Free Cosa Nostra by John Dickie

the sect because it is confident that it will have no trouble in slipping away from any police hunt. The courts too hold little fear for the sect: it takes pride in the fact that evidence for the prosecution is rarely produced because of the pressure it puts on witnesses.
    This sect, Turrisi Colonna guessed, was about twenty years old. In each area it recruited its affiliates from the brightest peasants, the wardens who guarded estates around Palermo, and the legions of smugglers who brought grain and other heavily taxed items past the customs posts that the city depended on for its income. The sect’s members had special signals that they used to recognize each other when they were transporting stolen cattle through the countryside to city butchers. Some of the sect members specialized in rustling cattle, others in transporting the animals and removing identifying brands, still others in illegal butchery. In some places the sect was so well organized, receiving political protection from the disreputable factions that dominated local government, that it could frighten any citizen. Even some honest men found themselves turning to the sect in the hope that it might be able to bring some semblance of safety to the countryside.
    Driven by its hatred of the brutal and corrupt Bourbon police, the sect had offered its services to the revolutions of 1848 and 1860. Like many men of violence, the sect’s members had an interest in revolution because it offered the chance to open prisons, burn police records, and kill off police and informers in the confusion. A revolutionary government would—the sect hoped—grant an amnesty to people ‘persecuted’ by the old regime; it would form new militias that needed tough recruits, and give jobs to the heroes of the struggle to overthrow the old order. But the 1860 revolution had brought few of these benefits, and the new Italian government’s indiscriminately harsh response to the crime wave that followed only made the sect more eager to cause trouble.
    It was only four months after the publication of Turrisi Colonna’s report that the sect would acquire its name when the word ‘mafia’ was written down for the first time. And given what is now known about the mafia, Turrisi Colonna’s account of the sect is strikingly familiar. He mentions the kind of kangaroo court that can be found in many later tales of mafia business; the sect members meet to decide the fate of any of their number who has broken the rules—with a death sentence a frequent outcome. Turrisi Colonna goes on to describe the sect’s code of silence and loyalty in terms that chime rather eerily with current knowledge:
    In its rules, this evil sect regards any citizen who approaches a carabiniere [military policeman] and talks to him, or even exchanges a word or a greeting with him, as a villain to be punished with death. Such a man is guilty of a horrendous crime against ‘humility’.
    ‘Humility’ involves respect and devotion towards the sect. No one must commit any act that could directly or indirectly harm the members’ interests. No one should provide the police or judiciary with facts that help uncover any crime whatsoever.
    Humility— umiltà in Italian or umirtà in Sicilian—is a word that jumps off the page. It is now considered to be the most likely origin for the word omertà. Omertà is the mafia’s code of silence, and the obligation not to speak to the police that it imposes on those within its sphere of influence. Evidently omertà was originally a code of submission.
    Turrisi Colonna advised the government not to respond to the sect by ruling ‘with the scaffold and the torturer’. Instead he offered some well-thought-through reforms of policing that would, he hoped, change the behaviour of the people of Sicily, giving them ‘a second, civil baptism’. The balance, astuteness, and honesty that Turrisi Colonna demonstrated in his account of the sect was matched by his gentlemanly reserve.