The American Mafia, commonly known as the Mafia, Italian Mafia, Italian Mob, or the Mob in the United States, is an Italian American criminal society that originated and developed from the Sicilian Mafia. The Italian-American Mafia is a secret criminal society without a formal name, similar to the Sicilian Mafia. Its members usually refer to it as Cosa Nostra (Italian pronunciation: [kɔza nɔstra]), a phrase which literally translates to "our thing," but can be more accurately paraphrased as "our work" or "our operation." The press also coined the name "National Crime Syndicate" to refer to the entire network of U.S. organized crime, which included the Jewish Mafia elements and the Italian-American Mafia. It was described as a confederation of mainly Italian and Jewish-American organized crime groups throughout the U.S., as revealed by the findings of a U.S. Senate Special Committee in the 1950s chaired by Estes Kefauver. The Mafia in America emerged in Italian immigrant neighborhoods in New York's East Harlem (or Italian Harlem), Lower East Side, and Brooklyn. It also emerged in other areas of the East Coast of the United States and several other major metropolitan areas (such as New Orleans[1]) during the late 19th century and early 20th Century following waves of Italian immigration, especially from Sicily and other regions of Southern Italy. It has its roots in the Sicilian Mafia, but is a separate organization in the United States. Neapolitan, Calabrian, and other Italian criminal groups in America, as well as independent Italian-American criminals, eventually merged with Sicilian mafiosi to create the modern pan-Italian Mafia in North America. Today, the American Mafia cooperates in various criminal activities with the Sicilian Mafia and other Italian organized crime groups, such as the Camorra in Naples, 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, and Sacra Corona Unita in Apulia. The most important unit of the American Mafia is that of a "family", as the various criminal organizations that make up the Mafia are known. Despite the name of "family" to describe the various units, they are not familial groupings.[2] The Mafia is currently most active in New York, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Detroit, Chicago, and New England (primarily Boston, Worcester, and Providence, with a minor presence in other New England cities);[3] with smaller families, associates, and crews in places such as Florida, Las Vegas, Los Angeles, and Cleveland. There have been at least 26 cities around the United States with Cosa Nostra families, with many more offshoots, splinter groups, and associates in other cities. There are five main New York City Mafia families, known as the Five Families: the Gambino, Lucchese, Genovese, Bonanno, and Colombo families. At its peak, the Mafia dominated organized crime in the U.S. Each crime family operates independently, while nationwide coordination is provided by the Commission, which consists of the bosses of each of the strongest families. Law enforcement considers the Mafia to be the largest organized-crime group in the United States, with influence in criminal activities in the United States and certain parts of Canada. (See Rizzuto crime family.) A 2010 U.S. government report on organized crime ("Organized Crime in the United States: Trends and Issues for Congress")[4] Recent FBI statistics[5] indicate that there are approximately 3,000 members and associates in the U.S., scattered mostly throughout the major cities in the Northeast, the Midwest, California, and the South. Today, most of the Mafia's activities are contained to the Northeastern United States and Chicago, where they continue to dominate crime, despite the increasing numbers of street gangs and other organized-crime groups

• published: 08 Nov 2015
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