Qualitative field study uncovers how mafia-themed walking tours commodify organized crime history in New York City, suggesting dark tourism sustains the cultural legitimacy of La Cosa Nostra.
This article focuses on mafia-themed tours through Little Italy and Nolita in New York City to interrogate how they reproduce La Cosa Nostra’s, the Italian-American mafia, ongoing relevance. The study shows how this type of ‘dark tourism’ distils complex histories into marketable myths that stabilize past reputation and translate it into present-day social (and eventually criminal) power. The walking-narrative and atmosphere approach combines participant observation and audio-visual records of guides’ narratives. The paper argues that mafia tours function as active cultural infrastructure equating mafia history to Italian heritage: tours perform, legitimize, and circulate the symbolic currencies by which La Cosa Nostra remains legible and actionable in contemporary urban and criminal spheres, through the ‘atmospheric production of nostalgia’.
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Anna Sergi (2026) studied this question.
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