Made Men

by Marcel Danesi

  Of all the terms used by Mafiosi, perhaps the most interesting one is that of picciotto, the term denoting foot soldiers. It means, literally, “little one,” and the suffix -otto gives the word an endearing quality. This name fits in perfectly with the concept of the Mafia as a family, with older leaders at the top and younger ones, picciotti, at the bottom, thus emphasizing the Mafia’s family structure, whereby the younger members are expected to be obedient to, and respectful of, the older, wiser elders.

  The Russian Mafia also has hierarchical structure, which is overseen by the Bratski Krug (“Circle of Brothers”), an elite band of policymakers who impose their will in an informal manner. The basic officers of a typical Mafiya gang consist of a pakhan/krestnii otets (“godfather/boss”) and a group of boyeviky (“soldiers”). Membership is based on ethnicity, blood ties, or criminal record, supported by tattoos (as mentioned earlier). Similarly, the Yakuza names its ranks (as we have also discussed) with distinctive names, including oyabun (“boss,” also “father”), kobun (“members,” also “children”), saiko komon (“senior advisor”), waka gashira (“number two man”), shatei gashira (“number three man”), kimon (“advisor”), kaikei (“accountant”), kumicho hisho (“secretaries”), shatei (“senior bosses”), and wakashu (“junior leaders”).

  Criminal organizations also develop a vocabulary that reverberates with specific connotations. Perhaps the best-known example is the word omertà, which means both “humility” and “honor,” and thus true “manliness.” It constitutes a self-contained lexical “code of behavior,” as Lunde describes it, that reaches “beyond the traditional wall of silence.”[27] It is part fiction, part truth.

  In a fundamental way, every nation and society needs a founding myth, whether it is based on real or fictitious facts. The fiction created by the movies and television not only taps into this, but also takes it in other directions. As Dickie observes, even if the criminals themselves can discern unrealistic elements in this form of fiction, they bask in its artificial light just the same:

  Mafiosi are like everyone else in that they like to watch television and go to the cinema to see a stylized version of their own daily dramas represented onscreen. Tommaso Buscetta was a fan of The Godfather, although he thought the scene at the end where the other Mafiosi kiss Michael Corleone’s hand was unrealistic. The conflicting demands that lie behind the motivation of a fictional character like Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone—ambition, responsibility, family—are indeed the same ones that are central to the lives of real Mafiosi.[28]

  Words allow us to gain control over reality. As Reynolds writes, omertà, “like the Mafia itself, was born not from the machinations of a criminal mastermind but out of the desperate necessity of middle-class Sicilian families seeking control over their own lives,” and thus the legend of the Mafia emerged because its appalling behavior “is actually rooted in good intentions.”[29] The original Mafiosi are traced back, as discussed, to gabellotti, who were tax collectors and managers selected by the Spanish landowners because they were deemed to be “honorable men,” uomini di onore, and “trustworthy men,” uomini di fiducia. These men were often accompanied by so-called campieri (“men of the field”), who bore arms and rode horses to maintain order and command respect for the collectors. From this enclave social system, the Mafia traces its roots, since it is from the gabellotti and the campieri that the first self-appointed capi emerge. When the Spanish departed, a vacuum of authority took shape, and, thus, “only one organization existed to fill that role: the Mafia.”[30]

  Along with omertà, such expressions as pentito, La Mano Nera, and pizzo define the history and character of the Mafia. The pentito (“one who has repented”) is marked for reprisal by the Mob. American equivalents are “stool pigeon” and “rat.” One of the most infamous pentiti was, as mentioned several times in this book, Joseph Valachi, who exposed the workings of the American Mafia in public testimony. Valachi broke the code of silence because he feared that bossman Vito Genovese, with whom he shared a jail cell, was planning to have him murdered, claiming that Genovese had given him the kiss of death. Valachi was pegged with the nickname “Joe Cago,” which means “I shit,” a shortened version of his previous nickname “Joe Cargo,” which he received because he would build makeshift scooters for people as a young man.

  Another well-known high-ranking Mafioso to become a pentito, turning state’s evidence in the mid-1980s, was Tommaso Buscetta, a native of Palermo who was a prominent member of the Porta Nova family. Influenced by a meeting with Giovanni Falcone, his testimony in both Italy and the United States led to numerous convictions and, more importantly, disclosed many of the secrets of Cosa Nostra. Buscetta became a pentito after Totò Riina murdered two of his sons, his brother, his son-in-law, a brother-in-law, and four nephews. Many pentiti followed Buscetta’s example, leading to the so-called Maxi-trials in Palermo in 1986. These had a considerable impact and several important consequences. Lunde explains their accomplishments as follows:

  One of the great achievements of the Maxi-trials was to affirm the rule of law in a democracy. The defendants’ rights and legal processes were scrupulously respected. The other great achievement was the discovery of the existence and structure of Cosa Nostra and the proof that it was highly organized. The testimony of 1,000 witnesses revealed a worldwide network of arms and drugs trafficking.[31]

  But corruption and inertia allowed the Mafia to get away with it, as support was being withdrawn from Falcone’s investigation. This annihilated the brave work done by Falcone and his team, leaving him isolated in his crusade. It is relevant to note that only after the arrest of Riina for the murder of Falcone did a strong anti-Mafia movement surface in Italy. It started in Milan in early 1992, when a small-time politician was arrested for bribery. The movement was appropriately called Operazione Mani Pulite (“Operation Clean Hands”), referring implicitly to the fact that various politicians had their mani sporche (“dirty hands”), meaning they were in on the take. Operation Clean Hands was headed by the magistrate Saverio Borrelli, leading to indictments of prominent politicians and, more importantly, to a reform of the system of proportional representation that had been the source of the corruption in favor of a simple majority system.

  The term Mano Nera, as previously pointed out, has a macabre and grisly ring to it, becoming a metaphor for organized crime in the United States. It first referred to a gang of street hoods who attempted to inflate their importance by using a symbol of terror and secrecy. The Black Handers preyed on newly arrived immigrants at the turn of the twentieth century. With the advent of Prohibition in the 1920s, Black Hand extortion was replaced by bootlegging, leading to the rise and spread of the modern Cosa Nostra. As Lunde writes, “There is no doubt that the Black Hand, popularly believed to be a sinister, worldwide Italian criminal conspiracy, prepared the public’s mind for the idea of the all-embracing power of the Mafia that was to come.”[32] A reporter in the United States, Lindsay Denison, wrote that the emergence of the term in the United States was due to some Italian gangster wishing to evoke terror.[33]

  The term pizzo was introduced into the American Mafia by Don Vito Cascio Ferro, a word deriving from the Sicilian expression fari vagnari u pizzu (“to wet one’s beak”), or, in English slang, “to wet your whistle,” referring to a glass of wine offered in recognition of services rendered. As Nigel Cawthorne and Colin Cawthorne write,

  The principle was simple. Instead of asking for a large amount that risked bankrupting the victim, it was better to ask for smaller amount that the victim could afford, then return later for more money. Don Vito decreed that no one who could afford it was to escape paying the Onorata Società u pizzu for its protection.[34]

  The pizzo represents an estimated 16 percent of Mafia income and is the primary means for guaranteeing an uninterrupted flow of cash for the daily needs of its members. Moreover, the pizzo allows a clan to define, delineate, and affirm its control over a specific mandamento (“district”). The ant
i-Mafia populist reform movement Addiopizzo (“Goodbye to the Pizzo”) is based on the notion that by eliminating the pizzo, organized crime will crumble. “If you don’t collaborate, the Mafia is finished,” is the rallying cry of the movement. But the solution is far from being that simple, because the extent and embeddedness of the pizzo phenomenon is enormous, penetrating deeply into the very cultural fabric of Sicilian society. Top boss Bernardo Provenzano cautioned his minions to be careful in their extortion efforts. Keeping people quiet is a crucial strategy, and this means asking for a little money at any one time: “Pagare poco, ma pagare tutti” (“Modest payments, but payments from everyone”).

  It is significant to note that dialect is used strategically by the Italian criminal gangs. In Italy, dialects have always evoked perceptions of identity of various kinds.[35] Dialect forms are often perceived markers of class structure. In Mafia culture, the use of dialect bears significant historical and cultural meaning. Essentially it says, “Only Sicilian or Calabrian is spoken here, the language of our origins and our ancestors.” The dialects are indexes of identity and group membership, and Mafiosi feel fiercely proud about their speech, using dialectal characteristics as signs of solidarity and personal pride in their heritage. In ordinary conversations among fellow gangsters, it might even be considered to be snobbish or artificial to use standard Italian, which is felt as giving the discourse an artificial quality, thus diminishing its overall ethnic power. As Gianrenzo P. Clivio, Marcel Danesi, and Sara Maida-Nicol put it,

  The identity structure is mirrored in pronunciation and other linguistic features that carry social-tribal meaning and import. It is a type of “coded know-how” to which group members are highly sensitive. Speakers of dialects use the resources of the code to make inferences about the world and themselves, to give it a particular psychological shape, and to literally imbue it with “sense.” Dialect brings people together, allowing them to gain control of the social world which they inhabit and, thus, to evaluate the world around them, on their own terms.[36]

  Each word used in a dialect is a kind of identity sign. As dialectologist Nicola De Blasi has observed, to a Neapolitan, a word like scugnizzo (“a kind of street urchin”) describes an emotionally powerful reality that evokes both laughter and shrewd understanding.[37] The term elicits a specific cultural worldview. Words like picciotto and ’ndrina have the same kinds of effects on gangsters. It is part of the wise guy’s system of understanding. In the United States, the situation calls more for “code-switching” than it does for the exclusive use of dialect, given that most of the mobsters were born into a bilingual and primarily English-

  speaking environment. Code-switching, or switching to the important words of the native dialect during conversation conducted primarily in English, is a means of showing identification with the past and a vehicle for establishing, or at least affirming, group identity. The strategic use of dialect comes out in the 2008 movie Gomorra, about the Camorra, which was subtitled in Standard Italian for non-Neapolitan audiences to be able follow the story. Without the dialect, however, the movie would have not been as effective. It brings out the connection to identity that it entails among criminal groups like the Camorra.

  In the end, made men may speak a different language because they see themselves as different, but they are themselves victims of the language they speak, for it simply limits their thoughts to criminal meanings, and this constitutes a form of thought control. The names and words used to define themselves, along with the symbols and rituals that indoctrinate them into the group, are essentially forms of brainwashing. Users perceive them as meaningful, but, in reality, they are tools of persuasion that keep members in a cult-like trance when they hear the words, much like the stimuli used to train animals and condition them accordingly. They destroy a person’s basic convictions and attitudes and replace them with an alternative set of fixed beliefs.

  1. Frank Costello, “Why Do They Think I Am Superman?” Time, November 28, 1949, 16.

  2. John Follain, The Last Godfathers: Inside the Mafia’s Most Infamous Family (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2009), 22.

  3. Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe, Angels, Mobsters, and Narco-

  Terrorists: The Rising Menace of Global Criminal Empires (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005), 140.

  4. Florence King, Reflections in a Jaundiced Eye (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 27.

  5. Pasquale Natella, La parola Mafia (Firenze: Olschki, 2002).

  6. Paul Lunde, Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World’s Most Successful Industry (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2004), 54.

  7. Cited in Lunde, Organized Crime, 55.

  8. Nicaso and Lamothe, Angels, Mobsters, and Narco-Terrorists, 34.

  9. Nicaso and Lamothe, Angels, Mobsters, and Narco-Terrorists, 35.

  10. John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 271.

  11. John Lawrence Reynolds, Shadow People: Inside History’s Most Notorious Secret Societies (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2006), 182.

  12. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, 271.

  13. Nicaso and Lamothe, Angels, Mobsters, and Narco-Terrorists, 63.

  14. Reynolds, Shadow People, 183.

  15. Reynolds, Shadow People, 183.

  16. Reynolds, Shadow People, 181.

  17. Reynolds, Shadow People, 181.

  18. Reynolds, Shadow People, 182.

  19. Reynolds, Shadow People, 166.

  20. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, 434.

  21. Lunde, Organized Crime, 168.

  22. Cited in Lunde, Organized Crime, 86.

  23. Cited in Lunde, Organized Crime, 96.

  24. “Supplement to the British Colonist: The Markham Gang,” British Colonist, July 9, 1846, 12.

  25. “Supplement to the British Colonist,” 12.

  26. Cited in Nicaso and Lamothe, Angels, Mobsters, and Narco-Terrorists, 70.

  27. Lunde, Organized Crime, 57.

  28. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, 9.

  29. Reynolds, Shadow People, 173.

  30. Reynolds, Shadow People, 178.

  31. Lunde, Organized Crime, 69.

  32. Lunde, Organized Crime, 124.

  33. Cited in Nigel Cawthorne and Colin Cawthorne, The Mafia: First-Hand Accounts of Life Inside the Mob (London: Constable & Robinson, 2009), 69.

  34. Cawthorne and Cawthorne, The Mafia, 63–64.

  35. Gianrenzo P. Clivio, Marcel Danesi, and Sara Maida-Nicol, Introduction to Italian Dialectology (Munich, Germany: Lincom Europa, 2011).

  36. Clivio, Danesi, and Maida-Nicol, Introduction to Italian Dialectology, 123.

  37. Nicola De Blasi, “Conferme gergali per scugnizzo,” in De vulgari eloquentia: Lingua e dialetti nella cultura italiana, ed. Rachele Longo Lavorato, 103–14 (New York: Legas, 2009).

  Chapter 6

  Myth

  Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.

  —Italo Calvino (1923–1985)

  The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer characterizes human beings as “symbolic animals.”[1] The initial symbols of a culture are connected to its founding myths, that is, to the stories that people tell about themselves—how they originated, why they exist, and so on. These allow humans to share group experiences in spiritual and thus meaningful ways. All cultures have them. So, too, do criminal societies. Without them, their symbols and rituals would make little sense, since they would not be able to link themselves to historical events and thus claim authenticity.

  The movies have also joined in by embellishing and fictionalizing Mafia history. In The Godfather, Part II, the origins of the Mafia are traced back to Sicily, and the organization is portrayed as a timeless and mythical society. Michael Corleone’s wife, Kay, makes reference to the Mob as a “Sicilian thing that’s been going on for 2,000 years,” and whose origin is shrouded in mystery. Similarly, the film The Yakuza
opens with a blurb explaining that the Yakuza have been around for more than 350 years. Criminal organizations that have emerged in modern times, like the Russian Mafiya, and in specific situations (for example, in a prison or on the streets of an urban center), will invent convenient legends for themselves, which can be called simply “street myths.” One such myth is presented in Eastern Promises, as we have seen. It does not come from a claim to a mythic past, but inheres simply in the need to reject one’s previous life through a ceremony of rejection.

  Foundation Myths

  Foundation myths are stories that are told in early cultures to explain how the world, people, and significant events came into existence. They revolve around divine personages, legendary heroes, or supernatural events. Later societies also have hero myths that attribute exceptional qualities to real historical figures. Robin Hood was a mythic hero who stole from the rich to give to the poor; William Tell was a crossbow hero who resisted tyranny; Davy Crockett was a frontiersman and congressman who died bravely in the battle of the Alamo in 1836. Britain, Switzerland, and the United States have made these heroes, and their stories, part of the foundational fabric of their nationhood.

  Criminal societies like to tell stories that trace their origins mythically, imparting a sense of validity and legitimacy to themselves. As George Orwell so aptly puts it, “Myths [that] are believed in tend to become real.”[2] But, as we have discussed, this is fiction that, like any good fictional story, is partly based on truth, partly on fantasy and on rationalization. The reality is different. It is guns and death, money and power. More often than not, the results are tragic, not only for the hapless victims, but for the criminals themselves. The Godfather, Part III ends with an attempt on Michael Corleone’s life, but a bullet misses him and tragically kills his daughter, an innocent bystander. An episode of the series The Sopranos unfolds in slow motion, as Tony’s biological family is having dinner. This makes us feel that every person who enters the restaurant thus becomes a potential assassin, coming to kill Tony and his family.