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.