Sicilian Mafia

• 1. Introduction

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  The Sicilian Mafia, an Italian criminal society born on the island of Sicily and also called Cosa Nostra, once made a young man juggle a burning saint. In 1976, a man named Giovanni Brusca was invited to what was called a banquet at a country house. No feast awaited him. Several mafiosi sat around a table in a room, and on the table lay a pistol, a dagger, and a paper bearing the image of a saint. They questioned his commitment to crime and to murder, even though he already had a record of both. When he answered firmly, Salvatore Riina, then the most powerful boss of Cosa Nostra, took a needle and pricked his finger. Brusca smeared his blood on the image and held it in his cupped hands while Riina set it alight. As the paper burned, Riina told him: "If you betray Cosa Nostra, your flesh will burn like this saint." Brusca later described the night to investigators after his arrest. What kind of organization needs a ceremony like this one? Where did it come from, and what exactly does it sell? How did a loose collection of gangs fight wars among themselves, buy politicians, and then take on the Italian state? And why did more than a century of official effort fail to remove it?

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• 2. Names and Meanings

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  In nineteenth-century Sicily, the noun mafiusu meant roughly swagger, boldness or bravado. The scholar Diego Gambetta says the word was ambiguous when applied to a man. It could signal strength, arrogance, fearlessness, enterprise and pride all at once. For a woman, the feminine form mafiusa simply meant a beautiful or attractive female.

  A second Sicilian word, mafie, names the caves near Trapani and Marsala. Refugees and criminals often hid in them. Because Sicily was once an Islamic emirate, some writers have argued for Arabic roots. The candidates include mahyas, meaning aggressive boasting, marfud, meaning rejected, and mu'afa, meaning safety or protection. Another is Ma'afir, the name of an Arab tribe that ruled Palermo.

  A stage play from 1863 may have tied the word to a criminal brotherhood in the public mind. Giuseppe Rizzotto and Gaspare Mosca wrote it, and its title translates as "The Mafiosi of the Vicaria." Oddly, the words mafia and mafiusi never appear in it. The drama follows a prison gang in Palermo with a boss, an initiation ritual, and talk of umirta, the code of silence. It also features pizzu, a codeword for extortion money. The play was a great success across Italy. Soon afterward the word began turning up in the Italian state's early reports, and a police prefect's report in 1865 is its first documented use.

  The judge Giovanni Falcone, whom the Mafia murdered in 1992, disliked how loosely the word had come to be used. He complained that it had become "an overused term" applied to all kinds of organized crime that had little to do with the real thing.

  The members themselves prefer another name. Cosa Nostra means "Our Thing." In 1963, the Italian American mafioso Joseph Valachi told a United States Senate subcommittee that American mafiosi used the term. The FBI then added the article la, producing La Cosa Nostra, although Italians leave the article out. In 1984, the turncoat Tommaso Buscetta told Falcone that Sicilian mafiosi used the name too. Buscetta dismissed the word mafia as a literary invention. Antonino Calderone and Salvatore Contorno, two other defectors, confirmed him.

  Members introduce one another as belonging to cosa nostra, or as la stessa cosa, meaning "the same thing." Older names include the Honored Society, Onorata Societa, and the Brotherhood, Fratellanza. None of these should be confused with the 'Ndrangheta of Calabria, the Camorra of Campania, or the Sacra Corona Unita and Societa foggiana of Apulia. Buscetta's willingness to talk in 1984 would matter far beyond a question of vocabulary.

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• 3. Selling Trust

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  In 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti described the Sicilian Mafia as an "industry of violence." In 1993, Diego Gambetta offered a sharper picture. He called it a cartel of private protection firms, and he called mafiosi "guarantors of trust." Nobody sits at the top giving orders to all of them. The Mafia is an association of independent gangs that sell their services under one shared brand. The cartel claims the sole right to sell protection outside the law within its territories. Titles such as man of honor and mafioso separate its members from ordinary criminals, whom it shuts out of that market.

  Gambetta illustrates the idea with a butcher who wants to sell meat to a supermarket without paying sales tax. Because the deal is illegal, neither side can go to the police or the courts. The seller might deliver rotten meat, or the buyer might refuse to pay. Fear of being cheated could kill a profitable deal. So both parties invite the local clan to oversee it, for a commission. The mafioso promises that whoever cheats will be assaulted or have property vandalized. His reputation for viciousness and impartiality is so strong that neither side tests him.

  Legal trade buys protection too. A shopkeeper who signs a protection arrangement gets a mafioso who announces that any thief will be hunted down and beaten. The mafioso will try to recover the goods, since mafiosi make it their business to know every fence in their territory. Clans often cooperate across borders to follow stolen goods, and they try to block the sale of the loot. Mafiosi may also shield a client from rivals. A mafioso might lean on bars to serve only his client's coffee, or bully a competitor out of bidding for a government contract. The main method, though, is enforcing agreements among businesspeople to avoid competing with one another. Garbage collection is one industry that fits that pattern.

  The popular image of mere extortion misses something. Many clients, especially criminals, actively seek out Mafia protection. People who willingly pay do not want the police to arrest their mafioso. This is one reason the Mafia has outlasted a century of government campaigns. In Sicily the payment is called pizzo, and the anti-extortion group Addiopizzo takes its name from it.

  The price falls unevenly. What the Mafia takes from a firm correlates only weakly with the firm's revenue. Smaller firms can lose as much as 40 percent of profits, while larger ones may lose as little as 2 percent. That works like a tax that punishes small businesses, discourages new entrepreneurs, and leaves a few big firms selling poor goods at high prices. Gambetta adds that the Mafia increases distrust overall. Protected parties are tempted to cheat the unprotected, and the fees raise the cost of living for ordinary Sicilians.

  Scholars have argued for generations about what the Mafia really is. The ethnographer Giuseppe Pitre, writing in the late 19th century, called it a way of being. Pitre belonged to the movement called sicilianismo, which resisted blaming all Sicilians for crime. Gaetano Mosca described both a mentality of pride and a set of small, loosely related organizations. Until the 1980s, many social scientists treated the Mafia as behavior rather than as an organization. In 1983, Pino Arlacchi summed up their view by saying the research had reached the point of concluding that the mafia, as commonly understood, does not exist. Then he argued the opposite and stressed its business side. Historian Salvatore Lupo says the Mafia has been read as a mirror of Sicilian society, as an enterprise, as a secret society, and as a parallel legal order. He concludes that it is all of these but none of them exclusively.

  Italian law caught up in 1982, when Pio La Torre introduced article 416-bis of the Penal Code to define a Mafia-type association. Franchetti had argued that the Mafia would never vanish unless the structure of Sicily's institutions changed fundamentally. A little over a century later, Gambetta agreed. He listed practical steps, including legalizing the drug market, ending price-fixing of cigarettes, making public contracts transparent, and redesigning voting to make vote-buying harder.

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• 4. Roots in Feudal Collapse

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  Historian John Dickie warns that the Mafia's beginnings are hard to trace. Mafiosi keep no historical records. They have been known to spread deliberate lies about their past, and sometimes they believe their own myths.

  The broad outline begins in 1812, when Sicily's feudal barons started selling or renting out their land. Primogeniture was abolished, land could no longer be seized to settle debts, and one fifth of the land became the private property of peasants. After Italy annexed Sicily in 1860, public and church land was redistributed to private citizens as well. The number of landowners grew from 2,000 in 1812 to 20,000 by 1861. Every new owner meant more disputes to settle, more contracts to enforce, and more property to guard.

  The barons had dismissed their private armies, expecting the state to enforce the law. The state was not ready. The island often had fewer than 350 active policemen. Some towns had no permanent police at all, and troops visited only every few months to round up troublemakers. Banditry rose as food prices climbed and desperate peasants lost public land, church land and the old feudal commons.

  In small towns without constables, local elites recruited young men into "companies-at-arms." These hunted thieves and negotiated the return of stolen property, in exchange for a pardon for the thieves and a fee from the victims. Many recruits were former bandits, picked for their skill and violence. That saved communities the cost of training police, but it may have made the companies inclined to collude with old comrades. Lupo calls such groups "proto-Mafia."

  The Mafia grew mostly in western Sicily. The east saw the island's most violent land conflicts, yet mafiosi were not involved. Eastern elites stayed cohesive and kept their stables of enforcers, so they absorbed or crushed any new violent groups. Eastern estates were also large and few, so their owners hired full-time guardians. Western estates were smaller. It was cheaper to hire one mafioso to protect several of them at once, and absent owners could not easily replace him. That gave him independence and the power to charge high prices.

  Citrus growers and cattle ranchers were early clients, because their businesses were so easy to damage. Citrus plantations could be sabotaged, and cattle are simple to steal. In the 1920s, observers noted that the Mafia recovered stolen cattle 95 percent of the time, against only 10 percent for the police.

  In 1864, Niccolo Turrisi Colonna, leader of the Palermo National Guard, described a "sect of thieves" across Sicily. It was mostly rural and made up of cattle thieves, smugglers, wealthy farmers and their guards. It used special signals for members to recognize each other and kept a code of silence called umirta. Colonna also warned that the government's brutal and clumsy attempts to crush crime only alienated the population.

  Politics came in early. Only a small fraction of Sicilians could vote, so one boss could control a large share of the electorate. Between 1898 and 1900, Palermo police chief Ermanno Sangiorgi wrote a series of reports naming 670 mafiosi in eight clans. They alternated between cooperation and conflict. The reports listed counterfeiting, ransom kidnappings, murder, robbery and witness intimidation. They also noted that the clans kept funds to support imprisoned members' families and pay defense lawyers. In February 1898, troops arrested 64 people in Palermo. When the trial began in May 1901, only 32 defendants were convicted of starting a criminal association, and many walked free the next day.

  Modern economists have offered their own explanations. A 2015 study in The Economic Journal tied early Mafia activity to towns rich in sulfur, Sicily's most valuable export. A 2017 study in the Journal of Economic History pointed to the demand for oranges and lemons after citrus was found to cure scurvy. A 2019 study in the Review of Economic Studies linked it to the rise of the socialist Peasant Fasci, which frightened landowners into hiring the Mafia. One leader of that movement would end up joining a Mafia group himself.

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• 5. Structure and Codes

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  In the spring of 1893, Bernardino Verro, a leader of the Fasci Siciliani, joined a Mafia group in Corleone called the Fratuzzi, or Little Brothers. He wanted to give his movement teeth and to protect himself. In a memoir written years later, he described a mysterious room with men armed with guns around a table. A skull drawn on paper lay on the table beside a knife. He passed some trials of loyalty, then had his lower lip pricked with the knife's tip, and the blood soaked the skull. An 1876 police report holds the earliest known description of the ritual. The elements have changed little since. Gambetta explains why. A secret criminal group cannot have recruits sign contracts that police might seize. So the ceremony is made specific, bizarre and painful, and senior mafiosi witness it. The symbols may mean nothing. The point is that nobody can later deny or revoke the new status.

  The same fear of paper shapes other habits. In 1969, Michele Cavataio was murdered because he had drawn a map naming the Palermo mafiosi he knew and marking their territories. He had shown it at meetings to explain how he thought the families should be reorganized after a Mafia war. His killers searched his body for the map to destroy it, but they did not find it.

  Introductions follow the same logic. A mafioso never introduces himself to a mafioso he does not personally know. A mutual acquaintance must make the introduction face to face and vouch for both men. Indelicato Amedeo was initiated in the United States in the 1950s. When he came home to Sicily, he could not announce his membership to his own mafioso father. He had to wait for a mafioso from the United States who knew of his induction to come and introduce them. Equals sometimes call each other compare, meaning comrade, while inferiors call superiors padrino, the Italian word for godfather.

  Omerta is the code that forbids betraying comrades to the authorities. The penalty is death, and relatives of a turncoat may be killed too. A mafioso whose business is robbed does not call the police, because that would damage his name as a protector. Mafiosi are discouraged from drinking or taking drugs, since a drunk man may blurt out secrets. Many Sicilians are talkative and expressive, but mafiosi tend to be terse and subdued. Civilians who deal with them are expected to keep quiet as well, and witness intimidation is common.

  In November 2007, Sicilian police found a list of "Ten Commandments" in the hideout of the boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo. It says never to look at the wives of friends, never to be seen with cops, and to avoid pubs and clubs. It demands availability for Cosa Nostra even if a wife is about to give birth. It also says that answers to questions must be truthful, and that money belonging to others or to other families must not be taken. Antonino Calderone recounted a similar set of rules in his 1987 testimony.

  To describe the clan itself, Buscetta explained the chain of command to prosecutors in 1984. A boss, called capofamiglia or rappresentante, leads each clan. An underboss and one or more advisers called consiglieri assist him. Groups called decine, led by a capodecina, hold the soldiers. Despite the name, a decina can have anywhere from five to thirty soldiers, and some small clans have none. Soldiers elect the boss, usually every year, and he can be removed for misconduct. The consigliere is also elected yearly and watches over finances to prevent embezzlement. People who help a clan without being members are called associates. Mafiosi consider them tools, or in their phrase, "nothing mixed with nil."

  Membership is open only to Sicilian men. Candidates cannot have close ties to a police officer or a judge. Some recruits were as young as sixteen. A candidate is tested for obedience, discretion, courage, ruthlessness and skill at espionage, and he is almost always required to commit a murder. That act shows he is not an undercover policeman and binds him to silence. Despite the word family, members are usually not related, and rank is not hereditary. The Commission forbids relatives from holding inter-clan positions at the same time. Even so, mafiosi often bring their sons in, since a son carries his father's approval.

  Since the 1950s, each Sicilian province has had its own Commission. Clans are grouped into districts called mandamenti, each made up of three or four neighboring clans. Each district elects a representative, the capo mandamento, to the provincial Commission. The Commission is not a central government. The criminologist Letizia Paoli says it would be wrong to picture a centrally managed Mafia holding company. Its main job is to regulate violence. A murder in another clan's territory needs that boss's permission, and killing a police officer, lawyer, politician or journalist needs Commission approval. It also manages succession by splitting up a fallen boss's territory or appointing a regent.

  The media often speak of a capo di tutti capi, a boss of bosses. Calogero Vizzini, Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano have each been given that label. Buscetta and Lupo say the post does not formally exist. Vizzini, in particular, would soon be appointed a mayor by Allied officers.

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• 6. Mussolini, Allies, and Concrete

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  In May 1924, Benito Mussolini passed through Piana dei Greci, where the mayor and Mafia boss Francesco Cuccia received him. Cuccia was surprised by the police escort and whispered: "You are with me, you are under my protection. What do you need all these cops for?" Mussolini refused the offer. Cuccia felt slighted and told townspeople not to attend the speech. Mussolini felt humiliated, and the remark has passed into history as the spark for his war on the Mafia. He also saw a propaganda victory in it, and a pretext to suppress political opponents, since many Sicilian politicians had Mafia links.

  In October 1925, Mussolini appointed Cesare Mori as prefect of Palermo and gave him special powers. Mori formed an army of policemen, carabinieri and militiamen that moved from town to town. To force suspects out, his men took their families hostage, sold their property, or slaughtered their livestock in public. By 1928, more than 11,000 suspects had been arrested, and confessions were sometimes beaten out of them. More than 1,200 were convicted and imprisoned, while many others were exiled internally without trial. Charges fell on poor peasants and farm leaseholders called gabellotti, but major landowners were spared. Mussolini recalled Mori to Rome in June 1929. The campaign had not destroyed the Mafia as the Fascist press claimed, yet it had suppressed it. Sicily's murder rate dropped sharply, and landowners were able to raise legal rents, sometimes ten-thousandfold.

  In 1943, nearly half a million Allied troops invaded Sicily. Prison inmates escaped, banditry returned, and the black market flourished. For the first six months of occupation, party politics were banned. The Allied Military Government of Occupied Territories simply appointed replacements as Fascist mayors were removed. Several turned out to be mafiosi, including Calogero Vizzini and Giuseppe Genco Russo. Their anti-communist stance lent them credibility, and they could pose as political dissidents. Bosses rebuilt their clans, absorbed some bandits, and shifted their base from the countryside to cities.

  A communist Minister of Agriculture then pushed to give peasants larger shares of the harvest and let them form cooperatives. The Mafia was linked to many landowners and killed many socialist reformers. The Portella della Ginestra massacre came on the 1st of May 1947, during May Day celebrations. Eleven people died and 33 were wounded. The bandit Salvatore Giuliano carried it out, possibly backed by local Mafia bosses. The reforms were not stopped, but many landowners chose to sell to mafiosi, who offered more than the government did.

  Palermo's postwar building boom offered a new fortune. Allied bombing had left more than 14,000 people homeless, and migrants poured in from the countryside. Much construction was funded with public money. In 1956, two Mafia-connected officials, Vito Ciancimino and Salvatore Lima, took control of the city's Office of Public Works. Between 1959 and 1963, about 80 percent of building permits went to just five people, none from major construction firms and probably frontmen. Firms with no Mafia ties had to pay protection money. Many buildings went up illegally before the city's plan was final, and historic buildings were demolished for apartment blocks, many below standard. Cement was a favored business because it allows high local involvement and works well as a front.

  In 1957, Joseph Bonanno returned to Sicily to franchise his heroin operations to the Sicilian clans. American authorities had cracked down on drug trafficking, and Cuba had fallen to Fidel Castro. Bonanno expected rivalries over the American drug market, so he negotiated a Sicilian Mafia Commission to mediate disputes.

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• 7. Wars and Heroin

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  In 1962, the boss Cesare Manzella organized a heroin shipment to the United States with two clans, the Grecos and the La Barberas. He trusted another boss, Calcedonio Di Pisa, to handle the drugs. American buyers then claimed some heroin was missing and paid Di Pisa less. Di Pisa accused the Americans of cheating him, while the La Barberas accused him of embezzling the missing heroin. The Commission sided with Di Pisa, and the La Barberas, enraged, murdered both Di Pisa and Manzella. That began the First Mafia War, and many non-mafiosi died in the crossfire.

  In April 1963, bystanders were wounded in a Palermo shootout. In May, Angelo La Barbera survived a murder attempt in Milan. In June, six military officers and a policeman were killed in Ciaculli while trying to dispose of a car bomb. National outrage followed, along with a crackdown that produced nearly 2,000 arrests. Clans disbanded and mafiosi hid. The Commission was dissolved, and did not re-form until 1969. In 1968, 117 suspects were tried, but most were acquitted or lightly sentenced. Legal fees and lost income left most mafiosi poor, and the Palermo families were so hard hit that they stopped working in the city for a few years.

  The 1970s brought far richer rackets. Cigarette smuggling was the most lucrative. Sicilian and Neapolitan bosses agreed on a joint monopoly over smuggling cigarettes to Naples. Then French authorities closed the heroin refineries run by Corsican gangsters in Marseilles, and traffickers turned to Sicily. From 1975, Cosa Nostra built heroin refineries around the island and sought to control both refining and distribution. Sicilian mafiosi moved to the United States to run distribution personally, often at the expense of their American counterparts. North American heroin addiction surged from the mid-1970s into the early 1980s. By 1982, the Sicilian Mafia controlled about 80 percent of the heroin trade in the northeastern United States. Pizzerias owned by the Mafia served as distribution points, and drug revenue could pass as restaurant profit. This scheme became known as the Pizza Connection.

  Luciano Leggio, boss of the Corleonesi clan, was also a member of the Commission. In the early 1970s he built a coalition of clans, also called the Corleonesi, to dominate Cosa Nostra and its narcotics trade. After Leggio was imprisoned in 1974, his deputy Salvatore Riina acted for him and eventually took over. The Corleonesi bribed poor Palermo clans, subverted members of others, and recruited in secret. In 1977, they had Gaetano Badalamenti expelled from the Commission on false charges of hiding drug revenue. In April 1981, they murdered Stefano Bontade, a rival Commission member, and the Second Mafia War began in earnest. Hundreds of enemy mafiosi and their relatives were killed, sometimes by traitors inside their own clans. Riina replaced some bosses with hand-picked regents and effectively became boss of bosses.

  The Corleonesi also murdered journalists, officials and policemen. At the funeral of a policeman killed in 1985, policemen insulted and spat at two politicians in attendance, and a fight broke out with military police. Salvatore Lima, Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti and High Court judge Corrado Carnevale were all long suspected of Mafia ties. In 1999, an Italian court of appeal found that Andreotti had knowingly nurtured a stable relationship with the organization. It did not convict him, because the statute of limitations had run out. Police were frustrated by the silence of witnesses and politicians. In the early 1980s, two magistrates named Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino began a campaign that would break that silence.

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• 8. The Maxi Trial and After

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  Tommaso Buscetta gave the magistrates their first big break. The Corleonesi had already murdered many of his friends and relatives. He chose to become an informant in exchange for protection, and other mafiosi followed. Falcone and Borsellino compiled the testimonies and organized the Maxi Trial, which ran from February 1986 to December 1987. A bunker-courthouse was built for it. There, 475 mafiosi were tried and 338 were convicted. In January 1992, Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation confirmed the convictions. It is considered the most significant trial against the Sicilian Mafia and the biggest in world history.

  The Mafia hit back. In 1988 it murdered a Palermo judge and his son. Three years later, a prosecutor and an anti-mafia businessman were killed. Salvatore Lima was murdered for failing to reverse the convictions as he had promised. On the 23rd of May 1992, Falcone was killed by 400 kg of TNT placed under the highway near Capaci. Borsellino died in a car bombing on the 19th of July 1992. Public outcry and a massive crackdown followed, and Riina was arrested in January 1993.

  More informants appeared, and many paid heavily. The mother, aunt and sister of Francesco Marino Mannoia were murdered. After Riina's capture, the Mafia ordered terror attacks as a warning against turning state's witness. They also answered the overruling of the Article 41-bis prison regime. Bombs hit the Via dei Georgofili in Florence, the Via Palestro in Milan, and the Piazza San Giovanni in Laterano and the Via San Teodoro in Rome. Ten people died and 93 were injured, and the Uffizi Gallery suffered severe damage. Two churches were bombed and an anti-Mafia priest was shot dead in Rome. Part of the aim was to destabilize the government. The Mafia also felt the Catholic Church had broken an unwritten hands-off policy toward traditional organized crime in the south.

  Leoluca Bagarella briefly led the Mafia after Riina, until his own capture in 1995. Bernardo Provenzano then took over and replaced violence with what was called Pax Mafiosa. He stopped the murders of state officials and of informants' families, hoping to get informants to retract their testimony instead. He also restored the support fund for imprisoned mafiosi. By the late 1990s, a weakened Cosa Nostra had given most of the drug trade to the 'Ndrangheta of Calabria. In 2006, the 'Ndrangheta was estimated to control 80 percent of the cocaine imported into Europe. The flow of defectors slowed, and the Mafia preferred to initiate relatives of existing members, thinking they would defect less often. Provenzano was arrested in 2006 after 43 years on the run. His successor, Matteo Messina Denaro, was arrested only in 2023.

  The Article 41-bis regime restricts jailed bosses' contact with the outside world, to stop them running operations from prison. Antonino Giuffre, a confidant of Provenzano who turned informant after his capture in 2002, alleged a 1993 contact between Cosa Nostra and representatives of Silvio Berlusconi, who was then planning Forza Italia. The alleged deal traded repeal of 41-bis for electoral support in Sicily. His claims remain unconfirmed. Parliament reinforced 41-bis with Forza Italia's full support, and made it permanent in 2002, extending it to other crimes such as terrorism. The magazine L'Espresso reported that 119 mafiosi had been released individually, one fifth of those held under it. Amnesty International warned that the regime could amount to "cruel, inhumane or degrading treatment" in some circumstances.

  The Mafia Capitale investigation of 2015 showed that the Mafia profits from the European migrant crisis and exploits refugees. In October 2017-37 people were arrested, including members of the Renzvillo family and two Carabinieri officers. More than 600 officers took part, and real estate and goods worth 11 million euros were seized. On the 22nd of January 2018, Carabinieri arrested 58 people tied to 16 mafia families across Caltanissetta, Palermo, Enna, Ragusa, Agrigento and Catania. The mayor of San Biagio Platani, Santino Sabella, was among them, accused of agreeing on candidates for the 2014 local elections with the Mafia. Two companies running migrant reception centers were targeted as protection rackets, among 27 businesses extorted. On the 1st of February 2018, Operation "Game Over" brought 31 arrests in Palermo. Benedetto Bacchi reportedly controlled over 700 betting shops across Italy and earned roughly 1 million euros a month. He bought a villa for 500,000 euros and listed it the next day for 1.3 million.

  Murders have fallen sharply. In 1991, Sicily had 481 murders, of which 253 were linked to the Mafia. In 2020 it had 33 murders, and 4 were Mafia killings. Yet after the arrest of an alleged new boss in July 2019, CNN pointed to Passo di Rigano in Palermo, where the Mafia works in wholesale food supply, online betting and gambling. Reports also confirmed links with New York's Gambino family. The newspaper La Repubblica wrote that the streets of Passo di Rigano, Boccadifalco and Torretta connect to Brooklyn, Staten Island and New Jersey, because "from Sicily to the US, the old mafia has returned."

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