Z. Lohe
[dropcap]C[/dropcap]ompensation of 30,000 dollar launched the multi-million dollar Mafia. A true story retold.
No one knows for certain Mafia comes from. It may be derived from a Sicilian dialect term for boldness, or from the Arabic ‘mehia’ , which means boastful. But wherever it originated, the word mafia means only one thing: fear.
The Mafia is the largest, most successful criminal organisation in the world. And it spells fear not only for its victims and its unwilling customers, but also for its members.The autocratic society of the Mafia began as a resistance movement in 13th century in Sicily. It flourished over the centuries as a secret brotherhood which protected Sicilians against a succession of invaders. To the foreigners’ despotism the islanders preferred even the Mafia’s perverted system of justice. By the 1940s the Mafia was so powerful that it could fix the Italian army and hand over the whole of Western Sicily to the Allies without a shot being fired.
But it is the USA that the Mafia’s grip is now the most frightening, powerful and insidious. And its reign of terror in that country dates back to two sad but well-meant blunders made by US governments half a century apart.
The first was made in New Orleans in 1890 when 11 Mafiosi (Mafia members) were lynched. Naively, the US government paid 30,000 dollars compensation to the widows of the hanged men. But the money was seized by the criminal brotherhood to launch their first organised operation of extortion.
The second blunder was the Prohibition in the 1920s. In unison, the fragmented Mafia families leaped at the opportunity of supplying bootleg liquor to help ‘dry’ America drown its sorrows during the Depression. By the time the law was repealed in 1933, the Mafia had branched out into other criminal activities like vice, gambling and ‘protection’. And when there was no longer a market in illicit liquor, the brotherhood put the amassed fortunes into seemingly respectable businesses.
The Mafia families rule by fear- often fear of each other. The gang warfare of the 1930s alerted the Americans to the size of the problem in their midst. The biggest gang killing was in September 1931 when Salvatore Maranzano, head of the senior Mafia family, was murdered along with 40 of his men. But such killings also alerted the Mafiosi themselves to the dangers of advertising their power in blood.
Leaders of Mafia groups from the Atlantic to the Pacific got together to form “the Commission”, a loose-knit group of about a dozen members who represent the nation’s 24 Mafia families. Always at their head is 11 Capo di Tutti Capi’, the Boss of Bosses, whose job is to keep the younger and more fiery members in line.
The role of 11 Capo di Tutti Capi was glamorised in the book and film The Godfather, which used as their inspiration for the title role the story of a frail old man, Carlo Gambino. Under Gambino’s severe but diplomatic guidance, the Mafia flourished. He frowned on public killings, and he excluded from the families hot-headed young bloods. During his reign, there were few ritual oaths: scraps of paper burning in a new member’s hand while he recites, ‘This is the way I will burn if I betray the secrets of this family’.
In 1976 Carlo Gambino died peacefully at the age of 73- and new and less respected members of the fraternity fought to become his successor. Fifty new members were immediately invited to take the oath of allegiance. And the killings began again, although more quietly and never on the scale of 1930s gang wars.
US Police and Government agencies have sought consolation from the Mafia’s low-key approach of recent years, and they have noted with satisfaction the following facts. More than 800 members were jailed during the 1970s. In Chicago, warring families wiped each other out-22 died between 1974 and 1978. In New York, the Mafia lost control of vast areas of crime, and throughout the States, its grip seemed to be slackening.
But this victory is largely illusory. The brotherhood is still so powerful that the bill for keeping Mafiosi hit-men away from the 2000 ‘squealers’ prepared to give evidence to the Government is a staggering 20 million dollars a year.
Moreover, the Mafia can accept the loss of a few dozen members to the police and FBI, since it has 3000-5000 criminals working for it across the country. And it can write off the loss of some of its vice and drug activities because it owns as many as 10,000 legitimate firms, producing profits estimated at 12 billion dollars a year. That fantastic sum is five times the profits of America’s largest industrial corporation, Exxon.
In the United States today, people may start their lives wrapped in a Mafia produced nappy, listen to rock music from a Mafia record company, dine out on a Mafia steak, drive a car bought from a Mafia dealer, holiday at a Mafia hotel, buy a house on a Mafia-financed development and be buried by a Mafia funeral parlour.
Even the 12 billion dollar a year raised from these activities is small-fry compared to the brotherhood’s profits from crime. In an exhaustive survey, Time magazine reckoned that the Mafia takes at least 48 billion dollar, of which 25 billion dollar is untaxed profit; and that, because of the mob’s grip on the market, the average citizen has to pay an extra 2% for almost everything he buys.
That is the price of a problem which a naive government tried to buy off for 30,000 dollar in 1890.
