Scene from Alien Girl (2010).
“Mafia is not a Russian word,” retorted Putin, in a brusque exchange with Italian journalists questioning him on the rule of law in Russia in 2000.
View it as a forceful reframe or a case of aggrieved butthurt as you wish, but he has a point. Despite the comparisons made between them, there are in fact very few intersectionalities between the Sicilian Mafia (Cosa Nostra) and its less well known cousins such as the Calabrian Ndrangheta and the Apulian Sacra Corona, and the amorphous network that has come to be known as the “Russian” mafia, or Bratva (“brotherhood”).
I.
The Cosa Nostra is extremely hierarchic, whereas the Bratva is far more “horizontal.” To be sure, it has its pakhan equivalent to Italian and Italian-American godfathers/bosses, and its avtoritety (“authorities”) that correlate to caporegimes. But that is where the similaries end. The Cosa Nostra clans are strongly familial, territorial, and substantially hereditary (though more so in the US than in Italy itself). This directly extends to the name of their basic organizational unit: The family. Membership in most Sicilian families is limited to men of Sicilian ancestry or even specific regional ties or bloodline associations. There are formal initiation rites involving symbolic blood sacrifice (a pinprick to draw out blood and splatter on an icon, which is then burnt, with the promise that the initiate will likewise burn in hell should he betray the oath of omerta).
The Russian mafia is completely different, even in etymology. It is not a “family” but a “brotherhood.” And a brotherhood not in any literal blood sense, but in a way that evokes associations with a “fraternity,” or a “band of brothers.” Organization is strongly hierarchic, as is the case in every strongly masculine institution from the army to the priesthood, but the direct control the pakhan exercises over matters such as personnel policy is far more limited relative to the godfather. They are highly decentralized, with the constituent “brigades” operating largely independently of each other. There are no particularly elaborate initiation rituals; instead, a vor’s (thief’s) position in the criminal pecking order can be gauged by his associates through an elaborate system of tattoos that can be studiously analyzed and decoded by the brothers in bathhouses, in prison showers during the vor’s periodic spells of incarceration, and during card games many of which are played while topless. After all, if you don’t have blood ties, you need to be able to recognize your own through other means.
By far the most striking difference is that the “Russian” mafia is strongly multiethnic. It has its origins in the heavily Jewish port city of Odessa in Tsarist times, which originated most of the criminal argot known as fenya, or blatnoy language. (The term “blat” itself is a Yiddish one which has transmigrated to denote the whole concept of crony connections, kickbacks, favors, etc. that have its parallels in what we might know as an old boy network in the Anglo-Saxon West (but more overtly criminal) or guanxi in China (but less overtly nepotistic). The world of blat and of the vor are not the same thing, but they do intersect quite heavily – many businessmen and politicians associate with them out of the pursuit of advantage or just plain necessity).
Fast forwarding to the 21st century, some of the most prominent Russian mafia bosses of recent years were the Kurdish Aslan Usoyan (“Grandpa Hassan”), assassinated in January 2013 by a competing kingpin rumored to be either the Georgian Tariel Oniani or the Azeri Rovshan Janiev. In the US, they had their counterparts in the Evsey Agron and Boris Goldberg; the heavily Jewish nature of the Russian mafia in the US was made clear in the 2005 movie Lord of War. Though it is necessarily incomplete, what statistical evidence exists indicates that ethnic minorities, especially the Caucasians, are so massively overrepresented in the ranks of the Russian mafia that ethnic Slavs are a minority within it. As such, the Bratva is a highly multiethnic and universalistic organized criminal group.
The traditional Italian mafia is an organic part of its community, with no restrictions on conventional employment to its “associates.” In contrast, one of the core “vorovskie ponytie” (thief understandings) is that it is forbidden to pursue legitimate employment. Another such “understanding” is that the thief is to take no wife and father no children (though as in the Night’s Watch, having a woman or even many women is just fine). There are of course no such restrictions in the Cosa Nostra. As Don Corleone informs us, a man who doesn’t spend time with his family can never be a real man.
Speaking of women, they are very rare but not completely unheard of in both organizations. However, in the Italian mafia, they are almost invariably related by blood to senior figures within the organization and typically only come to play a role when their male relatives die, go to prison, or are otherwise incapacitated in some way. Within the Russian mafia, they are just another crewmember, possibly an unreliable one; one of the first songs in the Soviet criminal chanson genre was about a “murka” who betrayed her crewmates to the Cheka and got paid with lead for it.
One point of similarity is that both organizations are highly antithetical with respect to nationalism: The Russian mafia because of its “multinational” nature and ingrained aversion to authority, and the Italian mafia because of its strongly familial and regionalistic nature. The Cosa Nostra hated Mussolini, and even helped the Allies take southern Italy. However, some forms of organized crime group, which we will soon come to, are far more conductive to nationalism than others.
So what you have then in the Russian mafia is a far more amorphous, globalist, and literally “rootless cosmopolitan” structure relative to the far more grounded and blood-knit Italian mafias.
”The problem is in the definition,” said Pino Arlacchi, an expert on the Italian mafia and a former Italian senator who heads the United Nations’ Office for Drug Control and Crime Prevention. ”When you go to court, you have to be able to define what the mafia is. In Italy, we discovered that there was a formal structure, with a very precise division of roles, and formal system for joining. In Russia you don’t have that.”
This accords with the opinion of Giovanni Falcone, the famous Sicilian prosecutor assassinated by his quarry in 1992:
Even if the Russian mafia (and those of the other countries of the ex-Soviet bloc) do pose serious problems… in the East an organization comparable to Cosa Nostra does not exist. Without doubt the collapse of state and ideological structures will inevitably cause a growth in illegal traficking and criminality, but the criminal organizations of the ex-Soviet Union, for the moment, are above all a phenomenon of generalized adminstrative corruption. There is no sense in calling something a Mafia when it is not…
II.
But why these differences?
Many people and even criminologists would say “culture” and leave it at that. But as the HBDsphere constantly asks, “Where does culture come from?”
Ultimately, it comes from the family.
(1) Here is Emmanuel Todd’s map of Europe’s traditional family systems:
Emmanuel Todd’s European family systems. Link to best intro to this topic.
(2) hbd*chick on the viscosity of different family systems:
and some populations are more viscous than others:
1) inbreeding populations where close relatives marry frequently over the long-term. mating with relatives must be highly viscous [insert sweaty/sticky incest joke here]. not only do the individual members of the population likely interact fairly regularly (can depend on your mating pattern), they pass many of the genes they share in common on to the next generations — who then also interact and mate. that’s what i call viscous! and, as you all know by now, some human populations inbreed more than others, and some have been doing so for longer than others. and vice versa. (see: entire blog.)
2) populations where extended families are the norm. societies where two or three generations of families all stay together, work together, play together. viscous. plenty of opportunity for nepotistic behaviors to be selected for. on the other hand, societies of nuclear families where more distant relatives are seen only once a year on thanksgiving, and then only to argue, and where your your heir is your pet cat…not very viscous. (see: family types and the selection for nepotistic altruism.)
3) socio-economic systems which push for close relatives to remain together rather than dispersing. if that sounds vague, that’s ’cause it is. sorry. i haven’t thought through it all yet. i do have an example of the opposite for you — a socio-economic system which pushed for close relatives to disperse — and that is the post-manorialism one of northwest europe. already by the 1500s, it was typical for individuals in northwest europe to leave home at a young age (as teenagers) and live and work elsewhere — often quite long distances away (several towns over) — before marrying. then it was not unusual for them to marry someone from their new locale. not viscous. conversely, many societies outside of the hajnal line (northwest europe) have had systems which encouraged the opposite.
There is a vast body of literature – very helpfully summarized and interpreted by several bloggers, most prominently hbd*chick – on traditional family systems before industrialization. In short, more “introspective” family systems – that is, ones characterized by greater degrees of inbreeding and clannishness (not necessarily the same thing) – tend to produce more in the way of corruption and less in the way of civic virtue, even after adjusting for IQ (which also tends to suffer).
The Arabs, for instance, are an extreme case – more than a millennium of widespread FBD (father’s brother’s daughter) marriage has brought their levels of average IQ down to close to Sub-Saharan African levels. Even where inbreeding doesn’t have a direct effect, clannish dysgenics might have selected against intelligence (though considering that the communitarian family is humanity’s “default,” it’s perhaps more accurate to speak of merely the absence of nuclear or authoritarian family eugenics).
But inbreeding is unlikely to have inflicted much of an IQ hit on either South Italians/Christian Mediterraneans or Russians/Eurasians directly. First cousin marriage was the exception rather than the rule in the former (just as in pre-Meiji Japan), and virtually completely absent in the latter.
That said, this doesn’t exclude the appearance of particular cultural peculiarities.
With the extended schemata recently proposed by hbd*chick quoted above, it strikes me that South Italians would fall fall into Category 3 with considerable overlap with Category 1, while Russians would fall heavily into both Category 2 and Category 3 but largely avoid Category 1.
This is confirmed by a later post by hbd*chick herself:
so, again, i think there are at least three things to juggle in our heads here when thinking about possible selection pressures for nepotistic (or or not-so-nepostistic) altruism, all having to do with the “viscosity” of populations: 1) inbreeding, 2) family types, and 3) the forces socio-economic systems exert on familial relationships. for more than the last thousand years, northwestern european pops have had low inbreeding, small family types, and societal pressures which have pulled apart related individuals (those pressures increased over the period). eastern european pops have probably had higher inbreeding for some or all of this time period (although nothing on the scale of the arab world), large family types, and not very many social or economic pressures for family member to disperse. the mediterranean world, aside from the large islands mentioned by kaser above, has had higher inbreeding rates than northwestern europe (especially southern italy), small family types (at least, small residential family types), but few pressures for close family to separate much.
III.
Organized criminal groups tend to hew to conservative social mores and act as repositories of tradition.
They are the distillation of the essence of a national culture.
And isn’t it striking that the heavily regionalistic and nepotistic nature of the Cosa Nostra is perfectly synced with the traditional family system of Southern Italy, which combined conjugal autonomy, modest degrees of inbreeding, and a strong regionalistic focus?
In contrast, the strongly exogamous communitarian family system of Russia is, in crime as in politics, authoritarian but strongly universalistic.
Incidentally, while the Russian mafia has little in common with the Sicilian Mafia and its American offshoots, that is not the case with respect to the Camorra, or Neopolitan mafia:
Of Italy’s other regional crime groups, the Camorra in Naples is the most anarchic, a loose band of gangs whose penetration into local society has been more difficult to root out. According to Mr. Arlaachi, Russian organized crime is closer in kind to the Neapolitan version, although even in Naples, he conceded, the Neapolitans abide by rules that the Russians routinely ignore.
By its very essence, the Russian version of the mafia defies the Italian definition of a secret society, which until recently protected itself by a wall of silence. Here there is no oath of silence, or ”omerta,” as the Sicilians call it. Instead, crime groups have an open-door policy that over the last 10 years has been wide enough to let in a large swath of society, willingly and unwillingly, from policemen to bankers, from politicians to industrialists.
The region of Campania from which it hails had a historically lower rate of consanguineous marriage than either Sicily (Mafia) or Calabria (Ndrangheta), with their far more restrictive entrance policies.
Consanguinity rate in Italy, 1930-1964.
Midway between Sicily/Calabria and Hajnal Northern Italy, it is also organizationally midway between the Sicilian Mafia and the Russian mafia.
And lo and behold! Unlike the Sicilian mafia, who disapprove of them, the Neapolitan mafia sure do love their tattoos! And their card games!
IV.
Apart from the patriarchal clans of Sicily and Calabria, and the horizontal networks formed in the cosmopolitan seaports of Naples and Odessa, perhaps the most culturally distinctive criminal underworld is that of the Japanese yakuza.
The yakuza are far less familial than the Sicilians; its structure resembles that the traditional oyabun-kobun (FOSTER parent – FOSTER child) model. Most of the kobun are drawn from low caste and “outcast” backgrounds, such as the burakumin; ethnic Koreans, who are marginalized in Japanese society, are strongly overrepresented (0.5% of the population; 20% of the top bosses in the early 1990s). Traditional folklore features many stories of orphans getting accepted by the yakuza.
Predictably enough, the yakuza take their tattoos to the max; they are not just a veritable book of symbols testifying to a rich criminal history, as with the Russian and Neapolitan mafia, but veritable full body ink suits.
And they love their cards so much that the yakuza are named after a particular hand in a card game, which they play without their shirts on:
The nickname for the worst hand in oicho-kabu—an eight, a nine and a three—is phonetically expressed as “ya-ku-za” and is the origin of the Japanese word for “gangster,” yakuza.
However, unlike the Russian mafia, the yakuza are extremely hierarchical; the oyabun holds unquestioned authority, instead of being sustained by (ever treacherously shifting degrees of) respect as in the Russian mafia. Rank and file relationships are defined in terms of brotherhood; but unlike with the Bratva, there are explicit designations for “elder” and “younger” brothers.
The yakuza are also strongly “rooted” in their communities, even to the extent of helping with earthquake and tsunami relief. The police famously know the locations of the main yakuza HQs and maintain good relations with them on the “understanding” that they don’t make too much of a mess and help them keep other roach infestations down. In contrast, the Russian “vorovskie ponytie” precludes any form of cooperation with the authorities or participation in the white market economy, and relations between the state and organized crime relations are, as in Italy and the US, strongly antagonistic (rhetoric from some quarters about their supposed “merger” to the contrary).
Thanks to this transparency, it is possible to maintain a much more accurate tally of the number of yakuza members than for almost any other criminal grouping (there are around 100,000 of them, if you’re curious).
Moreover, this symbiotic relationship has deep roots, from Tokugawa times when oyabun were granted the right to wear a wakizashi (short sword) – a right otherwise reserved for the nobility – to their close cooperation with and intermingling with the ultranationalist factions during the 1930s.
So, in short, with the yakuza you have: Top down authoritarian control, inegalitarian brotherhood, regional rootedness, nationalism, and a penchant for cooperative relationships with the official authorities.
What does this remind you of? The authoritarian/stem family type characterized by paternal authority, unequal inheritance, and a tendency towards social democratic and fascist governments upon its breakdown – and which also happens to be the family type characteristic of traditional Japan!
V.
So what sort of organized crime group corresponds to the last of the major family types: The traditional Anglo-Saxon absolute nuclear family?
Characterized as it is by autonomy, decentralization, a tendency towards Christianity, patriotism, capitalism, and “libertarianism”?
Proud and iconic products of American civilization – Hells Angels are almost as much a staple of global popular culture as the Sicilian mafia, the Russian mafia, and the yakuza – the biker culture ironically enjoyed its biggest political success upon migrating to Russia, where “The Surgeon” – the leader of the Night Wolves biker gang – has become a regular guest at convocations of the Russian elites thanks to his expert geopolitical trolling of Europe.
(The communitarian family had broken down in Russia two or three generations ago, so presumably by the 1990s there was no presumably no longer any substantial cultural barrier to such an assimilation).
But now the political winds are shifting in their homeland, and the bikers are gonna help make America great again!
Explaining everything by family structure is a bit like Freudians connecting individual personality with toilet training, or vulgar Marxists saying literary genres are determined by class relationships. The results are less impressive on closer inspection than at first glance.
Incidentally, if you read Todd and his great predecessor Gustave Le Play, you will be surprised at how little of value the former added.
The Chicago branch of Cosa Nostra (“The Outfit”) has long been known for being unusually multi-ethnic for a “Mafia” group. They even had an ethnic Japanese member:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chicago_Outfit
Great piece.
Here as some remarks I have.
What verb is that.
There we are, with your customary anti-Semetic Neo-Nazist hyper-fascist mega-racist ultraWhite remark. I’ll report this to someone, though I haven’t resolved if to the SPLC, AIPAC, or ADL. Maybe I should report it to the three of them altogether.
Another word I don’t know 😀
Well, that was the only interval of years in the history of Italy the Cosa Nostra (and the other South-Italy regional associations) lost their rule over the territory.
Another period od hatred was in the early 90s, when two heroes like Falcone and Borsellino, plus somebody else within the deep state, had decided to break the ever-in-place Mafia-State gentleman agreement.
Some bombs placed in sensitive famous spots in Northern Italy and a little blackmailing brought things to their natural course within the time of 4-5 years.
Some silly one could surmise the family structure comes from culture.
And indeed, the low IQ of Mongoloids and Ashkenazi is notorious. Or have they interbred a lot over the last centuries?
This inbreeding-low-IQ matter is controversial.
(Could their writing system, far more brain-taxing than Western ones, have helped Mongoloid peoples IQ get and stay high?)
“A” and “o” aren’t even close to each other in the keyboard.
And now the guy got his surname changed in the blink of an eye (it was “Arlacchi” some lines above).
Yes, they are far away from one another, culture-wise. The Campanian fall on the show off side, while in Calabria discretion and reservation are important, and in Sicily they are about the foremost virtue.
Then “Yakuza” must not be a self-given name, or they wouldn’t have picked the worst hand’s.
As I said, in Italy criminal organizations co-operate deeply with state authorities in running government of “their” regions. And the police knows the location of the main Mafia HQs very well. They also know with good precision the amount of mafia in each region.
Mafia doesn’t “participate in” white market economy: it embodies the larger part of it in the South.
You can’t conceive of a mega-store, or a factory they aren’t involved in.
This should have said of Southern Italy too. Women used to cover all their hair whenever exiting their home up to the 1940s, and many Muslim-type habits and rules applying to women were respect, although, of course, there was no Islam.
Shouldn’t we re-read a piece before publishing?
But firstly… what’s to define biker groups as criminal organizations? What if they sue you? lol.
predecessor Gustave Le Play
Frédéric Le Play? I was just googling.
with your customary anti-Semetic Neo-Nazist hyper-fascist mega-racist ultraWhite remark.
What do you mean by this? Are you making the subtle suggestion that AK is [[[ ]]]?
Organized crime in the Russian-speaking world is a multiethnic phenomenon, but are the individual crews multiethnic? I don’t know, but I’d be surprised if they were. The situation where there would be separate Chechen, Jewish, Russian, Georgian, etc. crews (or whatever they call themsleves) would be less surprising to me.
Did you mean anti-Semitic?
I think many of them are.
At least amongst the more “cosmopolitan” nationalities (e.g., Georgians, Russians, Jews). I have no “ins” with the criminal underworld, but my impression is that the more clannish types like Chechens and Dags do tend to keep to their own.
Thanks for the corrections.
Its not controversial, its as good as an established fact. However, it only has a really substantial (direct) effect on IQ when its between first cousins, especially father’s brother’s daughter type cousins.
Sure – there are articles and reports every so often where the various Italian mafias are estimated to control such and such a percentage (typically very high) of Italian and especially South Italian GDP. They are very much “pillars of the community.”
ROLF!!
Interesting post. It always gets on my nerves when Americans refer to FSU organized crime as the “Russian mafia”. They’re almost always not Russian and hardly resemble a mafia. Furthermore, the massive transitions of the 90s led to an over emphasis on organized crime’s role in society. For one thing, there was still the stigma that anyone who was making money was a criminal. Also, laws were chaotic and contradictory, to the extent that one had to break them in order to conduct any business enterprise. Like in the late 19th and early 20th century US, the line between robber baron and mafia boss was a fine one.
I was friendly with some fellas from the Solntsevo group back in the day and even got to meet one of their “vor v zakone” once. I didn’t ask to see his tattoos, nor would I have been able to interpret them anyway, but I’m pretty sure he was the real deal. this was over 15 years ago and even then he was in his mid-fifties, so with full Soviet era cred. They were normal people to socialize with, though I would never want to have any business-type dealings with them. I found them pretty interesting from a sociological standpoint.
Yup. And the level of it is measurable via RoH. Ashkenazi Jews or Japanese have nothing on Saudis, South Koreans don’t stand out at all. Some Middle Eastern Jewish groups or smaller East Asian or Native American groups are a different story.
Duplicate from another thread:
AFAIK, there are different groups of Jews in Israel:
*) Ashkenazi, Sefardi, Mizrahi, …(who else? Bombay Jews ?)
**) Lubavichs; Hasids; secular of various degrees; … .
By the way, who are Hareds ?
Each of the groups has its own “median IQ and Standard Deviation of IQ”.
What are the data ?
And what is the correlation with fertility rate ?
I thought Semion Mogilevich was still the top man, when I lived in Moscow I once got a lift with his right hand man Igor. One big car with one big driver.
Sorry for the lapsus. Even Homer nods, so how much more yours truly.
Todd’s characterisation of different European family structures 1500-1900 is gross, simplistic and often downright wrong. For example, Todd postulates the preponderance of the European stem family in this period in Wales, N W England and S W Scotland. The European stem family presupposes a peasant form of economy. There is no such evidence of a peasant economy for these areas during this period. I could continue, but the list would be long and most readers would find it boring.
Todd strikes me as the sort of Historian who uses Social Anthropological and Sociological material to make sweeping formulations. Unfortunately, his grasp of the material is faulty and the formulations are therefore flawed.
Memo to young Mr Karlin. I do like the general nature of your work. But please read much more about pre-industrial societies, particularly rural society. Not every pre-industrial society was a peasant society. Indeed, the Industrial Revolution developed first in a country without peasants.
There’s some kind of problem with Craig Willy’s site at the moment, so here’s the archived version of his intro to European family systems:
https://web.archive.org/web/20160616190603/http://www.craigwilly.info/2013/07/07/emmanuel-todds-linvention-de-leurope-a-critical-summary/
Interesting post, thank you!
Speaking of cultures & patterns of life in international context: http://www.worldvaluessurvey.org/WVSContents.jsp
Criminal organizations are like all other human organizations – they are accretions of adaptations to the environment in which the humans have been resident. In that regard, criminal organizations are fine expressions of unconventional warfare of sorts. For example…
In an environment in which the all-powerful state is pervasive and suffocating, a highly decentralized organizational structure with absolute ban on cooperation with the said state or, indeed, any legitimate business is very much conducive to survival.
However, in an anarchic environment with minimal state, there are disadvantages to decentralization, such as lack of scale that leads to lower capacity for sustained combat power. So small gangs with disparate purposes tend not to survive well in such an environment. Meanwhile…
In a world without a center, a large family affords continuity, stability, and protection. It can become the nucleus of a large and powerful force that can dominate others. Indeed that organization can sometimes become the (feudal) state itself if only regionally.
In high population density environments with a strong center, but without a suffocating surveillance and policing structure, neither a large organic family nor decentralization is optimal. A large organic family with means of violence tends to attract attention of the normally “hands-off” state as a rival (and is usually crushed) while decentralization does not take enough advantage of the absent policing structure or provide local point of arbitration for disputes. Here, as in other high density urban environments, constructed (or ersatz) family structure that cooperates with the center enjoys advantages. It maintains the local law and order as a subcontractor, extracts rent at the margins (without becoming an alarming presence for the state), and enjoys certain immunities while serving as a deterrent against social disruption (e.g. labor protests or communist agitation).
Great read, I completely agree about the national/regional character aspect. What is Mogilevitch up to these days? Coincidentally I’m watching Eastern Promises at the moment, it doesn’t gloss over thee multiethnic nature of the “Russian” mafia as some films do, but maybe they went overboard: there doesn’t seem to be one Russia-speaking actor among the cast!
Very interesting piece, Anatoly.
I only have a few related points to contribute.
Unlike the other groups (at least the ‘Russian’ and possibly the Neapolitan, you didn’t specify if the tatoos of the latter have specific meanings re. criminal activity), Yakuza tatoos are at least almost purely decorative.
The tatooing also bars them from most public baths and all swimming pools in particular. The latter is no big loss for them, Japan isn’t much of a swimming country, despite the efforts and money that lead to Olympic and other medals.
Skins considered to be particularly well decorated are also collected, although I haven’t seen publications featuring that lately (except second-hand), they may have been suppressed. I doubt that the practice has.
Overseas, I had a couple of Western bike gang friends, one himself a talented tatooist as well, before he became a member (after I’d left). Again, it is purely decorative.
I now avoid a bar run by Philippinos in Tokyo, where the tatoos on the nasty staff were clearly coded records of affilation, crimes, and times locked up.
If we are to believe the Oliver Stone Scarface, the same was true of some Cuban crims cleverly unleashed on the US by Castro in response to the foolish demand of Reagan. I believe it, because I saw clear examples of the same thing on Philippinos at that bar.
Wonder if similar customs exist in Sth. and Central America?
Cuba may somehow have adopted it from the USSR (Solzhenitzyn writes about it from his time in the Gulags, though a means of transmission is hard to imagine), but not the Philippines.
I have no tatoos, and I hate Western middle- and upper-class tribal tatoos.
Was first cousin marriage in Sicily really over 40%? Or is it cousin marriage, including second cousin marriages and other similar cases of consanguinity? (Like for example marrying the first cousin’s daughter – closer than second cousin, but more distant than first cousin.)
I read somewhere before that it was hovering around 10% in the early 20th century. Now it’s quite a shock to learn that it was over 40% as late as the middle of the century…
Italian crime Mafia only lives in Hollywood movies. It had long been taken over by the RUSSIAN-ISRAEL crime Mafia.
http://kennysideshow.blogspot.ca/2008/07/russian-israeli-mafiamccain-clinton.html
Is the floor laughing while you roll on it? Did you mean ROFL perhaps?
http://www.internetslang.com/ROFL-meaning-definition.asp
Very informative, cheers. I knew about the Sicilians but the structure of the Broderbund groups was news to me.
Your suggestion that marriages of first cousins where the connection is through father and his brother are worse for IQ suppression than others makes me ask: is this an established scientific finding and is it because of the difference between Y chromosome and X in completeness or whatever it is? Is this kind of cousinage accordingly more damaging for boys than girls?
hbdchick explains it here and here.
Those are associates, not Made Men i.e. full members of the mafia family. You have to be Italian to be a Made Man in the Outfit.
Thanks: interesting.
A very good comparative review of the Hollywood epic The Godfather, the Italian epic La Piovra and the Russian epic Brigada. Though it remains a mystery for me, why the author claims he has made a comparative analysis of various organized crime groups, because as the author has said himself in the comments he has “no ins” and just knows (as again the author once said) “anecdotes and rhetoric” about the subject. However, I’ve never been against good anecdotes or in this case retelling of anecdotes, so the text has its own merits.
Anatoly,
With mixed-race individuals or populations, would the prediction just be that your family structure would fall somewhere on a spectrum between the original two?
Like do African Americans with their Euro admixture show trends towards Euro-style relationships compared to African immigrants to the west, for instance?
Mount & Blade is one of my favorite games too.
It is interesting that criminal slang in Russia and Poland is full of yiddish words. The contribution of Jewish culture to the criminal underworld has not been sufficiently covered (for obvious reasons). But when one scans 19 century and early 20 century criminal columns in newspapers of Europe and America one can see how disproportionately Jews were overrepresented in criminal activities.
No that’s not how it works.
The “traditional” family structure is just that – the family structure that is predominant in a given society’s or culture’s traditional, pre-industrial phase.
In practice, industrialization has almost everywhere (with the major exception of Islam) meant the breakdown of the traditional family structure and its replacement by the absolute nuclear family.
(Todd explicitly makes the point that 20th century ideologies arose not as a result of family structures in and of themselevs but as a result of their breakdown).
To answer your specific question, two people who marry across cultures/races will today almost inevitably adopt the absolute nuclear family.
An interesting piece with a last-minute lateral pass from the quarterback to the League of Women Voters.
All that to make an ultra-contorted point that bikers are going to help Trump?
And that’s not a photo of any bad-ass Bandidos or Hell’s Angels but rather of two bikers who are probably programmers or accountants during the week.
“Fenya” was not originally a criminal argщt and has тo Odessan-connections. It’s lingo of wandering traders known as ofyeni.