Combating organised crime in Italy : the effects of EU membership

Abstract

My dissertation is going to be focused on organised crime in Italy, mainly the Mafia also known as Casa Nostra. Since their appearance in the mid 1800s, Italian organised crime and criminal organisations have infiltrated the social and economic life of many regions in South Italy, the Sicilian Mafia being one of the most notorious criminal organisations. It later expanded also in some foreign countries including the United States. Organised crime In Italy changes names depending on which city we are talking about. There is the Mafia in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria and the Sacra Corona Unita (SCU-Sacred United Crown) in Puglia. Yet, in North America, the 'mafia' often refers to Italian organised crime in general, rather than just traditional Sicilian organised crime. According to historian Paolo Pezzino: "The Mafia is a kind of organised crime being active not only in several illegal fields, but also tending to exercise sovereignty functions - normally belonging to public authorities - over a specific territory... " In a very general sense, the mafia is a manner of how the South gets back from the North, what the latter has took from it from L'Unita' d'Italia up until today. It is an illegal reaction to another 'not-so-legal' reaction.