Abstract
October 1888, New York City—Two owners of a restaurant that took its name, “La Trinacria,” from the three-legged symbol of Sicily, were charged with the murder of a Sicilian fruit dealer. Inspector Thomas Byrnes, interviewed by the press, said, “The persons were Sicilians, and hail from Palermo, the chief seaport of Sicily. They are intelligent, and have received some education. They are fugitives from their native country, having been engaged in various crimes and offenses.” On that remote island, the police officer informed us, the mobsters were linked together by the Mafia, a society consisting of “forgers, counterfeiters and assassins.” In America, the Mafia had two outposts: one in New York, the other in New Orleans.1
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Notes
Quoted by H. S. Nelli, The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1976, p. 65.
It appears incredible, but until recent times we find authors who refer to the medieval origins of the Mafia, or to Mazzini as its founder. See for example D. L. Chandler, Criminal Brotherhoods, London, Constable, 1976, pp. 24–30,
W. Balsamo and G. Carpozi Jr., Under the Clock: The Inside Story of the Mafia’s First Hundred Years, Far Hills New York, New Horizon Press, 1988, p. XV.
See in particular this topic in N. Recupero, La Sicilia all’opposizione (1848–74), in Storia d’Italia: le regioni dall’Unit à a oggi: La Sicilia, edited by M. Aymard and G. Giarrizzo, Turin, Einaudi, 1987, pp. 41–88; and Id., “Ceti medi e homines novi. Alle origini della mafia,” in Polis, 2, 1987.
N. Turrisi Colonna, Cenni sullo stato attuale della sicurezza pubblica in Sicilia, Palermo, ILA Palma, 1988 [I ed. 1864], p. 48.
See for example J. Schneider and P. Schneider, Culture and Political Economy in Western Sicily, New York, Academic Press, 1976.
E. J. Hobsbawm, The Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movements, New York, Norton, 1965.
L. Franchetti, Condizioni politiche e amministrative della Sicilia, in Inch iesta in Sicilia, edited by L. Franchetti and S. Sonnino, Florence, Vallecchi, 1974 [I ed. 1876].
G. Mosca, Che cos’è la mafia, Rome and Bari, Laterza, 2002 [I ed. 1900], p. 27.
S. Lupo, Il giardino degli aranci. Il mondo degli agrumi nella storia del Mezzogiorno, Venezia, Marsilio, 1990. See in particular Luigi Contencin, the most important Italian exporter, interviewed in Citrus Fruit Sales in New York, San Francisco, Pacific Press, October 22, 1897.
E. J. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds.), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1983.
G. Pitrè, Usi, costumi, usanze e pregiudizi del popolo siciliano, Palermo, Il Vespro, 1978 [I ed. 1889], vol. II, pp. 292–94.
L. Natoli (William Galt), I Beati Paoli: grande romanzo storico siciliano. Introduzione di U. Eco, Palermo, Flaccovio, 2003 [I ed. 1910].
A. Train, Courts, Criminals and the Camorra, London, Chapman and Hall, 1912, p. 227 and p. 232.
Quoted in D. Gallagher, All the Right Enemies: The Life and Murder of Carlo Tresca, New Brunswick and London, Rutgers, 1988, p. 28. Tresca arrived in America in 1904.
See the family tree in D. Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931, New York and London, Routledge, 2009.
L. Panepinto, “Ai compagni di Tampa Fla,” in La Plebe, June 1909, in C. Messina (ed.), In giro per la Sicilia con la “Plebe” (1902–1905), Palermo, Herbita, 1985, pp. 379–81.
Park and Miller, Old World Traits, pp. 151–52; R. D. Alba, Italian-Americans: Into the Twilight of Ethnicity, Englewood Cliffs, Prentice-Hall, 1985, p. 50.
F. J. Ianni and E. Reuss-Ianni, A Family Business: Kinship and Social Control in Organized Crime, London, Russell Sage Foundation, 1972.
J. Mangione and B. Morreale, La Storia: Five Centuries of Italian American Experience, New York, HarperCollins, 1992, p. 174.
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© 2015 Salvatore Lupo
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Lupo, S. (2015). Amid the Great Flood of Migrants. In: The Two Mafias. Italian and Italian American Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137491374_2
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