Cosa Nostra (Sicilian Mafia)

A criminal system that filled the space where the Italian state had not yet arrived, and then made sure it never quite did. Cosa Nostra emerged in western Sicily in the nineteenth century among the men who guarded the citrus estates of absentee landlords, in a place where landholding was contested, the courts were distant and protection was a service somebody had to sell. Its business has always been that service, extorted rather than offered, and its authority rested on being able to settle disputes and enforce agreements that the law could not. The structure is formal: families with defined territories, an initiation ritual, and from the 1950s a commission to arbitrate between them. Fascism suppressed it hard, and the Allied administration of 1943 restored several of its figures to local office as anti-communists. Emigration carried the model to the United States. The heroin trade in the 1970s brought money on a new scale and with it the Corleonesi, who won an internal war by killing their rivals wholesale and then turned on the state itself, murdering prosecutors, politicians and police. The maxi-trial of 1986 to 1987, built on the testimony of the first major defector Tommaso Buscetta, convicted 338 people and established in law that the organisation existed as a single body. The judges who ran it, Falcone and Borsellino, were both killed by bombs in 1992. Public revulsion at those killings did the organisation lasting damage. Its boss Toto Riina was arrested in 1993. The anti-extortion movement Addiopizzo now lists businesses that refuse to pay. The organisation is based in western Sicily, above all Palermo.

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