MAFIA

A wide-ranging history of wannabe Corleones and other kindred criminals.

Blame some of it on The Godfather: When Francis Ford Coppola’s film version of Mario Puzo’s novel landed in Turkey, gangsters came to be called baba. Local terms meaning “Godfather” spread as “shorthand for crime lords and sinister political bosses in countries worldwide”—even though, historian Gingeras points out, there really wasn’t an equivalent for the Mafia in many places where some version now thrives, such as India and Nigeria. Mafias, Gingeras posits, have a political component as much as an economic one, and though the origins of the Sicilian Mafia as a folk form of resistance to foreign domination has been romanticized, “mafiosi are born into worlds shaped by the states that govern them.” Gingeras considers organized crime in the larger context of brigandry, banditry, and piracy, which flourished in states and regions that were economically backward—and whose populace the ruling elites tended to view with disdain. Yet modern Mafias flourish wherever there is a demand for prostitutes, drugs, gambling, and booze, vices that are, of course, widespread. Granted, “card sharks, pimps and lotus eaters did not necessarily leave bloodied corpses behind,” but such nastiness is a hallmark of the mob in whatever form it takes, from the murderous Kray brothers of England to the Japanese gangster Kinosuke Ozu, a pioneer of the modern yakuza who bragged that he once “took a meat cleaver to a boy and nearly sliced him to death.” Whether inspired by Hollywood (or Bollywood) or not, modern Mafias exist just about everywhere, Gingeras writes, in Chechnya and Albania and Alabama. But then, he notes, it’s a lawless world out there: “What, after all, do you call a state or corporation engaged in organized criminal activity?” In that regard, the Russian Mafia, the Colombian drug cartels, and the Irish Republican Army all seem of a piece.

A revealing study of organized crime and its many forms.