Membership in the Italian Mafia, aka La Cosa Nostra, is said to have dropped from 5,000 to 3,500 over the past few years. Attorney General Eric Holder's 2011 historic roundup of members of New York's 'Five Families' (Bonanno, Colombo, Gambino, Genovese and Luchese). The law seems more adept at catching these criminals, and a slew of high-profile indictments have made headlines - beginning with the famous cases brought by Manhattan attorneys Rudolph Giuliani in the 1980s and Robert Morgenthau in the 1990s, and leading up to former U.S. In the digital age, cash businesses are more transparent, which makes it harder to strong-arm the competition. Waste management, for example, has become so strongly tied to organized crime that in some parts of the country the term 'sanitation crew' might as well be synonymous with 'the mob.'Įven as mob types have gained higher profiles on TV and in movies, there's still the perception that the actual mob is less present or relevant than it was in the past. The Mafia favors unregulated or cash-based businesses that require the strength and stomach to do things members of polite society avoid. Organized criminals have long invested in legitimate business as both a base of operations and a means of laundering money from illegal activities such as drug trafficking, weapons dealing, prostitution, smuggling, counterfeiting and robbery.

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