The Origins of the Mafia

What really happened, and what they want you to think happened.

How did the Mafia begin? The answer is surprising.

The Mafia is a recent phenomenon, dating from the period immediately after the unification of Italy. Sicily became part of the Kingdom of Italy in 1862. The Mafia arose in the succeeding decade and its origins are somewhat banal. To understand them, one must picture Palermo as it was in the 1860’s, not just one of the world’s most beautiful and interesting cities, but also enjoying one of the greatest settings on earth, the Conca d’Oro, the ‘Golden Conch’. The city was hemmed in by mountains and surrounded by a rich and fertile plain. This created a perfect microclimate for the growth of lemons.

Lemons are originally from China, where they grew under forest canopies in damp soil. Lemons were first introduced to Sicily by the Arabs, and they grew in walled gardens, for citrus trees hate wind, and they were dependant on massive irrigation. They are a valuable crop, as the lemon has so many uses. In the time of Admiral Nelson, the British Navy, active in the Mediterranean, was desperate for them, as they were a preventative against scurvy; they have a wide variety of medical uses; but by the end of the nineteenth century they were in demand in New York, for the bars of Manhattan. Each lemon grove in the Conca d’Oro represented a huge potential income, and rival growers recruited men to guard their walled orchards with shot guns. Each grove, with its high walls, was like a fortress, and these guards were not shy about using their shotguns to frighten off and even to kill thieves, rivals, and those who might try and steal the water as well as the fruit. These guards became the first of the cosche, the clans (the Sicilians use this Scottish word), who controlled distinctive swathes of territory in the Conca d’Oro.

The Italian government immediately became aware that it had a problem in the Palermo region, and various magistrates were sent down from Turin, Italy’s first capital, and later Rome, to try and sort things out. They all reported on the difficultly of getting people to give evidence against criminals, and had little success in restoring the rule of law. And so was born the old myth of Sicilians hating outside interference, and the idea of omertà, the idea of not dobbing in a Sicilian to a ‘foreigner’.

So, that is the reality of the Mafia: an organisation that uses what is essentially a private army to protect its commercial interests, which nowadays stretch way beyond citrus fruit. The myth of the Mafia, in contrast, is that is of a secret society founded to protect Sicilian interests against foreign exploitation. I was once told on good authority that the Mafia dates from the time of the Sicilian Vespers, the revolt against the Angevin overlords of Sicily in 1282, and that the word, whose origins have never been convincingly explained, is an acronym Morte Ai Francesi, Italia Avanti, ‘Death to the French, Italy Forward’. There is not a grain of truth in this, as far as I can determine, but it is a good story. But the truth is that the Mafia does not exist to liberate Sicily from foreigners, and it is not a Robin Hood organisation, though that is what they would love you to believe. In fact, its only interests are purely selfish. And in pursuit of its interests, it has produced much grief; in its pursuit of wealth, it has damned others to poverty.