Pictorial history of the Mafia

Pictorial history of the Mafia by Don Maclean's. mass_market edition. ISBN: 9780515034721.

A celebrity roster of Americas most powerful gangland figures-from Frank Abbandando and Al Capone to Seph Valachi and Abner Zwillman. Filled with little-known facts, this comprehensive alphabet of original crime includes some explosive news about the white-washed world of American business, police, and politics. Who was the lord high executioner What gangster had a government deal to keep the docks free of sabotage? And much more. Organized Crime, Mafia, Capone, Bugs Moran, Mob, Legs Diamond, etc The Mafia is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid 19th century in Sicily. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct. Each group, known as a "family", "clan", or "cosca", claims sovereignty over a territory in which it operates its rackets – usually a town or village or a neighbourhood (borgata) of a larger city. Offshoots of the Mafia emerged in the United States during the late 19th century following waves of Italian emigration (see American Mafia) as well as in Canada and Australia. The term "Mafia" is also employed to name Mafia-type organizations operating under a similar structure, whether Sicilian or not; such as the Camorra (from Campania), the Ndrangheta (from Calabria), the Stidda (Southern Sicily) or the Sacra Corona Unita (from Apulia), as well as foreign organized crime groups. However, Giovanni Falcone, the anti-Mafia judge who was killed by the Mafia, objected to the inflation of the use of "Mafia" to organized crime in general: "While there was a time when people were reluctant to pronounce the word Mafia, … nowadays people have gone so far in the opposite direction that it has become an overused term … I am no longer willing to accept the habit of speaking of the Mafia in descriptive and all-inclusive terms that make it possible to stack up phenomena that are indeed related to the field of organized crime but that have little or nothing in common with the Mafia."