[alexpotato]

My mom, who is from Italy, has some great lines about the Mafia:

"Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia"

I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned:

"The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got involved."

[toyg]

Carabinieri have been involved with (and occasionally fighting) the mafia since late 1800s. That's got nothing to do with how we got to the current situation of relative tranquility.

What happened between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s was that, because of continuous feuds among mafiosi that produced too many civilian victims, political connections broke down, particularly with a few especially vicious bosses. Laws were passed to isolate the worst offenders, new connections were brokered with more moderate mafia leaders, and eventually the "bad" bosses were magically found, hiding more or less in plain sight.

[easyThrowaway]

It's... a bit more complicated than that.

That episode, the Falcone Judge murder, was a bit of a last straw in the way most of italian political parties had dealt with mafia till that point. They realized the issue couldn't be contained to the sicilian cultural and political environment and they couldn't be... that much complacent (they still are, but at least they try to save face when they're found).

Long story short, every political authority at the time was pretty much aware the murder was going to happen, they just didn't expect a terrorist-like approach.

Once we got to that point, a newish department, the DIA[1] was given full authority to handle the issue... again, for a time. Then it went swallowed up too in the neverending whirpool of shit that is the Italian politics.

In the meanwhile, the Mafia got smarter, and rather than going in a full frontal attack with the authorities, they became much more... diplomatic, offering indirect support trough some proxies to some newly political figures that emerged shortly after. You probably heard about that Berlusconi guy.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direzione_Investigativa_Antima...

[pizza234]

> the Carbinieri(Italian FBI)

Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US.

Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb".

[fragmede]

Depends how your bubble portrays the FBI to you, I suppose.

[LtWorf]

There's carabinieri in every 600 inhabitants village. Them being involved isn't any kind of big deal.

I think people who don't live in italy and have no understanding about italy are allowed to not comment on things they don't know.