The Dark Mafia

This book explores how organized crime has adapted and evolved in sync with ever-expanding technologies to update its popular image and to conduct its covert operations. It shows how organized crime operates in dark virtual spaces and how it can now form a dynamic interactive system with legitimate online spaces, solidifying its criminal exploits and resources, and making them attractive to a new generation of computer users. Focusing on Italian Mafias, Russian and Georgian criminal groups and drug cartels, and Asian crime syndicates such as Yakuza and Triads, this book aims to describe and explain the reasons behind the continuity of online and offline crime, taking into consideration whether or not internet culture has radically changed the way we perceive organized crime and if so how, and thus how the shift in popular imagery that the internet has brought about affects its actual illegal activities. We also consider how organized crime has shifted its locale from the physical to the virtual, how cybercrime has allowed criminal organizations to adapt and reinvent themselves, and how the police now use technology against organized crime.

To better understand the new generation of criminals, it is becoming increasingly urgent to understand the latest technologies and how criminals utilize them. The Dark Mafia is an engaging and accessible introduction to understanding virtual organized crime. It will appeal to students and scholars of criminology, sociology, policing, and all those interested in the digital age of organized crime.

Author Biography

Antonio Nicaso is an internationally recognized organized crime expert, who has published more than 40 books on Mafia and Mafia-like criminal organizations, including Bad Blood, which inspired a major television series. He teaches Social History of Organized Crime and Mafia Culture and the Power of Symbols, Rituals and Myth at Queen’s University, Canada.

Marcel Danesi is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at the University of Toronto, where he taught a course on Forensic Semiotics for many years. He has authored Organized Crime: A Cultural Introduction (Routledge, 2021) along with Antonio Nicaso.