Making money is the vital issue of the Mafia. Families use a multiplicity of their activities to achieve this. The most common and the simplest is extortion. The extortion is forcing the people to relinquish money by threatening in some way. Mafia “safety rackets” are this extortion method. They tell shop owner that he needs to give them $150 in a week by that they can “protect” him from other criminals who might destroy the shop or harm his family. The insinuation being that Mafia members are these criminals themselves.

The Mafia makes huge money by contributing in almost any activity which is illegal. Since, illegal goods are untaxed, unregulated, and expensive. Over the years, gangsters have dealt in the alcohol during the prohibition, prostitution, illegal drugs, and illegal gambling.

Burglaries and muggings produce income, but capos know that the activities need the grander scale to make sure maximum profit. So, they hijack many trucks and also unload all shipments of these stolen goods. A further method used by Mafia has to pay off the truck drivers and dock workers. They will “misplace” birdcages and shipments which later last part in Mafia hands. These stolen cargos could be everything, from the stereo equipment to the women’s clothing.

The most disreputable Mafia schemes were infiltration of the labor unions. For some decades, this is believed; every main construction project in the New York was controlled by Mafia. Gangsters threatened union leaders for getting a piece of action whenever union group got the construction job. Once Mafia had its clutch firmly on the union, it controlled entire industry. Mafia forced workers to work slow or halt the construction if the contractors or the developers did not make right payoffs. At one spot, the Mafia brought nearly all the construction and the shipping site in the USA to a halt.

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