CHAPTER 1
After long treating the concept as taboo, linguists now speculate endlessly about the origins of the word “Mafia.” Some say it comes from Mahias, Arabic for “bold” or “braggart.” Others say that its root is Muafirr, the name of a Saracen tribe that once controlled Palermo. Less plausibly, it has been suggested that the word comes from M’fie, the name of the caves that served as hiding places for those Saracens and later for Sicilians who retreated there in fear when Garibaldi landed in 1861.
The theory that has always seemed most reasonable to me holds that “Mafia” is a corruption of the Arabic Mu (“strength”) plus Afah (“to protect”). Yet what I find most intriguing about this word is not the exotic etymologies reaching far back into Sicilian history, but the fact that during the years of my youth, “Mafia” was almost never said. I was aware that it existed—both the word and the reality it stood for—but I apprehended it the same way that one catches a faint aroma on the wind, something familiar yet not quite identifiable.
The spectral presence of the Mafia in Sicilian life has always made me think of the comment by the Danish philosopher Sören Kierkegaard that part of our human dilemma is to be condemned to live our lives forward and understand them backward. We Sicilians have lived for generations with the Mafia, while rigorously excluding it not only from our conversation but even from our thought. Only relatively recently have we begun to understand backward the impact that “the Octopus”—a metaphor for Cosa Nostra first used by a judge and soon after a common term—has had on our history and culture.
Yet Sicily is the logical place for a phenomenon such as the Mafia to have arisen. We are a people who never really ruled our own territory. We were always a colony, and, even worse, a colony passed from one ruler to another. If these rulers had been harsh and repressive, they would at least have created a strong centralized government; but this was not the case. Sicily was always a place to be exploited more than governed. Until the nineteenth century, aristocratic families controlled Sicilian life more or less independently of whatever conqueror happened to be ruling at any given time. These barons cared about their own property and prerogatives, but not much else. Their ethos is beautifully portrayed in Giuseppe di Lampedusa’s The Leopard, where Fabrizio, the Prince, sleepwalks through life, disconnected from his country, his fate, and even his own ancestral holdings.
Eventually this aristocracy would collapse and disappear, but without leaving a middle class to fill the vacuum it left behind. Instead, as the barons moved to Rome, Vienna, Paris and other more cosmopolitan areas, the administration of their lands fell to middlemen called gabelloti. These administrators squeezed the share-croppers to pay the high rents demanded by absentee landowners, and controlled the brigands who roamed the countryside. Backed by a network of family, friends, and clients—the only groups able to provide social stability in the absence of an institutional order—these gabelloti became Sicily’s New Men, archetypes of the capimafia of the future. (Lampedusa’s Don Cologero is such a man avant la lettre.) The violent men they hired to enforce their power would become the Mafiosi of Sicily’s future.
Unlike its equivalent in the United States, which was based on family (Gambino, Bonanno and the like), the Sicilian Mafia was rooted in the land and organized around a place—Corleone, Prizzi, and other communities. Eventually the Mafia groupings in these places would build a bridge from the village to the developing urban centers such as Palermo. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra was always more intrinsic to the structure of society than its American cousins. It developed because the state itself was atrophied and defective in Sicily, and the people, conquered repeatedly by outsiders, never expected to receive justice from “the system.” They looked to the charismatic uomini di rispetto to fulfill the functions that bureaucratic governments served everywhere else in Europe. If your daughter was raped, you looked to such a “man of respect” for redress rather than to a distant and foreign police force.
The Mafia networks of the nineteenth century gradually took on the functions of the state: collecting taxes, providing a hierarchy of leadership, and raising little armies to enforce its “laws.” Political and economic life adjusted to these arrangements and accepted them as reality. Later on, when legitimate government tried to assert its authority, it would first have to redefine this reality as “criminal.” This was a monumental task. It is the subject of this book.
The Mafia created an autonomous social order in Sicily, but it could not have succeeded as well as it did, had it not also created a myth: that its members were Men of Honor comprising an honorable society that not only made the social order work, but made it work according to principle. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather, got this aspect of the Mafia mentality exactly right: those who chose this path believed that while they might be called upon to perform tasks others might shrink from in serving their family and friends, they were nonetheless superior to the corrupt and hypocritical world surrounding them.
A sign of how deeply—and swiftly—the Mafia had penetrated Sicilian life came in 1893 when a man named Emanuele Notarbartolo, director general of the Bank of Sicily and former mayor of Palermo, tried to overturn corrupt deals made by one of his directors, a politician named Raffaele Palizzolo, who had links to the Mafia. Notarbartolo bravely protested these criminal activities to ministers in Rome. Before the issue could be brought to trial, he was stabbed twenty-six times by an assassin on a train, becoming the first of many “excellent cadavers” in Sicily’s future.
The entrenchment of the Mafia, complete by the 1920s, made this organization a public enemy for Mussolini. Upon coming to power, the Fascists saw the Mafia for what it was even then: una associazione per delinquere, in the words of Cesare Mori, “an association for criminal purposes.” Mori, who became known as the “Iron Prefect” after Mussolini sent him to Sicily to bring the Mafia to heel, famously swept into the centers of Mafia power and bluntly laid out his intentions to the townspeople: “My name is Mori and I shall have people killed. Delinquency must disappear just as the dust disappears on the wind of the sirocco.”
A measure of the cleansing power of his sirocco could be seen in the fact that in 1928, the year that Mori took control, there were only 26 murders in Sicily compared to 278 the year before. But most of the “men of honor” he rounded up, killed, imprisoned or sentenced to hard labor were at the level of the picciotti, or soldiers. The bosses went into hiding or slipped away to the United States, Marseilles, or even Tunis, pretending to be heroic figures of resistance. And when, in 1929, Mori began to investigate the connections between the Mafia and some high-level figures of the Fascist regime, a telegram from Rome informed him that he had been pensioned off. He was thus the first to understand what others would see later on: it was far easier to deal with the Mafia militarily than to root the organization out of Sicilian politics and culture.
After the Allied invasion of 1943, the Fascists fled to the mainland as the Allies advanced on Palermo. American soldiers saw chaos: criminals escaping from jails, peasants occupying land, people settling private feuds with murder and arson, and everyone stealing anything that could be carried. General George Patton said of the Palermitans: “These people are crazy!” Such a view made any structure of influence appealing. While it is a myth that the Allies used American mobsters like “Lucky” Luciano to inspire an anti-Fascist Mafia underground in Sicily, it is true that some Americans naively failed to exclude the Mafia from the postwar social order. In fact, in one letter to the secretary of state, the American consul wrote: “I have the honor to report that on November 18, 1944, General Giuseppe Castallaro, together with Maffia leaders including Calogero Vizzini, conferred with Virgilio Nasi, head of the well known Nasi family of Trapani and asked him to