The Sicilian Mafia is a translocal fraternal organization whose respective local families called cosche (singular, cosca) lay claim to rural communities, urban neighborhoods, and suburbs, primarily in western Sicily. This organization began to coalesce after 1860 when the newly unified Italian state advanced capitalist development. The commoditization of land was especially disruptive, dispossessing peasants of use rights and exacerbating banditry, animal rustling, and the mayhem of regime change. Uprooted men migrated to cities and, after the 1880s, abroad; some joined urban gangs. Amid this turmoil, self-anointed estate guards, rentiers, demobilized soldiers, and fledgling merchants came together in secretive sodalities. Participants presented themselves as vigilantes who, through cultivating a reputation for violence, promised to restore a feudal form of justice. Among other interventions, they shielded landowners and vulnerable enterprises from brigands and gangsters, collecting or extorting a fee (a beak-full or pizzo) for the service. They imposed on employers the requirement that they hire particular clients. Mediating local conflicts, they arranged the return, for a fee, of stolen goods, rustled livestock, and unpaid debts. By the turn of the 20th century, there were almost 200 cosche with memberships ranging from 10 to nearly 50 plus close associates. This article provides an overview of the Sicilian Mafia, examining its basic structure and relationship with the state as well as its current status.
Basic Structure
The continuity of a cosca over time rests in part on kinship, the status of mafioso being passed from father to son, uncle to nephew. Mafiosi also name each other as godfathers to their children. In (biological) families where the father, uncles, cousins, older brothers, and godfathers are mafiosi, it is almost obligatory for the next generation to consider a criminal career. Kinship, however, is not the sole basis for recruitment nor does genealogical succession guarantee the right kind of talent. Older mafiosi often pass over sons and nephews who seem unsuited, while gathering around them unrelated youth who, as errand boys and show-offs, appear to have the necessary guts.
Each cosca elects its own leaders who enforce a set of rules that apply to the Mafia in general (e.g., prohibitions against adultery, kidnapping, and procuring prostitutes). Leaders also negotiate the terms under which it is permissible to commit murder (e.g., state officials were historically off limits) and oversee adherence to omertà, the norm that demands silence before official authorities and commitment to a man of honor identity: real mafiosi possess the courage, valor, and capacity for violence that render them capable of avenging wrongs without resorting to the law. Omertà is further reinforced by the funds each cosca skims from proceeds of the pizzo as these funds are often deployed to pay the lawyers and support the wives and children of members who get arrested and may be pressured to talk. Indeed, only since the 1980s have anti-Mafia prosecutors been able to cultivate justice collaborators (ironically called pentiti by the press).
Mafia cosche engage in a common set of cultural practices that contribute to fraternal solidarity and facilitate instant recognition between mafiosi who hail from distant places. Key practices include promulgating a common charter myth, assigning members evocative nicknames, and performing initiation rituals. In a typical ritual, the sponsor, surrounded by cosca members, pricks the initiate’s finger, rubs the blood on a saint’s image, and sets the paper on fire in the initiate’s hands, exacting an oath never to betray the Mafia. Having deemed the novice to be loyal and capable of taking the life of another, the cosca then celebrates at a banquet, replete with rounds of toasts. Banquets also mark other occasions (e.g., weddings and negotiated treaties between rival factions). On many of these occasions, mafiosi strategically invite outsiders (e.g., politicians, priests, local business leaders, occasionally police officials). Many banquets are male-exclusive; indeed, the hosts might well prepare the multicourse meal themselves. Male-only banquets are well known for sporting hilarious, transgressive, even homoerotic entertainment that binds the assembled revelers and encourages them to consider themselves above the rules of everyday society.
Substantial intermarriage among mafia-related households meanwhile bequeaths to mafia wives a dense web of kinship and friendship; these relations support her as she performs her roles, among them raising future mafiosi. Wives also benefit materially from the enterprises of their husbands, to which they sometimes lend their names as a hedge against prosecution. Although mafia wives may experience the demands of omertà as a heavy psychological burden, rarely do they rebel.
The Sicilian Mafia and the State
A crucial aspect of the Sicilian Mafia is its relation to the Italian state. Many have argued that the newly formed state of 1860 was weak and dysfunctional in the less developed South, so much so that the emergent mafias of Campania, Calabria, and Sicily filled a vacuum, performing state-like functions. Eventually, the state made its presence felt but not without being thoroughly corrupted by these mafias. A more plausible interpretation, however, builds on the new Italy’s ambition to join the league of the 19th-century capitalist imperial powers, its government and industrial leaders welcoming the regional mafias as adjuncts to the project. By menacing violence, these mafias brought a modicum of order to beleaguered landowners, nascent commercial enterprises, and oversubscribed small businesses. They selectively recruited at-risk youth to their secretive sodalities, calming the incidence of banditry and urban crime. They also lent a hand in keeping at bay anti-capitalist social forces, beginning with late 19th-century socialist movements. The Cold War role of the Sicilian Mafia in tethering Italy to the capitalist West is legendary. This does not mean mafia leaders take the state or other institutions (e.g., the Church, local businesses, the medical and legal professions) for granted; to the contrary, they actively work at befriending persons of authority, in part through orchestrating convivial occasions.
In effect, the relationship between the Mafia and the state transcends the self-serving quid pro quo implied by the word corruption. The Italian word intreccio (i.e., tightly braided strands of hair) is more evocative, with the understanding that the state consists of multiple pieces, some more entangled with criminal organizations than others. Historically, the most involved elements were the dominant political parties, especially the Christian Democratic Party that, with mafia-organized electoral support, expanded politically after World War II. National as well as local politicians in turn protected the Mafia, ensuring that aggressive police officers would be transferred; that forensic evidence and incriminating documents would disappear; that criminal trials would be moved to different venues; that convictions, if they occurred, would be overturned or sentences reduced on appeal. Thanks to this protection, the postwar Mafia achieved a significant presence in state-led initiatives for land reform, public works, and construction. Mafiosi intimidated the populations of their respective territories, but, thanks to government largesse, they also delivered resources to those populations.
No place in Sicily exhibited the postwar intreccio of Mafia and state more profoundly than the regional capital, Palermo, and its surrounding areas, the latter covered with commercially oriented citrus groves and orchards but giving way to urban sprawl. Mafia bosses, whether of the city or the orchards, busily brokered relationships between public officials and construction entrepreneurs or, acquiring trucks and construction materials, became entrepreneurs themselves. Contractors and subcontractors indebted to mafiosi obligingly employed the latter’s clients; mafiosi, in turn, were able to deliver more votes, most notably to local, regional, and national Christian Democrats. The mafiosi in and around Palermo harnessed additional revenue from their control over wholesale markets for fish, meat, and produce and from levying the pizzo on businesses in their respective territories. Individual mafiosi also invested in smuggling (e.g., meat from stolen livestock, American cigarettes to evade the Italian tobacco tax, and drugs for the American market).
Palermo and its orchard hinterland turned out to be an ideal place to prepare clandestine shipments of narcotics for crossing the Atlantic. Before the war, smugglers obtained morphine from Northern Italian and German pharmaceutical companies and hid it in crates of citrus, sardines, and other products destined for transport by ship to designated Sicilian immigrants in the United States. After the war, mafia leaders in Cinisi, a town near the coast just west of Palermo, convinced government planners to build the regional airport nearby; they and their allies used this facility to ship Southeast Asian heroin, refined in Marseilles by Corsican gangsters, to relatives and friends in America. Following the break-up of the French Connection in the early 1970s, mafiosi in Sicily, assisted by chemists from Marseilles, established their own refineries, while a new wave of migrants, some of them relatives of a Cinisi leader, created the pizza connection (i.e., America’s heroin distribution network anchored by pizza parlors).
In 1963, Sicily saw the first of two mafia wars occasioned by tension over drugs—in this case, a vicious argument over whom to blame for a wayward shipment of heroin. The second war exploded in the early 1980s, pitting interior cosche, centered in the rural town of Corleone, against mafiosi in Palermo and surrounding areas. Historically marginal to trafficking, the Corleonesi suspected the Palermo groups, advantaged as they were by their proximity to ports for shipping orchard produce, to the airport, and to traffickers in America, of excluding them from drug deals. Maneuvering to raise investment capital, the Corleone leaders audaciously kidnapped construction impresarios with whom their rivals were allied, pursuing a bandit-like strategy that violated the Mafia’s own rules. As prophylaxis against reprisals, they also infiltrated the most powerful Palermo cosche, enlisting the support of persons within them. Although the heads of several cosche sought to modulate the mounting conflict through a province-wide Cupola, or Commission, an unprecedented number of homicides and disappearances ensued: There were over 500 by 1983.
Current Status
The wars marked a turning point in Mafia-state relations as outright bribes and threats overtook the earlier entanglements. Most spectacularly, the Corleonesi overturned the taboo on killing state officials, initiating a series of assassinations that produced excellent cadavers: police investigators, high-level politicians, journalists, and magistrates. Especially vulnerable were the Sicilian magistrates who, building on the pizza connection investigation in the United States, formed a pool to reinforce one another as they followed narco-money and prepared indictments. Best known among the martyred magistrates are Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. Massacred in 1992, they had been pioneers of another crucial transformation of the Mafia-state relation: turning mafiosi into witnesses for the state. Based on pentito testimony, and supported by an anti-Mafia social movement, they and succeeding prosecutors won convictions against an unprecedented number of mafia leaders.
The depositions of the justice collaborators depict life in the Mafia as highly stressful, the more so in light of the narcotrafficking wars. Petty rivalries and provocations are ubiquitous, failures to pay respect are long remembered, and suspicion of potential betrayal or treachery demands preemptive action. Even initiations are a cause of tension, reinforcing, as they do, each novice’s fealty to a sponsor, ambitious for his own power base in the organization. Hero worship and patronage, intrinsic to the recruitment process, easily disrupt the solidarity of the brotherhood. Generating intensely affective dyads, they define the axes around which factions develop; disputes over territorial authority and over critical resources are often infused with quests for respect and affection.
Supposedly, a cosca uses its common fund to cushion the livelihoods of rank-and-file soldiers when they are in difficulty, but cosca leaders, however charismatic, may or may not be generous. Most adopt a demeanor that communicates authority and latent power; they want their dominion to be acknowledged through the obvious deference of others. Nor do they usually advertise difference, adopting modest dress and eschewing other markers of status. The inevitable exceptions, nurtured especially by profits from drugs, are a constant source of trouble. Hot-headed upstarts, attempting to usurp a leadership position, are not unknown. Paradoxically, although the mafia sodality maintains an ethic of brotherhood among its members, mafioso brothers may end up killing one another.
References:
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