Everyone’s heard of “The Mob”.  The “Cosa Nostra”.  The “Mafia”.  The Italian organized crime syndicate, ostensibly established on the principles of Omerta, the fabled, iron-clad code of silence, is ironically the most famous, best-publicized organized crime syndicate in the world.  The “secret brotherhood” of the Mob has been the subject of hundreds of movies, many of them Oscar-winners.  It’s been immortalized in thousands of books, TV shows and other staples of popular culture.

In short, the Mafia is about as “secret” as Linday Lohan’s battle with substance abuse.  And a big part of this immense, society-choking wave of publicity comes at the hands of Italians – Mario Puzo, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorcese, Robert Di Niro, Marlon Brando, Robert Duvall, Joe Pesci, James Gandolfini…

There are, of course, other ethnic organized crime outfits; Jewish and Irish syndicates were once very powerful in the US; the Russian, Japanese, Albanian and Vietnamese syndicates are visible and brutal.  The Armenian mob dominates Twin Cities business radio on Saturdays.  They all have one thing in common; someone talks about them – to cops, prosecutors, the media, writers, producers or whatever.  There is always some body of knowledge out there about each of these organizations.

But there is one organized crime syndicate that dwarfs all the others in terms of reach, power, brutality and especially secrecy.  And nobody knows about it.

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In the movie The Usual Suspects, the ubervillain Keyser Soze is a human macguffin, a supercriminal whose power and menace is multiplied by the fact that nobody has ever seen him and lived; that nobody knows if he really even exists. He is, one character says, “a story mothers tell their kids when they misbehave; like Keyser Soze will get you in the night”.

Soze is fictional.

But there’s a syndicate that’s all too real – rendered all the more sinister by the fact that it has mastered the key to secrecy; make denying its very existence less a matter of fear than utter putative preposterousness.

It hides in plain sight, behind a cloak of its utter improbability

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Reporter Anthony DiLigio has undertaken one of the most daunting feats in the history of investigative reporting.  I’m going to quote his piece pretty much in full, as he goes…

…Inside the Norwegian Mob.

The story begins Friday in Shot In The Dark.