Breaking Omertà: Comparing North American Legal Strategies Against Italian Organized Crime

Abstract

Organized crime groups, including the Italian mafia, or Cosa Nostra, have long reigned over the public consciousness. While works like The Godfather, The Sopranos, and Goodfellas present a romanticized version of organized crime, the reality is and was far bleaker, especially for Italian Americans. Americans of all ethnicities had to contend with the effects of organized crime in everyday life, including high rates of violence and crime. Among these residents, however, Italian Americans, most of whom were Sicilian or Southern Italian in origin, were particularly likely to be victims of Cosa Nostra because of their proximity to mafia territories. Additionally, membership in Cosa Nostra became unfairly associated with all Italian Americans, leading to increasingly horrendous discrimination against the group.1 This discrimination included, for example, such hyperbolic claims as “murder is the foundation stone of the social fabric in Sicily.”2 For these reasons, but especially high crime rates and violence, decreasing the power of Italian organized crime groups became a government priority in the mid to late 1900s. This paper examines the methods employed in Canada and the United States to combat Italian organized crime, arguing that the American Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) framework has been substantially more effective than Canada's current approach. First, it outlines efforts to combat Cosa Nostra in the United States, with particular attention paid to the effectiveness of the RICO Act. Then, it shifts focus to Canada and illuminates the issues that the government experiences in taking down the ‘Ndrangheta. Through this comparison, the paper concludes that the United States, under RICO, is more effective than the Canadian system, primarily because of the United States’s more limited personal privacy protections. It will make recommendations to improve the Canadian system, including allowing the convictions of criminals based on association with an organized crime group.