Be it money laundering or drug smuggling, intimidation or assassination, money has always
inspired humanity to do sinister things. With this, comes the phenomenon of organized crime,
a tragic inevitability in developed cultures all across the world. Welcome to a brand new
series on the history of the world’s most famous criminal empires - we will be exploring
the origin stories of iconic syndicates from around the globe, examining shadowy pasts
that often extend back centuries. So, sit back as we delve into the underbelly of society,
and uncover the historical origins of today’s organized crime, beginning with the Sicilian
Mafia.
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The Sicilian Mafia, referred to by its own members as Cosa Nostra, a phrase meaning “our
thing”, is an infamous association of criminal syndicates. They are famous for their heavy-handed
role in protection racketeering, alcohol and drug smuggling, and other organized illegal
activities across Italy, the United States and beyond. These Italian Gangsters have been
immortalized in iconic 20th-century literature and film, which often depicts them at the
height of their power in and around the 1950s. Yet, rarely explored are the earliest origins
of the Mafia, a history that goes back a century before the era depicted in the likes of The
Godfather and Goodfellas.
In 1972, Italian Journalist Luigi Barzini had this to say about Italy’s southernmost
island: “The reason why Sicily is ungovernable is that the inhabitants have long ago learned
to distrust and neutralize all written laws and to govern themselves in their own rough
homemade fashion as if official institutions did not exist. This arrangement is highly
unsatisfactory because it cures no ills, promotes injustice and tyranny, leaves crimes unpunished,
does not make use of the Sicilians' best qualities, and has kept the country stagnant and backward
in almost every way.”
Since Antiquity, Sicilian history has been defined by foreign rule. Greeks, Carthaginians,
Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Vikings, Normans, Germans and Spaniards had all claimed dominion
over the island over various periods. At the turn of the 19th century, Sicily had been
the domain of the ancestrally French Bourbon Kings, who ruled the island and much of southern
mainland Italy.
Most of Sicily’s previous dynasties had practiced a form of feudal rulership, and
the Bourbons were no exception. Under their rule, Sicilian land was exclusively in the
hands of either the Catholic Church, or Feudal Barons, who held vast estates and made up
a tiny percentage of the population. However, by the year 1812, this had begun to change.
Primogeniture, the law by which a noble’s domain is passed down to his firstborn son,
was abolished. And the Barons of Sicily began gradually selling off parcels of their land
to the peasantry. Soon, over one-fifth of Sicilian land was made up of the smallholdings
of private citizens.
This slow shift from Feudalism to Capitalism was sped up exponentially in the year 1860,
when the intrepid Italian General Giuseppe Garibaldi led a volunteer force of 1,000 men
into Sicily, waging a bloody war of liberation that resulted in the islands’ annexation
into the nascent Kingdom of Italy. Disdainful of the old world order, the Italian Kingdom
wished to form itself on the model of a modern nation-state. As such, the bulk of the land
that remained in the possession of the Church or the nobility was seized and distributed
among the peasantry. In Sicily, the number of landowners increased tenfold, from 2000
to 20,000. Most of these new plots were small farms, grazing lands, lemon groves, or vineyards.
This was a colossal societal shift.
Prior to Italy’s modernization, most Barons with vast feudal landholdings had the resources
and manpower to ensure their properties remained protected. The same was true for the immensely
wealthy and influential Catholic Clergy. However, this was not the case for peasant-owned small
estates that now made up the bulk of Sicilian land.
Many Sicilians would resist the imposition of Italian rule and Italian laws and take
arms in the form of populist uprisings that raged from 1860 all the way to 1876. The violent
upheaval born of this fighting further destabilized the region, and the poverty caused by war
drove many desperate and starving peasants to steal from Sicily’s many new landowners.
Unlike the old feudal Barons who bought their own protection, these small landowning citizens
were dependent on federal Soldiers and Policemen to safeguard their property, neither of which
were able to effectively monitor private plots in the face of widespread political unrest
across the Island. The situation was grim, for the Italian Government had distributed
land to tens of thousands of middle-class peasants, but left them helpless when it came
to actually protect it.
To any man with a nose for business and a constitution for violence, late 19th century
Sicily was a dreamland, ripe for exploitation, and that is exactly what happened. In lieu
of any presence of law enforcement, the island’s landowners were forced to turn to private
thugs to protect their property. These loose gangs of hired gunmen soon realized they were
the only real authority in the region, and began taking advantage of the situation, turning
against the very people they were meant to protect, forcing many local farmers into their
clientele under threat of violence. Landowners no longer had a choice in whether or not they
would hire these contractors. Either they paid out a handsome sum for the protection
of their estate, or they would suffer dire and violent consequences.
Anton Blok, an anthropologist who studied the gangs of Italy, defined the central characteristic
of Mafia as “the private use of unlicensed violence as a means of control in the public
arena.” And from the 1860s onward, this phenomenon would be the principal method by
which the Sicilian people were ruled.
Due to the inherently clandestine nature of organized crime, the scope and influence of
the various factions of Cosa Nostra are hard to quantify. Although it is safe to say that
by 1865, they had accumulated vast sway in Sicily, controlling much of its farms and
ranches, especially in the western regions surrounding Palermo. As a result of this,
stories of their machinations during this era have been well recorded.
The extent of the Mafia’s reach is first mentioned in a book published in 1864, plainly
titled Public Safety in Sicily, and written by one Niccolo Turrisi Colonna, however, the
publication never used the word “mafia” specifically, instead referring to a “Sect
of thieves that had ties across the whole island”.
Colonna was an Italian patriot and a staunch unionist, the kind of man who brought with
him the law and order that criminals reviled. He had narrowly survived an assassination
attempt a year earlier when five armed hitmen had tried to gun him down with muskets while
he traveled down a rural road outside Palermo by carriage. Luckily, his guards managed to
fend off the attackers with their pistols, causing them to flee. This brush with death
had inspired Colonna to raise awareness about Sicily’s ever-growing underground criminal
lords.
Colonna’s book brought attention to many of the Mafia’s sinister powers. The ‘sect
of thieves’ that he wrote about was described to have no fear of policemen, who they could
easily elude. They had no trepidation for the courts either, due to their ability to
pressure any witnesses into silence. Colonna’s testimony grows even more morbid, as he claimed
that any civilian caught approaching a military policeman would be caught and executed. This
was a practice done to enforce a disconnect between lawmen and the citizenry born of fear
and instill a law known as “humility”, by which the Mafia coerced total devotion
and respect out of the peasantry which they ruled over. Far removed from being simple
extortionists, Cosa Nostra had evolved into a dangerous cult, with deep tendrils in every
facet of Sicilian society.
The Mafioso were especially prominent amongst the owners of Lemon Groves. Introduced by
the Arabs in the 9th century, Lemons had quickly become a valued Sicilian export, and by the
19th century was the island’s most lucrative cash crop. For instance, by 1855 over 2.5
million crates of Sicilian citrus made it to New York alone annually. However, they
were a fickle plant, with even slight changes in soil acidity being able to sabotage an
entire field. This made them especially easy for the Mafia to threaten, and doubly lucrative
for them to own.
A seminal example of this is the story of a man known as Dr. Gaspere Galati. In 1874
the former surgeon had inherited a four-hectare Lemon Grove known as the Fondo Riella. The
land was only a short stroll away from Palermo’s city walls, putting it in the heart of Mafia
territory. Furthermore, Galati had only inherited the Grove because the previous owner, his
brother-in-law, had suffered a heart attack upon receiving a string of death threats.
Sure enough, Galati soon realized that the men who worked the farm kept a dubious company.
The person responsible for sending the death threats had been the warden of the estate,
Benedetto Carollo, a man undoubtedly linked to the Mafia. Dr. Galati may not have been
aware of the death threats that lead to his brother in law’s demise, but he certainly
picked up on Carollo’s problematic nature quickly, as the man undercut the sale value
of the farm’s produce, stole coal from the estate’s steam pumps and lemons from the
trees, all while strutting about like he owned the place.
Dr. Galati was no fool, realizing his farm was being sabotaged, he had Carollo fired.
Naturally, this drew upon him the attention of malicious shadows. Many of Galati’s close
friends implored him to rehire Carollo, friends who previously had no vested interest in his
business, and had no doubt been pressured or bribed by Cosa Nostra. However, the doctor
did not relent on his decision. He had forced the Mafia’s hand, and on the 2nd of July,
the man he had hired to replace Carollo was gunned down on a narrow rural street.
Naturally, Galati’s attempt to report this murder to the police turned out to be a pointless
affair, for they had already been paid off to look the other way. The doctor soon received
a string of letters, with the heavy-handed promise that if he did not rehire Carollo,
he and his family would face the same fate as the replacement warden they had shot dead.
Eventually, the doctor abandoned the Fonda Riella and fled to Naples, leaving his property
entirely in the Mafia’s hands.
The doctor wrote a written testimony of his misfortunes, giving us a key example of how
the early Sicilian Mafia operated. A system in which Mafioso strongmen operated from the
shadows, forcing noncompliant Landowners out of town by either by planting saboteurs on
their farms or with threats of violence.
The Mafia faction that harried Galati was based in the village of Uditore, where, out
of a population of only 800, 23 souls had been gunned down in the year 1874 alone. No
doubt they were individuals who had defied the rule of the Mafia. While Dr. Galati’s
case maybe only one story out of many, there exists countless cases just like it in lemon
groves, farms, and villages all over Sicily throughout the latter half of the 19th century.
The 1870s saw not just the steady increase of Mafia power, but also the development of
many of their rituals which still survive to this day. In 1875, Palermo’s chief of
police reported on the initiation rights of Mafia, in which new members were made to prick
their finger and smear blood over the image of a Christian Saint, after which the bloodied
image was then burned, binding the initiate to undying loyalty, and symbolizing the death
of all traitors to Cosa Nostra. Another sacred tenet that had cropped up in the decades prior
was Omerta. Originating from the Sicilian word umiltà, meaning ‘humility’, Omerta
was a law that compelled all Mafioso to never speak about their affiliations to anyone outside
of their inner circle, under threat of death.
It was clear now that what had begun as a loose association of opportunistic brutes
had evolved into something much deeper, born from the chaos of Sicily’s upheaval. An
entire society existing in the shadows, and bound by blood. A society whose hooks sunk
deep into the lives of countless men, women, and children.
The 1880s saw Cosa Nostra power grow even further. Turrisi Colonna, the man who had
first brought public attention to the Mafia some twenty years earlier, was elected mayor
of Palermo in 1881. Supposedly a staunch opponent of Sicily’s criminal overlords, in reality,
Colonna had been paid off by the very people who had tried to gun him down decades before.
Heavy allegations pointed to a crooked mayor of a crooked city, protecting Mafioso from
the law, even hiring a Mafia member as his chief of Police.
Colonna was just one of many public servants whom the Mafia had ingratiated themselves
with; the mob’s ability to pull powerful politicians into their pocket became a key
strategy of theirs in the years to come, and an essential source of their growth as an
organization. So far was its reach, that around this era, a Roman correspondent of the British
daily The Times remarked that the gangsters were an “intangible sect whose organization
is as perfect as that of the Jesuits or the Freemasons, and whose secrets are more impenetrable.”
From here, we begin to enter the era known more broadly through popular film. Between
the 1880s and 1930s, one million Sicilians emigrated to America, and naturally, the Mafioso
went with them. The Prohibition-era of the 1920s saw Mafia activity explode in the United
States, as they made a fortune from smuggling bootleg liquor, and later on, branching out
into prostitution and drugs. While the Cosa Nostra of America operated independently from
their cousins back home in Sicily, they shared the same rituals of shadow and blood.
Mafia factions would continue to hold Sicily within its grip until the Maxi Trials of 1986
to 1992 when 475 high ranking Mafioso were rounded up, tried, and jailed by the Italian
government. As suggested by its name, these trials were the biggest in world history.
A whole new courtroom, fortified like a bunker, had to be built just to house all the proceedings,
with armed guards posted at every corner to deter Mafioso saboteurs. The Maxi trials were
responsible for single-handedly ending over 150 years of Cosa Nostra rule over Italy’s
most pristine southern isle.
From humble beginnings as hired guards, the Sicilian Mafia grew itself through the turmoil
of political upheaval, the desperation of the common peasant, and the greed of powerful
men willing to look the other way in exchange for lined pockets. While the height of their
global influence would peak in the United States through the 20th century onwards, it
is through their 19th century ancestors who held the rolling hills of Sicily in a grip
of fear, that such iconically bloody gangsters like Al Capone, Frank Castello, and Henry
Hill could exist.
Our series on the criminal syndicates will continue with a video on the origins of the
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