exclusively upon the Italian community.
The Mafia thrived on violence. Its fearsome reputation, in both Sicily and the United States, was based on an eternal readiness to kill: men, women, infants, anyone who stood in its way. Its innocent victims—the businesses from which it extorted money, the parents of children held for ransom, inconvenient witnesses who saw or heard more than was good for them—all knew that Mafiosi carried out their threats and that failure to heed their warnings had dire consequences. To all that, though, was added a further diabolical refinement. From its earliest days, the Mafia nurtured an intricate web of working relationships with the people responsible for fighting it. Policemen were bribed. Landowners had favors done for them. Politicians were shown how helpful aruthless group of criminals could be at election time. In this way, a fraternity that existed to sell protection was protected itself. The real reason why the Mafia was feared—and had its demands met, its orders obeyed—was not simply that it killed. It was that it seemed to be invulnerable. It killed
and got away with it
.
Understanding how and why this murderous society came into existence means understanding a little of the history of Sicily, for the Mafia could have arisen nowhere else. The island, which lies at the tip of the Italian boot, was a place unlike any other. It had been a vitally important crossroads for thousands of years, standing astride trade routes that ran north and south and east and west across the Mediterranean, and its strategic importance meant that it had been fought over ever since Roman times. Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Holy Roman Emperors, the French, and the Aragonese had ruled over Sicily, and all of them had ruthlessly exploited its people. Most recently, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the island had become subject to the Bourbon kings of Naples, a junior branch of the royal family of Spain, which ruled over a fragile patrimony known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Bourbon state consisted of the southern half of mainland Italy and the island itself, but there was never any doubt as to which of its pair of provinces was most important. Its kings lived and reigned in Naples, the largest city in all Italy, and visited the island portion of their kingdom as infrequently as once a decade. Even in the Two Sicilies, in short, Sicily itself was seen as a distant, troublesome, and barbarous place—of value for its revenues but too rugged and too rural to befit a king.
For the people of the island, this indifference was to be expected. Centuries of occupation and harsh taxation, of being ruled from afar by men who had no roots on the island and no reason to care for it, bred in the local people a hatred of authority and a deep-rooted unwillingness to settle disputes through the same courts that protected foreign interests and enforced alien laws. Rebellion was commonplace in Sicilian history, and resistance—however mulish and unheroic—was seen as praiseworthy; private vengeance and vendetta were preferable to abiding by the rule of law. Even in the nineteenth century, outlaws were popular heroes there; banditry was more deeply rooted in Sicily than it was anywhere else in Europe, and it endured there longer, too. Little changed even after 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi landed on the island on his way to uniting all of Italy. Garibaldi himself was all but worshipped in Sicily becausehe freed it from its Bourbon overlords. But the Italy that he created, with its capital in Rome, treated Sicily much as the state that it replaced had done, extracting what it could in taxes and giving little or nothing in return. Peace was kept by a garrison of northerners and by police, recruited on the mainland, whose most important duty was not solving crimes but keeping order. The carabinieri did this by setting up and running a huge network of spies and informants to keep an eye on potential malcontents
The Mafia thrived on violence. Its fearsome reputation, in both Sicily and the United States, was based on an eternal readiness to kill: men, women, infants, anyone who stood in its way. Its innocent victims—the businesses from which it extorted money, the parents of children held for ransom, inconvenient witnesses who saw or heard more than was good for them—all knew that Mafiosi carried out their threats and that failure to heed their warnings had dire consequences. To all that, though, was added a further diabolical refinement. From its earliest days, the Mafia nurtured an intricate web of working relationships with the people responsible for fighting it. Policemen were bribed. Landowners had favors done for them. Politicians were shown how helpful aruthless group of criminals could be at election time. In this way, a fraternity that existed to sell protection was protected itself. The real reason why the Mafia was feared—and had its demands met, its orders obeyed—was not simply that it killed. It was that it seemed to be invulnerable. It killed
and got away with it
.
Understanding how and why this murderous society came into existence means understanding a little of the history of Sicily, for the Mafia could have arisen nowhere else. The island, which lies at the tip of the Italian boot, was a place unlike any other. It had been a vitally important crossroads for thousands of years, standing astride trade routes that ran north and south and east and west across the Mediterranean, and its strategic importance meant that it had been fought over ever since Roman times. Greeks, Arabs, Normans, Holy Roman Emperors, the French, and the Aragonese had ruled over Sicily, and all of them had ruthlessly exploited its people. Most recently, in the middle of the eighteenth century, the island had become subject to the Bourbon kings of Naples, a junior branch of the royal family of Spain, which ruled over a fragile patrimony known as the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The Bourbon state consisted of the southern half of mainland Italy and the island itself, but there was never any doubt as to which of its pair of provinces was most important. Its kings lived and reigned in Naples, the largest city in all Italy, and visited the island portion of their kingdom as infrequently as once a decade. Even in the Two Sicilies, in short, Sicily itself was seen as a distant, troublesome, and barbarous place—of value for its revenues but too rugged and too rural to befit a king.
For the people of the island, this indifference was to be expected. Centuries of occupation and harsh taxation, of being ruled from afar by men who had no roots on the island and no reason to care for it, bred in the local people a hatred of authority and a deep-rooted unwillingness to settle disputes through the same courts that protected foreign interests and enforced alien laws. Rebellion was commonplace in Sicilian history, and resistance—however mulish and unheroic—was seen as praiseworthy; private vengeance and vendetta were preferable to abiding by the rule of law. Even in the nineteenth century, outlaws were popular heroes there; banditry was more deeply rooted in Sicily than it was anywhere else in Europe, and it endured there longer, too. Little changed even after 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi landed on the island on his way to uniting all of Italy. Garibaldi himself was all but worshipped in Sicily becausehe freed it from its Bourbon overlords. But the Italy that he created, with its capital in Rome, treated Sicily much as the state that it replaced had done, extracting what it could in taxes and giving little or nothing in return. Peace was kept by a garrison of northerners and by police, recruited on the mainland, whose most important duty was not solving crimes but keeping order. The carabinieri did this by setting up and running a huge network of spies and informants to keep an eye on potential malcontents
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