WI Sicillian Mafia Crushed in 1870s?

Recently was reading an interesting article about the beginnings of the Mafia. Apparently some Plantation owner got threats and went to some officials in Rome. The government flipped out an initiated a series of brutal crackdowns all over Sicily. But the Mafia survived, and whether we like it or not it's still there. So what would happen if the crackdowns succeeded and the Mafia was wiped out?
 

DusanUros

Banned
You would just have it start somewhere else. Mafia is organised crime, they would just appear, its one of the products of imperialism and capitalism. You have them cracked down in Italy, so what? There are still organisations of crime in other parts of the world. If you mean, that we wouldnt be speaking about cosa nostra, when speaking about mafia, yet about some other legendary mafia, well thats a different thing.
 

Vitruvius

Donor
You would just have it start somewhere else. Mafia is organised crime, they would just appear, its one of the products of imperialism and capitalism. You have them cracked down in Italy, so what? There are still organisations of crime in other parts of the world. If you mean, that we wouldnt be speaking about cosa nostra, when speaking about mafia, yet about some other legendary mafia, well thats a different thing.

Probably they would still be Italian just not Sicilian. To look at Cosa Nostra today is to see an organization under great stress. Some businessmen are refusing to pay pizzo, the number of pentiti is increasing and major fugitives and bosses are being arrested. Yet conversely Camorra / Gomorrah is still a powerful force in Campania and 'Ndrangheta is perhaps stronger than ever with a network that stretches throughout Europe and a stranglehold on the drug trade.

Of course the character of what we commonly call the Mafia might be different if the Sicilian Cosa Nostra is crushed early on. Perhaps the stereotypical mafia is more clannish if a Camorra like group is exported abroad for example. The only big difference might be in WWII when the allied invasion of Sicily was greatly facilitated by mafia contacts. Perhaps a slightly more difficult invasion of Sicily but an easier time in the rest of the Mezzogiorno. That and the Godfather films follow a Calabrian family from Locri.
 
You cant kill the Mafia. In Southern Italy and Sicilly, the Mafia is the law. It is ASB to try and destroy it., unless your PoD changes the whole situation of the people in Southern Italy completely.
 
You cant kill the Mafia. In Southern Italy and Sicilly, the Mafia is the law. It is ASB to try and destroy it., unless your PoD changes the whole situation of the people in Southern Italy completely.

After the unification of Italy, the Italian government was fighting a low-level war in the South against people who didn't like the idea of being ruled by the House of Savoy.

Re: the Mafia being the law, plenty of governments have been toppled and plenty of ethnicities have been subjected to partial or complete genocide. The House of Savoy could have destroyed the Cosa Nostra, if anything by rounding up all the relevant-aged males and tossing them off a cliff. I've heard some pretty bad things went on during this time, so it's not OOC.

And in OTL, when the Mafia interfered with Mussolini, Mussolini put all of the Sicilian ones in jail. The US, in its lack of local knowledge, thought these were all oppressed political prisoners when they arrived in Italy and let them all out.
 
There were other organized crime groups in the US long before mafiosos. Basically it began with the corruption brought by political machines. Think Gangs of New York, as sensationalized and inaccurate as it is.

In the US the main difference would be you'd see other crime groups romanticized in film. Irish, Jewish etc.
 
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