Unit 14 · The Mafia on Trial

In 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi’s volunteers landed in Sicily. Soon the island joined the new Kingdom of Italy. The new government was far away in the north. It had few police in the countryside and little trust from the people. Around Palermo, in the west of the island, rich lemon and orange groves earned good money. Anyone who could guard that wealth, or threaten it, had power.

In this setting, armed men began to sell protection. A landowner paid them to keep thieves away from his trees and his water. But the same men could also send the thieves. Paying was safer than refusing. A deal where people pay a group so the group will not harm them is called a protection racket. It grew strongest where the state was weakest.

The name came into use in these same years. A popular play set in Palermo’s prison, I mafiusi di la Vicaria, was first staged in 1863. It made the word mafioso familiar to many people. In 1865 a government official in Palermo, Filippo Antonio Gualterio, used the word ’maffia’ in a report to his superiors. Historians usually call this the first official use.

Historians such as Salvatore Lupo and John Dickie place the Mafia’s beginnings in these decades, not in the Middle Ages. A popular legend says the Mafia began in 1282, or that its name is a secret code made of first letters. No record from that time supports either story. They are legends told much later.

In 1876, two young men from Tuscany, Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, traveled through Sicily. No one sent them. They paid their own way and asked their own questions. They wanted to understand why the island was so violent. They also wanted to know why the new national government seemed unable to stop it.

They published what they found in 1877, in two volumes called La Sicilia nel 1876. Sonnino wrote about the hard lives of peasant farmers. Franchetti wrote about politics and government. A careful study of a problem, built on interviews and evidence, is called an inquiry. The Italian parliament held its own official inquiry into Sicily in those same years.

Franchetti’s main idea was striking. He described what he called an industry of violence. In his view, violence in western Sicily was not wild or random. It was a service that some people bought and others sold, much like any trade. Landowners, estate managers and armed guards all took part in this market.

Many historians today build on Franchetti’s idea. Diego Gambetta’s 1993 book The Sicilian Mafia describes the Mafia as a business in private protection. Other historians, such as Salvatore Lupo and Letizia Paoli, add that it is also a brotherhood, with rituals, loyalty and political ties. Both views use the same evidence. They stress different parts of it.

Ermanno Sangiorgi was the questore, the chief of police, of Palermo in the late 1890s. From November 1898 to February 1900 he sent 31 reports to the government in Rome. Together they run to about 485 pages. They describe the Mafia around Palermo in more detail than anyone had put on paper before.

Sangiorgi described eight Mafia groups. Sicilians called these groups cosche; one group is a cosca. Each group had its own territory in the citrus gardens around the city. He named and profiled 218 men. He wrote about their rules, their leaders and the ceremony that brought in new members.

For about a century, the report sat almost forgotten in the state archives in Rome. The historian Salvatore Lupo published it in full in 2011. The historian John Dickie described it for English readers. It matters because it shows that the Mafia’s groups, rules and ritual already existed in the 1890s.

Sangiorgi’s work did not end the Mafia. Police knowledge alone was not enough when witnesses stayed silent and powerful friends protected suspects. But his report is a primary source, a record made at the time by someone involved. Historians can compare it with what later witnesses said, and they find the same kind of structure.

On 1 February 1893, Emanuele Notarbartolo was stabbed to death on a train near Palermo. He was a former mayor of the city. He had also run the Bank of Sicily and tried to clean up its dealings. Suspicion fell on a powerful member of parliament, Raffaele Palizzolo.

The case dragged through courts in Milan, Bologna and Florence. In 1902 a court in Bologna convicted Palizzolo, but a higher court threw out that verdict. In 1904 a court in Florence acquitted him for lack of evidence. Through all of it, Notarbartolo’s son Leopoldo kept pushing for justice, while many witnesses said little or nothing.

That silence has a name: omertà. It is the Mafia’s rule that members, and people around them, never help the police or the courts. Breaking it could bring punishment or death. Many ordinary people stayed silent, not out of loyalty, but out of fear. A crime with no witness willing to testify is very hard to prove in court.

This is why omertà runs through every part of this unit. The state could not win while people stayed quiet. Every real victory came when someone chose to speak, and when others protected them. Watch for that pattern in each story that follows, in Sicily and in America.

Between about 1880 and 1920, about four million Italians moved to the United States. Most came from southern Italy and Sicily, and many were poor farmers. Sonnino’s 1877 study had described how hard life was for Sicilian peasants. In America they built railroads, worked in factories, opened shops and raised families in cities like New York and Chicago.

Almost all of these immigrants had nothing to do with crime. But a small number of criminals came too, or grew up in the new neighborhoods. From about 1903 to 1915, some sent threatening letters signed with a black hand. They demanded money and threatened harm. Getting money by threats is called extortion. Police at the time said the Black Hand was a method used by many small gangs, not one society.

Most victims of the Black Hand were Italian immigrants themselves, and many fought back. In Chicago in November 1907, Italian Americans proposed a group called the White Hand Society. By early 1908 it had an office in the Masonic Temple building downtown. It offered rewards and pressed the police to act.

Prejudice made life harder. In New Orleans in 1891, after a trial ended without convictions in the murder of the police chief, a mob killed 11 Italian men. In 2019, the mayor of New Orleans formally apologized to Italian Americans. A stereotype, a fixed and unfair idea about a whole group, can do real harm.

On 16 January 1920, national Prohibition began. Making and selling alcohol was now against federal law. But millions of people still wanted to drink. Gangs of many backgrounds, including Irish, Jewish and Italian gangs, made fortunes supplying them. In Chicago, Johnny Torrio and then Al Capone built a large organization that later came to be called the Outfit.

Some of these gangs were organized like the Sicilian cosche. Each crime family had a boss, other leaders and members who swore loyalty in a ceremony. In the early 1930s, after a violent struggle among New York bosses, leaders set up a system of families with a council to settle disputes. New York came to have five families. Chicago had one main group, the Outfit.

The families lasted after Prohibition ended in 1933. They moved into gambling, loan-sharking, labor unions and other rackets, illegal businesses built on fraud or threats. Their power depended on bribing officials and on silence. For years, many officials said little about them. Some doubted a national organization existed. Others were paid not to look.

Remember what the families were not. They were never ’the Italians.’ Only a very small share of Italian Americans ever took part. Many Italian Americans became police officers, prosecutors, judges and reporters who fought organized crime. Historians also stress that gangs of many backgrounds ran rackets in these years.

In May 1950, the United States Senate formed a special committee to investigate organized crime that crossed state lines. A special committee is a group of senators set up for one task and for a limited time. Its chair was Estes Kefauver, a senator from Tennessee. Over the next year it held hearings in about 14 cities and heard more than 600 witnesses.

Chicago was one of those cities. Some Chicago testimony was taken in closed session, meaning the public and the press were kept out. One witness was a police captain, Daniel ’Tubbo’ Gilbert, who was running for Cook County sheriff. He was asked how he had become so wealthy. His private testimony leaked to the press before the November 1950 election, and he lost.

The hearings also showed the danger to people who spoke up. On 25 September 1950, a former Chicago police lieutenant, William Drury, was shot and killed in Chicago. He had been expected to help the committee. His murder reminded everyone why so many witnesses were afraid to talk.

The committee held a hearing, not a trial. Senators could question witnesses under oath and publish what they learned. They could not convict anyone of a crime. But hearings can change what the public knows. That can push police, prosecutors and voters to act.

In March 1951 the committee held hearings in New York, and they were shown live on television. The Senate Historical Office estimates that about 30 million Americans watched. Frank Costello, a New York gambling boss, did not want his face shown. So the cameras showed his hands instead. Many viewers remembered those hands for years.

On 1 May 1951 the committee issued its Third Interim Report, an interim report meant to share results before the final one. It said there was a nationwide crime syndicate, a group of criminals working together, known as the Mafia. It said the Mafia had members in many large cities and controlled some of the most profitable rackets. It said the Mafia’s power rested on force and murder.

Not everyone agreed. The scholar Joseph Albini in 1971, and Dwight C. Smith in The Mafia Mystique in 1975, argued that the evidence was thin. They said the committee relied too much on rumor and focused too much on one ethnic group. Later evidence confirmed that Italian American crime families existed and worked together. It did not show that one Mafia ran all organized crime in America.

This debate is a good lesson in evidence. A committee’s finding, its stated conclusion, can be partly right and partly overstated. Historians test each part. Which claim has sworn testimony behind it? Which rests on police opinion? Which was later proved in court?

Edgar Croswell was a sergeant in the New York State Police. He worked near Apalachin, a small town in upstate New York. He knew that Joseph Barbara, who owned a country estate there, had a criminal past. In November 1957 Croswell noticed signs that many out-of-town visitors were coming to Barbara’s estate. He decided to watch.

On 14 November 1957, Croswell and other officers set up a roadblock near the estate. When the guests learned that police were outside, many tried to leave by car or ran into the woods. Officers stopped and identified 58 men from many states. Many were known leaders of crime families. Sam Giancana, a leader of Chicago’s Outfit, is said to have escaped through the woods.

The police could not easily prove a crime. The men gave innocent-sounding reasons for being there. Some were later convicted of conspiracy for lying about why they met. But in 1960 a federal appeals court overturned those convictions in United States v. Bufalino. Simply being at a meeting is not, by itself, a crime.

Still, Apalachin changed minds. Before it, the FBI under J. Edgar Hoover had given organized crime little attention. Right after it, the FBI began its Top Hoodlum Program to gather intelligence, meaning organized information, on crime leaders. One observant officer had shown that the families were in contact across the country.

Joseph Valachi was a low-ranking member of a New York crime family. By the early 1960s he was in federal prison. He came to believe his own boss wanted him dead, and he agreed to talk to the government. It was a rare break in omertà by a sworn member in the United States.

In September and October 1963, the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations held public hearings. A subcommittee is a smaller group inside a larger committee. Its chair was Senator John McClellan of Arkansas. The hearings opened on 25 September, and Valachi first appeared before the cameras on 27 September. He testified on five days. Millions watched a sworn member describe the secret society from the inside.

Valachi said members called their organization Cosa Nostra, Italian for ’our thing.’ He described an initiation ceremony, ranks such as boss and soldier, and the five New York families. He named many members. Most Americans had never heard the name before. Newspapers soon spread it everywhere.

Valachi’s testimony had limits. He was a low-level member, so he saw only part of the organization. Some of his dates and details did not match other records. Investigators and historians treat him as an important informant, a person who gives inside information to the authorities. His account still has to be checked against other evidence.

In 1882, Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It barred most new Chinese workers from entering the United States. Chinese immigrants already here faced unfair laws and violence. Many could not turn to the courts or city hall for help. So they built their own associations, based on family names, home districts and brotherhood.

A tong is one kind of these associations. The word means a hall or meeting place. Tongs offered mutual aid: members helped each other find jobs, housing and lawyers. They lent money and settled arguments. Other Chinese associations, based on home districts, helped send the dead home for burial in China. For many men far from their families, the tong was a second home.

Some tongs also ran gambling halls and other illegal businesses. Rival tongs sometimes fought what newspapers called tong wars. In New York in the early 1900s, the Hip Sing and On Leong tongs fought around Doyers Street in Chinatown. These fights were real. But they were not the whole story, and most tong members never took part in them.

Chicago shows both sides. In 1926 and 1927 the On Leong Merchants Association built a grand building at 2216 South Wentworth Avenue, a meeting place for the Chinatown community. In 1988 FBI agents and Chicago police raided it and found an illegal casino, and the government seized the building. A church bought it in 1993, and in 1994 it became the Pui Tak Center, a community center. It is a Chicago Landmark.

Triad members tell a founding legend. In the 1670s, it says, loyal monks of the Shaolin monastery were betrayed by the emperor. Five survivors swore to overthrow the Qing dynasty and bring back the old Ming rulers. The story appears in the society’s own ritual books. It gave members a heroic past and a cause.

Records tell a different story. Qing government files, studied by the historians Dian Murray and Qin Baoqi in 1994, show that the Heaven and Earth Society, called the Tiandihui, began around 1761 or 1762 in Zhangpu county, Fujian. It started as a brotherhood for poor men who moved around looking for work and needed each other’s help. Its anti-Qing slogans grew later.

The government learned much about the society after a crackdown in Taiwan in 1786 and a rising there in 1787 and 1788. Arrested members described it under questioning. Over time the society split into many groups, known together as the Hongmen. Some became political. In 1904 in Honolulu, the revolutionary Sun Yat-sen joined the Chee Kung Tong, a Hongmen group, to win support from Chinese people abroad.

The English word triad came later, from the society’s symbol joining heaven, earth and humankind. Some later triad groups, especially in Hong Kong, became criminal. Scholars say modern triads descend from the old society but are not the same thing. As with the Mafia, historians separate the legend from the records, and old roots from later crimes.

For decades, American prosecutors faced a problem. They could charge a gunman for a shooting or a collector for a threat. But the bosses who gave the orders rarely touched a gun or wrote anything down. A family could lose members to prison and keep running. The organization itself stayed out of reach.

On 15 October 1970, President Richard Nixon signed the Organized Crime Control Act. Title IX of that law is the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as RICO. Its main author was G. Robert Blakey, a lawyer who worked for the Senate and later taught law.

RICO made it a crime to run or take part in an enterprise, meaning any group of people working together, through a pattern of racketeering activity. A pattern means at least two related crimes of certain listed kinds within ten years. The list includes murder, extortion, bribery and illegal gambling.

This mattered for three reasons. Prosecutors could now try a boss for the whole pattern of an organization’s crimes. They could put many members on trial together and show a jury the big picture. And the government could take away property and money gained through the enterprise, a step called forfeiture.

At first RICO was used slowly. Prosecutors and judges were still learning how it worked. In the 1980s that changed. Federal prosecutors began building large cases that treated a crime family as the enterprise. Court-approved wiretaps and hidden microphones gave them the bosses’ own words.

In New York, prosecutors went further. In what became known as the Commission case, begun in 1985, they charged leaders from several of the city’s families together. They argued that the Commission, the council of bosses, was itself a criminal enterprise. In 1986 a jury convicted the defendants, and long prison sentences followed.

RICO also has a civil side. People harmed by an enterprise can sue for damages, money to make up for harm, and the law allows three times the loss. The government has also used civil RICO to take control of labor unions that crime families had captured, and to appoint monitors to clean them up.

Critics say RICO is very broad. Because an enterprise can be almost any group, prosecutors have used it against businesses, street gangs and public officials, not only the Mafia. Defenders say the breadth is the point: organized crime changes shape, so the law has to fit many shapes. You can weigh both sides.

In Italy, an investigating magistrate is a judge who gathers evidence and builds a case before trial. In Palermo in the early 1980s, that job was deadly. Magistrates who looked into the Mafia often worked alone, and some were killed. When one died, much of his knowledge died with him.

Rocco Chinnici, the head of Palermo’s investigating office, had an idea. What if a small team shared every file? Then no single death could stop the work. On 29 July 1983, Chinnici was killed by a car bomb. His successor, Antonino Caponnetto, made the idea real. The team became known as the anti-Mafia pool.

The pool included Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two magistrates who had grown up in Palermo and had known each other since childhood. Falcone was known for following the money: bank records and cash that tied crimes together. The pool’s members lived with armed guards and could rarely go anywhere freely.

The pool’s method was patient. Link each crime to others. Link each person to a family. Then show that the families belonged to one organization. That last step was the hardest. It needed someone from the inside who knew how the whole structure worked.

Tommaso Buscetta had been a member of Cosa Nostra for decades. In the early 1980s a violent war broke out inside the Mafia. A faction from the town of Corleone killed many rivals, and several of Buscetta’s relatives were among the dead. Buscetta was living in Brazil when police there arrested him in October 1983.

In 1984 he was sent back to Italy. From July 1984, he answered Giovanni Falcone’s questions in Rome. The sessions lasted months. Falcone wrote Buscetta’s words down by hand, filling hundreds of pages. Buscetta became Italy’s most famous pentito, a word for a Mafia member who turns and cooperates with justice.

Buscetta explained the structure. Each family ruled a territory. Families were grouped into districts. Above them sat a ruling body called the Commission. He described rules, ranks and the oath of loyalty. His picture fit what Sangiorgi had described around Palermo more than eighty years before.

Why did he talk? Buscetta said the Mafia had betrayed its own old rules. Critics noted that he also had reason to want revenge on the men who killed his relatives. Both can be true. Falcone’s rule was to check everything. A pentito’s words mattered most when other evidence, such as bank records or other witnesses, backed them up.

Using Buscetta’s evidence and years of their own work, the pool wrote the charges. In Italy this document was called an ordinanza-sentenza, a kind of indictment in which the investigating judges lay out the case for trial. It was filed on 8 November 1985. It filled about 40 volumes and roughly 8,000 pages.

The case charged 475 people. No ordinary courtroom could hold that many defendants. So the state built a new hall beside the Ucciardone prison in Palermo. It was called the bunker courtroom because it was built to resist attack. Defendants sat in barred cells along the sides of the hall.

The Maxi Trial opened on 10 February 1986. The word maxi means very large. It was one of the largest criminal trials ever held. Reporters came from around the world. Many people in Palermo had never before seen Mafia members named, one by one, in a public court.

The trial tested the pool’s main idea. Could a court accept that hundreds of people belonged to one organization, Cosa Nostra, with a Commission at the top? If so, leaders could be held responsible for crimes their organization carried out. That idea later came to be called the Buscetta theorem.

The trial lasted almost two years. On 16 December 1987 the court gave its verdict. Most Italian sources report that 346 people were convicted and 114 were acquitted. Some sources give slightly lower counts, between 338 and 344, so it is safest to say more than 330. Nineteen people received life sentences.

In Italy a verdict is not final until it passes through appeal, when a higher court reviews the case. The top court for criminal cases is the Court of Cassation in Rome. On 30 January 1992, it upheld the Maxi Trial’s verdict. It also accepted the key finding: Cosa Nostra is one organization, led by a Commission.

This was a turning point. Italy’s highest court had confirmed what Sangiorgi, Buscetta and the pool had described. Mafia leaders could now be held responsible as leaders. Life sentences for bosses were final. The silence that had protected the organization for more than a century had been broken in law.

Why do the conviction counts differ? Large trials have many defendants whose cases change. Some defendants die, some are tried separately, and some charges are combined. Different writers counted at different moments. Good historians report the range and say where each number comes from.

The Maxi Trial made the magistrates targets. On 23 May 1992, a bomb exploded under the highway near Capaci as Falcone’s cars drove from the Palermo airport toward the city. Falcone was killed. So were his wife, Francesca Morvillo, who was also a magistrate, and three police officers of his escort: Antonio Montinaro, Rocco Dicillo and Vito Schifani.

Fifty-seven days later came a second attack. On 19 July 1992, a car bomb exploded on Via D’Amelio in Palermo. Borsellino had come there to visit his mother. Borsellino was killed with five officers of his escort: Emanuela Loi, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina and Claudio Traina.

Italian courts later convicted Salvatore Riina, the head of the Corleone faction, and many others for these attacks. Some questions are still being examined in court, including whether people outside the Mafia played a role. Investigators also learned that one early witness in the Via D’Amelio case had given false testimony, which led to new trials years later.

These were not only attacks on two men. They were attacks on the idea that the law could win. The Mafia wanted to frighten judges, police and witnesses back into silence. We remember the escort officers by name too, because they chose to stand beside the judges, knowing the danger.

In the weeks after the 1992 killings, many families in Palermo hung white bedsheets from their balconies. Some had words painted on them against the Mafia. It was a simple act. But many people were showing their neighbors, in public, which side they were on.

In the Brancaccio neighborhood, a parish priest named Pino Puglisi opened a center so children would have somewhere to go besides the street. He taught that young people could choose a different life. On 15 September 1993, his 56th birthday, he was murdered. In 2013 the Catholic Church beatified him, a step toward naming him a saint.

In 1995 a priest from Turin, Luigi Ciotti, founded Libera, a national network of anti-Mafia groups. Libera works with families of victims and with schools. It helps turn land and buildings taken from Mafia bosses into farms, cooperatives and community spaces. The idea is that stolen wealth should come back to the public.

An anti-Mafia movement is not one group. It is many people acting in many ways: teachers, priests, shopkeepers, students, reporters and families of victims. A saying often credited to Falcone puts the hope plainly. The Mafia is a human thing, it says, and like every human thing it had a beginning and will have an end.

The pizzo is protection money paid to the Mafia. It is the same business Franchetti described in 1877, in modern form. A shop pays regularly, often every month. In return, nothing bad happens to it. For a single shopkeeper, refusing alone could feel impossible. The collector might come back with threats, or worse.

The young people who put up the stickers in June 2004 understood this. So they looked for a way to make refusing a shared act. Their movement, called Addiopizzo, meaning goodbye pizzo, invited shops to say publicly that they did not pay. Shopkeepers joined over time.

Addiopizzo then asked customers to take a side too. People could sign a pledge to shop at stores that refused to pay. A published list of pizzo-free businesses helped them find those stores. This idea is called critical consumption: choosing where to spend money so that it supports honest businesses.

The strategy changed the math. One shop refusing alone is a target. Many shops refusing together, with customers behind them and police ready to act, are much harder to punish. Addiopizzo also supports shopkeepers who report extortion, helping them through the police and court process.

For decades, murders linked to Chicago’s Outfit went unsolved. Families of victims waited without answers. In the early 2000s, federal agents and prosecutors in Chicago built a case they named Operation Family Secrets. They used RICO to charge Outfit members with a long-running racketeering conspiracy that included 18 murders from past decades.

A key witness came from inside one family. Frank Calabrese Jr. agreed to wear a hidden recording device, called a wire, while talking with his own father, Frank Calabrese Sr. Later he testified in court against him. It was one of the hardest choices a witness can make.

On 10 September 2007 the jury found all five defendants guilty of racketeering conspiracy. On 27 September it found that three of them, Frank Calabrese Sr., Joseph Lombardo and James Marcello, were responsible for murders. For many victims’ families, the trial was the first time the full story was told in public.

The case shows RICO doing what its authors hoped. Old murders that could not easily be tried one at a time became part of one pattern. It also shows omertà breaking in a very personal way: a son chose his conscience over his father’s code of silence.

Almost every big case in this unit depended on someone from the inside: Valachi, Buscetta, Frank Calabrese Jr. Only insiders know how a secret group really works. But insiders may have reasons to bend the truth. They may want a lighter sentence, protection, money or revenge.

Courts deal with this through corroboration: evidence from another source that supports what a witness says. Falcone checked Buscetta’s words against bank records and other witnesses. In Chicago, the recordings Frank Calabrese Jr. made let the jury hear a defendant’s own voice.

When checking fails, justice can fail too. In the Via D’Amelio case, a man named Vincenzo Scarantino confessed and named others. Years later, courts found that his story was false, and convictions based on it were overturned. Italian courts are still examining how that mistake happened.

Governments also protect witnesses who tell the truth. The United States set up a federal witness protection program under the same 1970 Organized Crime Control Act that contained RICO. It can give a witness a new name and a new home. Italy built its own system to protect collaborators of justice.

Films often show crime families as clever, stylish and loyal. The record tells a different story. Think of a family that runs a bakery. Every month, part of what they earn goes to the pizzo. That money comes out of wages, prices and savings. Customers pay more. Honest competitors can be pushed out.

The costs spread wider. When officials are bribed, people stop trusting police and courts. When public works such as roads and schools are rigged, they cost more and may be built worse. When witnesses are killed, like William Drury in Chicago in 1950, others learn to stay silent. Fear becomes a kind of tax too.

Whole communities have paid in another way: prejudice. Italian Americans and Chinese Americans were often blamed as groups for the crimes of a few. In 1891 that prejudice led to a mob killing in New Orleans. Most victims of the Black Hand and of the pizzo came from the same communities the criminals claimed to belong to.

The heaviest price was paid by those who resisted: Emanuele Notarbartolo, Rocco Chinnici, Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo, Paolo Borsellino, their escort officers and Father Puglisi. Their stories show what this unit has traced from 1876 to today. Silence protected the Mafia. Speaking up, together and with protection, is what weakened it.