Mafia’s deadly power wielded without mercy

Mafia Republic Italy’s Criminal Curse:Cosa Nostra, Camorra and ’Ndrangheta from 1946 to the present

MAFIA REPUBLIC is the latest in a series of books on the same subject by John Dickie the Professor of Italian Studies at University College London. He is also the author of Delizia! a history of Italian cuisine. Mafia Republic is in places more Spaghetti western than scholarly analysis. It is a vast collation of facts, arranged over seven chapters and 43 subchapters. Regrettably the author’s labour is unleavened by an overarching narrative or a satisfying synthesis.

Mafia Republic does, however, over 500 pages give a sense of the evil, the insidiousness and the success of the mafia. From the lemon groves of a once stunningly beautiful Conca d’Ora, the plain that sweeps down from the mountains to Palermo and the Tyrrhenian Sea, to the backwater of Calabria and the fruit markets of Naples the mafia is in Dickie’s telling an overlapping criminal conurbation of three separate organisations, three histories that flow into an eventually shared estuary of misery, brutality and crime.