The Sicilian Mafia or Cosa Nostra (; ; ), also known as the Mafia, is an Italian secret criminal society and criminal organization originating on the island of Sicily and dating back to the mid-19th century. Emerging as a form of local protection and control over land and agriculture, the Mafia gradually evolved into a powerful criminal network. By the mid-20th century, it had infiltrated politics, construction, and finance, later expanding into drug trafficking, money laundering, and other crimes. At its core, the Mafia engages in protection racketeering, arbitrating disputes between criminals, and organizing and overseeing illegal agreements and transactions.
The basic group is known as a "family", "clan", or cosca. Each family claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town, village or neighborhood (borgata) of a larger city, in which it operates its rackets. Its members call themselves "men of honour", although the public often refers to them as mafiosi. By the 20th century, wide-scale emigration from Sicily led to the formation of mafiosi-style gangs in other countries, in particular in the United States, where its offshoot, the American Mafia, was created. These diaspora-based outfits replicated the traditions and methods of their Sicilian ancestors to varying extents.
Etymology The word mafia originated in Sicily. The Sicilian noun mafiusu (in Italian: mafioso) roughly translates to mean "swagger", but can also be translated as "boldness, bravado". In reference to a man, mafiusu in 19th-century Sicily was ambiguous, signifying strength, arrogant but also fearless, enterprising and proud, according to scholar Diego Gambetta.This etymology is based on the books Mafioso by Gaia Servadio, The Sicilian Mafia by Diego Gambetta, and Cosa Nostra by John Dickie (see Books below). In reference to a woman, however, the feminine form "mafiusa" means a beautiful or attractive female. The Sicilian word mafie refers to the caves near Trapani and Marsala, which were often used as hiding places for refugees and criminals.
Sicily was once an Islamic emirate, and it has been challenged that a Sicilian mafia might have Arabic roots. Possible Arabic roots of the word include: mahyāṣ (): aggressive boasting, bragging marfūḍ (): rejected muʿāfā (): safety, protection Maʿāfir (): the name of an Arab tribe that ruled Palermo
The public's association of the word with the criminal secret society was perhaps inspired by the 1863 play "" ("The Mafiosi of the Vicaria") by Giuseppe Rizzotto and Gaspare Mosca. The words mafia and mafiusi are never mentioned in the play. The drama is about a Palermo prison gang with traits similar to the Mafia: a boss, an initiation ritual, and talk of umirtà (omertà or code of silence) and "pizzu" (a codeword for extortion money).Gambetta, The Sicilian Mafia, p. 136. The play had great success throughout Italy. Soon after, the use of the term "mafia" began appearing in the Italian state's early reports on the group. The word was first documented in 1865 in a report by police prefect .
The term mafia has become a generic term for any organized criminal network with similar structure, methods, and interests. But Giovanni Falcone, an Italian judge who was murdered by the Mafia in 1992, had objected to the conflation of the term "Mafia" with organized crime in general:
According to Mafia turncoats (pentiti), the real name of the Mafia is "Cosa Nostra" ("Our Thing"). Italian American mafioso Joseph Valachi testified before the Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations of the U.S. Senate Committee on Government Operations in 1963 (at what are known as the Valachi hearings). He revealed that American mafiosi referred to their organization by the term cosa nostra ("our thing" or "this thing of ours" or simply "our cause" / "our interest").Their Thing , Time, 16 August 1963.Killers in Prison , Time, 4 October 1963."The Smell of It" , Time, 11 October 1963. At the time, Cosa Nostra was understood as a proper name, fostered by the FBI and disseminated by the media. The FBI added the article la to the term, calling it La Cosa Nostra (in Italy, the article la is not used when referring to Cosa Nostra).
In 1984, Mafia turncoat Tommaso Buscetta revealed to anti-mafia Italian magistrate Giovanni Falcone that the term was used by the Sicilian Mafia, as well.. Cosa Nostra Buscetta dismissed the word "mafia" as a mere literary creation. Other defectors, such as Antonino Calderone and Salvatore Contorno, confirmed the use of Cosa Nostra by members. Mafiosi introduce known members to each other as belonging to cosa nostra ("our thing") or la stessa cosa ("the same thing"), meaning "he is the same thing as you – a mafioso."
The Sicilian Mafia has used other names to describe itself throughout its history, such as The Honored Society (Onorata Società) or Brotherhood (Fratellanza). Mafiosi are known among themselves as "men of honor" or "men of respect".
Cosa Nostra should not be confused with other mafia-type organizations in Southern Italy, such as the 'Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Camorra in Campania, or the Sacra Corona Unita and Società foggiana in Apulia.
Overview In 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti described the Sicilian Mafia as an "industry of violence". In 1993, the Italian sociologist Diego Gambetta described it as a cartel of private protection firms.Paraphrase. See chapter 5 of The Sicilian Mafia (1993). He further characterized mafiosi as "guarantors of trust", and that Sicilian people tend to be distrustful of each other and therefore routinely seek mafia protection in their business dealings. This is true for other parts of southern Italy, which never experienced the same post-war economic growth that northern and central Italy enjoyed due in part to a lack of cooperation and healthy competition among the locals. The Mafia may provide a sense of security to those who pay it for protection, but the Mafia actually increases the general amount of distrust in Sicilian society. Those who are under mafia protection have an incentive to cheat those who are not under protection. The Mafia fosters crime by making it safer for criminals to engage in illegal dealings with each other (criminals are the Mafia's most important clients because they can't get protection from the legal system). And since mafiosi charge fees for their services, they increase transaction costs, which in turn leads to a higher cost of living for average Sicilians.Gambetta 2011
The central activity of the Mafia is the arbitration of disputes between criminals and the organization and the enforcement of illicit agreements through the use of violence.: "The mafia's principal activities are settling disputes among other criminals, protecting them against each other's cheating, and organizing and overseeing illicit agreements, often involving many agents, such as illicit cartel agreements in otherwise legal industries. Mafia-like groups offer a solution of sorts to the trust problem by playing the role of a government for the underworld and supplying protection to people involved in illegal markets ordeals. They may play that role poorly, sometimes veering toward extortion rather than genuine protection, but they do play it." The Mafia does not serve the general public as the police do, but only specific clients who pay them for protection.. The Sicilian Mafia
The Sicilian Mafia is not a centralized organization. It is more of an association of independent gangs who sell their services under a common brand. This cartel claims the exclusive right to sell extralegal protection services within their territories, and by their labels (man of honor, mafioso, etc.), they distinguish themselves from common criminals whom they exclude from the protection market.Gambetta 2011: "the Sicilian mafia, as I argue in chapters 5 and 6, is more akin a federation of independent “families,” which have one thing in common above all: they share a reputation asset as suppliers of protection, a trademark that distinguishes them from similar other groups present both in Sicily itself and in the rest of Southern Italy."
Franchetti argued that the Mafia would never disappear unless the very structure of the island's social institutions were to undergo a fundamental change.Servadio, Mafioso, pp. 42–43 Over a century later, Diego Gambetta concurred with Franchetti's analysis, arguing that the Mafia exists because the government does not provide adequate protection to merchants from property crime, fraud, and breaches of contract. Gambetta wrote that Sicily (in the early 1990s) had "no clear property rights legislation or administrative or financial codes of practice", and that its court system was "appalling" in its inefficiency. Gambetta recommended that the government liberalize the drug market and abolish price-fixing of cigarettes so as to move these commodities out of the black market; to increase transparency in public contracting so that there can be no rigging, which mafiosi usually arbitrate; and redesign the voting process to make it harder to buy votes. Fixing these problems would reduce the demand for mafioso intervention in political and economic affairs.. The Sicilian Mafia, pp. 245–256
Cultural aspects Until the 1980s, leading social scientists like and Anton Blok that conducted the first field studies on the phenomenon between the 1960s and the early 1980s, saw the Mafia as merely a form of behaviour and power, downplaying its organisational aspects. Their thinking was shaped by sicilianismo, a late 19th-century movement opposed to the indiscriminate criminalization of all Sicilians by Italian law enforcement and public opinion, promoted in particular by the Sicilian ethnographer Giuseppe Pitrè. According to the sicilianisti, the term 'mafia' simply embodied an attitude, a mentality deeply rooted in the island's popular culture; an expression of the local traditional society's fundamental rejection of the foreign invaders who had ruled Sicily for centuries. "Mafia" was a "way of being", according to a definition by Pitrè:
Other scholars such as Gaetano Mosca say:
Like Pitrè, some scholars viewed mafiosi as individuals behaving according to specific subcultural codes, but did not consider the Mafia a formal organisation. Judicial investigations by Falcone and scientific research in the 1980s provided solid proof of the existence of well-structured Mafia groups with entrepreneurial characteristics. Pino Arlacchi, in his seminal 1983 study La mafia imprenditrice (Mafia Business), summarised the dominant way of looking at the mafia up to that point by writing, “Social research into the question of the mafia has probably now reached the point where we can say that the mafia, as the term is commonly understood, does not exist”. Arlacchi contested that view, and stressed the economical aspects of the Mafia as a criminal organization. The Mafia was seen as an enterprise, and its economic activities became the focus of academic analyses.Paoli, Mafia Brotherhoods, p. 15
However, by ignoring the cultural aspects, according to historian Salvatore Lupo, the Mafia is often erroneously seen as similar to other non-Sicilian organized criminal associations. These two paradigms missed essential aspects of the Mafia that became clear when investigators were confronted with the testimonies of Mafia turncoats, like those of Buscetta to Judge Falcone at the Maxi Trial. The economic approach to explain the Mafia did illustrate the development and operations of the Mafia business, but neglected the cultural symbols and codes by which the Mafia legitimized its existence and by which it rooted itself into Sicilian society.