ABSTRACT
Some construction and factory workers would play their special talents in order to find their place among America’s universe of celebrities. As third-generation Italian Americans, the people knowledge of the Mafia was always second-hand and at times almost folkloric. In the early years of the twentieth century, however, the Mafia was mainly thought of as something that mainly afflicted Italians in their own community. It could be argued that Italians, rather than importing an organized crime structure from Sicily, Naples, and Calabria, imported a certain cultural complex that included a distinctive mode of masculinity—Mafia, Camorra, ‘Ndrangheta, respectively—and crime. Likewise, cops and politicians had to be paid off in Italy as well as in the United States, so some degree of infiltrating both law enforcement and political structures always existed with organized crime—in both Italy and America.
