A globe-trotting history of organised crime from the Mafia to the Yakuza

HISTORY
Mafia: A Global History
Ryan Gingeras
Simon and Schuster, $37.99

American professor and historian Ryan Gingeras charts a steady course between academic respectability and formulating the odd unexpected sentence that will rock you on your heels. Try this for an original thought: “Young states are often born resembling a protection racket. Demands for taxes, tribute or spoils are among the essential features of a proclaimed state.”

“Mafia” is a term that appears to have existed in post-Renaissance Italy, although Gingeras admits that after the arrival of many North African Muslims in Sicily over the centuries, it may actually be derived from an Arabic root meaning “braggart”. To his credit, he rejects a semantically restrictive view of the term and generally treats it almost as a synonym for any form of gangsterism – practicing the dark arts of violence to satisfy one’s greed or, in the most notorious cases, bloodlust. Ned Kelly earns his rightful place in this pantheon.

His more expansive definition allows the author of Mafia to bring the creation of an entire generation of criminal confederates in Stalin’s Russia within his purview. And that is surely justified on scale alone: “Between 1934 and 1952, an estimated 18 million Soviet citizens were interned in the country’s massive gulag system.”

Unfortunately for the Russian people, the rise of oligarchs and a recognisable “Russian Mafia” after the fall of communism enabled a British reporter to announce that by 1994 Moscow had become “the world’s crime capital”, with “more mafia victims per week than in the worst days of Chicago, more casinos than Las Vegas per head of population, [and] more prostitutes and massage parlours than anywhere else” on the globe.

Long before they were called mafia (capitalised or lower-case), they were known as bandits or, in medieval England, highwaymen. In the Middle Ages, and indeed in ancient times, bandits roamed the countryside. Ironically, civilisation – in its technical sense of city-building – is to blame for mafiosi replacing banditry. As Gingeras says: “The dual forces of industrialisation and urbanisation created increasingly difficult environments for bandits to survive [in].”

Brigandage can be spurred on by the disintegration of a state: China’s triads flourished in the anarchic vacuum created by the breakdown of the imperial state in the early 20th century. Or, paradoxically, by the opposite tendency, the formation of a state. Naples’ camorra and Sicily’s Mafia were both borne aloft by the revolutionary forces that unified the Italian nation – in 1861, not 1860 as the author twice mistakenly asserts. (That incorrect dating of an important historical event is one of several to mar an otherwise exemplary work. To cite but two, Egypt wrested its independence from Britain in 1922, not 1919, and Mikhail Gorbachev came to office in 1985, not 1986.).

In Japan, as Gingeras adroitly points out, the yakuza had long operated unobtrusively “but matured alongside Japan’s reinvention as a nation state”.

Apart from a wholly understandable focus on the history of Mafia activities in America, Gingeras gives special (and equally understandable) weight to its machinations in Italy.

We are reminded how the brave mafia-hunting judge Giovanni Falcone was assassinated, and of just how unequal a battle it is when the state – which might be presumed in favour of upholding the law – cultivates criminal operatives. In the 1970s Silvio Berlusconi hired the services of a Sicilian gangster to guarantee his safety. “As Italy’s three-time prime minister, he raised eyebrows when he watered down anti-Mafia laws and declared magistrates who fought organised crime mentally disturbed.”

In Mexico, nine decades of one-party rule proved an ideal seedbed for fascist actions when the government’s will was thwarted. The eagerness of new president Felipe Calderon (in office from 2006 to 2012) to unleash the Mexican Armed Forces in built-up areas, though ostensibly aimed at stamping out cross-border drug traffic, “resulted in an orgy of violence unlike anything the country had seen since 1910”.

The predominant tenor of this impressive book is not doom and gloom but sober realism. Mafias will be with us until men turn into angels. Gingeras also records what the global community has achieved in its fight against darkness. On the cusp of the new millennium, the United Nations convened a conference in Sicily’s main city, Palermo, where governments of 120 countries inked a fresh Convention against Transnational Organised Crime.

The Italian government was in self-congratulatory mode, boasting that it had the Cosa Nostra on the run. Maybe so, but Gingeras adds, without the need for further comment, that the meeting took place under the watchful gaze of 10,000 security officers.

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