Italian Mafias killing less but infiltrating more businesses

People and movies focused on the killings, while the real nightmares were and are in the business, public sector and work environment. When you don't do what a politician wants you to do, he sends you the tax authorities or some other random authority of which Italy is full of, and he'll get what he wants. Do you realize how bad this is? The Public Forces are used to enforce mafia-like behavior. It's bad, it's widespread, it's cultural and it's stopping any kind of real development or innovation. The problem is that Italy never really got out of feudalism.

Bikers have done this too, here they own development corps which are just rackets to exploit city tenders. Nobody else can bid or else you find your yards and equipment robbed or destroyed. Police don't do anything because propping up org crime is part of their management strategy of the failed war on drugs. Young violent upstarts who heat out the city with public shootings are better handled by the dominant org crime group so they let them racketeer it up so long as they promise to reign in the lesser groups that make the police look bad with public violence. Since these young upstarts need the money laundering services only mafia/bikers can provide on that scale they generally fall into line.

They also are propped up in the prison system in turn for helping the guards establish order in overcrowded units. Guards do set ups to make sure the dominant group always has an upper hand in any conflicts, like 4 associates being "accidentally" put in the same class/program with a rival of another group.

My guess is that in a "professional" organized crime family if you have to whack someone it means someone (possibly yourself) screwed something up very badly. Killing someone is extremely high risk and is probably regarded as sloppy operations.

It sort of mirrors the way governments have gotten more advanced with repressive and tyrannical techniques. Unsophisticated governments will whack people or arrest them and throw them in bottomless pit prisons, etc. Sophisticated totalitarian regimes use nudge theory and very advanced astroturf type propaganda, and when they have to 'whack' someone they discredit them and assassinate their character and credibility rather than martyring them with a physical attack. Much cleaner, more efficient, and in the end far more effective.

This trend started a long time ago when they realized it's easier to hide millions of dollars behind companies people expect to bring in millions of dollars. The smaller ones often used chain stores that did a lot of cash business but also plenty of volume. The larger ones just partnered with banks that looked the other way at where the money was coming from. Sometimes they start a bank (BCCI) geared toward like-minded individuals. A side-benefit of all this is much less heat on them and [in U.S.] a statute of limitations on any given crime that wasn't murder.

So this is nothing new except to the writer apparently.

One interesting fact is that the mafia was reduced to meaninglessness during the facist era in italy. I deduce from that that there can be only one villian in town.

I don't think people realize that Mafia is not anymore what it used to be 50 years ago. They are well-established in different regions across europe (you wish it was just an italian thing, right?) which are generating a tremendous income with drugs and prostitution, but the real deal is when this capital gets re-invested in legitimate business - again across europe. Do you really think that once you get into the range of the tens of millions any financial institution is going to turn down easily any investment? They won't.

So, I think it's so simplistic to picture mafia as gangsters robbing and extorting businesses and dealing drugs. I rather picture them as shirt-and-tie business men traveling to Milan, Munich, London, Luxemburg and Geneve looking for investing opportunities.

Interesting that this is hosted on a Japanese news site. Remember that Japan has their own Yakuza.

I guess they finally figured out there is more money ripping people off being above the law as a banker or politician than below it as racketeers.

Once they don't do killings, traditional business should be more efficient and therefore drive them off.

Mafia should only be able to thrive in underground activites like predatory loans, drugs and such.