Mafia’s deadly power wielded without mercy
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.
The Sicilian Cosa Nostra, the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta and the Camorra of Naples and Campania are, as Dickie explains, born of separate histories and environments, with different structures and customs.
With emigration the Cosa Nostra spread to the United States and it was there, in the movies, in criminal and congressional investigations, that its existence was unearthed and the spotlight put on a phenomenon long occluded by denial and myth.
Taking the story forward from 1946, it is astonishing to read the extent to which what we now call the mafia successfully hid its existence for so long. A recurring theme of this book is the decades of struggle, much of it deadly, to unveil and name what are actual organisations with their own separate if frequently unstable structures. The very names by which these organisations are now known only emerged in the 1950s, and in Italy at least their existence continued to be widely denied for decades thereafter. In Dickie’s story the loss of anonymity was a key step in a belated recognition of an endemic problem which when tackled at all was done do only sporadically and tardily.
The two consistent threads in Dickie’s book are crime and politics. Mafia organisations had long antecedents in peasant societies. In Sicily especially the dislocation of power structures caused by ending of the Bourbon monarchy and the unification of Italy in the 19th century forged bonds of politics and business between an agrarian-based secret society and an emerging elite determined to protect its newly acquired influence and wealth. If the strength of those bonds waxed and waned they endured.
In modern Italy, Dickie tells how “every party clique had to get into bed at some point or another with politicians who were ‘friends of friends’ in Sicily, Campania or Calabria”. Fifty years of unbroken Christian Democrat dominance, the so-called First Republic, ensured that if there were periodic crackdowns, there was also a systemic interrelationship between organised crime, organised politics and government.
Organised crime was based on the enforcement of rackets that allowed business profiteer at the expense of the population. At first it was about control of the immensely valuable citrus crop that grew in the fertile orchards outside Palermo and beyond. Italian unification brought no equivalent of the Land League in Sicily. The mafia brutally enforced the interests of landowners and shared in the spoils with a business class who were corrupted, co-opted and coerced into accepting mafia ‘protection’. The fresh food markets of Naples were similarly shaken down. Astronomical profits were made, but not by peasant producers. In Dickie’s words “the mafia established a stranglehold on the south’s food supply”.
An Italian economic miracle from the 1950s gave opportunity for an already engrained system of corruption to expand exponentially. And the first and greatest of these opportunities was in concrete. The result is known since as ‘The Sack of Palermo’. A once beautiful and fertile plain was carpeted in concrete to build appallingly badly planned housing with few facilities. Corruption was rampant, cohesion was deadly and non-cooperation lethal. The planning process in Palermo was an epic and violent but not unrelated collage of the events that replayed as cartoons in Conway’s Pub on Dublin’s Parnell Street when it served as the antechamber for Dublin County Council around the corner. A more prescient parallel is the paramilitary economy that operated on this island for decades and which unlike the mafia has never been successfully investigated. As Italian magistrates were able to establish, bodies decompose, money doesn’t. And that paramilitary currency remains in circulation.
Tobacco, cocaine, heroin and kidnapping all supplemented the revenue streams of the mafia. And so too did migration. In Dickie’s telling about a million people moved north from the south in just five years from 1958 to 1963. A mafia that had been localised in southern Italy, then exported to the US now arrived in the wealthy and industrialised north of Italy. Its opportunities and terrain spread in tandem.
But what was it? Did it exist? In 1966 Senator Donato Pafundi, who chaired Italy’s first major parliamentary hearing into the mafia, described the mafia in Sicily as “a mental states the pervades everything” and this mentality originated “above all” from a “millennium of Muslim domination”. In other words, it was in the air and in the culture but it was not a tangible thing. It was everywhere and yet it was nowhere.
It took another generation of violence and exploitation before the Italian legal system found in magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino the bravery and determination that finally established beyond doubt or denial that the mafia existed, that it had a structure and that its influence was pervasive and systematic. The so called maxi-trial of 1986-87 not only put mafia leaders on trial en masse, it for the first time effectively put the mafia as an organisation on trial too.
Falcone and Bersellino paid with their lives. They knew they would.
When in 1992 the Italian Supreme Court upheld the substance of the maxi-trial convictions so too did Salvo Lima. He was the Christian Democrat kingpin in Sicily who has operated the corrupt system than concreted some of the most beautiful vistas in Europe for tower blocks that housed generations since in substandard conditions. A member of the European Parliament and a government minister in Rome, he was a standard bearer and an indispensible pillar for an indelibly corrupt system. His death sentence was in Dickie’s book presumed a quid pro quo for the jail sentences handed down to the ‘men of honour’ he had let down.
In allowing the maxi-trial come to its culmination Lima had failed to honour his side of a Faustian pact and he paid the price. He was the standard bearer of a state that in the author’s words was viewed “with scorn by many of its citizens; its human and material resources were treated by all too many politicians as mere patronage fodder”. In a country that has from several vantage points looked into but never as completely slid into the same abyss we have little room for complacency and much for concern.
Dickie’s book has a great theme and great qualities of fact. It is, however, a volume punctuated by inadequately connected episodes. Mafia Republic is too literal a transcription of the author’s undistilled knowledge. It leaves the reader grappling with hundreds of characters too few of whom are adequately expanded on and followed-up over time. At times facts and personalities are arranged like pebble dash across the pages. A shorter, more focused book would have served the reader and author better.
If Dickie has all the material needed to fill the space on a grand horizon, in this volume he either lacked the capacity or eschewed the effort of mastering and moulding his material in ways that are either satisfactory for scholarship or pleasing to the reader.
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