Abstract
In the first chapter, I quoted two Sicilian writers, the anthropologist Giuseppe Pitrè and the novelist Luigi Natoli, who in the late 1800s and early 1900s reevaluated the Sicilian contribution to the Italian nation, evoking (inventing, in Hobsbawm/Ranger’s sense) a noble regional tradition. In 1882, Pitrè denied that the words Mafia and omertà could refer to the criminal sphere: according to him, omertà in particular corresponded to manliness, the traditional code, and the sense of oneself that forced every Sicilian male to defend both his own and his family’s honor.1 In 1911, Natoli narrated the legend of a secret society—I Beati Paoli—that, centuries ago, had defended Sicilians, primarily the poor and the weak, from the tyranny of the Spanish occupation. While it is unclear whether the two specifically intended to legitimate the Mafia, the Mafia-connected Italian congressman Raffaele Palizzolo surely intended to do so when he used both Pitrè’s and Natoli’s arguments—the cultural and the political one—in the interview he gave to the New York Times in 1908.
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Notes
G. Pitrè, Usi, costumi, usanze e pregiudizi del popolo siciliano, Palermo, Il Vespro, 1978 [I ed. 1889], vol. II, pp. 292–94.
Italy v. Spatola, Tribunale di Palermo, Sentenza di rinvio a giudizio contro R.Spatola + 119, January 22, 1982, p. 485.
S. M. Gilbert, Mysteries of the Hyphen. Poetry, Pasta and Identity Politics, in Beyond the Godfather. Italian-American Writers on the Real Italian-American Experience, edited by A. K. Ciongoli and J. Parini, Hanover, University Press of New England, 1997, p. 56.
G. Talese, Honor Thy Father, New York, Ivy Books, 1992 [I ed. 1971], p. XV.
L. Bernstein, The Greatest Menace: Organized Crime in Cold War America, Boston, University of Massachusetts Press, 2002, p. 164 and p. 166.
R. Salerno and J. S. Tompkins, The Crime Confederation, Garden City, NY, Doubleday, 1969.
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So in 2001 Professor J. Scelsa, director of the Italian American Institute of the City University of New York, during a forum on The Sopranos: G. De Stefano, An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America, New York, Faber and Faber, 2006, p. 13.
See for instance Puzo’s account of his altercation with Frank Sinatra in a restaurant in M. Puzo, The Godfather Papers & Other Confessions, New York, Putnam, 1972.
It seems enlightening to read P. Novick, The Holocaust in American Life, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin, 1999, pp. 7–10 and passim.
P. Maas, Underboss. Sammy the Bull Gravano’s Story of Life in Mafia, London, HarperCollins, 1977, p. 72.
M. Puzo, The Godfather, London, Penguin, 1978, pp. 29–32.
B. Bonanno, Bound by Honor: A Mafioso’s Story, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1999.
L. Abbate, “Picciotti americani a lezione di mafia,” in ANSA, March 6, 2004.
But see also C. Bizzi, La mafia di Castellammare del Golfo, tutor S. Lupo, Tesi di Laurea, Università di Palermo, 2008.
J. Bonanno, A Man of Honor: The Autobiography of Joseph Bonanno, with Sergio Lalli, New York, St. Martin Paperbacks, 2003, p. 405.
N. Gentile, Vita di capomafia. Memorie raccolte da F. Chilanti, Rome, Crescenti Allendorf, 1993 [I ed. 1963], p. 55.
De Cavalcante Tapes, The FBI Trascripts on Exhibit in Usa v. De Cavalcante, New York, Lemma Publishers, 1970, p. 3.90 and p. 4.26.
F. J. Ianni and E. Reuss-Ianni, A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime, London, Routledge, 1972, p. 73 ff.
G. Selvaggi, Rise of the Mafia in New York from 1895 through World War II, Indianapolis, Bob-Merril, 1978.
H. Abadinsky, Organized Crime, Belmont, CA, Wadsworth, 2002, p. 46. 57. Buscetta’s Testimony in United States v. Badalamenti, p. 150. Italics mine.
In H. Abadinsky, The Mafia in America: An Oral History, New York, Praeger, 1981, pp. 92–93.
V. Teresa, My Life in the Mafia, New York, Doubleday, 1973, p. 3. 61.
P. Jenkins, “Narcotics Trafficking and the American Mafia: The Myth of Internal Prohibition,” in Crime, Law and Social Change, 18 (3), November 1992, pp. 303–18.
Quoted in S. Raab, Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 2005, pp. 280–81.
S. Alexander, The Pizza Connection: Lawyers, Money, Drugs and Mafia, New York, Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1988, p. 43.
R. Blumenthal, Last Days of the Sicilians: At War with the Mafia, the FBI Assault on the Pizza Connection, New York, Times Books, 1988, p. 296.
J. B. Jacobs, C. Panarella, and J. Worthington, Busting the Mob: United States v. Cosa Nostra, New York, New York University Press, 1994, pp. 4–5.
G. Natoli, Italia e USA: esperienze a confronto, in Pentiti. I collaboratori di giustizia, le istituzioni, l’opinione pubblica, edited by A. Dino, Roma, Donzelli, 2006, pp. 39–62, in particular p. 62.
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© 2015 Salvatore Lupo
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Lupo, S. (2015). Mafia’s Ideology. In: The Two Mafias. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491374_8
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