The Sicilian Mafia
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Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia
The Italian-American mafia has its roots in a mysterious and powerful criminal network in Sicily. While the mythology of the mafia has been widely celebrated in American culture, the true origins of its rituals, laws, and methods have never actually been revealed. John Dickie uses startling new research to expose the secrets of the Sicilian mafia, providing a fascinating account that is more violent, frightening, and darkly comic than anything conceived in popular movies and novels. How did the Sicilian mafia begin? How did it achieve its powerful grip in Italy and America? How does it operate today? From the mafia's origins in the 1860s to its current tense relationship with the Berlusconi government, Cosa Nostra takes us to the inner sanctum where few have dared to go before. This is an important work of history and a revelation for anyone who ever wondered what it means to be "made" in the mob.
The Sicilian Mafia
Author: Diego Gambetta
language: en
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Release Date: 1996-02-01
In a society where trust is in short supply and democracy weak, the Mafia sells protection, a guarantee of safe conduct for parties to commercial transactions. Drawing on the confessions of eight Mafiosi, Diego Gambetta develops an elegant analysis of the economic and political role of the Sicilian Mafia.
Men of Respect
The global crime organization which we know as the Mafia traces its origins to the orange groves of the Conca D'Oro, the rich hinterland of Palermo, Sicily, during the early nineteenth century. It was here that the "mafia of the gardens", made up of loose networks of bandits, built their industry of crime. In exploring the Mafia's remarkable rise to power, Raimondo Catanzaro shows how these rural bands successfully opposed the encroaching authority of the Italian government in Sicily during the 1840s, as they infiltrated it, took control of its agencies, and effectively replaced it as the force of law throughout the island. Unlike past chroniclers, Catanzaro sees no break between the traditional rural mafiosi of the nineteenth century and the flashy criminals of today. To the contrary, he demonstrates that the fluid and unstructured composition of the early Mafia enabled it to change its form and thereby survive the many lethal threats it encountered, where a more rigid and unified organization would have failed. This ability to adapt was never more apparent than during the Socialist movement of the Sicilian Fasci in the 1890s. While older, established mafiosi intimidated and murdered local party organizers, younger mafiosi extended the Mafia's power by joining and then subverting these political movements. In his presentation of the recent history of the Mafia Catanzaro makes particularly ingenious use of the Italian Parliament's 40,000 page Commissione Anti-Mafia report to trace the explosive growth of this criminal enterprise since World War II. Here his narrative details the increasing involvement of mafiosi in clandestine commerce, first of tobacco, and then, during the last twodecades, of drugs and arms. Catanzaro presents the hitherto untold story of an organization that continues to affect us to this day.