Mafia

Sicilian in origin, roughly two centuries old, and built into something recognisably modern by Italian immigration to America and then Prohibition. It's the youngest of the world's three major crime syndicates by a wide margin: a fifth the age of the Triads and half the age of the Yakuza. Hollywood and twentieth-century American primacy made it the most famous organized crime in the world, which was never the same thing as the most powerful.

It isn't, and hasn't been for a long time. Distrustful of magic and metahumanity, still organized along ethnic lines the rest of the underworld has moved past, it's a second-tier power at best today. Europe is where what's left of its strength actually lives; in North America it has spent decades losing ground, mostly to the Yakuza and to homegrown rivals neither of the other two syndicates ever had to contend with.

What the crew knows#

• Reputation outruns reach. The Mafia gets the movies; the Triads and Yakuza get the actual market share.
• It lost its grip on the California drug trade generations before the Awakening ever mattered to anybody, and nothing since has given it back.
• What's left in North America is mostly legacy footprint rather than growth: old relationships and old territory, not new ones.
• The one piece of old ground that never fully let go is Hollywood's own labor side. Real-world organized crime ran the stagehand and projectionist unions for a generation, from Prohibition into the postwar years, and extorted the studios through the threat of a strike rather than through a gun. What survives of that here is thin and quiet, but it's specifically here, in this industry, rather than anywhere else in the city.
• What it actually trades in now is BTL chips, not the old vice list. The Mafia holds stakes in ordinary entertainment and pharmaceutical corporations, the kind of legitimate business a family can sit inside quietly, and diverts product out the back rather than running its own labs. It moves more in BTLs today than in any drug it used to run.

Standing with the crew#

Neutral. Nobody has done business with the Mafia yet, on either side of the law, except for whatever Johnny Shoe Shiner sells Vinnie.