). Introduction. In: The Two Mafias. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491374_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491374_1
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