A Very Interesting Paragraph From …

… the jacket of a new book from Princeton University Press called Mafias on the Move: How Organized Crime Conquers New Territories, by Federico Varese:

In a series of matched comparisons, Varese charts the attempts of the Calabrese ‘Ndrangheta to move to the north of Italy, and shows how the Sicilian mafia expanded to early twentieth-century New York, but failed around the same time to find a niche in Argentina. He explains why the Russian mafia failed to penetrate Rome but succeeded in Hungary. In a pioneering chapter on China, he examines the challenges that triads from Taiwan and Hong Kong find in branching out to the mainland.

Varese is a professor of criminology at Oxford; he also wrote The Russian Mafia. The new book sounds well worth reading — a nice bookend to Codes of the Underworld: How Criminals Communicate, by Diego Gambetta, a sociologist who also teaches at Oxford.