A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

were believed to stand for: Morte Alia Francia Italia Anela - Death to France is Italy’s Cry). In
Naples, organised crime went under the name of the Camorra; in Calabria, the Fibbia; the
Stoppaglieri in Monreale. (Anyone who wants to understand how this kind of lawlessness
developed should read Manzoni’s novel The Betrothed -I Promessi Sposi - set in the 1620s.) The
Italian tendency to indulge in blood feuds that sometimes went on for generations fostered the spirit
of lawlessness. Yet, oddly enough, it was Garibaldi’s unification of Italy in 1860 that turned the
Mafia into a full-scale criminal organisation. One reason was that the Mafia placed itself at the
disposal of Garibaldi when he invaded Sicily (because, as one historian says, it could not afford to
be on the losing side), and so achieved a kind of respectability. Besides, the Mafia constituted a sort
of private army of mercenaries that could be hired by landowners - or the central government - to
keep the peasants in order. And now that Italy at last belonged to the Italians, the mafiosi could
forget political quarrels and concentrate on the business of extortion and intimidation. The criminal
was no longer a social outcast, living in the mountains; he had become a force in society. By the
late 1860s, the Mafia had organised itself into a society with its own rules and initiation rites. (On
the west coast of America, the same thing was happening with the Chinese ‘tongs’.) In fact, the aim
of all these criminal brotherhoods was to be a kind of secret local government. They made farmers
and small landowners pay taxes (later to be called ‘protection’), destroyed the property of those
who refused, and corrupted judges and police officers to prevent criminals from being successfully
prosecuted. They developed the rule of Omertá - meaning the code of silence, the refusal to talk to
authority, even when dying from an assassin’s bullet or a stiletto. The Mafia leaders soon
discovered that crime was not the best way to make a living. It was far easier to rent an estate from
an absentee landlord, then let it to peasants at an extortionate rate. By the 1890s, the Mafia had
become a kind of criminal aristocracy in Sicily. By the turn of the century, the leader, Don Vito
Cascio Ferro, was a kind of benevolent despot.
It is Ferro who is suspected of organising the importation of the Mafia into America. The most
popular city for Italian immigrants was New Orleans, which had a climate much like that of
southern Italy. It was there that one of Sicily’s best known brigands, Giuseppe Esposito, decided to
settle in 1880. Esposito had also made the discovery that, even for a mafioso, violence must be used
with caution. In November 1876, his gang had kidnapped an English curate named John Forester
Rose and demanded a £5,000 ransom. Rose’s wife declined to pay, and Esposito sent her one of her
husband’s ears. A week later, she received his other ear, and a note telling her that unless she paid
up the next package would contain his nose. She paid, but there was an international scandal like
the one that followed the Dilessi murders; the Italian government sent its carabinieri looking for
the gang, and after a battle nine were killed and fourteen captured. Esposito succeeded in bribing
his way out of jail, but decided that Sicily was no place for him and sailed for New York. Soon
New Orleans, with its large Italian population, proved more attractive than the inhospitable north.
But Esposito was filled with contempt for the relatively unambitious scale of lawlessness in New
Orleans, and began to apply rules of Mafia organisation. He would undoubtedly have become
America’s first ‘godfather’ if it had not been for the persistence of the Sicilian authorities, who
instituted extradition proceedings. In July 1881, two police officers - Mike and Dave Hennessey -
arrested Esposito, who was betrayed by a friend named Tony Labousse. A few days later, Labousse
encountered a friend of Esposito’s named Gaetano Arditto, and shots were exchanged which
resulted in the wounding of Arditto and the death of Labousse. It was probably America’s first
Mafia killing. Arditto was tried and sentenced for the murder, and Esposito was returned to a
Sicilian jail. But the Mafia organisation in New Orleans persisted, and led to many more killings
before the end of the century.