Countless films and novels have helped lend a sinister glamour to the mafia. These mafia stories are so compelling because they dramatize the everyday by adding the hair-trigger thrill that comes when danger is mixed with unscrupulous cunning. The world of the cinematic mafia is one where the conflicts that everyone feels—between the competing claims of ambition, responsibility, and family—become matters of life and death.
It would be both pious and untrue to say that the mafia presented in fiction is simply false—it is stylized. And mafiosi are like everyone else in that they like to watch television and go to the cinema to see a stylized version of their own daily dramas represented on-screen. Tommaso Buscetta was a fan of The Godfather, although he thought the scene at the end where the other mafiosi kiss Michael Corleone’s hand was unrealistic. The conflicting demands that lie behind the motivation of a fictional character like Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone—ambition, responsibility, family—are indeed the same ones that are central to the lives of real mafiosi.
One obvious thing that is different is that none of the glamour of the cinema can survive an encounter with the horrific reality of Cosa Nostra. A less obvious, but in the end more important, difference is that whereas Michael Corleone’s story is about the moral dangers of unchecked power, real Sicilian mafiosi are obsessed with the rules of honour that limit their actions. A man of honour may dodge, manipulate, and rewrite those rules, but he is nonetheless always aware that they shape how he is perceived by his peers. That is not to say that the values of mafia honour have much that is conventionally ‘honourable’ about them. Honour has a specific meaning within Cosa Nostra that informs even its members’ most execrable actions, as the unsettling case of Giovanni Brusca, the man who pressed the detonator on the Capaci bomb, goes to show.
Brusca was known in Cosa Nostra circles as ‘lo scannacristiani’, ‘the man who cuts Christians’ throats’. In Sicily, ‘a Christian’ means ‘a human being’; in the mafia, it means ‘a man of honour’. Brusca was part of a death squad reporting directly to the boss of bosses, the leader of the Corleonesi, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina. After the Capaci bombing Giovanni Brusca was not idle. He killed the boss of the Alcamo Family who had begun to resent Riina’s authority. A few days after that, members of Brusca’s team strangled the same man’s pregnant partner. Brusca then killed a spectacularly wealthy businessman and man of honour who had failed to use his political contacts to protect the mafia from the maxi-trial.
Worse followed. ‘Lo scannacristiani’ was the friend of another man of honour, Santino Di Matteo, whose little son Giuseppe would play with Brusca in the family garden. That was all before Santino Di Matteo decided to betray Cosa Nostra’s secrets to the state; he was the first mafioso to tell the authorities how the killing of Falcone had been carried out. Brusca’s response was to kidnap little Giuseppe Di Matteo at a gymkhana and hold him captive in a cellar for twenty-six months. Finally, in January 1996, when Giuseppe was fourteen, Brusca ordered him to be strangled and his body dissolved in acid.
‘Lo scannacristiani’ was captured on 20 May 1996 in the countryside near Agrigento. Four hundred police surrounded the box-like two-storey house where he was hiding. At about 9 P.M., a team of thirty broke in through the doors and windows. They found Brusca and his family at table watching a television programme about Giovanni Falcone—the fourth anniversary of his murder was only two days away. In the bedroom police discovered a wardrobe full of Versace and Armani clothes, and a big red bag containing some $15,000 in Italian and US currency, two GSM cellphones, and jewellery including Cartier watches. On the dining-room table they found a short-barrelled pistol; it was made of plastic and belonged to Brusca’s young son Davide.
Brusca is now collaborating with justice. By his own disturbingly imprecise confession, he has killed ‘many more than one hundred but less than two hundred people’. Here is what he says about the murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo:
If I’d had a moment longer to reflect, a bit more calm to think, as I did with other crimes, then maybe there would be a hope in a thousand, a million, that the child would be alive today. But today it would be useless to try and justify it. I just didn’t think it through at the time.
The terrifying thing about the Sicilian mafia is that men like ‘lo scannacristiani’ are not deranged. Nor are their actions at all incompatible with the code of honour or, indeed, with being a husband and father in Cosa Nostra’s view. Until the day he decided to turn state’s evidence and tell his story, nothing that Brusca did, including murdering a child not much older than his own, was considered by mafiosi to be inherently dishonourable.
In the wake of the Capaci bomb, more mafiosi turned state’s evidence, and some of these ‘penitents’ justified their decision by saying that killers like ‘lo scannacristiani’ had betrayed traditional values, the code of honour. Tommaso Buscetta had used the same argument, along the lines of ‘I did not leave Cosa Nostra, Cosa Nostra left me’. But this is a flimsy claim, historically speaking, because within the mafia betrayal and brutality have been compatible with honour since the beginning. Giovanni Brusca is more typical than some mafia defectors would have the world believe.
This new post-Capaci wave of pentiti has allowed researchers to flesh out the evidence about the mafia’s internal culture that had been provided by the earlier generation of defectors, including Buscetta. What is now clear is that the code of honour is much more than a list of rules. Becoming a man of honour means taking on a whole new identity, entering a different moral universe. A mafioso’s honour is the mark of that new identity, that new moral sensibility.
Tommaso Buscetta first outlined Cosa Nostra’s code of honour to Falcone back in 1984. He told of its initiation rite in which the candidate for membership holds a burning picture—usually of the Madonna of the Annunciation—while swearing allegiance and silence until death. Rumours of this quaint ritual had previously been dismissed as folklore, and it is still a part of Buscetta’s evidence that seems to run counter to common sense. Yet it has become abundantly clear from the testimonies of Buscetta, ‘lo scannacristiani’, and others that mafiosi take such things in deadly earnest, as matters of honour.
The initiation ritual shows that honour is a status that has to be earned. Until he becomes a man of honour, an aspiring mafioso is carefully watched, supervised, put to the test; committing murder is almost always a prerequisite for admission. During this period of preparation, he is constantly reminded that until he goes through the ritual of affiliation he is a nonentity, ‘nothing mixed with nil’. And when initiation arrives, it is often the most important moment in a mafioso’s life. The burning of the sacred image symbolizes his death as an ordinary man and his rebirth as a man of honour.
At initiation, the new mafioso swears obedience—the first pillar of the code of honour. A ‘made’ man is always obedient to his capo; he never asks, ‘Why?’ One way to understand the implications of this obligation involves what is also a crucial test case for the code of honour as a whole: the murder of women and children. This has always been something of a delicate issue for the Sicilian mafia; indeed, mafiosi have frequently made the claim that they never touch women and children. It has to be said that many men of honour hold to that principle for as long as they can. Cosa Nostra certainly does not murder babies willy-nilly, not least because to do so would damage its image and alienate some of its closest supporters.
Yet Giuseppe Di Matteo was far from being the first child whose life had been very deliberately ended by men of honour. For eliminating women and children is only deemed dishonourable if it is unnecessary; it can become necessary when a mafioso’s survival is at stake; and simply by being a member of Cosa Nostra, a mafioso often puts his life in danger.
Like nearly all mafia killings, the murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo was committed after it was collectively decided that it was necessary. The boy’s death was part of a strategy adopted by some of Cosa Nostra’s leaders vis-à-vis the families of mafia defectors who were putting the whole organization at risk. Once such a decision became policy, it would have been considered dishonourable not to put it into effect.
Which is where obedience comes in. The mafioso who actually implemented that policy and strangled Giuseppe Di Matteo on Brusca’s orders later explained his thinking to a court:
If someone wants to have a good career [in Cosa Nostra] he must always be available … I wanted a career, and I’d accepted this from the outset because I was walking on air. At that time I was a soldier in Cosa Nostra, I obeyed orders, and I knew that by strangling a little boy I would make a career for myself. I was walking on air.
Honour accumulates through obedience: in return for what they call ‘availability’, individual mafiosi can increase their stock of honour and in doing so gain access to more money, information, and power. Belonging to Cosa Nostra offers the same advantages as does belonging to other organizations, including the achievement of aspirations, an exhilarating sense of status and comradeship, and the chance to pass responsibility, moral or otherwise, upwards in the direction of their bosses. All of these things are ingredients of mafia honour.
Honour also involves the obligation to tell the truth to other men of honour and, therefore, the notoriously elliptical way in which mafiosi talk. Giovanni Brusca relates that, when he visited American mafiosi in New Jersey, he was appalled by how talkative his hosts were by comparison. A dinner was held to welcome him, yet on entering the restaurant Brusca was astonished to see that the mafiosi had all brought their mistresses, and that they chatted openly about which Families various mobsters belonged to. ‘In Sicily, none of us would dream of talking that way in public. Or even in private. Everyone knows what needs to be known.’ Brusca claims he was so embarrassed that he made his excuses and left. ‘It’s a different mentality,’ he concluded about his American experience. ‘They live out in the light of day. They only commit murders in exceptional circumstances. They never carry out massacres like we have in Sicily.’
The mafioso’s duty to tell the truth is partly a way of promoting the kind of mutual trust that is in short supply among outlaws. This need for trust also explains the components of mafia honour that relate to sex and marriage. Newly ‘made’ mobsters swear not to take income from prostitution, and if they sleep with another mafioso’s wife they face a death sentence. Moreover, if a mafioso gambles, womanizes, and parades his wealth, he is likely to be considered unreliable and therefore expendable. Keeping to these rules is an important way of showing your fellow men of honour that you can be trusted. For the same reason, the mafia’s top management makes a virtue of getting its hands dirty, and old-school patriarchal machismo is crucial to the company culture. For example, there are work social events that usually revolve around manly pursuits like hunting parties and banquets.
Honour is also about loyalty. Membership of what mafiosi used to call the ‘honoured society’ brings new loyalties that are more important than blood ties. Honour implies that a mafioso must put Cosa Nostra’s interests above those of his kin. Enzo Brusca, brother of ‘lo scannacristiani’, worked for the organization, took part in killings, but was never made into a man of honour. As was appropriate, he did not ask questions. What he knew about his relatives in Cosa Nostra he gleaned from hearsay, and from the media; thus he was unaware for a long time that his father was boss of the local mandamento (district). So although Enzo Brusca was part of the mafia’s operations and was a member of the same family as men of honour, this did not entitle him to know about Family business.
The reverse is not true, in the sense that a mafia boss has an absolute right to keep watch over the personal lives of his men. For example, a mafioso will often have to ask his capo’s permission to marry. It is crucial that individual mafiosi make a sensible choice of marital partner and behave honourably within marriage. Mafiosi have an even greater need than other husbands to keep their spouses sweet, simply because a disgruntled mafia wife could do extensive damage to the whole Family by talking to the police. Members of Cosa Nostra have to be careful to preserve their women’s prestige; a major reason for the taboo against pimping is to ensure that the wives of men of honour, as Judge Falcone explained, ‘are not humiliated in their own social environment’. Mafiosi often marry the sisters and daughters of other men of honour, women who have lived in a mafia environment all their lives and are therefore more likely to have the kind of discretion and/or submissiveness that the organization requires of them. Women may also actively support the work of their men, albeit in a subordinate role. Women cannot formally be admitted to the mafia and honour is exclusively a male quality. Nevertheless a mafioso’s honour brings prestige to his spouse, and his spouse’s good behaviour feeds back into his stock of honour.
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Judge Falcone once compared entering the mafia to being a convert to a religion: ‘You never stop being a priest. Or a mafioso.’ The parallels between religion and the mafia do not end there, largely because many men of honour are believers. Catania boss Nitto Santapaola had an altar and a little chapel constructed in his villa; according to one pentito, he also once had four kids garrotted and thrown in a well for mugging his mother. The current boss of bosses, Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano, communicates from his place in hiding by little notes, some of which have recently been intercepted; they always contain blessings and invocations of divine protection—‘By the will of God I want to be a servant’. One senior boss who led a death squad like ‘lo scannacristiani’ would pray before every action: ‘God knows that it is they who want to get themselves killed, and that I carry no blame.’
Sentiments like these are partly a result of the tolerance towards the mafia that was displayed for a long time by the Catholic Church. Clergymen have often treated men whose power is based on routine murder as if they were sinners of the same ilk as everyone else. They have overlooked the evil influence of the mafia because it seems to share the same values of deference, humility, tradition, and family as the Church. They have accepted donations drawn from criminal wealth for processions and charity. They have been content to see cosche (plural of cosca) disguise themselves as religious confraternities, and to entrust the administration of charity funds to dignitaries with blood on their hands. Some churchmen have even been killers. The story of the Church’s relationship with the mafia is filled with episodes like these.
But the point is not, as some would wish to claim, that the mafia is little more than a branch of the Catholic Church. A mafioso’s religion has nothing to do with the Church as an institution. In fact, the secret of mafia religion is that it serves the same purposes as the code of honour; it merely expresses the same things in a different language. Mafia religion generates a sense of belonging, trust, and a set of flexible rules by borrowing words from the Catholic creed, just as the code of honour does so by aping the chivalric terms that were still used by the nobility when the mafia began.
Like mafia honour, mafia religion helps mafiosi justify their actions—to themselves, to each other, and to their families. Mafiosi often like to think that they are killing in the name of something higher than money and power, and the two names they usually come up with are ‘honour’ and ‘God’. Indeed, the religion professed by mafiosi and their families is like so much else in the moral universe of mafia honour, in that it is difficult to tell where genuine—if misguided—belief ends, and cynical deceit begins. Understanding how the mafia thinks means understanding that the rules of honour mesh with calculated deceit and heartless savagery in the mind of every member.
So ‘honour’ translates as a sense of professional worth, a value system, and a totem of group identity for an association that regards itself as being beyond good and evil. As such, it has nothing to do with Sicilian traditions, or chivalry, or Catholicism. Whether it is expressed in religious terms, or in the pseudo-aristocratic language of ‘honour’, the code is there to ensure that every aspect of a mafioso’s life is completely subordinated to the interests of ‘our thing’.
When it is working well, the code produces a proud sense of fellowship. Catania mafioso Antonino Calderone spoke for the whole organization when he said, ‘We’re mafiosi, all the others are just men.’ But for that very reason a mafioso without honour is no one; he is a dead man. For a member of Cosa Nostra, being defeated in one of the organization’s internecine wars and losing honour can amount to exactly the same thing.
It is no wonder, then, that the decision to break the code of honour and turn state’s evidence is traumatic for some mafiosi. It means abandoning both an identity and a dense fabric of friendships and family ties; it means trying to find a way of coming to terms with a life built on murder; it means incurring an automatic death sentence. Giovanni Brusca maintains that it took more courage for him to turn state’s evidence than it did to kill.
Nino Gioè was the mafioso who shouted ‘Vai!’ to Brusca when he pressed the detonator on the Capaci bomb. Soon after being captured and placed in solitary confinement in the summer of 1993, Gioè began to feel the accumulated pressure of long years lived by Cosa Nostra’s rules. He knew that some of his conversations had been bugged by the police, and that he had probably given away evidence that would count heavily against other men of honour; unwittingly, he had broken the most sacred of Cosa Nostra’s tenets. He sensed the suspicion growing among the mafiosi held in cells on the same wing. As the pressure mounted, it began to show—he let his beard grow and neglected to clean his clothes. Men of honour are expected to maintain the dignity of their bearing in prison, so the decline in his appearance only increased the fears of those around him that he was about to break and tell what he knew to the state. Instead, on 28 July 1993, he used the laces of his tennis shoes to hang himself in his cell. Although it is very rare for men of honour to end their own lives, Gioè’s suicide note can serve as the final word on what it means to live and die by the code of honour:
This evening I will find the peace and serenity that I lost some seventeen years ago [at initiation into Cosa Nostra]. When I lost them, I became a monster. I was a monster until I took pen in hand to write these lines … Before I go, I ask for forgiveness from my mother and from God, because their love has no limits. The whole of the rest of the world will never be able to forgive me.
The historical question raised by this picture of life inside Cosa Nostra is simply: ‘Was it always like this?’ The equally simple answer is that no one will ever know for sure. Pentiti may have talked to the police on many occasions, but when they did, they tended to talk about specific crimes and not about what it felt like to be a mafioso. But what evidence there is does suggest that something along the same lines as this code of honour existed all along. After all, if it had not existed, then the mafia would not have survived so long; in fact, it might never even have emerged at all.