Modern Day Mafia
The modern mafia is described perfectly as an organization complete with initiation rites, through the folk historian Giuseppe Pitré’s play, “I Mafiusi della Vicaria” (translated as “the mafia of the old”), first preformed in 1863. By 1900, the “Black Hand” was identified with the “friends of the friends.” Every town, even each city quarter, contained a resident “capo” (chief). Cesare Mori, known as the “Iron Prefect,” threw most of the capos in prison. But in all honesty, the Fascists who rallied themselves against the Mafia merely resembled one group of criminals pitted against another—“two wolves fighting over the same chicken coop.”
Immediately after WWII, the Mafia regrouped itself and reorganized its activities.
The most well known of the freelance bandits that roamed the Sicilian countryside
were Salvatore Giuliano, who came closest to a modern day Robin Hood, and was
a strongly advocated a free and independent Sicily.
After the death of Calogero Vizzini in 1954, the Mafia turned to activities
associated
with “gangsterism,” a more reckless “American style of crime.” In
1957, Lucky Luciano orchestrated the alliance between the families in the United
States and Canada. The new Sicilian Mafioso “men of honor” were faconi
(uncouth people) who pretended to be nothing other than their gangster selves.
Unlike Vizzini and his generation of mobsters, who maintained at least a veneer
of civility, and could have easily passed for a dignified resident of society,
the newcomers like Genco Russo, Michele Greco and Luciano Leggio, although sharp
and quick in certain regards, were truly vulgar by nature. Vanishing in a haze
of murders, “men of honor” and the “code of honor” were
a thing of the past. By the early 1970s, women and children had to endure the
carnage.
"Lucky" Luciano
Despite the parallel sentiment that heroin and cocaine were properties “less
respectable” than extortion and murder, during the 1960s, the Sicilian “Cupola” and
the American “Commission” began to seriously cooperate in the narcotics
trade. Still more ruthless and vulgar than its American counterpart, the Sicilian
faction often resorted to the murder of judges and other public officials whose
activities they considered inconvenient. Palermo’s “Falcone-Borsellino” airport
is named after two such judges, and there is a monument in Piazza 13 Vittime
(13 Victims), at the end of Palermo’s Via Cavour, dedicated to the memory
of people killed by the Mafia.