A CRIMINAL HISTORY OF MANKIND

Palermo. The result is that between 1973 and 1983, Palermo has become one of the richest cities in
Italy. One result is that in the 1980s, Palermo has had an average of two gang murders per week.
Anybody who took an anti-Mafia stand was in danger. In 1982, the victims included two judges,
two police chiefs and a leading Christian Democrat politician. And at this point, the Mafia
apparently overreached itself. Pio La Torre, the Sicilian Communist Party leader was a relentless
campaigner against the Mafia and a member of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission; he had
sponsored a bill to give the police special powers to deal with the Mafia, including access to private
bank accounts and tapping telephone conversations. The ‘La Torre law’ failed to reach the statute
book. On 30 April 1982, La Torre was ambushed and shot to death.
General Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the policeman who had defeated the Red Brigades, was appointed
prefect of Palermo. When he arrived with his new young wife, he had a foreboding that he would
be killed.
Dalla Chiesa pressed hard for the La Torre law to be passed, but the government dragged its feet. In
a country as poor as Italy, it could be politically dangerous to destroy an industry that brings
wealth.
Then on 3 September 1982, Alberto Dalla Chiesa was shot dead, together with his wife and his
police escort. The result was that the Church launched a violent campaign against the Mafia; the
Pope denounced it on a visit to Palermo. And the ‘La Torre law’ was passed by a guilt-ridden
Parliament. The result has been Italy’s most successful campaign against the Mafia so far. In
November 1982, sixty-five defendants came to trial in Palermo in what became known as the
Spatola trial - after Rosario Spatola, the alleged Mafia ‘accountant’ whose multi-million-dollar
‘laundering’ operations had been opened to investigation by the new law. But with at least twenty
backroom heroin refineries in Sicily capable of producing half a billion dollars’ worth of heroin a
week, it seems doubtful whether even the anti-Mafia law can get to the root of the problem.
Compared to America and Italy, there is something engagingly amateurish about organised crime in
Britain. After the trial of the Kray twins in 1969, it was revealed by their defence counsel that, at
one point, the twins went to New York and tried to make some business arrangement with the
Mafia, explaining that they ruled London, that the police were in their pay, and that they were
immune from arrest. The Mafia sent an envoy to London - who was promptly arrested in the
Mayfair Hotel and placed in Brixton jail to await deportation. ‘I thought you told me you ran this
place?’ he said with disgust when the twins came to see him in prison.
Gangsterism came to Britain after the First World War; by the end of the 1920s, the slums of most
major cities had their mobs of criminal hooligans. But the kind of gang warfare described in No
Mean City has more in common with the present-day violence among gangs of Mexican teenagers
in Los Angeles than with the American Mafia. That is to say, it is essentially a phenomenon of
‘territory’ - the ‘overcrowded rats syndrome’. Overcrowding heightens tension; tension heightens
aggression. In a ‘normal’ social situation - without overcrowding - the dominant five per cent
naturally find various outlets for their need for self-expression, from daydreaming to competitive
sport. But in a society that teems with aggression, even the intelligent find themselves unable to
ignore the challenge; their self-respect demands the ability to respond aggressively to aggression.
So normal competition comes to express itself through violence.
In Glasgow in the 1920s there were dozens of gangs with names like the Norman Conquerors (from
Norman Street), the Briggate Boys, the Beehive Gang and the South Side Stickers. Norman Lucas