In the late 1980s, when I was covering Italy’s booming media business, a Milan advertising executive provided me with a subtle insight into the raucous debate then under way over the Italian government’s efforts to maintain its television monopoly.
It’s like a man walking his dog through a dangerous part of town, he explained. The man actually wants the dog to look completely uncontrollable so that potential muggers will steer clear.
So, even as Italian media tycoons and other aspiring tycoons were struggling to block a proposed government clamp-down, they were loudly proclaiming to anyone who would listen—especially to foreign media companies considering entry into the Italian market—that it was impossible to work with the reckless and unpredictable Italian government. (This at a time when the prime minister of Italy, Bettino Craxi, regularly vacationed with the country’s most powerful media tycoon, Silvio Berlusconi, during the long August holidays; Craxi was also Berlusconi’s best man at the tycoon’s second wedding.)
Things in Italy, in fact, are often not quite what they seem; the real messages are often embroidered within the hems of the ostensible messages.
No study of Italian political history can ignore the existence of the mafia, and as Salvatore Lupo explains in this important book, the existence and meaning of the Mafia are less—and more—than they appear.
Another story from the late 1990s offers an exquisite paradox: Silvio Berlusconi (who at the time had served briefly as prime minister and would begin a second term shortly thereafter) had just added the Standa chain of department stores to his vast media and real estate holdings. There was a problem, though: the Standa stores in Sicily kept burning down. Then, inexplicably, the apparent cases of arson stopped.
One of the flagships of Berlusconi’s media empire was—and remains—the newsweekly Panorama. In this delicate period, the magazine began publishing a series of hard-hitting exposés on Berlusconi’s awkward dilemma and the possibility that negotiations with the Mafia had made the problem go away.
I was interested in the nexus between politics and media and had written on the subject for the Columbia Journalism Review. When I called my contacts in an attempt to understand why Berlusconi’s own media vehicles were focusing on allegations of his ties with the Mafia (could it have been simple crusading journalism?), I was presented with this elegant but Byzantine theorem: the editor in chief of Panorama was about to enter negotiations with Berlusconi for the renewal of his contract. For Berlusconi to fire him in the wake of a series of sharply critical articles accusing the media tycoon of Mafia ties would have looked embarrassing. The editor—according to this piece of conspiracy theorizing, anyway—thus greatly strengthened his hand in the ensuing negotiations.
The English term “ulterior motives” is rendered in Italian as secondi fini: literally, “second objectives.” The sense is only slightly different, but it offers Italians the possibility of referring to secondi, terzi, quarti, e quinti fini—or second-, third-, fourth-, and fifth-order ulterior motives. Like the legendary 120 words in Inuit to describe snow, it seems appropriate that Italian should be capable of describing so many levels of conflicting or concealed objectives.
This book explores, first and foremost, and in admirable if exhaustive detail, the hidden levels at play in the phenomenology of the Sicilian mafia. Lupo attempts to establish just what the Mafia is, examining various previous hypotheses that range from an inbred folk tradition to a powerful international “octopus,” to use the Italian slang term (la piovra). In so doing he describes patterns and histories that offer eloquent illustrations of the smoke and mirrors concealing all mafia structures.
Duplicity is the bedrock of Mafia tactics. One owner of a Sicilian citrus grove subleases it to a Mafia custodian, whose responsibility it is to prevent theft of the fruit before harvest and to negotiate the final contract with the fruit merchant who will harvest the citrus crop and sell it.
Imagine his surprise and dismay when the fruit merchant contacts the owner of the grove to complain that the Mafia custodian has allowed several other merchants to pre-harvest the grove, leaving slim pickings for him, in exchange for the full price negotiated and paid. At this point, the owner of the citrus grove tries to fire the custodian: nothing doing. He tries to sell the grove, and is clearly informed that to do so would be a fatal insult to the mafioso. The rules are iron-bound, although they are grounded in a duplicitous alternate underworld.
This is the same pattern found in a Mafia boss ordering his underlings and associates—originally agricultural custodians and laborers, though the pattern persisted in the new urban settings in which the Mafia later evolved—to steal horses and cattle, so that he could first express his condolences and outrage at the brazen theft, and then offer to see if he could make an arrangement to recover the property.
Another nexus of duplicity, according to Lupo, is in the area of police informants and omertà, the much bruited Mafia code of honorable silence. “Omertà,” notes Lupo, “understood as a sense of ‘moral’ repulsion with respect to the idea of availing oneself of the legal system, may perhaps represent a general value, an ideal model of behavior of the Sicilian populace and, in particular, of the larger criminal universe; certainly, it is no guide to the actual behavior of mafiosi, who—as we have seen over and over—collaborate with the law whenever and however it furthers their own interests.” So that no one is more likely to inform to the police than mafiosi (after all, it is they who have the information), but then the doubt remains as to whether that information is a way of manipulating the police.
This shadow has, in turn, been used to cast doubts on the use of pentiti, Mafia turncoats who have been one of the chief tools used by crusading Italian prosecutors in the past quarter century. Sadly, it was exactly this sort of house of-mirrors that blotted the reputation of Leonardo Sciascia, the great Sicilian author and political thinker, whose obituaries upon his death in 1989 were marred by Sciascia’s contrarian statements that it had become possible to build a career as an “anti-mafia judge.”
Lupo explores an understanding of the Mafia as an underworld—this being Italy, more in the sense that the poet Virgil might give to the term than that which Eliot Ness might assign to it—in which power accrues to those mafiosi who are able to find access to powerful figures in the “overworld.” Inside this strange parallel universe, the geography of organized crime is the product of evolution, and frequently a parasitical, nonorganic evolution.
The process is reminiscent of a theory from another field, that of organic chemistry and chemical evolution. Graham Cairns-Smith popularized this view in his 1985 book, Seven Clues to the Origin of Life. In it, he described an inorganic process whereby clays might clog a stream or silt up a pond through the propagation of crystalline structure. In so doing, the clays might cause a watercourse to dry up, and the wind might then blow the clay dust to a different pond or watercourse, renewing the choking and drying process, and so on, ad infinitum. The idea was that this inorganic process might then serve as a scaffolding upon which an organic process might well evolve, leading to carbon-based life forms.
The choking off of a stream is an evocative metaphor for the growth of the Mafia, but a noncriminal system as a scaffolding for an opportunistic form of criminal organization is also apt. Two such systems, in the history of the Sicilian Mafia, are the citrus fruit trade and the mining of sulphur.
The citrus trade is a well-known setting for the development of the mafia, though it is not as well known how the citrus trade with the United States helped bring the Mafia to this country. The first documented Mafia presence in the United States is in the port city of New Orleans, and that presence is clearly closely related to the substantial trade in lemons and oranges that ran through that southern port. In fact, the world of the Sicilian Mafia and southern law enforcement collided in 1891, with the largest mass lynching in American history: the victims of the lynching were eleven Italians—some American citizens, and a few Italian subjects—who had been acquitted of the murder of New Orleans police chief David Hennessy. Even though New York is, in the collective imagination, the mythic hotbed of the Mafia’s presence in the United States, New Orleans remained a major center for the germination of organized crime here.
The other leading structure within which the Mafia germinated and grew is the sulphur-mining industry. Until the turn of the twentieth century, Sicily held something approaching a monopoly on the world’s sulphur supply. Sulphur was a crucial component of rubber production (vulcanizing involves the addition of sulphur to raw rubber under high heat, but its name might well be a specific reference to Sicily’s volcanic geology and mythological history).
It was in particular the organization of the mine crews that worked the sulphur deposits that seems to foreshadow some of the structures later found in the Sicilian Mafia. The crews were small, independently operating entities, and they stood to profit by their own production, as long as a sizable percentage was rendered to the owner of the mine. The fact that they earned by piecework is not a novel arrangement, but it was the nature of work in the mines, brutal, toxic, and violent, that made the setting such a breeding ground for the characteristics of the Mafia crew. Intriguingly, Sicilian control of the sulphur industry suddenly collapsed around the turn of the century when American technology made it possible to mine sulphur-domes in Louisiana and Texas.
As the sulphur industry began to decline, might the structure of the mining crews have served as a scaffolding for the construction of the Mafia crew as a self-motivating franchise? The sulphur mine is a recurring motif in descriptions of Sicilian life and analyses of the Mafia, from Giovanni Vergara’s short story “Rosso Malpelo” (1880, from Vita dei campi), in which an underage boy dies in a mining collapse, all the way up to Carlo Levi’s Words Are Stones (Le parole sono pietre, 1955). In Levi’s account of his visit to Lercara Friddi, Sicily, during a strike by sulphur miners, he paints a remarkable picture of Signor Ferrara, the man who runs the sulphur mine on behalf of its absentee owners.
Here is Levi’s description of the man, known colloquially among the townspeople as “Nero”:
How can I describe him? Perhaps only a painting could adequately render the aura of that face, the atmosphere that enveloped it, the uncommon manner of his gestures. His face was impassive and inscrutable, and yet at the same time it was enlivened by grimaces expressing feelings different from those we are accustomed to perceiving: a mixture of cunning, extreme mistrust, mingled confidence and fear, arrogance and violence and even, perhaps, a certain wit: and yet all these elements seemed to be fused in that face in a way that was distant and alien to us, as if the tone of the emotions, and the very appearance of the face, belonged to another era, of which we have nothing more than an archaic, hereditary recollection.
I had the distinct impression of being in the presence of a rare representative of a lost race, not a man of today, or yesterday, or even a hundred years ago, but one of those who had lived a thousand years ago, in that period of history that has left practically no documentation at all, a time that we can only imagine.
Levi then tells how Signor Ferrara deals with the fact that he has come accompanied by a photographer:
“Of me, a photograph?” he exclaimed. “No, that’s prohibited, absolutely forbidden. No one has ever taken my picture, and no one ever will. My doctor forbids it,” he added, with a smile that revealed a formidable row of teeth, “and so does my pharmacist.” As he said these words, he noticed that [the photographer] had his photographic equipment on a strap around his neck, ready to use; and to make sure that no one took his picture, Signor [Ferrara] rose to his feet, huge and heavy as a boulder, and placed himself, back to back, against [the photographer]: he thus made sure that he could not be surprised.
Thus the description offered by a renowned Italian anti-Fascist and socialist writer and activist. And it is impossible to separate the politics of Italy’s left and right and the role of the mafia.
Just as this book goes back to the unification of Italy in its attempt to trace the first appearance of the Mafia, the unique role of the Mafia might well be seen in relation to the anti-Risorgimento, the phenomenon of the brigantaggio post risorgimentale, or brigandage. I am currently writing about this subject, and it is a forgotten but significant chapter of Italian history.
The brigand wars, as they might be called, erupted with the northern Italian occupation of southern Italy, also described in patriotic literature as the “unification” of the Italian nation.
The first three years were astonishingly violent, and more northern soldiers (Piedmontese, as they were described in the south) died in repressing the southern rebellion than did in liberating and unifying Italy in the first place. There is a remarkable letter from Lincoln’s Secretary of State, William H. Seward, to the Italian government, assuring it of American support and understanding in view of their twin southern uprisings.
General Alfonso Ferrero La Marmora, a hero of the Italian Risorgimento, made the following statement to the parliamentary commission of inquest on brigandage: “From the month of May 1861 to the month of February 1863, we have killed or executed by firing squad 7,151 brigands. I know nothing more, I can say nothing more.” One French newspaper decried the Italian campaign of military repression, comparing it to the eradication of the Native Americans then under way in the United States.
The brigandage continued, at a lower boil, for a solid twenty years after that, until 1880, and its ultimate repression coincided with the beginning of mass Italian emigration to the United States and to South America. The historian and Italian prime minister Francesco Saverio Nitti coined the phrase “O emigrante o brigante” (“Either emigrant or brigand”), summarizing the options available to starving peasants in southern Italy.
What the brigandage did in the context of this history, however, was to clearly emphasize to the ruling class in Rome that, while disorders broke out in Calabria, Campania, and other parts of the mainland south, there was a reliable organization in Sicily that managed to keep the peasants under solid control.
The collegial understanding that developed between government and mafia was shattered with the advent of the Fascist regime, which successfully repressed the Sicilian Mafia by quasi-military means. Sciascia, in fact, probably was thinking of the anti-Mafia campaign of Mussolini’s prefect in Sicily, Cesare Mori, when he lamented the antidemocratic dangers lurking in the wholesale repression of the Mafia. Sciascia in fact quotes one of the Mafia bosses sent to prison by Mori. The elderly boss addressed the court famously with these words: “Your honor, with all the murders that I have committed, that you should send me to prison for a killing of which I am innocent …”
It was, in fact, the techniques used in eradicating the brigands that Mori adopted during his rule in Sicily.
His suppression of the Mafia was effective but short-lived. When World War II came to an end, the Mafia returned to power in Sicily all the faster because they alone had no compromising dalliances with the Fascist regime.
The commanding officer of Allied occupation forces in Sicily after the war was none other than Colonel Charles Poletti, former governor of New York State (very briefly in 1942; he had previously served as lieutenant governor under Herbert Lehman), and his driver and interpreter was Vito Genovese, who had left New York in 1937 to escape prosecution.
With the end of the war and the fall of Fascism, the Mafia returned to Sicily.
It is understandable that in the years of left-wing turmoil in Italy, when terrorist groups like the Red Brigades named themselves after formations from the Italian anti-German Resistance movement, the Mafia was identified with the “imperialist occupation” forces, such as NATO and multinational corporations like AT&T.
Paradoxically, when a Christian Democratic politician named Ciro Cirillo was kidnapped by the Red Brigades, the party turned to its contacts in Neapolitan organized crime (Camorra, not Mafia) to see if they could arrange Cirillo’s release.
The intersection between the Mafia as an organized crime system and its legend as a Robin Hoodish mutual aid society may be a dynamically moving boundary, part of a process that evolves over time, making the goal of an understanding of the nature of the Mafia even more of a moving target.
Suffice it to extrapolate from some of the political organizations that we have watched metastasize from revolutionary forces into crime cartels: Sendero Luminoso, FARC in Colombia, the Irish Republican Army (as so memorably portrayed in the 1980 film The Long Good Friday), and others. At one point, a colonel in the Cuban army was found to have been in cahoots with Manuel Noriega in trafficking drugs in the Caribbean.
It is easy to theorize a socially responsible Mafia protecting peasants in the early days, long before the beginning of documented mafia history, and then degenerating into its present cancerous form.
Ultimately, by the end of the Cold War, there was no clear political alignment of any sort with organized crime in Italy. As strong as the ties with the Christian Democrats had been, the loss of a unified anti-Western force in Russia and China deflated the rigid alignments in countries like Germany, Italy, and Japan. As Italy moved out of its ideological phase and into its second boom period of the late twentieth century, the idea of pro-and anti-Mafia political alignments began to seem superficial. In the corruption fever that culminated in the Tangentopoli investigations, bribe-takers made sure that payments were divvied up equally among the parties. And in that context, the Mafia declared open war against the Italian state.
As an American living in northern Italy, I was fairly removed from direct contact with the experience of the Mafia dominion. Only once did I happen upon the aftermath of an execution-style murder—a man had been shot as he sat in his car in the Via Vetere, off Corso di Porta Romana.
But the one time I really came in contact with the stark menace of the mafia was in Palermo, in the years following the maxitrial against the Mafia, but still prior to the murders of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
I went to pay a call on Michela Buscemi, a woman who was one of only two civil plaintiffs in the gigantic trial of nearly 500 Mafia defendants. I rode a bus from the center of Palermo out into the countryside. The bus tooled along highways, and finally came to a stop in a barren piazza, the end of the line. From there I followed the directions I had been given, through narrow streets, and past a small open piazza where an Apecar, the small, Vespa-built, three-wheeled pickup truck that is the workhorse of Italian farmers, sat, loaded over the cockpit roof with gigantic, surreal bright purple cabbages. The driver sat inside, speaking in a whiny sing-song into a microphone wired to a loudspeaker, describing the virtues of his merchandise in an echoing wail that sounded like a muezzin’s chant. I finally came to the street on which Michela Buscemi lived. It was literally the last street in the last hamlet of Palermo. And across the way was an empty lot that swept upward into the mountains. There were cactuses and rocks, and nothing more.
Inside, Michela sat with her small family and told me about how one of her brothers had stumbled upon a Mafia killing, and had then been lured away and killed. After a short time, “they” came calling for the other brother, yelling his name night after night. And then he too was gone.
She knew more than anyone should know about how her brothers had died: hog-tied, tortured, partly dissolved in a barrel of acid that proved to be defective.
And when she decided to turn civil plaintiff, something analogous to state’s witness, a badge of infamy in the Mafia-ridden society of Palermo’s poorer neighborhoods, her own mother had spat in her face.
“They call here, on the phone, late at night,” she said. “Sometimes they don’t talk, other times they threaten to kill us.” She stopped, panting slightly. Sitting in the dark living room, she pointed to the window, through which could be seen the Martian landscape of the red-rock mountain. “That’s the mountain where the Bandito Giuliano lived,” she resumed. “Can you imagine how long it would take the police to get here?”
Her solitude and exposure made her courage all the more remarkable.
Fear of the Mafia is reasonable, but ignorance of what it really is only makes that fear worse. This book provides invaluable documentation on just what makes up that mysterious essence: the Sicilian mafia.