The systematic study of organized crime dates back to John Landesco's classic of ethnography, Organized Crime in Chicago (1929). Since then, the field has grown considerably and, as well as criminologists and sociologists, the topic has been embraced by researchers from a broad range of disciplines, including political science, anthropology, economics, as well as literary and film studies.

While at first attention was principally devoted to the study of 'traditional' organized-crime groups, such as the Sicilian and the American mafias, since the 1980s, serious scholarly...