I have been posting a lot lately in my blog about the fact that I am going to be running a modern day mafia game, as well as postings of the mob structure and mob slang.

I was curious, has anyone run a modern day mob game at all/recently? If so what can you tell me about it

I ran an extensive nWoD game in which the player characters were members of a coyote gang that smuggled illegal immigrants from Mexico to the United States. They had been forcibly pushed out of the drug business a few years previous by a rival crime family (who had also murdered virtually everyone in the PC's organization), and one of the major threads of the game was the desire for revenge for the murders, the greed of the huge amount of money that can be made only in the drug trade (an organization set up to smuggle people can smuggle drugs too, and not doing it is basically leaving money in the street to be picked up by the rivals), and the rivals' flat disbelief that they really are out of the game.

It was great because when they came across ghosts and monsters and shit, nobody said "let's call the cops", because calling the cops means that they start fucking with you and digging into your business and asking to see people's papers, and so on.

The key thing for my group is that they didn't want to be rampant murderers and drug dealers. Since drugs are the primary engine of organized (and disorganized) crime to some ridiculous factor (probably 99 percent of the money illicitly made in America is made through the drug trade, and that's a modest estimate, it might be something like 99.9 percent), I had to make a setup that pushed them - very forcibly and horribly - out of that part of the crime world. They basically started with both their organizational legs broken, crawling through the desert. The fact that they fought like hell NOT to get back in the drug game made for a really good internal conflict for the organization. I just had to put some people in the family that wanted money and didn't want their enemies to have it.

Very cool. Thanks for sharing

Organized crime almost always play some role in our games. I work in my Department's Gang Task Force, as it were, and as such I'd like to thin games pretty accurately reflect how these sorts of outfits would interact in our setting with the PC's.

You ought to take a look at Bedrock Games' Crime Network, to see a good modern take on the subject.

-clash

I am awaiting a comp copy for review here soon. Brendan already contacted me making the offer

What exact game are you playing?

Awesome! Brendan rocks!

yes he does. I scanned through it and I like what I see. I am going to try to get to reading in the next couple of days

Generally speaking we play Shadowrun. We've done D20 Modern, D&D 3.5e, Star Wars SE, Earthdawn and some AFMBE.