I would be glad to, first of all I highly suggest the book Cosa Nostra: A History Of The Sicilian Mafia by John Dickie, you can find it by clicking here. That book contains all of the facts I state hear on this board. According to the book, the Mafia was originally created by Sicilian peasants, the peasants needed protection from the invading foreigners trying to take over Sicily since the foreigners were taking control of the peasants' lands, because of this, peasants were getting killed all the time because they did not want to give up their land, so a group of peasants created the Mafia and protected the other peasants, over a period of time the Mafia kicked the foreigners out of Sicily. After that they immigrated to the U.S. and protected the Italian immigrants there, over an even more period of time they started to get greedy with money which ultimately was the root cause of their downfall, greed and drugs brought the Mafia down. That's just a basic history but I suggest that you buy this book to get even more facts. If you click here, you will see a Wikipedia page containing other facts about the Mafia, myself and other Mafia historians have contributed to this page, I know Wikipedia isn't reliable, but it does have some good facts.