Free The First Family: Terror, Extortion, Revenge, Murder and the Birth of the American Mafia by Mike Dash Page A

of men, women, and children was that, after about 1890, practically every family in Sicily had friends or relatives in the great American seaports, particularly New York and New Orleans.
    For those who stayed behind on the island, poverty and the lack of opportunity combined to make crime increasingly commonplace in the latter half of the nineteenth century. Given the choice between a lifetime of toil in arid fields, struggling for survival, and the lures of the “bad life,” the mala vita , thousands of Sicilian youths were tempted into careers of thievery and petty deception; and when, eventually, they were caught and sent to prison, they mixed there with far worse criminals and emerged as likely recruits for far more dangerous gangs. Crime on the island was, moreover, all too often violent. Government authority was never absolute in the depth of the Sicilian interior, and the failure of the Italian state to restrict power and weaponry to the hands of the police and army—to impose what historians would call a “monopoly on violence”—meant that many men habitually bore arms. The annual murder rate in western Sicily, which by 1890 ran at as much as sixty-seven deaths for every thousand people, was fifty times the rate in mainland Italy and paid eloquent testimony to Sicilians’ propensity to deploy knives and guns to solve their problems.
    One other factor, unique to Sicily, played a part in the emergence of the Mafia, and that was the readiness of large swaths of the island’s population to conspire and rebel against hated authority. As early as the late eighteenth century, in the wake of the French Revolution, the Sicilian police began picking up reports of secret societies that met in remote parts of the countryside to swear oaths of loyalty and plot the downfall of the Bourbon monarchy. Although few in number at first, they grew; there were many such groups by the mid-1830s, and more a decade later, when, at the height of the unpopularity of the Naples government, one Palermo nobleman observed that “all the good citizens had begun to organize themselves in Secret Societies.” Conditions for the formation of such groups remained propitious even after the unification of Italy in 1860; one of the new regime’s earliest proclamations, a demand for universal military service, drove hundreds of Sicilian youths to flee into the interior and turn to banditry, not least because it was widely rumored that young men sent for service on the mainland were castrated.
    Sicily’s “brotherhoods” and “sects” were generally organized around a capo, or captain, who was often a gabelloto . Many borrowed the ideas and symbolism of the Masons, a secretive brotherhood, centuries old, whose notoriety and love of ritual had provided inspiration for any number of similar societies. There were others, though, with different inspirations, which owed loyalty to a radical village priest or which drew for their membership on the armed town militias that participated in uprisings against the hated Bourbons in 1820, 1848, and 1860 and rose again to support a Sicilian nationalist rebellion in 1866. Each of these groups had weaponry and men; each hated the government and the police. The “sects,” like criminals and politicians, were in the business of controlling people, and it seemed natural for them to offer to protect their fellow citizens—against the Bourbons at first, then against their personal enemies—and to expect to be paid for their services. Within a year or two, predictably enough, “protection” morphed into protection rackets. Landlords, farmers, and ordinary villagers discovered that they were no longer paying to be shielded against the Bourbons. The protection that they paid for was protection from the “sects” themselves.
    WHETHER THE BROTHERHOODS that slowly coalesced in Sicily between 1800 and 1860 possessed any form of central leadership is still debated. Little evidence survives—some early Mafiosi