( Photo by www.sperimentaleleonardo.it)   In the history of Italy, or rather, of the Unification of Italy, there is a constant: the search for the superstructure, the “hidden power” which conditions the economy, the politics and, therefore, the life of the Italians. Thus, there was the labored search for the “Big Brother” during the “years of the bullets” and there was, and in certain ways, there still is, the search for the “Third Level” of the mafia, in which not even Giovanni Falcone believed. Different, obviously, is the discussion on the horizontal dimensions of the collusions and the profit sharing between mafia and power. The issue that Alberto Cisterna addresses in this Number is the mafia, or rather, the mafias, collocated within the history of Italy. A parallel history which starts before the Unification of Italy, with the Report in 1838 of Pietro Calà Ulloa, Attorney General of Trapani and arrives at the Article 416 bis of the Criminal Code which, for the first time, defines the Mafioso association, beyond the geographic collocation of the term mafia. But the “omertà” – the conspiracy of silence – let us define the Mafioso conduct in this way, imposes the decline of the law, wherever the criminal structure thrives. And it is only with the recovery of legality that it will be possible to win the war against organized crime. But a cultural leap will be indispensable, which, in part, has already happened, with the abandoning of conventional wisdom, and with a practical vision of the “mafiosità” which allow immediate and targeted interventions.

A dusty literature unravels the history of the Country like a dense sequence of crimes, murders and, above all, conspiracies. There is a non-marginal and, especially, combative portion of the society which even tends to hypothesize that the life of the Nation can be recounted as an uninterrupted criminal romance, in which mafia, hidden powers, foreign potentates and economic lobbies have decided the fate of the collective life: that a dark demiurge holds the fate of the society according to an inscrutable criminal design.
The black holes of the Italian history (the unpunished massacres, the scandals which have never been thoroughly investigated, the complicities which remain in the shadows) are the occasion to attribute to a sort of enemy – invisible and yet ubiquitous – the most nefarious responsibilities, the most villainous agreements. An underground mainstream to the Institutions and to the public life in which undisclosed or not fully understood atrocities are hidden.
And yet the rottenness that has, too many times, corroded the republican ethics and tainted the legitimacy of the Institutions does not have a mysterious face, nor does it assume indecipherable behaviour; the corrosion and scars appear more like the dark side of a society, the Italian one, capable of explosions of remarkable generosity and humiliating failures. Much has been said and written about the Italian vices and virtues and, perhaps this opaque territory of the collective morality can be represented in the words which, with certain harshness, Francesco De Sanctis dedicated to the work of Guicciardini: “In Guicciardini an already resigned generation appears. It has no illusions. And since it sees no remedy to that corruption, there, it also enfolds itself, and of it makes its wisdom and its aureole. Its Memories are the Italian corruption encoded and elevated to a rule of life. The God of Guicciardini is his own particular one”.
Probably, in a view prone to anthropological enchantment and to ethnographic temptations, the deep roots of an undeniably all-Italian phenomenon, the mafias, could be recognized in this atavistic contradiction of the National spirit, in this perennial oscillation between civic and religious solidarity, on one side, and relentless pursuit of ones own interests, on the other. (this is the famous theory of Giuseppe Pitrè, according to whom “the mafia is not a sect, or an association, it has no regulations or statutes … The mafia is consciousness of its own being, the exaggerated concept of individual strength, the one and only arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of interests and ideas, where the intolerance of superiority is even worse than the arrogance of others”).
Or else, with more adherence to the history of the Country, we must take into consideration the circumstance that the awareness of the existence of the mafia in Sicily is practically coeval with the Unification of Italy, when a world which had remained confined within a portion of the Bourbon kingdom enters into contact and opposes the new regulations of the newly proclaimed Nation.
There was, it is true, the testimony of the Attorney General of Trapani, Pietro Calà Ulloa, who in a Report of 1838 directed to his superiors, indicated the presence of “brotherhoods” and “strange sects” “the people have come to tacit agreement with the criminals” through “Unions or brotherhoods, kinds of sects, they call them parties, which, headed by “landowners” and “parish priests” realize “little governments within the Government” for negotiations between victims and perpetrators of crimes, with which the power of pursuing crimes is taken away from the legal system, for other schemes against the public officials. The Magistrate writes: “there is not an employee in Sicily who does not prostrate himself at the nod of a powerful person and who has not thought of taking advantage of his own position. This general corruption has made the people resort to exceedingly strange and dangerous remedies. In many areas there are brotherhoods, kinds of sects that are called parties: without meetings, without other ties but that of the dependence on a boss, who is a landowner here, or a parish priest there. A common fund provides for the needs – perhaps to exonerate an official, or to buy him, or to protect him, or to blame an innocent person. The people have come to tacit agreement with the criminals. When thefts occur, mediators appear to offer transactions for the recovery of the stolen objects. Many high magistrates cover these brotherhoods with an impenetrable protection, such as Scarlata, Judge of the High Civil Court in Palermo, such as Siracusa, another magistrate … It is not possible to persuade the citizen guards to patrol the streets; or to find witnesses for crimes committed in full daylight. At the center of such a state of dissolution, there is a capital with its luxury and its feudal pretensions – in the middle of the XIX Century – a country in which 40 thousand proletarians live, the subsistence of which depends on the luxury and caprices of the bosses. In this umbilicus of Sicily, you can buy public office, justice is corrupt and ignorance is bred”. Leonardo Sciascia, The History of the Mafia, in Quaderni Radicali, Year XV, January – June 1991, N° 30-31).
But as the historians comment, it concerned an act which, on looking closer, did not signal the presence of a rebellious or anti-State phenomenon, but the sole practice of concealed forms of regulation of controversies between private parties, a sort of ‘proto-mafia’. Salvatore Lupo write: “In 1864 in his short treatise on the current state of public security in Sicily, Nicolò Turrisi Colonna, component of the revolutionary Government in 1849, subsequently a Senator of Italy and Mayor of Palermo, exponent of the moderate Left, explains the phenomenon very well. His is the first book on the mafia, even though the word ‘mafia’ does not appear. Turrisi tells of a “sect” composed of thieves and smugglers, said to be ordered according to the rules of the “umiltà” (humility) (a Masonic term which becomes, in dialect “omertà” (code of silence), and explains that in this sect the decisions are taken in assemblies, which one enters upon taking an oath, and that its courts can hand down death sentences. In 1860, the sect was used for political purposes, continued Turrisi, but in 1864, it is necessary to reckon with this reality, at least, if the Government does not adopt adequate measures”. (History of the Mafia. The organized crime in Sicily from its origins to the present day, Rome, 1993).
The axis of oscillation around which gravitate cultural attitudes and methods of interpretation of the mafia remains – at a distance of over a century – while still represented, at one extreme, by an anthropological conception that ties the Mafioso actions to a kind of interior predisposition connected to social and environmental factors, and at the other end, by a purely forensic vision that identifies in mafia conduct the features of a delinquent way oriented towards profit. Up to the present, one or the other definitions, and all the intermediate ones, constitute an arena for debate on the mafia and the anti-mafia, since it is evident that it concerns approaches which demand solutions and prefigure dystonic scenarios or, at least, not completely convergent.
It is worthwhile, therefore, to hazard a few considerations, with the awareness that the considerations which have been prepared do not aspire to any scientific distinction.
They are pervaded, to a certain extent, by the conviction that the particular ability of the Mafioso organizations to resist any action of contrast from the State finds its raison dêtre not only in the difficulty of producing appropriate strategies and durable efforts, but also in a sort of “in itself” of the Mafioso actions in which one can glimpse peculiar traits of the South and its post-unification history.
It is necessary to proceed little at a time and very carefully, given the endless congeries of ideas and debates (also bitter) which, for decades have condensed around these issues.
Let us, therefore, commence from certain considerations made by the President of the Republic in his speech held on the 17th March in the joint session of Parliament in occasion of the opening of the celebrations of the 150^th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy:“And the brigands of Southern Italy were eradicated, even though we had to pay for the vital necessity of defeating that danger of legitimist reaction and of National disintegration with the price of a sometimes ferocious repression in response to the ferocity of the brigandage and, in the long term, with the price of a tendency to alienation and hostility towards the State that would be even more entrenched in the South”.
One can certainly share the dry severity of this syntagm: “tendency to alienation and hostility towards the State” and it does not matter whether it is the daughter of the Sanfedism or of the Southern Latifondism, of the Bourbon Administration or of the Garibaldi Annexation. What counts is that on this unresolved political and ideological aporia, on this sketchy constitutional loyalty or civicness, a dual sense of belonging is created, which only the modernity or, better still, the globalization of the last decade seems able to sweep away, together with, unfortunately, far deeper ethical roots; as the highest judiciary of the nation has sternly warned (“We shall withstand – in this great open sea – the trials which await us, as we have done in crucial moments of the past, because we have, also today, those great reserves of human and moral resources. But we shall succeed on one condition: that the strong cement of national unity prevails once again not eroded and dissolved by blind partisanship, by the widespread loss of the sense of limit and responsibility. I do not know when and how this will happen; I trust that it happens; let us all convince ourselves, deeply, that this is, by now, the condition of the common salvation, of the common progress”).
We shall treat this question further.
For now, we cannot but consider a crucial date in the history of the contrast to mafia-type criminality. The fight against the mafia is near its thirtieth year. It is an approximate calculation if one looks at the history of the Country, but at least from a regulatory standpoint, the estimate has a certain dose of reliability. Certainly there have been no solemn proclamations, nor can we indicate a precise date. The war on the mafia, like all modern conflicts, is a de-formalized war, without ritual. Not only removed from the traditional rules of the law of war, but also far from the solemn rhetoric of the words pronounced on the 20^th September 2001 by George W. Bush before the Congress of the United States: “On September 11th, enemies of freedom committed an act of war against our Country. Americans have known wars, but for the past 136 years they have been wars on foreign soil, except for one Sunday in 1941”. The shame of Pearl Harbour, the only day of war on American soil in 136 years of history: the surprise attack which was not preceded by the timely declaration of belligerence on the part of the Empire of the Rising Sun.
Many times the mafias have begun hostilities, perpetrating the ignominy of the surprise attack, committing shocking ambushes. The mafia Pearl Harbour materialized in Palermo in the evening of 3^rd September 1982, in Via Carini, with the killing of Prefect Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. That event marks, in all likelihood, the beginning of the war fought between mafia and State, at least, from a juridical point of view. It was, however, not men of the Government, nor summit members of the Police or the Judiciary who responded to that aggression and violence of Cosa Nostra. The realization of the war happened on the 5^th September 1982 during the church funeral service, in the presence of the Heads of State and a frightened and speechless congregation. The formalities are performed by a man in the vestments of cardinal: “We are all dismayed spectators of the development of a chain of violence and vengeance, all the more horrifying because, while the moves and decisions of those who must provide for the security and well-being of everyone – be they private citizens, officials or authorities of the same State – appear so slow and uncertain, compared to the more decided, rapid and determined actions of those who have the mind, the will and the ready force to strike”. It recalls, and it can be applied, a well-known phrase from Latin literature, by Sallust, I believe, in De bellum Jurgurthinum: ‘Dum Romae consulitur Saguntum expugnatur’; while Rome thinks of what to do the City of Sagunto is conquered by the enemy”.
His Excellency, Salvatore Pappalardo, Cardinal of the Diocese of Palermo, pronounces a phrase that within a few seconds enters the moral and civil patrimony of the Country and breaks through the wall of belligerence: the city is stormed, Saturday 11^th September 1982, the Government acknowledges that the clash is inevitable and with a Law Decree, the season of the fight against the ‘cosche’ (Sicilian mafia clans) begins. The enemy exists and it has a name. It is called ‘mafia’. A new article is incorporated in a passage of the Criminal Code, which was written 50 years previously: Article 416-bis which punishes the Mafioso associations. It is not only the legislation which many investigators and politicians had urged for years for the purpose of better fighting and punishing the Mafioso, but contains also the “rules of engagement” to observe during the hostilities.
To be effective any conflict requires, above all else, that the enemy is identified and is described with the maximum possible accuracy and the Article 416-bis fulfills this task: “the association is of the mafia type when those who are part of it avail themselves of the force of intimidation of the mafia membership and of the condition of subjection and ‘omerta’ resulting from it, to commit crimes, to acquire directly or indirectly the management or, however, the control of economic activities, concessions, authorizations, contracts and public services or to realize unjust profits or advantages for themselves or others”. Ten years later – a few days before the Capaci massacre, and a few months from the murder of the Honourable Salvo Lima, the following was added: “or else, with the purpose of impeding or hindering the free exercise of the vote or to procure votes for themselves or others during elections”.
Let us omit any legal assessment on the syntax adopted in the writing of the new crime of “association of a mafia-type” and let us also put aside any consideration on the influences that a certain sociological and anthropological vision of the mafia has exercised in the drafting of the legal text. Rather, let us concentrate on the fact that Art. 416-bis is not limited to punish the Mafioso, but also wishes to define the mafia, to clarify the criminal and social objectives, to unmask the hegemony project over the Sicilian society and the South in general. This last portion of the Country is explicitly mentioned in the last part of the text, where one reads: “The provision of the present Article applies also to the camorra, to the ‘ndrangheta and to other associations, howsoever locally named which, exercising the force of intimidation of the mafia membership, pursue objectives corresponding to the mafia-type associations”. The perfunctory corollary dedicated to the camorra et similia allows us to understand that the principal preoccupation of the State was that of challenging the most formidable and ferocious adversary. The new crime is directed, principally, against the Palermo Cosa Nostra. To indicate what the mafia is and, therefore, who the mafia are, is the first step against the omertà and the intimidation, also that suffered by the Institutions, which in the previous decades have even denied the existence of the mafia. The element of fear is the real objective of the Art. 416-bis, the subject of all attention; the obsessive and paralyzing fear, that which renders the Institutions distracted or accomplices, that which forces the Sicilians to turn their heads the other way. It is necessary to face this fear because it would be dangerous to elude it again. And it is necessary to do it in a clear way, without hesitation or reticence: the omertà is the fear of admitting that one is frightened.
“I will boast then, most willingly of my weaknesses … hence I am happy in my infirmity, in the outrages, in the necessities, in the persecutions, in the agonies suffered for Christ: when I am weak, it is then that I am strong” (Paolo, II letter to the Corinthians).
It is necessary to transform the weakness of the fear from an instrument which is firmly in the hands of the Mafiosi, into evidence to use against the new “Unnamables” during the course of the trials. Every time a witness remains silent or lies, one will have an element to believe that the accused is indeed a Mafioso; it is this silence that begins to tell something about him and his organization. At this point everything can be unveiled: the method, the purposes, the will to dominate, the means employed and resources at his disposal. “ …rapid and determined actions of those who have the mind, will and ready force to strike” had thundered the voice of Cardinal Pappalarda and the State writes the Article 416-bis admitting that the Nation is filled with men who not only jeopardize the lives and possessions of the citizens (“to commit their crimes”), but exercise “the force of intimidation of the mafia membership and of the conditions of subjection and omertà which results”, threaten to take-over “the management or, however, the control of economic activities, concessions, authorizations, contracts and public services” to secure for themselves “unjust profits” and even “to impede or hinder the free exercise of the vote”.
The prisons are not sufficient to stop such a warlike and ferocious force. We need to deprive the mafia not only of men, but also of the resources: confiscation will be the other instrument employed in the field of this conflict, which began in 1982. Just as in any other war, victory is possible on the condition that the wealth that supports the war effort of the adversary is dissolved, also the mafia must see the erosion of their riches and accumulated capital, since the “cosche” our not limiting themselves to infiltrate the legal economy, but are moving to occupy the society. (ref: from last intervention in Forum - State confiscation of accumulated assets of organized crime, by Emanuela C. Del Re, in Gnosis N° 2 /2010). It is evident that it has not been sufficient and the massacres of 1992-1993, the killing of Don Puglisi, of Libero Grassi, of many men from the Forces of Law an Order, of politicians, entrepreneurs and of parents of police cooperators are all remembered in these tragedies. In fact, the phase of social and military escalation completed in a few decades in their territories, the Mafioso function and vocation has claimed a complete hegemony over men and resources and have dangerously overflowed towards the Center-north, towards Europe and elsewhere.
The Italian mafias, unlike other criminal organizations, are not solely voracious structures, in other words, oriented exclusively towards the perception of illegal profits, but aim at the subjection of the social aggregations of reference. In the long campaign of control, the mafias have progressively involved ever-increasing numbers of social groups, making them participants in the distribution of the stolen wealth and gaining their loyal cooperation. Where it has been necessary, they have practiced appalling violence, annihilating any resistance and smashing every obstacle in their path. In other cases, they have moved with great flexibility, avoiding any brutal opposition and moving on the side of cooptation and corruption.
Nevertheless, it is indubitable that in the backward and depressed perimeter of the Southern societies, the Mafiosi organizations have triggered a formidable and villainous process of social innovation.
If one could follow, in parallel, the life of the Mafioso of a small Calabrian town and that of his immigrated contemporary in Lombardy or Germany, in the 50’s and 60’s, we should notice a difference which is not made of blood and money alone. The distinction would concern, in a much more incisive way, the context of modernity into which the boss has managed to place himself, his relatives and affiliates, notwithstanding an apparent territorial stagnation. For example, the drug business between America and Europe has constituted not only the occasion for enormous profits for the mafia, but also the occasion for a refined social and cultural emancipation, founded on the knowledge and use of the banking systems, commercial practices, transportation networks, foreign languages and so on.
A same line of development takes place in the mafia involvement in the flows of public money intended for health, agriculture or public contracts. Also in these sectors the clans have acquired an extraordinary competence in weaving relations with the decisional centers of politics, with the Public Administrations or legal businesses. Social strata which were totally marginalized from the usual channels of political, social and economic development have gained, through the exercise of violence, a prominence and a role otherwise inaccessible. The Mafiosi have reached objectives which would have been possible to achieve through much slower and, probably, more selective and elite paths in relation to the social structures involved.
There has been no cooptation by the Southern bourgeoisie, for the most part cautious and suspicious: the men of the clans simply subdued it, imposing their oppressive presence. In the South there has been the explosion of consistent portions of subordinate classes, suddenly included in the net of the beneficiaries of the new wealth due to family ties or loyalty to the bosses. To the clientele of the Southern political bourgeoisie, the mafia responded with the clans, with the families; they assimilated the method of the employment of power and applied it with extreme effectiveness and harshness.
The social metamorphosis which, starting from the poverty of the small centers of the South (from Corleone to Casal di Principe to Gioia Tauro) came to the sharing of the power with the local and National oligarchies, gives a trend of expansion which would be difficult to repeat in other scenarios.
Little by little, as the Mafioso organizations acquired a role of influence in political and economic affairs, substantial numbers of social groups recognized in the Mafioso method the aptitude to realize an efficient allocation of the resources and a rational distribution of the power. The failure of the policies of economic support to the Mezzogiorno and the resulting inefficiency of the Public Administration has, for decades, channeled towards the mafia the real consensus of significant segments of the population and progressively, of the same Southern elite. In many regions of the South, the clans, due to the ruthless operative efficiency by which they are known, were able to set up a regulation system in which converge: the instances of protection of an entrepreneurship unable to withstand the competition of the markets; the necessities of strata of the population needing economic assistance and mediation with the governing classes and, the anxieties of the political class to gain electoral consensus in the presence of a strong fragmentation of the party representation. (Diego Gambetta, the Sicilian Mafia: An industry of private protection, Turin 1992).
In this initial phase or, if we wish, pre-imperial phase, a real Mafioso deregulation was effected, with the intention of cornering every source of wealth at the expense of any rule and with the daily sacrifice of legality. This abridgement is too eclectic and imprecise, but serves to introduce a point of the discussion.
At the apogee of its vital cycle the mafia constitutes, for all purposes, a “Totalitarian System” in a sense analogous to that usually used to described Nazism and Stalinism, and as such, acts as obsessive guardian of the status quo and is a firewall against any innovation which can alter the social order. (“No-one bribes where he can bully”, wrote Sir Lewis Namier). The conservative drive compels the mafias to maintain a continual operation of containment and contrast of the factors of modernization of the society and incites it against any innovation likely to unbalance the control, at least, if they themselves are not able to dispose of it. The Cupola (heads) of the Cosa Nostra or the summits of the ‘ndrangheta in Aspromonte, in the same way as happens in other political and economic segments of the civil society, are nothing more than the instrument necessary to control the status quo; celebrating the strength of the mafias and reassuring them of their invincibility.
According to the classical scheme individuated by Eric Hobsbawn and Terence Ranger, the mafia do not limit themselves to exercising great authority, but have “invented a tradition” which they can, in a certain sense, justify and perpetuate (one thinks of the legendary Beati Paoli which has entered into the archaic paraphernalia of the mafia, thanks to the serialized romance published by Luigi Natoli in “Il Giornale di Sicilia” newspaper from 1909 to 1910).
The idea is that in the hidden and intimate recesses of the Southern society lurks a Mafioso sentiment – poised between rebelliousness and oppression that the mafia embodies and organizes – which is, to a great extent, the hard core of this tradition, invented from scratch by the clans, modelled on oaths, rites, ranks and ceremonies. The greatest error that was made in this scenario was that of confusing what appears to be mafia with the reality of the mafia, to be convinced that the tradition was not cunningly invented and nurtured, but had its roots in an obscure, impenetrable “somewhere” in which one does not ‘become’ a Mafioso, one is ‘born’ a Mafioso.
So, the fight against the clans suddenly loses its technical characteristics, loses the dimension of the State winning in a direct clash and suggests the idea that the defeat of the mafia requires a complete social palingenesis, a profound change of the power structures tout court understood. The Mafioso conservation is confused with ambiguous political immobility of the South, to the point where the vision of the one overlaps the other, constructing a single imaginary power block. This vision assumes the tones of an insurmountable premise and, therefore, implicit in any strategy of contrast to the mafia.
It would be complex and perhaps uncomfortable to explain the balance reached, the subtle play of mirrors in which the more militant and radical anti-mafia and the mafia continue to reflect. A game is played that is at once, psychological, cultural and political; it involves the role of the repression apparatuses of the mafia; their institutional weight, the moral suasion which they are able to exercise in the places of politics and public opinion, the professional advantages and of images associated with a militancy.

To thoroughly understand how the decline of the clans can be realized, it is necessary, without any reticence whatsoever, to dispose of the alibi of a plundered and enslaved Mezzogiorno, of the ideological vision according to which the Meridional populations live in a condition of apparent democracy which conceals a world dominated by the diarchy conspirator of mafia and corrupt elite. Thunderstruck by the successes of the blitzkrieg of the 70’s and 80’s, the Mafioso acted as if they could profit from almost inexhaustible human, moral and economic resources. In reality, the breakdown of not a small part of the social fabric, the loss of any collective conscience, corroded the habitat which had allowed the Mafioso phenomenon to grow and consolidate: the social eco-system could not withstand indefinitely the savage onslaught put into effect by a no longer small portion of criminals, but with the cooperation of entire segments of the population that took advantage of the decline of legality.
Let us take the case of the movement of refuse or illegal building in the Southern regions, with millions of square meters of houses constructed anywhere in defiance of any urban plans or regulations or decorum, with the illegal occupation of public areas, green zones and coastlines. Population, mafia, politics and entrepreneurs have stipulated through this pillage, started in the 70’s and continued at a rapid pace for two decades, an admirable social and criminal pact. The most underprivileged classes remedied their own elementary housing necessity; the legal entrepreneurs and the mafia constructed the properties in the silence of the local public administration, which in turn, from this inertia, obtained staunch electoral support. The mafia control of the territory was the ideal instrument to allow that no-one saw and no-one attempted to stem the irremediable ruination of the South. We can still cite the business of the refuse emergency in Campania: the collusive agreement between politics and camorra had gone on for years with the resulting devastation of thousands of hectares of land, rivers, hillsides, arriving at the appalling example of the garbage dumping road. Also in this case, connivance of the local populations, – who gained economic advantages or patronage from the business – was discovered, and the situation lasted until the total breakdown of the mechanism and the irreversible degradation of the environment.
«Ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant», warned Tacitus. The mafia like any imperial structure tends to squander substantial economic, social and moral resources. The implementation and, in certain zones, the liquefaction of any perception of the common good, the disposal of any legal or cultural snags able to impede the desire of the mafias to dominate could perpetuate itself provided that the cycle of the criminal growth is unlimited.
However, the original moral and civil patrimony of the Southern populations represented, like the environmental and financial resources, a decisive factor for the mafia escalation, for the constitution of a “vertical” power.
In territories where significant portions of the population are convinced of a permanent impunity for illegal actions and of a correlative ineffectiveness of the actions of the State, the clans operate with growing difficulty. It was not by chance that in the environmental interceptions carried out at Palermo in 2007, the bosses complained of the effects of the recent pardon and of the fresh outbreak of neighbourhood petty delinquency, which jeopardized their businesses and their prestige. The speakers in the interception are Giuseppe Bisesi and Giuseppe Libreri, a young emerging 31 year-old, and the boss of the Mafioso Family of Termini Imerese: “there’s always been the problem of thieves, not only here - all over. Now with this pardon they’ve given… we’re in a real mess. There’s a situation in Palermo: pharmacies and supermarkets don’t feel safe at night anymore. But we can’t have this! It’s all going to hell”.
The moment in which the Mafioso method is perceived by all as an effective system to influence the economy, employment, business or politics, the holders of the privilege lose the monopoly of the force and lose the competitive advantage. Paradoxically, it cannot be said that the bosses have not perceived the risks of a widespread degeneration of the social fabric. Like men of the Institutions or the Church, of sensitive intellectuals and shrewd businessmen, also this singular and perverse category of “social operators” has weighed the difficulty of working in a disaggregated stripped community.
It is not a coincidence that Bernardo Provenzano or Salvatore Lo Piccolo were seriously immersed in the reading of sacred texts or in the editing of the Decalogue of the “perfect Mafioso”. They are convinced that the criminal system can hold its own on the condition that the most profound nature of power “from above” is not altered – imperial, of course.
The frequent findings in the hideouts of the bosses, as also in the abandoned houses of the affiliates, of pages bearing hand-written formulas of initiation, the continuation in prison, of the rites of attribution of the “ranks” among acolytes are the evident signs of a criminal culture that does not want to withdraw and which, on the contrary, claims to represent a “vertical” cohesion factor for vast social strata. It is the image of Giuseppe Salvatore Riina, son of the boss of Cosa Nostra, who on the 28th February 2008, as soon as he was released from prison, returned to Corleone to presents himself at the Carabinieri barrack to know the Commander and “to be known”. The Emperor has his rituals and does not intend to renounce them, for profound reasons which, intuitively, everyone understands.
The moral, economic and environmental desertification of the Mafioso enclaves has, therefore, been reached due to a combination of many factors and has generated a troubled social melting pot which has shaken the credibility of the governing classes, and also that of the delinquent establishment. From this point of view, the crisis of confidence that grips the mafia bosses has the same roots as that intolerance that has corroded the authority of the power elites of the South. With the difference that while politics is able, through options of electoral technique or simplifications of the decisional procedures, to launch a new phase in the administration of the common good, the mafias find themselves totally lacking in alternatives respecting the strategies of social governance, which have been practiced so far.
In abstract, to subjugate and generate terror, they could resort to all-out violence, for example, perpetrating other shocking massacres, but the mafia, like the waning regimes of the East knows that it no longer has any political legitimization to resort to force. Just as the VoPos did not open fire on the young people who were smashing the Berlin Wall, so the revolts of the shopkeepers and businessmen of Palermo will not suffer any vendettas. The social groups, also those that cooperate with the mafia, will find the use of indiscriminate violence intolerable and will further distance themselves from the organizations. The last chance of the mafia is a blind alley. They are condemned to witness – in their impotence to use their own military arsenal – the imperium they conquered in the communities of Southern Italy dissolve into nothing, and they may then turn their attention to the Center-North, (see further ahead).
The alteration inflicted on the Southern society has produced a social fabric poised between metastasis and regeneration. Certain uncontrolled factors have damaged and broken the Mafioso hegemony:- the cessation, even in the most backward social groupings, of the blind allegiance and omertà has isolated the bosses, objects of anonymous slanderous disclosures, of social envy, of intolerance for wealth perceived as unjust ownership; the hope among the entrepreneurs for a growth sustained by technological innovation and of production quality, rather than scarce and contaminated public hand-outs; the drastic contraction of the State money transfers due to the policy of budget containment; the collapse of credibility of the feudalism policy induced the social classes who had participated in the pact of representation in favour of the mafia, to decide that the mechanism had become too costly and inefficient.
The regulatory function of the clans is perceived as a dysfunction. A clutter of rules which has become incapable of reallocating the resources and of constructing effective mediation in the social and economic competition, and useful only to increase the power and wealth of the bosses and their courtiers. Naturally, like all complex organizations, also the mafias do not omit to implement policies to counteract the decline they perceive. To commit itself to a soft power with a decrease of the violence exercised and, for example, with the containment of the extortion racket, all indicate a yielding attitude, inclined to accept a role of influence in place of the hegemony exercised up to date. A sanguinary and dangerous lobby, but which fears to finish relegated to a marginal role within a society which does not give it decisional prestige and in which it sees no shared projects.
Therefore, the idea of an “invisible mafia” is not convincing; inclined in this phase of history to resort to a strategy of camouflage and submergence. This option contradicts the social and normative evidence of the mafia which, to exist as a power, necessitates continual visibility and recognizability.
It is the same Article 416-bis which, evoking the canon of omertà and subjugation precludes considering the withdrawal of the social visibility of the mafia as a free option of the clans. For more than a decade, the fugitive from justice has ceased to walk calmly around the districts and towns. The photographic sequences of arrests and hideouts show threadbare situations, on the edge of squalid collapse, without dignity; caves, underground bunkers, manholes, ruined country houses, wall cavities with a camp bed and pieces of food.
What has all this to do with the imperial dimension, with the triumphant image of Totò Riina who, in 1993, drove leisurely around the streets of Palermo?
Perhaps, in a paradoxical way, the criminal history of the underworld organizations – the Sicilian mafia and the Neapolitan camorra in the lead – risks undergoing a sharp turn for the worst for the dissolution or rarefaction of a republican ethic, which irreducibly opposes them.
The discussion, we shall see, goes inevitably in the direction of the progressive expansion of the Mafioso infiltration in the Center-north of the Country, where “widespread loss of the sense of limit and responsibility” (Giorgio Napolitano) risks regenerating ideal conditions within which the criminal organizations prefer to operate and expand.
But it was noted that for the mafia to rise and, especially to perpetuate, it requires, at the roots, a dual approach towards the State and its Institutions, which is not found in other criminal phenomena: if brigandage and terrorism – crimes of great importance in the century and a half of national life – express a radical and often irreducible opposition to the laws of the State and the way in which its social life is organized, the mafias have a different pretension: that of contaminating the social life without extinguishing it; to bend the collectivity to its own will without any intention of destroying it. In this duality, pursued and guarded tenaciously by the Mafioso organizations, there, perhaps, is the reason for the difficulty in uprooting a phenomenon which, if it were merely criminal, it would not have been able to survive the multitude of dramatic events that have marked the life of the Nation in over a century of unitary history.
The temple of the mafias is a two-faced Janus, able to succumb, without being extinguished e.g. by the ferocious repression of Prefect Mori and the siege of Gangi, begun with fanfare on the 1^st of January 1926 until the massacres of 1992-1993. No social system would have been able to tolerate an uncontrolled violence, widespread and practiced incessantly on the population; if this had happened, if the mafias had really contended with the State with the sole “monopoly of violence”, then the question would have been definitively resolved by the fascist totalitarianism and by the mystical power of the dictatorship, which does not tolerate exceptions. But also the Democratic Republic would not have been able, in any way whatsoever, to accept the presence of organizations which would radically challenge coercive authority (and the history of the Red Brigade demonstrates this).
The flexibility of the mafia is the only stratagem that characterizes so unfailingly the mode of operation of these organizations; the capacity to adapt rapidly to the reactions of the State and, even, to those of the civil society (fore example, the feared anti-racket associations) is the remedy with which the cosche respond to the inevitable changes of scenario and only for the purpose of their own survival.
It should be noted that the same criminal law does not take into sufficient consideration this special “statute” of the mafias, having preferred to emphasize the contention that these organizations wage against the State on the above mentioned level “monopoly of violence”.
There are ideological, political and cultural influences in this view (“the mafia as anti-State”), which have their very roots in an incomplete reading of the manner in which the cosche act towards the society and its institutions. Probably much has had influence on the writing, in the first place, of the Article 416-bis Criminal Code, but more generally, on the entire anti-mafia legislation of 1982 onwards, the concomitant terrorist season and, after, the strategist imprint of 1992-1993. However, it is certain that the Article 416-bis Criminal Code, emphasizes the “military”, anti-State side of the cosche (“the association is of a mafia type when those who are part of it, exercise the force of intimidation of the mafia membership, the condition of subjection and omertà (the code of silence) which derives from it, to commit crimes….”) and neglects the modular use of violence, but gives excessive attention to the organizational dimension of the phenomenon. This, probably, is a vulnerable point of the legislation and of the consequent preventive practices (one thinks of the anti-mafia certification) and repressive practices (talks focus very much on fraud in exchanging votes and external aid to a criminal association in the parliamentary chambers).

Therefore, the system does not seem exactly suitable to cope with the soft war inaugurated by the Sicilian Cosa Nostra circa twenty years, ago. The media rhetoric (perhaps excessive) on investigative topics as “the agreement”, “the paper” (allegedly believed to contain the terms of the famous and, at the same time, unbelievable pact between the Mafia and the State) the hidden‘mandanti’ (those who commissions crimes) and so on and so forth, although proportionate to the importance and delicacy of the investigations, risks generating an incorrect focalization of the present state of the Mafioso apparatuses in the Country, and of the strategies to follow that are best suited to the result, that is, the defeat of the clans. The visual distortion, i.e. the constant proposition in terms of media coverage of historical events which happened twenty years previously, could compromise the clarity of analysis that the present operative phase of the cosche demands, and propose solutions inadequate to the effort required. To be more specific, I refer to: the subject of the punishment for money-laundering; of the strengthening of the structures committed to the utilization of the banking and financial system by the cosche; of the strict connection between the fight against tax evasion/tax avoidance and the individuation of illegal assets; of the reinforcement of the anti-corruption legislation, which risk being marginal in the ideological debate about the objectives of the mafias.
With great effectiveness, Salvatore Lupo defined the mafia as pathology of power and modernity (Criminal Power. Interview on the history of the mafia, edited by Gaetano Savatteri, Roma-Bari, 2010). This hendiadys merits being taken apart and considered analytically. If on the side of the “pathology of power” an almost unanimous evaluation by historians, analysts, politicians and sociologists can be registered; the sharing of a vision of the mafia as a “pathology of modernity” appears more controversial. The attempts to accredit the folkloristic and ritual aspects of some organizations with meanings and prominence which exceed the concrete modus agendi of the Mafiosi families are still recent; if the cosche were really placed outside of modernity, in an almost archaic territory, they would be destined to succumb and would risk losing the advantage which they still derive from the use of (threatened or practiced) violence.
It is a distinctive profile that characterizes not only the mafias, but more generally, all the organizations rated as criminal, as well as the natural realization of criminal actions, the construction of more complex social projects through influence, interference and hegemony. In this sense, the considerations of Gray with reference to one of the most feared post-modern organizations appear illuminating: “ … is organized on the model of an extended family. Relying on the ties of trust which hold families together, a considerable use of the banking systems which have a global operation range can be made … its closed structure renders it extremely difficult to penetrate … the “pre-modern” values permit them to operate in a very efficient manner in a condition of globalization. Hence, they are not pre-modern at all” (John Gray, Al Qaeda and the meaning of modernity, Rome, 2004).
In the same context, a passage of the celebrated Professor of the London School of Economics is even more significant: “no cliché is more astonishing than the one describing Al Qaeda as a medieval regression. It is a collateral effect of the globalization. As are the planetary drug cartels, and the corporations of the virtual business which developed in the 90’s, Al Qaeda evolved in a period in which the financial deregulation had created huge assets abroad and organized crime became global” (ibid).
The ‘ndranghetist necromancy of the Polsi summits or of the Paderno Dugnano Meeting should not lead us to indentify in these ritual profiles, anything more than ceremonies aimed at the strengthening and conservation of the criminal identity of the association, without any refluence in terms of the criminal dynamics or of the sole sharing out of illegal profits.
In the famous passage of Walter Benjamin one reads: “In a painting by Klee entitled ‘Angelus Novus’, there is an angel who seems in the act of going away from something on which his gaze is fixed. He has his eyes wide open, his mouth open and his wings spread. The angel of history must have this aspect. He has his face turned towards the past. Where a chain of events appears to us, he sees one single catastrophe, which accumulates relentlessly, ruin upon ruin and they fall at his feet. He would dearly like to remain, awaken the dead and recompose the shattered. But a storm blows from Paradise and becomes caught up in his wings, and it is so strong that he can no longer close them. This storm impels him irresistibly into the future, to which he turns his back, while the mound of ruins rises before him to heaven. That which we call progress is this storm”. (Thesis of philosophy of history (1940), in Angelus Novus. Essays and fragments, Turin, 1962).
It is an important pivot of the careful evaluation that the theory of the mafia as “pathology of the modernity” requires of the operator.
To be in the modernity also involves bearing the effects and the consequences; to abandon the comfortable position of social demiurge and expose oneself to the collateral damage of progress. In this sense every “man of respect” reaches out in search of a precarious balance between the archaic exercise, brutal and always least tolerated of the violence (the massacre of Casal di Principe or that of Duisburg, the massacres of 1992-1993) and the necessity to perceive with precision the path along which the society, in its variegated entirety, proceeds and organizes itself. It is an extraordinarily complex task which brings into play the same survival of the Mafioso organizations, born in backward economic contexts and accustomed, for decades, to circuits of mere pillaging of the resources of others (racket, watchmen, subcontracting etc.,).
To operate in a competitive way in this context, the organizations develop a growing demand for competence and human resources. They need subjects, initially strangers to them, who are disposed to contribute to the activities of money-laundering, handling of the politics, the connivance in the Institutions, and the development of the practices of media influence. It is customary to define this area of free exchange and cooperation, the “grey zone” or the “Mafioso bourgeoisie” a criminological locution which is very much in fashion, but has a certain vagueness and imprecision.
The hendiadys “grey zone”, as is it known, was coined by Primo Levi in a chapter of “The Drowned and the Saved”. The Turin writer intended to draw attention not only to the tragedy of the lager, but also to all those situations and places in which the cohabitation of hundreds or thousands of people, from the barracks to the offices, from the hospitals to the factories, produces that dialectic of power between a summit that commands and a base that obeys. In the middle, there is, in fact, the “grey zone”, the zone of those who, in various ways and at various levels and responsibility collaborate in the functioning of the power machine. In this sense the term describes, in an inapposite way, the situation of the strata in the middle who choose to liaise with the organizations in a position which is often on an equal level, if not actually biased in their favour (AA.VV. various authors: The drawing-room mafia; the intellectuals; the moral question, in Segno, 2005). In reality, in these cases, they are subjects often equally operating in “black zones” who enter into contact with the bosses to create this area of illegal exchange; it is the case of political-administrative corruption, tax evasion, the illegal cornering of public funds, unfair labour, industrial pollution and so on (see Rocco Sciarrone, The power of the mafia networks, in .VV., Mafia and power, Turin, 2006).
The above described characteristics of the Article 416-bis Criminal Code show a factor of rigidity with respect to this new negotiation conduct, which does not encourage the criminal repression and renders the ascertainment of responsible very difficult. The use of this sanctions instrument, with the provision of the “external aid”, creates a structural setting that in the long run and in line with the evolution of the criminal phenomena, produces fibrillations in the legal system and obliges the jurisprudence to prepare perimetrical remedies to sanction the conduct of single subjects whose “structural” value is weakened. The pantheon of the judgments which form part of the shifting and vague contours of the external aid to a criminal association in ‘Mafioso association’ is, basically, the inevitable corollary of a punitive approach strongly oriented to the organizational form of Article 416-bis Criminal Code, and poorly suited to repress individual behaviour which is able to increase the power of the mafia.
And this is a fact which must be taken into consideration whenever discussions are initiated on the way in which it is possible, over the next decade, to accomplish the defeat of the clans in our Country. To do it, and I am sorry to underline this, a clear and non-emphatic view of the substance of the questions that concern the mafia-society relationship is necessary.
Certain statements and public reports look to be light years away from the current evolutionary dynamics of the criminal under world of the mafia.
Thus, when the accent is placed insistently on the “grey zones” claims or on the so-called infiltrations to the North, one must, frankly, recognize a delay of at least two decades in the proposition of the questions, the matrices of which are linked to the stages of the Mafioso phenomenology now past. And the fact, however, is even more questionable if it comes from sectors which had the specific task of attacking the new spaces occupied by the mafia from the beginning of the 90’s and, instead, meticulously dedicated themselves to other things. There is, in short, in the clamorous ways in which, today, certain of these threats are highlighted, a sort of latent bad conscience of some segments of the investigative apparatus which, with a certain tardiness, have approached the issue – for example, the perimetrical collusions of the mafias – with rather inadequate structures and judicial techniques. Among these, the external aid to a criminal association appears to be, more than any other, left with no choice by an ever increasing restrictive orientation of the Supreme Courts (the famous Mannino sentence of the Supreme Court) and of the difficulty of interpreting, in a dynamic way, the real attitude of the society.
For many decades, in fact, a purely antagonistic vision of the Mafioso phenomena prevailed (the celebrated maxim, legitimized by the work of Professor Romano “theory of organizations”, according to which “the mafia is a state within the State”) and, as has been said, strongly conditioned by the “military” model transposed by the Article 416-bis Criminal Code and certainly able to focus on the period of violent conflict between the mafia and State in Sicily, and yet unsuitable in describing the evolution of the associations in other parts of the same region (reference to Catania and Messina), not to speak of the rest of the Country (Calabria, Puglia, Campania and gradually towards the North). For the epigones of that structural setting it is consequential, for example, to describe the current situation of the Southern Regions as a phase of conquest; almost as if the Mafioso Armada had moved in unison to converge on those rich lands; i.e. to imagine the area of the contiguity as a sort of “fifth column” available to assist the winner and expunge from “inside the walls” the spotless whiteness of populations removed from the Mafioso yoke.
It could be that things are completely different and that the action of the cosche in regions of low Mafioso density is favoured by vices which are by now inborn in those social, economic and political structures, rather than being mafia action of sophisticated strategies of occupation. The unscrupulous commercialism of ‘Tangentopoli’ (Mega-bribes investigation in Italy) had already shown the signs of legal and ethical break-down within a world in which, however, (in that historic investigation), no significant Mafioso presence was ever registered as included in the dynamics of the politics or the economy of those regions.
The point is that the same situation seems to recur today with urgency, even if only in patches, with an impressive resumption of the corruptive and collusive practices in politics and in the public administration (see the Report of the Attorney General at the Court of Auditors of 22nd February 2011) and with the dangerous perception by the men of the clans that they are moving in areas of wide and easy negotiability. At this point, the argument needs some synthetic considerations.
First of all, it must be realized that the clans – in all the regions of the South with the traditional presence of the mafia – have practiced particularly complex and flexible interlocution strategies with political authorities and the Institutions. The practices of homicide (Reina, Mattarella, La Torre, Lima, Ligato, Fortugno and continuing) have certainly heavily characterized the Sicilian slaughter (to the point of massacres), and only episodic actions of the camorra and the ‘ndrangheta, but they also represent one of the most difficult knots in the necessity felt by the clans to establish dialogue with the political powers. Where the term “dialogue” is used, there is no intention to negatively define the action of the political establishment, but to describe the intrinsic difficulty for the bosses to understand “the parlance” and the “rules” of the political environment. The mafia apprenticeship in the vital sector of influence, interference and hegemony on politics could be measured in terms of alternations between soft and hard wars, that is, with the establishing, at low intensity, of conflicts (damaging, intimidation, warnings) and at high intensity (murders, leg shootings) until, at least in part, the situation reaches a kind of less precarious equilibrium. To the point in which mafia and politics learn the art of negotiating shared meanings. Also in this case the equilibrium cannot be brought to a general rule of the mafia-politics relations in our Country, since actually the structural arrangement of such a liaison implies multi-faceted specificity and is manifested in a markedly different way, not only from region to region, but even in the ambit of the same Mafioso districts, that is, in the individual areas of influence of the clans.
And we arrive at the second consideration. In western Sicily the evolution of the phenomenon has shown in a more evident way – because of the profound distance that separates the criminal history of the mafia from that of the ‘ndrangheta and camorra (see again Criminal Power by Salvatore Lupo) – the structuring of a system of relations tendentially designed to have a heavy influence/interference on political decisions, through the construction of national interlocutions first and, therefore, only regional (not always supported by the necessary jurisdictional screening, but historically verified). But already, the question for East Sicily cannot be depicted in an analogous way. The Catania Cosa Nostra appears characterized by rather archaic political relationships compared to its sister-nation, Palermo; essentially based on the vote of exchange and on a mercantile system of relations with the regional political class. Something similar occurs for the more stable criminal areas of the Neapolitan and Caserta provinces, with the exclusion of the disorderly entropy of the urban district of the Campanian capital. In Calabria, the situation is even more backward. The strong fragmentation of the criminal system and the peppered presence of the cosche on the territory render the political sector of the ‘ndrangheta highly unstable and characterized by unstable and moving relations with the political interlocutors who contend, sometimes, the packet of votes at the disposal of the clans.
However, It must be clarified that the last investigations indicated an evident subsidence of the mafia control on the electoral consensus; big bosses manage to maneuver a handful of preferences, which shows a substantial loss of adhesion on the patronage mechanisms and on the dynamics of exchange which regulate the political question in the South.
The fact, however, if on the one hand, it could appear comforting (the powerful clan of the Pelle di San Luca, for example, in the last regional consultations was not able to determine the political fate of any of the candidates for which it had decided to vote and, in some cases, the outcome was even embarrassing), on the other hand, it indicates a dangerous turning point in the mafia-political partnership, that is, the possibility, i.e. that the bargaining chip desired by certain political sectors is, in fact, the Mafioso violence and the possibility of its unconditioned use. In this case, the clock of the relations rather than going back, would show a dangerous leap ahead because it would confirm the definitive and not the episodic (as it has occurred) position of the Calabrian clans as a specialized service structure in the use of violence and an evolutionary line of the ‘ndrangheta, in this part of the third millennium, entirely different from that of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. Where, i.e. the hegemonic claim lags behind in favour of a cohesion of interests aimed at giving entry to organized violence as a regulating factor of the social life is clearly evident of an ongoing project, of which one glimpse signs and advances, but which could undergo a sharp acceleration due to a strongly federalist construction of the Republican Institutions not accompanied by a vigilant reorganization of the actions of contrast (see further ahead).
This is obviously not the place to address such controversial issues and on which the history of Italy itself has long spent time. However, it is possible to resort to considerations which although in the minority in the all too emphatic and mythological debate currently in course on the Mafioso power, have the merit of indisputable authority: «Giovanni Falcone, in the conversation with Marcelle Padovani collected in the book ‘Cose di Cosa Nostra’ (Things of Cosa Nostra), analyzing the Mafioso phenomenon, uses strong words for those, who not knowing what the Cosa Nostra really is, classify it as a service structure of the so-called “third level”. Here is the text in which he summarizes his thoughts: “The outstanding crimes on which no light has been thrown, up to now, have fuelled the idea of the “third level” intending with this that a network exists above the Cosa Nostra, where the people who are really responsible for the homicides are hidden, a kind of super-committee, made up of politicians, Masons, bankers, high bureaucrats of the State, heads of industry, who give orders to the ‘cupola’ (chief of the body of organized crime)”. He adds: “This evocative hypothesis which sees a structure like Cosa Nostra under the orders of a directional executive center removed from its control is completely unrealistic and exposes a profound ignorance of the relations between the mafia and politics”. Actually, this vision of the “Things of Cosa Nostra” has been fed not only by well-known “mafiologists”, but also by the behaviour of certain magistrates who, being compliant means of communication, have indicated persecutors of the “third level” as uncompromising.
Falcone himself, warns how “through a mysterious course, I don’t know by what intellectual uncouthness, our “third level” has become the “great old man”, the “puppeteer” who, from above, pulls the strings of the mafia” … Instead, the things are much more simple and complex at the same time. The words of Falcone addressed to Marcelle Padovanni are of 1991 …. Today, sixteen years have passed since Falcone gave this interview to Padovani. Years laden with events of which Falcone himself was protagonist until the day of the Capaci massacre and of Via D’Amelio, which certainly marked a turning point not only in the history of Cosa Nostra, but also in the relations between mafia and politics and mafia and State» (Emanuele Macaluso, preface to Pietro Grasso and Francesco La Licata, “Pizzini, veleni e cicoria” (Protection money, poisons and cicoria) The mafia before and after Provenzano, Milan, 2007). The exemplary clarity of these reflections offer a criterion to interpret the differentiated way through which each criminal organization pursues the search for liaison with politics and the institutions. It is necessary to adapt ourselves to this plural reading and not ideological of the illegal relations of the clans with the governing classes and try each time to reconstruct in concrete terms, the object, the nature and the prospect of these ties.
The use of rigid expositive schemes and slogans intended for mere media communication risk prejudicing the results of the analyses and, even worse, compromising the chances of success in the fight against the clans. The great success of formulas like “third level” or “grey zone” cannot meet the irrepressible need of parceling out and dismembering the techniques of contrast, adapting them to the ‘mongrel’ characteristics which every organization manifests not only in the genotype of affiliation (mafia, ‘ndrangheta, camorra), but in the same territorial context of action.
To assimilate the operations of the clans of the Piana di Gioia Tauro or Reggio Calabria to those of the narcos organizations of Platì or San Luca could momentarily satisfy instances of media marketing, but it leaves the path open to dangerous generalizations, essentially incapable of a lasting success. All the ‘porous’ concepts («Mafioso bourgeoisie») have the advantage of allowing subtle nuances and imparting significant semitones, but they constitute easily perishable material in the courtroom.
The third proposition introduces us, as a way of saying, into the unstable territory where one should, with careful attention, scrutinize the results of the actions of contrast and verify in concrete terms the possibility that the Mafioso organizations are defeated only through judicial channels. The observation does not intend to pose the problem in a banal way – obvious and constantly repeated – of the necessary social cohesion which must second the investigative and repressive operations of the State, but rather to place the accent on the necessity that one cannot even think of solving the mafia problem with a more advanced application of the corps of the Bersaglieri and the Cavalry of which there is an outline in the report of the Franchetti-Sonnino Commission of Inquiry of 1875-1876, almost as if it were only a matter of making enough men and equipment available.
Under discussion, rather, is the need to organize the social, economic and political factors in such a way as to orient them towards the definitive isolation of the model of social regulation proposed by the clans. In other words, it is necessary to propose a structure in which the question of violence which the mafia aims to meet is progressively contained, which will entail certain inevitable adjustments in the way in which social formations and centers of power pursue the intention, in itself lawful, of exercising a strong political, economic or also only cultural influence in the Country. It will also be necessary to ask about the reasons which led to the unsuitability of epoch-making political and institutional reforms carried out in the history of Italy to rid us of the Mafioso phenomenology, which has survived the monarchy, fascism, the republic, regionalism, decentralization, the European Union and so on.
The autarchic polycentrism of the mafias constitutes an extraordinary model of resistance to the social innovations which finds its raison d’être in their latent capacity to meet the request of violence inherent in the decision making processes and in the decisional turning points.
It is a gamble, but perhaps the attenuation in Italy – for historical reasons which include the entrenched presence of the Church and the brusque process of reunification of very distant social realities during the period of the Risorgimento – of the rules of hard social and economic determinism which are implicit in the advanced capitalist model, has resulted in the fact that the tenuous “legal violence” of the processes of inclusion and exclusion from the decisional circuit and from the profit (strongly selective electoral procedure, abrupt and cyclic change of the governing classes, lack of protection for the new socially marginalized etc.,) has been replaced by an “illegal violence” in which certain of these results are reached by using the actions of the cosche. The vehement instance of the modernity responded, in widespread zones of the South, to the inevitable selective inefficiency of the consociationalism, of the assisted economy and of the solidarism founded on the unlimited public expenditure, making use of the brutal force of the mafia, with its capacity to give abrupt political acceleration or to stem courageous attempts of change.
The social competitors found themselves enmeshed in an interlacement of pressures and coercion in which the Mafioso violence finished by assuming, always with different gradients of incisiveness, an important role and in some cases decisive, accrediting itself, in fact, with the role of regulator, from time to time, of the modernity or of the conservation. And with all probability, one of the historical responsibilities of the Mezzogiorno is the conscious acceptance of this violence, which the President of the Republic, in his Parliamentary Speech, clearly said on the point of the “Southern Question”: «Looking at this crucial question, it would be worth making the 150th Anniversary of the Unification of Italy an occasion for a profound critical reflection, for what I called ‘an examination of the collective conscience’». A examination from which no part of the Country can be absent, and in which it is essential that the leaders and citizens of the South contribute a severe reflection on their own attitudes and behaviour. From many aspects the reference is to the South, and in no small measure, but it should be seen in its overall characterization and National significance – the social question, the inequalities, the injustices, the heavy penalization of a part of the society – which today, presents itself in Italy»
One is perfectly aware that the above mentioned considerations can, at the most, inspire some reaction, but do not offer any satisfactory answer to the historical reasons which make of the mafia, on close inspection, one of the few social formations in Italy which survived the “Fall of the Berlin Wall” and the consequent geopolitical variations. However, the problem tends to present itself with urgency the moment in which the history of the Country, at least, in the last two decades, tends to give characteristics of great significance to the territory and to the territorial identity.
Ilvo Diamanti wrote more than ten years ago, «The break between the North and South has been reversed. Until then the national question was the Southern question, in the sense that in that area the equation “low development = low national identity”, starting from the 80’s until the 90’s (but today, even more – editor’s note) the national question has become that of the North with a reversal of the terms of the problem because now the disenchantment with Italy is greater where the development is greater, not where the development is less. For some strange reason, the regions have become more evident, the territory kept at bay for years, has got out of hand and has become a banner of disunity; if before, the territorial problems were concealed, for fear they could generate contradictions, now they are used to actually generate contradictions. In any case, behind the two attitudes of which, on the one side, hid the territorial differences and which, on the other, tends to extol them, there is a common conviction, a common judgment, i.e. that the territory is an element of division, breakage and contradiction for Italy» (Intelligence and strategic analysis, with participation of Ilvo Diamanti, Efisio Espa, Giuseppe Rome in Per aspera ad veritatem, n. 14, 1999).
So, it must not appear coincidental that the problem of the presence of the Mafioso organizations in the Center-north of the Country has assumed very important connotations and, in some cases, animated political dialectics. It is obvious that many reasons push the clans to direct their operations towards those zones: the need to follow the public and private resources which, in droves, abandon the Southern areas, apparently condemned to the marked economic marginality in the allocation processes governed by a policy which is always more attentive to the territorial needs; the urgency to allocate the profits of the illicit traffic (in the first place, narcotics) in contexts in which the activity of recycling, or only the camouflaging, can more easily escape investigative control (the Ipermarket of Trapani or Siderno and that of Bergamo or Rovigo present an indisputable lower rate of risk); the insuppressible necessity of seconding the social and political processes of the Country so as not to lose ones ambition to play an important role in the decision-making mechanisms.
These are only some of the reasons which push the clans to surmount the phase of infiltration and of putting down roots in the Center-north (developed in the years of the obligated residence until the end of the 80’s and of the sale of heroin and cocaine in those places), to face the more delicate and complex question of the hegemony. This is still an embryonic phase and the alarmism which has been spread most liberally must not induce errors of analysis. Certainly, the investigation “Infinito” (July 2010) or the investigation “Redux-Caposaldo” (March 2011) of the Office of the Public Prosecutor of Milan show traces of further development, of a metastasis in progress in ambits and sectors (public and private building, health service) in which the criminal presence – in this case, the ‘ndrangheta – has been going ahead for almost a decade without significant setbacks. The clan men seem to have activated the silent cells which, for many years, were implemented in that territory, now earmarking them for a new vocation: the occupation of the spaces of politics and the legal economy connected to the practices of the maladministration. The signs of a change in strategy, or perhaps of a mere attempt to transpose the model of the South, should not lead to under-estimation of the criticalness of the choice made. The clans are in mid-stream, in an uncertain middle ground in which they have, on the one side, abandoned the familiar enclaves of the Southern Regions and, moreover, not having yet achieved that coefficient of social and institutional penetration which their criminal operating needs in an indefectible way. It is not a question of numbers (10, 100 or 1000 affiliates), but a question of control of the context in which one reacts to this, fortunately, slow in arriving.
The construction of legal remedies and social defence against Mafioso deep strategy needs, therefore, a radical change of the perspective of contrast. The adversary should be more severely fought not only in the traditional places of its action (the Southern region) where the presence of investigative structures is very strong – devoted for over a decade to the capture of dozens of fugitive bosses – (there remain only the noted Messina Denaro and Zagaria, while in Calabria the elimination is more or less total), but where its ambitions are leading it. The economies, the administrative bodies, the businesses of the Center-north have differing features to those of the South; if the corruption and parceling out the profits are present in that fabric, lacking, fortunately, a social context widely tolerant or accomplice to illegality.
In these cases the hardening of the anti-corruption legislation, the most intense fight against tax avoidance and evasion, a careful revision of the access and government rules of the political parties could lead immediately to the isolation of the men of the clans.
The real emergency legislation would be that which, in this moment, accompanies the intervention in the traditional ambits of anti-mafia intervention (harsh prison, confiscations, increased penalties etc.,) with a more incisive action on the side of the legality of the economy and public administration.
Here, the approaching decade comes into consideration and the definitive transition to be accomplished from the accentuated regionalism of the 1970’s onwards to the true federalism. In the middle there is the need to avoid that the Center-north sees further eroded the coefficient of public ethics, which marks the difference with respect to the degenerative and centrifugal forces of the history of the Southern society.
No-one can think or accept that the economic and social processes of the Country can undergo the conditioning of the mafias. One can, for example, be in favour or contrary to the bridge over the Strait, but it is unacceptable that the choice is made by raising the spectre of the Mafioso occupation of the construction yards. It is obvious that it is up to the State to ensure the legality of the contracts and the democratic transparency of the decisions, impeding that the burden of the cosche can condition such important choices.
It is right to consider that Federalism is an indispensable option for the Country, indeed crucial for the reorganization of the political responsibility. In fact, to be more exact, the transfer of the public powers and resources to the local municipalities could constitute a decisive occasion for the recovery of the Republican ethics. However, it is a turning point which, also to guarantee these objectives, certain awareness is necessary.
The National electoral system though bad for the rights of citizenship has literally sent up in smoke the power of the cosche to influence the election of members of parliament.
The lists of the “nominated” on a regional basis are a real curse for the ‘padrini’ who are not able to get any parliamentary elected with their own votes. The proportional to multiple preference was, instead, a godsend for clientelism and the infiltrations. The modification to the National electoral system, in the recovery of the popular sovereignty with respect to the choice of the candidates, I believe, cannot but take all of this into account.
Thus the electoral boulder of the cosche, which is still able to move hundreds of votes into their own enclaves, heads more and more towards the regional and administrative elections, where the preferences still weigh and are still eagerly pursued by the candidates, as judicial enquiries show also recently in Calabria and Campania.
A pursuit which is not specific to one part or another, but which is kept up by the mafia for the sole use of its own convenience. A fully implemented Federalism necessitates, therefore, also a certain shrewdness in the local electoral systems which, obviously, is up to the politics to identify, also through devices able to sanction the parties that choose their candidates with very little astuteness (for example, with a substantial decrease of the electoral reimbursements and of the sums at the disposal of the advisory groups).
Again, the transfer of powers and resources towards the regions or the municipalities risks favouring the action of a “proximity mafia” which makes the obsessive control of the territory its point of strength. It is evident that in an accomplished federal state, it will be even more important for the cosche to have collusion and complicity with a regional assessor, rather than with a minister because the greater portion of the resources will be managed at that level. One thinks of what the sectors already of wide regional competence have signified for the Mafioso power, for example, the health system, the management of forest workers, urban planning, the local transport system or the distribution of the European funding. On the other hand, one cannot deny that the regional autonomy of Sicily has not functioned as an element able to contain or counter the endemic presence of the mafia in that region (Gaetano Paci, Sistema di Potere Mafioso e Malsanità - System of Mafioso Power and Medical Malpractice, in AA.VV., La Violenza Tollerata – Tolerated Violence, Milan, 2006). The mafias run where there is the money: this remains their true and fundamental characteristic.
Therefore, the problem is raised of the public controls on the activities of the territorial institutions, in fact, cancelled over a decade ago, and of the overall adjustment of the Institutions that counter the illegality (the regional offices of the public prosecution of the Court of Auditors are insufficient in ranks, and it should be repeated that there is an urgency of a good anti-corruption law). The path of transparency and controls in the management of the resources and in the exercise of the administrative functions is crucial. The percentage of Mafiosi that does not pay local taxes, with the complaisance or terror of many municipal administrations, is very high and some enquiries have also addressed this endemic and odious privilege. All the Institutions on the territory are heeded to render vigorous action; otherwise the wager for a modern and efficient State risks being lost.