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Comment by izietto | Hacker News Reader

It is probably no coincidence that this happened in an Italian region where organized criminality was born (Calabria, the other ones are Sicilia and Campania.). This phenomenon happens there because organized criminality put their hands on government contracts and bribes the government inspectors.

In this way organized criminality deals two important damages: it steals government money and it dramatically decreases life quality of the people living in those regions. For example, people from Calabria use to move to other regions when they need health treatments.

Disclosure: I'm Italian.

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I saw the same thing when working at the docks in Melbourne (forklift driver for 6 months). The check-in had a few cards for people who I had never met, but we're on my schedule (less than 50-100 onsite per day and I was involved in warehouse organisation which required me to pass out location sheets to other drivers).

Eventually I got to speaking with the site manager and I mentioned in passing the cards. He clammed up immediately and I shrugged it off.

A few months later after I left, the manager and I were having a beer and grouching about that site and he told me that those cards were for the local .. well mafia for lack of a better word. They were clocked in by a senior member every day, and clocked out at the end, the pay cheques were sent off and as a result we never had any break ins.

Crazy.

It opened my eyes up a lot and over the years since then I have seen similar things in a few other industries, eg in Japan and hospitality we had a very friendly grandpa style gentleman visit the restaurant once a month, hand over a receipt to the manager and she paid him some cash. Turns out he was Yakuza and that was our payment for the month

That sounds the same setup as Nice Guy Eddie has in Reservoir Dogs. Probably you don't want to meet the people who had those cards as they might have a penchant for chopping people's ears off and setting them on fire.

Fascinating. I didn't realize the Mafia was still around until reading your comment.

After rabbitholing for a bit I realize now that they are still very much around.

They remind me of the Mexican Cartels a little bit.

Please also remember that the mafia is just one of the big organized crimes in Italy.

We have whole criminal families and such, "cosa nostra", "'ndrangeta" and many more:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organized_crime_in_Italy

Unfortunately they are all very much still alive, and I am pretty sure a lot of those are older than Italy

Wow! It's so involved and deep!

Feels like I'm reading a technical manual on organized crime.

Any idea why Italy is so susceptible to this compared to the rest of Europe? Or is the Italian version just glamourized by the media more?

Mexican cartels kind of make sense being the gate way for drugs from South America to the U.S.

Does Italy serve a similar function for Europe maybe?

(not parent but also Italian)

First of all, Italy is a profoundly divided country geographically, to the point where the North and the South are almost operating as if they were different countries. Specifically, there are regions with unemployment numbers that are almost unbelivable for a first-world country: https://www.statista.com/statistics/778264/unemployment-rate.... The "Southern Question" ("questione meridionale") is a recurrent theme in the political discourse and has been so literally since Italy has been a country.

The lack of economic development in the South is also compounded by a very ineffective national welfare system, and, more generally, by an incredibly inefficient but very large public sector.

This is a hotbed for organized criminal associations, who are always ready to prey on corrupt local officials and widespread discontent.

Also bear in mind that the average Italian company is much smaller than the average American (or even German or French) company, which (aside from being in and of itself an economic problem) makes criminal schemes easier to set in motion, either directly or through corrupt politicians.

Another major issue is that criminal organizations have deep ties with the political power itself, to the point where such ties are referred to as "a pact": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-Mafia_Pact

As for the media issue, it's probably true that we know more about the Italian mafia due to its ties with American criminal organizations, but I don't feel one could say it's just media coverage, it's a massive problem, at least when compared with other European countries.

Sorry it's come to my attention that I can come across sarcastic and snarky without meaning too. Just for clarity I was genuine in my previous comment. :)

Why no radical approach has been taken to fix it?

It is not so easy, even to explain. Many books have been written about organized criminality in Italy and many have to be written yet. Consider that Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian Mafia) at the beginning of '90 had so much power that managed to start a negotiation with high functionaries of the Italian government about which laws could pass and which not (la "Trattativa Stato-Mafia", the "State-Mafia Pact"). In those regions, Italian government and organized criminality have been the same thing for a lot of time. Would you fight yourself?

Also, let me add that a radical approach had been taken by two judges, Falcone and Borsellino. They almost destroyed Cosa Nostra, at the cost of their own lives. They have been both murdered by Cosa Nostra, along with their security, in the 1992. For the curious, this is the wiki page of the State-Mafia Pact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-Mafia_Pact

Why is it called Mafia if it functions similar to the state? What would happen if Sicily was given independence?

Well, for example it can be countered by offering all young men from these regions jobs outside. For example, in the military, creating a large mobile military force recruited from these regions for operations in say, Afghanistan, offering them good pay and discouraging them from returning - and encouraging people from other regions or countries moving in their place (for example by lowering barrier of entry for immigrants as long as they are going there, or increasing otherwise) - until "locals" become a minority and their social connection networks disrupts or become irrelevant.

This mafia thing is definitely cultural - "it is the way things are done there" - so it can be fixed by replacing/diluting people.

>Well, for example it can be countered by offering all young men from these regions jobs outside. For example, in the military, creating a large mobile military force recruited from these regions for operations in say, Afghanistan, offering them good pay and discouraging them from returning - and encouraging people from other regions or countries moving in their place

So, striping the place from its inhabitans, sending them to imperialist wars to be killed and kill, and bringing people from other countries to take their place?

Keeping the mafia sounds better than this scheme. Why not buldoze their houses and kill every first born while at it?

>This mafia thing is definitely cultural - "it is the way things are done there" - so it can be fixed by replacing/diluting people.

Yeah, like any cultural problem can be fixed by nuking a region.

>So, striping the place from its inhabitans, sending them to imperialist wars to be killed and kill, and bringing people from other countries to take their place?

Not to mention that training people as soldiers to keep them out of organized crime sounds like a method primed to backfire when they leave the service and filter back to their homes and old ways of life, now complete with military training?

What else do you suggest? Analysis of cell phone movements + drones has been tried in other environments and success record is mixed. It does scare people but hardly fixes things.

A lot of studies show that people very rarely change their beliefs - like very few people even in the U.S. changed from Republican to Democratic or back - states changed their colours mostly due to demographic changes - red and blue population had different age breakdown, birth and death rates, and different migration/naturalisation patterns which mostly determine changes in voting outcomes. This is even more true in case of such much much deeper rooted thing like this one. It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people (well you can, but it's called brainwashing and is illegal everywhere but maybe North Korea), so have to replace people.

Mafia isn't about people being literally forced to do something with the fear or death - such an approach totally doesn't scale, even Sicily is not a Nazi death camp. It's about deeply rooted tradition to say, "respect your village elders" and "don't put your family to shame by exposing issues". And people don't even realise they have those beliefs, everyone taken separately just acts "normally", letting the whole society be exploited. Just reducing proportion of people having these beliefs in the first place - to some percentage giving "herd immunity" from them because these informal links need to be able to sufficiently propagate - solve the problem.

>It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people (well you can, but it's called brainwashing and is illegal everywhere but maybe North Korea), so have to replace people.

That is social engineering (not the security term, the historical), and is associated with the worst totalitarianism (closely related to genocide and ethnocide). At the very least it's Machiavellian. And it's even more illegal than brainwashing!

This "solution" sees the population from outside, as assets to be replaced, manipulated, etc to solve an abstract problem.

But the problem is not "how to have Calabria without mafia" (that has several trivial solutions, from the suggested population replacement to nuking the area to a totalitarian government that maintains absolute control against the mafia).

The problem is rather, "how the population of Calabria can get rid of mafia".

In other words, e.g. Calabria is not just a named piece of land (for someone to rule as they see fit and do whatever to it, including removing the population) - it's first and foremost population and a culture.

If the culture can't change easily (or at all), tough luck. But replacement of the population is not a solution (at least not this side of Stalin).

Well the problem is cultural. As i said, mafia doesn't exist because of some "boss" scares everyone into obedience, but because whole local culture is permeating it. If the culture is no longer shared by majority of people, mafia turns into just a sort of crime, and then it can be tackled by policing alone, as it was successfully done with Italian mafia in the U.S. (although not without some trial and error).

What's bad about getting to that point by mixing/diluting the population?

Back to ethnic cleansing, i think categorically criticising it is an utter hypocrisy. All stable European states are products of ethnic cleansing done at some point. And while it is ancient history for Western Europe, in case of Central and Eastern Europe e.g. Poland, Germany, Czechia, Slovakia, Austria, Hungary, it was done after 1945, mostly by decisions pushed by U.S. itself. Ethnic cleansing is good for everyone as long as it's done without too much violence. Middle East is just an example of region where formation of ethnic nationalities - process that predates ethnic cleansing - is not yet complete. There is little else fundamentally broken about Middle East - apart from territories being fragmented sometimes down to village level onto fractions of population divided by ethnic, religious and political lines with and hating each other - a process which must eventually result in some of them being butchered and others amalgamating into nations, divided by political borders and united by... something better than just force. In a piece of land where people who have nothing in common have to coexist, there is either a brutal dictatorship coercing them into bearing with each other, or unlimited all-on-all bloodshed (see pre-2011 and post-2011 Syria). Nothing can fix it apart from thorough ethnic cleansing.

Example of reverse is Poland. There is very little which could shake this country, so united in single culture, single ethnicity and single religion. It totally wasn't that way before post-1945 population transfers (ethnic cleansing).

> Example of reverse is Poland. There is very little which could shake this country, so united in single culture, single ethnicity and single religion. It totally wasn't that way before post-1945 population transfers (ethnic cleansing).

There are two Polands since at least 2015. The right-winged, covertly pro-Russian, nationalist Poland, and the pro-EU Poland. The ruling party is using divide&conquer strategy on its own people (as opposed to on enemies, as practiced by ancient Romans).

Isn't this what a well-functioning democracy supposed to be? And, you can't be a Catholic and pro-Russian at same time.

>And, you can't be a Catholic and pro-Russian at same time.

You'd be surprised...

> And, you can't be a Catholic and pro-Russian at same time.

It's more being anti-EU than pro-Russian, but the geopolitics of Poland are brutal enough that these are both almost one and the same. And being a Catholic, at least of the variety we have here, pretty much requires you to be anti-EU. The effect is that, the warlike rethoric notwisthstanding, the right-wing Catholic nationalists are working hard to benefit Russia. I think this is where the word "covertly" comes from in the GP.

That's fine. It's the same as to say, claim that Brexiters are "covertly pro-Russian", and it's fine when half the people are against EU, coz if everyone was thinking the same, it's same as no one thinking at all.

Great Britain is an island. It's not between Germany and Russia. If you're a country between powerful neighbors with history of waging wars on you, you either need to be very powerful, or you need an alliance. Poland is far from powerful. It's not going to get powerful in the foreseeable future. Therefore it needs an alliance.

1. Polarization among politicians is normal. Political polarization in the society, where family members often don't talk to each other because of opposing political views, is very unhealthy. Most people on either side of the political divide don't read each others' media. People don't disagree, people hate each other.

2. Of course you can. Church hierarchs in Poland are very conservative and often pro-Russian.

https://arbinfo.pl/skad-arcybiskup-jedraszewski-wzial-pomysl...

  * 2007 - "Homosexuality - the plague of 21 century", a conference in Sankt Petersburg, Russia, attended by Protoiereus Aleksandr Grigoriew
  * 2012 - patriarch Ciril (former KGB agent, codename: Michajłow/Mikhailov) meets Polish archbishop Józef Michalik
  * 2013 - Polish Church starts a campaign against "gender", by the Russian playbook.
  * 2015 - archbishop Jędraszewski uses the word "plague" to describe homosexuals, women, and the liberal left.
  * 2019 - the archbishop calls the LGBT movement "plague".

Tadeusz Rydzyk has been running a pro-Russian "catholic" radio station for a few decades now. The initial 10000 Swiss franks for the radio mast came from a mystic (Vassula Ryden) who keeps saying Russia will be elevated by God and will rule other nations. Russian diplomats showed up on the radio's 8th anniversary. The radio has transmitters in Ural and operates on frequencies used by the Russian army. Tadeusz Rydzyk is de facto the head of Polish Church. Rydzyk is notorious for criticizing the West.

Grzegorz Rzeczkowski has recently written a book "Katastrofa Posmoleńska", about how the plane crash in 2010 was used to sow dissent and divide. One of the major points of contention was a catholic cross illegally placed in front of the presidential palace to honor the dead. There were pilgrimages, pious crowds, angry people insulting the new president, etc.

Ordo Iuris is a para-legal branch of the Brasilian sect TFP. It successfully campaigns for strict law based on catholic orthodoxy - for example abortion punishable with jail, next up: no divorces. Attorney General Zbigniew Ziobro supports it. It has support from other politicians, like Grzegorz Braun and Krzysztof Bosak (his wife is in OI). That it's not "real" catholicism doesn't matter, because the society at large can't tell the difference. The resemblance is where their power comes from.

Also, the whole Konfederacja Targowicka was highly conservative, nationalist, catholic and pro-Russian. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Targowica_Confederation

"Some nations have benefited from ethnic cleansing, so it's impossible to say if it's bad or not"

You comment and line of reasoning is nothing short of pathetic.

> It's obvious: you have a cultural problem, and you can't change people... so have to replace people.

This makes no sense at all. The government exists to serve those people who are getting replaced, so if you fix their problems by replacing them then nothing has actually been solved. You’re putting the importance of the government and the region over the people which is backwards.

> Why no radical approach has been taken to fix it?

And then you go on to suggest what amounts to barely obfuscated ethnic cleansing. Radical indeed.

To be fair, you're not the first to suggest methods like that. Soviet population transfer comes to mind. Not that I condone such measures. I find them quite revolting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Population_transfer_in_the_Sov...

Yup, this has happened over and over again throughout history. More recently with Stalin, with Han Chinese, in the Balkans, etc.

But also in Medieval times and many centuries before. E.g when Sweden gained control over Scania (Southern tip of today's Sweden) from Denmark in the 17th century they relocated a lot of native Swedes into that area to pacify the population. (I may need to reference this, I am only remembering school history classes...)

All to establish control, though we see it sometimes does quite the opposite. Though I would also think some of it is natural migration. So not always forced, but probably "encouraged".

Though always more when borders have changed. Not to combat an internal "culture"/crime problem.

That will only work for a short time. Those young men will still have their grandfathers' rich Sicilian blood coursing through their veins. When they return home - and they will - armed with military training and experience, and with all the fury one might reasonably expect of a young man witnessing the deliberate genocide of his people, there will be hell to pay.

The demographic replacement across Europe is progressing very well, I think it would be a mistake to train and incite young European men in any way. Patience is key now. Shalom.

Whoever tries to undermine the actions of the mob is next in line for a tragic accident.

In a way, it's a coordination problem. If everyone outside of the mob were to unite at once against them, the mob wouldn't stand a chance. But that's not how activism works.

> If everyone [outside of the mob] were to unite at once

That's basically how the mafia works

Because it's almost certainly not as simple and unambigious as he's claiming.

Everyone in NYC thinks they know all the ways they can fix Buffalo

>Everyone in NYC thinks they know all the ways they can fix Buffalo

Why would NYC try to solve Buffalo's problems? Isn't that the job of the Buffalo municipal government and state government in Albany?

>> Everyone in NYC thinks they know all the ways they can fix Buffalo

This sentence intrigued me, but as a life long Californian I wasn't sure what you meant.

While technically in the same state Buffalo, NY is a city on the Canadian border that is farther away from NYC than Washington D.C. is. As a new yorker, I can safely say my fellow new yorkers can't honestly pretend to know how to tackle what issues Buffalo might be facing.

I assume the meant Albany - as in everyone in NYC thinks they know how to fix the state government. Or maybe there is a huge mob presence in Bufallo?

If you want to go down a rabbit hole you should read about the recent Italian trial of ~300 mobsters. IIRC they have something like 800 witnesses scheduled to appear and they had to build a special courtroom to hold everyone. One of the accused was in hiding and police only located him after finding his cooking channel on YouTube.

Unfortunately English-language reporting is pretty light on the details presented in court but here are two articles to get you started.

About the trial: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-55633091

About the prosecutor: https://www.independent.co.uk/independentpremium/mafia-trial...

I guess the system is tugging away at it and trying to fix corruption. Italy has the strictest approach to organized crime in Europe. So the government tries to go at it with lots of resources.

This court proceeding for example was the result of a raid where 2500 police officiers participated (and years of work).

See for example https://www.theguardian.com/world/2021/jan/13/italy-mafia-tr...

It's hard to do something about an org that is everywhere in the world.

Mussolini cracked down on organized crime pretty hard. But he didn’t completely wipe them out, and so when WW2 rolls along and the Allies are invading Italy, they actually get in contact with the surviving mafiosi and cut a deal with them to gather intelligence and organize resistance against the fascist state. This sort of thing continued after the war because the Mafia are also reliably anti-communist.

So yeah—a radical approach was taken to fix it, and then organized crime was reinstalled by the OSS and the CIA.

I think the mafia is overhyped and an easy way of keeping up the fiction of a clear separation between good and bad, citizens and criminals, oppressed and oppressors.

In this specific case, there is no need whatsoever for the threatening employee to be part of a criminal association. In a land where many people have little to lose and are, by culture, prone to up their threats until they have their way, victims are afraid of refusing their requests. This in turn further encourages the behaviour. The issue, more than the power of the mafia, is the weakness of the state: extremely slow, sloppy and reluctant in prosecuting crime (big or small), very quick in pardoning convicted criminals.

(Italian here, too)

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