How the Mafia Made Things Worse ... and Better?
Concrete Evidence (December 29, 2025)
Welcome to the inter-holiday edition of Concrete Evidence, my last words of 2025. There’s no better time to talk about Mafia violence!
A new paper from Bocconi University’s BAFFI Centre explores what happened in America when Mussolini cracked down on the mob in the mid-1920s. The dictator turned loose the “Iron Prefect,” Cesare Mori, for a military campaign against Mafia strongholds on the island of Sicily. Many gangsters fled to the states to see if, perchance, there might be some criminal opportunities available during our Prohibition era.
These folks largely wound up in enclaves seeded by previous waves of immigration—not just from Italy or even Sicily in general, but from the specific places Mori targeted for enforcement. This abrupt change, concentrated in a very particular set of places, allows the researchers to see what a sudden influx of criminality does to a community. The upshot is that these “Mori enclaves” suffered in the short run—but over time rebounded and even thrived.
The authors painstakingly assembled numerous data sources, aided by the fact that old records don’t have the same privacy protections as new ones. They use full-count, de-anonymized data from the 1920 to 1940 censuses. These can tell them that, for example, 22-year-old future mob boss Joe Magliocco lived at 646 Union St. in Brooklyn in 1920. They also have Social Security death records, Bureau of Narcotics files revealing the names of Mafia members and associated businesses, old redlining maps, current-century data on how neighborhoods are faring, and some other odds and ends like Ellis Island manifests and detailed Chicago homicide records.
What happens when the mob shows up? Unsurprisingly, a lot of things get worse.
Folks from these Mori enclaves were more likely to respond to the 1940 census from prison, relative to those from other Sicilian neighborhoods (who’d had similar incarceration trends previously). Homicide rates went up in Chicago Mori enclaves, relative to other Chicago neighborhoods that’d had similar trends previously. Redlining is infamous for its impact on black neighborhoods, but Italian neighborhoods with lots of mob activity were also frowned upon: “Mori neighborhoods were about 40 percent more likely to be redlined than other areas, even when compared to neighborhoods with similar shares of Italian and Sicilian immigrants.”
However, despite the redlining, homeownership in these places rose starting in the 1930s. In the 21st century, people from Mori enclaves have had better economic outcomes than people born elsewhere in the same cities, even after accounting for neighborhoods’ overall Italian and Sicilian immigration levels.
Could the mob presence have actually strengthened these communities over the long run? The authors suggest the “patterns may reflect the reinvestment of illicit profits into local assets and the emergence of informal credit and enforcement arrangements that partially substituted for formal financial institutions.”
I’m skeptical, though it’s certainly interesting that Mori neighborhoods eventually not only matched, but outperformed, what you might expect from an Italian neighborhood otherwise.
Other Work of Note
How biased are the people who review academic papers against younger scholars and those from less prestigious universities?
What types of evidence does the Economic Report of the President rely on?
Prosecutors who are just starting out, who are Democrats, or who previously worked on the defense side are more likely to endorse “color-conscious” as opposed to race-neutral views.
Forecasting investment in data centers.
“Opportunity Zones” seem to move jobs more than create them.
Police “bias units” seem to increase hate-crime reporting.
Higher-income parents are more likely to take advantage of school choice when it’s available.
Cautionary notes about studies that rely on random placement “into groups such as schools or regions to estimate the effects of group-level variables on these individuals.”
See y’all in 2026.