During the 1970's and 1980's, Sicilian organized crime took on a central, coordinating role in the transnational traffic in drugs, arms, and dirty money. The intensification of this global activity took place with the tacit consent and studied ignorance, if not the outright encouragement, of elements of the Italian establishment. With a few exceptions, governmental regimes, parliaments, mass media, and intellectuals consented that criminal endeavors should prosper; there was a virtual absence of countermeasures. The article analyzes the various aspects of this tolerance: the symbiosis between mafiosi and politicians, especially the Christian Democratic Party; the cultivation of a web of associations through which mafiosi traditionally "conditioned" the police and the judiciary; the creation -- under cold war conditions -- of a covert structure of power in Italy that furnished mafia potentates with a new range of friends; and the convergence of interests between mafiosi and an emergent stratum of rule-bending financiers. References