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?
There is still some around here, but not like in the past, nobody was shaking us down for protection money in our little storefront (that used to happen in the same neighborhood) but a lot of the drugs still come through those organizations and there are still gangs around - there was a police standoff with a biker gang a few blocks from my house once, they shut down the streets.
I guess the US is too big and disorganized.
Now - LA in the early 1990s - I stayed there awhile and holy crap, anything people say about gangs during that time is true. The police were a big violent gang, the prisons had gang riots, I knew people in gangs even though it wasn’t my world, it was widespread. So disorganized organized crime, there was a lot of that back then