- Petrosino was an Italian-American detective in the New York City Police Department in the early 1900s who was assigned to investigate the Mafia, an Italian organized-crime group that was well established in the immigrant Italian community in New York but about which very little was actually known. Petrosino's investigations resulted in many arrests and convictions for extortion, robberies, murders, etc., and exposed the organization to the public. He was sent to Sicily to work with the Italian police to investigate the connection between the Sicilian and American branches of the Mafia, but he was assassinated by Mafia gunmen in Sicily in 1909.
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