Secrecy is one of the defining characteristics of the Italian Mafia. Wiretaps, financial records, and the rare informant occasionally reveal its inner workings, but these impressions are all too often spotty and fleeting, hampering serious scholarship on this major form of criminal activity. During her years as a consultant to the Italian government agency responsible for combating organized crime, Letizia Paoli was given unparalleled insider access to the confessions by pentiti (literally, repentants), former Mafia operatives who had turned. This mafia ''''hard core'''' came primarily from the two largest and most influential Southern Italian mafia associations, known as Cosa Nostra and 'Ndrangheta, each composed of about one hundred mafia families. The sheer volume of these confessions, numbering in the hundreds, and the detail they contained, enabled the Italian government to effectively break up the Italian mafia in one of the dramatic law enforcement successes in modern times. It is on these same documents that Paoli draws to provide a clinically accurate portrait of mafia behavior, motivations, and structure. Puncturing academic notions of a modernized Mafia, Paoli argues that to view mafia associations as bureaucracies, illegal enterprises, or an industry specializing in private protection, is overly simplistic and often inaccurate. These conceptions do not adequately describe the range of functions in which the mafia engages, nor do they hint at the mafia's limitations. The mafia, Paoli demonstrates are essentially multifunctional ritual brotherhoods focused above all on retaining and consolidating their local political power base. It is precisely this myopia that has prevented these organizations from developing the skills needed to be a successful and lasting player in the entrepreneurial world of illegal global commerce. A truly interdisciplinary work of history, politics, economics, and sociology, Mafia Brotherhoods reveals in dramatic detail the true face of one of the world's most mythologized criminal organizations.
Author(s): Letizia Paoli
Series: Studies in Crime and Public Policy
Edition: illustrated edition
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Year: 2003
Language: English
Commentary: 66327
Pages: 312
Contents......Page 14
The Italian and American Mafia: A Comparison......Page 18
The Italian Mafia: A New Paradigm......Page 28
1. Mafia Associations and Ruling Bodies......Page 39
Families and Members......Page 41
Historical Background......Page 48
The Ruling Bodies of Single Families......Page 55
The Institutionalization of Superordinate Bodies of Coordination......Page 66
2. Status and Fraternization Contracts......Page 80
Rites of Passage......Page 82
Ritual Brotherhoods......Page 91
Mementos......Page 100
An Idealization of the Mafia Phenomenon?......Page 104
3. Secrecy and Violence......Page 124
Variations in Secrecy......Page 125
The Obligation of Silence......Page 131
The Escalation of Secrecy......Page 137
Alternative Legal Orders......Page 143
Mafia Consortia as Illegal States?......Page 153
4. Multiplicity of Goals and Functions......Page 164
Money versus Power......Page 167
Neither Enterprises . . .......Page 177
. . . Nor States......Page 187
5. Mafia, State, and Society......Page 201
Competition and Complementarity......Page 202
Mafia and Politics in Republican Italy......Page 214
A Difficult Liberation......Page 226
Conclusions......Page 243
Notes......Page 252
References......Page 268
B......Page 298
C......Page 299
D......Page 300
G......Page 301
L......Page 302
M......Page 303
P......Page 304
S......Page 305
Z......Page 306
C......Page 308
D......Page 309
N......Page 310
S......Page 311
V......Page 312
