Mafia

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MAFIA

Following their restoration in 1815, the Neapolitan Bourbons, rulers of Sicily, attempted to abolish feudalism and enclose common holdings, subordinating collective pasture rights to "improved" private cultivation. Their parallel effort to establish seven provincial prefectures suffered from a paucity of roads and financial resources. Poorly managed by governmental authority, the agrarian transformation produced conditions—banditry, rebellion, and political corruption—that nurtured mafia formation.

The land reform was intended to create a class of smallholders, but instead it privileged an emergent group of civile owners whose newly minted titles, marriages with aristocrats, and acquisitions of vast estates (latifundia) reproduced the landlordism of the past. Displaced from promiscuous access to land, peasants rebelled, encouraged by the secret societies of liberal intellectuals and Free-masons plotting insurrection against the Bourbon ancien régime. The rebels spawned bands that kidnapped landlords, rustled livestock, and pirated commodities moving through the countryside. Although it is tempting to distinguish among revolutionary "squadre" aimed at state power, "bands" of rural thieves and kidnappers, and "gangs" of persons escaping arrest, these categories were inherently ambiguous, subject to manipulation by bandits, gangsters, revolutionaries, and repressive authorities alike.

Peasant disturbances were particularly violent in the western provinces, a reflection of the greater presence in these provinces, when compared to eastern Sicily, of latifundist great estates. As the Bourbon reforms abrogated rights of common pasturage, and as Sicily's population grew in the nineteenth century, this forbidding territory became a "brigand corridor"—a highway for abusive grazing, animal theft, and the clandestine movement of stolen beasts to city markets. The lawlessness of the corridor was one reason the mafia would gain a particular foothold in western Sicily. Another factor concerns the significance of Palermo, seat of the viceroyal government, as the fulcrum for both insurrection and repression. Each uprising consolidated relationships between the rural and urban forces of disorder in the western half of the island.

The first official reference to groups that would later be defined as mafias dates to an 1838 report of a Bourbon magistrate who noted that in the western province of Trapani, many local communities supported "types of sect called partiti" that had powerful patrons and deployed common funds to influence judicial proceedings. This phenomenon was not labeled mafia until the early 1860s, when Sicilian dramatists Giuseppe Rizzotto and Gaspare Mosca produced a play called I Mafiusi di la Vicaria (1863), in which the word "mafiusi" referred to a group of prisoners in a Palermo jail who defined themselves as "men of respect" and exacted deference from other prisoners. Shortly after, in 1865, the prefect of Palermo Province, Filippo Gualterio, referred to the "so called Maffia" in a government document, defining it as an increasingly audacious criminal association.

Mafia formation continued in the 1860s, now in the context of the landing of Giuseppi Garibaldi (1807–1882), the Bourbons' surrender, and the plebiscite favoring adherence to the constitution of Piedmont. Not only did Sicily receive Piedmont's flag and currency, the Piedmontese also imposed their tax code, anticlerical legislation, and, most controversially, a military draft. Like an occupying power, in 1866 they declared a state of siege in Sicily, rounding up alleged draft dodgers for trial in military courts, placed suspicious persons under surveillance, and suspended freedoms of association and press.

After 1862, 163,000 hectares of ecclesiastical holdings plus 37,000 hectares of royal land were sold at auction to pay off debts incurred by the new nation state. As with the Bourbon reforms, local councils administered the land sales, favoring elite cliques. A parliamentary inquest of 1878 determined that 93 percent of the distributed land went to those "who were already rich," leaving thousands of peasants precariously closer to landlessness than they had been before. The colossal problem of peasant unrest worsened and with it the confusing mix of criminal and revolutionary activity. By the late 1860s, banditry had become endemic to property relations.

The new Italian state did not conduct a "brigand war" in Sicily comparable to its military campaign in southern Italy; even the most audacious bandits continued to enjoy the support of kin and neighbors, landed elites and notables, and the police. To the national government's authorities, all Sicilians seemed impenetrably "barbarian" and "criminal."

In 1876, however, the more democratic forces of the Risorgimento—the "Historic Left"—took power, expanding the presence of southern and Sicilian notables in the national government and altering the dynamics of local governance. As restricted parties of "liberal" elites and "democrats" competed for ministerial positions, parliamentary deputies from Sicily made themselves clients of ministers who dispensed the state's patronage, while local "grand electors" both distributed this patronage and delivered the deputies' votes.

The new regime also supported initiatives for public welfare and economic growth, including the development of citrus crops, mineral exports, and shipping facilities. At last acknowledging the need for effective police action against brigandage, it brought about a decline in kidnappings. But crimes against property continued: the lucrative new crops invited theft, and animal rustling flourished with the growth of urban markets. Opportunistically, local "mafias" transformed themselves into full-fledged protection rackets.

The racketeers arose, it seems, among an incipient entrepreneurial class of carters, muleteers, merchants, bandits, and herdsmen who, in the rural towns and suburbs of Palermo, joined fratellanze or "brotherhoods," also called cosche (singular, cosca) after the tightly bundled leaves of the artichoke. Claiming to restore order, members of these groups "offered" landowners the service of protection and/or forced them, against the menace of violence, to employ particular clients as estate guards, rentiers, and all-around henchmen. At the same time, they extorted a tribute or pizzo— literally, a "beakful"—from business activities in the cosca's territory. Amid the spreading orchards around Palermo, racketeers also deployed violence to gain monopoly control of produce markets and water for irrigation. In each case, racketeering advanced with the collusive knowledge of public officials and policemen and in the context of an inadequate state investment in policing and criminal justice. Distributing employment opportunities, mafiosi won at least grudging admiration in poor communities, enough so that silencing witnesses to their crimes did not have to depend on fear alone. When arrests and convictions did occur, the cosca functioned as a mutual aid society, using its accumulated funds to support the families of imprisoned members.

Post-1870s police reports index the mafia's growing influence, defining it as a monopolistic network of "politically protected extortion rings" or "groups of criminals who terrorized a local community, living off extortion and other illegal gains, and controlling access to jobs and local markets." In a 500-page report of 1898 to 1900, the police chief (questore) of Palermo, Ermanno Sangiorgi, referred to a "vast association of evildoers, organized in sections, divided into groups, each group regulated by a capo." Mafiosi, by contrast, represented themselves as "men of honor" who solved problems (their own and others') without resort to state-sponsored law.

The Sangiorgi and subsequent reports, amplified by the occasional autobiographical or observer's account, and, in the late twentieth century, by the depositions of justice collaborators in the anti-mafia trials of the 1980s and 1990s, are remarkably consistent regarding several features of the mafia's social organization and culture. Territorial in scope, most cosche bear the name of the rural town or urban neighborhood over which they hold sway. Also referred to as "families," they are to some extent kin-oriented, with membership extending from fathers to sons, uncles to nephews, and through the fictive-kin tie of godparenthood. Yet, becoming a mafioso is also a matter of talent. Sons of members believed to lack "criminal reliability" are passed over in favor of impressive young delinquents from unrelated backgrounds.

Applied to the cosca, the term family is metaphorical—an evocation of the presumed solidarity of kinship. Mutual good will is further induced by idiosyncratic terms of address and linguistically playful nicknames. In a symbolically laden rite of entry, possibly learned from Freemasons in nineteenth-century prisons, the novice holds the burning image of a saint while his sponsor pricks his finger and, mixing the blood and ashes, has him swear an oath of lifelong loyalty and omertà, or silence before the law.

The mafia cosca is a male organization; women are habitually excluded not only from meetings but also from events like banquets and hunting parties where masculine identity is asserted. These events have implications for socializing novices into the practice of violence, and women's absence from them may be fundamental to the bonding that takes place. Nevertheless, the women of mafiosi are themselves from mafia families. A mafia wife basks in the refinements that her husband's money and status can provide and knowingly shelters his assets from the confiscatory power of the state. Her sons will most likely join the company, her daughters marry into it, and she participates in preparing them for these futures.

The mafia cosca is a largely autonomous group, structured internally along lines of age and privilege, with new recruits, the "soldiers," expected to take greater risks and receive lesser rewards. Generally, the senior bosses monopolize the elected leadership positions, but there are notable cases of ambitious upstarts seizing power. Although each cosca stands alone, members share in an island-wide sub-culture fostered by the standardized initiation, ideology of honor and omertà, and secret signs of mutual recognition, not to mention collaboration in specific trafficking ventures. Anticipating the Commission that united mafia groups in and around Palermo in the 1960s through 1980s, leaders of several cosche attempted a common command structure, the Conferenza, at the turn of the twentieth century.

The mafia's intreccio or dense interweaving with national as well as local and regional governments was already in place by that time. The most powerful mafiosi served as grand electors of parliamentary deputies; reciprocally, these political patrons made it easy for racketeers to acquire weapons and fix trials. Older, established capi rarely went to jail, while younger "soldiers" experienced incarceration as no more than a perfunctory interruption of their affairs. Populating the murky moral universe of the mafia and politics were the figures of the mandante, who orders crimes, and the mestatore or scandalmonger, who brings rivals down through accusations of "sponsored criminality." For many scholars of the mafia, the notorious murder of Emanuele Notarbartolo was diagnostic of these ills.

On 1 February 1893, Notarbartolo, an aristocrat allied with the Historic Right, former mayor of Palermo (1873–1876) and director general of the Bank of Sicily (1876–1890), was stabbed to death on a train en route to a town southeast of Palermo. Suspicion fell on two mafiosi from the nearby cosca of Villabate, yet no one thought that responsibility for the crime ended with them. Another bank director and prominent notable, Raffaele Palizzolo, was eventually indicted and convicted as the organizer of the murder, but his conviction was annulled by the appeals court, and he was eventually acquitted after a retrial. All told, the Notarbartolo affair was a script for later developments, from the powerful intreccio between the mafia and politics, to the divided role of the judiciary in prosecuting mafia crimes.

The investigation of the Notarbartolo case also unearthed a geographical fault line that would reappear in subsequent mafia conflicts. The cosche of the orchards to the north and west of Palermo were geographically closer to, and heavily involved in, the city's produce markets and port. Strongly territorial in orientation, their members specialized in guarding crops, commercial mediation, and the control and distribution of water; extortion was their premier crime. Supporting politicians electorally, they received protection from them, but they organized their own intercosca relations more or less independently of this political shield.

In contrast, the cosche to Palermo's south and east were less coherent. Much of this zone was also given over to orchards and gardens, but these were interspersed with large towns of the sort that characterize the latifundist interior. Moreover, the entire zone was a gateway to the interior—the main pathway over which rustlers drove stolen livestock for clandestine butchering and sale in Palermo. Significantly, robbery, kidnapping, and animal theft were the premier crimes of this zone. Elastic relationships between local mafias articulated well with these offenses, as did the lesser concern of mafiosi with strictly territorial activity. At another level, political figures like Palizzolo enabled a certain degree of integration among cosche. In the early twentieth century, these divergent tendencies deepened as the coastal and orchard mafias gained advantage from their greater commercial interaction with relatives in the United States. Constituting an economic and ecological substrate of mafia formation, the factionalism would resurface after World War II in the "mafia wars" related to urban construction and narcotics trafficking.

Understanding the mafia is rendered difficult not only by the ambiguities inherent in its relationships with society and state but also because of the contradictory discourses that surround it. For, at the same time as police reports began to depict a secret, conspiratorial association sworn to omertà, they were countered by theories of a mafia-friendly Sicilian character, diffuse and age-old. Positing Sicilian culture as the locus of the mafia took two different forms, however. One was explicitly racist—all Sicilians are delinquenti at heart. The other amounted to a defensive attempt to render the mafia benign and romantic—"not a criminal association but the sum of Sicily's values" that outsiders can never understand. Folding the mafia into a generalized cultural "atmosphere," blurring its definition by assimilating it to Sicilians' presumed exaggeration of individual force or efficacy, constitutes a kind of Sicilianismo that for many years obstructed any concerted mafia historiography. It is one of the most significant achievements of the late twentieth century antimafia process that there are now Sicilian historians working on the reconstruction of this much misunderstood institution.

To a large extent, the new research both uses and validates police reports such as that of Sangiorgi while at the same time faulting police and prosecutorial models for hyper-coherence. Representing the cosca and the coordinating bodies as super-secret, clearly bounded, and conspiratorial, these models underplay the systematic practice of single mafiosi to cultivate friends, and friends of friends, in wider social and political fields. This reality, and the mafia's intreccio with politics, tells us that the prototypical nucleus of Sicilian organized crime, and the key to its economy and system of power, is not the overly conjured cosca, Conferenza, or Commission, but shifting coalitions of select capi and corrupt elites.

See alsoCrime; Sicily.