Mafia

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MAFIA.

THE MAFIA AND THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY
MAFIA, CAMORRA, AND 'NDRANGHETA
FASCISM ATTACKS THE MAFIA
THE MAFIA IN POSTWAR ITALY
THE FUTURE OF THE MAFIA
BIBLIOGRAPHY

The origins of the Mafia remain mysterious. No two accounts agree. Some trace its existence back to medieval mafie or guerrilla bands. The De Mauro–Paravia dictionary says that it "arose in western Sicily in the nineteenth century." Most accounts explain the Mafia by citing the southern Italian great estate or latifondo. Absentee landlords hired an agent, the gabellotto, to manage their property. The agents used a paid armed force, called variously campieri or caporali, to discipline the landless peasants. This system operated across much of the Italian south, but caporali were hired guns, not mafiosi. Besides, the Mafia seems to have emerged only in western Sicily and only spread to the rest of the island after the Second World War. Why there? Again nobody really knows.

THE MAFIA AND THE UNIFICATION OF ITALY

The unification of Italy in 1861 brought organized government to the Italian south, and northern Italians discovered a new world. Giuseppe Rizzotto's "I Mafiusi della Vicaria," performed in 1863, turned the Mafia into a romantic conspiratorial organization complete with initiation rites. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the earliest official use of the word in English comes from the same decade. The Times of London reported on 11 October 1866 that "the Maffia, a secret society, is said to include among its members many persons of an elevated class." Others denied that it was an organization at all. The scholar Pasquale Villari wrote in 1878 that the Mafia had "no established hierarchy, no set rules, no regular revenue. The Maffia has no written statutes; it is not a secret society, and hardly an association. It is formed by spontaneous generation" (p. 54). In the 1980s the so-called pentiti (repentant Mafia bosses who "talked" to the police and thus violated the notorious code of silence, omertà) described elaborate rites, annual meetings, and hierarchies. As in everything to do with the Mafia, there is no certainty here either. Villari could have been right in the nineteenth century and the Mafia then changed in the twentieth. Nobody knows.

MAFIA, CAMORRA, AND 'NDRANGHETA

By the middle of the nineteenth century observers had identified not just one system of organized crime but several. In Naples there was the Camorra, an urban version of the Mafia. Various branches of the Camorra continue to operate in Naples in the early twenty-first century. They dominate the building trades, control drugs and smuggling, and fight bloody battles for control of the city. A third version of the Mafia called the 'Ndrangheta operates in Calabria. The word is said to come from the Greek and to mean "honored society." All three criminal societies, the Mafia, Camorra, and 'Ndrangheta, maintain that their activities bring them "honor." Indeed, a traditional term for a mafioso is precisely that he is "a man of honor" (uomo d'onore).

The Mafia and 'Ndrangheta, unlike the Camorra, began in the countryside. The typical Mafia boss in the province of Palermo until the Second World War was the macellaio, who owned the local butcher shop, organized voting fraud, rustled cattle, and kept order. They acted as "middle men" and doffed their caps to the gentiluomo in his white suit who sat in cafés in the small towns. They supported the church, collected debts, and settled disputes. Pino Arlacchi, the leading Italian sociologist of the Mafia, sees this comportamento mafioso (Mafia behavior) as the distinctive characteristic of the phenomenon. The Mafia was not an organization but a way to behave: farsi rispettare (to make oneself respected), to acquire honor by fatti provi (proven facts or deeds), and, above all, to show courage by acts of violence. Killing a respected enemy gained the killer a huge quantum of honor. Because violence eliminated so many young men, the "family" or cosca extended itself by coparenthood (comparaggio) to young males not directly related by blood to the family. The capo mafia adopted them and became their padrino or godfather. All family members bound themselves by the oath of silence (omertà) to reveal nothing of the family's activities. In this sense, the Mafia is not simply a gang of crooks but represents what sociologists call a "total social fact," a highly complex, historic, social organism.

FASCISM ATTACKS THE MAFIA

The fascist regime of Benito Mussolini attacked the Mafia. Mussolini installed his "Iron Prefect," Cesare Mori, in the seat of government in Palermo in October 1925 with orders to smash the Mafia by any means. Mori used large forces of police and carabinieri to round up hundreds of rural mafiosi and small-time crooks. He put them in concentration camps, held them without trial, and drove many of the bigger figures to flee the country. By 1927 Mori declared that the Mafia had been eliminated. It survived, of course, because Mori stopped short at the so-called third level, the great landlords, aristocrats, and businessmen in Palermo and Torre del Greco whose funds supplied cash to the various Mafia families in return for violence by contract. The Mafia could not then and cannot now be separated from Sicilian society, on which it lives in parasitic symbiosis.

Mussolini's war on the Mafia turned its victims into "antifascists." When the U.S. and British forces landed on Sicily in July 1943, they found hundreds of blameless antifascists all over the island who spoke English with Brooklyn or Philadelphia accents, knew the locals, and could tell the Allies where the Fascists and Nazis were to be found. The Allies named many friendly mafiosi mayors of their towns.

THE MAFIA IN POSTWAR ITALY

Between 1945 and the early 1970s, about eight million country dwellers left the land for better jobs in northern cities. The traditional Mafia lost its popular base. The Italian state intervened just in time to save the Mafia by creating a Sicilian autonomous region with substantial powers and beginning a massive investment in infrastructural improvements—roads, sewers, dams, hydroelectric power plants, swamp clearance, and disease control. Billions of lira flowed from north to south. The Mafia went into the construction business, the hotel and restaurant business, and set up travel agencies and casinos. A tertiary economy spread out. Universities turned the children of illiterate peasants into local bureaucrats, lawyers, and academics. Sicily, with its population of roughly seven million, was flooded with capital. Much of it financed "legitimate" businesses that banks knew perfectly well belonged to Mafia families.

In 1972 U.S. and French law enforcement agents broke the "French Connection," a Marseille-based heroin cartel controlled by Corsicans. The price of heroin in the United States went up sharply, and the Sicilian Mafia reacted. They hired the French chemists and set up labs for them in Palermo. The American Mafia families, after some hesitation—drugs were not "honorable"—took over the dispatch and marketing in the United States. The Mafia went from very profitable regional activities to international big business. Billions of "narcolire" flowed through the Sicilian economy. The drug trade knew no boundaries. The sums at stake became astronomical, and waves of murders in the 1980s showed that jurisdictional disputes over territories and supply routes were now lethal. Between 1980 and the early 1990s, there were more than a hundred Mafia killings a year in Palermo alone.

The Italian state could not control the Mafia. The mafiosi had more money, better political connections than ever, and had outgrown their place as "middle men." Now they gave orders to the gentiluomo in the white suit, not the other way round. They killed policemen, they killed magistrates, and on 3 September 1982 they murdered General Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the commanding general of the carabinieri, in broad daylight. The following year, the Italian state got a break. Brazilian police arrested an Italian mafioso called Tommaso Buscetta, who decided to tell what he knew. He revealed that the Sicilian Mafia had a rigid organization ruled by a supreme commission of ten top bosses called the cupola. Using Buscetta's evidence, the state prosecutor Giovanni Falcone tried, and in December 1987 convicted, over three hundred leading Mafia figures in the so-called maxi-processo. The American Mafia families were also weakened by waves of killings. In February 1985, after close cooperation between Italian and American police officers, nine of the top bosses of the main American clans—the Gambino, Lucchese, Bonanno, Colombo, and Genovese "families"—were arrested and successfully prosecuted.

THE FUTURE OF THE MAFIA

The Italian Mafia has been wounded but is not dead. It has lost its U.S. monopoly. Colombian drug syndicates offer a better product. The competition of cocaine and crack has reduced the demand for heroin, the main Mafia drug, but not eliminated it. Legal changes in Italy allow Italian magistrates to prosecute groups as well as individuals, but the connection between the "third level" and the Mafia still exists. In December 2004 Senator Marcello Dell'Utri, a founding member of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi's Forza Italia Party, was sentenced to nine years in prison for money laundering and serving as the link between the Mafia and the governing elites. Forty mafiosi testified against him. Nevertheless, as long as the Sicilian Mafia still lives as a parasite on the surrounding society and expresses some of its values, it will continue to exercise its malign influence on the community for years to come.

The word mafia has also been generalized. There are "Russian mafias," "Chinese mafias"; indeed, any number of criminal gangs or groups now bear the name. Few of them really fit the peculiarly tight social and cultural conditions that created and sustained the original Sicilian Mafia over the centuries of transformation from feudal agriculture to international business. The Sicilian Mafia survived these changes because its familial structure proved tight yet flexible enough to adapt to new conditions.

See alsoCrime and Justice; Italy .