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

seem to have joined in the revolt of 1866 expressly in order to ransack police stations and burn the confidential reports they contained—and while there are certainly suggestions that the first criminal “families” emerged in and around Palermo and spread outward from there, there is also plenty of evidence that the Mafia meant different things to different people. In some tellings of the story there was a “high Mafia” on one hand—made up of barons, gabelloti , priests, and lawyers—and a “low Mafia” on the other, consisting of criminals from the peasant class who committed crimes at the behest of their superiors and were protected by them in turn. The Mafia, in this interpretation, deployed violence to make itself integral to the government in Sicily, which certainly explains why it has proved so hard to keep down. Other writers, though, including several of the policemen charged with keeping order on the island, insisted that “Mafia” was nothing but a state of mind. The word, in these men’s view, was nothing but a bit of slang, denoting a sort of insolent self-confidence and pride innate to all Sicilians; there was no secret society at all, they argued, merely groups of men who would not tolerate oppression. It took decades, and the evidence of numerous informants, to prove to everybody’s satisfaction that the Mafia was very organized and very real.
    The earliest written references to the society’s existence date only to 1865, when the prefect of Palermo warned his superiors that “the so-called Maffia” was causing problems in his district. The prefect did not know much about the group, though he thought it had existed for a while—but it was now growing more daring, he suggested, thanks largely to the new government’s failure to stamp its authority on Sicily. Over the course of the next four decades, several successive prefects and their chiefs of police shed further shafts of light on the subject without ever really tackling it head-on. The “Maffia” that emerged from these investigations was not a monolithic secret society, with a headquarters and a central leadership; it was an agglomeration of loosely allied gangs known as cosche , the Italian name for the tightly bundled leaves of artichokes. These groups, which later writers gave the name of “families,” might number anywhere from fifteen to several hundred men. Most towns had only one cosca —though there were several in the largest city, Palermo—but it was dangerously misleading to presume that they therefore coexisted peacefully. The Sicilian Mafia is better understood as a rural than as an urban phenomenon, and its families defined themselves by the territory they controlled, territory that generally included large swaths of the countryside outside their city walls. The borders of almost every cosca’s sphere of influence thus butted against those of other gangs, and this meant that most existed in an uneasy state of mutual suspicion and occasional violent conflict. The resultant murky swirl of shifting allegiances made it difficult for even a family’s own members to know exactly where they stood in relation to the Mafias of other towns.
    It was vital, in such uncertain times, for each capo to depend upon the loyalty of his men. Many Mafia families had their roots in flesh-and-blood relationships: fathers, sons, uncles, and cousins could trust one another more than they did strangers. Recruits were also required to submit to an intimidating initiation ritual. This practice, the scattering of evidence suggests, was conducted in much the same way in every family, and its basic form was borrowed from Masonic rites. An initiate would be summoned, often at short notice and frequently at dawn, to some remote spot where his capo and several companions were waiting. There, according to a police report dating to 1880, an
oath was sworn in the presence of three members, one of whom having bound the finger [of the candidate] with a