Cosa Nostra News

By  Giovanni Mastrobuoni ,  University of Essex ;  Nadia Campaniello ,  University of Essex , and  Rowena Gray ,  University of California, Merced When it comes to education, you may not think of a mobster or gang member as top of the class, but it turns out that even criminals benefit from more time spent at school. Did college help don Michael Corleone become a better criminal? Facebook/TheGodfather Our 2017 study , which used a unique sample from the Italian American mafia, shows that mobsters who began their working lives in the 1930s made significant financial gains from extra years of schooling. We found that a mobster who completed just one extra year of education could increase earnings by around 8% on average . Of course, mobsters by their very definition are high level, well connected members of complex criminal organisations – that mimic the structure of a large corporation . And in the 1940s, th...

By  Gianmarco Daniele , Bocconi University The arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro, one of Sicily’s most infamous mafia bosses, has reminded many Italians of the extreme violence he was associated with when operating as a leading figure of Cosa Nostra.  "Diabolik." Denaro appears to belong to another time – when the mafia brutally killed at will. And it is indeed true that the period of extreme violence with which he is associated has been confined to the past. But that does not in any way mean Italy’s organised crime groups have disappeared in the 30 years Denaro has been in hiding – they’ve just had a rethink about how they operate. The Italian mafia has drastically reduced the number of homicides it carries out. Violence is now used in a much more strategic and less visible way. Rather than bloody and conspicuous murders, the modern mafia intimidates with crimes that are less likely to be reported to the police – such as arson and physical assault or sending threats. Mur...

The following is about podcasting feuds between former members of organized crime and how these feuds sometimes create unlikely alliances because the enemy of my enemy is my friend. We received emails from a couple of sources alerting us to the existence of Jeff Nadu last year. Who is Jeff Nadu? Jeff Nadu, host of The Sitdown with Jeff Nadu. (Source: Vendetta Sports Media .) He launched The Sitdown with Jeff Nadu podcast a couple of years ago. Another guy doing another mob podcast. There's a million of them, and many of them are done by former wiseguys and associates. Nadu is neither but seems to be holding his own. His podcasts are generating tens of thousands of hits, with some getting views in the hundreds of thousands.  We've listened to a handful and liked them, and we emailed Jeff and told him so. His "about" section offers the following: Jeff Nadu is an American Mafia and organized crime researcher, podcaster and content creator. He has worked at Barstool Sport...

By George Anastasia , Adjunct Professor of Law and Justice Studies, Rowan University The bloody mob war that is the focus of the 2025 Netflix series “ Mob War: Philadelphia vs. The Mafia ,” is full of the murder and mayhem, treachery and deceit that have been the hallmarks of the nation’s  Cosa Nostra  family conflicts. Former mob boss John Stanfa, pictured here in 1980, waged a bloody war for control of the Philadelphia mafia in the late 1990s. Bettmann via Getty Images What was different in Philadelphia was that the FBI had it all wired for sound. Electronic surveillance has been a major tool in the government’s highly successful war against the Mafia nationwide, but nowhere has its impact been felt more dramatically than in Philadelphia . As a reporter for The Philadelphia Inquirer, I covered this mob war in real time from 1994 through 2000. Now I teach a course at Rowan University on the history of organized crime, using the...

David Schoen, one of the attorneys who helped President Donald Trump win an acquittal following his  second impeachment trial—for inciting an insurrection at the Capitol on January 6—is representing, pro bono, former Colombo mobsters Michael Sessa and Victor (Little Vic) Orena, who have been sitting in prison cells for more than three decades thanks to crimes committed during the third Colombo war, which left 12 dead and dozens wounded in the early 1990s. Vic Orena, former Colombo acting boss. Schoen wrote a letter seeking pardons or commuted sentences for Orena and Sessa, which he sent to Trump on Christmas Eve. So far, the President hasn’t responded. Orena, 91, the former Colombo acting boss who had visions of making his position official and who is today wheelchair-bound and suffering from dementia, among other ailments, was convicted in 1992 of nine counts, including the murder of Thomas Ocera and conspiracy to murder members of the “Persico faction ” of the Colombo family. He...

A senior organized crime prosecutor once said that the Bonanno family’s idea of a meeting was to “sit around in a circle and shoot at each other.” While he was thinking of Bonanno family history circa the 1960s and 1970s, we couldn’t help but recall that quote—and the sentiment around it—when word of recent family unrest reached us. Mikey Nose, the recent prison years. Believe it nor not, it involves Operation Southern Spear, the US military’s campaign in the Caribbean to annihilate drug-smuggling boats to stop a perceived flow of illegal drugs into this country from Venezuela. The military has so far conducted at least 29 strikes since September 2, killing at least 105 individuals.  The Trump Administration and the Pentagon have presented no public evidence to support their drug trafficking assertions. In fact, Operation Southern Spear is most likely a “false flag” operation—the real goal of which is regime change in Venezuela, not destroying drug trafficking. It’s also been ...