I just played through the whole game (Mafia 2) last week.
-To stop it from crashing at initialisation, you have to navigate to
'.wine/drive_c/users/yourusername/Local Settings/Application Data/2K
Games/Mafia II/Saves' (substitute 'yourusername' for your username)
and open the videoconfig.cfg file in a text editor. It should contain a line
like this (when you first open it): ' 24 24 1024 768 0 0 0 1'.
Change everything, except for the resolution, to 0, so that it looks like this:
'0 0 1024 768 0 0 0 0'. Save the file and the crashing should be fixed.
-To get the sound working, open winecfg and disable mmdevapi in the libs tab.
-To make the game playable (performancewise) set Physx to off in the in-game
graphics options menu and set 'UseGLSL' to 'disabled' using
regedit.
After that you should be able to play Mafia 2. I got a constant 25 FPS with my
GTX285 and wine-1.3.3.