In italy from all groups,there are about 25,000 made members and about 300,000 associates.
The FBI has cited 25,000 members and 250,000 associates. One could accuse them of taking the lazy man's route of just estimating 10 associates for every member but, with the Italian clans, 10 associates per member is very realistic.
Nice stats, the thing is though with Italian organized crime you know that the members and associates are closely interlinked - hence have an organized structure. With Russian mafiya groups , they may have something like 100 000 members but a lit of them aren't all Russian and a lot of them are small groups of fraudsters , traffickers etc. like that fraud ring in Miami where waitresses ripped of clients , how can that be considered mafia?
If a group of Italian fraudsters got busted with no links to the mob the media wouldn't call them Mafiosi , why is it different within soviet ethnic groups ?
