Share this
Cosa Nostra was formed in the summer of 2003 in Los Angeles, CA by Hank 'Combat' Bronson and Jimmy' Iron Jae' Jump. Like most artist they began their evolution in the Hip-Hop culture as street break-dancers and later as graffiti artist.
The Sicilian Mafia, also simply known as the Mafia and frequently referred to as Cosa Nostra (Italian: ˈkɔːza ˈnɔstra, ˈkɔːsa -, Sicilian: ˈkɔːsa ˈnɔʂː(ɽ)a; 'our thing') by its members, is an Italian, Mafia-terrorist-type, organized crime syndicate and criminal society originating in the region of Sicily, dating to the 19th century. Cosa Nostra is quite simply far more organized than the other southern Italian criminal associations. None of the others has anything like the provincial Commissions that act as parliaments and courts for the mafia in western Sicily. None of the others has a boss of all bosses as Cosa Nostra does. When worn, white musical notes are intermittently seen playing from the Earbuds. The musical notes have no associated sound effect. This item was awarded to players who launched Team Fortress 2 using the macOS operating system (at the time Mac OS X) between June 10, 2010, and June 14, 2010. Cosa Nostra (Our Thing) has inspired innumerable publications1. It attracts the attention of the public opinion for several different reasons. First and foremost, it is the secrecy that surrounds the Cosa Nostra that fascinates the public which, in essence, equates it to the amoral cooperative character (‘amoral familism' as described by Banfield 1958).
Posted on 17 Feb 2020
Italian law-enforcement efforts, the presence of new, foreign criminal networks in Sicily and internal instability have weakened the Sicilian Cosa Nostra as its bosses try to reorganize the mafia group.
Cosa Nostra (berudil) Mac Os X
In July 2019, investigations carried out by Italy's anti-mafia investigative directorate (the Direzione Investigativa Antimafia – DIA), led to the arrest of 19 mafia suspects. The drive was part of New Connection, an operation conducted jointly by the Italian police and the FBI's New York bureau.
New Connection came a year after Cupola 2.0, a 2018 investigation that seriously dented Cosa Nostra, with the arrest of 46 prominent bosses. Such a high number of arrests in a short period of time has allegedly prevented the criminal network from settling decisive matters. Evidence from the wiretapping deployed extensively during the recent joint investigations shows a destabilized Cosa Nostra as bosses attempt to establish new leadership structures.
New Connection and the earlier Cupola 2.0 seem to have had a bigger impact than previous anti-mafia operations, with the police managing to hit both Sicilian and Sicilian-American affiliates trying to restructure Cosa Nostra's so-called ‘cupola'. Derived from the Italian for a dome that crowns a building, the cupola is a structure formed by the heads of independent Cosa Nostra families. This high-level committee makes decisions on important issues, such as those targeted for assassination and structural changes in the organization.
Recently, the media have reported on how Cosa Nostra's power has been dwindling and, as a consequence, how the weakened group has been losing its grip on Sicily's lucrative illicit markets. Allegedly, the DIA's focus on breaking the Cosa Nostra has left the playing field open for Romanian, Albanian, and especially Nigerian gangs, to make inroads into former mafia territory, mainly in its two largest cities, Palermo and Catania. As a result, large tranches of the drug-trafficking, prostitution and migrant-smuggling markets across the central Mediterranean route are now controlled by such foreign nationals – a scenario that would have been unthinkable during the 1980s heyday of Cosa Nostra, when they held a virtual monopoly over the Italian criminal scene.
Police operations and the presence of foreign networks are, however, only partially the reason for Cosa Nostra's decline. The death of the Corleonesi clan boss, Totò Riina, in 2017, the group's ferocious and authoritative capo for more than three decades, left a significant governance vacuum that erstwhile successors have struggled to fill.
The Corleonesi clan (who hail from the eponymous town of Corleone) started out in the 1970s and expanded their area of influence towards Palermo, Sicily's largest city. In spite of their notorious propensity for brutality, the Corleonesi were initially underestimated and dismissed as rural peasants by the bosses of the Palermo-based mafia families who, by contrast, enjoyed the patronage of politicians and elements of Sicilian high society.
They overlooked the Corleonesi at their peril, however, because, under Riina, the Corleonesi launched what some have dubbed the second mafia war. This was a series of killings within Cosa Nostra carried out between 1981 and 1983, after which the Corleone clan, led by Riina, Bernardo Provenzano, and Leoluca Bagarella, stepped into the commanding role of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.
The remaining families were forced to either submit to the Corleonesi or flee. Several of them, such as the members of the powerful Inzerillo family, abandoned the Cosa Nostra and sought asylum in Sicilian-American mob-allied families.
That conflict led to the long-lasting domination of Cosa Nostra by the Corleonesi, one that remained unchallenged until Riina's arrest and imprisonment under solitary confinement in 1993, though he managed to retain considerable authority through proxies. It was not until his death that the battle to control the cupola of the Cosa Nostra began in earnest.
A clear authority figure is crucially important to a top-down organization like Cosa Nostra. A mafia network divided by internal conflicts and disconnected clans cannot guarantee the safety of their businesses, maintain the constitution of the group intact, function as a solid counterforce to other criminal networks, or resist police pressure. But no single capo has yet emerged.
Recently, the media have reported on how Cosa Nostra's power has been dwindling and, as a consequence, how the weakened group has been losing its grip on Sicily's lucrative illicit markets. Allegedly, the DIA's focus on breaking the Cosa Nostra has left the playing field open for Romanian, Albanian, and especially Nigerian gangs, to make inroads into former mafia territory, mainly in its two largest cities, Palermo and Catania. As a result, large tranches of the drug-trafficking, prostitution and migrant-smuggling markets across the central Mediterranean route are now controlled by such foreign nationals – a scenario that would have been unthinkable during the 1980s heyday of Cosa Nostra, when they held a virtual monopoly over the Italian criminal scene.
Police operations and the presence of foreign networks are, however, only partially the reason for Cosa Nostra's decline. The death of the Corleonesi clan boss, Totò Riina, in 2017, the group's ferocious and authoritative capo for more than three decades, left a significant governance vacuum that erstwhile successors have struggled to fill.
The Corleonesi clan (who hail from the eponymous town of Corleone) started out in the 1970s and expanded their area of influence towards Palermo, Sicily's largest city. In spite of their notorious propensity for brutality, the Corleonesi were initially underestimated and dismissed as rural peasants by the bosses of the Palermo-based mafia families who, by contrast, enjoyed the patronage of politicians and elements of Sicilian high society.
They overlooked the Corleonesi at their peril, however, because, under Riina, the Corleonesi launched what some have dubbed the second mafia war. This was a series of killings within Cosa Nostra carried out between 1981 and 1983, after which the Corleone clan, led by Riina, Bernardo Provenzano, and Leoluca Bagarella, stepped into the commanding role of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra.
The remaining families were forced to either submit to the Corleonesi or flee. Several of them, such as the members of the powerful Inzerillo family, abandoned the Cosa Nostra and sought asylum in Sicilian-American mob-allied families.
That conflict led to the long-lasting domination of Cosa Nostra by the Corleonesi, one that remained unchallenged until Riina's arrest and imprisonment under solitary confinement in 1993, though he managed to retain considerable authority through proxies. It was not until his death that the battle to control the cupola of the Cosa Nostra began in earnest.
A clear authority figure is crucially important to a top-down organization like Cosa Nostra. A mafia network divided by internal conflicts and disconnected clans cannot guarantee the safety of their businesses, maintain the constitution of the group intact, function as a solid counterforce to other criminal networks, or resist police pressure. But no single capo has yet emerged.
Among those loyal to the Corleonesi is Settimo Mineo – a boss believed to be the de facto head of Cosa Nostra – who has many times tried (until his arrest) to set up a dialogue with the US-based members of the powerful Inzerillo family, and specifically with Francesco Inzerillo, whose brother was killed by Riina in 1981.
Cosa Nostra (berudil) Mac Os Operating System
But also waiting in the wings are other notorious Corleonesi: Leoluca Bagarella and the Graviano brothers (currently imprisoned), and, more importantly, Matteo Messina Denaro and Giovanni Motisi. Messina Denaro and Motisi are, respectively, number one and two on the list of most wanted fugitives in Italy. Investigators lost track of Motisi a decade ago, so assessing the credibility of his bid for power is difficult. Messina Denaro, who has a stronghold in Palermo, and his interests would have to be accommodated in any eventual brokered resolution.
With the primary goal of stemming the organization's decline, bosses from all over the island have tried to build bridges between the many Cosa Nostra factions and put to rest long-standing disputes. Investigations also show how renowned bosses historically loyal to the Corleonesi, together with young and powerful gangsters, such as Leandro Greco (grandchild of historic godfather Michele Greco), have attempted to form partnerships with old enemies, such as Giovanni Buscemi, a rival boss sponsored by the Inzerillo family.
But the process of reconciliation between these factions, whose rivalry goes back many years, has been slow and tenuous, and neither a new unifying authority figure nor solid consensus has yet emerged within the cupola. Meanwhile, Cosa Nostra's operations continue to be eroded by foreign organized-crime groups, who are consolidating and expanding into the power vacuum the fractured Cupola has left.
It is clear from the ongoing investigations that Cosa Nostra is in a delicate phase, and the next moves by some of the prominent candidates for the top position of capo will need to be carefully monitored. While it is certainly too soon to declare the power of the Sicilian mafia as obsolete, continued decisive state intervention may be able to permanently divide and conquer Cosa Nostra's mythical unity.
Author(s)
'The mafia, in the strict sense of Cosa Nostra, the hierarchical criminal organization based in Sicily, does not ‘run Italy' as you sometimes hear people rather glibly say,' explains John Dickie, senior lecturer in Italian at the University of London, and author of Cosa Nostra – a history of the Sicilian Mafia. It's in response to the question, to what extent is an understanding of the Mafia crucial to an understanding of the history of modern Italy? 'It is no coincidence – though, he continues – that the mafia was born at the same time as the modern Italian State, in the middle of the nineteenth century. Since then, the Italian state has co-habited with illegal forms of power based on an ability to use violence (that is, with the mafia in a looser meaning). Still today, some areas of southern Italy are not under the full control of the legal government, in the sense that criminal associations create their own ‘legality', their own shadow state. Understanding how that situation has evolved tells us a great deal about Italy, and about the State's difficulties in establishing its right to rule.'
Dickie's work, which is amongst the first serious academic studies on Cosa Nostra published in English, dismisses many of the accepted myths about the organisation, propagated by its own members, as well as through art, literature and film over the last century.
Let's talk about the name. Do we know what the origins of the name are? When it first came into use? Do ‘mafiosi‘ actually use the term referring to themselves?
Men of honour, as initiated members of Cosa Nostra are called, do not use the word mafia about themselves. That fact alone is enough to tell us that all the etymological speculation that has gone on around the origins of the word is missing the point. That said, the best guess we have is that the word existed in Palermo dialect in the middle of the nineteenth century: it meant a kind of self-confidence and beauty–'cool' is an approximate English equivalent. The story of how it then came to have criminal connotations, and came to be a powerful political weapon at the same time, is told in an early chapter of my book.
Cosa Nostra exists to protect the credibility of its brand. In other words, to make sure that the threats its members issue are never made in vain. A bit like the Volkswagen brand and its reputation for reliability. Only in the case of Cosa Nostra, protecting your brand identity means being able to kill people and get away with it, rather than just being able to start your car on a damp morning.
Many books on the mafia have been written by journalists and commentators, but relatively few by historians (certainly in English). What are the challenges facing the historian approaching a topic like the mafia?
The first and most serious problem was only overcome remarkably recently. Until 1992 we didn't know for certain what the Sicilian mafia was! It was in that year that the existence of Cosa Nostra was finally confirmed by the Italian courts. Before then, historians couldn't be confident that they knew what they were looking for when they went back through the records to research the mafia. That is why the first genuine history of the Sicilian mafia ever written in Italian only came out in 1993–a brilliant work of scholarship and analysis by the Catania historian Salvatore Lupo. It's a great shame that his book has never been translated into English.
The other, obvious, problem is documentation. The Sicilian mafia is, and has always been, a secret association of murderers and criminals. By its very nature, it does not leave written records. However, because it has always lived in close contact with political power, it has left a great deal of secondary evidence about itself.
What sets Cosa Nostra apart from organisations like the ‘Ndrangheta of Calabria, or the Sacra Corona Unita of Puglia? How is it that the mafia has come to be seen as the template for organised criminal activity worldwide?
Cosa Nostra is quite simply far more organized than the other southern Italian criminal associations. None of the others has anything like the provincial Commissions that act as parliaments and courts for the mafia in western Sicily. None of the others has a boss of all bosses as Cosa Nostra does. The close links with the United States, where the Sicilian model came to dominate over the other criminal associations exported from Italy, has also helped Cosa Nostra become prominent.
One review of your book described it as a 'precise and necessary work of rebranding'. Would you agree? Medically inaccurate - macos mac os. What drew you to the subject?
The reference to branding is interesting. It derives from a fascinating sociological analysis of the Sicilian mafia by Diego Gambetta–another one of the breakthrough studies on the subject that came out in the early 1990s. He pioneered the idea that ‘mafia' could be thought of as a brand–either of trust, or of intimidation, depending on how you view the extortion rackets that are at the basis of Cosa Nostra‘s power.
Cosa Nostra exists to protect the credibility of its brand. In other words, to make sure that the threats its members issue are never made in vain. A bit like the Volkswagen brand and its reputation for reliability. Only in the case of Cosa Nostra, protecting your brand identity means being able to kill people and get away with it, rather than just being able to start your car on a damp morning.
Leave a Reply
