WORLD WORLDWIDE EUROPE ITALY SICILY - news journal UPDATE - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #460: THE MAFIA IN CHANGING (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 With the story of the arrest and death of Matteo Messina Denaro, the

cycle of massacres by the Sicilian Cosa Nostra seems to have
definitively ended. The direct clash with the State, a source of
disturbance for the entire mafia organization, hit in its dealings by
excessive media and judicial attention, has been replaced by a new
season of excellent business, driven by the innate mimetic and adaptable
ability of the mafiosi («versipelle animals» as Aldo Giannuli calls them
in Mafia mondiale, Ponte alle Grazie, Milan 2019), with the mediation of
the «mafia bourgeoisie» (first of all entrepreneurs, then accountants,
lawyers, notaries, provincial administrators and high bureaucrats,
consultants, money laundering experts, etc.) and well-known politicians,
described by the journalist Attilio Bolzoni in his latest book,
Immortali, RCS, Milan 2025.

According to Bolzoni, the Sicilian mafia has returned to doing «what it
had always done before its excellent crimes: accumulating wealth with
politics and public administration, corrupting, infiltrating
institutional ganglia, rigging contracts, asking for and offering
protection, dealing with the apparatus, fixing processes, controlling
territories, influencing legal markets, intimidating, poisoning,
blackmailing».

In reality, today it does much more. Emerging from a branch of the
Camorra in the mid-nineteenth century, the Sicilian Mafia still
maintains a privileged relationship with its places of choice (prisons,
working-class neighborhoods of large cities, poor towns in the interior
but also rich towns, with an intensive economy, on the hills and coasts
of Palermo and Trapani), a true trench of identity in which it tends to
take refuge and regroup in moments of crisis, exercising both the
parasitic power, represented by the «pizzo», and that of the
intermediation of its origins, non-negligible sources of consensus; but
in the meantime it has expanded into geographically and culturally very
different areas, wherever it has encountered conditions of relative
tolerance and opportunities for investment and laundering of illicit
capital.

Thus, from hegemony over our illegal markets (waste, smuggling,
prostitution, black market work, illegal fishing, counterfeit money,
etc.), the Sicilian mafia has moved on to carving out a leading role,
also in collaboration with other mafias, in the management of illegal
markets at a global level: from drugs to gambling, its main sources of
income, from arms trafficking to fuel trafficking, using digital tools
with flexibility to the point of entering the world of cryptocurrencies
(see the police reports reported in the book by the Gratteri-Nicaso duo,
Una Cosa sola, Mondadori, Milan November 2024).

But the greatest novelty consists in the particular combination created
between legal and illegal markets: the mafia exploits the capitalist
system, its weaknesses and its greed, to invest in economically
strategic sectors; on the other hand, that same system benefits from the
influx of capital and "services" of dubious origin to recover from the
contingent crises it is going through. It is estimated that the Sicilian
mafia, with 200 billion euros per year of "unobserved economy", has
significantly contributed to respecting the limits of the European
stability pact; all this without considering the billions of investments
directed to legal entrepreneurship, where violence (which remains a
resource to draw on in case of need) is replaced by convenience,
infiltration, corruption, manipulation ...; and the billions invested in
sovereign funds, difficult to intercept by judicial and police authorities.

The Sicilian mafia, until now interpreted as an obstacle to the economic
take-off of the Island, instead manifests itself, especially in areas
considered "depressed", as a powerful factor of economic and commercial
development, thanks to the injection of capital obtained illegally
(evidence of this, for example, is the activities of the Trapani gangs
in the sectors of construction, wind turbines, tourism and shopping
centers). There is no economic sector in Sicily that is not conditioned
or dependent on criminal proceeds. Thanks to this type of capitalism
"assisted" by Cosa Nostra, which is part of the power of mediation and
administration that it imposes on social life, the mafia shows,
according to Isaia Sales in Storia dell'Italia mafiosa, Rubbettino,
Soveria Mannelli 2015, to have "a certain affinity, a certain
consubstantiality" with the forms of state power.

To combat the mafia, it is therefore necessary to also act against this
economic model of assisted society, linked to a sub-culture of
submission, functional to the monopoly of violence and the social
control over the populations exercised by both the State and the mafia.
Dismantling that sub-culture and denouncing that union, repudiating the
systems of thought connected to them, is a task that we must undertake
together, anarchist militants and activists in the areas degraded by the
mafia contagion. We must free the territories from the needs and fears
that make them passive.

No collaboration with the mafia, no support (direct or indirect), no
compromise. But, at the same time, no collaboration with the State, no
support for its repressive apparatus and the hypocrisy that cloaks them.

Natale Musarra

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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