The Tendency to Form Mafias (part 3)
Beretta model 1917 automatic pistol, stripped
This is the last of three notes about the Italian tendency to form mafias. A few other other countries – China, Japan, Russia perhaps – spawn major organized crime syndicates, but they have much larger populations and their criminals, on a per capita basis, are not nearly as effective – as productive – as those coming from Italy. Why is that?
We argued in the last installment – (here) – that Italy has mafias because it likes to have them: because they are the darker side of the same coin that makes this such a nice place to live and to visit.
Since out and out crime is by definition a “bad” thing, we are going to try to explain all this here – without saying it is “good” – by talking about another, somewhat related gray-area phenomenon: corruption. Italy is good at this. You might want to see (here).
In our last note, we mentioned that it is not possible to directly bribe someone (in Italy) with whom you are not on good terms. It is not socially “cricket.” We left it at that, without saying why this is so and possibly without convincing you, the reader, that it is in fact the case.
A first and obvious element element is that, when you hand an envelope of cash to somebody, you want at least a degree of certainty that they will “stay bought.” Suppose they don’t. What are you going to do about that? Go to the cops?
Beyond that though, even if there are certainly exceptions, very, very few people who are “on the take” conceive of themselves as criminals. They believe whatever they are given is their due, that they deserve it. This is especially true in the social atmosphere we described in the last note, one based on reciprocal obligations between individuals.
Suppose that you require a “CAT” or “CT” scan – “Computerized Axial Tomography” – to save your life or that of one you love. The national medical service can get around to this, eventually, some few months away. On the other hand, there is a person who can do you a favor and move your scan up on the list. Could you be so ungrateful as to not thank them? They may have saved your life after all. Will some flowers be enough, a potted plant maybe? How about a more valuable equivalent, some cash in an envelope… It’s the same thing, realistically.
Now, let’s say you’re on the “take” side. If you know these folks, and you’ve done them an important favor, what could be more natural than that they’d want to square things by giving you a gift, a token of appreciation? It might even be offensive to say no, as if you did not even bother to recognize their gratitude, or considered that they were entirely too low-rent to offer it. On the other hand, if you’d never seen them in your life, that kind of gratuity would amount to a bribe – and you are not a crook, at least by your own lights.
Please note that, in market-oriented terms, all this creates a need to find a way to adjust an overly rigid system for allocating a scarce resource – a very expensive clinical exam – that otherwise would probably be handed out on a straightforward first come-first serve basis both to people who desperately need it and to those for whom it doesn’t really matter very much. In other words, according to honest market theory, people who have a desperate need for the exam ought to be prepared to pay something more because their lives are at stake – a rational, “fair” way of assuring that those who most need the resource actually get it.
At the same time, those who control this resource can’t really be expected to personally know everyone who might actually require its services. In other words, the system requires a broker in order to work correctly, someone who is a “friend” – or is a least “findable” – to those who might really need the service and is also, once again, “friendly” with those who control access to the device.
Well, that person belongs to the “mafia,” a medical mafia. There really is no other truth to say about this. Depending on how he or she is painted, we are talking about a criminal – but a necessary criminal, grease to make the system work.
We move only one step beyond when we talk about the “real” mafia. The organization is feudal, based on obligations that work both ways. The picciotto, the “soldier,” has obligations toward his capo, but can reasonably expect that his own needs will be met. There is a merchant – or something like one anyway – in all of this who is paying protection money, a kind of tax really. He may be a drug or a ladies of the night or a three card monte kind of merchant, but it’s all the same. In any event, shoplifters come to realize that it is not appropriate to steal in that “store,” a new competitor who sells below cost or has simply failed to understand how things work may have a fire.
It’s not nice to say this, but the merchant who can obtain these guarantees for, say, ten percent of his net – when the State wants more, but gives him jack – is probably wise to simply pay. That’s much the safer approach too.
And the mafia, the mafias, offer other services, things like drugs, women, gambling. As far as drugs go, the State is very conservative. It admits only tobacco and alcohol. Women? Nothing, at least in present-day Italy. The gambling is there, but the government is a miserly croupier, paying back – let’s take the case of Italian scratch card games – only around forty percent of the sum actually bet. Underworld “numbers” are a much better deal, unless of course you win (tax free!) enough to cause someone a serious financial problem…
Without putting too fine a point on it, the mafia then has reasons to exist. And if these reasons are hardly limited to Italy, it happens the Italians are particularly well-prepared to staff such organizations because they understand, accept and largely share a binding form of social regulation that does not require law to function.
Only a very few Italians are actually mafiosi in any literal sense, but they obviously have a huge leg up when it comes to making a career in that organization. They tend too to practice a watered down version in almost every area of human endeavor: in academia, in publishing and television, in business, certainly in politics. Italian business cannot hardly see a bidding contest without wanting to rig it, Italian investors fail utterly to understand why they should not act on their particular knowledge of some company’s activities – a thing called “insider trading” in Anglo-Saxon countries.
The mafia exists, everywhere, by standing between the desires of the population – whether for certainty in the operation of a commercial enterprise, the appetite for a spin at cards, as a guarantor of the source of drugs or even as a source of justice – and the actual behavior of government. Perhaps it ought not be a surprise that successful mafias prosper in democracies rather than in totalitarian states.
The “realpolitik” approach to public life is not currently very popular. If it was, it might be argued in light of all of this that the Italian State would do better to encourage and support its mafias – at least in their international manifestations – than to attempt without much success to suppress them. Oddly, we have already touched on this point (here) without really intending to.
Together with the Catholic Church and with the fashion industry – the sports cars are nice but don’t matter much – organized crime is one of the things that allows this country to count in the world, even with and in spite of its tradition of largely useless government. Italy is, on paper, one of the richest and most powerful nations on the face of the Earth, but you would not know this if your view is limited to the amazingly ineffective actions of those who nominally govern the place.
(end of part 3, you may wish to see also parts 1 and 2)