The Two Mafias: A Transatlantic History, 1888-2008

"Salvatore Lupo is Sicilian and now a professor of history at Palermo University. He’s a friend of mine. In some sense Lupo’s research is the unifying thread of my book, Cosa Nostra , although it does draw on many other sources as well. I was trying to make his research—as well as a lot of other stuff—accessible to an English-speaking audience of non-specialists. Lupo began by writing a book on the lemon industry in Sicily, which is significant because that’s where the mafia began. But his historical investigations moved in parallel with the story of the Palermo Maxi trial. That’s the trial that began with the first confession of a mafia boss, Tommaso Buscetta, who turned state’s evidence in 1984, and ended with the final verdict of Italy’s supreme court in 1992. Over the course of those eight years, we found out what the mafia was, legally. A whole new precedent was set for treating the mafia as an organization, and not as a sort of loose archipelago of gangs, or—still worse—a sort of diffuse Sicilian mentality. The shocking thing is that this really was the first time that had been proved. Then, of course, it was in 1992 that both the magistrates who pioneered that Maxi trial prosecution—Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino—were murdered by the mafia in revenge. “Lupo began by writing a book on the lemon industry in Sicily, which is significant because that’s where the mafia began” Lupo’s historical investigations were triggered by the judicial findings. As the mafia’s existence was mapped out and Cosa Nostra was shown to exist in the 1980s, historians began to ask, ‘When did it begin? How did it begin? When did it become what it is now? Has it always been the same?’ Lupo was really the first to write a credible history of the mafia. He started by investigating certain key moments in its history and then sewed all the research together for the first time in a small, very dense book . A lot more research has been done since then, but his book still stands up really well. It was the first proper history of the Sicilian mafia and it was only published in 1993, the year after Falcone and Borsellino were murdered. So it was a hugely important book. That’s a more recent book. Lupo’s original book was, unfortunately, really badly translated—so badly translated, in fact, that it’s almost not worth reading in English. This book, The Two Mafias, was much better translated, partly because I corrected it and talked in depth to Lupo about it while it was being translated into English, to make sure that we got everything straight. The breakthrough of this book is that he treats the American and the Sicilian mafia as part of the same criminal system. American historians had focused exclusively on the American side of the story and had dismissed the Sicilian side as an antiquated, primitive mafia. Sicilian writers had focused exclusively on the Sicilian side. What he argues is that since the 1980s there has been a constant traffic in ideas, in criminal personnel and criminal commodities (like drugs), backwards and forwards across the Atlantic. There really have been transatlantic mafia bosses who have operated in both spheres and we cannot conceive of how the mafia became so powerful on both shores without examining the dynamic relationship between the organization’s two branches. Neither one nor the other is more sophisticated or powerful or more businesslike than the other. They’re both part of the same system. It’s an extraordinary insight and it allows Lupo to explain an awful lot that’s new about the mafia. It’s an international perspective and that’s why it’s so exciting. No. And there are fascinating insights—for example, how mafiosi argue whether being a member of the Sicilian mafia automatically entitles you to the status of mafioso in the United States or not. They argue about that sort of thing. It gives you a sense that they’re in the same world, the same system. The Two Mafias is an extraordinary work of scholarship. People tend to forget how tricky it is to write reliable history when some of the sources are mafiosi themselves—many of whom are born liars. Lupo shows real forensic skill in sifting out the lies from the truth, and in showing how the lies can still be very significant in their own way."