MAFIA
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This article is about the Sicilian criminal society. For the Italian American counterpart, see American Mafia. For other uses, see Mafia (disambiguation).
The Mafia (also known as Cosa Nostra) is a Sicilian criminal society which is believed to have emerged in late 19th century Sicily, and the first such society to be referred to as a mafia. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a common organizational structure and code of conduct. Each group, known as a "family", "clan" or "cosca", claims sovereignty over a territory in which it operates its rackets - usually a town or village or a neighborhood of a larger city.
Offshoots of the Mafia emerged in the United States, Canada, and in Australia[1] during the late 19th century following waves of Sicilian and Southern Italian emigration (see Italian-American Mafia).
ETYMOLOGY
There are several theories about the origin of the term "Mafia" (sometimes spelt "Maffia" in early texts). The Sicilian adjective mafiusu may derive from the slang Arabic mahyas (مهياص), meaning "aggressive boasting, bragging", or marfud مرفوض meaning "rejected". Roughly translated, it means "swagger", but can also be translated as "boldness, bravado". In reference to a man, mafiusu in 19th century Sicily was ambiguous, signifying a bully, arrogant but also fearless, enterprising, and proud, according to scholar Diego Gambetta.[2]
The public's association of the word with the criminal secret society was perhaps inspired by the 1863 play "I mafiusi di la Vicaria" ("The Mafiosi of the Vicaria") by Giuseppe Rizzotto and Gaetano Mosca. The words Mafia and mafiusi are never mentioned in the play; they were probably put in the title to add a local flair. The play is about a Palermo prison gang with traits similar to the Mafia: a boss, an initiation ritual, and talk of "umirtà" (omertà or code of silence) and "pizzu" (a codeword for extortion money).[3] The play had great success throughout Italy. Soon after, the use of the term "mafia" began appearing in the Italian state's early reports on the phenomenon. The word made its first official appearance in 1865 in a report by the prefect of Palermo, Filippo Antonio Gualterio.[4]
Leopoldo Franchetti, an Italian deputy who travelled to Sicily and who wrote one of the first authoritative reports on the mafia in 1876, saw the Mafia as an "industry of violence" and described the designation of the term "mafia":
"the term mafia found a class of violent criminals ready and waiting for a name to define them, and, given their special character and importance in Sicilian society, they had the right to a different name from that defining vulgar criminals in other countries."[5]
Franchetti saw the Mafia as deeply rooted in Sicilian society and impossible to quench unless the very structure of the island's social institutions were to undergo a fundamental change.[6]
Some observers have seen "mafia" as a set of attributes deeply rooted in popular culture, as a "way of being", as illustrated in the definition by the Sicilian ethnographer, Giuseppe Pitrè, at the end of the 19th century:
"Mafia is the consciousness of one's own worth, the exaggerated concept of individual force as the sole arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of interests or ideas."[7]
According to popular myth, the word Mafia was first used in the Sicilian rebellion - the Sicilian Vespers - against the oppressive Anjou rule on 30 March 1282. Mafia is the acronym for "Morte alla Francia, Italia anela" (Italian for "Death to the French is Italy's Cry").[8] However, this version is discarded by most serious historians nowadays.
THE NAME "Cosa Nostra"
The Sicilian Mafia has no formal name, as members see no need for one. Nonetheless, in many Italian publications the term "Cosa Nostra" is used to distinguish the Sicilian Mafia from other criminal networks that are also sometimes referred to as "mafias" (such as the Camorra, the "Neapolitan Mafia").
When the American mafioso Joseph Valachi testified before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations in 1962, he revealed that American mafiosi referred to their organization by the term cosa nostra ("our thing").[9][10][11] At the time, it was understood as a proper name, fostered by the FBI and disseminated by the media. The designation gained wide popularity and almost replaced the term Mafia. The FBI even added the article to the term, calling it La Cosa Nostra (in Italy this article is not used when referring to the Sicilian Mafia).
Italian investigators did not take the term seriously, believing it was only used by the American Mafia. Then, in 1984, the Mafia turncoat Tommaso Buscetta revealed to the anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone that the term was used by the Sicilian Mafia as well.[12] According to Buscetta, the word "mafia" was a literary creation.[13] Other defectors, such as Antonio Calderone and Salvatore Contorno, confirmed this. Mafiosi introduce known members to each other as belonging to cosa nostra ("our thing") or la stessa cosa ("the same thing"), e.g. "he is the same thing, a mafioso, as you".
The Sicilian Mafia has used other names to describe itself throughout its history, such as "The Honoured Society." Mafiosi are known among themselves as "men of honour" or "men of respect".
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Mafia Word Origion..
"The word Mafia became known throughout Italy for the first time in 1863, when a Sicilian writer, Giuseppe Rizzotto [sic--according to Hess, Rizzotti e Mosca, 2], wrote a play entitled "I Mafiusi di La Vicaria" which went through 2,000 performances, over a period of 23 years, of which 34 in the Italian language, in Rome alone, in 1884.
"According to Gaetano Mosca, the word mafia cannot be found in any Sicilian dictionary before 1868, when it was entered as a neologism in Traina's "Sicilian-Italian Dictionary."In another dictionary, Mortillaro's, published in 1878, the word is said to be of Piedmontese origin and to be synonymous with camorra. However, this is not correct.
"The adjective mafiusu (mafioso, in Italian) has been common in Sicily for at least two hundred yers. Cesareo, the poet, found the following verses in an eighteenth century manuscript:
Quannu vinisti vui, piciotta beddatutta la briaria si ribiddauchista è la donna chiù mafiusieddachi l'anncilu, bedd' ancilu purtau.
(when you came, beautiful girlthe entire prison revoltedshe is the finest-looking womanthat the angel, the beautiful angel, brought down).
"According to Cesareo, the word is of Arabic origin, but Pitré does not agree. He simply does not know. He only knows that the word was common in the Borgo section of Palermo and that it meant beauty, charm, perfection, excellence. Thus in Palermo, street vendors, or peddlers would advertise their brooms as scupi d''a mafia! Haju chiddi mafiusi veruu (Brooms that can't be beat! I have the real stuff).
"Capuana, the novelist, found that the word had the same meaning in Catania, where there has never been any Mafia. 'Mafia and its derivatives,' he wrote, 'always meant and do mean 'beauty, charm, perfection, excellence' in their field. Una ragazza mafiosa (a smart-looking girl); mafiusedda (rather charming, neat); casa mafiusedda (a fine looking house). The word mafia adds to the idea of beauty the idea of superiority, of bravery, the feeling of being a man, boldness, but never in the sense of arrogance or braggadocio. After 1860, however, it acquired a new meaning."
Henner Hess, in Mafia & Mafiosi: Origin, Power and Myth. Trans. Ewald Osers.
New York: NYUP, 1998, cites the same sources as Schiavo, and expands on his definitions. For him the word also has connotations of "boldness, ambition, arrogance" (1, Sciascia 1964). And, "A mafioso is simply a courageous, brave fellow who won't stand any nonsense from anyone" (1, Pitré 1889). He says that some believe that the word derives from the Arabic, "either from mahias, meaning a bold man or a braggart, or from Ma afir, the name of the Saracen tribe that ruled Palermo. A third theory of Arab origin relates mafia to maha, a quarry or a cave in a rock. The mafie, the tuff caves in the Marsala region, served the persecuted Saracens as hiding places and later provided hide-outs for other fugitives" (2, Lestingi 1884). Hess states that Giuseppe Loschiavo (not to be confused with Giovanni Schiavo) writes that before Garibaldi's landing, "the rebellious Sicilians had hidden out in the mafie near Marsala and had therefore subsequently, during their successful advance on Palermo, been called mafiosi, the people from the mafie" (2, Loschiavo 1964).
Hess goes on to write that the "term gained currency and first appeared in official language in 1865. In a letter of 10 August, 1865, the delegato di Pubblica Sicurezza, the police agent, in Carini justifies an arrest by the charge that the arrested man had committed the delitto di mafia" (3). " Gradually the delitto di mafia came to mean more the offence of manutengolo, of being a fence or planner of crimes, and not so much the offence of malandrino, of banditry, of being an executant criminal.
Eventually the word mafia was used, above all, for organized crime, until sensation-hungry journalists, confused northern Italian jurists and foreign authors interpreted it as the name of an organization. The emergence of the word was, then, linked with the emergence of a secret society and thus gave rise to fantastic speculations."(3).
He then goes on to add that the "theory which assigns the greatest antiquity to this society suggests that mafia is a corruption of the Arabic word mu afah, in which mu means something like 'inviolability, strength, vigour,' and afah something like "to secure, to protect.' Mu afah had therefore been an association which provided security for its members" (3). Among other possibilities, Hess also cites the Sicilian vespers (1282) and the slogan "Morte alla Francia Italia anela!" which he mistranslates as "Death to France, Italy groans" as opposed to desires. (3).
Yet another improbable source is seen "as an acronym for the slogan 'Mazzini autorizza furti, incendi, avvelenamenti" (Mazzini authorizes theft, arson, poisoning).
"And finally, the mafia was seen as a secret masonic society, said to have been founded by five men in Mazara del Vallo in 1799" (4). "About 1875 the concept off mafia penetrated also into German, French, and English" (4). He cites no sources.
The first published references I have been able to find in the US are:
The Mafiusi of Sicily. The Atlantic monthly. / Volume 37, Issue 219 Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Co. Publication Date: January 1876 City: Boston
"THE SARACENS IN ITALY ." LITTELL¹S LIVING AGE, Fifth Series, ~Volume i~iii, No. 1783. ‹ August 17, 1878.
"Italian Immigrants," Harper's Weekly, November 23, 1889, page 939. The latter reference was posted on the H-Itam list. Regrettably, I did not write down the name of the "poster" or the source.
"LYNCH LAW AND UNRESTRICTED IMMIGRATION." BY THE HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE, REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM MASSACHUSETTS. The North American review. / Volume 152, Issue 414. University of Northern Iowa Publication Date: May 1891
"The mafia and what led to the Lynching," Harper's Weekly, Vol35(March 28, 1891): 602-612.: By 1891 the references to the mafia, in particular in reference to the New Orleans lynching, are almost too numerous to cite.
The tone of these articles varies quite a bit. Some are almost anthropological and merely try to describe the "phenomenon," others are sympathetic to the plight of Italians in Southern Italy and to that of Italian immigrants, while others still can only be described as scurrilous and essentially racist.
Given the current controversy over the use of the term by President Bush and Senator Biden, and the controversy over its meaning, I found the following article to be interesting.
A History Of The Last Quarter-Century In The United States. V. "The United States Will Pay", by E. Benjamin Andrews: pp. 71-91. Charles Scribner's Sons Publication Date: July, 1895
The article talks about the criminal exploits of the notorious and murderous Irish gang, the Molly Maguires. What is interesting and ironic is that, already in 1895, the author, uses the word Mafia to refer to the Molly Maguires. He writes:
"The principal honor of exposing and suppressing this Pennsylvania Mafia is due to Hon. Franklin B. Gowen, a law- yer, at the time President of the Penn-
sylvania and Reading Coal and Iron Co.
Knowing the uselessness of attempting the work with the local police, he, in 1873, secured from Pinkerton's Detective Agency in Chicago the services of one James MeParlan, a young Irishman of phenomenal tact and grit, to go among the Mollies as a secret detective."
It is, in other words, rather clear, that by 1895 the word Mafia could be used as a generic term to refer to criminals of any ethnic group. What is regrettable is that both the president and the senator chose to use the word in a context that made it clear that they were referring to the historical Italian American Mafia, regrettable because it suggests that they are as ignorant about the true state of organized crime in this country as they were to the true nature of the terrorist threats.
Because, while it is rather clear from the context that both the president and the senator were referring to the Italian American Mafia, this article written in 1895, uses the term Mafia to refer to Irish American criminals.
Ben Lawton
"According to Gaetano Mosca, the word mafia cannot be found in any Sicilian dictionary before 1868, when it was entered as a neologism in Traina's "Sicilian-Italian Dictionary."In another dictionary, Mortillaro's, published in 1878, the word is said to be of Piedmontese origin and to be synonymous with camorra. However, this is not correct.
"The adjective mafiusu (mafioso, in Italian) has been common in Sicily for at least two hundred yers. Cesareo, the poet, found the following verses in an eighteenth century manuscript:
Quannu vinisti vui, piciotta beddatutta la briaria si ribiddauchista è la donna chiù mafiusieddachi l'anncilu, bedd' ancilu purtau.
(when you came, beautiful girlthe entire prison revoltedshe is the finest-looking womanthat the angel, the beautiful angel, brought down).
"According to Cesareo, the word is of Arabic origin, but Pitré does not agree. He simply does not know. He only knows that the word was common in the Borgo section of Palermo and that it meant beauty, charm, perfection, excellence. Thus in Palermo, street vendors, or peddlers would advertise their brooms as scupi d''a mafia! Haju chiddi mafiusi veruu (Brooms that can't be beat! I have the real stuff).
"Capuana, the novelist, found that the word had the same meaning in Catania, where there has never been any Mafia. 'Mafia and its derivatives,' he wrote, 'always meant and do mean 'beauty, charm, perfection, excellence' in their field. Una ragazza mafiosa (a smart-looking girl); mafiusedda (rather charming, neat); casa mafiusedda (a fine looking house). The word mafia adds to the idea of beauty the idea of superiority, of bravery, the feeling of being a man, boldness, but never in the sense of arrogance or braggadocio. After 1860, however, it acquired a new meaning."
Henner Hess, in Mafia & Mafiosi: Origin, Power and Myth. Trans. Ewald Osers.
New York: NYUP, 1998, cites the same sources as Schiavo, and expands on his definitions. For him the word also has connotations of "boldness, ambition, arrogance" (1, Sciascia 1964). And, "A mafioso is simply a courageous, brave fellow who won't stand any nonsense from anyone" (1, Pitré 1889). He says that some believe that the word derives from the Arabic, "either from mahias, meaning a bold man or a braggart, or from Ma afir, the name of the Saracen tribe that ruled Palermo. A third theory of Arab origin relates mafia to maha, a quarry or a cave in a rock. The mafie, the tuff caves in the Marsala region, served the persecuted Saracens as hiding places and later provided hide-outs for other fugitives" (2, Lestingi 1884). Hess states that Giuseppe Loschiavo (not to be confused with Giovanni Schiavo) writes that before Garibaldi's landing, "the rebellious Sicilians had hidden out in the mafie near Marsala and had therefore subsequently, during their successful advance on Palermo, been called mafiosi, the people from the mafie" (2, Loschiavo 1964).
Hess goes on to write that the "term gained currency and first appeared in official language in 1865. In a letter of 10 August, 1865, the delegato di Pubblica Sicurezza, the police agent, in Carini justifies an arrest by the charge that the arrested man had committed the delitto di mafia" (3). " Gradually the delitto di mafia came to mean more the offence of manutengolo, of being a fence or planner of crimes, and not so much the offence of malandrino, of banditry, of being an executant criminal.
Eventually the word mafia was used, above all, for organized crime, until sensation-hungry journalists, confused northern Italian jurists and foreign authors interpreted it as the name of an organization. The emergence of the word was, then, linked with the emergence of a secret society and thus gave rise to fantastic speculations."(3).
He then goes on to add that the "theory which assigns the greatest antiquity to this society suggests that mafia is a corruption of the Arabic word mu afah, in which mu means something like 'inviolability, strength, vigour,' and afah something like "to secure, to protect.' Mu afah had therefore been an association which provided security for its members" (3). Among other possibilities, Hess also cites the Sicilian vespers (1282) and the slogan "Morte alla Francia Italia anela!" which he mistranslates as "Death to France, Italy groans" as opposed to desires. (3).
Yet another improbable source is seen "as an acronym for the slogan 'Mazzini autorizza furti, incendi, avvelenamenti" (Mazzini authorizes theft, arson, poisoning).
"And finally, the mafia was seen as a secret masonic society, said to have been founded by five men in Mazara del Vallo in 1799" (4). "About 1875 the concept off mafia penetrated also into German, French, and English" (4). He cites no sources.
The first published references I have been able to find in the US are:
The Mafiusi of Sicily. The Atlantic monthly. / Volume 37, Issue 219 Publisher: Atlantic Monthly Co. Publication Date: January 1876 City: Boston
"THE SARACENS IN ITALY ." LITTELL¹S LIVING AGE, Fifth Series, ~Volume i~iii, No. 1783. ‹ August 17, 1878.
"Italian Immigrants," Harper's Weekly, November 23, 1889, page 939. The latter reference was posted on the H-Itam list. Regrettably, I did not write down the name of the "poster" or the source.
"LYNCH LAW AND UNRESTRICTED IMMIGRATION." BY THE HON. HENRY CABOT LODGE, REPRESENTATIVE IN CONGRESS FROM MASSACHUSETTS. The North American review. / Volume 152, Issue 414. University of Northern Iowa Publication Date: May 1891
"The mafia and what led to the Lynching," Harper's Weekly, Vol35(March 28, 1891): 602-612.: By 1891 the references to the mafia, in particular in reference to the New Orleans lynching, are almost too numerous to cite.
The tone of these articles varies quite a bit. Some are almost anthropological and merely try to describe the "phenomenon," others are sympathetic to the plight of Italians in Southern Italy and to that of Italian immigrants, while others still can only be described as scurrilous and essentially racist.
Given the current controversy over the use of the term by President Bush and Senator Biden, and the controversy over its meaning, I found the following article to be interesting.
A History Of The Last Quarter-Century In The United States. V. "The United States Will Pay", by E. Benjamin Andrews: pp. 71-91. Charles Scribner's Sons Publication Date: July, 1895
The article talks about the criminal exploits of the notorious and murderous Irish gang, the Molly Maguires. What is interesting and ironic is that, already in 1895, the author, uses the word Mafia to refer to the Molly Maguires. He writes:
"The principal honor of exposing and suppressing this Pennsylvania Mafia is due to Hon. Franklin B. Gowen, a law- yer, at the time President of the Penn-
sylvania and Reading Coal and Iron Co.
Knowing the uselessness of attempting the work with the local police, he, in 1873, secured from Pinkerton's Detective Agency in Chicago the services of one James MeParlan, a young Irishman of phenomenal tact and grit, to go among the Mollies as a secret detective."
It is, in other words, rather clear, that by 1895 the word Mafia could be used as a generic term to refer to criminals of any ethnic group. What is regrettable is that both the president and the senator chose to use the word in a context that made it clear that they were referring to the historical Italian American Mafia, regrettable because it suggests that they are as ignorant about the true state of organized crime in this country as they were to the true nature of the terrorist threats.
Because, while it is rather clear from the context that both the president and the senator were referring to the Italian American Mafia, this article written in 1895, uses the term Mafia to refer to Irish American criminals.
Ben Lawton
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