The Sicilian Mafia - Life Inside Cosa Nostra - World Documentaries

The Sicilian Mafia, additionally called Cosa Nostra ("Our Thing"), is a criminal distribute in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal teams that share a common business framework and code of conduct, and whose core tasks are security racketeering and the adjudication of disagreements in the black market. Each group, referred to as a "family", "clan", or "cosca", declares sovereignty over a region, generally a community or village or a neighbourhood (borgata) of a larger city, where it runs its rackets. Its members call themselves "guys of honour", although the general public often describes them as "mafiosi".
The American Mafia arose from offshoots of the Mafia that emerged in the United States during the late nineteenth century, following waves of emigration from Italy. There were similar spin-offs in Canada amongst Italian Canadians. The same has been claimed of organised criminal offense amongst Italians in Australia.
Modern scholars think that the Mafia's seeds were planted in the upheaval of Sicily's transition from feudalism start in 1812 and its later annexation by mainland Italy in 1860. Under feudalism, the nobility had a lot of the land and applied order via their private armies. After 1812, the feudal barons progressively sold or rented their lands to private citizens. Primogeniture was abolished, land could not be seized to resolve financial obligations, and one fifth of the land was to end up being private property of the peasants. After Italy annexed Sicily in 1860, it redistributed a big share of public and church land to private residents. The result was a huge boom in landowners: from 2,000 in 1812 to 20,000 by 1861. The nobles also released their private militaries to let the state take control of the task of police. The authorities were incapable of properly implementing home rights and contracts, mainly due to their lack of experience with totally free market capitalism. Lack of manpower was also a problem: there were often much less than 350 active policemen for the whole island.