The Sicilian Mafia

The genesis of Cosa Nostra is hard to trace because mafiosi are very secretive and do not keep historical records of their own. In fact, they have been known to spread deliberate lies about their past, and sometimes come to believe in their own myths.

• Leader
• Membership
• Location Kingdom of Sicily
• Identifier’s
• Criminal activities – racketeering, illegal drug trade, murder, contract killings, extortion, intimidation, bid rigging, loan sharking, assault, smuggling, political corruption, terrorism, illegal gambling, prostitution, art theft, money laundering, firearm trafficking, vote rigging, political bribery, fraud, fencing, kidnapping, robbery
• General Attitude

The Sicilian
Mafia, also known as Cosa Nostra (“Our Thing”), is a criminal syndicate
in Sicily, Italy. It is a loose association of criminal groups that share a
common organizational structure and code of conduct. Each group, known as a
“family”, claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town or village
or a neighbourhood (borgata) of a larger city, in which it operates its rackets.
Its members call themselves “men of honour”, although the public often
refers to them as “mafiosi”. The Mafia’s core activities are protection
racketeering, the arbitration of disputes between criminals, and the organizing
and oversight of illegal agreements and transactions.

The Mafia began as an extralegal force, as the nobility owned most of the land and enforced the law through their private armies. When feudal barons steadily sold off or rented their lands to private citizens. Land could no longer be seized to settle debts, and one fifth of the land became private property of the peasants. The result was a huge increase in landowners — with this increase in property owners and commerce came more disputes that needed settling, contracts that needed enforcing, transactions that needed oversight, and properties that needed protecting. The barons released their private armies to let the state take over the job of enforcing the law, but the new authorities were not up to the task, largely due to clashes between official law and local customs. Lack of manpower was also a problem; some towns did not have any guards, only visited every few months by some troops to collect malcontents, leaving criminals to operate with impunity in the interim. Compounding these problems was banditry. Rising food prices, the loss of public and church lands, and the loss of feudal commons pushed many desperate peasants to steal. In the face of rising crime, booming commerce, and inefficient law enforcement, property owners turned to extralegal arbitrators and protectors. These extralegal protectors eventually organized themselves into the first Mafia clans.

In countryside towns that lacked formal constabulary, local elites responded to banditry by recruiting young men into “companies-at-arms” to hunt down thieves and negotiate the return of stolen property, in exchange for a pardon for the thieves and a fee from the victims. These companies-at-arms were often made up of former bandits and criminals, usually the most skilled and violent of them. This saved communities the trouble of training their own policemen, but it may have made the companies-at-arms more inclined to collude with their former brethren rather than destroy them.