A good man passes

[fpb]

Cardinal Salvatore Pappalardo, Archbishop emeritus of Palermo, has died at 88. To people of my country and generation, this man stands for a time not to be forgotten: the time when, in the middle of terrible shocks and difficulties, Sicily and all Italy began to turn the corner in the struggle against the Mafia - accepting that it was a struggle,

Comments

[redcoast]

There is nothing inevitable about the Mafia?

[fpb]

I am sorry to have to tell an American this, but we owe the modern incarnation of the Mafia to our American friends. In the early 1920s, the Sicilian Mafia was silenced and driven underground by the legendary police chief (Prefetto) Mori. Though appointed by a pre-Fascist government, the Fascists took care to support him and his achievements and in general kept the Mafia pretty well crushed. In the US, on the other hand, the Sicilian secret society had prospered, thanks to two main reasons - prohibition, and the existence of vast and corrupt city party machines. (I rather suspect that first contact with these in the third quarter of the nineteenth century, when Irish party machines had established their hold over the largest American cities and Italian immigrants were following, helped turn primitive Sicilian banditry into the system of political control and mass extortion known as the Mafia.) So, in 1943, American agents, suffering from the eternal twin American delusions that, one, the end justifies the means, and, two, that

[redcoast]

Well, that's really interesting! Write more about the mob!

[fpb]

Understand, even without the idiotic American intervention (one of a whole series of catastrophic decisions taken during WWII and afterwards, which damaged relationships with Europe for ever), it is likely enough that the Mafia, kept down by the military power of the Fascist state, would have raised its head during the last couple of years of war, with the Italian state reduced to a shadow and civil war and German occupation in much of the country. But the Americans all but legitimated the Mafia, which therefore had a much easier life. At the time of Mori, hundreds of mafiosi had fled Sicily for America; now a lot of them - beginning with Lucky Luciano, an illegal immigrant if I remember correctly - came back, with all the know-how and capital they had accumulated in the States.