The Mafia cannot keep its stranglehold on Italy
Popes, judges and shopkeepers are leading resistance to organised crime, says Patrick West
Mafia Republic, by John Dickie, Sceptre, £25
How do you think Italians react when you mention you’re learning their language? With happiness? Interest? Gratitude, perhaps. No. Invariably, it’s something along the lines of: “Why do you want to learn my useless language, or learn about my hopeless country?” Despite our perceptions of the Italians as an amorous, stylish, artistic and sonorous people, when it comes to talking about their country today they’re a profoundly gloomy lot.
It’s not surprising, really. Anyone who follows Italian politics knows how embedded organised crime is in that country, and how for decades an endless stream of politicians, businessmen, architects and doctors have been bought by the mob. Many Italians regard their country almost as a failed state. Even so, Mafia Republic is still a shocking dissection of the rise of Italy’s three main organised crime fraternities: Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, the Neapolitan Camorra and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta.
The ’Ndrangheta is now the world’s most powerful mafia, which account for three per cent of Italy’s GDP alone. In Sicily, the mafia even tax petty criminals: burglars have to ask permission from the Cosa Nostra before they break into a house. John Dickie’s book exposes not just the level of corruption and extortion, but the depth of its reach.
How did this happen to one of Europe’s greatest countries? The author dismisses the theory, favoured by some northern types, that lawlessness is inherent to the southern Italian character. Rather, he attributes organised crime to the youth of the Italian state (united in 1861, a democracy since 1946), and the fact that it remains regionally disparate – culturally, politically and linguistically. Young democracies of this type are always unstable. Dickie challenges the belief that Mussolini crushed the mafia. Rather, Il Duce banned all mention of it in the media, in the hope it would quietly go away.
The state continued to wish away the mafia after the war, with lamentable consequences, leaving the three main mafias to fester in parallel with the booming economy. The ’Ndragheta were only officially recognised in 1955 and, most shockingly, a witness protection scheme wasn’t initiated until 1992.
When the state did act, it often worsened matters. Mafia activity increased on the mainland as a direct consequence of imprisoning Cosa Nostra convicts on it. “God bless these prisons!” exclaimed the Camorra member Gaspare Mutolo in 1976, after his arrest for heroin trafficking. The Camorra had previously been an association of petty thieves and smugglers, but having been introduced to Sicilian gangsters to jails in Naples and Campania, their members moved on to more ambitious criminal activities.
Unlike France or the United States, Italy didn’t join in the war on drugs, and consequently it was Mutolo’s Camorra that re-routed the “French connection”. Naples became the new Marseilles, massively enriching the prestige, power and influence of the mafia bosses, and simultaneously spreading misery.
By 1980, Italy had more heroin addicts per head of population than the United States. By the turn of the millennium the mafias had power bases not only in the north of the country, but also in Germany, Australia, Argentina and beyond. The illegal construction of houses is still rampant, as well as of massive towns without schools or hospitals, with potentially fatal consequences. (In July this year, 39 people were killed after a bus careered off a shoddily built viaduct.) One statistic sticks out: during the 1980s an estimated 10,000 people were killed in southern Italy’s mafia wars. That’s more than three times the number killed in 30 years of Troubles in Northern Ireland. Strangely, one of the most alarming constants of this book is not its gory narrative, but the degree to which the now defunct Christian Democracy party was involved in organised crime at an individual level. No wonder the country’s youth were drawn towards the Red Brigades in the 1970s and that many didn’t appear to muster much sympathy during the kidnapping and murder of former Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro in 1978. Italian youth then drew little distinction between politicians and gangsters.
But it’s not all gloom. Dickie believes that the mafia’s days are now numbered. Following the mayhem of the 1980s, a new resolve emerged, one epitomised by the fearless campaigns of two judges, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino. By 1992, both knew that they were walking corpses. Falcone was killed by a bomb placed underneath a motorway on May 23 that year. Borsellino waited 56 days, frequently going out alone to buy cigarettes in the hope he would be shot dead alone, before a bomb killed him and six others. Both judges were Sicilians. Both were ready to die for their homeland.
Suddenly, it wasn’t only the Communists speaking out. In 1990, John Paul II told an audience at a football stadium in Sicily not to be seduced by the mafia’s “culture of death”. He said: “Convert! Because one day that judgment of God will come!” By now, writes the author: “The Vatican had abandoned its traditional misgivings about the anti-mafia cause. Cosa Nostra, finally, was anathema.”
Shopkeepers formed an organisation called Addiopizzo (“Goodbye Extortion”). They signed a public pledge not to pay protection money; and consumers signed a pledge to patronise businesses that did not pay. This surprisingly simple idea worked: mafiosi couldn’t be bothered with those who made the pledge. The mafia is now quite literally going underground. In Campania and Calabria the powerful bosses have taken to building underground bunkers as mafia hunters have become ever more expert and determined.
Although written in slightly breathless prose, Mafia Republic is an excellent achievement. It may be an indictment of Italy’s rulers, but it offers much hope. My generation grew up assuming mayhem and murder in Northern Ireland was the norm. Let’s hope tomorrow’s Italians will one day think of kidnappings and assassinations as things that happened in the bad old days.
The British public is eager to be offended.
By Patrick West
There is something about "Muslim anger" that many in the West find difficult to comprehend. How can representations of Mohammed in a YouTube video, a film that barely anyone saw, or cartoons in French or Danish publications, which hardly anyone read, generate such a violent reaction? As Kenan Malik, author of From Fatwa to Jihad, wrote after the events: "The extraordinary violence unleashed across the Muslim world by Innocence of Muslims, an obscure US-made video, has left many bewildered and perplexed."
This perplexity, however, is often combined with a feeling of superiority. The ostensibly touchy and childish behaviour of some Muslims is depicted in contrast to our open, secular society, which is sufficiently mature to deal with offensive images and films. Many Christians, for instance, objected to
The Life of Brian, but the Monty Python team didn't go into hiding for two decades as a consequence. But such smugness is unwarranted, as we in the West have our own form of secular blasphemy. It¹s called "being offensive".
Last year two Christians in Brighton were arrested for displaying a giant banner of a 10-week-old aborted child outside an abortion clinic. After receiving complaints from the public, police asked the protesters to take down the "offensive" banner. They refused and late last month the pair were put on trial but cleared on the grounds of "lack of evidence".
You may disagree with the pair¹s actions. Such photographs could upset children or women about to undergo an abortion. On the other hand, graphic images on cigarette packets aren't very nice either. But society isn't in denial about smoking. The issue here is that (as I saw on the local news) one police officer had reportedly informed the couple: "I find these images offensive." It's not the job of the police to have opinions, of course, but it's not surprising that even they have become sensitive souls these days.
Consider the furore concerning the chief whip, Andrew Mitchell, who allegedly called a police officer a "----ing pleb" after refusing to dismount his bicycle at the gates to Downing Street. The chairman of the Metropolitan Police Federation responded that there was an "inbuilt dislike of the police service in general", while the Surrey Police Federation called
Mitchell "a bully". Some suggested that the police are trying to play the victim card in the wake of the Hillsborough report. And I imagine that policemen have been called worse names than "pleb".
Being "offensive" is increasingly a wider police matter. Earlier this year a Welsh student was imprisoned for two months for sending offensive messages on Twitter to a seriously ill footballer, while another "troll" was arrested in a dawn raid for typing nasty things about the diver Tom Daley. Twitter can certainly bring out the worst in people, leading them to hurl disgusting abuse from the safety of their keyboards, but it's concurrently an avenue to censor people who are "offensive". Last year a group of writers launched a campaign against "misogynistic trolling" on the internet, including everything from "threats of rape" to comments that are "strongly and
personally antagonistic towards feminism" thereby conflating threats of violence with expressing a political opinion: two very different things.
The comedian Frankie Boyle landed himself in trouble last month for making jokes about the Paralympics on Twitter, provoking a Mencap spokesman to say it would be disappointing if Channel 4's coverage of the Paralympics was
"undermined by providing a comedian who has repeatedly caused profound offence to disabled people opportunities to do so again". A statement from the station replied: "Frankie Boyle was tweeting from his personal account and not on behalf of Channel 4. He is not under contract and there are no
shows planned with him."
Frankie Boyle isn't Alan Titchmarsh or Pam Ayres. You don't expect sweetness and light from him. Being offensive is what Frankie Boyle does. Still, members of the public are eager to be offended, because being offended permits one to be a victim, as victimhood bequeaths righteousness. The
emotive, subjective argument that used to be confined to traumatised guests on the Kilroy show years ago "How would you like it if happened to you!?" has become the unspoken mantra for a society in which personal feeling counts for expertise.
Twitter is a perfect avenue for the lonely and unhappy to give meaning to their lives. It gives the powerless the illusion of power. This is what causes people to get "outraged" about silly articles in the Daily Mail they haven't read, Page 3 girls in a newspaper they never buy or pictures of topless royalty they haven't seen.
Recently Gerry Adams described as "deeply hurtful" allegations that he sanctioned the 1973 Old Bailey bombing, which I imagine is an invitation to "feel his pain". Back then in the 1970s football fans were caged behind perimeter fences to stop them misbehaving. Now they are micromanaged, facing arrest for swearing or "indecent chanting". Such is the insidious nature of our "You can't say that" culture.
It is often remarked that profanities and jokes are signifiers of society's taboos. You aren't going to cause a stir in polite society today if you take the Lord's name in vain, but you will if you use a coarse description of female genitalia. You will certainly get into trouble if you make the kind of jokes Bernard Manning did 40 years ago non-ironically. Andrew Mitchell's sin was not in using the F-word, but the P-word - pleb - as class snobbery is taboo but the usage of vulgar Anglo-Saxon isn't.
In our current climate of censoriousness and fear of causing offence, I bet The Satanic Versus wouldn't get published if it were written today - not for being blasphemous, but for "hurting people's feelings". This is to say, all societies have taboos and associated transgressions. Anyone who thinks a
nominally liberal and secular society is consequently free of intolerance must be joking.
Patrick West is a columnist for Spiked-online.com
Watching Life on Mars we’re supposed to look down our noses at racist, sexist, Paddy-bashing Gene Hunt. But, hey, he gets the job done
