What is organized crime like ITTL? I don't believe prohibition ever happened in TL-191, so Al Capone and much of America's view of the Mafia would be different. With Mexico and the rest of Latin America being somewhat more developed, are drug cartels still a major issue?
For my reply, I’m including what I previously wrote about the image of organized crime in US culture, slightly edited.
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In the United States, organized crime was weaker in comparison to our world because of the absence of Prohibition. However, this did not mean that organized crime was non-existent. Different gangs emerged in various US cities that engaged in similar kinds of crimes, such as extortion, smuggling, racketeering, illegal gambling, and thievery. The gangs that emerged during the Interwar years did not operate at the same scale as in OTL. While there were conflicts between different gangs, there was nothing comparable to the North Side Gang - Chicago Outfit war or the Castellammare War from our world. Without the Castellammare War, the organization of the Five Families in New York City didn’t take place.
The long-term effects of these developments meant that throughout most of the 20th Century, organized crime did not have the presence or influence that it did in the United States in OTL. In cities like New York City, Philadelphia or Chicago, gangs were usually limited to certain neighborhoods, with the more powerful gangs achieving influence at the city level, or sometimes outside of their states. As in OTL, some gangs were divided by ethnicity. There were Italian, Irish, Jewish, and Polish gangs in different US cities during the Interwar period and the Second Great War. In most big US cities, no single gang ever achieved dominance over the criminal underworld.
Organized crime also emerged in Occupied Canada during the Interwar period. These kinds of gangs took advantage of times violent upheaval, such as during the two Canadian Uprisings, to supply civilians and rebel groups with essential supplies and goods for extortionate prices. The US military regime never succeeded in addressing the problem of Canadian gangs. However, these Canadian gangs never succeeded in expanding south past the former international border, and many of these gangs were destroyed during the US suppression of the Second Canadian Uprising during the Second Great War.
The lack of Prohibition also meant differences in how the law was enforced in the United States at the federal level. There was nothing analogous to either the Bureau of Prohibition or the FBI during the Interwar years. Enforcing the law against organized crime was left to different state and city police forces, not all of which placed a great amount of importance on enforcing the law against these kinds of criminals.
The end of the Second Great War proved to be a turning point for organized crime in the United States. The election of Thomas Dewey as President of the United States meant that the USA now had a leader who viewed organized crime as a serious problem to be addressed at the federal level. The Dewey administration founded the modern Bureau of Investigation, the analogue to the FBI from our world. The US government also passed new laws that were intended to stop illegal activities that crossed different state lines. Encouraged by the Dewey administration and supported by the new Bureau of Investigation, various District Attorneys began to target gangs in their respective jurisdictions. The 1940s and 1950s saw the successful arrests and sentencing of numerous gang leaders in different cities. While these postwar legal developments did not completely suppress organized crime, they did diminish what influence they’d possessed throughout the Interwar years and Second Great War.
However, the end of the Second Great War was also the catalyst for the emergence of what would come to be known as the Dixie Mafia. The Dixie Mafia was never one single organization, but was used to describe criminal gangs, known as outfits, that operated throughout the former CSA, in the region that became known as the Midsouth.
Organized crime had existed in the CSA, but had gone to ground under the Freedom Party, though some gang leaders cultivated ties with local Freedom Party bosses. The gangs that came to comprise the Dixie Mafia emerged in harsh conditions, when the former national government had collapsed, when much of the population had few economic prospects, and in an environment where was little to no trust of the new governing authorities. The Dixie Mafia gangs existed alongside the ultimate failed anti-US insurgency of the 1940s and 1950s, with different Dixie Mafia outfits absorbing survivors from destroyed rebel groups. One failure of the US authorities in the immediate postwar period was not addressing organized crime in the Midsouth, with the insurgency in the region as a more immediate danger.
The different Dixie Mafia outfits, for all of their differences in region and culture, were organized in similar ways by the 1960s and 1970s. The different outfits borrowed terminology from the Freedom Party for describing their own ranks, and also engaged in similar kinds of crime, including extortion, racketeering, smuggling, theft, and contract killings. Some of the Dixie Mafia outfits also differed in geographic reach and size compared to prewar US gangs. For instance, by the late 1970s the New Orleans Outfit dominated the criminal underworld of Louisiana and the Gulf Coast, the Bluegrass Outfit dominated the underworld of Kentucky, the Piedmont Outfit dominated the underworld of Atlanta and the interiors of Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina, and the Norfolk Outfit dominated Virginia.
The Dixie Mafia outfits shared certain elements of culture, as well as rules that were based on similar kinds of paranoia and xenophobia. By 2024, members of different Dixie Mafia outfits are banned from defecting to a different outfits or even marrying relatives of someone from another outfit. However, similar to the American Mafia from OTL, an associate of an outfit can be from any background, as long as they make the outfit money, or are considered useful in another way. The different Dixie Mafia outfits, from their earliest years, gained a reputation for brutality and cruelty. However, they did not receive much attention from the US authorities until the 1980s, when they began to expand their influence outside of the Midsouth.
Beginning in the 1980s, large numbers of people began to leave the Midsouth to seek better economic opportunities elsewhere in the United States. This large internal migration continued into the 1990s, 2000s, and the 2010s, which resulted in the establishment of what came to be known as Dixieland enclaves in different US cities located in the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, Midwest, Far North, Rocky Mountain West, Far Southwest, and West Coast. The members of different Dixie Mafia outfits were part of this wave of migration, and usually based themselves in the Dixielands that emerged in various US cities. It didn’t take long for different outfits to make their presence known.
During the 1980s and 1990s, there was a rise in violence involving gangs in different US cities, as the existing gangs were systematically driven out of their existing rackets and other criminal activities by the different Dixie Mafia outfits. None of the existing gangs in different US cities were equipped to face gangs that were larger and more openly vicious compared to anything that had been seen before in the underworld. By the end of the Tech Recession in the late 1990s, the criminal underworld throughout the United States was dominated by the different Dixie Mafia outfits. This didn’t halt the growing levels of violence involving gangs, as different outfits started to fight each other for the most lucrative rackets, and some local outfits, leaders tried to break away from the larger outfits in the Midsouth.
The Bureau of Investigation, after being caught flat footed in 1980s with the expansion of the Dixie Mafia outfits, began more concerted efforts to combat the outfuts in the early 1990s under the leadership of its new director, Alfred Astaire. Efforts by the Bureau of Investigation and different police departments to combat the Dixie Mafia continued during the DeFrancis, Gutierrez, and Hernandez administrations in the 1990s and 2000s, which resulted in some successes and brought the worst of the criminal violence to an end, though this did not entirely end the presence of the Dixie Mafia in the criminal underworld. While some outfits were broken up, other such gangs continued to operate on a smaller scale.
By the end of the administration of President Alfred Astaire in 2021, most political leaders in the United States assumed that the Dixie Mafia was no longer a serious problem. These assumptions would be disabused later in the 2020s when the Dixie Mafia Scandal brought down the Holst administration.
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Unlike the portrayals of the mafia in some US works of fiction in our world, which arguably romanticizes and, to a certain extent, glamorizes organized crime, portrayals of the Dixie Mafia in US fiction in TTL tend to be unremittingly brutal, which is not too far removed from the reality of what Dixie Mafia outfits are in the real world. Fictional portrayals of the Dixie Mafia in US culture in TTL are similar to the portrayal of the Camorra in the film
Gomorrah or the portrayal of the motorcycle gang in the film
Mad Max in our world. Nothing equivalent to the
Godfather films were produced in this world.
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I don’t know enough about the history of organized crime in Mexico or Colombia to provide a detailed answer as to their presence and influence in TTL.
