ABSTRACT
The American organized crime is a subtle and complex cultural phenomenon, a staple of the collective unconscious formed and reformed through the fictive personalities of film and television stars, their creators and real–life imitators. This approach and explicit in a number of studies whose thrust is policy development is the idea that organized crime is a monolithic alien conspiracy. The point, then, is that American organized crime is the product of deep contradictions in American culture which are surely analogous to the contradictions responsible for the emergence and endurance of Mafia in Sicilian history. The critical sense that Chambliss has in a sense rediscovered already has had a major impact in a closely related field: the study of the Mafia phenomenon within the context of Italian/Sicilian history. The “real choice”, therefore, “is between explicit history, based on a careful examination of the sources, and implicit history, rooted in ideological preconceptions and uncritical acceptance of local mythology”.
