organized crime summary

Mafia, hierarchically structured society of criminals of primarily Italian or Sicilian birth or extraction. The term applies to the traditional criminal organization in Sicily and also to a criminal organization in the United States. Most scholars agree that the Mafia emerged in Sicily in the 19th

Yakuza, Japanese gangsters, members of what are formally called bōryokudan (“violence groups”), or Mafia-like criminal organizations. In Japan and elsewhere, especially in the West, the term yakuza can be used to refer to individual gangsters or criminals as well as to their organized groups and to

Al Capone was an American Prohibition-era gangster who dominated organized crime in Chicago from 1925 to 1931 and became perhaps the most famous gangster in the United States. Capone’s parents immigrated to the United States from Naples in 1893. Al, the fourth of nine children, grew up in Brooklyn,