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THE MAFIA AS A MIRROR OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY
Investigative journalism, sociological and anthropological investigations, even the reports of
the Anti-Mafia Commissions, all attempt to establish a context for phenomena and forms of
current and relevant behavior, making use of the history of the past hundred years and even
beyond that. Unfortunately, however, these sources often use an outmoded approach to
historiography that describes nineteenth- and twentieth-century southern Italy (the
Mezzogiorno) as a semifeudal society. The region is depicted as entirely agrarian and
organized according to the latifundium, or large landed estate, economically and socially inert
and immobile, swept by only a single impulse of reform: the peasant movement. In this
context, it seems logical to assume that the Mafia served essentially to ensure the
subordination and obedience of the peasants to the ruling classes, even though this function
does not appear clearly until the years following the First World War and the Second World
War—that is, in certain specific moments of the long story of the Mafia. In other cases of
latifondismo (that is, an economy based on large landed estates), both in Italy and elsewhere,
there is a distinct absence of such a phenomenon, which clearly is not comparable with the
theme of the private armies used by feudal landowners and fazenderos to uphold their power
around the world. For that matter, the mafiosi who were most specifically considered to be
representative of the traditional model, Calogero Vizzini and Giuseppe Genco Russo, were
hardly the blind and subservient tools of the agrarian power. Rather, they were organizers of
cooperatives and won much of their power base by serving as intermediaries in the transfer of
land from the large landowners to the peasants, and therefore by placing themselves firmly
astride the collective movements precisely in the postwar years following the First World War
and the Second World War. Therefore, they were not the guardiani (rural watchmen), but
rather the undertakers of the feudo, or large landholding class, and they played a role that
could not be imagined outside of the great political and social modernization processes of the
twentieth century.
One might very well wonder why the latifundium, or large landholding, is the context that is
almost universally discussed, while it is instead fairly obvious that, from the beginning, there
has been a compatibility between the Mafia and the fragmentation of large landed estates, and
a high degree of integration between the Mafia and prosperous international—and even
transoceanic—markets, in the sulphur-mining industries of Sicily and along the coastal areas
of the Palermo regions, the Trapani region, and the region of Reggio Calabria, on the
mainland side of the Strait of Messina: sectors and periods of economic and social dynamism
that southern Italy, however underdeveloped it might have been, still offered in considerable
abundance. Fascinated by rural and “primitive” settings, scholars have often forgotten the
island’s “capital” and its urbanized countryside, even though many nineteenth-century sources
identified those as the center of the Mafia infection. According to Antonino Cutrera (1900), it
was here that “the true Mafia is based, the legendary Mafia, the Mafia of the great criminal
trials, which has aroused such terror with its great murders . . . a unique feature of the history
of crime in Sicily.” We do not necessarily agree with the concept of a “true” Palermo-based
Mafia, in contrast with the Mafias of the Trapani or the Agrigento areas, but unquestionably
the majority of the most spectacular Mafia crimes and episodes occurred in an area that
roughly coincides with the province of Palermoff This area extended from the city’s
hinterland, the “rich” agricultural zone of the Conca d’Oro, to the rest of the coastal strip that
pushes all the way to the Trapani district, the inland area of the province, the latifundium
zone, which established links to the city in the nineteenth century, and to a lesser extent in the
twentieth century, by the chains of rent, by the movement of revenue from the interior toward
the city, and often by the movement of management (administrators), gabellotti (renters and
sublessors of parcels of farmland), and guardiani in the opposite direction. In our history of
the Mafia, which focuses on a vast area centering on Palermo, we will find a disconcerting
continuity of the groups, places, experiences, and sectors of activity. The power of the Grecos
in the borgata , or the outlying suburb, of Ciaculli, and of the city’s mafioso hierarchy has
lasted more than a century. In this hundred years, everything has changed in the economy, in
society, in politics—everything, one might venture to say, except for the continuity of this
territorial control. In particular, in what in the nineteenth century was called the agro
palermitano , or Palermo territorial countryside, midway between city and countryside, in the
borgate and in the villages of the hinterland, the Mafia groups established a system of control
over the territory that set out from the dense network of guardianìe (custodianships). They
ultimately seized control of both legitimate and illicit business, cattle rustling, smuggling and
contraband, and the early commercial intermediation of citrus fruit and other products of the
area’s rich agriculture. In a more recent era, the same area proved to be the more or less
natural marketplace for the expansion of real estate and for speculation in that field—age-old
locations and age-old power bases finding new opportunities for profit. The Mafia’s
introduction into a transoceanic migratory network and its involvement with long-distance
trade, such as the citrus fruit business, simply laid the groundwork in terms of mentalities and
abilities well suited to smuggling tobacco and narcotics.
The idea of equating the Mafia with the latifundium, along with the other equivalency—
equating small landholding with social progress—represents a way of analyzing the
phenomenon as a relatively feudal residue of the past, projecting it toward an obscure past and
liberating the future from its murky claim. In the history of the various interpretations that
have been offered of the Mafia and of the battle against it, the idea cyclically resurfaces
according to which “modern” changes (agricultural land reform, industrialization, education,
and the development of more liberal sexual ethics) ought ipso facto to destroy the
phenomenon, together with the broth that nourishes. The Italian left wing has put forward
such a mind-set and propagated it in good faith ever since the end of the Second World War,
and over time, with some instrumental manipulation, nearly everyone has adopted it, with the
objective of winning more public funding, more resources to control. Similarly, in the United
States, the Mafia has been described as a holdover from a “peasant” culture destined to die out
once the Italian community was absorbed into the upper ranks of American society. But it is
possible to look further back in time, when the Italian liberals still identified “feudalism” and
Bourbon mismanagement of the government as the causes of all the ills of Italy’s south. Many
believed that the Mafia would vanish once the sound of locomotive whistles echoed through
the villages of the desolate Sicilian hinterland. They were completely unaware that people
would still be talking about the Mafia long after the whistle of train engines, the sonic booms
of jet planes, and the beep of modern computers had sounded.
Today, more than thirteen decades after the unification of Italy, the context that was once
simplistically decried as archaic has changed in all its various components. Yet we are still
faced with something that we call Mafia, as we attempt to understand how this phenomenon
that at first glance is typical of a “traditional” universe has managed to survive the process of
modernization. It is clear, therefore, that the modern does not overwhelmingly clash with a
Mafia type of phenomenon, as demonstrated by the case of America and the south of Italy in
recent years. Nor does the category of immobility adequately explain either the phenomenon
itself or its context. The Sicilian Mafia has remained in the spotlight for over a century,
though it remains to be proven that the phenomenon described by this name truly presents,
inevitably and universally, a significant degree of homogeneity. The Camorra presents itself
in specific moments of history, as if in a series of flash photographs, encompassing the era
following Italian unification, the Giolitti regime, and the post–Second World War period. In
Calabria, for a brief time the picciotteria , which emerged suddenly and was harshly repressed
at the turn of the twentieth century, revealed a dark history that was largely overlooked in the
debate of the time, and it is no accident that only recently has it become the subject of
historical analysis.
In any case, the Mafia was traditionally a geographic phenomenon characteristic of Palermo
and nearly all of the Palermo province, Naples and certain districts of the Neapolitan
hinterland, the province of Reggio Calabria, part of the province of Trapani, the inland
Sicilian area of the sulphur mines and the large landholdings, with the exclusion of the eastern
section of the island. Only in the past thirty years has the infection spread until it covered with
some homogeneity three Italian regions, or states—Sicily, Campania, and Calabria—as well
as a fourth region, Puglia (Apulia).
This evolution, or perhaps we should say, this regression, calls into question not only the
explanation based on the notion of socioeconomic archaism, but also its sociocultural
counterpart, which makes Mafia behavior a direct consequence of the anthropology of the
Sicilians or, in general, of southern Italians. This culture is said to be characterized by a
mistrust of the state and therefore by a habit of taking justice into one’s own hands, by a sense
of honor, by clientelism, by a familism that exempts the individual from a perception of his
own responsibilities in the face of a larger collective than his immediate surroundings. These
characteristics ought to be relatively homogeneous throughout all of southern Italy. It is
therefore impossible to explain the uneven distribution of the phenomenon in the past. Nor is
it clear how this phenomenon, ostensibly a product of a traditional culture, has been able to
extend and become diffused well outside its original territory, in parallel with the
modernization of the country, even though a sociocultural hybridization was in fact a crucial
and constituent element of the historical transformation.
It should not appear that we are attempting to expunge the cultural element from the
explanation of this (and from any other) social phenomenon. If we accept the notion that the
depiction of southern Italian anthropology offered here is credible, we should then attempt to
distinguish the phenomenon from its context by investigating the way the Mafia organization
appropriates cultural codes, instrumentalizes them, modifies them, and turns them into an
adhesive to ensure that they remain intact. Let us consider the rejection of the concept of the
impersonal nature of the law, the scorn for the police and for those who collaborate with them
—traits that were quite prevalent among the common folk, the bourgeois, and the aristocrats
in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Sicily, but that the Mafia reutilized for its own purposes.
Or let us reflect on the image of a moderate and protective Mafia, unfailingly offered by the
mafiosi, either through their representatives or directly in person. We shall see the great Mafia
capo of the postunification period, Antonino Giammona, described by his lawyer as a uomo
d’ordine (literally, a man of order), unwilling to submit to arrogant abuse; we shall also see
the defense lawyers of the Amoroso brothers (1883) insist on the lower-class origins of their
clients, who were ignorant perhaps but conditioned by an anthropology made up of iron-
bound codes of honor, a furious attachment to solidarity, and family hatreds. In 1930 Vito
Cascio- Ferro’s lawyer stated that the Mafia, in the person of his client, represented “an
attitude of distinctly bold and fearless individualism, devoid of squalor, evil, and criminality.”
In a broad array of contexts, the Mafia always defines itself in the same terms. As we read in
the epitaph engraved on the tomb of Ciccio Di Cristina, Mafia capo of Riesi in the years
following the Second World War: “His Mafia was not criminality, but respect of the law of
honor, defense of all rights, and great-heartedness.” “Are we interested in defining what the
judges and governors call Mafia? It is not called Mafia, it is called omertà , that is, men of
honor, who help rather than profiting off of the weak, who always do good and never do evil,”
is written in a text confiscated from Rosario Spatola, a Mafia entrepreneur and a leading
money launderer of profits from the narcotics trade in the late 1970s.
Therefore, it is first and foremost the Mafia that describes itself as a way of life and a form of
behavior, as an expression of traditional society. Every eminent mafioso makes a point of
presenting himself in the guise of a mediator and resolver of disagreements, as a protector of
the virtue of young women. At least once in his career, the mafioso boasts of the rapid and
exemplary execution of “justice” against violent muggers, rapists, and kidnappers. We are, in
any case, in the presence of a power group that expresses an ideology meant to create
consensus on the outside and coherence and compactness on the inside. In that ideology there
is a certain degree of self-persuasion, a great deal of overweening ambition, and an even
greater degree of propaganda destined to clash in the great majority of cases with a far
different reality. The ideological scheme was at the time saved by a reference to a new Mafia.
By this point, it was nothing more than common criminality, which no longer embodied the
sense of respect and honor that characterized the old Mafia. Nonetheless, the argument
appears suspect when one considers that it appears as early as 1875 in the reports from the
delegato di PS of Monreale and, in a different form, in the writings of Pitrè as well (the word
indicates a concept that was once good but has now lost its virtue). It has resurfaced
periodically throughout the entire period of history in question—in the years of the First
World War, when the old-school mafiosi were supposedly replaced by ferocious criminals; in
the wake of the Fascist repression of the 1920s, at a time when (according to the recollections
of the Sicilian American Mafia capo Nick Gentile) there “died in Sicily an honored society,
the Mafia which had its laws, its principles, an organization that protected the weak and . . . its
place was taken by . . . people without honor, people who robbed without restraint and killed
for pay”; in the United States in the 1930s when, according to the New York Mafia capo Joe
Bonanno, the old Sicilian tradition began to give way to the toxins of the New World; during
the 1950s, when the honorable old agricultural Mafia supposedly yielded to a ferocious urban
gangsterism; and finally, last but not least, upon the advent of the Corleonese, when—
according to Buscetta—Cosa Nostra lost its age-old virtues and was disfigured by violence
and greed. Greed and ferocity, as will be documented in the pages of this book, are intrinsic
characteristics of the Mafia of both yesterday and today, and both Mafias are and were
capable of slaughtering innocent people, women and children, in defiance of their codes of
honor. The varying quantity and quality of the violence are linked, rather, to political
situations (for instance, the years that followed, respectively, the First World War and the
Second World War), or to the various generational shifts that brought new leadership and new
cadres, giving birth to internal conflicts of a cyclical, rather than an epochal, nature.
THE MAFIA AS A BUSINESS ENTERPRISE
The distinction between the old Mafia and the new Mafia, even though it has a merely
ideological or rhetorical substance, continues to resurface because it represents an excessively
facile conceptual shortcut in the face of the complex cross-breeding of old and new detected
in this field. Thus, Pino Arlacchi, in his famous book La Mafia imprenditrice (Italian edition,
1983; English edition, Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism , 1987),
did his best to preserve the figure of the old mafioso as he might have borrowed it from Anton
Blok, Jane and Peter Schneider, and especially Henner Hess. Indeed, Arlacchi reduced the
Mafia figure to that of the country notable, poor and in any case scornful of wealth, eager only
to win social consideration. Arlacchi contrasted this figure with a modern entrepreneurial
Mafia, a creation of the 1970s, eager to amass wealth and especially focused on drug
tra.cking, as ferocious as the previous Mafia was moderate. We find this excessively clearly
delineated conceptual contrast unpersuasive. As for the past, it should be said that the
gabellotti , too, were entrepreneurs; though not particularly innovative ones, still they were
definable as “speculators, who use gunpowder and lead as a means of speculation”— in the
words of a nineteenth-century landowner—or, to use the words of Franchetti, as
“industrialists of violence.” It is indicative that Arlacchi’s misleading description of Calogero
Vizzini should derive once again from the mafioso’s intentionally minimizing self-description
as a poor, ignorant bumpkin (“I don’t say much because I don’t know much. I live in a
village, I come to Palermo only rarely, and I don’t know many people”), while instead the
sources depict Vizzini as “a gentleman, a knight of industry, a multimillionaire.”
These sources describe him as working among other places in London in 1922, with other
“industrialists” of the sulphur sector, with high executives of the Montecatini Company, with
the elite of the world chemicals industry, in negotiations for the foundation of the
international sulphuric acid cartel. In the other camp, that of the present-day Mafia, Arlacchi
placed excessive emphasis on Mafia entrepreneurship, a supposed “Schumpeterian”
characteristic that is both creative and innovative. In the area of the legal economy, it is
questionable whether the mafioso can show entrepreneurial abilities that are much more
complex than those needed for operating a traditional farming concern, which (leaving aside
the great difference in contexts) finds its present-day counterpart in building and commerce,
while the introduction into large-scale financial activities, such as that of laundering “dirty”
money, makes the mafioso not an entrepreneur but a rentier . In general, the clientelistic
structure of the Mafia cosca , which is required to carry out a continual redistribution of funds
among its ravenous members and which involves an endless fragmentation of corporate
structures with a view to concealing their activities, hardly seems to resemble the rational and
vertical structure of the capitalist corporation.
It is evident that a far more substantial continuity in the phenomenon exists. The learned
quotes that Luciano Leggio offered from Pitrè, the writings of Spatola, and the statements of
pentiti , which included those of the most recent generation, clearly show that there is no
fundamental transformation that, with the passage of time, drives the enterprise syndicate to
renounce its image, and its protectionist and traditionalist ideology. Yet this does not prevent
it—and never prevented it—from seeking money and displaying ferocity. Sicilian and Italian
American mafiosi continue to declare their hostility to drugs, which destroy the sociocultural
ties of the community, even when they are caught red-handed dealing narcotics. From the
prison in which Nitto Santapaola—boss of the Mafia of Catania—was finally confined after
an extended run from the law, Santapaola depicted a city that no longer enjoyed security, and
therefore, prosperity, because it had been deprived of the safety he and his friends had
guaranteed. “Where is the flourishing Catania, where are the businessmen, the shopkeepers
who could live and work without fear?” he wondered, forgetting the cost in tears, blood, and
corruption caused by the safety and security he had provided.
Taking into account elements of this kind, recently Diego Gambetta again proposed, in a
different and far more rigorous context, the theme of the Mafia-as-enterprise, or enterprise
syndicate. He stated that a mafioso sells a specific “product,” protection—in a historic
context, the protection of Sicily or southern Italy, where trust and confidence are lacking. As
the reader will see in the present history of the Mafia, such a concept is evident from the very
beginning, in every phase of the story. It has been adopted by magistrates, policemen,
scholars, novelists, and—once again—even the mafiosi themselves, who set themselves up as
protectors from criminality. In this sense, the heart of the problem, the basic function of the
Mafia, can be identified in the racket that protects a legal institution, the business enterprise,
using violence to ensure a monopoly for itself—specifically, the verbal and physical
intimidation of thieves, traitors, witnesses, and competitors. Mafia wars are largely waged
among aspiring protectors. It seems open to question, however, whether Gambetta is not
underestimating the extortion factor as opposed to the protection extortion factor. The Mafia
d’ordine (order-keeping Mafia) always presupposes a disorder that needs to be organized and
kept firmly under control, whether during post-Risorgimento Sicily or during the more recent
process of criminal escalation. It is therefore, to a considerable degree, the Mafia itself that
helps to create the widespread sense of insecurity on which it battens and which it exploits.
Thus, it is reasonable to say that its sole function is a self-determined one, given that ordinary
criminals constitute the base from which the cosche (Mafia families) recruit their members.
Frequently, the threat is amplified, or even created ex novo, in order to ensure that the
insurance policy is purchased. It often happens that in linking the party that explicitly makes
the threat and the party that is willing to provide protection to the target of that threat, there is
a prior arrangement to play these specific roles, that of extortioner and protector. The division
of labor is made within the context of the same organization in order to persuade
entrepreneurs, in the past and today, to subscribe to this “insurance” service. The Mafia, as we
have already mentioned, is a power, nor does the fact that its blend of violence and ideology
that creates consensus prove anything about the substance of its claim that it provides a
service. “They act, therefore,” Gaetano Mosca noted as early as 1901, “in such a way that the
victim himself, who is actually paying a tribute to the cosca , can flatter himself that this is
actually a gracious gift or the price paid for a service rendered, rather than an extortion
exacted through the threat of violence.” The same reasoning applies to that sort of ex post
facto protection that offers intermediation to arrange for the recovery of stolen objects, an
intervention “apparently on behalf of the victim of theft” but that in point of fact is undertaken
by organizations featuring nothing more than a “division of theatrical parts,” played by
thieves and intermediaries. Then there is the interplay of protection and intermediation
artificially fomented in order to modify the power relationships among the factions within the
Mafia. Let us think, for instance, of the case of Vito Ciancimino, the corrupt politician with
whom a great many mafiosi aspired to establish close contact, but who happened to be in “the
hands” of Totò Riina: it was impossible to establish contact with Ciancimino except through
Riina. Pippo Calò, one of Palermo’s Mafia capos, suggested to Leonardo Vitale the idea of
kidnapping Ciancimino’s son, not only to make a little money, but also to attain another goal:
“It was expected that, given their relationship, Ciancimino would then turn to Riina and
[Calò] would himself be able to play the role of the intermediary, while in reality serving our
own interests.”
We should not think that, as in the perfect market of classical economics, supply and demand
for protection intersect and that all subjects are on an equal basis. In a class-driven society like
that of the nineteenth century, the asymmetry of power among the negotiating parties is at a
maximum, though it tends to diminish over time. In any case, both in the past and today, it is
difficult to hypothesize a freedom of choice, and therefore any real advantage, for the
peasants, the small shopkeepers, or the entrepreneurs who were not in on the game, being
forced out of the market or else obliged to limit artificially their range of activities. If any deal
exists, it is that of the lion with its prey, and therefore is null and void, as jurists might say. On
the other hand, as for both past and present-day large-scale entrepreneurs, the contract for
protection actually can be considered to be advantageous. Particularly respectful of the
clauses of those contracts were the “continental” companies that came to do business in the
infected zones. Such is the case, for instance, of the Standa-Berlusconi group, which the
investigating magistrates of the Catania district recently judged especially reluctant to reveal
to law enforcement forces the terms of its understanding with local extorters and protectors.
The logic of collusion, then, is common to northerners and southerners alike. Indeed, we can
say that the outsiders, in not forming part of the local networks of clientelism, tend to off er
greater space to their representatives, much as did the old large landholders who lived in
Naples, Rome, or even Madrid, since they had never actually seen their lands and gave their
administrators the authority to do as they wished. This was the opinion of the economist Carlo
Rodanò, who provided an insider’s account of the penetration of the Mafia in the Chimica
Arenella, or Arenella chemicals plant, the crown jewel of Palermo manufacturing since 1911,
which was owned by a German group and run by a German:
"His behavior was that of a man unfamiliar with the area. Pure-blooded Sicilians, even when
they were obliged to have dealings with mafiosi, unless they were complete fools took care
not to allow that contact to become very close, because while those good fellows stood out for
the agreeable way in which they offered all their potential clients an apparently altruistic form
of protection, it remained true that, with the passage of time and the growth of the friendship,
they would inevitably find a way of appropriating 100 percent of the possessions that their
new protégé had avoided losing by acquiring that protection; ordinarily, the mafioso would
also take a substantial chunk of what was left over."
The local governing classes’ skill at “establishing and keeping their distance” points to
situations that are still typical of an elitist society. With the passage of time, the associations
established to provide services to the dominant class become autonomous, and the cases of
major Sicilian entrepreneurs of more recent periods who availed themselves of Mafia
protection (the Salvos, the Cassinas, and the Costanzos) point to a much closer relationship to
the Mafia network itself.
Finally, the basic element that distinguishes the type of protection linking the Mafia with the
establishment is the factor of reciprocity. Just as the questore (administrative director of the
district police) of Palermo, Ermanno Sangiorgi, stated at the turn of the twentieth century,
“the caporioni of the Mafia are under the protection of senators, members of parliament, and
other in. uential figures who protect them and defend them, only to be protected and defended
by them in their turn.” Even today—just as in the past—it is the “protection industry” that is
obliged to ask politicians and public institutions for protection from the rigors of the law. The
truth is that the intertwining of Mafia and politics cannot be reduced to a straightforward
“economic” logic, and it is rather futile to try to force that point. Within the physiological and
variegated relationship of give and take with the machinery of politics, but especially in major
historical turning points such as Italian unification or the post–Second World War years, this
interlinking process profoundly determined the very structure of the Mafia. It might also be
that the Mafia seeks to condition the government, as has happened in Italy in recent years.
The history of the Mafia cannot be reduced to a single scheme, applicable in all situations and
all periods.
Protection, however, is not the only “industry” controlled by the Mafia;indeed, protection
inevitably constitutes a sort of bridge leading to other activities. The person who holds the
keys of security, whether it be the friend of mafiosi or a mafioso himself, is best suited to
enter a market such as the nineteenth-century marts of the gabella del latifondo —that is, the
market of commercial mediation in the citrus-growing districts in the area around Palermo—
or in the construction subcontracting of the twentieth century. As in the past, when the threat
of brigands was used to induce the large landowners to entrust to the mafiosi the management
of the agricultural enterprise, so it is today that shop-owners are threatened by armed robbery,
extortion, and loan-sharking to accept mafiosi as partners. We thus see the transition from the
protection business to full control of a company; this is an intrinsic part of the phenomenon.
On the one hand, we have a continual transformation of mafiosi into profiteers, and on the
other hand an ongoing transformation of “clean” companies into companies—generically—
corrupted or “in contact” with the Mafia. This twofold process was not determined by the
intrinsic characteristics of the commercial activities in question, but rather by the Mafia
groups’ degree and level of control of the territory. From this power base, the mafiosi went on
to control other illegal lines of business (large-scale smuggling and drug trafficking) that in
and of themselves have little to do with the protection business and control of the territory.
The twofold nature of the Mafia’s activities corresponds to a twofold organizational model.
On the one hand—in the case of Palermo—we see a series of organizations that take their
name from the territory in which they operate, that finance their activities through
protection/extortion, in some cases paying salaries to their members, and that pay for legal
expenses and subsidize the families of those who have been arrested. On the other hand, as
Buscetta explained, we see a business network that cuts transversely across the organizations
and in which the various affiliated members can participate, under certain favorable
conditions, but still risking their own funds and earning money as individuals. To distinguish
the first organizational model, based on extortion, from the second organizational model,
which is more fluid and profiteering, we might examine the distinction between a power
syndicate and an enterprise syndicate proposed by the American historian Alan Block,
although that distinction was made in an interpretative context that was somewhat different
from the one explored in this study. The two functions, as will become evident, interact, clash,
and in any case tend to be linked together. It therefore becomes impossible to distinguish the
mafioso from the trafficker, with the mafioso considered the protector (intermediary,
guarantor) and the trafficker the protected, in the presence of an opposite or reverse process of
the inclusion of entrepreneurs, smugglers, and drug traffickers into the Mafia organizations,
within which the roles tended to overlap. It might happen that a camorrista like Cutolo should
demand the payment of a pizzo from the Nuvolettas, who were the Neapolitan affiliates of
Cosa Nostra, and that in fact they continued to pay that protection fee until they felt they were
ready to wage war on Cutoloff This, however, has more to do with the shifting relationships
of power between the two alignments, and certainly not with any fundamental difference in
their natures.
THE MAFIA AS AN ORGANIZATION
Police and judicial sources are every bit as rife with ulterior motives as other sources. Those
who make use of them immediately venture into a gallery of mirrors involving the battling
truths of the prosecution and the defense, of the reputation and the infamy that make up the
role of the mafioso. For many years administrative measures ( ammonizione , a special
security regimen, or domicilio coatto , an obligatory residence) have been based on public
rumor and opinion as interpreted by police and magistrates as well as on the judicial efforts
made by the liberal governments, Fascism, and the Italian republic to attack the phenomenon
of the Mafia. There has never been anything spontaneous about that public rumor and
opinion. It has been instrumentally guided and created by a number of Mafia factions as a way
of combating the opposing factions; and then, when the interests of criminal politicians or
ordinary politicians pointed toward a repressive crackdown, it was instrumentally adopted by
certain state agencies. Credit should be given to the judges of Palermo (Chinnici, Falcone, and
Borsellino) for shifting this age-old mechanism to the interior of the structure designed to
protect civil rights within criminal prosecution and trial, and for ensuring that through the
evidence and testimony provided by those willing to collaborate with the law we have finally
obtained a source of information from within. Such sources are no longer filtered—as was the
case during the Liberal era or under the Fascist regime—through police reports or the
executive branch of the government.
In this case we are faced with a point of view—that of the Mafia determined to surrender and
pentirsi , or repent—that cannot exempt us from the need for sophisticated analyses, full-
blown reconstructions, and references to broader issues than those that the protagonists
themselves, both mafiosi and investigators, have been concerned with or have been willing to
present to us. However, taken as a whole, the confessions of Joe Valachi (1962), the memoirs
of Nick Gentile (1963), the revelations of Leonardo Vitale (1974), and those of Tommaso
Buscetta and so many other mafiosi following in his footsteps have shown us a Mafia that is
clearly a secret organization and that as such would subsequently be taken to court and be
found guilty.
Evidently, the first of these accounts, by Joe Valachi, focuses on the counterpart of the
Sicilian Mafia, located on the far shore of the Atlantic Ocean, in the heart of world capitalism.
The leadership of the “five families” of the New York Mafia, which took form in the early
1930s with the creation of the so-called Commission, included individuals nearly all of whom
had come to America at very early ages. The one exception was Salvatore Maranzano, who
arrived in 1927 at the age of forty-three and who immediately became a boss, certainly
because of a power base that he had already built in his hometown of Castellammare del
Golfoff American sources indicate that the 1920s was a time of a significant immigration of
mafiosi, with the arrival of no fewer than 500 criminals fleeing the prefect Mori. Can we
therefore speak of a sort of transplant?
The fact that the Sicilian-born leaders of the six families (Bonanno, Luciano, Gambino, Reina,
Lucchese, Profaci) all came from corrupt areas of the western section of the island would
seem to favor that interpretation: three of them came from Palermo, and the other three came
from Lercara, Corleone, and Castellammare. Or was the U.S. Mafia basically new,
considering that it took on an interregional character without counterpart in Italy, and that
among the heads of the families we find two Neapolitans (Genovese and Gotti) and two
Calabrians (Costello and Anastasia)? Powerful bosses like Joe Bonanno painted themselves as
direct descendants of a “Sicilian Tradition,” but that may be nothing more than the product of
the well-known ideological self-portrayal. Bonanno himself believed that the “purist” line was
defeated with the “Castellammare war” of 1930–1931, in the face of the overwhelmingly
evident process of Italian American cross-breeding in which he was personally involved in a
leadership role; and that is not to mention the decisive role played in these developments by
such Jewish criminals as Meyer Lansky and Benjamin Siegel.
In the United States, the basic unit of the organization, described in nineteenth-century Sicily
as a cosca , nassa , partito (party), società (society or company), or fratellanza (brotherhood),
was called a family. In actual practice, both in Palermo and in New York, the Mafia family
rarely corresponded to the blood family, and in America just as in Sicily, both today and in
the past, it may well happen that—in open defiance of the familistic ideologies—in infra-
mafioso conflicts, parents and children and brothers and sisters often find themselves on
opposite sides and wind up murdering one another. The emphasis on the family appears to be
little more than a tribute to the traditionalism found in radically different fields and typical of
Italian Americans. It also seems that the name used to designate the organization as a whole—
Cosa Nostra—comes from America. As far as can be determined, the name was previously
unknown in Sicily and certainly calls to mind an immigrant on a quest for a cosa “ nostra ”—
something of “our own”—clear and understandable, to be preferred to the incomprehensible
cose “ loro ”—their things. This terminology refers to the Sicilian component only among
present-day pentiti and can lead us to overturn the customary thought that Sicily exports its
archaic ways, leaving us to wonder to what degree a flow of the archaic is engendered in
America and then reexported to the Old World. Here we find an interaction of models, which
followed the travel patterns of individuals moving not only from Sicily to America but also
from America to Sicily. In this respect, the best known episode occurred after the end of the
Second World War when U.S. authorities sent back to Italy sixty-five “undesirables” of
Italian nationality, with the intention of returning a group of foreign criminals who had
infiltrated American society in an earlier period. In contrast, the Italians saw these deportees
as ambassadors and propagandists of a way of life, or of a typically American criminal
organization, which they considered to be far more dangerous than the local Mafia. However,
a far more frequent and continuous series of movements occurred along the circuits of
returning emigrants. For the present let us consider a single case: Nick Gentile built his career
in America, where he first arrived from his birthplace of Siculiana in 1903, at the age of
eighteen. He returned to Sicily in 1909, 1913, 1919, 1925, and 1927–1930, and then, for good,
in 1937, managing all the while to take part in election races in his homeland and various
forms of the import-export business, as well as to organize murders, be arrested, and then
released, thanks to his contacts and ties among various offcials, including those in the Fascist
regime. This introduces the theme, which we’ll come back to later, of international
profiteering activities, including drug traficking, “operated by this association [the Mafia] in
the United States and in Europe.” Apparently, a document mentions the existence of the New
York Commission prior to the revelations of Valachi, Gentile, and Bonanno: a report dated
1940 from the Italian financial police, the Guardia di Finanza, addressed to the U.S. Customs
supervisor of New York and to the Federal Bureau of Narcotics. This document, sent from
Italy to inform Americans about an American event, indicates the intensity of the trans-
Atlantic relationship, even though it came at the end of a historical phase, the period between
the two world wars, when migratory flows from Italy had completely collapsed.
Of course, this does not mean that the U.S. Mafia was not clearly distinct from the Sicilian
Mafia. First and foremost, the U.S. Mafia was profoundly modeled on American society, as is
emphasized by a number of studies (prevalently democratic and Italian American in nature)
that focus on the criminalizing elements of the American society into which these immigrants
were introduced, in contrast with the traditional WASP thesis of a foreign conspiracy. This
praiseworthy effort to overturn the racist idea that Italian Americans had a predisposition to
engage in crime, however, ultimately points toward a model of the Mafia that was nothing
more than a form of clientelism in its society of origin—“a system of godfathers and clients
exchanging favors, services, and other benefits,” perpetuated by the immigrants when they
arrived in the New World, and destined to die out once the Italian American community was
fully integrated into the upper ranks of U.S. society. According to the anthropologist Francis
J. Ianni, the mafiosi of the Lupollo family were “modest, taciturn people, . . . men of honor”
deserving of “sympathy and admiration,” linked together in a “family business” in which
legal activities gradually replaced the illegal activities that had once been necessary for
advancement for those who came from a world where there was neither law nor justice. In
short, theirs was “a vanishing way of life”—yet another variation on the theme, inevitably
refuted by events, of a modernity destined to automatically dissolve the archaism of the
Mafia. The vertical and highly structured organization described by Valachi was therefore
basically a paranoid invention of the authorities and the WASP power structure. The Mafia, as
Hawkins asserted, is like God: to believe in it is tantamount to a profession of faith that
cannot be sustained by empirical evidence. We should point out, however, that Ianni’s study
was based on documents provided by the Lupollos themselves and certainly reflects their
point of view; whereas Hawkins, without knowing it, formulated the same equation,
Mafia=God, that had already been set forth by Pasquale Sciortino, the lieutenant and
“intellectual” of the Giuliano gang, in a polemic with Girolamo Li Causi.
The Americans’ unwillingness to consider the Mafia as a criminal organization, especially
(though not only) during the years that followed Valachi’s revelations, profoundly influenced
the sociological and anthropological debate concerning the Sicilian Mafia that took place
between the 1960s and 1970s. In both cases, the only aspect considered worthy of study was
“Mafia behavior,” identified as that of the traditional Sicilian way of life, whereas “the
Mafia,” inasmuch as it was a structure independent of that mode of behavior, was not thought
to exist at all, since the Sicilians were only capable of identifying with their families and their
clientele. These were “natural” and personal aggregations that required no further bonds of
association, such as a special oath or a specific ritual. Characteristic in its obstinate
persistence in this direction is the work of the German sociologist Hess (1970), who believed
that the cosca corresponded to “a series of paired relations that the mafioso establishes with
people otherwise unrelated to one another.” The cosca was unstable and was established on
specific occasions for specific purposes; the cosca coalesced around the boss’s personal
charisma and network of relations, and it died with the passage of those elements. “We are not
in the presence of a static association of conspirators,” Arlacchi wrote a few years later, in a
paraphrase of the Schneiders’ more balanced formulation, “but rather of a group of friends
and relatives that, like any other organization of the sort, often gets together to play cards, go
hunting, or to celebrate a birth or a wedding, or to enjoy a schiticchio [banquet among men].”
Once again, we can point out how the effort to reduce the entire subject to the context of
Mediterranean anthropology tended to coincide with the interpretation that mafiosi had and
offered of themselves; they were content to portray themselves as innocuous country cousins
rather than members of dangerous criminal associations. The old boss of Ribera, Paolo
Campo, unhesitatingly acknowledged certain forms of behavior and declared himself to be a
mafioso, but—as usual—he criticized the mafiosi of his day (1985) who had become nothing
more than “common criminals.” Most importantly, he took great care to deny that he had ever
become an “associate” with a formal induction (the oath of loyalty): “I never committed
criminal acts, nor did I ever associate myself with others to do that. I have to say that I was
born mafioso and that I will die mafioso, if by Mafia you mean, as I do, to do good to one’s
neighbors, to give something to those who are in need, and to find work for those who are
unemployed.” It is a typical defense strategy in Mafia trials, a strategy that, as mentioned
earlier, coincides with the emphasis on traditionalist factors: already, during the nineteenth-
century trial of the Amoroso brothers, the defending lawyer described the charges of
conspiracy or association as “a chimaera,” “a contrivance,” “a mysterious anomaly.”
Similarly, Cascio-Ferro was described as an “individualist.” Interpretative schemes like
Hess’s, which included references to Pitrè, the “true and unrivaled sage who understood the
Sicilian soul,” find their precedent in the theorizing of the lawyerly culture of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries. According to this theorizing, the traditional Sicilian, a man of the
people, a “man of the countryside,” would be incapable of founding an association as
complex as the one described by the police, since he was an individualist or, at the very most,
a familist.
In 1965, in the aftermath of Valachi’s confession, Robert T. Anderson attempted to preserve
the traditional thesis by describing the path that led from Mafia to Cosa Nostra. Originally,
Anderson stated, the Mafia was supposedly a coalescing of family groups, but in America,
once it came into contact with modernity, it adopted “impersonal” organizational models,
centralized governing institutions to prevent a primitive internal violence, primarily because
that would be bad for business. The Sicilian organization, Anderson maintained, also followed
this path, when confronted with the demonstrated effects of the American model and the
similar processes of economic development. Here we encounter the usual opposition between
the old Mafia and the new Mafia, in which a naïve and all-inclusive model of modernization
relegates culture, clientele, and blood family ties to the traditional world, placing in the world
of the present “impersonal” organization, while instead the problem lies in understanding the
complex interactions that exist, past and present, between the former elements and the latter
institution.
Today, in the wake of the investigations of the last thirty years in Italy and America, nearly
everyone is willing to recognize that Mafia organizations are characterized by a level of
continuity extending beyond the life spans of the individual members, by a hierarchical
structure, and by a membership that is carefully filtered, in accordance with the definition
offered by official American institutions. In accordance with Anderson’s approach, however,
it is often said that these characteristics have been acquired only recently, whereas it would be
more accurate to say that they have only been recently acquired, not so much by the Mafia, as
by the mafiologists, or at least by the majority current in that field, because from the very
beginning, there have always been those who described “Mafia associations” of this sort. This
is the case, for instance, of the two policemen and criminologists, Giuseppe Alongi and
Antonino Cutrera, between the end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century,
who made use of the investigative findings of the questura of Palermo in the three decades
from 1860 to 1890—analyses that Hess summarily dismissed as “erroneous.” The methods of
the division of territory and coordination among the cosche revealed by that documentation
were very similar to those on which Buscetta insisted. In particular, in the years between the
end of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century, there existed a command
structure composed of representatives of these groups, whose acts and rules (as we shall
describe below), in the wake of the previously mentioned questore Sangiorgi, resembled the
New York Commission as well as the organization in Palermo, which from the 1960s on
oversaw the activities of Cosa Nostra, until the further centralizing crackdown of the
Corleonese. This does not mean that the Mafia groups of the Palermo area have remained
under the control of supervisory institutions from Italian unification to the present day.
Indeed, those institutions are unstable, fully exposed to the stress of internal divisions, and
have probably had their ups and downs. Moreover, in recent history, the territorial extent of
their authority (the city? the province? the region?) has shifted according to various
circumstances. However, the relative success of the efforts at centralization in Palermo (as in
New York) is likely the result of this age-old proclivity for coordination, since these
tendencies are universal in the realm of organized crime but do not always achieve results. In
Naples, for example, the attempt in that direction with the Nuova Camorra Organizzata
(NCO, or New Organized Camorra) under Raffaele Cutolo ended in a bloodbath, and
prevailing today at Reggio Calabria is a horizontal model, or a “swarm model.” In the
Caltanissetta and Catania districts, the groups linked to Cosa Nostra have been unable to take
full control because of the continuous emergence of new gangs. And the a.liation of the
Palermo families with eminent personages of the ’ndrangheta or the Camorra, tending to
reinforce business ties established in the context of cigarette and drug smuggling, failed to
bring about the expected centralizing effects.
In short, one should avoid falling into the trap of the idea of the Single Great Conspiracy,
eschewing the popular image of a piovra (octopus, a term used colloquially in Italy to
describe the Mafia— translator’s note ) with one head and a thousand tentacles, with
omniscient and omnipotent leadership, a notion that has been simplistically foisted on the
public by authorities in both America and Sicily, in particular during the course of the first
investigations and inquiries in the nineteenth century. The mafiosi are involved in business
dealings that link them with subjects who neither belong to the Mafia nor could they ever do
so: intermediaries, criminals of every kind and every nationality, Turkish or Chinese drug
traffickers, bankers. In their role as protectors—a role that as we have seen is highly
ambiguous—they interact with landowners, entrepreneurs, and shopowners. In their necessary
connections with politics and public institutions, they make deals and agreements with
notables, professional politicians, policemen, and judges. As we shall see, the individual
mafiosi carry on conversations with the outside world, in some cases independently of the
Mafia as an organization. This helps us to see, among other things, that the concept of the
Mafia as an anti-state is overstated and misleading, and it points us to the theme of the ties
linking the Mafia and official power. This field should be carefully considered and entails in
fact current implications both in the judicial field (I am referring to the penal category,
recently introduced into Italian legislation, of external involvement in Mafia conspiracy) and
in the political field. Let us consider, for instance, the attempt to distinguish between the
political responsibility and the penal responsibilities of public figures involved in various
ways in relationships with organized crime. Stefano Bontate, the Grecos, and other eminent
leaders of Cosa Nostra have deemed it useful to find a venue for meeting with their partners
from the worlds of politics and economics in the more-or-less secret Masonic lodges. In
scholarly terms—as well as political and judicial terms—it is useful to wonder how these
fluid and varied networks serve as parallel and overlapping structures to the organization that
ties the mafiosi together.