Cosa Nostra News

"The Mafia is oppression, arrogance, greed, self-enrichment, power and hegemony above and against all others. It is not an abstract concept, or a state of mind, or a literary term... It is a criminal organization regulated by unwritten but iron and inexorable rules... The myth of a courageous and generous 'man of honor' must be destroyed, because a mafioso is just the opposite." -- Cesare Terranova , Italian Magistrate murdered in 197 9 Gaetano Riina, brother of Salvatore 'Toto' Riina, after he was arrested in Mazara del Vallo Photo: AP An interview with Professor John Dickie Cosa Nostra - rebranding the Mafia : "The mafia, in the strict sense of Cosa Nostra , the hierarchical criminal organization based in Sicily, does not ‘run Italy’ as you sometimes hear people rather glibly say,” explains John Dickie, senior lecturer in Italian at the University of London, and author of Cosa Nostra – a history of the Sicilian Mafia. 

Can you find Lucky Luciano in the picture? The NYTimes.com is publishing a review of John Dickie's "Blood Brotherhoods," and surprisingly, finds fault with it. I am currently reading Dickie's "Mafia Republic," a gigantic volume that basically serves as a consolidation of all his previous works; I don't know why the Times chose to review this particular book now. The review is written by an academic who also writes about organized crime in Italy, Alexander Stille,  a professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and the author of “Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic,” which is next on my bookshelf. Divertiti! All in the Famiglia  "In “Blood Brotherhoods,” the British scholar John Dickie sets himself the wildly ambitious task of writing the histories of Italy’s three major criminal organizations from their origins in the mid-19th century to the present...

I don't like to write stories this way, but sometimes, when someone threatens your credibility because they believe Cosa Nostra is some sort of supernatural entity composed of "Men of Honour" that is far superior to  other "Men of Honour" from Italy's mainland, and they simply refuse to accept what one of the most accomplished scholars on the Mafia has written regarding this, I am reduced to scanning a book page. John Dickie wrote the above, which is the bottom portion of page 157 of his book Mafia Republic . He sprinkles the names of examples throughout the book and I am not going through it page by page to find a list of names. As for the American Cosa Nostra, we have the example of Carmine Galante making Sicilian members of the Mafia into the Bonanno borgata. We have the testimony of Frank Coppa, a close friend of Joseph Massino and Frank Lino who was known for his pump-and-dump stock schemes.