Crime fiction writers are also aware of the power of symbols, starting with the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur, Conan Doyle. In fact, detective fiction coincides with the rise of forensic science, as Ronald R. Thomas has perceptively written.[38] Today, there is a growing sense among the police and criminologists that to understand crime groups, one must look at symbolism much more seriously. For example, the Center for Homicide Research in New Orleans has adopted specific techniques to investigate crime scenes and decode the symbolism used by criminals and gangs. The courts are also beginning to use semiotic evidence in criminal proceedings. In the city of Edmonton, Canada, for example, the court may look at whether an accused person uses a name, word, symbol, or other form that identifies, or is associated with, a criminal organization to determine whether the accused participates in the criminal organization. As Diego Gambetta argues, the “myth lends force to a reality [that] would not otherwise be able to manifest itself.”[39] Demystifying the Mafia means unpacking the artificial meanings of their symbols and exposing their true brutal purpose.
1. Dwight C. Smith Jr., The Mafia Mystique (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975).
2. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (New York: Collier, 1912).
3. Attilio Bolzoni, Parole d’onore (Milano: BUR, 2008), 22.
4. Salvatore Scarpino, Storia della Mafia (Milano: Fenice, 2000).
5. John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 37.
6. Report of the police chief of Palermo, February 28, 1876, in Archivio di Stato di Palermo, GP, Busta 35.
7. G. Giarrizzo, “Mafia,” in Encicolpedia Italiana (Roma: Treccani, 1993), 278.
8. Cited in John Follain, The Last Godfathers: Inside the Mafia’s Most Infamous Family (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009), 25.
9. John Lawrence Reynolds, Shadow People: Inside History’s Most Notorious Secret Societies (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2006), 179.
10. Nicola Gratteri and Antonio Nicaso, Fratelli di sangue (Milano: Mondadori, 2009).
11. Antonio Nicaso, ’Ndrangheta: Le radici dell’odio (Roma: Aliberti Editore, 2007).
12. Alessandra Dino, La mafia devota (Roma: Editori Laterza, 2008).
13. Edgar Quinet, Ultramontanism, or The Roman Church and Modern Society (London: Chapman, 1845).
14. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, 16
15. Bolzoni, Parole d’onore, 23.
16. Joseph Farrell, Understanding the Mafia (Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 1997), 52.
17. Bolzoni, Parole d’onore, 92.
18. Paul Lunde, Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World’s Most Successful Industry (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2004), 68.
19. Gratteri and Nicaso, Fratelli di sangue, 34.
20. George Bernard Shaw, Androcles and the Lion (London: HardPress, 1916), i.
21. Leon Festinger, A Theory of Cognitive Dissonance (Evanston, IL: Row, Peterson, 1957).
22. Cited from Superior Court of New Jersey, Law Division—Criminal, Indictment, Superior Curt Number 91-03-00052.
23. Lunde, Organized Crime, 175.
24. Reynolds, Shadow People, 166.
25. Lunde, Organized Crime, 57.
26. Sir Walter Raleigh, The Works of Sir Walter Raleigh, Vol. 1 (London: R. Dodsley, 1751), 34.
27. James Baldwin, “A Dialogue” (1973; with Nikki Giovanni), from a conversation in London, November 4, 1971.
28. Lunde, Organized Crime, 55.
29. Thomas M. Pitkin and Francesco Cordasco, The Black Hand: A Chapter in Ethnic Crime (Totowa, NJ: Littlefield, Adams & Co., 1977).
30. Cited in Nigel Cawthorne and Colin Cawthorne, The Mafia: First-Hand Accounts of Life Inside the Mob (London: Constable & Robinson, 2009), 69.
31. Cawthorne and Cawthorne, The Mafia, 69.
32. Cited in Cawthorne and Cawthorne, The Mafia, 70.
33. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, 208
34. Pitkin and Cordasco, The Black Hand.
35. Cawthorne and Cawthorne, The Mafia, 60–61.
36. Lunde, Organized Crime, 124.
37. Reynolds, Shadow People, 192.
38. Ronald R. Thomas, Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).
39. Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 129.
Chapter 4
Appearance
Every man is the builder of a temple, called his body, to the god he worships, after a style purely his own, nor can he get off by hammering marble instead. We are all sculptors and painters, and our material is our own flesh and blood and bones.
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
As they say, appearances can be deceiving. In the case of Mafia culture, this is absolutely true. “Made men,” as the movies have certainly realized, are attractive because they literally put on appearances, from gangster chic to facial expressions meant to scare people to death. In The Godfather, Marlon Brando plays Don Vito Corleone, the capo who runs the Mafia universe from his chair. His body language, stern yet benevolent facial expression, suave clothing, and uncompromising composure in the face of adversity bespeak of an “appearance code of omertà” that, thanks to Hollywood, has become a model even for the real Mafia. Corleone is what a wise guy is imagined to be in both Mafia and popular culture. He is an icon. Like a veritable patriarch, he inspires fear, yet reassurance, by his appearance and his actions. He is even seen playing with his grandson in the movie.
The Mafioso is a chivalrous knight, a character who by force of his impeccable appearance and behavior must exude an inherent inner strength that allows him to keep up a constant “menacing atmosphere” around him. This must always be clear and unambiguous. It is imprinted in his style of clothing, his posture, his walk, and all other aspects of appearance that the made man must convey to others. Any sign of weakness is not tolerated. But are Mafiosi really like this? Photos of Mafiosi at the turn of the twentieth century hardly convey this macho image of the cool, well-dressed gangster. A lot of the actual appearance features associated with the Mafioso persona today actually come from the movies. The reality of Mafia culture today lies in the blurring of lines between fiction and reality. As filmmaker Jean Cocteau once put it, “A film is a petrified fountain of thought.”[1]
Mafiosi, like everyone else, model themselves after actors in film. The persona of the Mafioso that comes from the movies and is transferred to real life is a very attractive one, since it taps into the myth of the handsome and fearless “bad boy,” who is sexually attractive and exciting at the same time that he is dangerous. This myth is especially appealing to dispossessed youths and those growing up in a Mafioso family. The Mafioso is an “appearance junkie.”
The sociologist Erving Goffman points out that everyday life is theatrical, involving a skillful staging of character according to social context.[2] The Mafiosi on the screen and on the streets are indeed “character actors” who adopt a nonverbal code of dress, gesture, posturing, and facial expression to impress one another and identify themselves to others as men of honor. The ancient Greek word persona meant, in fact, a mask worn by an actor onstage. The Greeks probably adapted it from the ancient Etruscan word phersu. Subsequently, it came to have the meaning of “the character of the mask-wearer” on the stage.[3] Eventually, the word came to have its present meaning of “human being,” jumping from the stage to real life, but it still reverberates with theatrical meaning. The linkage between character and the theater has not been missed by modern-day criminals. Their whole business is, in many ways, a performance—a performance of stylish, honorable terror. And it works, because at an unconscious level, we are all affected by the performance.
The Made Man
As anthropologist Ray L. Birdwhistell observed in his study of body language, nonverbal signals constitute a powerful system of communication because “all movements of the body have meaning. N
one are accidental.”[4] This certainly applies to the Mafia. A capo, being older and wiser, is expected to show a laid-back imperious persona, whereas a picciotto would have to put on a different appearance, showing strength of will and, at the same time, an eagerness to please the capo.
Hollywood has been both a documenter and fabricator of Mafioso body language. The ruthless gangster on the screen is a macho figure, complete with mustache, slicked hair, erect body posture, and a gait-style walk. No one can tell him how to behave. And he is a promiscuous man, as emphasized by the movie Goodfellas (1990): “Sunday was wives night at the club, but Saturday was girlfriend night.” In reality, a large part of the allure of Mafia culture is sex. John Lawrence Reynolds puts it as follows:
The allure of a secret society, the macho posturing of its leaders, and the immense wealth at the fingertips of its most successful members attracted women to the Cosa Nostra men almost from the beginning. Of course, the reverse was true as well: Many ambitious young Italian men wanted to join because Cosa Nostra members had no trouble attracting good-looking women.[5]
The adoption of a cinema style and look became ludicrously obvious when Cosimo Di Lauro, the son of a notorious Camorra boss, intentionally donned a gangster appearance before the cameras as he left his house handcuffed in 2005. He slicked back his hair with gel and pulled up the jacket collar of his black raincoat in imitation of characters in such cult movies as The Crow and The Matrix. Hairstyle surfaces every once in a while in Mafia culture as significant. In a famous trial in Calabria in 1890, the members of the piciotteria (a forerunner of the current ’Ndrangheta group) were distinguished by the fact that they wore their hair cut in a “butterfly style,” with a tuft of hair in the middle that was slicked and combed high toward the back of the head. In 1911, Joe Musolino, a Calabrian gang leader in the city of Toronto who controlled the waterfront, was arrested wearing the same hairstyle, showing that the symbolism of the hairstyle knew no borders.[6]
In the comedy Analyze This (1999), a Mafia capo, played by Robert De Niro, begins seeing a psychiatrist, played by Billy Crystal, for therapy, because he is experiencing problems while having sex with his mistress. The reason is that he is having qualms of conscience. The irony is tangible. The true virile uomo d’onore (“man of honor”) would never be expected to behave or think in this way. One of the members of De Niro’s crime family discovers the therapy sessions and proclaims that they are a sign of weakness. The movie is, clearly, a satirical deconstruction of the Mafia persona and a parody of Mafia culture in general. A true Mafioso would never be a part of a culture that espouses psychiatry as a remedy to sexual problems. Real men solve their own problems or take advice from family members, not from therapists. In fact, there are real cases of Mafiosi suffering mental problems who consult psychiatrists in jail regarding a series of personal issues, from losing one’s hair to unflattering skin blemishes, showing how paranoid gangsters are, just like De Niro, about appearance and sexuality.
Mafiosi have actually feigned mental illness to save their skins or avoid being jailed. One of the most well-known cases of this is that of Vincent “the Chin” Gigante, who was the Genovese family boss until 2005 and was dubbed the “Odd Father” by the media because he often showed himself in public wearing pajamas, slippers, or a bathrobe, walking along Sullivan Street in Greenwich Village. His appearance was a put-on, a ploy to indicate that he had mental problems and thus that he should not be jailed for his criminal activities, but the police caught on and he was eventually put in prison, where he later died.
Made men must always display their virility. Motorcycle gang members wear leather suits complete with boots, street thugs in Los Angeles wear baggy pants and caps to instill fear in passersby, and so on and so forth. Dress codes might appear ludicrous and even comical to some, but to insiders and those victimized by gangs, they evoke trepidation and even terror. A Mafioso dressed in a black shirt with white tie, donning a mustache and slicked-down hair could easily be seen as a caricature of the gangster—a gangster imitating a gangster image—unless he is coming at someone with a violent intent. The same applies, in a different way, to the modern-day Yakuza, who, instead of wearing traditional Japanese clothing, seem to favor, as Reynolds notes, “tight-fitting silk suits, pointed-toe shoes, slicked long hair in a pompadour style, and a swagger more reminiscent of the sitcom television character The Fonz than of butchers like Vito Genovese and Lepke Buchalter.”[7] The appearance cliché is bolstered by the fact that Yakuza members love to drive large and ostentatious American cars, like Cadillacs and Lincolns, rather than smaller Japanese automobiles. Gangster appearance codes are, indeed, part of a construction of a criminal persona that is intended to give the gangster a recognizable look, like a dark knight, and elicit fear in anyone who comes upon him on the streets.
The gangster borrows extensively from popular culture. As part of the code, the typical modern-day gangster has adopted sun glasses, cigars, and a ring for his pinky finger. Dark sun glasses have always stood for toughness and sexuality, as the movies have constantly shown, starting with a famous 1944 photo of movie actor John Ford donning a pilot uniform, with a cigar and dark glasses. The look caught everyone’s attention. Gun Crazy (1949) was likely the first movie in which a gangster wore sunglasses to convey coolness and toughness at once. Soon afterward, the glasses were adopted by gangsters everywhere as part of the evolving new appearance code. In Sicily, Prince Alessandro Vanni Calvello Mantegna di San Vincenzo, suspected of having Mafia connections, was invited to a reception in honor of Queen Elizabeth II during her visit to Palermo in 1982. A photo taken at the reception showed the prince standing to the left of the Queen wearing sunglasses, which stood out incongruously.[8]
Tattoos
In the initiation ceremony scene in Eastern Promises, Viggo Mortensen sits in his underwear in front of a panel of members of the Russian Mafia who are reading the tattoos on his body in an effort to literally “read his character.” The tattoos reveal that Mortensen was a thief who had spent time in a Siberian prison and that he was noncooperative in prison, spending a lot of time in solitary confinement. After Mortensen passes the initiation test, he is marked with three new tattoos, including a ten-pointed star on each shoulder near the collarbone and a star on his knee. These indicate his status as a new member of the Russian Mafia. At that point, a higher-ranking member looks at the knee star and says to it, “So he won’t get down on his knees before authority.” Tattoos are part of the appearance code in many criminal gangs. They constitute a visual language identifying the gang to which a member belongs, recording his personal biography or his autobiography, along with describing his strengths, accomplishments, and opinions. They constitute a pictography of the criminal mind.
Tattooing is one of the most ancient forms of body decoration. Some anthropologists date it to around 8,000 BCE, but it may go back even farther in time.[9] Almost every culture has practiced tattooing at one time or another. As early as 2,000 BCE, the Egyptians used it to indicate social rank and affiliation. The ancient Greeks and Romans, on the other hand, used tattoos to brand slaves and criminals. In the Marquesas Islands, a group of islands in the South Pacific Ocean, they are revered signs of honor. In eastern New Guinea, tattoos on young women are signs of beauty. The list of cross-cultural functions of tattooing could go on endlessly.
The importance placed on the role of tattoos in character portraiture by the Russian Mafia was first brought to wide attention by the documentary film Mark of Cain (2000), which consists of interviews and conversations in a Russian prison. The aforementioned line spoken by a high-ranking member in Eastern Promises was taken word-for-word from the interview of an inmate in the documentary. Tattoos have specific meanings. For example, getting a tattoo of the image of famous communists like Lenin, Stalin, and Engels on one’s chest meant a death sentence; however, the inmate would not be shot because that would imply shooting the famous image. Knuckle tattoos identify a prisoner as a convicted armed robber, while the t
attoo of a ring on a prisoner’s finger represents a journey through a juvenile correctional facility. Tattoos of churches stand for beliefs. As one prisoner puts it, “Each cupola is a conviction.” As mentioned earlier, the star tattoo on a knee means that the gangster will not get down on his knees before authority, as another prisoner pointed out. Those who wear tattoos as fashion statement or to brag about themselves will have them cut off, “along with his skin,” declares another prison interviewee. A tattoo in criminal culture is not a fashion statement; it is a biographical statement. As one prisoner states in the film, “You don’t have the right to tattoo just anything.”
The cult of prison tattooing can be traced back to the 1920s, when tattoos were used by prisoners to recount their criminal activities, as well as to show contempt for the authorities. Many of these early criminal tattoos remain as part of prison symbolism to this day. Their meanings are self-explanatory:
Skull on a finger: Means that the wearer is a murderer.
Barbed wire across the forehead: Represents a life sentence.
A spider’s web: Indicates that the wearer is a drug addict.
Head of a tomcat: Stands as a good luck sign.
SS runes: Denotes that the wearer is not a stool pigeon (informant).
A dagger running through the neck from shoulder to shoulder: Implies that the wearer is a sex offender and that the tattoo was applied forcibly on the wearer.
Made Men Page 11
