Sicilian Mafia, also called Cosa Nostra (Italian: Our Thing) or black hand, hierarchically structured organization of criminals in Sicily, Italy. The Sicilian Mafia is made up of a coalition of criminal organizations—called “families” or “clans” in English and cosche (singular, cosca) in Italian—which engage in extortion, smuggling, gambling, and the mediation of disagreements between other criminals. The term Mafia has become synonymous in English with organized crime, but technically Mafia refers only to the Sicilian organization and its Sicilian American counterpart in the Unit...