Last week, Italian police arrested the leader of Italy's richest mafia, even though you may not have heard of the Ndrangheta family, whose annual income is estimated to be three percent of Italy's GDP. Some may argue that mafia exist only in reruns of Godfather movies, but organized global crime has brought them huge benefits and has had a huge impact. So how big is the mafia, and who are its main members?
The Japanese Mafia is widely regarded as the most powerful gang group in the world, especially the Yamaguchi group before World War II. It is said to have more than 35,000 members and 24 groups earn about $80 billion a year. Like other gangs, they run gambling, prostitution, kidnapping, and of course, the most important drugs. Allegedly 35 percent of their income comes from the Drug Trade in Japan. On the 22nd, the U.S. government sanctioned the leaders of the Yamaguchi Group as part of the U.S. crackdown on transnational crime, including sanctions against other powerful international criminal gangs.
In Russia, a relatively young mafia born in the 1980s known as the Sontsevskaya Brotherhood is considered the most dangerous and massive of Russia's countless gangs, with thousands of members. Formed by the riots of the post-Soviet criminal oligarchs, the Brotherhood was influential by virtue of its ties to the top echelons of the government. A WikiLeaks document shows that they are even protected by the Russian Federal Security Service, and their income comes mainly from loan sharks, drugs and car theft.
The most famous mafia is the Sicily cosa nostra, and despite their fame, most of their leaders are in prisons and suspicious members are closely monitored. Thus, by the 1990s, much of COSA Nostra's ties had been transferred to the Ndrangheta family, including their sprawling drug trade. Today's ndrangheta controls 80 percent of Europe's cocaine imports, and a 2013 crime investigation estimated that Italy's mafia made a total of $33 billion in revenue. According to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, in 2009, the revenue from transnational crime totaled $1 trillion, or 1.5 percent of global GDP. There are many active and interconnected mafia organizations in the world, with different classes, different levels of influence, and different responses to crises.