So, in some ways, Mafia and ’Ndrangheta wives are hardly the silent homebodies of traditional Sicilian and Calabrian culture. They have always helped their men run Mob affairs, at least behind the scenes.[36] The ’Ndrangheta, in particular, relies on women to ensure that secrecy is maintained throughout the family system. Together with its rule of restricted membership, this role of women provides a lasting and solid structure to the criminal organization, which makes an ’ndrina difficult to penetrate and defeat. Calabrians are less likely to inform on their criminal colleagues with whom they have familial bonds. Overseeing this code of secrecy is the femmina (himmena in Calabrian), who ensures that its strictures are maintained and respected within the fold. In the case of imprisoned husbands, the women become valuable liaisons or conduits between the husbands and the other members. On the other hand, ’ndrina women have also been instrumental in provoking clan feuds, which can result in lost territory and the disruption of family units. In such cases, the women cannot remain passive, because a threat to the clan implies a threat to the family.
But ultimately, life in a criminal family is alienating for many women, especially young ones. Growing up in such a family isolates them from the rest of society. A young Mafia woman tends not to have any contact of any meaningful duration with individuals outside her family. She also is prohibited from interacting with, or frequenting, “certain persons.” If she does, she will invariably have to pay the price. There are many documented cases of Mafia and ’ndrina young women being murdered and left to rot on the streets for the dishonor they have brought to the family through their relationships with outsiders.
As Schneider and Schneider have written, the role of women in the Mafia is thus paradoxical; it is both empowering and enslaving.[37] The practice of violence, according to the code of honor, being a pseudo-chivalric one, generally excludes women from the exercise and display of violence. Women are perceived to be the beneficiaries of the criminal lifestyle, not participants in it. A Mafia wife is expected to be an aristocratic woman. She hosts her husband’s friends, while basking in the refined lifestyle that money and status bring. The Mafia looks out for its women, punishing those who “fool around” with them. The love of their men means a lot to many of the women, who sense that they are getting much more romantic attention than they would otherwise get. Omertà is attractive to some women, who are fascinated by its secret lifestyle, with its macho men and the prospect of immense wealth. It is what draws them to, and keeps them in, the fold, even though, as Reynolds astutely observes, they are well aware of the double standard:
The benefits include the prospect that her man will rise high enough in the ranks to generate an impressive flow of income, permitting her and her family to enjoy the perks of wealth—a large home, expensive clothes, luxury cars, and first-class vacations. Another perk is respect from her husband and his cohorts. The family remains a powerful unifying force among Sicilians and especially among Cosa Nostra members. You don’t embarrass your wife, and you don’t abuse her either.[38]
Living on the edge seems to be romantically engaging. The criminal lifestyle is exciting because it is dangerous, and danger, as the great German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche so aptly phrased it, is the “greatest fruitfulness and the greatest enjoyment of existence.”[39] The promise of romance, protection, respect, and excitement is very attractive, at least at a subconscious level. The sexuality of the “bad boy” is the stuff of legend, but there is a price to pay. The women have to accept the fact that the manliness code of omertà not only allows the men to be promiscuous, it implicitly demands it, since a wise guy “who is without a mistress or two may be suspect.”[40] Weekdays are for wives; weekends are for mistresses. This tacit rule is understood by both the men and women, ensuring that there are no risks of embarrassments. It is part of the code of silence. However, the code is often counterproductive and even dangerous for the Mafiosi themselves. Tales of lurid sexuality and consequent internal vendettas abound in Mafia history. It is written that one of the most famous Cosa Nostra bosses of all time, Vito Genovese, had another Mafioso killed because he lusted after his wife. The murder was rationalized as an act of passion. Clearly, the rules of omertà can conveniently be set aside if need be.
Furthermore, the code of manliness demands complete avoidance of homosexuality, as the case of John (“Johnny Boy”) D’Amato so brutally brings out. Reynolds summarizes it as follows:
D’Amato was head of the DeCavalcante family, the largest in New Jersey and reputed to be the basis of the popular The Sopranos television series. He had also been a confidante of the notorious John Gotti, a relationship that might have protected him in other times and other circumstances. With his girlfriend Kelly, D’Amato began frequenting clubs where men and women swapped partners and engaged in group sex. At more than one of these events, D’Amato’s girlfriend witnessed him performing oral sex on other men, and she tearfully confessed it to one of D’Amato’s wise guy friends. When the friend reported the incident to Mafia heavyweight Vincent (Vinnie Ocean) Palermo, the mob boss ordered D’Amato’s murder. The motive was clear. “Nobody’s gonna respect us if we have a gay homosexual boss sitting down discussing business,” D’Amato’s killer testified in court.[41]
An unwritten commandment of the omertà code is that, if you are a Mafia man, you can have all the sex you want, discretely, as long as it is heterosexual. In 1902, the Calabrian police found a document containing rules for admission into the ’Ndrangheta in which it is explicitly stated that homosexuals were prohibited from joining. Male chauvinism seems to be alive and well among criminal secret societies. Ironically, however, in a 2009 trial, a Gambino family pentito admitted that he was gay, living in the closet for many years. He did this as a gambit to obtain a more lenient sentence for a crime he had committed in 2003.
Lost in all this self-serving concoction of pseudo-chivalric notions is the brutality that underpins the criminal lifestyle. In reality, being married to, or the mistress of, a mobster is hardly a matter of exciting romance, with stylish clothing and cosmetics, as the movies and television programs proclaim. The glamorous fantasy that is created both by Mafia fiction and Hollywood fiction is just that—fantasy.
The Yakuza
It is interesting, at this point, to make a comparison between the Italian criminal organizations and the Japanese Yakuza, given that there are striking parallels between the two.[42] The Yakuza constitutes one of the largest organized crime syndicates in the world today. In Japan, as of 2005, there were nearly 90,000 known members, eclipsed only by Hong Kong’s Triads, with 160,000 members.[43]
Japanese society places great value on conformity. A common Japanese proverb states, “The nail that sticks up must be hammered down.” Individualism generates suspicion, but acts of individualism inspire silent admiration. This is why the Yakuza, which stubbornly refuses to fit into the traditional Japanese social mold, have secret admirers among the Japanese populace. The origin of the gang is traced to the early seventeenth century, when a group of “crazy men,” called the kabuki-mono, purportedly engaged in criminal activities, standing out through odd clothing styles, bizarre haircuts, and violent behavior, which involved the use of long swords. The kabuki-mono harassed and terrorized those living in their immediate milieu. They would use their swords to literally cut down anyone who went against them or even for the sheer pleasure of it. They also spoke a self-made slang, so that no one could listen in on their plans. They swore absolute loyalty to one another, protecting one another no matter what the circumstances, even going against their own families, if necessary. Having no established system of leadership, they eventually lost their ability to control people and thus started to wander nomadically around Japan as a band of thugs, pillaging villages and towns. Many historians believe that the Yakuza descended from this band of gangster-warriors.
The Yakuza, however, denies any historical linkage to the kabuki-mono. Like the Mafia, they spin a different tale of their origins, linking the
mselves to groups of brave individuals (storekeepers, tavern owners) known as the machi-yakko, who took up arms against criminals, including the kabuki-mono, in defense of their towns and villages. They were common people and purported to be skillful gamblers. The term Yakuza derives from the Japanese words for “eight + nine + three,” referring to the worst hand in a gambling game. The group established a chain of command, much like today’s Yakuza, and developed various symbols and rituals to set themselves apart from other gangs, garnering the support of the people in their crusade against common street thugs. According to legend, they had few weapons, using their bare hands and pugilistic skills to vanquish their opponents. They rose to folk hero status in a short period time. Their exploits have been extolled and magnified in legends, stories, and plays about them. “Yakuza leaders,” notes Lunde, “have devised largely mythological genealogies linking themselves to these past folk heroes.”[44] But the evidence for this is slim at best, specious at worst.
Like the Mafia, the Yakuza see their ancestry in chivalric traditions. They think of themselves as ronin, “masterless men,” in the tradition of the samurai warriors of the past. The samurai were members of a hereditary warrior class who defended the estates of aristocrats. They wore a distinctive helmet and armor and used two curved swords, one long and one short. They became folk heroes throughout Japan. Many see the Yakuza as their descendants. For this reason, much of its criminal activities are overlooked by the populace at large, which is beguiled by the tattoos, martial arts skills, and power of the samurai code of honor. But when one demystifies the group’s origins and its code of honor, the Yakuza, like the Mafia, are nothing but ruthless criminals who seek power and wealth through intimidation and violence.
Yakuza membership is not through bloodlines. Those who join tend to be from poorer backgrounds or are social misfits. The Yakuza clan functions as their adoptive family, providing them with a sense of belonging to something meaningful. Each new member must pledge loyalty to the code and the other members. The Yakuza unit has a “godfather” at the top, with new members initiated into the fold through a ceremony and assigned to a lower position in a pyramidal structure. The initiates are conceived as “children,” and the term used to designate their relation to the head is oyabun-kobun, which translates as “father-child,” mimicking the samurai warrior’s allegiance to his feudal overlord. As Kaplan and Dubro put it, “The oyabun provides advice, protection, and help, and in return receives the unswerving loyalty and service of his kobun when needed.”[45] Initiation rites are highly formal, including an exchange of saké cups (a traditional rice alcoholic drink) to symbolize the exchange of blood between the oyabun and the kobun. The ceremony is carried out in a Shinto shrine, which imbues it with religious undertones.
While the venue, the circumstances, and the culture may be different, it is obvious that the Mafia and the Yakuza share many of the same formalisms (or, more accurately, delusions). Blood symbolism is crucial to both. A candidate for admission into the Mafia must participate in a ceremony in which his trigger finger is pricked and the resulting blood smeared on the image of a saint. The picture is then set on fire, burning the initiate’s hands as he swears his loyalty and silent obedience to the family. Blood is not exchanged in the Yakuza ceremony, but saké is, as mentioned, which is a metaphorical substitute and connected to a life-giving substance in Japan—rice.
Like the Mafia, the basis of Yakuza operations is extortion but also includes smuggling, prostitution, drug-dealing, and gambling. And like their Mafia counterparts, the Yakuza control restaurants and trucking companies. In the 1980s, they also engaged in real estate speculation. In recent years, the Yakuza have been forced to change their recruitment standards. Most new members come from the bosozoku, the name for violent street punks, who ride proudly and arrogantly around in motorcycles. The Yakuza who treasure their ancestral forms of recruitment reject the recruits, considering them an insult to the dignified mettle of the group. But the world is changing for the Yakuza, as it is for the Mafia.
The Yakuza is an exclusive male society. They do not trust women, seeing them as weaklings and thus as a threat to their organization. The only woman who is expected to play any role at all in the gang is the leader’s wife, called ane-san, meaning “older sister.” She is given the same respect as the boss, simply because she is his wife. Unlike ’Ndrangheta and Mafia women, however, she is not allowed get involved in any of the criminal enterprises or to give advice of any kind. To a Yakuza member, the most important personality trait is courage, which women are thought to lack. If there is a conflict, the Yakuza warrior must be ready to fight to the death. Women are mothers and wives, not warriors. The Yakuza believe that they should stay at home and look after the children, not engage in men’s affairs. In this way, they will not have access to information and thus cannot talk to the authorities.
The Yakuza have elaborate initiation rituals, which include the application of elaborate tattoos covering the entire torso, as well the arms and legs.[46] Naked, a Yakuza looks like a painted mural, with images of dragons, flowers, landscapes, and gang insignias. The new member is supposed to show his determination and courage by subjecting himself to hundreds of hours of painful tattooing. Like the Mafia, the Yakuza enforces loyalty to the clan by using vendettas against anyone seen as being disloyal or any member who tries to distance himself from the gang. A Yakuza who offends or fails to execute some assignment will have his finger cut off at a joint (yubitsume) and must then present it to the boss—a practice highlighted in the first Kill Bill film by director Quentin Tarantino. For serious acts of disloyalty, the offending Yakuza is given the choice of committing “honorable suicide” or being killed by his confreres.
As stated, the Yakuza power structure is pyramidal, with a boss, the oyabun, on top and loyal underlings, the kobun, beneath him. When a new recruit is accepted into the Yakuza, he must vow his allegiance, loyalty, obedience, and duty to the oyabun, who, like a father, is supposed to provide protection and good advice to him. There is also a kumicho (“supreme boss”), a saiko komon (“senior adviser”), and a so-honbucho (“headquarters manager”). The wakagashira (“number-two man”) is equivalent to the Mafia underboss and is responsible for overseeing the operations of various gangs. He is aided by the fuku-
honbucho, who is responsible for several gangs of his own. A typical Yakuza family will also have dozens of shatei (“younger brothers”) and many wakashu (“junior leaders”).
Like the Mafia, the staying power of the Yakuza involves funneling funds obtained by crime into legitimate businesses, as Lunde points out, writing the following:
Organized crime is an economic activity and differs from street gangs like the Bloods and Crips, not just in the degree of organization and purpose, but because organized crime accumulates capital and reinvests it. It is this that differentiates organized criminal groups from street gangs and “unorganized” criminals. It is the accumulated capital of organized groups like the U.S. Mafia and the Yakuza that enables them to buy the political protection that allows them to diversify and to respond to market shifts, such as the upsurge in demand for illicit drugs in the 1980s and human trafficking in the 1990s.[47]
The Yakuza are glorified in film. The 1974 film entitled simply The Yakuza reinforces the legend of the Yakuza as originating to protect poor people in small towns from traveling bands of marauding noblemen, adopting a code of honor as rigorous as the samurai code of Bushido. The claim is also made that the Yakuza disallow membership to foreigners. In Tarantino’s Kill Bill, there is a scene that shows the Yakuza bosses of five families as being upset that a “Chinese-Japanese half-breed” woman named O-Ren has become a boss several years after killing the former head of the family. One of the male bosses exclaims that this is an outrage for the “fathers of the fathers, of the fathers, of the fathers of the men sitting here [who] started this.”
In the end, the Yakuza are, like the Mafia, part self-styled fiction and part media fiction. Like th
eir Italian counterparts, they are gaining strength and power because of this “dual fictionalizing” process. They are even migrating to other countries and have become heavily involved in cybercrime. But the global cyber-village is also allowing common people to fight back. There are signs that the Yakuza’s lure is diminishing, as Japanese citizens, like the Addiopizzo members in Sicily, are fighting back by writing blogs against them and encouraging opposition through social media. But these signs can be deceiving, since Japanese youth, like Italian and American youth, are still drawn to a group where a sense of belonging, along with honor and respect, can be achieved through trials of bravery. Because they are tightly knit as a group and secretive in their lifestyles and criminal operations, like the fabled ninjas of ancient Japan, the Yakuza can be everywhere and nowhere. They terrorize by their silence. And they remain lethal.
1. John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), xiii–xvii.
2. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1840; New York: Signet Classics, 2001), 160.
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