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...

Jeff Nadu recently contacted us about this story, and we're working on a follow-up. 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 ...

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...