Overview

For decades, the Mafia served as the dominant symbol of criminal power: visible, territorial, hierarchical, and culturally identifiable. It provided a reassuring narrative-an enemy with a name, a face, and a mythology. Yet focusing on this image has obscured a deeper transformation. The most effective forms of criminal domination today no longer resemble the mafias of the twentieth century. After the Mafia offers a rigorous analysis of organized crime as a system of power, not as folklore or spectacle. Using the Italian Mafia as a historical case study, the book examines how criminal organizations emerged where States failed to provide protection, order, and economic stability, and how they governed through a combination of violence, familiarity, and social embeddedness. But this book goes further. It argues that traditional mafias are aging not simply because of repression, but because identity itself has become a liability. In a world shaped by globalization, digitalization, and financial abstraction, criminal power no longer depends on territory, ritual, or lineage. It operates through infrastructures rather than communities, through opacity rather than force, and through modular networks rather than stable organizations. Contemporary crime is increasingly anonymous, transactional, and integrated into legal and institutional grey zones. It exploits regulatory complexity, fragmented jurisdictions, financial secrecy, and social vulnerability. Violence remains present, but it is no longer central. Visibility is replaced by deniability. Rejecting cinematic myths and comforting narratives, this essay shows why societies continue to misunderstand crime by fighting outdated enemies, while leaving new criminal systems largely untouched. The real danger lies not in what is hidden, but in what has become ordinary and therefore invisible. Written in a clear, sober style and grounded in established facts, judicial records, and social analysis, After the Mafia challenges readers to rethink criminal power beyond identity, mythology, and spectacle. This is not a book about gangsters. It is a book about power-how it mutates, how it hides, and why it remains so difficult to confront once it no longer has a face.

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