The mother of all mafia knows no boundaries

“I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse!” Almost everyone knows this phrase; Marlon Brando made him famous as mafia boss Vito Corleone in the film ‘The Godfather’. The film is based on the methods of the Sicilian mafia, but the characters and plot are purely fictional. Director Francis Ford Coppola portrays the mafiosi of Cosa Nostra as “men of honor” and has built a partly transfiguring monument for them. But their affairs have little to do with honor.

How does the original Italian mafia, the Cosa Nostra from Sicily, work? What methods does it use and how is it organized?

What is the Cosa Nostra?

The Cosa Nostra resembles the original mafia. They have been around since the 19th century. At that time, noble landowners’ administrators used local gangs to protect their property and collect interest from peasants. Over time, the Cosa Nostra (translated: Our Cause) initially developed into a criminal organization with thousands of members in Sicily and eventually into an internationally operating network.

For a long time, everyone who said “mafia” just meant “Cosa Nostra.” In the dialect spoken around the Cosa Nostra house in Palermo, ‘mafia’ has a positive meaning and is associated with beauty, courage and bravery. This corresponds to the self-image of the Sicilian mafiosi, who also call themselves ‘men of honor’.

Over time, other criminal organizations using similar methods developed in other parts of Italy, such as the Camorra and the ‘Ndrangheta. The term is now widely used – for example also for criminal organizations from other countries.

What methods does Cosa Nostra use?

Protection money, extortion and kidnapping have long been Cosa Nostra’s core activities. For decades it was the norm for businessmen in Sicily to not only pay taxes to the state, but also to pay the so-called ‘pizzo’ to the mafia. A profitable company. Those who did not pay faced violence.

But Cosa Nostra’s business has been expanding for a long time. Drug and arms trafficking, prostitution, betting, real estate, land and loan transactions – whatever makes money, Cosa Nostra is there. “The modern mafioso is not the one with the gun, but rather IT specialists, bankers and lawyers,” explains Peter Voegeli, Italy expert at SRF.

However, from the 1980s onwards, Cosa Nostra’s methods led to increasingly violent protests and political reactions in Italy. For example, in the early 1990s with the kidnapping of little Giuseppe Di Matteo, who was held under inhumane conditions for two years. Cosa Nostra wanted to silence his father in court. Giuseppe did not survive, he did not live to be 15 years old. Eventually the mafiosi strangled him and dissolved his body in acid.

A bloody series of attacks also shook Italy in the early 1990s. In May 1992, lawyer Giovanni Falcone, known as a mafia hunter, was murdered by a car bomb. The 500-kilogram explosive exploded under the road as Falcone drove his car in a convoy just above it.

The floor was torn open and Falcone and his wife and three bodyguards were killed. The attack went down in Italian history as the ‘Capaci massacre’ and led to mass protests against the mafia’s methods. A few weeks later, Falcone’s closest confidante in the fight against the mafia, Paolo Borsellino, was also killed in an explosive attack.

However, the assassinations with which the mafia wanted to show its power had a different effect: the murders of Falcone and Borsellino woke up Italy, more and more people protested against the mafia and its methods, and from then on there were sex education classes in Italy. school – and the authorities took much tougher action against the mafiosi.

Many Italians have lost family members to the mafia or been threatened by it. This also applies to Sergio Mattarella, who has been president of Italy since 2015. His brother Piersanti was regional president of Sicily and was shot dead in his car by mafiosi in 1980. Sergio Mattarella helped get his seriously injured brother out – in the presence of his sister-in-law and her children. The mafia is “a cancer,” Mattarella said in an interview, that oppresses and limits the freedom and opportunities of all people.

How is Cosa Nostra organized?

The hierarchy in the mafia is strict, the tasks are clearly divided. Values ​​and methods are often passed on from an early age. Also from the women and mothers – although they themselves are not allowed to play a leading role in Cosa Nostra.

Just like a pyramid, at the lowest level there are many petty criminals who do the street work and the dirtiest and most dangerous jobs. They are structured – often, but not exclusively – by family origin and region in ‘Coscas’, i.e. families. Towering above everything is the ‘Cupola’, the highest organ of the mafia, in which the most important people make decisions and resolve disputes between families.

Because spies, moles and deals with the authorities have caused a lot of damage to Cosa Nostra in recent decades, secrecy has been tightened: members now often only know their immediate boss, and who is in the ‘Cupola’ is unknown to them.

How powerful is Cosa Nostra today?

In recent years, Cosa Nostra has lost enormous amounts of power, mainly due to heavy persecution by the authorities. At the end of January this year, Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the last major bosses of Cosa Nostra, was caught after three decades on the run.

Some experts see the Cosa Nostra at the end, while the ‘Ndrangheta is seen as bolder and more successful. However, this assessment is controversial – and it is not just Italy that continues to wage a bloody battle against the mafia as a whole.

“This battle is ours,” Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni said after Denaro’s arrest, “but we have not won the war yet. We have not defeated the mafia yet.” The infamous mafia boss has now died, as you can read here.