Sicilians and other Italians began immigrating to the United States in the 1800s, but a major wave of them arrived on American shores early in the 20th century. While the vast majority of them worked hard at building a new life for their family through legal means, some of them brought the ways of the Sicilian Mafia with them.

The first major Mafia incident occurred in New Orleans in the 1890s. A Sicilian crime family was pressured by the local chief of police, who was then murdered. When the mobsters were tried, they bribed witnesses and were acquitted. Anti-Italian fervor erupted, and a lynch mob went to the jailhouse. The mob shot or hanged 16 men.

Mafia families spread through the country in the first half of the 20th century, emanating from New York City, where five families vied for control. The era of Prohibition poured vast amounts of money into Mafia coffers as they sold illegal alcohol in speakeasies around the country. Their power during this period grew exponentially, and wars between the families broke out. There was an epidemic of Mafia violence in the early 1930s -- bosses and underbosses were assassinated regularly, with few bosses ruling their families for more than a few months before they got killed. The Luchese family went through three or four bosses in 1930 alone.

In the middle of this bloodbath (and helping to orchestrate much of it) was a mobster named Charles "Lucky" Luciano.
Luciano attained a position of great power throughout La Cosa Nostra, and he threw his support behind an idea that had been floating around for some time -- the formation of a multi-family commission that would approve Mafia activities nationwide.
The Commission
A meeting in Chicago cemented the formation of a multi-family Mafia committee. The seven-member Commission was initially made up of bosses from the five New York families along with Al Capone from Chicago and Stefano Maggaddino of the Buffalo family. The Commission members acted like senators for other families, bringing their concerns to the attention of the rest of the Commission. For example, the families in cities on the west coast were almost all represented by the Chicago boss. Large scale money-making activities, as well as murders and kidnappings, had to be approved by the Commission. Commission membership was determined at national Mafia meetings that were held every five years.

One of these meetings was the scene of a famous event in Mafia history -- the Apalachin Raid. On November 14, 1957, bosses (dons) from across the country met at a tiny town in New York State, near the Pennsylvania border. A suspicious state trooper led the raid and brought 58 mobsters into the spotlight -- and in many cases, brought them to trial. While the raid struck a serious blow to the Mafia, it had a more profound effect. The American public could no longer deny that the Mafia existed.

Since its formation, the Commission has shrunk -- some families have fallen out of power and no longer send representatives. Today, it is rumored to still exist, but mainly on the east coast, and it is nowhere near as powerful as it was in Lucky Luciano's day.
Vegas and the Mafia
La Cosa Nostra had always been involved in gambling, from numbers games to sports betting. They operated luxurious, illegal casinos through the United States, bribing local police officers to look the other way. When Nevada legalized gambling in 1931, mobsters were not the first ones to see the opportunity. The famous Strip was already developing, and a few fancy hotel/casinos were already in place by the time the Mafia arrived.
When they did arrive, it wasn't the usual suspects. Instead, many of the early Vegas casinos were financed by Jewish mobsters like Bugsy Siegel and Meyer Lansky. It cost a lot of money to build casinos, and these men offered shady loans to prospective developers. Some of these loans happened out in the open, with the mob-controlled Teamsters union using its pension fund to finance casino and hotel construction projects. This stopped in 1975, when federal officials took notice. Casinos generate huge profits on their own, so it didn't take much creativity on the part of the wiseguys to figure out a way to get their cut. They skimmed cash from casinos they partly owned or simply extorted payoffs from casino managers. Many mob bosses were "business partners" with casino owners, whether the owners wanted them as partners or not.

Since the 1970s, the government has been very strict about keeping the mob out of the Vegas casinos. Today, it is believed that the major casinos are not influenced by the Mafia, and any hint of an organized crime connection is enough for a casino to lose its gambling license.
Fighting the Mafia: Law
One of the government's most important tools in the fight against organized crime is RICO. RICO isn't a mob informant -- it's a law, the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, Title 18, United States Code, Sections 1961-1968. It was passed in 1970 specifically to help fight the Mafia. It does this by allowing prosecutors to go after entire organizations. Racketeering (a crime that was invented with the law and is based on the word for Mafia schemes, or "rackets") is making money through an unlawful enterprise that shows a pattern of such illegal moneymaking activity.
Almost any felony falls under racketeering; two or more such crimes must take place with a 15-year period for a conviction to occur. The result is extra jail time if multiple crimes are committed in pursuit of the same general scheme -- that is, bribing a union representative, murdering an uncooperative business owner and extorting money from construction contractors add up to racketeering, a designation that adds decades to the bribery, murder and extortion sentences. Furthermore, members of the criminal enterprise can be prosecuted for racketeering even if they weren't specifically involved in individual crimes. This removed one of the most common defense tactics of Mafia dons -- sending low-level criminals to commit the actual crimes so they could never be prosecuted.

Today, RICO has been used by civil attorneys to get large lawsuit awards from corporations and other groups and is used less and less against organized crime.
Fighting the Mafia: Undercover
For legal officials to arrest and prosecute organized criminals, they need to find out what's going on in the organization. They can bust drug dealers or truck hijackers, but the family will just find new ones. They need to reach the top to really crack a family. And the best way to do that is by sending someone into the family undercover.

An FBI agent working undercover as a mob associate is an incredibly dangerous job. This is the life that FBI agent Joseph Pistone led for six years, working deep undercover as mob associate Donnie Brasco.
In an interview for the Web site Mafia-International.com, Pistone described how he became an undercover agent:

      I grew up around wiseguys on the streets of Paterson, New Jersey, but I never got involved with them. I always worked all kinds of blue-collar jobs: in construction, in bars, driving tractor trailers. So before I went to college, I saw a lot of things and learned a lot. My first government job was with the Office of Naval Intelligence, investigating drug, theft, and espionage cases. I passed the FBI's entrance exams and became a special agent in 1969. Because of my background and training it became clear that my specialty was undercover.

Pistone was so effective that even when the operation put dozens of mobsters behind bars, his Mafia friends still thought he was a mobster-turned-informant, rather than an actual FBI agent. His story was made into the film "Donnie Brasco."

Undercover work continues to be an important part of the FBI's fight against the mob. A sting orchestrated by an undercover agent in Cleveland netted more than 40 corrupt cops in 1998. However, you will never hear of most undercover work -- the very nature of the job means that undercover agents use assumed names, refuse to be photographed and hide their very existence from the public eye.
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