Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America's Most Powerful Mafia Empires (4 page)

His fortune grew so immense that he boasted of having stashed about $7 million in one-thousand-dollar bills, gems, gold, and rare coins as an emergency nest egg, in a safe concealed in a vault behind a bathroom vanity cabinet. While the riches flowed in, Accetturo thrived in the shadows, a relatively obscure mafioso, his name and importance largely unknown except to a handful of New Jersey law-enforcement experts on organized crime.

When sporadic problems with the law arose, Tumac could afford costly legal talent to get him suspended sentences or jail terms of only a few months for serious felonies. He had the money and the contacts for a $100,000 bribe to a juror to win acquittals for himself and twenty members of his New Jersey crew tried on racketeering charges. On another occasion, his stable of lawyers obtained a dismissal on charges against him of intimidating a vital witness in an
assault case. In Florida a thorny conspiracy indictment was overcome by finding psychiatrists who classified him as mentally unfit to stand trial. The diagnosis of presenile dementia, early Alzheimer’s disease, was a total fraud. “I slipped and banged my head in the shower and the Alzheimer’s went away,” he told friends, grinning unabashedly.

For almost four decades, the Mafia—the Cosa Nostra—with its sordid deals, violence, and murders, was an existence Accetturo accepted and cherished. He considered a Mafia life so admirable and worthwhile that he welcomed one of his two sons into the fold as a made man in his crew.

Engraved in his mind was the day he held the flaming picture of a saint in his hand, swearing eternal allegiance to the borgata that embraced him. Even before his induction, he understood that the most unforgivable transgression a made man could commit was violating
omertà
, the code of silence. The penalty for informing was usually a bullet in the back of the apostate’s head, and Accetturo never doubted that such executions were deserved.

But after a lifetime of loyalty, Tumac, the renowned, dreaded capo, the quintessential Mafia success, renounced
omertà
and other principles he once lived by. He became a traitor. To prosecutors, to investigators, he disclosed criminal secrets from decades of intrigue. His words exposed dozens of mobsters who had followed and obeyed him as their trusted commander. Moreover, his defection symbolized an unprecedented malaise afflicting the Cosa Nostra.
Omertà
and the other maxims that for seventy years had shielded Accetturo and other self-appointed Men of Honor were being undermined by relentless internal and external forces.

As the twenty-first century dawned, the Cosa Nostra was imperiled as never before. During the previous century the Mafia had forged a unique and almost unassailable criminal organization in America. And much of its frightening power arose from an arcane legacy transported to urban America from provincial Sicily.

Roots

T
o the casual traveler, Sicily for centuries was an enchanted land, one of the most pleasant places on earth to live. It was comforting to be seduced by the island’s inordinately gracious people, sunny weather, alluring palm trees, and the delicate fragrance of its orange and lemon blossoms.

But those intoxicating, superficial impressions were largely a mirage. For over two thousand years, most of Sicily’s population endured tyranny and suppression under foreign conquerors and feudal overlords. From ancient times until the mid-nineteenth century, the nine-thousand-square-mile island was raided, invaded, and even traded—actually exchanged for other territories—by foreign rulers. Sicily’s strategic and vulnerable location, almost in the center of the Mediterranean Sea, close to southern Italy and North Africa, subjected it to an endless succession of occupation and oppression by Phoenicians, Greeks, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Romans, Byzantines, Normans, Arabs, French, Spanish, Austrian, and finally hostile Italian armies.

Sicilians survived these occupations by developing a culture rooted in two basic concepts: contempt for and suspicion of governmental authorities; and tight-knit alliances with blood relatives and with fellow countrymen facing the same perils.

Analyzing the fundamental siege mentality of large numbers of Sicilians
from the vantage point of the twentieth century, Luigi Barzini, in his book
The Italians
, observed: “They are taught in the cradle, or are born already knowing, that they must aid each other, side with their friends and fight the common enemy even when the friends are wrong and the enemies are right; each must defend his dignity at all costs and never allow the smallest slights and insults to go unavenged; they must keep secrets, and always beware of official authorities and laws.”

Over time, these historical and cultural underpinnings spawned furtive clans, in Sicilian dialect,
cosche
, for self-preservation against perceived corrupt oppressors. Without the security of reliable public institutions to protect them or their property, the clans, which were mainly in the countryside, relied on stealth, compromise, and vendetta to extract private justice.

Eventually, the secret
cosche
became commonly labeled in Sicily by a single name: Mafia. Over hundreds of years, they evolved from guerrilla-like, disorganized bands for self-defense into greedy, terrifying gangs, whose basic concepts and guiding principles would extend, with profound influence, far across the seas to America.

Like much of the Sicilian Mafia’s roots, the origin of its name is cloaked in folklore and mystique. A romantic legend maintains that the name was born in the late thirteenth century during an uprising against French Angevin forces in Palermo, Sicily’s main city. According to this tale, a Sicilian woman died resisting rape by a French soldier and, in revenge, her fiancé slaughtered the attacker. The fanciful episode supposedly sparked the creation of a rebellious, acronymic slogan from the first letter of each word:
“Morte alla Francia Italia anela”
(“Death to France is Italy’s cry”). A revolt against the French occupation army in 1282 was called the Sicilian Vespers, because the signal for resistance was the ringing of church bells for evening prayers.

A less romantic and more likely derivation of the name
Mafia
is a combined Sicilian-Arabic slang expression that means acting as a protector against the arrogance of the powerful. Until the nineteenth century, the appellation
mafioso
, a Mafia member, had wide currency in Sicily as a noncriminal, resolute man with congenital distrust of centralized authority.

“A mafioso did not invoke State or law in his private quarrels, but made himself respected and safe by winning a reputation for toughness and courage, and settled his differences by fighting,” the English historian Eric J. Hobsbawm noted. “He recognized no obligation except those of the code of honor or
omertà
(manliness), whose chief article forbade giving information to public authorities.”

To a nineteenth-century Sicilian with a cultural heritage of centuries of danger and oppression, true manhood was said to consist of an independent arrogance in which a man kept silent in the event of a crime. The Sicilian reserved the right of personal
vendetta
, vengeance, for offenses committed against himself and his relatives.

Mafia clans never functioned under a united, centralized command for the entire island. They sprung up as regional bands organized primarily to protect specific local interests from foreign aggressors and intruders from other regions of Sicily. As late as the mid-nineteenth century, mafiosi were portrayed by some writers as patriotic partisans who had defended and upheld the island’s hallowed traditions. The clans were also called “families,” with the leader of each referred to as
padrino
, father, or as the
capo di famiglia
, the autocratic chief of the family who arbitrated disputes and controversies in his extended group.

In 1860 Giuseppe Garibaldi, a military hero of the Risorgimento, the movement to unify Italy, landed in Sicily with a thousand volunteer fighters immortalized as “Red Shirts” for their distinctive military attire. Aided by popular support on the island, Garibaldi easily defeated the troops of the King of the Two Sicilies, and the last Spanish Bourbon monarch was deposed.

Among the rebels who rallied to Garibaldi’s army and his call for social justice were about two thousand roughhewn farmers from the countryside who, as economic conditions warranted, alternated between working the fields and holing up in caves as bandits. Symbolizing the respect afforded to these part-time peasants and part-time brigands, they were glorified by Garibaldi as his
“Squadri della Mafia”
Mafia squadron.

A year after Garibaldi’s landing and lightning military victory, Sicily—an area about the size of Vermont—was incorporated as a province into the newly formed state of Italy. In 1863 a play appeared in Sicily titled Í
Mafiosi della Vic-aria
, translated in English as “Heroes of the Penitentiary.” The mafiosi in the drama were oppressed but valiant patriots and prisoners who showed their physical audacity in knife duels. The play toured Sicily and Italy and the performances were instrumental in introducing the words
Mafia
and
mafiosi
into the common language of Italy. An Italian dictionary from 1868 defined “mafia” in noncriminal terms as denoting “bravado.”

Within a decade, however, liberation and the removal of the old pillars of
authority brought widespread disorder and rampant crime to the island. These conditions created fertile prospects for the best-organized Mafia
cosche
, which could mobilize small private watchdog armies. They took advantage of the turmoil and the judicial and governmental vacuums by turning to subtle forms of criminal activities. During a period of little law or order, the
cosche
demanded systematic payments from wealthy landholders and businessmen to safeguard their properties from vandals and to protect them and their relatives from abductions and ransom demands.

Oddly, to restore a semblance of law and order, the new national government in the 1870s enlisted the clans to help capture the most violent non-Mafia bandits. These roving marauders were terrorizing the island and were viewed as a criminal epidemic, threatening public safety and Sicily’s economic stability.

As a reward for the Mafia’s aid, the nascent government in Rome secretly pledged that the
cosche
could continue without interference their own refined style of plunder and economic domination over sections of Sicily. The Rome officials, mainly from north and central Italy, were unfamiliar with the nuances of Sicilian culture and viewed the private deal as an expedient compromise. Overconfident, they believed the Mafia leaders would serve as temporary middlemen between themselves and the island’s population, and would help to maintain order until the young constitutional monarchy gained the strength to impose its own will.

The arrangement, however, gave a virtual license and a new impetus to Mafia families. The strongest clans were in northwestern Sicily near Palermo; they began functioning openly and more brazenly, without any thought of relinquishing their privileged positions.

Italy’s unification and new government led to the breakup of many of Sicily’s feudal estates and a measure of economic freedom. These additional opportunities were seized upon by the Mafia groups. With the weak central government looking the other way, the clans, in effect, became a substitute, extra-legal government, especially in remote rural areas. Through hints of violence, the families began extorting payoffs from new and absentee landowners to insure that crops were harvested. They initiated similar shakedowns from merchants in cities and towns, promising to use their influence to ward off harassment from the government, particularly tax collectors.

The Catholic Church became a willing collaborator with various
cosche
, relying on them to safeguard its vast land holdings on the island and to stifle peasant
demands for land or for larger payments as tenant farmers. Grateful for the protection, church leaders refrained from denouncing the mafiosi’s strong-arm tactics.

When it suited a clan “father,” he could simply authorize his mafiosi to cheaply acquire or monopolize profitable businesses the family wanted to possess. The families might pretend that they served as benefactors, protectors, and dispensers of justice to powerless peasants and small merchants, but their basic goal was self-enrichment.

Any assistance a Mafia family provided to individuals in business or in land disputes came with a price tag. Sooner or later, the recipient of the favor might be asked in a none too subtle manner to perform some deed—a legal or illegal quid pro quo—as compensation for the family’s aid.

Unification gave Sicilian men the right to elect representatives to a national parliament and local offices. This democratic reform also was a boon to the clans. Through intimidation and control of blocs of voters, the mafiosi helped elect numerous politicians, who as a result were indebted to them and under their sway.