Organizations like the Yakuza, 'Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra, the Irish Mafia, etc, are part of many countries, to bigger or smaller fashion.
But to someone from those countries, what do you think was the original/historical cause for such organizations to develop?
My country - Portugal - has some degree of presence of these organizations but, to my knowledge, we never developed our domestic version of a crime syndicate. And we are not a bunch of choir boys. Something just kept things from forming. And that intrigues me.
So, what is the understanding of someone from a country where the organizations exist?
So a lot of people here are going to be very broad and not particular about corruption in the US.
I live in Hawaii, and what most people in the US experience is a more general, liberalized form of corruption; a corruption which is more baked into the process and acceptable. Corruption as law, as process; formalized and legal.
However, in Hawaii, we have a very, very different form of corruption. Bags of cash getting handed to legislatures. You can’t get a permit for construction in less than a year unless you bribe someone. The sheriff in Maui was thinking they like be walter white and control all crime syndicates in the county. Web of bribery extending throughout the state house with rumors it goes all the way to Governor Josh green.
So we end up with lots of underground/ “illegal” activity. Underground like, fell neighbor to neighbor, just gotta know, type thing. Get one game room, some thing fell offa truck. local kine shit.
So it is essentially an ingrained scheme of institutional corruption, too hard to break apart because it has become a de facto means of getting things done.