ABSTRACT
Among the oldest and best-known criminal organizations are the Italian organized crime groups – the Sicilian Mafia, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta, and the Neapolitan Camorra. This chapter deals with how they originated, what their constitution (structural and symbolic) tells us about organized crime in general, and what their predecessors were, including piracy and banditry. It was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that the first legends and myths emerged about these groups, based partly on fiction and in part on historical events. However, the direct ancestors of the Italian Mafias are not known with any degree of certainty; it is likely that they descended from various bandit gangs who opportunely took advantage of social and political conditions. The starting point for tracing the origins of modern-day criminal organizations is in these gangs, which emerged on the basis of a “Robin-Hood principle,” whereby they presented themselves as serving common people, against the corrupt status quo, while their real goal was to extort them and gain control over the governance of their territories.
