3. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, xiv.
4. Aldous Huxley, Beyond the Mexique Bay (London: Paladin, 1934), 12.
5. Cited in Nicola Gratteri and Antonio Nicaso, Dire e non dire (Milano: Mondadori, 2012), 36.
6. Paul Lunde, Organized Crime: An Inside Guide to the World’s Most Successful Industry (London: Dorling Kindersley, 2004).
7. In Nicola Gratteri and Antonio Nicaso, La mafia fa schifo (Milano: Mondadori, 2011), 7.
8. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, 13.
9. Letizia Paoli, Mafia Brotherhoods: Organized Crime, Italian Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).
10. Jean de La Bruyère, Characters (1688; New York: Scribner & Welford, 1885), 13.
11. Good treatments of the relation between symbolism and gangs are the ones by Jack B. Moore, Skinheads Shaved for Battle: A Cultural History of American Skinheads (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993) and Daniel J. Monti, Wannabe Gangs in Suburbs and Schools (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994).
12. Marcel Danesi, My Son Is an Alien: A Portrait of Contemporary Youth (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2004), 57.
13. Works on gang and cult membership—both popular and scientific—have been proliferating. This is strong evidence that such behavior has become a widespread social problem. See, for example, Margot Webb, Coping with Street Gangs (New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 1990) and Kay M. Porterfield, Straight Talk about Cults (New York: Facts on File, 1997).
14. Nicola Gratteri and Antonio Nicaso, Fratelli di sangue (Milano: Mondadori, 2009), 297.
15. Ercole Giap Parini, Myths, Legends, and Affiliation Practices in the Italian Mafioso Imagery: The Local Dimension of Power of a Global Phenomenon (Marburg, Germany: European Consortium for Political Research, 2003).
16. Edward C. Banfield, Le basi morali di una società arretrata (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1976).
17. John Lawrence Reynolds, Shadow People: Inside History’s Most Notorious Secret Societies (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2006), 173.
18. Carl Jung, The Essential Jung (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983).
19. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, 260.
20. A good discussion of the romance of banditry is the one by Anton Block, “The Peasant and the Brigand: Social Banditry Reconsidered,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (1972): 494–503.
21. Robert Warshow, “The Gangster as Tragic Hero,” Partisan Review 15 (1948): 240.
22. Bill James, Popular Crime: Reflections on the Celebration of Violence (New York: Scribner, 2011).
23. James, Popular Crime, 14.
24. Reynolds, Shadow People, 177–78.
25. Michele Pantaleone, Il sasso in bocca: Mafia e Cosa Nostra (Bologna: Cappelli, 1970), 11.
26. Shelley Klein, The Most Evil Secret Societies in History (London: Michael O’Mara, 2005), 177.
27. Lunde, Organized Crime, 38
28. Lunde, Organized Crime, 49.
29. Good treatments of the relation between culture and gangs are the ones by Jack B. Moore, Skinheads Shaved for Battle: A Cultural History of American Skinheads (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1993) and Daniel J. Monti, Wannabe Gangs in Suburbs and Schools (Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, 1994).
30. Works on gang and cult membership—both popular and scientific—have been proliferating since the 1980s. This is strong evidence that such behavior has become a worrisome problem for society at large with respect to adolescence. See, for example, Margot Webb, Coping with Street Gangs (New York: Rosen Publishing Group, 1990) and Kay M. Porterfield, Straight Talk about Cults (New York: Facts on File, 1997).
31. Jean Baudrillard, Simulations (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).
32. Writings on Mafia women can be found in Mary Jo Bona, Claiming a Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
33. Dickie, Cosa Nostra, 15.
34. Nigel Cawthorne and Colin Cawthorne, The Mafia: First-Hand Accounts of Life Inside the Mob (London: Constable & Robinson, 2009), 403.
35. Reynolds, Shadow People, 193.
36. Renate Siebert, Secrets of Life and Death: Women and the Mafia (New York: Verso, 1996).
37. Jane Schneider and Peter Schneider, “Mafia, Antimafia, and the Plural Cultures of Sicily,” Current Anthropology 46 (2005): 501.
38. Reynolds, Shadow People, 192–93.
39. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, aphorism 283 (1887).
40. Reynolds, Shadow People, 193.
41. Reynolds, Shadow People, 194.
42. Peter B. E. Hill, The Japanese Mafia: Yakuza, Law, and the State (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2003).
43. Raimondo Catanzaro, Men of Respect: A Social History of the Sicilian Mafia (New York: Free Press, 1992); David E. Kaplan, Fires of the Dragon (New York: Scribner, 1996).
44. Lunde, Organized Crime, 95.
45. David E. Kaplan and Alec Dubro, Yakuza: Japan’s Criminal Underworld (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 19.
46. Kaplan and Dubro, Yakuza.
47. Lunde, Organized Crime, 9–10.
Chapter 3
Rituals and Symbols
You never see animals going through the absurd and often horrible fooleries of magic and religion. Dogs do not ritually urinate in the hope of persuading heaven to do the same and send down rain. Asses do not bray a liturgy to cloudless skies. Nor do cats attempt, by abstinence from cat’s meat, to wheedle the feline spirits into benevolence. Only man behaves with such gratuitous folly. It is the price he has to pay for being intelligent but not, as yet, quite intelligent enough.
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
The Godfather, Part III revolves around the Mafia’s involvement with, and connection to, the Catholic Church, bringing out the fact that the Mafia sees itself, or at least portrays itself, as a quasi-religious institution. At a social event in the movie, the character Michael Corleone is seen donating $100 million “to the poor of Sicily,” which he gives to the Church to distribute equitably. The implication is that the Mafia is an honorable and charitable organization that traces its own roots, ipso facto, to groups of valiant men whose intention has always been to help the poor—in line with the myth of cavalleria rusticana. Religion is a frequent theme in The Sopranos. In episode 9 of the second season, for example, a mobster is shot and pronounced dead for approximately one minute, during which time he has a chilling vision of hell. This makes another mobster nervous, because he is very superstitious. So he goes to a priest asking him if donations to the church would be enough for forgiveness for a life of brutality so that he can escape the fires of damnation. Mobsters may not have a conscience, but they certainly do understand that their actions are profoundly immoral and evil. And like everyone else, they fear retribution.
The use of religious symbols and rituals in Mafia initiation rites imparts a pseudo-spiritual authority to the Mafia. Joining the Mafia is akin to joining a religious order, complete with oaths, rituals, special symbolic practices, rules of conduct, punishments, and so on. Omertà is as much a self-styled religious code as it is a pseudo-chivalric one. This connection to religion, fictive (through the use of imitative symbols and rituals) and nonfictive (through actual adherence to real religious practices), allows the Mafia, the ’Ndrangheta, and other criminal organizations to insert themselves seamlessly into the religious cultural substratum of southern Italy. This is seen in the Godfather films, as well as in the HBO series The Sopranos, with the many trips to Italy and to churches that American mobsters take in various episodes. In the movies and real life, the tradition of churchgoing is part of the code of omertà. There is one reference in the second Godfather movie to the Mafia being a 2,000-year-old Italian secret religious society. This is, of course, fiction, but it is a convenient fiction for the real Mafia, allowing it to create a mystique for itself shrouded in mystery. A parallel claim is seen in the film The Yakuza, which represents the actual claims of the Yakuza. The movie opens by informing the viewer that the Yakuza have
been in Japan for more than 350 years, abiding by a code of honor as rigorous as the samurai code of Bushido.
Rituals and symbolism are what give claims like these permanence and significance. Without them, the criminal organizations would have a harder time maintaining the crucial emotional bonds among their members that keep them intact. They are means for ensuring continuity. One of the most important ceremonies for criminal groups is the one used for initiating new members into the group, turning them into “made men.” In David Cronenberg’s Eastern Promises (2007), the character played by Viggo Mortensen becomes a made member of the Russian Mafia through a ceremony in which he is asked if he will renounce his father (who was a stool pigeon against the Mob). Mortensen replies “yes” and attempts to say something positive about his mother, only to be cut off by a high-ranking member, who tells him provocatively that his mother was a “whore.” Mortensen accepts this subserviently and deferentially, knowing full well that to become a true made man, he will have to reject his past, and his real family, symbolically and literally, by pledging exclusive allegiance to the clan, which has become his only family.
Rituals and Rites
Ritual weaves a feeling of magic on believers and specific groups (and even entire societies), but rituals and attendant rites can, over time, suffer from the erosion of significance. So, to maintain their control over group members and preserve a collective identity of the group, Mafia organizations revise their own rituals in terms of the convenient fictions provided by popular culture (movies and television). This “resemblance effect” is achieved with characters and places in the movies that remind us of real people and familiar settings, as well as plots that focus on issues of common concern (love, happiness, relationships, marriage, children, and so on).
People do not grasp reality directly, but through representations (words, symbols) of it. In a fundamental way, all representations are fictive, because they do not tell the real story of existence, only a selective and interpretative version of it. Criminal organizations certainly have grasped this basic principle of the human mind, manipulating fact with fiction to produce a mystique for themselves.[1] In fact, much of the Mafia allure captured in movies and real life revolves around symbols associated with ritual mysticism (symbols borrowed from religious orders, secret societies, and other groups), mystification (unique bits of language), and styles of self-presentation (a strategic use of images). There is drama associated with Mafia rituals, even if many of its actual ceremonies are quite unglamorous and dull to outsiders. Criminal groups are what the sociologist Emile Durkheim calls “segmentary societies,” that is, groups whose survival depends on producing “mechanical solidarity” through a ritualistic replication of existing cultural forms.[2] Ritual is the first phase in achieving replication and thus obtaining consensus to the cause from new recruits.[3] It thus re-creates the identity of the new member, fashioning it in conformity to the expectations of the group. The objective is to impart to the participant a new belief system and role as part of a new family, as well as how he is supposed to relate to others.
The rites used have been shaped liberally from those of both the secret societies of the past, like the Freemasons, and religious and chivalric practices.[4] Alongside the Mafia’s money and violence, the folklore surrounding its connections to ancient rites is a powerful tool for instilling fear in outsiders and promoting silent conformity among members. Given the large presence of Freemasons and other secret societies in Sicily—for instance, a Masonic sect named the carbonari (“charcoal burners”) became a subversive political group who wanted to unite Italy—it is probable that the arcane oaths and ceremonies used by the Mafia today originated in these societies. As John Dickie notes, “More than anything else about the Mafia, the initiation ritual bolsters widespread myths about how ancient the organization is. In reality, it is as modern as everything else about the Mafia. It was almost certainly borrowed originally from the Masons.”[5]
The rituals of Masonic secret societies were brought to Sicily from France via Naples around 1820. There they became somewhat fashionable among opponents of the Bourbon regime at the time. Masonic societies took an oath of secrecy and had initiation bloodletting rites and other ceremonies that the Mafia clearly seems to have “cut-and-paste” for its own purposes. The first description of the ritual of allegiance is found in a police report of 1876, in Palermo, regarding a Mafia clan led by Antonio Giammona, one of the first infamous Mafia bosses in the postunification period of Italy. The ritual is described as follows:
The boss pricks the index finger of the initiate. He then lets the blood from the finger fall onto a sacred image, which is then burned and put in the hands of the initiate, who is expected to hold the burning artifact. The burning image symbolizes the fate that the initiate will suffer if he were ever to betray the clan.[6] (translation ours)
According to scholar Giuseppe Giarrizzo, in eighteenth-century Masonic groups both within and outside of Sicily, a betrayer was called infame, a designation later adopted by the Mafia.[7] Giarrizzo further notes that it is from Masonic ideology that the Mafioso concept of humility and total submission derives. The Italian word umiltà (“humility”) is rendered as umirtà, following a dialectal pattern in Sicilian of rendering “l” as “r.” And from this the word omertà emerges.
Ritual differentiates criminal organizations from common street thugs. It allows them to create bonds, trust, and a shared system of symbols among members. And by connecting them to secret societies of the past, it ensconces the view about themselves as ancient warrior organizations. The following citation of a Mafioso initiate allows us to get a glimpse into this mind-set:
You must forgive me for this distinction I make between the Mafia and common crime, but it’s important to me. It’s important to every Mafioso. We are Mafiosi, the others are just the rabble. We are men of honor. And not so much because we have sworn an oath, but because we are the elite of crime. We are very much superior to common criminals. We are the worst of all![8]
If one adds to this sense of superiority the power of organizational structure, it is easy to see why the Mafia continues to be successful. John Lawrence Reynolds puts it as follows:
Primitive in terms of other, more beneficent institutions such as governments and the Catholic Church, the Mafia nevertheless managed to develop a configuration that exerted discipline and control over its members. Over time, it crafted the group into an effective power in the same manner that disorganized guerrillas are transformed into an effective fighting force by adapting the techniques of a regimented and motivated army.[9]
Religious Symbolism
There are two ways in which religion is exploited by the Mafia. One is by expecting members of the Mob to show devotion to the Church; the other is to adopt and adapt religious symbols and rites for its own purposes. In other words, outward faithfulness to Catholic practices (baptism, confirmation, marriage) is part of the display of omertà meshing with the use of in-group practices and ceremonies that mirror religious practices in form and symbolic content. By invoking the names of saints and adopting sacred forms of ritual, the criminal organization maintains its connection to the broader forms of meaning that constitute the culture in which it exists. It is little wonder that the Italian Mafias trace their origins to religious events and figures. Members are typically practicing Catholics who show themselves to be devoted to the sacraments and the Church in general. In fact, they often negotiate deals and plan operations during baptisms, marriages, and other religious ceremonies.[10] Religion is thus a cover for the conduct of criminality and establishing allegiance to the group. For the ’Ndrangheta, the cumpari (“godfather”) is the archetypal figure of the extended family, assigning to him the same religious duties that a real cumpari is supposed to accept. Here again, The Godfather has had a direct impact on how the criminals now conduct their rituals and perceive themselves. The ’Ndrangheta now considers the relation between cumpari and figlioccio (“godson”) an important one in
its model of family structure.[11] This creates powerful loyalty under the guise of religious duty.
Religious marriages, too, allow the criminals to establish blood and family linkages. The marriage ceremony brings the different criminal families together, just like in The Godfather, to discuss the meaning of their differences and seek consensus on various issues. The marriage ceremony and feast thus provides a context for intergroup discussion and the negotiation of new partnerships and business transactions.[12] What could be more “honorable” and “respectful” than a contract killing negotiated during a sacred marriage or the performance of some sacramental rite? The twisted irony is ludicrous, yet deadly real.
Quotations from the Bible are found throughout the documents of the criminal syndicates rounded up by the police. The reason for this is obvious. In the same way that televangelists play liberally on the Bible for self-serving purposes, so too do Mafiosi use it to justify their deeds. One criminal organization, the Sacra Corona Unita (“United Sacred Rosary”), which is based in the Puglia region, has even named itself after a powerful religious artifact, the sacra corona (“sacred rosary”), which will purportedly “unify” the members (unita) as if in a prayer-based group. The following aphorism by French poet Edgar Quinet is clearly applicable to the Sacra Corona Unita: “It is certain that if you would have the whole secret of a people, you must enter into the intimacy of their religion,” for this guarantees allegiance to it.[13] Police raids of the homes of Mafiosi and Camorristi have uncovered religious icons and artifacts scattered throughout them. The Mafia is seen as a honorable gang, in part, because of this allegiance to traditional practices and its obvious dislike of the modern world’s nihilistic values, which they see as foolish and going against the traditions and history of the true Italy. This displayed worldview, as opportunistic as it is, has great appeal to many in an age of postmodern nihilism, which has left young people, in particular, searching for the kind of values and ethics that Mafiosi espouse in their own feigned fashion. The open display of religiosity is highly attractive to many young people today.
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