You need to mod it in. Look for Costas Free Roam Mod. But I heard 2K removed the links to it. Not sure what will happen if you installed it, wonder how the anal Steam will react.

Or just load any chapter and free ride instead of starting the mission... pretty simple.

You're a nice guy. I've got people hurling vulgarities and being all out aggressive or belittling me at other forums and websites when I rant at something wrong or disagree with them.
Though until I get to bash people with the baseball bat or smash up their cars with a crowbar then I'll feel like a real Mafioso. It's worth the money I paid for it, yes, much better than a certain FPS which makes u pay US$60 for which I boycotted luckily. But still it could do so much better than what it is now if not for the cuts.

I did that yesterday, crushed $3000 worth of cars before starting the final mission. But police shot and killed me and then the mission restarted. $3000 gone :)

I know sometimes my writing style comes off way more condescending that I mean it to, so I try to nip that in the bud. My warnings about Steam in particular always get people mad at me, which makes sense I guess since so many people love the damn thing.

Not me, I hate Steam. Not to the point of boycotting it or any games that uses it. But I try avoid it as much as possible.
I think my friend is starting to hate it. Mafia 2's patch had something in it, of coz Steam auto updates the game. So we both play Mafia 2 haflway, it CTDs possibly due to the new patch. We reinstall the game, I reload from my saved games, he on the other hand gets the saved games corrupted message, and he had to restart the entire game. That went on 3 times for him. Then he asked me how to fix it, I told him to stop the auto patcher. Wonder if it worked for him.

Valve are very mod-friendly on the whole. It's only when some complete twat of a publisher wants mods disabled that it happens. So far the only complete twat has been Kotick. Which sounds about right to me.
I've got a horrible feeling that Free Roam is coming back as a DLC though...

Free roam is back as DLC in the form of Jimmy's Vendetta (which is closer to the Free Ride Extreme mode of the original).
As for bonus/side missions and the like, they were originally supposed to be in the game (you can talk to several NPCs who just always say 'I haven't got anything for you right now', and a telephone system exists but you're always told you don't have any numbers to ring) but were cut for unknown reasons. Whether it's so they can sell it to you as DLC later or simply for pacing reasons (the game itself is ostensibly not free-roaming, it's a linear game that happens to have an open city) we'll never truly know.

It's not the same. I had that option with the original too don't forget.
Plus, it seems like the city in this game isn't so well designed for free roam. For one thing there's the retarded, yet omnipresent police force. Plus Mafia had Free Roam Extreme that had some cool additional vehicles you could unlock by completing various challenges.

It probably will be. But Jimmy's Vendetta has missions so it doesn't sound like that's it.

The first mission where the game is particularly epic, this scene + "Let it Snow" music in the background:
http://i55.tinypic.com/jp94yx.jpg
Oh btw, is there a way to disable the DOF effects in Mafia 2? The screenshot above, I used a Unsharp Mask on it, looks much sharper and better than what I see in-game. I dislike the DOF blurry effect unless when it's raining at night.

I can't find any actual content reviews for the new DLC amidst all the bitching about it existing.

The Jimmy DLC is pretty much what everyone wanted who criticized the game for being not GTA. Free roam, mission choice, less narrative, save without progression, etc.
If you consider $60 a worthwhile price for a "complete" Mafia 2 game with the epic 14 hour linear game as well as a great mission-based free mode, then buy it.

Actually, you can use the phone to bribe the police to leave you alone (probably most useful if they are in "shoot to kill" mode and can't be bribed directly).

there is third possibility - those things (sidemissions, melee weapons, etc) while they had them somewhat done, probably were not completely polished up to 100%. And 2K simply wanted to release the game to get some of its money back, so everything that was not completely finished and polished got cut, even if it was almost done.
It would be nice if they released the missing stuff for free, kind of like CDP with EE on Witcher, but sadly this is 2K.. so they will charge for it.
And me, sucker that I am, will buy it, because I love Mafia 1 and 2 and want to support 2K Czech, even if their publisher and owner now sucks ass.

Oh my God the Jimmy DLC sucks.
Take Mafia and it's finely crafted storyline and missions and throw all that out the window because Jimmy is about random stupid crap. On top of that all the shootouts take place in the normal city areas, which means EVERY mission you are flooded with cops from all sides as they run to the gunshots, on top of the 20+ hoods you normally have to kill for the mission itself. In the original game they made sure prolonged gunfights took place in out of the way areas or interiors so this did not happen... I literally have like 50 enemies all around me at once in some of the later missions, making cover useless and killing me in seconds. And of course, NO CHECKPOINTS WITHIN MISSIONS AT ALL.
On top of that the missions are just boring... the car ones are literally "go here, get car, drive it here." There is no random crazy stuff that happens or people protecting them, just get the car and drive it somewhere. The gunfights are all just bland shoot-a-thons with no real story or context.
The funny thing is that the main game, like Mafia 1 before it, is about telling a finely crafted and linear story with perfectly designed mission structure within an open world. Jimmy is the complete opposite, the worst of GTA, the random side missions from GTA without context, direction or attention paid to them. It's everything the main games do right removed and everything GTA does better.
Seriously... terrible. I might not even finish it, it's just too aggravating and without purpose.