A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #460: THE MAFIA IN CHANGING (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

With the story of the arrest and death of Matteo Messina Denaro, the 
cycle of massacres by the Sicilian Cosa Nostra seems to have 
definitively ended. The direct clash with the State, a source of 
disturbance for the entire mafia organization, hit in its dealings by 
excessive media and judicial attention, has been replaced by a new 
season of excellent business, driven by the innate mimetic and adaptable 
ability of the mafiosi («versipelle animals» as Aldo Giannuli calls them 
in Mafia mondiale, Ponte alle Grazie, Milan 2019), with the mediation of 
the «mafia bourgeoisie» (first of all entrepreneurs, then accountants, 
lawyers, notaries, provincial administrators and high bureaucrats, 
consultants, money laundering experts, etc.) and well-known politicians, 
described by the journalist Attilio Bolzoni in his latest book, 
Immortali, RCS, Milan 2025.

According to Bolzoni, the Sicilian mafia has returned to doing «what it 
had always done before its excellent crimes: accumulating wealth with 
politics and public administration, corrupting, infiltrating 
institutional ganglia, rigging contracts, asking for and offering 
protection, dealing with the apparatus, fixing processes, controlling 
territories, influencing legal markets, intimidating, poisoning, 
blackmailing».

In reality, today it does much more. Emerging from a branch of the 
Camorra in the mid-nineteenth century, the Sicilian Mafia still 
maintains a privileged relationship with its places of choice (prisons, 
working-class neighborhoods of large cities, poor towns in the interior 
but also rich towns, with an intensive economy, on the hills and coasts 
of Palermo and Trapani), a true trench of identity in which it tends to 
take refuge and regroup in moments of crisis, exercising both the 
parasitic power, represented by the «pizzo», and that of the 
intermediation of its origins, non-negligible sources of consensus; but 
in the meantime it has expanded into geographically and culturally very 
different areas, wherever it has encountered conditions of relative 
tolerance and opportunities for investment and laundering of illicit 
capital.

Thus, from hegemony over our illegal markets (waste, smuggling, 
prostitution, black market work, illegal fishing, counterfeit money, 
etc.), the Sicilian mafia has moved on to carving out a leading role, 
also in collaboration with other mafias, in the management of illegal 
markets at a global level: from drugs to gambling, its main sources of 
income, from arms trafficking to fuel trafficking, using digital tools 
with flexibility to the point of entering the world of cryptocurrencies 
(see the police reports reported in the book by the Gratteri-Nicaso duo, 
Una Cosa sola, Mondadori, Milan November 2024).

But the greatest novelty consists in the particular combination created 
between legal and illegal markets: the mafia exploits the capitalist 
system, its weaknesses and its greed, to invest in economically 
strategic sectors; on the other hand, that same system benefits from the 
influx of capital and "services" of dubious origin to recover from the 
contingent crises it is going through. It is estimated that the Sicilian 
mafia, with 200 billion euros per year of "unobserved economy", has 
significantly contributed to respecting the limits of the European 
stability pact; all this without considering the billions of investments 
directed to legal entrepreneurship, where violence (which remains a 
resource to draw on in case of need) is replaced by convenience, 
infiltration, corruption, manipulation ...; and the billions invested in 
sovereign funds, difficult to intercept by judicial and police authorities.

The Sicilian mafia, until now interpreted as an obstacle to the economic 
take-off of the Island, instead manifests itself, especially in areas 
considered "depressed", as a powerful factor of economic and commercial 
development, thanks to the injection of capital obtained illegally 
(evidence of this, for example, is the activities of the Trapani gangs 
in the sectors of construction, wind turbines, tourism and shopping 
centers). There is no economic sector in Sicily that is not conditioned 
or dependent on criminal proceeds. Thanks to this type of capitalism 
"assisted" by Cosa Nostra, which is part of the power of mediation and 
administration that it imposes on social life, the mafia shows, 
according to Isaia Sales in Storia dell'Italia mafiosa, Rubbettino, 
Soveria Mannelli 2015, to have "a certain affinity, a certain 
consubstantiality" with the forms of state power.

To combat the mafia, it is therefore necessary to also act against this 
economic model of assisted society, linked to a sub-culture of 
submission, functional to the monopoly of violence and the social 
control over the populations exercised by both the State and the mafia. 
Dismantling that sub-culture and denouncing that union, repudiating the 
systems of thought connected to them, is a task that we must undertake 
together, anarchist militants and activists in the areas degraded by the 
mafia contagion. We must free the territories from the needs and fears 
that make them passive.

No collaboration with the mafia, no support (direct or indirect), no 
compromise. But, at the same time, no collaboration with the State, no 
support for its repressive apparatus and the hypocrisy that cloaks them.

Natale Musarra

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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