The Tendency to Form Mafias (part 1)
Beretta model 1917 automatic pistol
At first glance, it is a paradox. Italy is in most respects a remarkably pacific place. Its streets are very safe by the standards of most countries – traffic aside of course. Even where petty crime is common, it is your camera or your car or your purse that is at risk, not your life.
Naples is currently having a fairly major gang war and much is being made of this in the Italian press, but the play in the papers has more to do with politics than public safety. The political flavor of the Neapolitan giunta – the City Council – is incompatible with that of the very edgy national government and something must give.
Italy is the country that invented organized crime in its modern form. It has not one, but four major mafias. They are the Sicilian Mafia properly speaking, whose North American branch is known as Cosa Nostra, the Neapolitan Camorra, the Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta and, down in Puglia, the “heel” of the Italian boot, something called the Sacra Corona Unita, or “United Holy Crown.”
These entities have surprising little in common and, at least as far as “Upper Italy” can tell, do not collaborate either willingly or very well, though they certainly do have what might be call “business relations.”
The most famous of them, the Sicilian organization, is both the oldest and, if we may, the most “respectable.” It has a strong central administration, a kind of elective monarchy that in its structure bears a surprising resemblance to the Catholic Church, something that is very likely not a pure coincidence. Like the Church, it passes through historical periods of decline and subsequent recovery. Like the Church, it may be eternal. See (here) and (here).
In order of notoriety, the Neapolitan Camorra is next up. Rather than a monolith on the Sicilian pattern, it is instead a sort of loose and continually shifting federation of urban bands operating in and around the city of Naples. The Camorra once had a relatively romantic tradition, at least in the popular literature, in which the camorristi were portrayed as semi-dashing if misguided “men of honor,” not unlike the literary figure of the Parisian apaches in their striped T-shirts. Drug money ruined that.
The Calabrian ‘Ndrangheta is a tribal affair, as wild and savage as the desperate part of Italy it comes from. These are the mad-men who would be the only Italian mafia that you might want to send in against a Jamaican necktie gang. They scare the Colombians, the Russians and everyone else, so it is probably just as well that they are not very sophisticated in their criminal ways and appear not to like venturing too far from that particular part of the toe of the Italian boot in which they operate, territory where for the most part the Italian State prefers not to venture far from the main roads
The newest and least alarming is the Sacra Corona Unita. As the fey name, appropriate to some sort of Catholic confraternity, would seem to suggest, the SCU is a substantially modern invention, a kind of graft onto the sort of rural mafia that flourished all across the Southern Italian countryside as a counterbalance to the extraordinarily thuggish class of big landowners – latifondisti – once dominant down there.
This traditionally hayseed organization came into contact, mostly as a source of manual labor, with the professionally managed smuggling operations that used to run across the Southern Adriatic Sea from the Balkan coast. Business, which was mostly cigarettes coming in and whatever once-communist Albania needed going back out, is kind of off now. An attempt to get into the illegal immigrant trade started well, but then went to pieces when the Sicilians made much more workmanlike arrangements with the Libyan Government.
When four reasonably effective mafias all spring up in the same country, you really have to ask why that is. This is the first in a series of three notes on why Italy is so good at organized crime – and the many less-violent manifestations that resemble it.
(end of part 1)