Justified: Yes, The Dixie Mafia Is Real & Inspired The Show's 'Bad Guys'
While the myriad of crime dramas that have come and gone over the decades of film and television have made us well aware of many different real-life crime organizations, that doesn't mean that there aren't lesser-known forms of organized crime out there. This is a fact that "Justified" uses firmly to its advantage.
Being that "Justified" is set mainly in rural Kentucky, it's home to a breed of criminals who have rarely been seen on the screen. The Dixie Mafia remains a central threat throughout all six seasons of the FX series, with recurring characters like Boyd Crowder (Walton Goggins), Wynn Duffy (Jere Burns), Dewey Crowe (Damon Herriman), and Dickie Bennett (Jeremy Davies) haunting Harlan County consistently throughout.
Still, many fans will be largely unaware of the real-life Dixie Mafia that inspired these "Justified" characters. Like many gangsters of the early 20th century, the Dixie Mafia got their start as bootleggers during the Prohibition era. Furthermore, though Prohibition was repealed across most of the United States in 1933, there were many areas in the southern United States that remained dry, allowing this organization to entrench itself further as the years went on.
The Dixie Mafia got its start just like other criminal organizations
Of course, by the time even these regions had given up on banning alcohol, the Dixie Mafia had found new ways to make money. Though where they operated may not have been hotbeds of organized crime like New York City or Chicago, the game was still very much the same — robbery, extortion, intimidation, violence, and inevitably, murder.
Though the term Dixie Mafia has been used over the years by law enforcement and true crime writers to describe them, just like in "Justified," they're not a central organization in the same way that the Irish or Italian mafia are often portrayed. They're more like loosely connected branches of crime that operate under only a single uniting code: Don't say anything to law enforcement.
Of course, there were caveats to that rule, so long as there was enough money flowing that bribery allowed the organization to corrupt local law enforcement. Either way, as fans of "Justified" will well know, aside from where they set down their roots, the Dixie Mafia operated in very much the same way as better-known criminal groups. Though their heyday has long since passed, with their prevalence peaking in the 1980s, the Dixie Mafia is thought to still be operating in the shadows even today.