CITATION SUPPORT FOR THE MAFIA MYTH IN CRIMINOLOGY TEXTBOOKS.

If the flood of government reports, newspaper articles, books and movies involving American organized crime is any indication of citizen awareness, then surely Americans are currently very conscious of this phenomenon. Numerous popular books on the subject, have been published in recent years. Several have been made into movies. Although there is some variation from source to source, the central image is that of a multibillion dollar-a-year conspiracy of Sicilian origin called either the Mafia or Cosa Nostra in which a code of secrecy, called Omerta, is enforced, if necessary, by violence. This conspiracy purportedly is international in scope yet organized around 24 families in the United States largest urban areas. This view of American organized crime is supported by the research of the eminent criminologist, Donald R. Cressey, who collected information on organized crime. These results reflect a heavy reliance among authors of criminology textbooks on journalistic and especially official documents for information about organized crime, apparently because such sources often contain information dealing most directly with this subject. This dependence on journalistic and official documents to understand the nature of organized crime is at least partially a consequence of the limitations of traditional social science research techniques.