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The Mafia, also known as organized crime or the mob, began as early as the 9th century. By the early 1900’s every large state in the United States had its own Mafia sanction. They concentrated on protection rackets. Soon they expanded by racketeering in other areas such as gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging. But it wasn’t until Prohibition in the 1920’s that organized crime gained almost complete control of illegal bootlegging, narcotic trafficking, gambling, and many other illegal activities. “A clear line divided the underworld from the upperworld. Members of the Mafia spent most of their times in occasional spates of killing and stealing, as well as in all the mundane activities of any conventional life” (Fox 11). Somewhere between the killing, stealing, and conventional life, the gangsters made their own world. “ It was a middle-earth of smoky nightclubs, the flash of chorus girls in a spotlight, a sprinkling of trumpet and saxophone, and time seemed to stop in a boozy moment of romance and glamour” (Fox 77). In the milieus the men of the underworld met to loaf and plot. Here too the people of the upperworld came to stand and