The story of Cosa Nostra, Sicilian mafia almost 150 years old

Pierre-Vincent Letourneau 09:00, May 07, 2022

We are on July 2, 1874 in Sicily, not far from Palermo.

The fertile plain that adjoins the city is dotted with many gardens of orange and lemon trees that fill the air with their sweet scent.

The cicadas sing and the warm wind rushes between the walls delimiting the plots.

Suddenly, a shot comes to break the tranquility of the place.

A young man, guardian of a lemon plantation, has just been killed.

No witnesses.

Nobody knows what happened.

A few months later, the new goalkeeper is in turn injured by a gunshot.

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At the same time, in his beautiful house in Palermo, Gaspare Galati, doctor who owns the plantation, receives threatening letters.

He is summoned to rehire a certain Benedetto Carollo to look after his citrus fruits.

Otherwise he must consider that he and his family are in danger.

For the doctor, it is out of the question to rehire Carollo, whom he just dismissed when he discovered that he was blithely helping himself to crops for his own profit.

From Uditore's cosca to Cosa Nostra

Doctor Galati complains to the police, but nothing happens.

The threats continue.

Fearing for his safety, he leaves for Naples with his family.

Galati understood that he had put his finger in a gear that exceeded him.

His letters sent to the Ministry of the Interior will not change anything.

It's because Benedetto Carollo, the first caretaker fired for helping himself to the crops, comes from the small town of Uditore.

He belongs to a cosca, a sort of secret mutual aid and support group that structures a good part of Sicilian rural society.

A group that can be considered as the basis of the clans of a mafia that we do not yet know under the name that will go down in legend: Cosa Nostra.

Before trafficking arms and drugs around the world, Cosa Nostra developed in part thanks to lemons.

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The origins of the mafia are complex and still partly mysterious.

But the soil of its growth is indeed that of the Conca d'Oro, this plain at the gates of Palermo planted with thousands of lemon trees which have made the wealth of the local aristocracy.

If the lemon has long remained a luxury product dedicated to perfumery or to the pleasure of a few elites, the discovery in the middle of the 18th century of its beneficial effects against scurvy (a disease that has decimated European navies since the Renaissance) made it a highly coveted product.

The fertile ground of an unstable Sicily

In the 19th century, Sicily was the main citrus supplier for the British and then American navies.

The large landowners of the island invest a lot in the plantations and thus create a comfortable income, which brings in much more than the vines, the olives or the wheat traditionally cultivated.

An annuity they want to protect.

Especially in a particularly turbulent time.

Throughout its history, Sicily has belonged to many foreign powers and was not integrated into a unified Italy until 1861. The social structures inherited from feudalism struggled to give way to a new state order.

Revolts are numerous, disorder reigns and robbery is present everywhere in the face of the absence of real public power.

And since the state cannot provide security, the cosca will take care of it.

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These clans, essentially rural, naturally turn to the protection of the precious citrus gardens for the benefit of the bourgeois owners.

Mafiosos are first guards, then foremen, and will then become sellers, matchmakers and traders, playing on their networks of affinity, not hesitating to use the passage for their own interest.

And if someone displeases, like a guardian from outside the community, it is enough to eliminate him.

Gradually, the bonds of mutual aid and kindness are woven throughout Sicilian society, outside the frameworks that the Kingdom of Italy seeks in vain to impose.

A priest, a bourgeois, a policeman or a deputy are quickly more indebted to the mafia than to the state, which finds itself very helpless.

The mafia thus imposes its own laws, in particular omerta, the law of silence, by severely punishing any treason.

“The man who talks a lot bury himself with his own mouth,” goes a fashionable song then.

A local system that is internationalizing and diversifying

The clans are united by ethics and initiation rites tinged with magic and religiosity.

Quietly, the organization, which we will later nickname "the octopus", extends its tentacles.

The Mafiosos get rich and assert their domination by demanding the pizzo, a protection tax that is nothing but racketeering.

But fratricidal struggles quickly appear, with their share of violence which forces the national authorities to intervene.

A first major trial was held in 1901.

Despite a few convictions, many mafiosos benefit from protection and can go back to their business quietly.

And business is good.

They are even getting bigger.

The lemon trade has not been so juicy since Florida developed its own production.

But sulphur, very present on the island and very useful to the industry, becomes so.

Once you have a foothold in international trade, nothing could be easier than getting involved in smuggling.

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The mafia is internationalizing.

Between 1900 and 1914, no less than 800,000 Sicilians emigrated to the United States.

The mafia get involved and will be able to organize illegal trafficking on two continents.

The rise to power of Mussolini and his intransigent prefect Cesare Mori seemed to bear fruit for a while.

But we don't get rid of Cosa Nostra like that.

The organization is so deeply rooted that it is difficult to attack its members without attacking everyone or splashing the authorities.

Some may have been arrested, but nothing comes to seize the machine which is deployed beyond the individuals.

Here is the secret of success: if you cut a tentacle from an octopus, it grows back.

After the war, the organization is all-powerful.

The pizzo hits almost every business on the island.

The Mafia manages land, waste, town planning, politics, and soon international heroin trafficking.

The 1980s and the end of the Cosa Nostra secret

But in Italy we still do not admit its influence and sometimes its existence as a real organization.

It was also necessary to wait for the first defections and testimonies of repentants in the 1980s to discover the very name of Cosa Nostra which means "our thing, what is ours", marking the exclusive and structured character of the organization.

The investigations and revelations for the Maxiprocesso of 1986 and 1987, a trial during which 475 defendants were tried and Judge Falcone killed, bring to light the compromises, crimes and strata of an extremely well-ordered pyramid system.

Italy therefore became truly aware of Cosa Nostra's hold on Sicily.

Influence which, according to some, tends to weaken.

But it is far from having disappeared.

If it is no longer in lemon, Cosa Nostra still has juice.

Bibliography:

- Salvatore Lupo,

, Flammarion, 1999

- Arcangelo Dimico, Alessia Isopi, Ola Olson,

, Department of Economics, University of Gottenburg, May 2012