Articles:
Mafia Republic: Italy’s Criminal Curse by John Dickie

Italians often
complain that foreigners are obsessed by the Mafia, turning a localized problem
of organized crime into a stereotype that damages the image of a whole nation.
Yet as John Dickie, a historian of Italy at University College London, shows in
this chilling and eye-opening book, the real problem is that the stereotype is
correct. The romanticisation of the Mafia by Hollywood may have been damaging,
for the truth is squalid and tragic. Yet the worst, and most damaging,
romanticisation has been that by Italian cinema, television and literature
itself, especially in the 1950s and 1960s.

The point is not that all Italians are mafiosi, of course. Rather, it is that
the strength, scale and endurance of the country’s three main mafias are fully and
sadly representative of Italy’s broader national weaknesses: disregard for the
rule of law, frail state institutions made frailer by the self-centred power
games of the politicians and parties that inhabit them, and the frequent
failure of Italians themselves, grand or humble, to care or to do much about
it.

That failure both caused and prolonged the phenomenon
that is hardest of all for outsiders to comprehend: the pretence that the Mafia
organisations did not really exist. They had in fact existed for more than a
century, albeit as secret societies intermingled with equally secret networks
of freemasons. But their crimes were evident for all to see. And as their
operations spread or matured from mainly local extortion to cigarette
smuggling, kidnapping, drug dealing and then more conventional businesses such
as construction, waste disposal and even hospital supplies, their effect on the
national economy became more and more evident too.

At the heart of the national weaknesses that explain
both the crime and the pretence, as Dickie outlines, has lain a close
relationship between organized crime and politics: two networks of power coming
to depend on one another for support and protection. That has been especially
true in the three southern regions that are the three mafias’ respective home
bases—Sicily for Cosa Nostra, Campania for the Camorra and Calabria for the
‘Ndrangheta—but it has also been true both at national level and in rich
northern regions such as Piedmont and Lombardy where the southern mafias have
also put down roots.

The most devastating period since 1945 for this
collaboration between crime and the state was in the 1980s and early 1990s, a
period brought recently back to many minds by the death earlier this month of
Giulio Andreotti, the Christian Democrat politician who dominated government
during that period. It was a time when terrorist outrages by extreme left and
extreme right groups coincided with wars within the Mafia, a blood-drenched
period that culminated in the massacres in Palermo in 1992 of the two brave anti-mafia
prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, who were leading the first
ever real fightback against organized crime.

The Christian Democrats’ party organization in Sicily,
and especially the part of it controlled by Andreotti, had long worked closely
with Cosa Nostra and had skillfully suppressed judicial and police efforts
against organized crime on the island. Yet the extraordinary spate of killings,
including many “eminent corpses”, during the 1980s had also brought the
previously hidden worlds of the three mafias out into the open and stimulated
the fightback against it.

Out of that dark and deadly period, and especially out
of the still-not-fully-resolved murders of Falcone and Borsellino, came however
both the progress and the hope with which Mafia
Republic closes. The progress has come from new anti-mafia powers and laws
that have led to the severe disruption and weakening especially of Cosa Nostra
in Sicily. The hope has come from growing popular resistance to organized crime
from civil society groups and, most notably, business groups such as
Confindustria, the Italian equivalent of the CBI and which for years denied the
mafias’ existence.

Yet there is a huge amount more to do. The Calabrian
‘Ndrangheta, in particular, remain hugely powerful and have networks stretching
all around the world. The Neapolitan Camorra, made much better known by the
bravery of the writer Robert Saviano, retain a tight grip on their region. And
the economic power of all the mafias—as sources of jobs and even finance, and
as barriers to open competition—remains extraordinary. The battle against them
may have begun, but the war is very far from being won.