Palermo, wrote Gualterio, the ‘Maffia’ had developed the habit of offering its muscle to different political groupings as a way of increasing its leverage; now it was on the side of whoever opposed the government. Thus, with Gualterio’s report, the Palermo street rumours about the mafia reached the ears of Italy’s rulers for the first time.
Prefect Gualterio was quite explicit about what a good occasion for a clampdown the ‘Maffia’ offered. The government, he explained, could legitimately send in the army to deal with the crime emergency, and in doing so land a fatal blow against the opposition—or so it hoped. As a result of Gualterio’s report, 15,000 troops spent nearly six months trying to disarm the population, arrest draft-dodgers, round up criminals on the run, and track down the mafia. The details of this military campaign (the third in a few short years) are not important here; suffice it to say that it failed.
Gualterio was a conspiracy theorist, but he was not a fantasist. He did not conjure up the mafia out of nothing with the sole purpose of justifying repression. In some respects, his analysis of ‘the so-called Maffia’ ran along the same lines as Turrisi Colonna’s. Organized crime was an integral part of politics on the island. Gualterio’s convenient ‘mistake’ was simply to claim that all the villains were on one side of the political spectrum—the opposition’s. As the revolt of 1866 subsequently proved, some of the most important mafiosi, like Antonino Giammona, were now partisans of order and no longer revolutionaries.
From the day of Gualterio’s report, the word ‘mafia’ rapidly entered general use and simultaneously became the subject of furious controversy. For every person who used ‘mafia’ to mean a criminal conspiracy, there were others who maintained that it still meant nothing more menacing than a peculiarly Sicilian form of self-confident pride. Gualterio thus began to kick up the same dust cloud of bewilderment about what the term ‘mafia’ meant that Franchetti and Sonnino would encounter on their travels round Sicily a decade later—a dust cloud that would only finally be dispersed by Judge Giovanni Falcone.
By giving the mafia a name in these circumstances, Gualterio made a crucial contribution to its image. For since then the mafia and its politicians have frequently claimed that Sicily has been victimized and misrepresented. The government, they protest, has invented the idea that the mafia is a criminal organization as a pretext to oppress Sicilians—yet another version of the ‘rustic chivalry’ theory. One reason that these protests have won support over the past 140 years is that they have sometimes been true. Officials were constantly tempted to pin the label of mafioso on anyone who disagreed with them.
When the Italian government acted in this hypocritical way, it boosted the mafia’s reputation. Thus, unwittingly, when Gualterio gave the mafia its name, he set in place what could be called the mafia ‘brand’s’ positioning strategy vis-à-vis its main competitor. After Gualterio, every blind crackdown that failed to prosecute the mafia—whatever the government happened to take that word to mean—served further to undermine the state’s trustworthiness, and thus to boost the real mafia’s reputation not only for being smart and immune from prosecution, but also for being more efficient and even ‘fairer’ than the state.
More than a century would pass after Gualterio’s report before anyone would write perceptively about the mafia’s own attitude to its name. The writer in question was novelist Leonardo Sciascia, whose 1973 short story ‘Philology’ has a contemporary setting and takes the form of an imagined dialogue between two anonymous Sicilians about the meaning of the word ‘mafia’. The more educated of the two, evidently a politician, is intent first and foremost on displaying his erudition, citing a century-long
Prefect Gualterio was quite explicit about what a good occasion for a clampdown the ‘Maffia’ offered. The government, he explained, could legitimately send in the army to deal with the crime emergency, and in doing so land a fatal blow against the opposition—or so it hoped. As a result of Gualterio’s report, 15,000 troops spent nearly six months trying to disarm the population, arrest draft-dodgers, round up criminals on the run, and track down the mafia. The details of this military campaign (the third in a few short years) are not important here; suffice it to say that it failed.
Gualterio was a conspiracy theorist, but he was not a fantasist. He did not conjure up the mafia out of nothing with the sole purpose of justifying repression. In some respects, his analysis of ‘the so-called Maffia’ ran along the same lines as Turrisi Colonna’s. Organized crime was an integral part of politics on the island. Gualterio’s convenient ‘mistake’ was simply to claim that all the villains were on one side of the political spectrum—the opposition’s. As the revolt of 1866 subsequently proved, some of the most important mafiosi, like Antonino Giammona, were now partisans of order and no longer revolutionaries.
From the day of Gualterio’s report, the word ‘mafia’ rapidly entered general use and simultaneously became the subject of furious controversy. For every person who used ‘mafia’ to mean a criminal conspiracy, there were others who maintained that it still meant nothing more menacing than a peculiarly Sicilian form of self-confident pride. Gualterio thus began to kick up the same dust cloud of bewilderment about what the term ‘mafia’ meant that Franchetti and Sonnino would encounter on their travels round Sicily a decade later—a dust cloud that would only finally be dispersed by Judge Giovanni Falcone.
By giving the mafia a name in these circumstances, Gualterio made a crucial contribution to its image. For since then the mafia and its politicians have frequently claimed that Sicily has been victimized and misrepresented. The government, they protest, has invented the idea that the mafia is a criminal organization as a pretext to oppress Sicilians—yet another version of the ‘rustic chivalry’ theory. One reason that these protests have won support over the past 140 years is that they have sometimes been true. Officials were constantly tempted to pin the label of mafioso on anyone who disagreed with them.
When the Italian government acted in this hypocritical way, it boosted the mafia’s reputation. Thus, unwittingly, when Gualterio gave the mafia its name, he set in place what could be called the mafia ‘brand’s’ positioning strategy vis-à-vis its main competitor. After Gualterio, every blind crackdown that failed to prosecute the mafia—whatever the government happened to take that word to mean—served further to undermine the state’s trustworthiness, and thus to boost the real mafia’s reputation not only for being smart and immune from prosecution, but also for being more efficient and even ‘fairer’ than the state.
More than a century would pass after Gualterio’s report before anyone would write perceptively about the mafia’s own attitude to its name. The writer in question was novelist Leonardo Sciascia, whose 1973 short story ‘Philology’ has a contemporary setting and takes the form of an imagined dialogue between two anonymous Sicilians about the meaning of the word ‘mafia’. The more educated of the two, evidently a politician, is intent first and foremost on displaying his erudition, citing a century-long
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