What the life of the biggest mafia clans looks like from the inside: money is earned not only from drugs, but also from high fashion

According to the FBI, now the Italian-American mafia clans continue to recruit new people, but try to operate quietly, less violently and focus on so-called “white collar” crimes, including the Internet. Mafia clans pocket between 50 and 90 billion US dollars a year.

Former “warriors” of the Gambino mafia family, John Alite and Luis Ferrante, who gave an interview to the magazine “Vice”, said that for the mafia clans this is a respite, an opportunity to hide. Selwyn Raab, the author of the cult book “Five Families” written in 2016, writer and former journalist of The New York Times, shares the same opinion. He wrote extensively about the American mafia, emphasizing that the tragedy of September 11 “saved” the gangsters from complete destruction. The mafia took advantage of this period to recover from the heavy losses they had suffered.

Mafia is the name of one of the organizations of the Italian criminal world, which has no exact analogues in the world. “Mafia” is a uniquely Sicilian concept. In other regions of Italy, similar organizations had and still have different names: “Ndrangheta” in Calabria, “Sacra Corona Unita” in Puglia, “Camorra” in Naples, according to history.com.

According to one version, on Easter Monday in 1282, a Sicilian girl was raped by a French soldier. It happened on her wedding day. The bride’s mother rushed out into the street with a heart-rending cry: “Ma fi…a!” Ma fi…a!”. (“Mia figlia! My daughter!”). The next day there was an uprising in the country. In one evening, the rioters killed thousands of French. These riots went down in history under the name “Sicilian Vespers”. Her signal was the ringing of bells, inviting parishioners to evening mass. And the abbreviation of the slogan of the uprising became “Morte alla Francia Italia Anelia!” (“Death to France! Long live Italy!”).

According to another version, the word “mafia” was used to refer to Palermo’s fighters against the authorities.

Sicilians banded together to protect themselves and administer their justice. In Sicily, the term “mafioso” or member of the mafia did not originally have a criminal meaning and was used to refer to a person against whom the authorities brought some kind of suspicion, according to wikipedia.com.

Members of the Sicilian mafia even trace their origins to the medieval sect of followers of St. Francis di Paolo, founded in 1185. In the 18th century, members of a secret society lived in Palermo, in underground caves, prayed during the day, and rushed to defend the oppressed poor at night.

Mafia members must follow their own “code of honor”. This means that any attack on one member of the mafia is an attack on the whole mafia. Justice is administered by the mafia. It is only she who judges, only she makes the judgment and only she executes the judgment. If someone gives out the names of mafia members, they can be killed by anyone at any time.