The play is about a fictitious gang of prisoners in Palermo. The gang has a leader; an initiation ritual for new gang members; a code of rules based on silence, called umirtà (omertà in modern Italian); and a system for obtaining pizzu (a code word for extortion money). In other words, the gang possessed all the hallmark features of the real Mafia. Soon thereafter, the word started appearing throughout Sicily, making its first official appearance in an 1865 report written by Filippo Antonio Gualterio, the prefect of Palermo. As they say, fiction mirrors life, and life mirrors fiction.
Much of modern Mafia slang and the concept of a honor code associated with the Mafia come from the play, as Dickie notes, writing the following:
The mafiusi are a gang of prison inmates whose habits look very familiar in retrospect. They have a boss and an initiation ritual, and there is much talk in the play about “respect” and “humility.” The characters use the term pizzu for protection payments, as do today’s Mafiosi—the word means “beak” in Sicilian. By paying the pizzu you are following someone to “wet their beak.” If this use of pizzu started life as jailhouse slang, it almost certainly entered general use because of the play.[9]
Without names, gangs would be perceived as just a group of hooligans. Through the name, members come to see themselves in more sophisticated ways and thus develop complex symbols and rituals that transform them into miniature cultures, or subcultures, that allow the members to live apart from the mainstream. This is why in police interrogations former gang members actually provide complex, abstract psychological descriptions of themselves as belonging to something meaningful and valuable. Members become interested in understanding their own roles in the gang and why they behave the way they do. Self-esteem increases as gang members move up the gang’s hierarchical structure. Like any culture a gang needs a leader; a division of labor and duties; and a set of principles, rituals, and symbols—a code—by which to live.
Criminal groups existed in Sicily long before Rizzotto and Mosca’s play provided a collective label for them, but they would have been relegated to the social wayside without a corporate name to remind people of their existence. Mafia did the job perfectly. All that was missing was a link to history—a link that would justify the existence of the Mafia as a legitimate cultural reality. This was done by scripting a convenient story connected to Sicilian history, as we shall see later. Storytelling is the essence of confabulation. Confabulated memories seem real and are almost impossible to distinguish from memories of events that actually occurred. Sicily’s history of incursions and occupations started with the Greeks, followed by invasions from the Vandals, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, and Bourbons. This situation is held as being responsible for the creation of secret societies allied to resistance movements. Paul Lunde gives a coherent picture of the conditions that brought about the rise of the Mafia in Sicily as follows:
From Norman times, the political system in Sicily was feudal. Foreign rulers controlled the island by cultivating the local aristocracy, who obtained concessions in return. The law was whatever the rulers made it. There was no concept of common justice and the peasants were excluded from the political process. They lived desperate lives on the margin of survival. It was from this social milieu that the mafia eventually arose, not as liberators of the oppressed, but as able individuals intent on obtaining their share of wealth and privilege however they could. Traditional Sicilian suspicion of state institutions created the conditions in which the mafia could develop.[10]
The perception of the Mafia as a historically based society has been a disastrous one for Sicily. Already in 1900, Antonino Cutrera, an early anti-Mafia activist and an officer of public security, wrote the following words: “For historical and ethnographic reasons, Sicily has for many years suffered a social vice perpetrated on it by the Mafia. This vice has hindered its social development and has compromised the thrust of its civilization.”[11]
Examining Mafia culture without understanding how it is intertwined with Sicilian society and culture would be a futile enterprise. People from all areas of that society, from the street vendor to police officers, have colluded in one way or another with the Mafia, either for personal gain, to avoid it, to combat it, or to comply with the mobsters because of threats.
Giuseppe Bonanno (“Joe Bananas”), a boss of one of the five infamous families of New York, provides his own theory for the origins of the Mafia. He suggests that the original Mafiosi were Red Shirt volunteers—a theory that he elaborates in his autobiography, writing the following:
In my grandfather’s time, Sicily was under the dominance of the Bourbon dynasty, a royal family of Spanish and French ancestry. Italy itself was like a jigsaw puzzle, with the pieces owned by various powers. Because of the patchwork of foreign domination and internal weaknesses, Italy was the last major country in Europe to be unified under a native ruler. The unification movement was spearheaded by King Victor Emmanuel II and his brilliant prime minister, Cavour. It could not have been accomplished, however, without the leadership and inspiration of the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi. Garibaldi catalyzed the unification movement by enlisting a volunteer army to liberate Sicily. These volunteers, a motley crew of idealists and zealots, wore a distinctive garb and became known as the Red Shirts. In 1860, Garibaldi’s enthusiastic band, some 1,000 strong, landed in Marsala on the west coast of Sicily.[12]
Bonanno’s subtext is that among the Red Shirts, there were certain “men of honor” who were able to organize themselves openly, since they were seen as “fighters for the cause.” After unification, the Mafiosi became even more unified, laying an even greater stake in Sicilian social and political life. They did this, in part, by portraying themselves as family men, playing on the belief in the pivotal value of bloodlines in Sicilian culture.[13] As Lunde aptly observes, “Nothing is as important to a Sicilian as the ties of blood.”[14] Blood lineage assures loyalty and a safety net for the Mafia, which thrives in a culture of vendettas that aim to avenge despoiled honor.
But history paints a different picture. The Mafia gained legitimacy by associating itself, historically, with uprisings against a tyrannical and corrupt state, claiming to be on the side of the peasants. Its crimes against the very peasants it had vowed to protect, however, have become conveniently obfuscated by the Mafiosi throughout time or eliminated from their confabulated narratives. As the acerbic commentator on human foibles, Mark Twain, so pertinently puts it, “A crime persevered in a thousand centuries ceases to be a crime and becomes a virtue. This is the law of custom, and custom supersedes all other forms of law.”[15] In a fundamental way, the victims of the Mafia have, through their own reluctance to speak up against the gangsters, given it strength and durability. As British author H. G. Wells writes, “Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State’s failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community.”[16]
Creating a convenient history for itself has been one of the most effective strategies adopted by the Mafia, since it connects it to Sicily’s past struggles. Fiction is a powerful force in human life. As American writer Henry Miller so insightfully puts it, fiction “is a part of life, a manifestation of life, just as much as a tree or a horse or a star. It obeys its own rhythms, its own laws, whether it be a novel, a play, or a diary. The deep, hidden rhythm of life is always there—that of the pulse, the heartbeat.”[17]
In the folklore connected to the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta, this heartbeat has been pulsating for a long time, with references to the Garduña appearing in native Calabrian songs and legends. The Garduña was a medieval prison gang in Spain that grew into a secret society, carrying out such crimes as kidnapping, robbery, arson, and murder-for-hire. A Calabrian legend claims that the Garduña is the precursor of the Sicilian Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, and the Neapolitan Camorra. It recounts the story of three Garduña brothers (Osso, Mastrosso, and Carcagnosso), who were shipwrecked on the island of Favignana (a Mediterranean island that is part of Sicily). One of the brothers made his way to Naples
to found the Camorra, another to Calabria to set up the ’Ndrangheta, and the third to Sicily to establish the Mafia. Significantly, the shipwrecked brothers were escapees from the Spanish authorities, having murdered a nobleman who had raped their sister.
But there is no evidence whatsoever to substantiate a link between the criminal organizations and the three Garduña brothers. The legend is, itself, a convenient fiction. The view that the ’Ndrangheta is heir to the Garduña has existed at different times in Calabrian folklore, creating for the criminal group a convenient mystique based on valor and adventure of the same kind captured by Hollywood pirate movies. Even the great sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Spanish novelist Miguel de Cervantes writes about the Garduña in one of his well-known short stories, “Rinconete and Cotadillo.”
The Camorra as a structured criminal organization in Naples traces its origins much more prosaically to the eighteenth century, when a gang of mobsters started collecting a tax from prisoners, as well as from prison authorities, to guarantee peace and quiet in the prisons. The term appears in print in an official document of 1735. During the unification of Italy in 1860, the mobsters were hired by Liborio Romano (an important political figure of the times) as vigilantes to keep social order during Garibaldi’s mission in Naples. One of its members, Salvatore De Crescenzo, was even made chief of the local faction of the National Guard. As a result, the Camorristi gained amnesty for their previous crimes, boastfully wearing a symbolic pin with the colors of the Italian flag. The operational wing of Camorra, like that of the Mafia, almost became extinct during Italian dictator Benito Mussolini’s reign but was revived after World War II, when the Mafiosi allied themselves with other groups in Italian society against communism and communists in the country, allowing it to regain a foothold in Neapolitan and Sicilian politics and society. Today, Camorra and Mafia groups control partitioned territories, forming a kind of parallel government in the two regions (Campania and Sicily).
During the seventeenth century there was, actually, a secret society in Calabria that resembled the contemporary ’Ndrangheta.[18] The word itself has a Greek origin meaning “heroism” and “virtue.” The first clear evidence of its existence, however, comes shortly after Italian unification, when the mobsters were hired by powerful stakeholders to threaten their rivals during elections. Unification brought no economic prosperity to southern Italy. Southerners remained impoverished, while squires from northern Italy took possession of large southern estates, imposing heavy taxation throughout the region. The ’Ndrangheta was either formed or heavily reinforced (if it indeed already existed) by groups of Calabrian men who wanted to get rid of the squires, or at least get even by blackmailing or robbing them. The group thus came forward as a kind of Robin Hood gang, preying on the rich, when, in reality, they were aiming to secure financial and political power. It is from that era that a folk culture in Calabria took shape around the ’Ndrangheta, celebrating the ’Ndranghetisti in songs. Gradually, the function and role of the ’Ndrangheta changed, developing into the fearsome brutal society it is today—a fact documented not by folklore, but by crime statistics. The ’Ndrangheta differs from the Sicilian Mafia, the Neapolitan Camorra, and the American Cosa Nostra in that membership is based exclusively on birthright or marriage.
Between the end of the 1970s and the first half of the 1980s, Sicily was the battleground of a Mafia internecine war that upset the equilibrium and relationships within it. The old rules that had moderated disagreements within the ranks and allowed for interclan cohesion were compromised. The many pentiti (“informants,” literally “those who have repented”) who collaborated with the authorities in the 1980s and 1990s opened up the secret society to public scrutiny, substantially dissolving the symbolic power of the Mafia’s code of omertà. But the organization survived the attack and still prospers, probably because it continues to adhere to its code as a sacrosanct set of principles that allows its members to feel a strong bond amongst one another.
Omertà is a version of the Italian word umiltà (“humility”), which in Sicilian is umirtà. It is a code of manly submission to the Mob that requires members to embrace a show of humility and take a vow of silence. Omertà, as Lunde comments, “is a pan-Mediterranean ideal of manhood, going back to the ancient Stoic tradition of ancient Greece and Rome,” and is thus bound up “with the larger category of onore (“honor”).”[19] The code demands a vendetta against anyone who dishonors a Mafioso or his family. The true “made man” must defend the honor of his crime family, which he is expected to protect like his real family. The code of omertà is why the ’Ndangheta and, to some extent the Sicilian Mafia, refer to themselves as the Onorata Società (the “Honored Society”).
Reinvention: Cosa Nostra
In the late 1800s, gangsters who immigrated to the United States took their Mafia culture with them, but they did not gain much street power until the advent of Prohibition in the 1920s. This allowed them to provide alcohol illegally and thus to profit immensely from bootlegging—the illegal making, selling, and transporting of alcoholic beverages. Also during this time, Mussolini went after Sicilian mobsters with his own form of street justice. Mussolini appointed Cesare Mori, the prefect of Palermo in 1925, to go after the Mafia, giving him special powers to do so. More than 11,000 people were arrested, many of them innocent individuals. They were tried and convicted expeditiously for being either Mafiosi or for having Mafia connections. But Mussolini’s “Mafia genocide” strategy did not work as well as expected, since many Mafiosi outwitted the authorities and avoided their roundup net.
As a consequence of Mussolini’s dire actions, many gangsters fled to the United States, where they joined other Mafiosi who were already there. Others stayed behind to fight for Sicilian independence, transforming the Mafia once again into a valiant “savior” of the people.[20] Those who emigrated to the United States quickly blended in with the American crime families, which had gained control over so-called speakeasies that had become locales for Mafia bootlegging operations. Speakeasies were the precursors of nightclubs, constituting places for the illegal sale and consumption of alcohol during the Prohibition. The Mafiosi stepped conveniently forward to satisfy a large part of the demand for the alcoholic beverages. Because of the great profit that was involved, different Mafia families battled one another for control of the bootlegging market. Violent gang wars erupted in many large cities, with a resulting carnage. Al Capone of Chicago was probably the era’s most famous Mafioso, rising to prominence as a bootlegger. Under his leadership, gang warfare in Chicago reached a frightful peak the morning of February 14, 1929, leading to what has become known, and enshrined by history, as the “St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.” Seven members of the George “Bugs” Moran gang were viciously assassinated in a North Clark Street garage where bootleg liquor was stored. Police suspected members of the Al Capone gang as the killers but were never able to prove it.
The bootlegging business led to a radical shift in American politics and society. Because the Mafia did not care to whom they sold the liquor, the Prohibition indirectly influenced the evolution of the current egalitarian society, as Lunde observes, stating the following:
It was during Prohibition that the modern United States, along with American organized crime, was born. Class, racial, and gender barriers began to erode in the fellowship of the speakeasy, where everyone present shared the camaraderie of breaking the law. Politicians, attorneys, and policemen rubbed shoulders with blue collar workers, gangsters, and entertainers. Al Capone’s Cotton Club in Cicero hired black jazz musicians and, by 1927, Chicago had become the jazz capital of the world.[21]
The American Mafiosi also inspired Hollywood. One of the most famous gangster movies of all time, Little Caesar (previously mentioned), was likely inspired by Al Capone and his flamboyant lifestyle. Actor Edward G. Robinson attended Capone’s trial in 1931 for tax evasion. He wanted to get a close look at Capone for his character model. The 1930s saw a slew of gangster films that perm
anently entrenched the Mafia into American popular culture. They include The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), G-Men (1935), The Petrified Forest (1936), Bullets or Ballots (1936), Kid Galahad (1937), The Last Gangster (1937), Racket Busters (1938), I Am the Law (1938), Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and The Roaring Twenties (1939). The titles alone provide an annotated anthropology of Mafia culture and its mystique to Americans. The Mafia gangster was replacing the cowboy as the mythic figure of redemption and virtue. After the end of the Prohibition in 1933, the mobsters entered into other illegal paths, including gambling and loan sharking in such major urban areas as New York City and Chicago.[22] The Mafia also played a role in the construction of the early casinos in Las Vegas, again taking advantage of shifts and trends in American culture, thus spreading its tentacles even more deeply into the United States and giving hardworking Italian Americans, who were the real builders of Las Vegas, a bad name by association.[23] Many Italian American pop stars, including Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, became linked to the Mafia via Las Vegas. Whether this was real or media fiction, it is still part of the popular lore that has always surrounded the American Mafia. As Lunde appropriately points out,
Probably the place that first comes to mind in association with the topic of casinos and gambling is Las Vegas, which grew with Mafia money during the 1940s. The Hotel Flamingo was opened in Las Vegas in 1947 by Benjamin “Bugsy” Siegel, friend of Meyer Lansky and Charles “Lucky” Luciano. Organized crime made a great deal of money skimming profits from the casinos for 40 years, until the laws regarding gaming were strengthened and it became impossible for anyone with links to organized crime to openly operate in Las Vegas.[24]
The Mafia in the United States had become a self-sustaining criminal organization, with a new identity. It also had a new name—Cosa Nostra. Although the terms Mafia and Cosa Nostra are often used interchangeably, the two groups are historically distinct. The Sicilian Mafia has roots in the 1800s and Italian unification (as seen earlier). Cosa Nostra, on the other hand, is a crime confederation of American Mafiosi. It is a reinvention. As the most infamous American Mafioso of all time, Al Capone aptly put it when he said, “My rackets are run on strictly American lines and they’re going to stay that way.”[25] A documented case of this duality is the one associated with Paul Violi, an underboss of the Cotroni crime family in Montreal, during the 1970s. During a conversation with a picciotto who had recently emigrated from Sicily, Violi informed him that he could not simply be a member of the clan without showing himself to be worthy of membership for at least a five-year trial period, implying that the Sicilian Mafiosi were perceived as different from the new Mafiosi in North America.
Made Men Page 2
