The Italians (35 page)

Lettori
are non-Italian university lecturers who teach a foreign language in their mother tongue. Back in the 1980s, the
lettori
began to lobby for pay and conditions comparable to those of Italian lecturers. But that would have meant giving them open-ended contracts. Those who have campaigned on their behalf believe that the last thing most of the so-called
baroni—
the tenured full professors—wanted was to give security of employment to a bunch of foreigners who might challenge the way things were done in Italian universities.

In 1995, under growing pressure from the European Commission, the Italian government changed the law. It reclassified the
lettori
not as teachers, but as technicians. Those who refused to accept their new status were sacked (though most were subsequently reinstated at the insistence of the courts). Among other things, the reclassification of the
lettori
has meant that they can no longer set or mark exams. That now has to be done by an Italian who, except in very rare cases, does not have the same proficiency in the language as the
lettori
who, in fact if not in law, have taught the students being examined
.

Ever since the mid-1990s, those who were dismissed (or who accepted the 1995 terms while reserving their right to contest them) have campaigned for the back pay they believe is their due for the period in which—it is acknowledged by all sides—they were teachers and not technicians. Over the years, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) has ruled six times in their favor, accepting their contention that Italy’s treatment of them constituted discrimination on grounds of nationality. On several occasions, the Rome government has changed the law in the semblance of an effort to meet the ECJ’s demands. But few of the
lettori
have ever been compensated. In 2010, a law was brought in that simply declared null and void the cases in which
lettori
were suing universities for compensation and led to about half of them having their salaries cut—in extreme cases, by as much as 60 percent.

All this may help to explain why Italians sometimes use a phrase that baffles foreigners, telling them with a shrug:
“Siamo tutti un po’ mafiosi”
(“We’re all a bit mafia-like”). The son of the last undisputed
capo di tutti capi
of the Sicilian Mafia
,
Bernardo Provenzano, said something like it after his father was arrested in 2006 at the end of an unprecedented forty-three years on the run. The then thirty-year-old Angelo Provenzano was being interviewed by a reporter from
La Repubblica
. “The Mafia,” he said, “follows on from
mafiosità,
which is not solely and exclusively Sicilian behavior.”

To say there is a widely diffused
mafiosità
in Italy (and that elements of
mafiosità
can indeed be found in every society) is one thing. But to claim, as Cosa Nostra’s apologists have often done, that the Mafia itself is no more than a frame of mind is quite another. Angelo Provenzano called it a “mental attitude” and a “fluid magma with no defined borders.”
²
In so doing, he was consciously or unconsciously echoing an argument that for many years succeeded in bamboozling politicians, investigators and public opinion. But the fact is that the Sicilian Mafia and Italy’s other organized crime syndicates exist as something considerably more than an attitude. And their borders are anything but fluid.

CHAPTER 16

Of Mafias and
Mafiosi

Noialtri siamo mafiosi, gli altri sono uomini qualsiasi. Siamo uomini d’onore. E non tanto perché abbiamo prestato giuramento, ma perché siamo l’élite della criminalità. Siamo assai superiori ai delinquenti comuni. Siamo i peggiori di tutti!

We are
Mafiosi
. The others are common men. We are men of honor. And not so much because we have sworn an oath, but because we are the elite of crime. We are very much superior to common criminals. We are the worst of all.

Antonino Calderone, a Mafia
pentito
¹

I
t may come as a surprise, particularly to readers who have seen the film
Gomorrah
or read the book by Roberto Saviano on which it is based,
²
but Italy is not a particularly crime-ridden country. Definitions vary widely from one country to another, so crime rates are notoriously difficult to compare. And what they show, in any case, is not the true amount of crime, which is unknowable, but the level of
reported
crime, which varies according to the readiness of the public in each country to tell the police. What is more, in Italy there are sizable variations between regions. The overall rates for most crimes are nevertheless much lower than in other European countries of the same size. Figures compiled by the European Commission suggest that in 2009, for example, there were less than half as many robberies as in France and only an eighth as much violent crime as in Britain.

Unsurprisingly then, many Italians feel outraged when foreigners identify their country with the mafia. Back in 1977, the German newsmagazine
Der Spiegel
put on its cover a photograph of a pistol on a plate of spaghetti. It has never been forgotten. Even today, whenever some foreign journalist is felt to have given a stereotyped view of Italy, someone will drag up that offending cover as evidence of the gross prejudices about the country that are held abroad.

Those who complain also point out that organized crime is found elsewhere. Reference has already been made to Japan’s mafia, the Yakuza. In recent years gangsters originating in Russia, Turkey, Albania and Latin America have been active far beyond the borders of their respective countries. Just a few weeks before I began writing this chapter, the Spanish newspaper
El País
publicized an official report showing that the police had investigated 482 organized criminal gangs in Spain in the previous year, mostly of foreign origin.

Nor did Italians invent the concept: the Yakuza gangs probably predate Italy’s oldest mafia, the Camorra, which operates in Naples and the surrounding region, by about a hundred years. There is evidence, moreover, to suggest that organized crime in Italy is not even homegrown; that it entered the Mezzogiorno from Spain when the south was under Spanish rule. But while it died out in Spain in the centuries that followed, it developed and flourished in Italy and turned into something that is different from, and more than, just organized crime.

Italy has three main criminal syndicates: the Camorra, Cosa Nostra in Sicily, which was the first organization to be designated with the term
Mafia,
^*
and the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta. There is also, on a much lesser scale, the Sacra Corona Unita (“Holy United Crown”) in Puglia.
^*
All these groups have at least four characteristics that set them apart from ordinary criminal gangs, including Italian ones.

One is that, like the Yakuza, they are secret societies. In the 1980s, a gang known as the Banda della Magliana was active in Rome. But it was not a secret society. It did not, like Cosa Nostra, initiate its members by getting them to hold a burning image of the Virgin Mary. Nor did it have ranks and rituals that mimicked the liturgy of the Catholic Church, like the ’Ndrangheta.

A second characteristic that Italy’s four mafias have in common is that their members all feel they belong to something more than just a gang. Though the gang, or clan, is largely autonomous in its day-to-day operations, it forms part of a broader fellowship that—albeit intermittently—has a hierarchical structure.

In the case of Cosa Nostra, the cell or gang is the
cosca
(a telling word: in Sicilian, it refers to the head of an artichoke, with its densely overlapping leaves). Above that is the
mandamento,
made up of several—usually three—neighboring
cosche
. Each
mandamento
sends a representative to the
commissione provinciale
(known in the province of Palermo, at least to the media, as the
cupola,
or dome). In the six provinces of Sicily where the Mafia is active,
^*
the
commissione provinciale
chooses a representative to send to a
commissione interprovinciale
(or
regionale
). That, on the evidence of most of the
pentiti
—
Mafiosi
who have turned state’s evidence—is how things are
meant
to work. But there seem to have been periods in which the structure has fallen apart, either because of police action or internal conflict.

The other point that needs stressing is that Cosa Nostra’s hierarchy has never really been a command structure. As far as is known, the
commissioni
exist—when they do exist—for the purposes of consultation, the resolution of disputes between
cosche
and the agreeing of rules common to the entire organization. They do not usually order specific operations. But there have been exceptions. Among them was the decision by the
commissione provinciale
in Palermo to assassinate two anti-mafia prosecutors, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, in 1992. There was a grim irony in their violent deaths. The killings were in reprisal for the so-called Maxi Trial of 1986–1987 in which the two men for the first time succeeded in convincing a court of law that Cosa Nostra had a hierarchical structure and that Mafia bosses could therefore be convicted of ordering crimes they did not themselves perpetrate.

For a long time, the situation in the ’Ndrangheta was less clear. It was known that, as far back as the 1950s, a supreme assembly had existed that met every year when the heads of the various cells, known as
’ndrine,
assembled in and around the village of San Luca for a pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Our Lady of Polsi. The assembly was called, appropriately enough, the
Crimine
(“Crime”). But in the early 2000s investigators discovered that the
’ndranghetisti
in Reggio Calabria, the biggest province in Calabria, had created a body similar to that of Cosa Nostra’s
cupola
. Recordings of conversations between mobsters suggested it was called the
Provincia
. It was assumed the old ways had been abandoned. But in 2010 an investigation established that the
Crimine
was still very much in existence. Domenico Oppedisano, an eighty-year-old man who had been almost unknown to the police and who lived quietly as an apparently impecunious peasant farmer, was identified as its president. He was arrested, tried and sentenced to ten years in jail.

The Camorra is less hierarchical and conflicts between clans are more frequent. But its initiates nevertheless feel they are part of a broader whole that they themselves refer to as the
Sistema
(System).

Like the
Mafiosi
and
’ndranghetisti,
though to a lesser extent, the gangsters of Naples and the surrounding region of Campania look for political “cover.” This is a third way in which
mafiosi
differ from ordinary criminals: they are constantly on the lookout for acquiescent lawmakers who can smooth their path in exchange for the votes they can deliver. Nor is it the only means by which Italy’s mafias subvert the authorities. Yet another distinguishing feature of its organized-crime syndicates is that they attempt relentlessly—and often successfully—to replace the state. The obsession of every “boss” is to secure
controllo del territorio
(“control of the territory”). Ideally, nothing should be done on his turf to which he does not consent, and the people who live there should look to him as the ultimate arbiter of their fortunes. If their home has been burgled, if they need a job for their son or daughter, if they need the drains fixed in their apartment building, it should be to the boss, and not to the civil authorities, that they turn.