In Australia, believe it or not, me have a "mafia", that is, organized criminals of Italian descent. The vast majority of migrant Italians in Australia being from Calabria (there are Napolitan,Sicilian and various Northerners, of course, but the bulk are Calabrese) the exported society is the N'drangheta, the Calabrian mafia.
There are many accounts of poor migrants being kept in poverty for decades through scams perpetrated by the local mobsters: google Maario Condello of Australia, this dirt-bag kept immigrant families poor fo decades by exploiting the ignorance of immigrant farmers, amongst his myriad other schemes. By flat out lieing to the people that depended on him (those that couldnt speak English and were still distrustful of government authority) about the value of their crops (he would sell at a much higher price than he let on), and by basically ripping of other elderly Italians that would come to him for help (one story has him conning an elderly Italian widower into selling his $300 000 property to him for $50 000.)
Italian produce-sellers in The Victorian Markets (the biggest produce market in the Australian state of Victoria) paid extortion money to the Italian syndicates for the right to set up shop and sell there produce for decades, well into the late 90's and still going on today by some accounts.
In America, the whole Black Hand saga was almost exclusively targeted at migrant Italians. And do you think the mafiosi who controlled the waterfront jobs, especially in the early days, really cared whether the labour they were exploiting came from an Italian or an Irishman?
Even in the real early days, the early 20th and late 19th century, there are people being murdered and extorted.
Sure they went after the rich, but the poor were targets as well if they failed their aquiesce to demands. Everyone paid the pizzo, from the buthchers to the beggars. A really good book on those early days: The HIstory of Cosa Nostra by John Dickie. Traces the earliest days of the Sicilian mafia through to today.
