Sicily: The day the earth shook

Category:

General Contents

The last two most recent dramatic events of earthquakes hitting Haiti and Chile have recalled back in my mind of many, many years ago. In January 15 1968, when I was still living as child in Sicily and I had the very first experience with earthquakes. I remember that they weren't so destructive like those recently two, at least not close to where I was living, but a couple miles away toward the quake epicenter they really were.




The first tremors started in the night at 3 a.m. between the 14th and 15th of January 1968 hitting the Valley of Belice with the force of a 6,4° Richter scale earthquake. About fifteen towns were badly damaged, and towns like Gibellina and Salaparuta were completely destroyed. In those tragic days, 370 people died and over 70.000 were left homeless.




After all these years I still have vivid memories of those horrible moments. I remember waking up to the first earth's shaking without much realizing what was going on, and seeing my mother in a total panicky mood while rushing into the room where I and the other of my brothers were sleeping.

After helping us in dressing up, she together with my father pushed us through the stairs of two floors. Even though the all matter happened in few seconds, I had the creepy sensation we were all moving in a very slow speed. In fact, it felt like we were pulled by an invisible gravitational force toward the earth's center, and each of our steps were very painful to perform because of the sensation of our legs been all in a sudden transformed in very heavy metallic lead.

During the all commotion, I felt the constant shifting of the all building while we were moving toward the door exit, where, I noticed my father's desperation while he was attempting to open it when we realized with terror the door frame was folding itself to one side.

In 1968 exactly 42 years ago, many countries on the Belice's Valley were completely destroyed by an earthquake with a magnitude of 6,4°



After the initial difficulty of my father in opening that door, finally he succeeded in his task and right after hastening us outside the building.

Once we were outside of our building, we saw all our house neighbors pouring out of their own apartments while screaming, "u tirrimuotu, u tirrimuotu" ( the earthquake, the earthquake). I must confess, right after I saw that apocalyptic scene of grown men and women in their own panic running toward a safety zone, I understood years later, the danger of myself and my family were in that night...

Devastating earthquakes are a recurring phenomenon in vast parts of Italy as you can see from the detailed map bellow:

Map of the seismic activities in Italy

We spent the rest of that night sleeping in my father car, but the following couple of nights we lodged in a temporary shelter. It was a large and very solid one low room structure made up of very light materials, and it was located up in the hills. It belonged to one of my father's brothers, indeed, we shared it with another two of my father's brothers and theirs families. Even though it was very cold inside, we felt very comfortable in it because we were like in a big family reunion enjoying one of their weekend festivities.

The following days were really tedious because many thought the worst was gone, and many people including my family went back to what we thought the normalcy of every day life, when indeed they weren't! The Sicilian land kept shacking uninterruptedly for another exhausting couple of weeks.

One day while I was in school, another of those earthquakes struck the building and the entire schoolchildren with their teachers had to flee in a frenzied panic. You can well figure out once we were outside in the open space, all the chaotic and indescribable confusion created by apprehensive parents rushing to the school's yard for their own children.

Today that I'm living in New York City, I remember to have experienced in the past years a couple of tremors (those earthquakes occurred on Oct 27, and on Jan 17, 2001 in the New York area with a magnitude of 2.6° and 2.4° on the Richter scale). Of course nothing on the big scale but on very low intensities, so low that most of the New York population didn't even felt them and they only found out about those earthquakes only thanks to the local news medias.

How Likely is an Earthquake in NYC?

Why the Mafia can't be defeated in Sicily? (part 1)

Category:

Mafia

The Sopranos

The Mafia is a sort of ghost, invisible to anyone visiting Sicily unless he does know how to look for it, for all other residents it's all an other matter... First, it's the kind of Mafia you won't find on American movies but the kind of Mafia you'll find in Sicily has nothing appealing. Those American movies based on the glamorous American Mafia are contrasting sharply with the reality of the Sicilian Mafia. The Sicilian Mafia is a revolting, treacherous, deceitful, viscid, threatening world that like a leech sustains itself by bloodsucking vital lymph from the sane tissues of the Sicilian society.

Why the Mafia can't be defeated in Sicily?

That's the one million dollar question which I wish, I could answer it! I'll take my years I lived in Sicily as an example while I'm trying to give an answer to this Sicilian eternal dilemma.

I remember from the experience that I had acquired while I was living in Palermo, that there was a stratified society similar to many other societies you'll find around the globe: there were the wealthy of an upper class, the middle-income people (as might be expected) from the middle-class, and last a lower class made up of the underprivileged such as: the poor, the helpless, the illiterates, the miserables, the misfortunate people, along with all the other kind of inadequates from a society (note: this last class sometimes has been rejected by the the rest of the upper-classes, but it has also been totally neglected by a failing Italian system for a very long time).

***

Now, from this lower class is where most of the times the Mafia refuels its ranks.




The people of this class, usually lives in unacceptable conditions inside run-down neighborhoods where crime is the norm, and where the kids of this lower class hardly get to finish the primary schools so that they can manage to speak a decent and acceptable Italian language. Those kids are usually been neglected by their own fathers (ordinarily these fathers are men with stone aged mentalities) and are spending the rest of their days hanging around the streets by doing nothing or almost nothing!




That nothingness is where takes those kids in looking toward detrimental activities. First of all, they start their petty crimes activities with broken-windows, small burglaries, doing small favors of doubtful nature to the next neighborhood's thug (like delivering packages of drugs, or delivering dubious messages to the local bosses, etc and etc...)




And soon, very soon escalating these activities with their first, "scippo". Scippo? What is this thing called scippo, you may ask! Ask a tourist that went to Sicily for a vacation, and maybe, he can answer you. The, "scippo" may sound like a beverage's name but it isn't. It's a violent motorcycle theft, and it is caused by the grabbing of an incautious's property with a violent pull by one or two kids while they are riding fast their motorcycle.




Consequentially to that violent pull, the poor tourist is left on the street floor badly bruised and sometimes even with broken bones (this form of stealing it is most of the times, practiced on unaware tourists and rarely on the locals because the locals know where to find them or to who to talk to get the stolen property returned). As soon these kids grown up and the local family Mafia have noticed them, they will be engaged in their ranks as, "picciotti" (literally it means youngsters but in the Sicilian culture it was also used for soldiers) to do their dirty jobs.

Mafia is an invisible and invincible force incapable of been defeated by traditional policing methods!

I believe we should still have a long time to confront ourselves with the organized crime of mafia origin. For a long time, not for the eternity: because the Mafia is a human phenomenon and like all the human phenomenons it has an its beginning, an its evolution and it will also have an its end.

Giovanni Falcone (assassinated Italian judge)

Now my next question is: why this malicious cycle can't be broken by removing the running water from the watermill?

Next: Why the Mafia can't be defeated in Sicily? (part 2)

Good people versus the people of respect in the Sicilian society.

Category:

Mafia

Since I was a little boy in Sicily, I learned to distinguish the people in general as good people and people of respect.

I remember of when people were mentioning my family in their conversations, and they were always referring to my family as good people. What that meant? I learned soon what they really meant.


"Good people" was a way to distinguish the honest hard working people inside the Sicilian society from another kind of people. This other kind of people which reputations were with dubious moralities, and they were the so-called, "people of respect".

The people of respect (also mis-regarded as honorable people) was and still it is in Sicily, the people gravitating around or living within the Mafia's contest.

When the common people were mentioning them in their private conversations, they were always doing it with uneasy feelings of hidden fears. In fact the phrase of, "people of respect" evokes till these days in the honest people a bad concealed truth, and this truth was that they were indeed all fearful of them (the mafiusi).

That was and unfortunately still it is, the sad truth. When you found yourself in some particular circumstances and you asked to someone close to you, who were those people present at that moment and this someone was telling you that they were people of respect, then you realized soon what that meant. That meant to be cautious, to be afraid, because you never knew what they wanted from you.

Indeed, what you really heard when you were hearing those words in the Sicilian society for sure was: fears, intimidations, extortions, murdering and so on. As you can see, there was little of respectfulness on those words and more of fearfulness. That's what the mafia really evoked in the minds of the Sicilian men when those words were spoken, and none of respectability.

Now, I want to tell you a story of when I was a teenager living in Sicily and I had a small incident with one of these people of respect.

This incident happened one summer morning, and I was with the company of my young friends. My friends and I were all playfully horsing around a nearby empty water channel.

During this playfulness, I felt someone grabbing my right shoulder with excessive strength. Then, in a puzzled way, I turned myself around and saw a tall old man with completely white hairs under a black coppola looking angrily at me. He started shouting at me with an old Sicilian dialect, which I could barely understood.

While I was trying to make sense of the words rushing out from the mouth of this old guy, he was already pushing me toward the edge of the empty water channel. After we reached that edge, he pointed his index finger to something which I could barely see down there.

I was totally confused up then. I could not make any sense of what he was trying to tell me, and either the why he was pointing his finger to that mysterious thing at the bottom of the channel.

At that point I was getting in a mix of frustration, angriness, and fearfulness. Slowly my brain started to decipher the intelligible words shouted at me from the old guy (later, I found out this old guy was on his seventies).

He was accusing me to had thrown his metallic wheelbarrow to the bottom of that channel. I promptly rejected his accusation vented on me, and his face started to twist more in an unrecognizable mask of angriness (I want to be more specific, in that incident I believe I was around the age of nine or maybe eleven years old). The kind of exaggerated reaction of this old guy, was like he was dealing with an adult guy capable to stand up to his confrontational attitude.

In fact now, he was pushing me harder to the edge of the channel while with a furious tone of voice (the kind tone of voice from someone used to give commands) he was ordering me to go towards the bottom of it to recover his metallic wheelbarrow. Right that moment, I started to think that the old man must had been out of his mind for wanting from me something like that, in spite of my young age. For me at that young age, his request sounded like he was asking me to descend from a very high mountain's peak, to recover a very heavy metallic object at the bottom of it.

Consequentially to his unreasonable request I started to cry while I was imploring him to let me go, but still he kept insisting with his absurd request. I can't recall how long he persisted with his absurdity. Eventually, he gave up and let me go but not before he warned to harshly punish me if he ever saw me again around that place.

Later, I had a conversation with some acquaintances about that old guy. I asked them who he was, and they told me he was a man of respect. A man of respect which was the family head of the Di Maggio's clan. To be more concise, he was a mafia boss well know and respected (I dare to say that more than respected he was feared) in the neighborhood where I lived.

In those days, I started to learn for the first times those words, "men of respect" and their real meanings.

Those same words, kept coming back during the rest of my years I lived in Sicily. I can say today, that harsh, brief encounter with the old, "respected" man was for me a childhood trauma, as well the first lesson on the real nature of the mafia's grasp on the minds and lives of the honest Sicilian people.

Facing the Mafia - La Mattanza (chapter II, part 2).

Category:

Mafia

Palermo's freeway after a major bomb attack from the Mafia.

In fact, in the following months more notable Italian figures were murdered in Palermo. The Mafia was, indeed, challenging the Italian State with its vicious war. Again and again, the Mafia kept murdering the servants of the Italian State sent in Sicily to fight the Mafia, and to many Italian citizens it looked as a losing war.

As the months went by I felt really afraid for the Sicilians as the the Mafia had once again killed an other great Sicilian man. This time the man to be murdered was Giovanni Falcone.



Giovanni Falcone (May 18, 1939 – May 23, 1992) was an Italian magistrate who specialized in prosecuting the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. He was killed by the Mafia, together with his wife and three of his bodyguards, by a 350 kg dynamite explosion placed beneath the freeway from Palermo Airport to Palermo near the town of Capaci.

Palermo's highway after the bomb attack to the Sicilian magistrate Giovanni Falcon.

At this news, I cried. I wanted to kill one by one with my bare hands those responsible for this atrocious crime (I couldn't really express my anger by just writing it here). That murder was an other brutish way from the Mafia, to eliminate a resolute man of justice.

Capaci was the small town where I was used to go in summertime for fishing, and that freeway was the same freeway I took the last time to get to the Palermo's Airport, before I embarked into a flight that was bound for New York.


Now, my desolation was complete.

The mattanza keeps going on.

After two only months from the death of Giovanni Falcone, an other tragic assassination reaches me through the American's mass medias. This time, was the turn of Paolo Borsellino to be murdered by what seemed an unstoppable Mafia's arrogance.



Paolo Borsellino (January 19, 1940 - July 19, 1992) was an Italian anti-Mafia magistrate who was killed by a Mafia car bomb in Via D'Amelio, Palermo, less than two months after his friend and fellow anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone had been killed by the Mafia. The bomb attack also claimed the lives of five policemen: Agostino Catalano, Walter Cosina, Emanuela Loi, Vincenzo Li Muli, Claudio Traina.

(Palermo)- Via D'Amelio after the bomb attack to the Sicilian magistrate Paolo Borsellino.

This new murder was extremely unpleasant and extremely serious, it added to the sum of more than a thousand of murders, the highest officials of the Italian State being murdered on the Sicilian streets in the space of few years: a mattanza! This freakish word, "mattanza" which I have learned in my youth, keeps coming back like a terrifying nightmare.

The turning point to the mattanza.

Going back in Palermo where the mattanza of highly Sicilian figures keeps going on, but slowly things starts to change even at the magistracy's level.

Thanks to the pentiti (collaborators with justice, or informants) of the Mafia that are testifying against their former associates.

Among the most famous Mafia pentiti (informants) is Tommaso Buscetta, the first important pentito (informant), who was very helpful to judge Giovanni Falcone in describing the Sicilian Mafia Commission or Cupola, the leadership of the Sicilian Mafia in the 1980s, and identifying the main operational channels that the mafia used and uses for its business.

And with Tommaso Buscetta start talking even bosses of the caliber of Francesco Marino Mannoia, Salvatore Contorno e Antonino Calderone.

La mattanza finally reaches its end.

Together with the informants' revelations and the magistrates' investigations, also all the investigative work from a police squad led by De Gennaro with their phone's interceptions, their following of suspects, and all their paperworks, finally, all these hard work starts to pay off, with a series of incriminations toward the men of the Sicilian Mafia.

All the incriminations emanated by the Italian judicial system will bring to the police blitz of San Michele (that's how it was called) with hundred of arrests in a single day. At last, the result of all these arrests will take to the maxi trial.

The Ucciardone's penitentiary.

The maxi trial with its 474 arrests accused of Mafia associations, began in Palermo in the 1986 inside a bunker next to the penitentiary institution of the Ucciardone. Among all the accused there are names such as Luciano Liggio, and Pippo Calò said to be the Mafia's cashier. The trial ended on December 16, 1987, almost two years after it commenced.

Palermo 1986 - Mafia's maxi trial video.

Red's note: Unfortunately, this video is only in Italian. I really sorry that I couldn't find an English translation of it.



The dark years of the Sicilian mattanza are finally over. Until...

Next: Facing the Mafia - Between mafia's myths and realities.

Facing the Mafia - La Mattanza (chapter II, part 1).

Category:

Mafia

The tuna fishes, "Mattanza".

The word, "mattanza" how is related to Mafia and what it meant to me? I have to go back to a couple years after I had immigrated in the U.S. to answer to this question.

First off, the term, "mattanza" is an heritage left after different centuries of Spanish dominations of the Sicilian island, and it originated from word matar, meaning to kill. There are two specific contexts where the word, " mattanza" has been used like expressions in every day Sicilian life.




In first context, the word mattanza is used for the killing of tuna fishes in the Mediterranean Sea. For hundreds of years, fishermen in Sicily and Sardinia have used dense nets to capture the Mediterranean blue fin tuna (thunnus thinnus) in a quasi-spiritual procedure known as the mattanza (if you like to read more about it, here is the link for: Mattanza

In the second context, the word mattanza has been used for a different Sicilian expression. Even though, it still meant to kill something, this time the killing wasn't a tuna fish but a human being. And to be more exact, it meant to kill a lot of people with methods of ferocious assassinations, like the same ferocious methods used to kill a large number of tuna fishes in the Sicilian seas.

Now, going back to a couple years after I had immigrated in the U.S. and I learned a bad news by watching the TV. The bad news was that a man was brutally murdered by a Mafia's reprisal, and this man wasn't just a common man but he was also the embodiment of an ideal, a hope to finally defeat the Mafia. That man was, " Il generale Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa".

I cento giorni a Palermo di Dalla Chiesa.
( The one hundred days of Dalla Chiesa in Palermo.)

The general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, was the new prefect of Palermo which was sent in Sicily by the Italian government after the premature death of Pio La Torre (of course, a premature death inflicted by the Mafia), to fight the Mafia.

Pio La Torre (Palermo, December 24, 1927 – Palermo, April 30, 1982) was a leader of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI). He was killed by the Mafia after he initiated a law that introduced a new crime in the Italian legal system, mafia conspiracy, and the possibility for the courts to seize and to confiscate the assets of the persons belonging to the mafia conspiracy.

Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was the man that had defeated the Italian terrorism, "the red brigades" and because of this success he was sent in Sicily with full powers granted to him, in the hope to defeat the Mafia. Unfortunately, in the paper was given to him full powers, but in reality was given to him none.

In fact, the Italian government was accused by many Italian citizens to have betrayed Dalla Chiesa's trust in the Italian institutions by leaving him alone to fight the Mafia. Consequently to this betrayal, he was left very vulnerable to the attacks of the Mafia that already had marked him as a dead man.

Before he was brutally slaughtered in his car together with his young wife Emanuela Setti Carraro by a Mafia's ambush on September 1982, had just passed one hundred days of his takeover of the Palermo's prefecture. Also I wanted to remember here, in the same attack died, "Domenico Russo" who was a police agent in escort with his armored car to Dalla Chiesa. On the place of the massacre, an anonymous citizen had left to the wall a paperboard with written on it a few bitter words:

Here died the hope of the honest Sicilians.

I was tremendously shocked and angered by those few words because were accurately telling a truth. The truth that the Mafia had killed the only man capable that could have given back to the Sicilian people, a hope of rebirth from the miseries and the abuses of a Mafia's historical impositions.

Even though I was living in the U.S., I felt at the moment defeated because the Mafia had won once more, first by enforcing me to leave my Sicily and now by making me feel like I had betrayed my land because I fled from it without a real fight.


When the TV's news was parading in front of my eyes those cruel images of the Dalla Chiesa's assassination, I couldn't believe it! Those streets were so familiar to me. Indeed, those streets were the same streets from where I grew up. The same streets, where I used to play soccer in my adolescence. And now, those images were broadcasted around the world. I felt an increasing desperation as the news went on. At some point, I started to hit the wall with a couple fists to calm down my rage.

What I didn't realized that time was, the Mafia's killing spree had just started. In other words, the Mafia's mattanza hadn't finished its job but it was just beginning.

Continue...

Next: Facing the Mafia - La Mattanza (chapter II, part 2).

Facing the Mafia - Mafia's American style (chapter I).

Category:

Mafia

Preface:

I been thinking for quite some time to post this new Mafia's article, but I have been delaying it for some time. The reason of this delay was that it could have endangered the safety of my life and the safety of my own family. Or worst, end up in some protection program for the rest of my remaining life.

That's why I'll be removing any potential references (such as: personal names, or location's names, and besides I don't know if I'll be writing the all story) which they could essentially lead to my true identity. Even though, in same particular case I'll be forced to keep them, because of their historical nature (meaning: facts that are worldwide well known).

Mafia's American style.

After I came to live in the U.S., I worked in different places. After some time, I started to work in a place (sorry but I can't tell what place it was) where a lot people came to do their usual business. They were people of every backgrounds: businessmen, politicians of every sorts, very rich men, affiliated to some kind of association, common people, and some, "Mafioso".



I'll pause for a brief moment and deviate from this part of the story, but I'm promising that I'll come back later to finish it. Now, I wanted to write of when I knew the first American goodfella.

When I knew the first American goodfella, I couldn't help but notice the way he was dressing. Unlike his Sicilian counterpart's fellows (which were dressing most of the times rather poorly), that wise guy was wearing a fashionable dress with nice shining shoes on his feet, gold rings on his fingers, and pomaded hair all combed towards the rear of his head. And strangely enough, he was acting to me very friendly. Maybe, because he knew I was Sicilian (That encounter, was for sure a real weird one. In truth, if he could been able to know back then how much I despised him and what he really represented to me, frankly, I don't believe he would have been that friendly to me).



And yet, I can't quite figure out if this guy was copying the bad style of some Mafia's American movies (see: Godfather, Goodfellas, the Sopranos, or many other American old movies) or it was the other way around. Those movies had really succeeded, in the capturing the real nature of the American Mafia's gangsters.

Anyway going back to when I started my first job in New York. This same place where I knew a lot people, and where I even knew some politicians from the New York metropolitan area, including guess who? The former mayor of New York City, Rudolph W. Giuliani (but this is an other story). As I said, I new from that place a lot of different people. One in particular which I wasn't too eager to know, just because, his only presence was enough to give me bad cramps to my stomach. He was a wise guy, and he looked exactly as one of those badly portrayed from some very bad Mafia's American movies.

The difference now was that he was for real. His attitude and his talk, were real too (the attitudes and the talks of a wise s..h...). I tried to avoid him the most I could, but because of my job I couldn't avoid him as much as I wished.

The first thing that struck me the first time I noticed him was, the golden rings he was wearing on his fingers.

He had a golden ring on his left hand's ring finger (I guess that indicated that he was married), and on his right hand, he was showing off two more golden rings. The one on his pinky finger was a gold ring with an embedded stone at the top of it. The other one, the one that had struck me was on his middle finger, and it was a big gold ring with some strange engravings on it.

I thought, that wasn't nothing special in it at the first glance (probably many people are wearing gold rings that big, and for sure they aren't gangsters), but when I paid a more attentive look at it, my mind quickly recalled back a couple of events from when I was still living in Sicily. In fact, I remembered to have seen that same ring with those same strange engravings on it, already twice.

The first occasion happened because of my business. It was in Palermo, I was talking to a Mafia's boss from the neighborhood, for the reason that I was trying to convince him to cut me some slack by giving me some more time to hand over, " u pizzu' " (The pizzu' is the protection money paid to the Mafia).

The second time happened in a different Sicilian location, and it was in a small town between Palermo and Corleone. That time I was also speaking to a local boss, but for a different reason. This time, I was pleading to the local Mafia boss to give back what he had stolen from my father. In fact after my father died, that piece of s... had the courage to steal (with the help of some corrupted local administrator) the land that my father had bought with the savings of a lifetime hard work.

I could have forced him to give back what didn't belonged to him, but I knew that I was playing with my life. In fact, the @#%$&@ was guarded by a pair of armed scum bags. At some point of our animated discussion, the two lowlifes that were guarding the boss motioned in a threatening manner their guns toward me. What else, I could have done? I left! When I left, I left with a heart full of bitterness and insane ideas in my head, for the revenge... Fortunately as the time went by, my head started to cool off and began to think that was better to give up the lost, rather than getting myself entangled in something much, but much worst.

In both of those two occasions the two, "gentlemen" were wearing (as I was mentioning before) that same gold ring with those strange engravings on it.



Just a pure causality, or there was more? I can't still figure it out. Exactly, what that meant? Maybe, that meant nothing! Or maybe, that meant a lot!

For sure, there must have been some sort of correlation among those facts. We already know, that the American Mafia and the Sicilian Mafia have (or have had) tight links. Is that ring a Mafia thing? Like an oath of loyalty and belongings to a certain clan, or just it is a simple way to recognize each other even in faraway lands?!?
............

Continue: Facing the Mafia - La Mattanza (chapter II).

Mafia, Coppole, and Lupare. (part II) Mafia's war.

Category:
Mafia

Mafia's war.

Now, I remember when all those three words (Mafia, Coppole, and Lupare) were combined together and led an entire city (Palermo) and my personal memories of it, to a long a nightmarish year of violences and deaths.

There are still vivid in my mind, the memories of a six years old boy, of when his loved city plunged into a bloody Mafia's war (The first Mafia War in 1962-63). I well remember that, for an entire year wasn't there a day in which my city woke up at the news that a dead body was found in some city's corner. At that time, it looked like the Mafia was gone totally insane and couldn't be stopped in its trail of blood and violence throughout the city.


The violent deaths were reported by the newspapers, like they were game's scorings, and I remember every afternoon myself with some young friends of mine, when we went together to a newsstand to buy the newspaper and read it, like we were reading a soccer match reporting, "September, 19, Mafia's death tolls has reached today the record of 234 "morti ammazzati" (deads by assassination). All the newspapers' reports of the Mafia assassinations, kept going till the end of that year.


Unfortunately as in any war, even innocent people succumbed to the madness of the Mafia's cycle revenges. I can even recall from my memories, the un-mentioned fears I could read all over the faces of the everyday guy that was thinking could be him, the next one to die mistakenly at the hand of the Mafia's rage.



First Mafia War.

• The first Mafia War took place in the 1962-63. The conflicted erupted over an underweight shipment of heroin. The La Barbera brothers were the protagonists in a bloody conflict between rival clans in Palermo in the early 1960s.

Second Mafia War.

• The Second Mafia War mostly taking place in the early 1980s, which is sometimes referred to as The Great Mafia War or the Mattanza, involved the entire Mafia and radically altered the power balance within the organization.

Of course, there were many other wars of Mafia such these ones, but especially the first Mafia's war, it was one of the two mostly bloody and violent Mafia's wars, in which the city of Palermo had to deal with.

Criminal capital of the world.

It one point, my Palermo was named, "the capital of crime" due to its death-roll, and it was compared to New York City, of when New York itself was named criminal capital of the world, for its crime rates. That record by itself wasn't for sure a boast of confidence and image, for any proud city.

Nowadays, Palermo has ceased to be the city of the hundreds violent deaths per year.

Thank God for that, but...there's still a but. The Mafia hasn't been defeated, despite all the battles already won by the police forces, this monster hasn't yet exhaled its last breath. The Mafia is wounded and now it's hiding from the spotlights, waiting for the right moment to re-emerge again from its dark hideouts.

I don't know, if the Sicilian society is ready to reckon again with the intimidations of a next Mafia's reappearances!!! Only time will tell us, how Sicilians will handle with a new Mafia occurrences.

Meanwhile, I wish that my city will get stronger and better prepared, in the event that this cancer will spread once again inside its social and economic tissues.

*****

I end here with a homage to my loved Sicily, with the hope of a better future without a Mafia, Coppole, or Lupare.

Sicilia Bedda.



My loved Sicily.

A wishful...Red.eVolution

Related links:

Mafia, Coppole, and Lupare. (part I)

Sicily, a land of lost opportunities.

Sicily "mafia land". (part one)

Sicily "mafia land". (part due)

Mafia

Mafia, Coppole, and Lupare. (part I)

Category:
Mafia

What a trio of words! These words sound like they belong to a Mafia's movie title, or a Mafia's book tittle. What these words mean, or meant for the common Sicilian citizens at one time! Mafia not needs for its explanation, already we all know what Mafia means, it means an oriented family crime organization.

What about those other words?

Coppola (a traditional flat cap worn by men in Southern Italy and Sicily) wasn't just a common piece of vestiary for the ordinary Sicilian, but for a "Mafiusu" in particular, it meant something more than a simple hat... It had also, an occult meaning along the ordinary use of it.


The coppola, especially when this piece of vestiary was worn by twisting it to one side of the head, gave to those wearing it a status of respect, power, and belongings to a privileged caste. That twisted hat meant, the Mafiusu' was part of a Mafia clan organization.

When I was very young (before I came to live and work in the States), back on those days I recall how was viewed by the Sicilian those men wearing the twisted hats. Those men were seen with fear, and therefore those so called men of honor got respect from the rest of the Sicilian communities not because of their good deeds, but the intimidation of their "persona".

Indeed those men, were (and are) the scums of the Sicilian societies, and unfortunately stereotypes of the Sicilians been seen as all "mafiusi" together with the saying, " Nenti sacciu, nenti vitti, nenti 'ntisi " (I don't know nothing, I didn't see anything, I didn't hear anything) has since stuck all over them as a blemish, especially if they went for jobs in the North of Italy.

I don't hear, I don't see, I don't talk.

Uomini di panza "Men of honor".

The "Nenti sacciu, nenti vitti, nenti 'ntisi" saying, it's associated with the code of silence (also known as omerta'). The omerta' (a refusal to give evidences and to cooperate with the police about criminal activities) is practiced by the Mafia itself (naturally) and by the common citizens for fears of the Mafia's retaliations. The men that make use of this code of silence are named, "uomini di panza" (men with big stomach). The term "uomini di panza" means that these men have enough stomach to keep Mafia's secrets inside, without revealing them to the police. Be a "uomo di panza" (man with a big stomach) in the same time means: to be an honorable man. I hope, you are now getting how distorted and wicked are the Mafia's rules, for being a (not) honorable man.

Luckily today, in Sicily many things have changed. If you go there for a visit, you wont see anymore those, "coppole" (except in very few small towns, with very few old men), and those men of honor will get less respect from the people, than back the old days of the coppolas.

Finally, the word lupara what it means?


Lupara means: violent death to those who dared to challenge the Mafia laws. The "lupara" was a sawed-off shotgun used particularly for the Mafia's vendettas. The word 'lupara' means literally 'wolf-shot', reflecting its lethal power and its history of use in Mafia killings. Another expression of the lupara is -the lupara bianca (white lupara)- a term which was, and it is still used, after someone has been murdered by the Mafia, and his body can't be found anywhere.

continues...

Next: Mafia, Coppole, and Lupare. (part II) Mafia's war.