Sicilian Mafia

The Mafia is a criminal syndicate that emerged in the mid 19th century in Sicily. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct. Each group, known as a "family", "clan", or "cosca", claims sovereignty over a territory in which it operates its rackets – usually a town or village or a neighbourhood (borgata) of a larger city.

Offshoots of the Mafia emerged in the United States during the late 19th century following waves of Italian emigration (see American Mafia) but also in Canada and Australia.The term "Mafia" is also employed to name Mafia-type organizations operating under a similar structure, whether Sicilian or not; such as the Camorra (from Campania), the 'Ndrangheta (from Calabria), the Stidda (Southern Sicily) or the Sacra Corona Unita (from Apulia), as well as foreign organized crime groups.

However, Giovanni Falcone, the anti-Mafia judge who was killed by the Mafia, objected to the inflation of the use of "Mafia" to organized crime in general: "While there was a time when people were reluctant to pronounce the word 'Mafia,' … nowadays people have gone so far in the opposite direction that it has become an overused term … I am no longer willing to accept the habit of speaking of the Mafia in descriptive and all-inclusive terms that make it possible to stack up phenomena that are indeed related to the field of organized crime but that have little or nothing in common with the Mafia."

According to the most commonly accepted definition, Mafia corresponds to the regional criminality of Sicily.