‘Mafia’ is now one of a long list of words—like ‘pizza’, ‘spaghetti’, ‘opera’, and ‘disaster’—that Italian has given to many other languages across the world. It is commonly applied to criminals far beyond Sicily and the United States, which are the places where the mafia in the strict sense is based. ‘Mafia’ has become an umbrella label for a whole world panoply of gangs—Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Chechen, Albanian, Turkish, and so on—that have little or nothing to do with the Sicilian original.
There are other criminal associations based in other regions of southern Italy, and all of them are sometimes called ‘mafia’: the Sacra Corona Unita, in Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot); the ‘Ndrangheta, in Calabria (the toe); and the Camorra, in the city of Naples and its environs (located on the shin). These other associations all have a fascinating history of their own—one of them, the Camorra, is a little older than the mafia—but they will only be touched on here when relevant to the history of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. The reason is simply that no other Italian illegal society is nearly as powerful, as well organized, or as successful as the mafia. It is not by chance that it is this Sicilian word that has become the most widely used.
This book is selective in that it is a history of the mafia of Sicily. Some of the most famous American mafiosi, men like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, also people these pages because the history of the Sicilian mafia cannot be told without also telling the story of the American mafia to which it gave birth. The United States has been a thriving environment for organized criminals over the past two centuries, but only a part of organized crime in the US has been mafia crime. Accordingly, the American mafia is here placed in its proper and most illuminating perspective. It is only when viewed from the coast of a small, triangular island in the Mediterranean that the history of the mafia in the USA, at least in its early stages, can begin to make sense.
The mafia of Sicily pursues power and money by cultivating the art of killing people and getting away with it, and by organizing itself in a unique way that combines the attributes of a shadow state, an illegal business, and a sworn secret society like the Freemasons.
Cosa Nostra is like a state because it aims to control territory. With the agreement of the mafia as a whole, each mafia Family (the Italian word used through much of the mafia’s history is cosca) exercises a shadow government over the people within its territory. Protection rackets are for a mafia Family what taxes are for a legal government. There is a difference, in that the mafia tries to ‘tax’ all economic activity, whether it is legal or illegal: retailers and robbers alike pay what is known as the pizzo. A mafioso may well end up protecting both the owner of a car showroom and the gang of car thieves who prey on him. So the only party absolutely guaranteed to benefit from any given protection deal is the mafia. Like a state, the mafia also arrogates to itself the power of life and death over its subjects. But the mafia is not an alternative government; it exists by infiltrating the legal state and twisting it to its own purposes.
Cosa Nostra is a business because it tries to make a profit—albeit by intimidation. But it rarely clears large margins from its ‘governmental’ activities. Most of the income from protection rackets tends to get ploughed back into maintaining its murder capability: it buys lawyers, judges, policemen, journalists, politicians, and casual labour, and it supports mafiosi unlucky enough to end up in prison. Cosa Nostra pays these overheads in order to build what some ‘mafiologists’ think of as a brand of intimidation. The mafia brand can be deployed in all sorts of markets, like construction fraud or tobacco smuggling. As a general rule, the more treacherous, violent, and profitable a market is—the obvious case is narcotics trafficking and dealing—the more mafiosi who enter that market benefit from having a world-renowned and utterly reliable brand of blood-curdling intimidation behind them.
Cosa Nostra is an exclusive secret society because it needs to select its affiliates very carefully and impose restrictions on their behaviour in return for the benefits of membership. The chief demands that Cosa Nostra makes of its members are that they be discreet, obedient, and ruthlessly violent.
The history of this organization is fascinating in its own right. But the history of the mafia cannot just be about the mafia, about the deeds of men of honour. Before Falcone and Borsellino, a great many other people died fighting the mafia. Some of them are characters in the drama recounted here, because an integral part of the story of the mafia is the tale of its struggle with the Sicilians and others who have opposed it from the outset. The mafia’s story also embraces the people who, for an assortment of motives ranging from rational fear, through political cynicism, to downright complicity, have favoured the organization’s cause.
But even a history of the mafia that included all these things would still leave many questions unanswered. Because everyone outside Italy knows what the mafia is, or at least thinks they do, it still seems baffling that it took until 1992 for the true nature of the Sicilian mafia to be confirmed. How could an illegal organization remain so powerful and so difficult to understand for so long? Part of the explanation was a lack of evidence. The mafia survived and prospered because it intimidated witnesses, and confounded or corrupted the police and courts. All too often in the past, the authorities (and so, after them, the historians) were left to count the dead bodies and wonder what strange logic underlay all the bloodshed.
The problem was even more deep-seated; indeed, it went to the heart of the Italian system of government. At the very least, the Italian state has been extremely absentminded about the Sicilian mafia over the past century and more. On the few occasions when an understanding of the mafia penetrated government institutions, it was swiftly forgotten. And even when it was remembered for a while, it was not put to good use. Italy repeatedly missed opportunities to grasp some of the truths that judges Falcone and Borsellino finally paid with their lives to prove. The mafia was a secret hidden in plain view. For that reason, Italy’s recurring failure to understand the mafia makes for a much richer story than would be the case if it were all down to some cloak-and-dagger conspiracy by a few individuals bent on keeping the truth concealed. For that reason too, as well as being a history of the mafia, this book is a history of Italy’s failure to comprehend and combat what was visible all the while.
There are plenty of contemporary examples that suggest that Italy’s deeply rooted mafia problem is still very much alive. At the time of writing, the President of the Sicilian Region is under investigation for links with the mafia—he denies any wrongdoing. Another high-profile mafia case involves the advertising executive who in 1993 founded Forza Italia, the political party of the current Prime Minister, media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. A recent mafia defector has alleged that there were high-level meetings to seal a pact between Cosa Nostra and Forza Italia. The allegations are strongly denied and one should not rush to draw conclusions about these individual cases, neither of which has reached a definitive verdict. But as well as raising eyebrows, they also raise historical questions about how Italy managed to get itself into such a predicament.
The historians who first attempted to answer those questions in the wake of Buscetta’s evidence quickly made a remarkable find that only deepened the mystery of why Italy had failed properly to understand the mafia before. Buscetta was, in fact, far from the first man of honour to break the mafia’s famous code of silence known as omertà; he was not even the first to be believed when he did so. There have been mafia informants for almost as long as there have been mafiosi. In addition, there existed from the outset a furtive and often intimate dialogue between men of honour and the powers that be—police, magistrates, politicians. Historians can now eavesdrop on passages of that dialogue; it makes for fascinating and uneasy listening because it reveals the extent of the Italian state’s complicity with murderers.
Even after the discovery of these earlier mafia defectors, there remained the profound problem of how to interpret what they said; police and magistrates had wrestled with this from the beginning of the mafia’s history, right up to Falcone’s and Borsellino’s maxi-trial. Why should anyone believe professional criminals who have any number of reasons to lie? The evidence of mafia informers was often dismissed as simply not reliable enough to be used in court—or in a history book. The testimonies of men of honour, even of pentiti, are always hard to read. In fact the word pentito is deceptive: true repentance in a man of honour is comparatively rare. Throughout the association’s history, members of the mafia have generally given their testimonies to the state as a way of getting back at other mafiosi who have betrayed them and defeated them in a war. Confessions turn up when the losers have no other weapons left. Buscetta was a loser and, like other pentiti, his testimony is skewed in parts as a consequence.
Yet there is something else about Buscetta’s evidence, something that made it more than just a subjective version of events, and turned it instead into the Rosetta Stone of mafia testimonies. Buscetta explained exactly how men of honour think because he set out both the strange rules that they follow and the reasons why they often break them. The ‘boss of two worlds’ himself still felt the power of these rules and always denied that he had become a pentito instead of a man of honour. Buscetta’s great lesson to magistrates and historians alike is that the mafia’s rules need to be taken seriously—which is by no means the same thing as assuming that they are always obeyed.
Tommaso Buscetta never ceased to stress the importance of one particular rule within Cosa Nostra. It relates to truth. Thanks to Buscetta we now know that the truth is a peculiarly precious and dangerous commodity for mafiosi. When a man of honour is initiated into the Sicilian mafia, one of the things he swears is never to lie to other ‘made men’, whether or not they are from the same Family. Thereafter, any man of honour who tells a lie can easily find that he has taken a short cut to the acid bath. Yet at the same time, a well-disguised lie can also be a very powerful weapon in the permanent struggle for power within Cosa Nostra. The upshot is simple: acute paranoia. As Buscetta explained, ‘A mafioso lives in terror of being judged—not by the laws of men, but by the malicious gossip internal to Cosa Nostra. The fear that someone could be speaking ill of him is constant.’
In the circumstances, it is not surprising to learn that all men of honour are prodigiously good at keeping their mouths shut. Before turning state’s evidence, Buscetta once spent three years in the same prison cell as a man of honour who had recently carried out an order to kill a third mafioso—a close friend of Buscetta’s. Throughout those three years the two enemies did not exchange a single hostile word, and even shared Christmas dinner. Buscetta knew that his cellmate had already been condemned to death by Cosa Nostra; it is not known whether the cellmate was also aware that he had been marked down for execution. He was duly murdered on his release.
Men of honour prefer not to say anything to anyone who does not already know what they are talking about; they communicate in codes, hints, fragments of phrases, stony stares, significant silences. In Cosa Nostra, no one asks or says more than they absolutely have to; nobody ever wonders out loud. Judge Falcone observed that ‘the interpretation of signs, gestures, messages and silences is one of a man of honour’s main activities’. Buscetta was particularly eloquent in explaining what it feels like to live in such a world:
In Cosa Nostra there is an obligation to tell the truth, but there is also great reserve. And this reserve, the things that are not said, rule like an irrevocable curse over all men of honour. It makes all relationships profoundly false, absurd.
For the same reason that they are so reluctant to speak openly, when men of honour do tell each other things, what they say is never idle chat. For example, if mafioso A tells mafioso B that he has murdered entrepreneur X or that politician Y is on Cosa Nostra’s paybook, what he says is probably true; if it is not, then it is a tactical lie that, in its own way, is every bit as significant as the truth. Thus, since Buscetta, mafiosi have no longer been viewed as inherently unreliable witnesses. Interpreting the testimonies of mafiosi, whether they have ‘repented’ or not, is now seen to be about making out a pattern among the truths and the tactical lies, and finding other evidence to corroborate that pattern. This has important consequences for the history of the mafia. It is a history built from all the usual sources—from police files, government inquiries, newspaper reports, memoirs, confessions, and so on. But running like a blood-tinged watermark through many of those documents, whether they directly reproduce the words of men of honour or only contain their faded traces, are the signs of the deadly truth game that is life within the mafia.
Because an element of uncertainty is bound to remain in any history, let alone a history that ventures into the devious world of the Sicilian mafia, this book cannot give the final word on the guilt or innocence of the characters whose stories appear here; the history of the mafia is not a retrospective trial. But it is not mere guesswork either. Although it would be both wrong and futile to try to lock long-dead historical figures in an imaginary prison, what we can do is sample the pungent ‘smell of mafia’—as the Italian phrase would have it—that they still give off.
The history of the mafia thus has many characters and many layers. Accordingly, the different chapters of this book tell different kinds of story. They move between the soldiers and the bosses, but they also step into the mafia’s penumbra to tell of its victims, enemies, and friends—from the poorest in society to the most powerful. In one or two of these chapters, because of a lack of historical evidence, the mafia must remain what it often seemed to be at the time: a malevolent, spectral presence.
Before telling of the mafia’s genesis, this history gives an account of what life is like inside Cosa Nostra today, with the code of honour obeyed by the men who are members of it. Recent defectors have provided an insight into how mafiosi think and feel now, which is simply not possible for earlier periods. And of course it would be simplistic to use what we know about things like the code of honour today to fill in the inevitable blind spots in the mafia’s history. All the same, as the mafia’s story unfolds, what becomes clear is that Sicily’s famous criminal association has changed surprisingly little since it began around 140 years ago. There never was a good mafia that at some point became corrupt and violent. There never was a traditional mafia that then became modern, organized, and business-minded. The world has changed but the Sicilian mafia has merely adapted; it is today what it has been since it was born: a sworn secret society that pursues power and money by cultivating the art of killing people and getting away with it.