There have been six car bombings in Malta since the beginning of 2016 and the word ‘mafia’ has always been mentioned, in whatever context, whether public or private, as if it were a grey suit, suitable for any occasion.
“It was professional and a classic Mafia-style homicide. The Mafia’s style is intimidation,” Antonio Di Pietro declared in an interview with the Times of Malta.
On closer analysis, the bombings – in the last of which, on October 16, blogger Daphne Caruana Galizia was killed – have many features in common. The intended victims were in their own car, explosives were used to murder them, there were no conventional weapons at the scene of the crime and those who carried out the bombing are, presumably, locals. Three Maltese men have been arraigned in connection with the blogger’s murder.
So far, the motives and the instigators of these crimes are unknown. That this could be the result of gang warfare to assert criminal power on Maltese territory may well be the case; whether they are the work of Mafia clans (cosche) is yet to be seen.
By now, the cosche are no longer a uniquely Italian phenomenon because similar forms of organised crime are to be found in other countries, such as the Solchnevskaya Brotherhood in Russia, or the mysterious Chinese Triads, or even the arrogant mafia of Albanian or Serbian origin.
Tommaso Buscetta, the first pentito in Italian history to renounce the Mafia, told Giovanni Falcone, who was interrogating him: “Mafia is a literary creation, we call ourselves Cosa Nostra!” He was speaking about the organisational, operational and criminal structure of the Italo-American Mafia.
The abstract term ‘mafia’ has acquired a different meaning in the Italian language. It became used in common parlance in 1863, after the runaway success, all over Italy, of the Sicilian play I mafiusi de la Vucaria. Until then, the word ‘mafia’ was used in Palermo, in the neighbourhood known as the Borgo, and had an entirely different meaning.
According to Giuseppe Pitrè, the leading authority on Sicilian traditions, the word ‘mafia’ “was, and is, always synonymous with beauty, graciousness, perfection, excellence of its kind”. The play’s script gave a lively portrayal of the habits, customs, the language of some youths serving time in Palermo, who, after committing various crimes, redeem themselves and ask for forgiveness.
Since then, the term mafioso in Italian became synonymous with “boasting, self-confidence, arrogance, haughtiness” and ‘mafia’ became “the collective name given to all the mafiosi of the honourable society and other similar forms of organised crime”.
The relationship between politicians and Mafia clans is certainly one of the most troubling and controversial aspects of organised crime
In reality, what should be defined as “a spirit or sense of mafia” is the fruit of a long-standing tradition of omertà and connivances attributed to the società dell’umiltà (societies of humility), the name given to the camorra, the organised crime network, in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, because its members always had to follow the orders of the boss and obey his laws. The resulting complicity that bound them together became a mainstay of the feeling of mafia.
In the second half of the 19th century, the mafioso became an integral part of a system of social rules in the district of Palermo, in a territory in which it was easy, for some young men, heirs of the Compagnie d’armi – a kind of private police force originating in feudal times – to become important figures in the flourishing trade in citrus fruits and sulphur with the United States, which, in fact, were later used to cover up shady dealings. Gambling, prostitution, smuggling of drugs and alcohol became the main business of the underworld.
The need to have reliable men to whom to entrust this traffic on the other side of the ocean, not to mention the control of the ports, brought along with it the adoption of a special and particular code of behaviour: a kind of an oath of loyalty to a secret organisation of a criminal character.
First there was La Mano Nera (the Black Hand) in America, then Cosa Nostra (Our Thing), the most powerful Italo-American crime syndicate. This was an invisible world that would be subdivided in families whose control was entrusted to a ‘godfather’ in Sicily as it was in America. The ‘godfather’ was usually a hardened criminal of considerable experience who sought to usurp God’s right over his members’ life and death.
“They call it family, probably to lessen the impact,” former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani declared, “but it is not a family, it is an illegal business organisation in which a group of men promise to be faithful to each other to divide various sectors of the business among themselves.” However, this definition does not explain the true essence of the Mafia, namely its ability to establish close links with politicians, without which it would be just a vulgar form of delinquency.
Generally speaking, the relationship between politicians and Mafia clans is certainly one of the most troubling and controversial aspects of organised crime in the history of political forces and institutions around the world.
In Italy, this phenomenon of large-scale collusion between the Mafia and politics has been going on for more than 100 years. This is evident in court sentences, arrests of leading politicians and, above all, Mafia executions of professional people above suspicion.
No one in Italy officially knows how many journalists, pentiti and their families, priests and businessmen are under police protection. Yet, many anti-Mafia magistrates have paid with their lives for their tough fight against mafia-style organisations, suffice to mention the assassination of Giovanni Falcone and Pietro Borsellino.
Nevertheless, without the collaboration of the pentiti, Italy’s magistrates would have been unable to conclude certain investigations while the executors and the instigators of many murders would have remained unknown to this day.
Nobody knows what the new organisation of Cosa Nostra in Sicily and in the Mediterranean is like after the death of Totò Riina, the capo dei capi (boss of bosses). It is said that, until a few decades ago, Riina moved about freely not only in Corleone, his Sicilian stronghold, but also in Gozo.
It is difficult to think that Malta, thanks to its geographical position and a somewhat carefree or naïve political class in dealing with international financial circles, could not offer an opportunity for international mafia-style organisations.
It is most unlikely that Di Pietro, during his recent short visit to Malta, did not carefully employ the term “mafia”. In a radio interview, a few months ago, he stated: “The Clean Hands investigation was stopped just when it started to investigate the connections with the Mafia. What I had found out, Falcone and Borsellino had already established before me. When I got to the point, I was forced to resign by an attempt at delegitimisation, in order to defend myself in court as a common citizen. I was lucky I found this system instead of TNT.”
It is difficult to see how six car bombings are just a settling of accounts of organised Maltese crime and Di Pietro has taken the credit for this.
Enrico Gurioli is an Italian journalist and author.