I would like to clarify a few things.

In the United States, from the late nineteenth century until the World War II, Italians were confined in the various Little Italy without integrating and then it is true that looked the Mafia with respect and that many honest Italians, if they weren't colluding at least pander the mafia.

After the end of World War II (where ten percent of the dead were Italian-Americans), many Italian-Americans have come out from the ghettos and integrated, then the fact of not only the Mafia became a hateful stereotype, but also that of with hair gel, tanning, gold chains and pinky rings. Not that the mobsters weren't looked so, but the mobsters not all the Italian-american.
It is now more probably that a commit a crime is a Latino or a black man, but you think are gang members are disorganized, while the Mafia is organized and more dangerous.
But this is wrong because the power that the Mafia had over time, has been mythologized, so to think that every Italian-American is a mobster, is easier than to say that many of the young blacks and Latinos, are part of the gangs, because say it would be considered racist.

Coming from Italy, we have never been the disturbing brother, or anyone, rather
we were a nation born from the oppression of a small statelet in the North (The Kingdom of Piedmont), which has forcibly annexed by the rest of Italy, especially in the South, was much better under the Bourbons that under the Savoy family.
So in the South were destroyed all the factories and infrastructure to promote the industrial triangle of Turin, Milan and Genoa.

So they took strength the Camorra, the Mafia, and the Ndrangheta.
The worst situation was, and is, in Calabria until the construction of the Salerno-Reggio Calabria was called the Third Island.
Even now, the three mafias to which they added a fourth: The Sacra Corona Unita, are ruling in Campania, Calabria, Sicily and Apulia.

I was born in the South, and I live in the city where born Raffaele Cutolo, the creator of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata , I don't want to say that in my region as well as in the south there is no organized crime, but also I want to say that even in the worst neighborhoods like Scampia or Zen in Palermo there are honest people that try with difficulty to live honestly.
But it is also true that only since the late 80's that the State really tried to fight the mafias and that there is still a long way to go.
 
I hope I was clear.