The Italian Mafia in the New World

Cleaning my external hard-drive, I found some essays I wrote in high school.
Here is one I wrote about the Italian Mafia in the New World, March 30th, 2007.



JACOPO BORDIN US HISTORY 30/3/07

THE ITALIAN MAFIA IN THE NEW WORLD


United States, 1870 – 1920: 26 million immigrants arrived to the New World. Many ethnic groups were leaving their countries seeking for better work, better places, better life and Italians were one of those. All these people had in common many reasons for their emigrations: the escape from low wages and high taxes.
At the beginning, Italians were known as hard workers, but after the First World War, their reputation switched into criminals, due to bad men as Al Capone, Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese, and so on. These people were, in fact, members of a criminal association, named “Mafia”. This society, born in Sicily and arrived in the East Coast during the late 19th century following the “Sicilian emigration”, was, according to historian Paolo Pezzino: “a kind of organized crime being active not only in several illegal fields, but also tending to exercise sovereignty functions – normally belonging to public authorities – over a specific territory” and from its first settlement in America, Mafia took control over the most powerful branches of the country.
Even though it is worldwide known as “Mafia”, the real name is “Cosa Nostra” (“our thing”), as many members claimed. However, it was during the Fascist period in Italy, that the Mafia was persecuted and forced to leave Italy. So, many Mafiosi (members of Cosa Nostra) escaped to the United States, but even after Fascism, Cosa Nostra was not powerful in Italy again until the country surrended in World War II and the U.S. occupied it.
One of the reasons why the Mafia regained influence in Italy was that American Mafiosi (as Lucky Luciano) had been able to give information to the U.S. government during the invasion of Italy and Sicily in 1943; therefore, the U.S. Office of Strategic Services permitted Cosa Nostra to take back its social and economic position in Sicily, and signing, doing this, the turning point for the next decades of Mafia’s history.
Few years ago, while getting these facts about Mafia and U.S.’s relationships, a question arose in myself: “Why did the U.S. decide to resettle Cosa Nostra in Sicily?”. It was practically impossible to me to realize that the most powerful criminal association was freed after all the damages done. The answer to my question, anyway, came by reading an article on “Il Giornale di Vicenza”, a local venetian newspaper, which stated that the decision had been taken also because, since Italian Mafiosi were anti-communist, they were seen as a medium to be used against socialist governments. In fact, they were so organized that they were considered the largest organization in the U.S. and they were active mostly in New York, Philadelphia, New England, Detroit, and Chicago. So, interested in this fast criminal’s development, I started to read books and watch movies and documentaries about Mafia; one book in particuarly, attracted my attention: “Cose di Cosa Nostra” (“Things of ‘Our Thing’”), written by Giovanni Falcone, defined as the “Nemico numero 1 della mafia” (“enemy number 1 of the mafia”). Falcone was the General Director of the Italian Anti-Mafia Organization and he got killed by the Mafia in 1992 in an unbelievable bridge explosion. The book was written in 1991, an year before his death, and there he also wrote about Mafia’s expansionism in the New World: he says that mafiosi arrived first in the New York City area around the end of 18th century, where they began with some small operations in the neighborhoods; then they kept growing reaching eventually an international scale.
The first Mafia’s group was called “La Mano Nera” (“The Black Hand”), whose job was to extort Italians and other immigrants making “offers they couldn’t refuse” (typical Mafioso’s way of saying “I’ll kill them if they do not do what I asked them”). These people were threaten by mail if the extortion demands were not met. Afterward, as more Sicilians immigrated to the States, Mafia expanded its activities to prostitution, drugs, alcohol, robbery, murder, and kidnapping. About kidnapping, Falcone gives a real fact occurred in 1874, when leader Antonino Leone and his lieutenant Giuseppe Esposito, kidnapped an English banker and demanded a ransom, but, since the payments were slow, Leone mailed first one ear, then the other, and then a portion of the victim’s nose to his family. And this was just the beginning, because later on, Cosa Nostra began to use even more horrible ways to trade with their victims, such as the acid bath (putting the person into acid), or cementation (putting the person alive into a box and cement it).
It has been with this evil method of acting that Cosa Nostra managed to take control over the most important fields of Italy, first; United States second; and part of the world, eventually.
“Cent’Anni!”



Bibliography

• Carey McWilliams, Factories in the Field
• John Higham, Strangers in the Land
• Giovanni Falcone, Cose di Cosa Nostra, Rizzoli, Milano, 1991
• Mario Puzo, The Godfather, Arrow Books, New York, 2004
• Il Giornale di Vicenza
• users.aol.com/whizkid01/hist.html
• http://www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/USAEitaly.htm