Journal Entries
Away for a While
Posted Jul 11, 2001
I'm off to austria biking on the Danube river, away for 15 days, but you can post stuff on my site anyway as I'll try to chec it anyway. BTW I'll be taking notes so I might make a guid entry on Biking on the Danube when I come back.
C Ya All
Discuss this Journal entry [1]
Latest reply: Jul 11, 2001
The sicilian mafia 0.4
Posted Jul 5, 2001
Not a proper guide entry yet. feel free to comment.
The Sicilian Mafia
In the broadest sense “mafia” refers to any form of criminal organization that ecxercises a degree of control over a certain territory.
In Sicily, however mafia describes a specific, if shifting, organization, deeply rooted in the cultural heritage of the land and profoundly intertwined with the political and economic powers.
A Brief History Of The Sicilian Mafia
Since 600 A.C. Sicily has been ruled by pretty much any Mediterannean population you can name (Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Normans, Spanish, French, other Spaniards, , English and Americans). This succession of authoritarian and often cruel governments has led the Sicilians to regard rulers and governments in general as enemies and in general something to hide from.
The Mafia is the criminal expression of this way of life.
From its roots which go back to the agricultural and semi-feudal power system whoose remnants where dismantled in Sicily only in this century, the mafia evolved several times to adapt itself to the evolving situations. Three main periods are clearly defineable:
First Period – Agricultural Mafia
Though as we have seen the mafia has its historic roots in the last two and a half milennia of Sicilian history it’s “formal” birth dates to the period immediately subsequent to the unification of Italy (1860). From this date and up to WW2 the mafiosi (members of the mafia) where the middlemen between the landlords and the peasants, controlling the fields, the wells, and instilling fear in the empoverished land workers ensuring that the popular revolts that where extracting concessions from the land owners in other parts of the world would not be echoed in Sicily.
Their profits came from the noblemen who paid for their services, and by various other means, such as forcing the peasants to buy water only at mafia-controlled wells, often at inflated prices as well.
So as is plain to see, from it’s outset the mafia managed to carve itself a niche by robbing from the population while at the same time presenting itself as a usefull form of population control for the official government.
The second period – The constructtion Mafia
This came to an abrupt change in about 1943 when the Supreme Allied Headquarters decided that an invasion by sea was going to be needed to free Italy of Fascism and Nazism.
Confronte with the problem of ensuring the support, or at least the neutrality, of the local population the allies took contacts with the Sicilian immigrant community in the US, finally offering imprisoned new york boss Lucky Luciano his freedom if he would accept to broker a pact with the Sicilian mafia. Their support in the coming invasion in exchange for the promise to appoint mafia bosses as mayors in the liberated towns of Sicily. Wether the pact between the United States and the mafia was actually undersigned or not is still a matter open to debate. The following facts may be freely interpreted by the reader in order to form his own opinion:
1. Lucky Luciano was freed, and charges dropped, he returned to Sicily and became a prominent figure in the post-war mafia.
2. Top Sicilian mafia bosses where appointed as mayors of the liberated towns.
3. The Allied troops where greeted with sentiments of joy by the local population (though this was also due to disillusonment with the fascist regimes promises).
In post-war Sicily the mafia, thanks to its control of the local administrations, where in a position to shepard Marshall Plan money in to the right pockets. The building of the highways, harbors and public housing projects where all carried out either by mafiosi, or by their friends who paid for the favor, and agreed to buy cement from certain companys emply certain people and so on.
If while travelling along the beautiful sicilian coastline, or in the cuntryside or in a historical center you come across some ugly, box shaped houses that look like they where designed by the same architect that gave us Ft.Leavenworth Naval Penitentiary chances are it dates to this period.
The Third Period – The Drug Mafia
Though the money flow connected to these construction pojects was fenomenal, the younger exponents of the mafia where starting to disaffectionate themselves with the system which costantly binded them to bank loans for their cash needs. Thanks to their political links (of which more will be said further on) they had a law passed that passed the buisiness of tax collecting on to private contractors, who were entitled to 10% of whatever they collected. The Salvo brothers where two such contractors who enriched themselves through this law. These schemes gave the mafia an increasingly large amount of liquid money. More money, in fact, than they could find uses for. What they ended up doing was entrusting it to Rosario Spatola, a major boss involved in the Sindona case, whose buisness card read “Industrialist”. It was later found out that his major association with the industrial world was the purchase of unrefined drugs in industrial quntities.
These drugs where then refined and shipped to the US via the mafia’s american cousins. The exact figure is of course unknown but it is safe to say that an extroardinarily high percentage of the drugs consumed in the US had been refined in Sicily.
Several problems arised connected to the laundering of these incredible amounts of dirty cash, and this was when the mafia started leaving a paper trail...
The Falcone – Borsellino offensive
A well established system was in place in sicilian courthouses in which judges who where handed mafia cases where faced with two choices
A- swamp the case, find an excuse to stall it, get a promotion and a pay rise.
B- Take the case seriously, ask questions, face pretty bad chances of winning and worse chances still of not having the case taken away from them just when they where closing in on the culprits.
Now, of course, if you where anything but a true hero the first choice might have seemed a tad more attractive than the second.
Luckily, by a gross mistake of the corrupt powers that reigned in Italy at the time, a mafia case was handed, in absentia of the designated judge, to a young bankruptcy prosecutor, judge Giovanni Falcone, who translated his goods tracking methods on to the fight against the mafia. By following the paper trail for the first time, Falcone asked would-be constructors questions regarding checks issued to colombian nationals. Of course no answer was forthcoming.
To be continued
Discuss this Journal entry [2]
Latest reply: Jul 5, 2001
Redfax
Researcher U180343
Write an Entry
"The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is a wholly remarkable book. It has been compiled and recompiled many times and under many different editorships. It contains contributions from countless numbers of travellers and researchers."