Mafia Politics. Marco Santoro

Mafia Politics - Marco Santoro


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      The list of colleagues deserving mention would be too long, but I want to specifically recall here the following: Raimondo Catanzaro, Umberto Santino, Nando dalla Chiesa, Alberto Vannucci, Monica Massari, Maurizio Catino, Federico Varese (who also read and commented on Chapter 3: thank you, Federico!), Felia Allum, Filippo Sabetti, Rocco Sciarrone, Alessandra Dino, Lucia Michelutti, Damiano Palano, Filippo Barbera. Barbara Carnevali deserves a special mention for reading and supporting an early statement of Chapter 2’s ontological argument. I haven’t been so generous with her symmetrical requests of reading, and for this I’m still apologizing.

      I would thank Diego Gambetta whose work on the mafia I discovered while writing my undergraduate thesis and attending a seminar he gave in Milan in 1987. His harsh reaction to a critical note of mine published a few years later indirectly fostered my research on the mafia to this day (an exemplary case of unintentional effects of intentional actions, I would say).

      Thanks to Richard Burket for your precious and professional help in making my English correct and more readable and much shorter, and to Jonathan Skerrett at Polity for patiently awaiting my chapters over all these years, offering suggestions and encouragement: I’m sure I would never have finished without your gentle but determined spurs.

      My son has been a source of joy and personal growth in all these years. I dedicate this book to you, Riccardo. Grazie per sopportare un padre che ti tormenta da quando avevi nove anni per farti vedere Salvatore Giuliano. Ancora non sono riuscito a convincerti. Un giorno lo guarderemo insieme, ne sono certo.

      Opening epigraph from: Becoming Deviant, David Matza, Copyright 1969, Prentice-Hall. Reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Group.

      Epigraph to chapter 3, reproduced with permission, is © 2008 by the University of Klagenfurt, Karl Popper Library.

      Epigraph to chapter 5 is reproduced, with permission, from The British Journal of Sociology © 1957 London School of Economics.

      Among their most notable accomplishments, the criminological positivists succeeded in what would seem the impossible. They separated the study of crime from the workings and theory of the state.

      Matza 1969, 143

      Crime is a political phenomenon and must be analyzed accordingly.

      Chambliss 1989, 204

      The political philosophers who taught me a generation ago were quite clear that whatever was to be called ‘political’ must have something to do with the State: if phrases like ‘University politics’ or ‘Church politics’ were used, then they meant that these institutions were playing a part in State politics: otherwise the phrases were simply metaphors. But political structures can be recognized at all levels and in all kinds of activities and can, when appropriate, be compared with one another.

      Bailey 2001 [1969], 12

      None of these research lines has been systematically pursued in mafia studies – a few attempts moving along these lines notwithstanding (e.g., Sabetti 1984; Calise 1988; Catanzaro 1992 [1988]; Santino 1994; Schneider and Schneider 2004; Collins 2011). In mafia studies, the assumption of an almost perfect and normatively backed equivalence between ‘state’ and politics has been dominant, and only rarely called into question. It is as if social scientists, when studying mafias, tend to believe in states and their claims much more than when they are studying states as such. In some way, this may be considered an indication of the success of criminology, the discipline that, in the words of an influential sociologist of deviance, ‘has managed the astonishing feat of separating the study of crime from the contemplation of the state’ (Cohen 1996, 4). Suspended between the mafia and the state, mafia scholars have little doubt about where to go. If mafia has to do with politics, says the common wisdom, this is only because it also has to do with the state – as an object of law enforcement and a potentially disruptive force within the state (with mafia being responsible for criminal activities such as corruption, collusion and even violence against representatives of the state). Mafias may at best have ‘policies’, but not ‘politics’ – because ‘politics’ is another thing. Or


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