This point is crucial to grasp: by the mid-1990s, the influence of the Italian mafia in New York City had severely waned. This decline was first spurred by Giuliani’s prosecutions, but was furthered by an influx of criminals from the former USSR due to the loosening of their immigration laws and the abuse of the Israeli “right to return” policy by mobsters who then moved from Israel to the United States. The Russian mafia operated differently than the Italian mafia, focusing less on small-time, local operations.
