Blood, Business, "Honor"

By Patricia Blake

The origins of the Mafia are lost in the mists of Sicily's tortured history. Scholars disagree on whether the term came from maehfil, meaning union in the language of the 9th century Arab conquerors of Sicily, or from the Tuscan word maffia, signifying poverty or misery. But there is little doubt that centuries of foreign occupation and feudal oppression turned Sicily into a unique breeding ground for organized crime.

The precursors of the modern Mafia were the compagnie d'armi, small private armies that feudal overlords employed to enforce their authority. In the absence of law courts, these armies dispensed a hideous kind of primitive justice. Peasants who found a corpse with a hand chopped off knew that a petty thief had been punished. A body with severed genitals stuffed in his mouth meant that the dead man had "offended" the wife of a compagnie member. A missing tongue signified that someone had violated the code of omerta, or silence.

By the time the term Mafia came into general usage in the early 19th century, the descendants of the old compagnie d'armi had evolved into a secret hierarchical organization, divided into specialized sectors that controlled Sicily's cattle and pasturelands, slaughterhouses, fruit plantations, market gardens and ports. The nucleus of the "honored association," as the Mafia's members euphemistically referred to their organization, was the family, whose members were linked by blood or marriage. A group of families would be allied in a cosca (artichoke), a cluster of separate leaves forming a single unit.

The Mafia entered the U.S. along with the wave of immigration that peaked in the first decades of this century. Legendary Sicilian Mafia Chief Don Vito Cascio Ferro is said to have traveled to the U.S. in 1900 to help found the Black Hand, a Mafia-affiliated organization. Back home, Don Vito liked to boast of how he murdered New York City Police Detective Giuseppe Petrosino, an Italian American who had traveled to Palermo in 1909 to investigate the links between the Black Hand and the Sicilian Mafia. On the day the policeman arrived, Don Vito broke away from lunch at the house of a Sicilian deputy of the Italian parliament, shot Petrosino outside Palermo's courthouse and returned in the deputy's carriage to finish his meal. The deputy saved Don Vito from murder charges by swearing that his guest had never left his home.

In order to consolidate his dictatorship, Benito Mussolini decided to crush the Mafia in the mid-1920s. Using such draconian methods as torture and summary execution, the police weakened the Mafia's stranglehold on Sicily. Don Vito was arrested and convicted for smuggling. When the president of the court asked Don Vito if he had something to say in his defense, the tall, distinguished-looking old man with a flowing beard declared, "Gentlemen, since you have been unable to find any evidence for the numerous crimes I really have committed, you are reduced to condemning me for the only one I have not."

The Sicilian Mafia came back to life in 1943, however, when U.S. intelligence asked American Mafia leaders to get in touch with their old colleagues on the island and persuade them to facilitate the movement of Allied troops during the invasion of Sicily. In return, the U.S. military government allowed Mafiosi to resume positions of power in a number of key Sicilian towns. Among the top operators in postwar Sicily was Italian-born American Mobster Vito Genovese, who had fled to Italy in 1937 when New York City Special Prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey charged him with several underworld killings.

Genovese reappeared as an interpreter in the offices of the Allied Military Command in Italy. He soon became the head of a huge smuggling ring dealing in goods stolen from the U.S. Army. The Army arrested Geno vese in 1944, and he was forcibly returned to the U.S. By then the witnesses to the outstanding murder charge against him had disappeared and he was able to assume control of the Luciano crime family. In 1959 he was sentenced to 15 years on a narcotics charge and died in prison a decade later.

Among the Italian-American mobsters who are believed to have collaborated with U.S. intelligence before the Allied landing in Sicily was Charles ("Lucky')' Luciano. In 1946, Dewey commuted his 30-to 50-year sentence for running a New York prostitution ring so that he could be deported to Italy. Together with a number of other American mobsters, Luciano helped form a new organization that was far more interested in the burgeoning international drug market than in old-fashioned "businesses" such as cattle rustling and extortion. The inevitable clash between the new and old Mafia resulted in a sensational series of shootings and stabbings on the streets of Palermo in the mid-1950s. The killings marked a sinister turning point in the history of the honored association: henceforth no code of honor or oath of loyalty would prove stronger than the lure of incalculable profits in the drug trade.