What is Pentitismo

Criminal organizations have opened up to profound global transformations, putting themselves on the financial markets and creating a network in Mafia style. The present contribution intends to offer a framework of transnational criminal organizations, starting from defining aspects, normative forecasts and peculiarities, and then describing the Italian mafias and those of Eastern Europe, China, and Nigeria. Through these analyses the author intends to demonstrate how although Italy is the only country to have introduced “the Mafia Criminal Association” ex Art. 416 bis of the Penal Code, other countries also know this phenomenon. China, Russia, sub-Saharan Africa have given rise to mafia-style criminal organizations, even though they have not legally defined them. Today the branching of these associations at transnational level brings out their mafia values and the need to intervene with the legal and investigative methodology that was first experimented in Italy.