Resource Analysis 2

Italian Organized Crime: Overview by the FBI

On their website, the FBI gives an overview of how the Sicilian mafia infiltrated the United States and established its own separate faction, La Cosa Nostra. Although the article is more of a history lesson, it is obvious that the FBI is attempting to calm any worried readers that they are carefully monitoring the organized crime scene in the United States. Despite their attempts, they manage to paint a picture of La Cosa Nostra in blood. The tangled chain of succession, wrought with murder and backstabbing, is carefully laid out, as is the condensed list of all the criminal activities La Cosa Nostra has been linked to. The FBI’s thesis is simple, “Since their appearance in the 1880s, the Italian criminal societies known as the Mafia have infiltrated the social and economic fabric of Italy and now impact the world. They are some of the most notorious and widespread of all criminal societies” (1). This is fairly self-explanatory warning as well as a statement of fact. As for the information being correct or not, all the information seems to correspond to my own research and I believe it to all be accurate. If it were not accurate, it would not be a very good testament to the FBI, nor to the United States federal government. Back to the point, I agree with their thesis, La Cosa Nostra are dangerous and do, in fact, threaten both social and economic aspects of American life, and, based upon the number of arrests in the 1990s, the FBI is on top of the situation.