Massimo Anelli, Paolo Pinotti and Zachary Porreca documented the transplantation of the Sicilian Mafia to the United States in the 1920s, when a large-scale repression campaign in Italy targeted Mafia strongholds and forced many Mafiosi to migrate, and study the resulting short- and long-term effects across neighborhoods in U.S. cities. Using newly linked administrative and historical data from the U.S. Census, Social Security records, and declassified files of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, the authors show that neighborhoods hosting enclaves of migrants from Sicilian Mafia strongholds targeted by the repression later became centers of Italo-American Mafia activity. These neighborhoods experienced higher violence, incarceration, and financial exclusion in the short run, but higher income, employment, and educational attainment in the long run. The results suggest that while the arrival of organized criminal networks initially intensified conflict and exclusion, their subsequent consolidation generated localized economic benefits, helping to explain the long-term resilience and persistence of organized crime.

Massimo Anelli is Associate Professor at Bocconi University's Department of Social and Political Sciences and an affiliate of the Dondena Centre for Research on Social Dynamics and Public Policy. He received his PhD in Economics from the University of California, Davis. His research sits at the intersection of demography, migration, and political economy, using administrative and historical data to study how population dynamics and technological change interact with social and economic outcomes. His recent work examines how automation reshapes family formation and fertility, the peer spillovers of child disability, the interplay between genetic endowment and economic shocks, emigration selection and its consequences for sending regions, and the long-run neighborhood legacies of historical migration flows. He also directs the Dondena AI and Society Initiative at Bocconi.
 

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