On the rare occasions when a Mafiuso is arrested, his friends and relatives appeal to their Capo-mafia in Palermo, and he at once institutes a most scrupulous inquiry into the man’s antecedents. If it is found that the prisoner has throughout his life strictly obeyed the principles and the commands of the society, its vast machinery is instantly set in motion to secure his release or acquittal, money is spent unsparingly, though the accused be penniless, scores and sometimes hundreds of witnesses are suborned, the most eminent lawyers are secured for the defence, and the strongest arguments appear in the man’s favour in the most accredited newspapers. The man is of course proved innocent, and the verdict is received with a chorus of popular approbation. If, on the other hand, the inquiry shows that the man has once failed in his duties as a Mafiuso, the Capo-mafia refuses all help, and a witness will dare to appear in his favour, and he is dealt with by the law without opposition. A stranger might think that the law has triumphed in such a case, but it has not; it has executed a verdict already given by the Mafia.
The Mafia in the country is more completely organized than that of the city, which is natural where a large body of men are employed in the same business, as watchmen of the fruit-crops. The country Capo-mafia has the privilege of disposing of all the watchmen’s places in his district, the landholders or tenants pay him for his patronage, they accept the watchmen he gives them, and the terror of his name is a sufficient surety of the safety of their oranges. If they were robbed, his reputation would be endangered; if some inexperienced thief is foolish enough to attempt it, he is certain to be caught and severely beaten.
It is the business of the country Capo-mafia to make demands upon rich landholders for sums of money, when funds are needed by the Mafiusi of his district, and here lies the connecting link between the more or less innocuous Mafia and the brigandage which is the curse of Sicily. A Mafiuso, great or small, pays at once what is demanded of him for the common good; but there are many large landholders in the country who believe themselves strong enough to be independent of the Mafia, protecting their crops from thieves with a small force of armed men, and maintaining constant relations with the government’s force of carbineers.
Two hundred and nineteen letters demanding money have fallen into the hands of the police of Palermo within seven years. Signor Cutrera publishes some of these in his valuable work. Several are dated, and most of them ‘Dear Sir,’ or ‘Dear Friend,’ while they all conclude by threatening the life of the person addressed, and often the lives of all his family. The place to which the money, sometimes as much as ten thousand francs, is to be taken is always indicated with extreme clearness, and in several cases, the name of the person who is to bring it is given, and that person is generally some one in the victim’s employment.
These instances, made public with a great quantity of corroboratory evidence by a chief officer of the Sicilian police, should be enough to explain the nature of the despotism exercised by the Mafia. From threatening letters to highway robbery there is but a step. Upon the road that leads from Palermo to Misilmeri there is a hamlet called Portella di Mare, which is famous for the number of attacks made upon travellers. In the whole province of Palermo the statistics show that there were one thousand and ninety-two highway robberies between the years 1893 and 1899 inclusive. When it is considered that no country in the world is so thoroughly patrolled by an efficient and courageous police, such figures show the magnitude of the difficulty with which the authorities have to contend. A further consideration of the subject would lead too far, but with regard to brigandage in Sicily it should be distinctly understood that it does not form a part of the system called the Mafia, but is often closely connected with it by the bond of common interest. The principal reason why brigandage continues to exist is that the outlaws make themselves useful to certain great landholders, who, in return, protect the malefactors from the police. It may even be known that a whole band — supposing it to be travelling together, which rarely happens — may be concealed in the house of a rich man, and that the police may be cognizant of the fact. In order to search the house, the commander of the detachment must produce a judicial warrant authorizing him to do so. The little squad of carbineers and soldiers of the line have very probably tracked the bandits for several days through a wild and dangerous country, not having the slightest idea where they might next take refuge. It would be manifestly impossible to issue a general warrant authorizing the police to search any house in the country, for this would be regarded as an act of tyranny, and the Mafia would probably retort by bringing on a general revolution throughout the island. If the officer commanding the pursuing party sends back to his chief, therefore, for the necessary authority, the bandits, well informed of their pursuers’ movements, have plenty of time to escape to another hiding-place; and if the officer at last receives the warrant, uses it, and finds no brigands in the house, the proprietor makes complaint to the heads of the Mafia, who have innumerable weapons at their command with which to make the action of the police publicly ridiculous. But if the officer, being quite sure that the brigands are in the house, takes upon himself the responsibility of searching it without a warrant, and if, as will very probably happen, the whole band escapes through a subterranean passage, such as may be found in many Sicilian houses, he is liable to an action at law, in the course of which the Mafia will spends hundreds of thousands of francs and put out its whole strength to destroy him. If by any possibility he escapes being dismissed from the service for having overstepped his authority, his only chance of life is to leave the island secretly and at once. As for a proprietor who refuses to receive the brigands or to offer them the best he has so long as they are pleased to prolong their visit, neither his property nor his life will ever be safe from that day. His crops will be burned, his orange and lemon trees hacked to pieces, his vines torn up by the roots; and if he is the possessor of great herds of cattle or flocks of sheep, the professional cattle lifters who abound in Sicily will mark him for their prey, knowing that neither the Mafia nor any band of outlaws will raise a finger to protect him. By twos and threes his cows and his oxen will disappear; with a skill that would do honour to Texas the brands on the animals will be converted into new and different ones, and before long the stolen property will be sold at a cattle fair a hundred miles away. If at the end of a year the unhappy victim is alive, he is wholly ruined, but it is far more probable that a bullet will have ended his troubles long before that time. To bring about such dire results, it is not even necessary that he should have shut his doors against the outlaws; he may receive them, entertain them, and thank them for the honour of their visit, as is customary in such cases, but if he should afterwards give the least clew to their movements, he is a doomed man as surely as if he had refused to receive them. I repeat that bandits are not necessarily Mafiusi, but in the great majority of cases they have been ‘friends’ before taking to the woods; and though the higher Mafia may disapprove of their proceedings, it is rarely unwilling to make exhibition of its vast power and of its contempt of the law by affording them its protection. The Mafiusi may occasionally quarrel among themselves and blood may be shed in encounters that are regarded as honourable, for it is only a man condemned by the society who is murdered without a chance for his life; the society will never interfere in the settlement of questions of so‑called honour, whereas it acts as a tribunal for all disagreements which would be settled by law in a civilized country. But, owing to the strong peculiarities of the Sicilian character, violent disputes between the ‘friends’ are extremely rare, and the solidarity of the whole society might be an example to associations formed with a better object.
It would be unjust to Italy to leave such a subject without making two important statements. In the first place, it is quite wrong to suppose that foreigners visiting Sicily and having no interests in the island are exposed to any danger from the Mafia or from any organized band of brigands, and with ordinary precautions, if the traveller is willing to avoid a few d
angerous localities, he will not be more exposed to the attacks of common thieves than in many other countries. He may go with safety where a Sicilian nobleman or a landholder hostile to the illicit powers would need the protection of a dozen mounted carbineers, and this well-known fact has been proved true in hundreds of cases. Foreigners who have been taken by brigands in Sicily and held for ransom have invariably possessed some vested interest in the country. This may be accepted as positively certain.
Secondly, as I have already said, the Camorra of Naples does not extend beyond the suburbs of the city. The southern mainland from Naples to the straits is one of the safest tracts of country in the world; it has produced no society even faintly approaching the Mafia, brigandage has been totally stamped out by the Italian government, and the entire absence of travellers who might be robbed is a sufficient reason why the evil should not break out again. The southern mountains are wild and desolate beyond description, the southern plains are lonely and thinly populated, the poverty of the lower classes everywhere is painful to see; but the country is safe from end to end, and the student, the artist, or the idler may traverse it in all directions, alone or in company, on foot or on horseback, without incurring the slightest risk. It is due to the honourable and untiring efforts of the present government to state this very clearly, and if the power which has accomplished so much on the mainland is unable to make headway against the Mafia in Sicily, the reason is that the Mafia is not an organized and tangible body which could be called to account for its actions, but is the inevitable result of many combined circumstances, involving national character, national traditions, and certain especial conditions of agriculture and wealth, none of which exist together anywhere else in the world.
My task is ended. If the curiosity of my readers is unsatisfied, let them visit the south and seek out for themselves those things which they desire to know; if they are disappointed with the story of twenty centuries, as I have told it, let them look into the fathomless archives of southern history and read in half a dozen languages and dialects the thousand tales which I have left untold. In either case, I shall not have laboured in vain. If any, after reading this book, are tempted to wander through some of the most beautiful and memorable places in the world, or if any, desiring more knowledge, are impelled to pursue the study of classic history or the romantic chronicles of Norman times, I am more than repaid for having attempted what is perhaps impossible.
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Series Contents
Series One
Anton Chekhov
Charles Dickens
D.H. Lawrence
Dickensiana Volume I
Edgar Allan Poe
Elizabeth Gaskell
Fyodor Dostoyevsky
George Eliot
H. G. Wells
Henry James
Ivan Turgenev
Jack London
James Joyce
Jane Austen
Joseph Conrad
Leo Tolstoy
Louisa May Alcott
Mark Twain
Oscar Wilde
Robert Louis Stevenson
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Sir Walter Scott
The Brontës
Thomas Hardy
Virginia Woolf
Wilkie Collins
William Makepeace Thackeray
Series Two
Alexander Pushkin
Alexandre Dumas (English)
Andrew Lang
Anthony Trollope
Bram Stoker
Christopher Marlowe
Daniel Defoe
Edith Wharton
F. Scott Fitzgerald
G. K. Chesterton
Gustave Flaubert (English)
H. Rider Haggard
Herman Melville
Honoré de Balzac (English)
J. W. von Goethe (English)
Jules Verne
L. Frank Baum
Lewis Carroll
Marcel Proust (English)
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Nikolai Gogol
O. Henry
Rudyard Kipling
Tobias Smollett
Victor Hugo
William Shakespeare
Series Three
Ambrose Bierce
Ann Radcliffe
Ben Jonson
Charles Lever
Émile Zola
Ford Madox Ford
Geoffrey Chaucer
George Gissing
George Orwell
Guy de Maupassant
H. P. Lovecraft
Henrik Ibsen
Henry David Thoreau
Henry Fielding
J. M. Barrie
James Fenimore Cooper
John Buchan
John Galsworthy
Jonathan Swift
Kate Chopin
Katherine Mansfield
L. M. Montgomery
Laurence Sterne
Mary Shelley
Sheridan Le Fanu
Washington Irving
Series Four
Arnold Bennett
Arthur Machen
Beatrix Potter
Bret Harte
Captain Frederick Marryat
Charles Kingsley
Charles Reade
G. A. Henty
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Wallace
E. M. Forster
E. Nesbit
George Meredith
Harriet Beecher Stowe
Jerome K. Jerome
John Ruskin
Maria Edgeworth
M. E. Braddon
Miguel de Cervantes
M. R. James
R. M. Ballantyne
Robert E. Howard
Samuel Johnson
Stendhal
Stephen Crane
Zane Grey
Series Five
Algernon Blackwood
Anatole France
Beaumont and Fletcher
Charles Darwin
Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Edward Gibbon
E. F. Benson
Frances Hodgson Burnett
Friedrich Nietzsche
George Bernard Shaw
George MacDonald
Hilaire Belloc
John Bunyan
John Webster
Margaret Oliphant
Maxim Gorky
Oliver Goldsmith
Radclyffe Hall
Robert W. Chambers
Samuel Butler
Samuel Richardson
Sir Thomas Malory
Thomas Carlyle
William Harrison Ainsworth
William Dean Howells
William Morris
Series Six
Anthony Hope
Aphra Behn
Arthur Morrison
Baroness Emma Orczy
Captain Mayne Reid
Charlotte M. Yonge
Charlotte Perkins Gilman
E. W. Hornung
Ellen Wood
Frances Burney
Frank Norris
Frank R. Stockton
Hall Caine
Horace Walpole
One Thousand and One Nights
R. Austin Freeman
Rafael Sabatini
>
Saki
Samuel Pepys
Sir Issac Newton
Stanley J. Weyman
Thomas De Quincey
Thomas Middleton
Voltaire
William Hazlitt
William Hope Hodgson
Series Seven
Adam Smith
Benjamin Disraeli
Confucius
David Hume
E. M. Delafield
E. Phillips Oppenheim
Edmund Burke
Ernest Hemingway
Frances Trollope
Galileo Galilei
Guy Boothby
Hans Christian Andersen
Ian Fleming
Immanuel Kant
Karl Marx
Kenneth Grahame
Lytton Strachey
Mary Wollstonecraft
Michel de Montaigne
René Descartes
Richard Marsh
Sax Rohmer
Sir Richard Burton
Talbot Mundy
Thomas Babington Macaulay
W. W. Jacobs
Series Eight
Anna Katharine Green
Arthur Schopenhauer
The Brothers Grimm
C. S. Lewis
Charles and Mary Lamb
Elizabeth von Arnim
Ernest Bramah
Francis Bacon
Gilbert and Sullivan
Grant Allen
Henryk Sienkiewicz
Hugh Walpole
Jean-Jacques Rousseau
John Locke
John Muir
Joseph Addison
Lafcadio Hearn
Lord Dunsany
Marie Corelli
Niccolò Machiavelli
Ouida
Complete Works of F Marion Crawford Page 1454