The Mafia Modernizes

When the US sent billions in aid to post-WW II Europe under the Marshall Plan and other programs they also sent along a cadre of gung-ho capitalists to help spend it. These men spread the gospel of what was called "productivism" or "Fordism," the belief that by raising productivity capitalist countries could make workers richer while simultaneously raising profits for investors. It isn't a zero-sum game, they kept saying; by working together we can all benefit. (Which in the 1950s and 1960s was true.)

They had a lot of influence, but not necessarily in the places they hoped:

The shift from the old assumptions about limited resources to the new thinking based on expanding opportunities occurred in even the most unexpected corners of the European economy. One was Sicily, where the Mafia dominated much business. Sicily was poor, and Mafia economic thinking centered on scarcity. The organization's aim was to squeeze the greatest possible benefits out of its victims rather than to increase total wealth, and one mechanism for doing this was water. Control of wells and springs allowed powerful Sicilians to extort money from peasants who needed to irrigate arid land, so the Mafia opposed projects might might have increased the total water supply in any area. After the war, though, a new generation of American mafiosi arrived. These men did not come under the aegis of the European Reconstruction Agency, but were sent by the Justice Department, which selected particularly dynamic entrepreneurs from Chicago or New York for deportation back to their country of origin. Like the smooth Harvard graduates who gathered in Rome, the American mafiosi tried to explain the virtues of growth to the Italians. They did not oppose irrigation projects. On the contrary, they favored the construction of large dams. In this way everyone could benefit from a new opportunity — though the Mafia, which took big rake-offs from construction contracts, benefited more than most.

– Richard Vinen, A History in Fragments, p. 292