Made Men

by Marcel Danesi

  Crime in Sicily was primarily a product of its feudal system. The absentee noblemen needed strong men with local power and influence, who also did not have much respect for the law, to manage their estates. Thugs were hired as the noblemen’s personal guardiani (“guardians”). Law officials were negligent and lenient and court proceedings lax and byzantine. Many judges bought their posts; clerks were paid little or nothing. Having no faith in the authorities, people looked to other means of protection. Banditry established itself early on as a protection business. By the nineteenth century, it started spreading to many areas of Sicilian society. During the rebellion of 1848 against Sicily’s Bourbon rulers, the bandits once again opportunistically joined the uprising, allying themselves to the Italian patriot Giuseppe Garibaldi when he arrived to initiate the unification of Italy in 1860. As a consequence, the Mafia gained legitimacy and power, as the first campaigns against it after unification tried to establish the Piedmontese government as the sole authority over the countryside. But, as in the past, the authorities fell prey to corruption. The fighters for unity had seen the organization as an ally, but those they put in power were as corrupt as the ones they replaced. As Paul Lunde notes, it was the “traditional Sicilian suspicion of state institutions that created the conditions in which the Mafia could develop.”[3] Nothing has changed since then.

  It was from the culture of the gabellotti (the mediators between landowners and peasants) that the Mafia most likely arose. During the Battle of Calatafimi in 1860, the gabellotti joined forces with Garibaldi’s troops to form squadrons. The squadrons were called squadre della mafia, after unification, having become vigilante police forces fighting random bandit gangs that surfaced after unification. As such, they eliminated both the bands and became a silent partner in Sicilian politics, as Lunde explains in the following:

  The Sicilian Mafia, now organized, offered to police the island and save the government the embarrassment of sending in troops. The government agreed, and some of the more prominent non-Mafia affiliated bandits were arrested or killed. Once again, the Mafia had positioned itself between two opposing groups and profited from the relationship with both.[4]

  To entrench its legitimacy in the new Sicily, the Mafia developed its code of omertà, tapping into the deep-rooted Sicilian belief in a potere occulto (“hidden power”) that would challenge visible authority. In a society that was becoming more and more middle class, and thus bourgeois in its value system, the claim to chivalry and values stood out conspicuously and effectively. As the world began to change in the process of urbanization, and traditional values started to disintegrate, the Mafia, and other criminal organizations, sprung up like oases in a valueless barren social desert. No matter what their ultimate aim, one could at the very least empathize with them on a moral level. In this case, the means were seen to justify the ends. Myths about Mafia origins show this perfectly.

  Two medieval codices, Breve Cronaca di un anonimo cassinese (1185) and Cronaca di Fossa Nova (1186), talk of an organization of Vendicosi (“revenge seekers”) who were hanged or punished severely by the King of Sicily for various crimes they were said to have committed. In 1784, Federico Münter, a writer, while visiting Sicily, came to know about a secret confraternity of Saint Paul, founded in the sixteenth century, during the reign of Charles V, that was purported to protect orphans and the oppressed. From this legend, the myth of the Beati Paoli emerged, which, according to some versions, were the predecessors of the modern Mafia, thus connecting the Mafia to the fight against oppression. Even a novel, published in 1909 and 1910 as a serial in a daily newspaper of Palermo, picks up on this legend and enshrines it even deeper into popular lore. Written by Luigi Natoli, the novel became a reference point for justifying the mythic origins of the Mafia. In the work, the nobleman protagonist Coriolano della Floresta creates an alternative justice system to which those have been oppressed and who distrust the authorities can resort.[5]

  The ’Ndrangheta traces its origin to ancient Greek heroism and virtue, adopting the Greek word andragathos, which had this meaning (a man of great courage). The ’Ndrangheta grew out of a nineteenth-century secret society in Calabria that resembled the current criminal society. Whether or not this is sustainable historically, the truth is that, like the Sicilian Mafia, the first evidence of a criminal ’Ndrangheta surfaces during Italian unification. Italian unity was not perceived to be beneficial to southern Italians. Poverty persisted, and heavy taxation became a veritable burden. Calabrians felt an endemic desire to defy the authorities, even if it meant engagement in criminal activities. The ’Ndrangheta legend was that it first came forward to prey on the rich, making them popular with the common citizenry. The exploits of the band were lauded in song and poetry. But the ’Ndrangheta soon made an about-face and turned against the very populace it claimed to protect.

  In sum, criminal gangs justify their existence by looking to the past. This is why they speak of chivalrous brotherhoods (Mafias), as Lunde points out, “of tacit state support (political protection), the sale of plundered cargoes to legitimate businessmen (money laundering), and corruption of public officials (bribery).”[6] In the case of the three traditional criminal groups of southern Italy, an unsubstantiated foundation myth is weaved to unite the three. As mentioned in the opening chapter, all three trace their origins to a common source—the Garduña, a group that emerged in the prisons in Spain that evolved into a secret criminal society whose main activity was murder-for-hire. A Calabrian legend, also as previously described, tells of three Garduña brothers who left Spain after having murdered a nobleman for raping their sister. During one of their forays, they were shipwrecked on the island of Favignana, with one making his way to Naples, founding the Camorra; another to Calabria, founding the ’Ndrangheta; and the third to Sicily, founding the Mafia. The story is an allegory, connecting the criminal gangs to pirate culture in the era of the Spanish Empire. There is some documentary evidence connecting the Camorra with Garduña rituals, but it is slight and speculative. History shows that the ’Ndrangheta, like the Mafia, emerged when the interests of the organization coincided with the interests of landowners, politicians, and other authorities to control voting in an effort to maintain the status quo.

  The Camorra, too, sprang up in the 1860s in Naples as a strain of the same breed of gangsters as the Mafia and the ’Ndrangheta, surfacing among prisoners who, after being released from jail, took their skills of intimidation and gangsterism they had acquired in prison to the streets. This is a far cry from the myth of the Garduña or cavalleria rusticana that the gangsters prefer to spin about themselves. The Camorra developed into an even more vicious organization.

  The roots of the Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, and the Camorra may indeed coincide chronologically with the recounted events, since these gangs saw the opportunity to gain the trust of common people, as protectors of the weak and helpless. They themselves actually spun the first myths, as John Lawrence Reynolds observes, writing the following:

  Like Sherwood Forest outlaws, the Sicilian bandits created their own folk heroes, lauding their bravery and exploits as examples of gallantry. The most celebrated of them, a man named Saponara, was captured and imprisoned in 1578. According to Sicilian lore, Saponara was tortured by his Spanish captors in an effort to learn the names of his cohorts, but Saponara chose to die in agony rather than betray others. His bravery became a symbol for every Sicilian who believed their salvation could be achieved only through loyalty.[7]

  The reality is vastly different than the myths. The Mafia, Camorra, and ’Ndrangheta are predatory organizations locked in bloody combat with the state, assassinating its legal persecutors, for instance, the magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. The stories of chivalric and noble origins are meaningless in the light of the activities of the contemporary gangs. They may continue to believe them and spin them for recruitment purposes, but no one in mainstream society really believes them any longer. They have truly become myths in the sense of half-trut
hs that are used opportunistically as part of a criminal ideological system. As the late French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss writes, myths are unconscious reflexes that we need to rationalize our existence: “Myths operate in men’s minds without their being aware of the fact.”[8]

  One of the forms that criminals have used to perpetrate their origin mythologies is music. The ’Ndrangheta, for example, adopted the so-called Canti di Malavita, Calabrian folk songs that extol the myth of the good outlaw, to suit their own purposes, suggesting that they were “good outlaws” intending to help the oppressed and the weak. Similar utilizations are the Neapolitan guappe songs, the Mexican narcocorridos, and the Russian Blatnyak (which is derived from the criminal slang word blatnoy, meaning “criminals”).

  Powerful criminal organizations seem to think alike. The Yakuza also spin a convenient foundation myth of their origin, with the help of popular writers—a myth that stresses the continuity to noble warriors of the past. Like the Mafia, they imagine and portray themselves as underdog fighters carrying on the traditions of machi-yakko (“chivalrous outlaws”), obeying and guided by an ancient Samurai code of loyalty,

  honor, courage, and selflessness. But the machi-yakko are hardly modern-day Robin Hoods. They take advantage of human weakness to recruit members for their self-serving monetary causes, including social failures and petty criminals, providing them with the discipline of a hierarchical gang—a discipline that these misfits clearly desire.

  The Yakuza began life 350 years ago as shady merchants at traveling fairs. They claim to have banded together to protect the poor of the towns and countryside from bands of marauding noblemen. To differentiate themselves from the latter, they adopted and abided by a code of honor. As we saw previously, this claim to ancient chivalry and the need to maintain ethnic purity among the membership came out in the movie Kill Bill during a meeting to place O-Ren, a woman and

  “Chinese-Japanese half-breed,” as head of the families. Objection to this plan was voiced emphatically by one of the elders present, who stated that the Yakuza comes from a lineage of Japanese “fathers of the fathers, of the fathers, of the fathers of the men sitting here.” The connection to the past is also symbolized by the use of samurai swords as the weapons of choice in both Kill Bill and Yakuza. Like the Mafia or ’Ndrangheta, the Yakuza sees and portrays itself as more than a bunch of hoodlums, but rather an honorable, chivalric society that carries on the secret traditions of ancient Japan. The movies seem to be onboard in this confabulation process.

  While it is true that townsmen formed gangs to protect ordinary people in the past, becoming legendary folk heroes, there is no evidence that the modern Yakuza are direct descendants of these “chivalrous commoners.” Nonetheless, it is crucial for the Yakuza to maintain this romantic and largely imaginary link to these heroes. Because of this, the Yakuza have been able to put themselves into a distinctive category, separate from that of common thugs. Lunde elaborates as follows:

  Much of the Yakuza’s behavior is overlooked, because they are perceived as the living link with a nobler world order. While the public is beguiled by tattoos, tales of prowess in the martial arts, and a belief in Robin Hood-type acts, the Yakuza, armed with laptops and cell phones, is asset stripping or manipulating shares in a completely modern idiom. More authentically, the Yakuza developed from the medieval guilds of gamblers (bakuto) and street peddlers (tekiya). Police still use these two divisions to describe the Yakuza, although the gangs have since branched out into numerous activities. Many of their traditions, customs, and folklore derive from this background.[9]

  The samurai myth is a favorite theme or subtext in many movies in Japan, thus helping the Yakuza to curry favor with the general public, much like the Godfather films helped bolster the image of the Mafia in America and Italy. Yakuza movies have been popular since the early postwar period. They are typically sentimental, with the gangsters living and dying with values seemingly lost in modern Japan. Like The Godfather movies, they fill a void in moral space that the postmodern world negates in many ways. Early postwar movies are known as ninkyo eiga (“chivalrous movies”). They continue to have great appeal with their formulaic scripts, pitting westernized, corrupt Japanese businessmen and politicians against noble Yakuza warriors. The Yakuza are portrayed as sacrificing themselves, even giving up their romantic lives, out of giri, or loyalty to the clan. Even student radicals carried posters of Yakuza actors during their protests in the 1960s. Exceptions to this romantic formula, however, started to occur in the 1970s, when movies portrayed the Yakuza more realistically as misguided gangsters, pretentiously claiming rights to a samurai past when, in reality, they were assassins who devoured themselves in macabre rituals, having long ago discarded any pretense of living according to real chivalry. Recent movies also paint a more realistic, and stark, portrait of the Yakuza as a cult-like organization that attracts young people because of the powerful symbols it uses.

  The Triads also recount their origins in terms of historical legends. China has a long history of secret organizations or clans. During the T’ang dynasty (619–907), Buddhism was prohibited and thus forced underground. The White Lotus sect of monks was apparently founded during this time to fight for justice and the right to exist. It reappeared much later in a new guise, becoming involved in extortion and kidnapping, as it overthrew the foreign Mongols who had conquered China, installing a Buddhist Monk, named Hung Wu, as the emperor in 1368.

  Modern-day Triads link themselves to the White Lotus movements, claiming to be descendants of the warrior monks. They also espouse another foundation legend that relates to the barbarian threat of the seventeenth century. The emperor at the time offered a reward to anyone who was willing to stand up to the invaders. It was a group of 128 monks from the Shao Lin monastery, all of them martial arts masters, who volunteered their services, driving the enemy away. Shortly afterward, the emperor grew fearful of the power of the monks, having them burned at the stake. Eighteen of the monks escaped, with five ultimately reaching safety. These are known as the “Five Ancestors,” as previously mentioned. The monks founded a secret society in the mystical City of Willows, vowing to avenge the death of their fellow monks.

  Until the end of the nineteenth century, the Triads essentially continued to be an honorable society based on monastic origins, but all this changed in 1900, when the Boxer Rebellion transformed the society into a criminal organization. The Boxer Rebellion was a bloody uprising in northern China in 1900 in which hundreds were killed. The rebellion was the climax of a movement starting in the late nineteenth century against the rise of Western and Japanese influence in China. It was started by a secret Chinese society called Yihequan (“Righteous and Harmonious Fists”), which was originally connected with the Triads. They were nicknamed Boxers by Westerners because they showed expertise in pugilism, gymnastics, and calisthenics. The Boxers set out to destroy everything they considered foreign, slaughtering anyone who supported Western ideas. Foreign diplomats in Beijing sent out calls for help, but the Manchu government declared war against the foreign invaders. Allied with the Boxers, government troops took over the official residences of foreign diplomats. Foreign guards and various Chinese civilians resisted courageously, until a rescue force from eight nations crushed the uprising. It was clear to the Triads that it would be likely impossible to throw out the foreigners. At that point, Reynolds writes, the Triads turned inward:

  If they could not win against foreign abuse, they would win by exploiting their own people, growing in strength and dissociating themselves from any non-Chinese influence or threat, although they retained interest in, and influence on, political issues for some time. Their most significant move was to provide support for Dr. Sun Yat-sen’s overthrow of the Manchu Ch’ing dynasty, replacing the emperor with a republican system of government. Sun may have actively recruited the Triads to ensure his revolution’s success, an obvious move if he had been, as many observers suggest, an enforcer in the Triad Green Gang/Three Harmo
nies Society (San Ho-Hui) during his youth.[10]

  In a form of twisted irony, the more the Triads moved away from their chivalric roots, the more they refined their secret rituals and symbols, expanding them considerably. This may be one of the causes of their continual attrition, increasingly giving way to more violent and more random street gangs. Connection to a chivalric or heroic past in the case of the Triads is likely to be a truism; in the case of the Yakuza, it is part fact and part fiction. They are nevertheless both pseudo-foundation myths. While there is some evidence to support parts of these myths, there is no evidence to support them in the way they are recounted by the gangs themselves. It is obvious that for most traditional criminal organizations, the identification with chivalric folk heroes and warriors is perceived as crucial for uniting the membership and creating a code of honor that separates them from common street gangs.

  An American Myth: Cosa Nostra

  Among such organizations, Cosa Nostra emerges as an exception. The main reason for this is that the American Mafia has simply transported the rituals of its parent Italian groups and planted them into a new social terrain. Like any ethnic American group, it has also shed ethnic and blood requirements. Simply put, in a melting-pot society, the Mafia has had to adapt. As Reynolds remarks, Cosa Nostra “easily overlooked any prerequisite for Italian heritage among its partners, welcoming Jewish and Irish criminals on an associate basis.”[11] Existing in a place where immigrants of different cultures or races formed an integrated society, it became apparent that it was to the Mob’s advantage to open its doors to all kinds of members, although the higher ranks were to be populated largely by Sicilians, Calabrians, or Neapolitans. The meaning of the term itself tells all there is to tell about its origins. Lunde elucidates as follows: