John Dickie's Reading List

"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."

"Giovanni Falcone was an epoch-making figure in the history of the Italian mafia. He was a prosecuting magistrate who—assisted by his close colleague Paolo Borsellino, who was also murdered in 1992— developed a new method for investigating the mafia. It was based around, in the first instance, following the money trail. They then assembled the prosecution case in the most important mafia trial of all time—the Maxi trial in Palermo—which ran from 1986 to 1987. It was a massive trial that saw more than 400 mafiosi charged established a legal precedent for the existence of the Sicilian mafia. As I mentioned before, Italy did not recognise the existence of the mafia until the Maxi trial. In fact, it did not formally recognise the existence of the Sicilian mafia until January 1992, when Italy’s supreme court issued a ruling approving the verdict of the Maxi trial. It’s no coincidence that Falcone and Borsellino were murdered within weeks of that ruling—they had proved the mafia existed and the mafia reacted by killing them. “He famously says that the mafia is a human creation and like all human creations it has a beginning and will have an end” Falcone also did something very important which is often forgotten. In the last phase of his career, when he was working in Rome, he set up the national coordinating structures for investigating and prosecuting mafia crime based on his methods. Everybody today who is involved in fighting the mafia now works according to the Falcone method. It’s based on an interview with a French journalist a few weeks before Falcone was blown up on 23 May 1992. It’s basically a theme-by-theme account of what the Cosa Nostra is and how it works, by somebody who knew it better than anybody else. You get a sense of the man’s extraordinary lucidity and humanity in the way he describes it. He famously says that the mafia is a human creation and like all human creations it has a beginning and will have an end. So he certainly didn’t subscribe to the theory that the mafia was hardwired into the Sicilian psyche and couldn’t be separated out and defeated. That’s principally because he was the first magistrate who actually took seriously the testimonies of mafia defectors—seriously in the sense that he didn’t just want to take bits and pieces of their evidence that he could use, but he wanted to find out about the whole mafia system, its way of thinking and the rules that governed its internal behaviour. A lot of what he learns comes from Tommaso Buscetta, who in his own way made history just as much as Giovanni Falcone. Buscetta turned state’s evidence in July 1984 after most of his family was murdered by his mafia enemies. It was Falcone’s debriefing of Buscetta that set the Maxi trial in motion and gave Falcone a real grasp of the human reality within Cosa Nostra. He said Buscetta was like an interpreter who allowed him to finally speak and understand the language of the mafia. Falcone shows in this book that he really was the first non-mafioso to master that language."

"Patti is on the list as the representative of a whole generation of young researchers who have done so much in recent years to advance our understanding of the mafia in Sicily and elsewhere. Her little book is about the crucial years in Sicily after the Allied invasion in the summer of 1943. Some of the most widespread myths about the Sicilian mafia concern that moment in history. It is often said, particularly in Italy, that Mussolini had done away with the mafia 15 years earlier, and that the Americans brought the mafia back in 1943. It’s even claimed—and people get very angry if you deny this myth—that the Americans secretly planned their invasion of Sicily with the mafia’s collaboration. Patti’s study shows a number of things: that the mafia had never gone away, and was widespread and influential in Fascist Italy; that the Americans had no grand plan to bring the mafia back; and that it was the climate of confusion and illegality (dysfunctional rationing, black market, etc) that gave the mafia huge opportunities to impose itself after 1943."

"Federico Varese, who is a criminology professor at Oxford, has here written a highly accessible account of mafia-type organizations internationally. He has an unrivalled knowledge of mafias beyond the Italian context. What he shows is the remarkable similarity in methods and behavior between criminal brotherhoods in all sorts of different geographical locations. That’s why the Italian word ‘mafia’ has become so widespread: because it describes a form of criminal organization that can be found around the world."

"Mafia Women is a great piece of journalism and another one of those rare books on the mafia written by an outsider that commands respect in Italy. It picks on an issue that is fascinating and historically very important—it’s about what the mafia does to women and the role that they have. We’re all fascinated by the figure of the female gangster, but Longrigg shows that there are many more dimensions to women’s roles within Italy’s criminal organisations. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . When you look up close, it’s not the active gun-toting women who are the most fascinating—it’s the women whose existence is dominated by the task of breeding mafia sons and passing on to them the values of honour and violence when their fathers are in prison or dead. They live under extraordinary psychological pressure and it’s a story that we have only just begun to find out about. The basis of it is stories about individual women, some of whom are as much victims as perpetrators. One that sticks in the mind as powerfully moving is the story of Rita Atria. She was a daughter of a mafioso and her brothers were mafiosi. She turned state’s evidence after her brother was killed. She was only a teenager at the time and had to unlearn the mafia brainwashing that she had undergone since birth. A number of mafiosi were convicted on the basis of her evidence. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter While going through this whole process she attached herself very closely to Paolo Borsellino, who became something of a surrogate father to her. Tragically, exactly a week after Borsellino was killed in July 1992, Rita Atria jumped to her death from the window of her safe house. It’s a horrible story that just gives a sense of the extraordinary stakes involved in being a woman inside that mafia culture. I get my students to watch Gomorrah (the movie, not the book or the TV series). It’s a film that gives a very powerful sense of the disorientating, semi-chaotic world of the Neapolitan Camorra. It does it by challenging some of the cinematic clichés that we owe to Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather trilogy—clichés that have ended up glamourizing the mafia. Gomorrah tells us that we have to change our lens if we really want to understand the reality of organized crime."