![]() Senate Committee on Government Operations in 1963 (at what are known as the Valachi hearings). Italian American mafioso Joseph Valachi testified before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Īccording to Mafia turncoats ( pentiti), the real name of the Mafia is "Cosa Nostra" ("Our Thing"). 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 organised crime but that have little or nothing in common with the Mafia. nowadays people have gone so far in the opposite direction that it has become an overused term . While there was a time when people were reluctant to pronounce the word "Mafia" . But Giovanni Falcone, the anti-Mafia judge who was murdered by the Mafia in 1992, had objected to the conflation of the term "Mafia" with organized crime in general: The term mafia has become a generic term for any organized criminal network with similar structure, methods, and interests. The word was first documented in 1865 in a report by the prefect of Palermo Filippo Antonio Gualterio ( it). Soon after, the use of the term "mafia" began appearing in the Italian state's early reports on the group. ![]() The play had great success throughout Italy. The drama is about a Palermo prison gang with traits similar to the Mafia: a boss, an initiation ritual, and talk of umirtà ( omertà or code of silence) and " pizzu" (a codeword for extortion money). The words mafia and mafiusi are never mentioned in the play. The public's association of the word with the criminal secret society was perhaps inspired by the 1863 play "I mafiusi di la Vicaria" ( it) ("The Mafiosi of the Vicaria") by Giuseppe Rizzotto and Gaspare Mosca. ![]() Maʿāfir ( معافر): the name of an Arab tribe that ruled Palermo.mahyāṣ ( مهياص): aggressive boasting, bragging.Those who pay it are "exempted" from prosecution. In Islamic law, Jizya is the yearly tax imposed on non-Muslims residing in Muslim lands. Possible Arabic roots of the word include: Sicily was once an Islamic emirate, therefore mafia might have Arabic roots. The Sicilian word mafie refers to the caves near Trapani and Marsala, which were often used as hiding places for refugees and criminals. In reference to a woman, however, the feminine-form, "mafiusa", means a beautiful or attractive female. In reference to a man, mafiusu in 19th-century Sicily was ambiguous, signifying a bully, arrogant but also fearless, enterprising and proud, according to scholar Diego Gambetta. The Sicilian noun mafiusu (in Italian: mafioso) roughly translates to mean " swagger", but can also be translated as "boldness, bravado". ![]() These diaspora-based outfits replicated the traditions and methods of their Sicilian ancestors to varying extents. By the 20th century, wide-scale emigration from Sicily facilitated the formation of mafiosi style gangs in Australia, the United Kingdom, Canada, the United States and South America. Its members call themselves " men of honor", although the public often refers to them as mafiosi. Each family claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town, village or neighborhood ( borgata) of a larger city, in which it operates its rackets. The basic group is known as a " family", "clan", or cosca. The Mafia's core activities are protection racketeering, the arbitration of disputes between criminals, and the organizing and oversight of illegal agreements and transactions. It is an association of gangs which sell their protection and arbitration services under a common brand. The Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra ( Italian:, Sicilian: "our thing" ), also referred to as simply Mafia, is a criminal society and criminal organization operating on the island of Sicily since the 19th century. Protection racketeering, extortion, vote buying, narcotrafficking, bid rigging, loan sharking, kidnapping and murder. Mostly western Sicily, particularly Palermo, Trapani, and Agrigento For other uses, see Mafia (disambiguation).
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