Made Men

by Marcel Danesi

  He was protected by professionals, politicians, businessmen, law enforcers. We found all of them in our investigations. Provenzano was under the protective umbrella of his criminal colleagues and, more importantly, by entire sectors of society. It was not a single politician who served as his protector all those years. It was the political system.[37]

  It will take a different kind of approach to eradicate the Mafia. It is relevant to note that in 2010, the FBI uncovered an alleged scheme involving the removal of debris at Ground Zero in New York that was directed by several members of the Colombo crime family of New York. An indictment alleged that a Mob-controlled trucking company paid kickbacks to secure a subcontract with a demolition company working at Ground Zero.[38]

  The Mafia’s infiltration into the world of politics has been well documented. But its goal is not to replace the state. Rather, it seeks to manipulate the political system for its own profit. Sicilian politicians cultivated criminals early on in Mafia history to deliver the vote at election time; the Mafia was thus able to gain access to the island’s political system. For many years after World War II, its most significant relationship was with the Christian Democrat Party, a fact brought out by the movie Il Divo (2008), which deals with longtime Christian Democrat leader Giulio Andreotti’s links with the Mafia. With the party’s demise as a political force in Italy, the bosses turned to a new party, Forza Italia, a party that also walked a fine line in its relationship with shady characters. One of the founders of Forza Italia was convicted for collusion with the Mafia.

  Organization

  Like the military or large corporations, the Mafia has been able to endure in large part because it has adopted a model of hierarchical organization. This includes a capofamiglia, or just capo (“boss of a family”); a sottocapo (“underboss”); a consigliere (“counselor”); a capodecina (one of a number of lieutenants responsible for ten or more men); and foot soldiers called picciotti (“little ones”), who are low-ranking enforcers. The capo’s presence and word, like that of a CEO, are enough to bring about a business arrangement on terms favorable to him. In the 1990s, a huge shopping center was planned in a town called Villabate. The local Mafia became involved in the project with a developer from northern Italy, acquiring the land and removing bureaucratic obstacles by pulling all the right strings. The capo overlooked the whole project, just like a normal CEO would. He controlled 20 percent of the hired employees and 30 percent of the office space. But unlike real CEOs, the boss was a gangster, receiving large kickbacks for eliminating the convoluted red tape that surrounds such projects in Italy. Things seemed to go according to plan, until the authorities stepped in, arresting the principal players in the corrupt scheme. The shopping center was never finished. The case showed conspicuously how paralyzing to social growth and development the Mafia’s continued presence and power is.

  The capo rules as the family head and makes all final decisions. In holding the top position, the boss gets a “cut” of all family income garnered by the lower-ranking members. The sottocapo is appointed by the boss. He is the second in command. His main duty is to pass along information, when necessary, and manage the everyday affairs of the family. The sottocapo will take over as “acting boss” if the capo is jailed or murdered. He is also a major voice in decision-making. The consigliere is the next one down the ladder. He is a mediator of disputes or of business between his family and other Mafia families. He also carries out bribery activities, for example, political payoffs. He is a trusted family member who holds a fair degree of power but is not involved in the conduct of street-level operations. At the bottom are the soldiers, or picciotti, who carry out the threats, brutality, and violence that get the job done. To become a soldier in the traditional Mafia, the member is expected to be of Sicilian background. As we have already seen, the American Cosa Nostra changed all this. But in all criminal organizations, the new member is accepted in the family only via an initiation ceremony, which includes a binding oath of loyalty that, if broken, will be punished by death.

  Like any corporation, every Mafia family has “associates” with whom business is carried out, even though they are not members of the specific clan. Associates are lawyers or public officials who are hired as go-betweens between the family and mainstream society, allowing the crime family to gain access to legitimate sectors of society. But the basis of operations of the Mafia has not changed throughout the years. It was always protection through extortion, which, as Lunde astutely observes, has provided the “plots for many gangster movies.”[39] Mafiosi are generally prohibited by their own code of honor to commit vulgar theft and robberies. They abhor those who do. The pizzo is perceived by them to be much like a legal tax system, not a form of extortion. They see the state as a criminal organization, competing with it for a stake in the control of the money flow and reflecting the popular view expressed by the great theologian St. Augustine of Hippo it in the fourth century, “For what are states but large bandit bands, and what are bandit bands but small states?”[40] Taxation ensures that people are protected; by extension, so does the pizzo. Indeed, if a target is robbed by thugs, the Mafiosi will actually go after them and make them pay for their vulgarity. As the first capo di tutti i capi (“the boss of all bosses”), Vito Cascio Ferro (1862–1943), known as Don Vito, put it, “Don’t ruin people with absurd demands for money. Offer your protection instead. Help them prosper in business and they’ll not only be happy to pay the pizzu, but they’ll kiss your hand in gratitude.”[41]

  Not all criminal organizations have the same type of hierarchical structure. In the ’Ndrangheta, the basic family clan is called the ’ndrina, which is made up of blood relatives. Several ’ndrine form a locale (a large clan), which has jurisdiction over an entire town or area within a large urban center. The head of the family is called capobastone (literally “the head pole or staff”), who has command over the entire clan. Like corporate managers, capobastoni meet once a year in a sanctuary dedicated to the Madonna outside the village of San Luca, a small town near Locri. As John Lawrence Reynolds aptly points out, unlike the pyramid structure of the Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta has its basis completely in bloodlines:

  The combination of tight structure and family blood provides the ’Ndrangheta with an enormous ability to maintain both secrecy and loyalty, consolidated through carefully arranged marriages between ’ndrinas. Nothing in Sicilian or Calabrian culture is more sacrosanct than family, and where linkages exist through marriage it would be an act of serious dishonor for one family to perform any act that would threaten the security of a related family.[42]

  Major non-Italian criminal syndicates also thrive because of structure, including the Russian Mafia (or Mafiya), the Japanese Yakuza, the Chinese Triads, and many others. This includes not only the assignment of specific roles to members, but also the adoption of customs and symbols that allow members to determine loyalty and adherence to the group in terms of a code. These are the basic elements that constitute a criminal culture. We discuss these throughout this book.

  Differences among the organizations are felt as necessary to keep their identities distinct. The Camorra and the Mafia, for instance, operate differently for this reason. The Camorra either shuns or discourages the same sense of kinship bonds. Family ties are important, but they are not essential. Virtually anyone can join the Camorra and rise to the top. All he has to do is prove his mettle through brutal street violence. This makes the Camorra an ideal recruitment group for dispossessed youth aiming to make a lot of money quickly or put forth a kind of “intimidating persona” on the streets of Naples. The Camorra also does not require an initiation ceremony, as do the Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, and other criminal organizations.[43] Nevertheless, the organization does require killing someone to prove one’s mettle and allegiance, which is, clearly, an initiation ritual.

  In recent times, the Mafia and other criminal organizations have had to adapt to changes in society, like every other type of business. Increasing pressure and prosecu
tion by the FBI, and in Italy by crusading anti-Mafia magistrates, have led to a rash of convictions. This has brought about the creation of new positions in the organizational structure, including the “family messenger” and the “street boss.” The former passes on orders from the leadership to middle management in a low-key way, to avoid detection; the latter temporarily takes over the family if the boss is unavailable to the family and a new boss has not been appointed. The Mafia survives, not only because it stakes a claim to historical validity, but also because it knows how to adapt to change.[44] It continues to have large appeal as a kind of folk devil who is nonconformist, “repudiating the virtues of the world,” as French playwright Jean Genet eloquently describes the power of the outlaw in modern societies, a heroic folk figure who “agrees to organize a forbidden universe.”[45] Mafia culture epitomizes this “forbidden universe,” which philosopher Michel Foucault calls a universe based on a “lyricism of marginality” and inhabited by “the great social nomad, who prowls on the confines of a docile, frightened order.”[46]

  1. Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Partisan Review 15 (1948): 243.

  2. The global rise of criminal organizations and their adaptive capacities is documented, for example, in Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe, Mafia Global: The New World Order of Organized Crime (Toronto: Macmillan, 1995); Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe, Bloodlines: The Rise and Fall of the Mafia’s Royal Family (New York: HarperCollins, 2001); Antonio Nicaso, Rocco Perri: The Story of Canada’s Most Notorious Bootlegger (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2005); and Antonio Nicaso and Lee Lamothe, Angels, Mobsters, and Narco-

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

  3. See also the opinions of Pasquale Natella, La parola Mafia (Firenze: Olschki, 2002) and Juan R. I. Cole and Moojan Momen, “Mafia, Mob, and Shiism in Iraq: The Rebellion of Ottoman Karbala, 1824–1843,” Past and Present 112 (1986): 112–43.

  4. John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2004), 1.

  5. Natella, La parola Mafia.

  6. Cited in Paul Lunde, Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World’s Most Successful Industry (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2004), 55.

  7. Diego Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia: The Business of Private Protection (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 139. For a complementary analysis of the origins and spread of the Mafia, see Raimondo Catanzaro, Men of Respect: A Social History of the Sicilian Mafia (New York: Free Press, 1992).

  8. Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia, 140.

  9. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, 55.

  10. Lunde, Organized Crime, 55.

  11. Antonino Cutrera, La mafia e i mafiosi (Reber: Palermo, 1900), 2.

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

  13. See Nicaso and Lemothe, Bloodlines.

  14. Lunde, Organized Crime, 55.

  15. Mark Twain, Following the Equator (1897; Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996), 291.

  16. H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (New York: C. Scribner’s Sons, 1904), 236.

  17. Henry Miller, The Cosmological Eye (New York: New Directions, 1939), 12.

  18. Lunde, Organized Crime, 76.

  19. Lunde, Organized Crime, 57.

  20. For a schematic account of the role of the Mafia in the Sicilian independence movement in the post-Fascist period, see Alan Cassels’s review of Monte S. Finkelstein’s “Separatism, the Allies, and the Mafia: The Struggle for Sicilian Independence, 1943–1948,” American Historical Review 104 (1999): 1,789–90.

  21. Lunde, Organized Crime, 130.

  22. A good account of the social influence of the Mafia in Chicago can be found in Humbert S. Nelli, Italians and Crime in Chicago: The Formative Years, 1890–1920 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969).

  23. An in-depth treatment of the Mafia’s role in the foundation of Las Vegas and the consequent “guilt-by-association” syndrome that resulted with regard to all Italian Americans is the one by Alan Balboni, Beyond the Mafia: Italian Americans and the Development of Las Vegas (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2006).

  24. Lunde, Organized Crime, 44.

  25. Al Capone, interview, c. 1930, with Claud Cockburn, published in Cockburn Sums Up: An Autobiography (New York: Quartet Books, 1981), 225.

  26. Robert T. Anderson, “From Mafia to Cosa Nostra,” American Journal of Sociology 71 (1965): 302–10.

  27. See also Michele Pantaleone, Il sasso in bocca: Mafia e Cosa Nostra (Bologna: Cappelli, 1970).

  28. Press release from U.S. Attorney’s Office, Southern District of New York, September 17, 2008.

  29. Jonathan Kwitny, “Vicious Circles: The Mafia in the Marketplace,” Michigan Law Review 79 (1981): 925, 928.

  30. See Federico Varese, The Russian Mafia: Private Protection in a New Market Economy (Oxford, UK: Blackwell: 2004). For a more generic analysis of the role of the Russian Mob on American culture, see James O. Finckenauer and Elin J. Waring, Russian Mafia in American Immigration, Culture, and Crime (Boston: Northeastern Press, 2000).

  31. Lunde, Organized Crime, 11.

  32. Jack E. Reece, “Fascism, the Mafia, and the Emergence of Sicilian Separatism, 1919–1943,” Journal of Modern History 45 (1973): 261–76.

  33. Dwight C. Smith Jr., “Mafia: The Prototypical Alien Conspiracy,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 423 (1976): 75–88.

  34. Humbert S. Nelli, The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976).

  35. Overall treatments of the extent to which the Mafia has been a corrupting force in the United States are the books by George C. S. Benson, Political Corruption in America (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1978) and Bill Freeman and Marsha Hewitt, Their Town: The Mafia, the Media, and the Party Machine (Toronto: James Lorimer, 1979).

  36. Shana Alexander, The Pizza Connection: Lawyers, Drugs, and the Mafia (London: W. H. Allen, 1969).

  37. Mike La Sorte, “Cosa Nostra Power in Sicily,” accessed November 12, 2011, www.americanMafia.com/Feature_Articles_445.html (October 2009).

  38. “Feds Allege Mafia Scheme Involving World Trade Center Ground Zero Site,” accessed November 5, 2011, www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-blog

  gers/2467532/posts (May 2010).

  39. Lunde, Organized Crime, 38.

  40. Cited in Lunde, Organized Crime, 17.

  41. Cited in Lunde, Organized Crime, 56.

  42. John Lawrence Reynolds, Shadow People: Inside History’s Most Notorious Secret Societies (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2006), 181.

  43. Tom Behan, See Naples and Die: The Camorra and Organized Crime (London: I. B. Tauris, 2002).

  44. See Raimondo Catanzaro, “Enforcers, Entrepreneurs, and Survivors: How the Mafia Has Adapted to Change,” British Journal of Sociology 36 (1985): 34–57.

  45. Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal (London: Blond, 1965), 29.

  46. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1975), 129.

  Chapter 2

  Honor

  Since an intelligence common to us all makes things known to us and formulates them in our minds, honorable actions are ascribed by us to virtue, and dishonorable actions to vice; and only a madman would conclude that these judgments are matters of opinion, and not fixed by nature.

  —Cicero (106–43 BCE)

  They say that there is no honor among thieves, but it is precisely a self-serving notion of honor on which Mafia culture is based. As the Mafia historian John Dickie observes, a large part of the ability of the Mafia to endure is the myth of its origins in a chivalric code—a code of omertà based on a concept of honor and retribution for injustices.[1] This is the subject of Pietro Mascagni’s marvelous 1890 opera Cavalleria rusticana (“Rustic Chivalry”), which deals with the rustic ethos of Sicilian culture. Based on a play by the Italian Roma
ntic writer Giovanni Verga, it focuses on the violent behavior that arises when people are under great emotional strain seeking to make sense of their lives. In such situations, for guidance, people rely on a set of principles that espouse honor, respect, and fidelity. Mascagni was not Sicilian. He was Tuscan. As an outsider, he was likely captivated by the emotional power of the Sicilian code of honor that he saw imprinted in the facial expressions of common people and deeply entrenched in their daily culture.

  It is no coincidence that the opera’s famous intermezzo was used by director Martin Scorsese in the slow-motion title of Raging Bull (1980), a movie about pride and honor, Italian style. Coppola also used various excerpts from the opera for his The Godfather, Part III. In the film’s climax, a Mafioso is seen stalking his victim in the Teatro Massimo in Palermo, where Mascagni’s opera is being performed on stage. Again, it seems that life and art mirror one another, influencing one another constantly.

  Bonds of family and friendship are strong in Sicily, especially given the hundreds of years of invasion and foreign rule that have constantly undermined the Sicilians’ trust in officials and authorities. Family can be trusted; others cannot. That deeply rooted belief is what makes the Mafia code of omertà so emotionally powerful, for both the Mafiosi and their victims. The code puts forth its own system of justice, warning members not to dishonor themselves by cooperating with the government and outsiders. Any injustice against a clan member is to be taken care of within and by the clan. Sicily’s tradition of private justice is what gives omertà a powerful psychological grounding. As the French social philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville aptly observes, “It is the dissimilarities and inequalities among men [that] give rise to the notion of honor; as such differences become less, it grows feeble; and when they disappear, it will vanish too.”[2] The code of honor implicit in the Cavalleria rusticana, not to mention many Hollywood gangster films, is now part of an unconscious mythic tale spun about the Mafia. The Mafia defines itself in terms of this code of rustic chivalry, tapping into the very ethos of Sicilians. “Today,” writes Dickie, “it is impossible to tell the story of the mafia without reckoning with the power of that same myth.”[3]