Cosa Nostra, largely created by men of Sicilian birth, still kept ties to the Sicilian Mafia. The term gained popularity through the media after the American pentito, Joseph Valachi, referred to the American Mafia as Cosa Nostra while testifying before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations in 1963. It was actually the FBI who added the article La to the term, referring to it as La Cosa Nostra.[26] In Italian, the article is not used. Back in Italy, the authorities did not take the new term seriously at first, mainly seeing it as a label for the American Mob. But, in 1984, it entered the Italian language when the pentito Tommaso Buscetta revealed to the anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone that it was being used by the Sicilian Mafia as well, which saw an opportunity to reject the traditional term Mafia as a mere literary epithet. Buscetta claimed that Cosa Nostra was the real name of the Mafia. Whether or not this was true, it certainly brought the name to center stage in the world of organized crime.
Cosa Nostra, unlike the Sicilian Mafia and certainly the ’Ndrangheta, is an equal opportunity employer. In the latter, mainly men descended from ’Ndrangheta families can be admitted as members. This rule has actually been a double-edged sword for the gang. It is counterproductive because it fosters internecine warfare. On the other hand, it minimizes the risk of infiltration by unwanted individuals and defection by members. “Blood is thicker than water” is a fundamental principle of the ’Ndrangheta. Cosa Nostra has no such requirement.
The Display of Power
The sense of belonging and self-worth that comes with joining a criminal gang exceeds the desire for wealth. Mafia fugitives could enjoy a life of luxury. Instead, they remain in their gang, hunted down and in danger of being arrested or killed by dissidents and other gangs, to maintain their criminal status. “Being someone” is a more compelling incentive than any amount of money. The Mafia is a power trip, as the character Rico Bandello in Little Caesar emphasizes repeatedly in the movie.
Intimidation (real and perceived) is a way of gaining power over people. It is directed at extortion victims, pentiti, relatives of pentiti, judges, police officials, and at anyone who gets in their way. It is as important as is the actual use of violence. Marks left on dead bodies indicating the nature of the victim’s injustice toward the Mafia, artifacts (letters, symbols) left near the cadaver, menacing sguardi (“looks”), gesti (“gestures”), and other signature strategies are all intimidation tactics.[27]
Alliances with other criminal groups are also part of ensuring power, even though such alliances go contrary to the origins of criminal societies. The traditional source of revenue for the Mafia has been extortion. Today, it is narcotics trafficking that provides it with its greatest source of income. This new line of business requires cooperation. The Mafia has, in fact, established a transportation network with other gangs for the trafficking of heroin and cocaine. The extent of the close relationship between the Mafia and Colombia’s Medellin drug cartel, for instance, first became apparent with the November 2, 1989, indictment of twelve people in Miami linked to the Mafia. The defendants were accused of shipping cocaine by train and car from Miami to Philadelphia and New York. Among those indicted were a member of the Sicilian Mafia and a Barranquilla drug group member, a group directly linked to the cartel. In 2008, a joint Italian, Mexican, and American investigation uncovered a link between the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta and the Mexican Gulf Cartel, leading to the arrest of 507 individuals and the seizure of more than $60 million in U.S. currency and of large amounts of cocaine, heroin, and other narcotics.[28]
The display of power with strategies like these allows the Mafia to recruit individuals, known as “middlemen,” who fear violent repercussions from the Mob if they do not follow orders. In the 1989 case, once the drugs were in the United States, an intricate network of pizzerias and pizza joints was used to distribute them. The eateries served as fronts for the Mob, providing them with legitimate sources of income, as well as a locus for gaining a foothold in the community. But their real function was to provide a system for recruiting middlemen to push and sell the drugs in small quantities. The middlemen were typically illegal aliens from Italy or Italian Americans who were attracted to the Mob lifestyle as “wannabes.” As legal scholar Jonathan Kwitny observes, the strength of middlemen and intergang partnerships can be discerned in the stated philosophy of the Mafia as “una mano lava l’altra” (literally “one hand washes the other,” meaning “I’ll do this for you, if you do that for me”).[29] This tit-for-tat strategy is also the reason why bribery of officials and the corruption of politicians are typical Mafia tactics.[30] As the fictitious Don Corleone of Godfather fame put it, mirroring the true mind-set of the Mafia, “A lawyer with his briefcase can steal more than a hundred men with guns.”
An inside look at the power strategies of the Mafia comes from a series of indictments stemming from a federal crackdown on organized crime called “Iron Tower.” The investigation started as two separate probes. They were subsequently merged into one when it became apparent that there was an international component to the operations involving a Sicilian connection. The investigation focused on several New Jersey members of the Mafia. In 1988, the probe resulted in the arrest of more than 200 suspected Mafiosi and middlemen in the United States, Italy, Spain, and the Dominican Republic. The impact of Iron Tower—an appropriate metaphor for how the Mafia conducted its operations in an “iron-fisted” way within its “tower” of operations—virtually destroyed the illegal operations.
Although several members of the cartel lived and conducted their activities in the New Jersey and Philadelphia areas, the headquarters was Café Giardino, a restaurant in Brooklyn. Recording devices and telephone wiretaps were used to record the conversations, most of which were in the Sicilian dialect. The use of dialect is part of the power trip, as we will soon discuss. The dialect is a perfect language for maintaining secrecy, spoken only by those in the know. It is, like other symbol systems used by the Mafia, una cosa nostra.
While Iron Tower was a major victory for law enforcement, the Mafia was no stranger to attacks from the law. It has always rebounded quickly. Leadership roles left vacant because of the prosecutions were, in fact, filled promptly by others in the gang. In the end, Iron Tower did not demolish the Mafia fortress; it only made a few dints in it. The Mafia is not just about drugs and wealth; it is about symbolic power that keeps members bound together at all times—good and bad. As Lunde has indicated, criminal societies have staying power because they have group-preserving structure and are able to create a mystique about themselves—a mystique that has bonding strength:
Organized crime, however defined, shares a few basic characteristics, whatever the differences among individual groups and the cultures that produced them. They have in common durability over time, diversified interests, hierarchical structure, capital accumulation, reinvestment, access to political protection, and the use of violence to protect their interests. Successful organized crime groups each have their own mystique, ensuring solidarity and loyalty through shared ethnicity, kinship, or allegiance to a code of behavior. [31]
We would add one other attribute to Lunde’s list as a factor giving the Mafia its longevity and perseverance—a sense of historical succession. The Mafia’s domination of Sicily is traced by some back to the so-called gabellotti (“bailiffs”) of the feudal period. These were men trusted by the aristocracy to collect taxes from the rural peasantry and manage their estates. They were important figures because the landowners were rarely around, living in cities. When the social system changed, the gabellotti remained, forming a proto-criminal gang that continued to collect “taxes,” for their own pockets. After Italian Unification in 1861, they emerged as leaders of crime families, which were evolving into a form of shadow government, able to influence social, economic, and political life in Sicily. They controlled to whom the farmers sold their produce and the markets that acquired it. They controlled the materials that came into the is
land. Through intimidation and bribery, they were able to influence whoever was given a government job and infiltrate various legal and judicial institutions.
Revolt by people against the crime gangs is also rarely effective for the same reasons that legal actions against them are usually futile. The first major American Mafia incident occurred in New Orleans in 1890. A Sicilian crime family was being constantly harassed by the local chief of police, David Hennessy. As a result, he was murdered. When the mobsters were tried, they bribed witnesses. To everyone’s shock, they were acquitted. Anti-Italian fervor erupted, and a lynch mob went to the jailhouse. The mob shot or hanged the released men. The incident was thought at the time to have annihilated the Mafia in the United States, but it did not. The only thing that the incident achieved was to introduce the term Mafia in the United States, as newspapers discussed it at length. The newspapers also were drawn to intergang warfare. An epidemic of Mafia violence surfaced in the early 1930s. Mafia bosses and their soldiers were slaughtered on a daily basis, with few ruling their families for more than a couple months at a time. The Lucchese family, alone, went through four bosses in 1930. The media loved it, since it sold newspapers and tabloids.
In the middle of this bloodbath, “Lucky” Luciano saw the advantages that alliances brought. He simply realized that there was strength in numbers, not in the hegemony of one crime family over others, gained through warfare. His new model for Cosa Nostra was a multifamily syndicate that would approve activities nationwide. Luciano’s accomplishments are now the stuff of legend. His furbizia (“cleverness” or “wise-guy-ness”) was unparalleled before or since. He was even crucial in getting a deal struck between the U.S. military and the Sicilian Mafia that would help the Allies in their invasion of Sicily in 1943.[32] The Allies, aided by the mobsters, were welcomed as liberators. The imprisoned Mafiosi under Mussolini were released from jail or returned from exile. By the end of World War II, the Mafia had become a major crime syndicate operating in both Sicily and the United States.
In Italy, the Mafia formed secret alliances with leading political figures in the Christian Democratic Party, the dominant political force in Italy for four decades following the war. With support at the highest echelons of the political hierarchy, the Mafia was able to expand its influence over the entire country, not just Sicily. It was not until it overreached its boundaries that the judicial system found the nerve and courage to unravel the Mafia’s massive influence over the entire Peninsula. The Mafia had declared an open war on the Italian state through a series of car bombings of Italian political figures. The outrage from the public forced the government to lend concrete support to honest, crusading anti-Mafia judges and officials. But, as it turned out, it was impossible to stamp out the Mafia.
The Mafia, ’Ndrangheta, Cosa Nostra, the Camorra, and other major criminal gangs perceive themselves as genuine societies, possessing a pseudo-value system that prizes honor, respect, and family ties—all of which are seen as lacking in the contemporary secular world, in which the philosophy of “anything goes” is seen to prevail. They are glorified for this by movies and television programs. This is a convenient myth for the Mafia, obfuscating what it really is—a cancer spreading throughout the global village. The Mafia has been very bad for Italians. In New Orleans, where the first Sicilian immigrants made their home, the mayor openly called them the most idle, vicious, and worthless people he had ever encountered. He publicly stated that he wanted to wipe out every one of them from the face of the earth. As social scientist Dwight Smith suggests, the Italians became part of a convenient alien conspiracy backlash that was really xenophobia disguised as outrage against criminality.[33] This only exacerbated the situation. The Italian communities accepted protection from the criminals because of the public outcry against them, even though most of them worked diligently and contributed significantly to American society. The American Mafiosi soon found new ways to protect their own countrymen from corrupt police forces and others who wished to exploit them. In reality, however, the primary target of the gangsters was the countrymen.
Already at the turn of the twentieth century, La Mano Nera (“The Black Hand”) had emerged as an extortion racket. Victims would receive a letter telling them to give the sender a certain sum of money or else risk death from a secret “Black Hand Society.” The letters were always signed with a black handprint. The Black Hand terrorized the immigrants. One of the most infamous Black Handers was Ignazio Saietta, also known as “Lupo the Wolf.” Saietta came from Italy to live with his brother-in-law, Nicholas Morello, who had built his own criminal operations into a thriving New York Mafia crime family that was eventually able to challenge all other gangs for territorial control. Saietta joined forces with Morello to carry out Black Hand operations. The growth of Morello’s power illustrates why the American Mafia became (and still is) so successful. He started out seemingly protecting his own community before exploiting it and turning the innate distrust of authority among the immigrants into a self-serving barrier of silence. He used Black Hand tactics to expand into other criminal areas, giving Morello an edge over his rivals. Black Hand terror was real. In 1908, there were more than 400 documented cases of Black Hand extortion in New York. Between 1910 and 1914, there were more than 100 murders attributed to the Black Hand.
The power of the symbolism did not go unnoticed by the early moviemakers. Indeed, an early film short, The Black Hand (1906), originally in Italian (La Mano Nera), became highly popular. Another movie of the same name, La Mano Nera, came out in 1909. It was a stark portrait of the deleterious effects Mafia culture had brought to the United States, based on the funeral of Italian American police detective Giuseppe (Joe) Petrosino, who was the first police officer to understand the need for American police forces to cooperate with Italian ones in weeding out the Mafia. Petrosino became an effective crusader against Black Hand operations in New York. As an Italian-speaking officer born in Italy, he understood the nuances of the Italian language and the code of honor used by the criminals. No one was convicted of the murder of Petrosino—a killing that was carried out while Petrosino was secretly visiting Palermo to orchestrate a cooperative anti-Mafia crusade. His body was returned to New York and his funeral attended by more than 250,000 people. The movie is not a gangster movie. Along with the other ones, it constitutes a filmic snapshot of the growing brutality of la malavita (“the bad life”) that Mafia culture entailed. It warned of things to come at the same time that it captured a growing gangster ethos that both repelled and appealed to movie audiences.
Cosa Nostra has become a major player in shaping American history.[34] The JFK murder, for instance, is entangled with a Mafia subtext—a fact noted and popularized by American director Oliver Stone in his blockbuster 1991 movie JFK, a controversial interpretation of the events surrounding the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, involving collusion among the Mafia, FBI, and CIA. Stone followed this up with Natural Born Killers (1994), a satire about America’s fascination with crime and violence. Through dummy firms and businesses, Cosa Nostra now controls numerous entertainment places, construction companies, food distribution and food services, large chunks of the garbage business, and much more. It has corporate structure. It feeds on fear and corruption, sustaining itself through its display of power.[35] Cosa Nostra is also highly adaptive to change, expanding its activities into the new industrial and technological areas of the contemporary world, as well as engaging in financial market manipulation. Cosa Nostra continues to be an organized criminal threat to American society.
Strengthening Cosa Nostra is the fact that it opened its doors to non-Sicilian gangsters. By an agreement with the largest family in New York City, the Sicilian Mafia was granted permission to take over parts of the lucrative heroin trade. Since then, the syndicate, just like a legitimate corporation, has grown, cooperating with other organized crime groups throughout the world in the trafficking of drugs. As already mentioned, its power was first brought into public light during the s
o-called Pizza Connection case in the early 1980s.[36] The case led to the FBI working closely with the Italian police, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, and Colombian authorities. Since then, FBI investigations have resulted in successful prosecutions of most of the families and the reduction of syndicate wealth through the aggressive use of asset forfeiture, undermining the Mafia’s financial power base. The FBI also developed an effective investigative technique called enterprise theory, which stipulates that “association in fact” can be used in a prosecution or a civil proceeding. Evidence of criminal acts is gathered to establish the criminality of an enterprise and also of individuals associated with it. But despite such legal measures and tools, the tentacles of Cosa Nostra have penetrated way too deeply into every aspect of social, economic, and cultural life. When Bernardo Provenzano, the alleged capo dei capi (“boss of bosses”) of Cosa Nostra, was captured on April 11, 2006, in Corleone, Italy, after many decades on the run, anti-Mafia prosecutor Pietro Grasso put it as follows:
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