There is no place like home.
How Mafia finds it difficult to
expand from its geographical place
Federico Varese*
Recently I visited Buffalo, NY, on the United States side of the Niagara
Falls. The reason for my visit was in part culinary. I wanted to lunch at La
Nova Pizzeria Inc., listed among the top 100 best and hottest Pizzerie in the
US by the website PizzaToday.com. As
the opening words of the site announce, Pizza making remains a family affair.
And indeed it is so in Buffalo: the manager of La Nova, Joseph Todaro, Jr. is
the son of Joseph Todaro, Sr. a reputed Mafioso who took over the local family
in 1987 and retired to Florida in 1999. This Mafia family was established in
the 1920s by Stefano Magaddino who set it up after fleeing the New York City
Mafia wars of the 1920s. Magaddino remained at its head, a deft and ruthless
leader, for 52 years, until Todaro Sr. took over.
Buffalo is some 300 miles North West of New York City
and, in the 1920s, it was virgin land for organised crime. Can a Mafia move to
a different state, to a different country? In order to have an answer, I
thought it more prudent to turn to books, rather than asking my host. Some
scholarly studies argue cogently that criminal organisations are intimately
connected to their area of origin and do not travel easily. For Diego Gambetta,
the author of The Sicilian Mafia
(1993), not only did the Mafia grow mainly in western Sicily, but, with the
exception of Catania, it has remained there to this very day. As supporting
evidence, he cites the testimonies of Sicilian Mafiosi who turned state
witnesses in the 1980s and the rate of murders ascribed to the Mafia, broken
down by area over a century. Most murders by Cosa Nostra still take place today
in the same areas they occurred hundred years ago. The Mafia, he suggests, is
an industry that, not unlike mining, is heavily dependent on the local
environment.
Yiu Kong Chu, in The
Triads as Business (2000), maintains that the Chinese Triads, likewise, are
a local phenomenon. Most importantly, he writes, Hong Kong Triads are not
international illegal entrepreneurs whose wealth and connections may enable
them to emigrate to Western countries. This is not to say that Sicilian and
Chinese Mafiosi do not travel or re-invest the proceeds of their crimes abroad
or enter into agreements with other groups for, say, the international
smuggling of drugs. It is the organisation as such that is localised. A Mafia
group relies on the reputation of its members, knowledge of the territory,
personal relations and networks of friendship and kinship to run its
operations. This set of relationships is not reproduced at will.
Nevertheless, worrying signs of Mafia transplantation
have emerged, and not only in Buffalo, NY. Not long after my meal at La Nova
Pizzeria in Buffalo, I had the opportunity to read wiretaps made by the Italian
police of conversations among Russian criminals in Rome. The Solntsevo, the
most powerful Moscow-based crime group, is both highly local and
trans-national. It controls an area of the Russian capital, where it runs a
particularly callous protection racket. It is those dilapidated streets of
Moscow, in the West and South West part of the city, that constitute the core
terrain of the group.
But the group has also an international dimension: at
a meeting held in Miami in November 1993, the twelve people who are said to
rule the Solntsevo decided to expand their operation to Italy. It was an
operation taken very seriously by the Italian police, who started a lengthy
investigation of the case and eventually produced a confidential three-volume
report on the activities of the Solntsevo in Italy.
Rocco Sciarrone’s Mafie
vecchie, mafie nuove, examines the roots and attempts at expansion of
various Italian Mafias, namely the Sicilian Mafia, the Neapolitan Camorra and
the Calabria-based ’Ndrangheta. Although the text is at times burdened by
academic jargon, this is an important contribution to the study of the local
nature of Italian Mafia groups and their attempts to expand to other parts of
the country. It draws on more than one hundred judicial reports and numerous
interviews with entrepreneurs who pay protection money, and with local
politicians and prosecutors. Sciarrone’s book is complemented by the collection
edited by Tom Farer on transnational crime in the Americas. At first I
suspected that the latter book was another attempt by academics to cash in on
the fear among the American public and politicians of the supposed “new
monolithic threat of Transnational Organised Crime” (to use Senator John
Kerry’s portentous expression), but the book usefully highlights the
inconsistencies of the current definitions of “Transnational Organised Crime”,
puts the international nature of contemporary criminal enterprises in
historical context and criticizes the attempt by some state bureaucracies, in
particular that of the United States, to manufacture a new security threat to
replace that of the Soviet Union.
The spread of the Mafia has often been compared to
that of a disease, such as cancer, and the carrier of that disease is said to
be migration. In Italy in the 1980s, the xenophobic Northern League called for
controls over the North-South migration. Sciarrone, however, shows that
migration as such can be at best a background condition, neither necessary nor
sufficient for a Mafia group to expand. Most of the migrant workers found
employment in the industries of Northern Italy in the 1950s and 1960s. The
labour market was able to integrate newcomers into the local economy.
A perverse policy of the Italian State is a more
significant factor in Mafia expansion. Until recently, convicted Mafiosi were
often forced to reside outside their area of origin as a form of punishment.
Forced re-settlement (soggiorno obbligato)
was predicated on the assumption that away from their home base and immersed in
the civic, law-abiding culture of the North, Mafiosi would surrender their old
ways. Since the mid-fifties, this policy brought hard-nosed lawbreakers to
northern regions of Italy, such as Lombardy, Piedmont and Emilia-Romagna. The
policy was clearly flawed, based on a naive view of the Mafia as a product of a
backward society. The soggiorno obbligato
selected for forced migration individuals with specific Mafia skills and surely
was a factor facilitating expansion.
Most important of all, criminals migrate to escape
Mafia wars in their area of origin, as Magaddino did, engendering the pizza
maestros of Buffalo. Yuri Esin, the Solntsevo envoy to Rome, was eager to move
from Moscow to Italy because he was afraid of being killed by fellow members of
the Solntsevo ruling elite. Ciro Mazzarella, a boss of a losing faction within
the Camorra, escaped to Switzerland in 1992 and was able to forge a vast
conspiracy to smuggle cigarettes from Montenegro to Italy and corrupt local politicians,
including the then Montenegro minister of foreign affairs, a story that has
been well documented by Antonio Bove and Graziella Durante in the collection Gli Stati Mafia.
The emergence of the American Cosa Nostra is often
seen as a direct consequence of Italian immigration to the US. Even Alan Block,
in his otherwise illuminating paper in Transnational
Crime in the Americas, rather hastily blames the emergence of Cosa Nostra
on demographic factors and mobility patterns. An interpretation that matches
the historical record more accurately is that Mafia families emerged in some
cities of the USA due to a combination of local conditions. Prohibition caused
an increase in the demand for services of contract enforcement and protection
in the underworld; the Depression produced high unemployment rates. Some new
immigrants saw the opportunity to exploit a demand for Mafia services in the
underworld. Surely, they had a comparative advantage over other competitors,
since they were coming from a land where Mafia already existed. They knew what
skills (violence as well information gathering and coalition building) it took
to run a protection firm.
The rough and ready view of the Mafia as a disease
that spreads through migration fails to consider the role of such criminal
opportunities. Thus it was Prohibition that offered Magaddino the opportunity
to run a profitable bootlegging business and Buffalo’s close proximity to the
Canadian border facilitated his job. As shown by Sciarrone, it has only been
since the late seventies that the drug trade has become a significant source of
revenues in Italy.
A desire to offer a product that is not available in a
given area, such as a new drug or private protection, is hence a reasonable
motivation behind a Mafia group’s expansion strategy. Alternatively, the
decision to expand might be driven by the search for new raw materials or in
order to control supply channels. In the mid-seventies Colombian traffickers
from the Medellín cartel approached Roberto Suárez Gómez, a respected Bolivian
cattle rancher, with the request to use his cattle ranch’s runway to load coca
paste onto small planes destined for refinement labs in Colombia. As a
consequence, the Medellín cartel acquired a foothold in Bolivia.
It is hardly ever the case that a move to a distant
land takes the form of an agreement with a local criminal organisation, still
less the integration of two organisations. Most importantly, local agents of
foreign Mafias tend to become autonomous from their old masters. Anthony P.
Maingot in his paper in the Farer collection shows how Dominican criminals at
first worked as agents of the Colombian traffickers, but soon became
independent of their old masters. Similarly, The Bolivian
rancher-turned-trafficker Suárez Gómez successfully freed himself from the
patronage of the Colombians and is now the biggest Bolivian drug king.
Unlike legitimate global businesses, Mafia firms find
it hard to take advantage of the benefits of economy of scale. The bigger the
organisation, the harder it is to collect reliable information both on new
recruits and local conditions. Moreover, the bigger the reach of the
organisation, the more likely it is that disputes emerge within the
organisation, and that criminal reputations are faked, allowing police informants
to penetrate the organisation. A successful expansion in far-away territories
also depends on adapting to the local conditions. The strength of local
criminal groups and the repressive ability of the police must be evaluated
accurately. The wiretaps of Russian Mafiosi in Italy offer astonishing evidence
of the rational strategy followed by Esin in order to establish his group in
Italy. Esin first wanted to infiltrate the country, obtain Italian citizenship
for most of his Russian accomplices, and set up a network of informants and
helpers. Only in a second phase did he plan to engage in significant criminal
activities. In the first phase, the members of Esin group were openly told to
refrain from using an amount of violence which might attract attention. Also,
they decided to minimise as much as possible any conflict with the
organisations already operating in Italy. They chose Rome as their base
precisely because the Sicilian Mafia was not present in the Italian capital.
Esin could already count on the contacts of one Russian criminal who had
escaped from the US and moved to Italy, who told Esin: “Here (in Italy) you can
do whatever you want, it is not Europe.”
Sciarrone shows how a concatenation of mechanisms
accounts for the expansion of the Neapolitan Camorra in the neighbouring region
of Apulia in the late 1970s and early 1980s. First a number of camorristi had
been forced to resettle in Apulia by the Italian court system (the soggiorno obbligato policy). Second,
a significant number of camorristi were incarcerated in Apulia, and were
therefore able to enter into contact with local criminals. These two events
provided background factors, but were not by themselves sufficient. Novel
criminal opportunities had just made Apulia a prized territory. The free port
of Tangier closed in 1960, thereby shutting the traditional route of smuggled
cigarettes that used to run from Tangier to Marseilles passing through Sicily
and Naples. By the 1980s, a new smuggling route from Yugoslavia had emerged and
Apulia had become a crucial node. As the war in the former Yugoslavia worsened,
Apulia offered even greater criminal opportunities for smuggling drugs and
people from the ruins of the former Communist bloc. A second opportunity was
the presence of a contingent of local criminals willing to collaborate and even
to join the Neapolitan Camorra. Finally, the leader of the Neapolitan Camorra,
Raffaele Cutolo, rationally decided to expand to Apulia, putting into action a
long-term plan, which included establishing relations with corrupt officials.
It is a variety of factors rather than a single event such as migration that
accounts for the expansion of the Camorra to Apulia.
The final outcome was not what Cutolo had planned. At first local criminals were managing the illegal trades while the Camorra lent financial resources and support. This arrangement proved to be an unstable one: soon the local criminals tried to free themselves from the masters. In 1981, one of them, Giuseppe Rogoli, founded the Sacra Corona Unita, a new Mafia invoking the regional Pugliese identity against the intrusion of the foreign Neapolitans. At first, the Sacra Corona Unita borrowed its symbols and rituals from the ’Ndrangheta, the Mafia based in Calabria. This piece of criminal history is further testimony of the difficulties at maintaining a subsidiary away from the firm headquarters. Even when all the factors seem right, a successful operation in a new territory is hard to sustain over time. As in the case of the Dominican drug traffickers and of Suarez in Bolivia, the subsidiary may evolve into an independent organisation.
In Northern Italy criminal organisations originating
from the South have been most active in the drug trade, thereby modifying their
nature of protection rackets into that of organised criminal groups dealing
only in one illegal commodity, drugs. Still, in at least two instances, a Mafia
from Southern Italy was able to transplant its protection racket to the North.
Construction firms from Calabria had been alerted by Mafiosi residing in
Piedmont of new opportunities in the Bardonecchia area and, by the
mid-seventies, these firms had muscled their way into the local market. The
Mafia was then able to forge a vast and genuine social consensus among the
Calabrian migrant workers, who were mistakenly grateful for having been
employed. The control of the labour market evolved into a wider protection
racket. The Mafiosi extended their protection to other spheres of social life
of the immigrant workers, who were ostracised by the local population. They
also offered protection to the Piedmontese residents by punishing those
Calabresi who were misbehaving.
The step from a successful protection racket to the
penetration of local politics is a short one: one third of the voters of
Bardonecchia originated from Calabria and worked in the construction industry.
As in the areas of high Mafia presence, in Bardonecchia a code of omertà emerged: residents were afraid to
report Mafiosi to the police and local politicians started to deny the existence
of the Mafia in the area. “It is disheartening”, write the Piedmont
prosecutors, “to note that the worst depiction of the Sicilian reality
perfectly fits the behaviour of entrepreneurs in a district of the North”.
The conclusion is at the same time reassuring and
worrying. Migration as such cannot be the sole carrier of the Mafia virus.
Criminal opportunities must also exist and adroit strategies must be deployed
for a crime group to expand outside its traditional areas. The end result is
often different from the one planned by the criminals. The subsidiary evolves
into an independent firm. Under certain conditions, however, areas where civic
values and social capital are high might fall prey to a vicious cycle of
worsening social relations and violence. The ground-breaking study of civic
culture in Italy by Harvard professor Robert Putnam (Making Democracy Work, 1993) showed on the one hand how hard it is
to break the vicious cycle of lack of trust and absence of civic virtues in
Southern Italy. On the other hand, it concluded that these virtues were robust
in the North. The case of Mafia penetration in Piedmont testifies that what is
solid can, at times, melt into air. We can only hope that, over three
generations, Piedmontese Mafiosi, like those in Buffalo, will also turn to
pizza making.
* Times
Literary Supplement, February 23, 2000, pp. 3-4.
Review of:
Rocco Sciarrone, Mafie vecchie, mafie nuove. Radicamento ed
epansione. Rome: Donzelli Editore. Pages 330; Tom Farer (editor), Transnational crime in the Americas.
London: Routledge. Pages 320; Lucio Caracciolo (editor), Gli Stati Mafia. Rome: Gruppo Editoriale L'Espresso. Pages 196, and
Yiu Kong Chu, The Triads as Business.
London: Routledge. Pages 167.