ITALIAN MAFIA HISTORY

italian mafia

The Mafia (also known as Cosa Nostra) is a criminal brotherhood that emerged in the mid 19th century Sicily. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct.

history

The study of past events, particularly in human affairs
a record or narrative description of past events; “a history of France”; “he gave an inaccurate account of the plot to kill the president”; “the story of exposure to lead”
the discipline that records and interprets past events involving human beings; “he teaches Medieval history”; “history takes the long view”
The past considered as a whole
the aggregate of past events; “a critical time in the school’s history”
The whole series of past events connected with someone or something

italian mafia history – American Mafia:

American Mafia: A History of Its Rise to Power

“Reppetto’s book earns its place among the best . . . he brings fresh context to a familiar story worth retelling.” —The New York Times Book Review

Organized crime—the Italian American kind—has long been a source of popular entertainment and legend. Now Thomas Reppetto provides a balanced history of the Mafia’s rise—from the 1880s to the post-WWII era—that is as exciting and readable as it is authoritative.

Structuring his narrative around a series of case histories featuring such infamous characters as Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, Reppetto draws on a lifetime of field experience and access to unseen documents to show us a locally grown Mafia. It wasn’t until the 1920s, thanks to Prohibition, that the Mafia assumed what we now consider its defining characteristics, especially its octopuslike tendency to infiltrate industry and government. At mid-century the Kefauver Commission declared the Mafia synonymous with Union Siciliana; in the 1960s the FBI finally admitted the Mafia’s existence under the name La Cosa Nostra.

American Mafia is a fascinating look at America’s most compelling criminal subculture from an author who is intimately acquainted with both sides of the street.

The Mafia (also known as Cosa Nostra) is a Sicilian criminal secret society which is believed to have first developed in the mid-19th century in Sicily. An offshoot emerged on the East Coast of the United States and in Australia[1] during the late 19th century following waves of Sicilian and Southern Italian emigration (see also Italian diaspora). In North America, the Mafia often refers to Italian organized crime in general, rather than just traditional Sicilian organized crime. According to historian Paolo Pezzino: "The Mafia is a kind of organized crime being active not only in several illegal fields, but also tending to exercise sovereignty functions – normally belonging to public authorities – over a specific territory…"[2]

The Sicilian Cosa Nostra is a loose confederation of about one hundred Mafia groups, also called cosche or families, each of which claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town or village or a neighborhood of a larger city, though without ever fully conquering and legitimizing its monopoly of violence. For many years, the power apparatuses of the single families were the sole ruling bodies within the two associations, and they have remained the real centers of power even after superordinate bodies were created in the Cosa Nostra beginning in the late 1950s (the Sicilian Mafia Commission).[3]

Some observers have seen "mafia" as a set of attributes deeply rooted in popular culture, as a "way of being", as illustrated in the definition by the Sicilian ethnographer, Giuseppe Pitre, at the end of the 19th century: "Mafia is the consciousness of one’s own worth, the exaggerated concept of individual force as the sole arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of interests or ideas."[4]

Many Sicilians did not regard these men as criminals but as role models and protectors, given that the state appeared to offer no protection for the poor and weak. As late as the 1950s, the funeral epitaph of the legendary boss of Villalba, Calogero Vizzini, stated that "his ‘mafia’ was not criminal, but stood for respect of the law, defense of all rights, greatness of character. It was love." Here, "mafia" means something like pride, honour, or even social responsibility: an attitude, not an organization. Likewise, in 1925, the former Italian Prime Minister Vittorio Emanuele Orlando stated in the Italian senate that he was proud of being mafioso, because that word meant honourable, noble, generous.[5][6]

Etymology

There are several theories about the origin of the term. The Sicilian adjective mafiusu may derive from the Arabic mahyas, meaning "aggressive boasting, bragging", or marfud meaning "rejected". Roughly translated, it means "swagger", but can also be translated as "boldness, bravado". In reference to a man, mafiusu in 19th century Sicily was ambiguous, signifying a bully, arrogant but also fearless, enterprising, and proud, according to scholar Diego Gambetta.[7]

According to the Sicilian ethnographer Giuseppe Pitre, the association of the word with the criminal secret society was made by the 1863 play I mafiusi di la Vicaria (The Beautiful (people) of Vicaria) by Giuseppe Rizzotto and Gaetano Mosca, which is about criminal gangs in the Palermo prison.[8] The words Mafia and mafiusi (plural of mafiusu) are never mentioned in the play, and were probably put in the title because it would add local flair.

The association between mafiusi and criminal gangs was made by the association the play’s title made with the criminal gangs that were new to Sicilian and Italian society at the time. Consequently, the word "mafia" was generated from a fictional source loosely inspired by the real thing and was used by outsiders to describe it. The use of the term "mafia" was subsequently taken over in the Italian state’s early reports on the phenomenon. The word "mafia" made its first official appearance in 1865 in a report by the prefect of Palermo, Filippo Antonio Gualterio.

Leopoldo Franchetti, an Italian deputy who travelled to Sicily and who wrote one of the first authoritative reports on the mafia in 1876, saw the Mafia as an "industry of violence" and described the designation of the term "mafia": "the term mafia found a class of violent criminals ready and waiting for a name to define them, and, given their special character and importance in Sicilian society, they had the right to a different name from that defining vulgar criminals in other countries."[9] He saw the Mafia as deeply rooted in Sicilian society and impossible to quench unless the very structure of the island’s social institutions were to undergo a fundamental change.[10]

The real name: Cosa Nostra

According to some mafiosi, the real name of the Mafia is "Cosa Nostra" ("Our thing"). Many have claimed, as did the Mafia turncoat Tommaso Buscetta, that

CAPONE

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This is an Original press photo of the Mafia’s number one son Alphonse "Scarface" Capone seen here with a Chicago official in 1939.

The photo is in bad shape. My touch up work is just as bad. The scan is poor as well. But, enjoy this little piece of history 🙂

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italian mafia history

Hailed in Italy as the best book ever written about the mafia in any language, Cosa Nostra is a fascinating, violent, and darkly comic account that reads like fiction and takes us deep into the inner sanctum of this secret society where few have dared to tread.In this gripping history of the Sicilian mafia, John Dickie uses startling new research to reveal the inner workings of this secret society with a murderous record. He explains how the mafia began, how it responds to threats and challenges, and introduces us to the real-life characters that inspired the American imagination for generations, making the mafia an international, larger than life cultural phenomenon. Dickie’s dazzling cast of characters includes Antonio Giammona, the first “boss of bosses”; New York cop Joe Petrosino, who underestimated the Sicilian mafia and paid for it with his life; and Bernard “the Tractor” Provenzano, the current boss of bosses who has been hiding in Sicily since 1963.