A Sect of Thieves

This sect of thieves makes affiliates every day of the brightest young people coming from the rural class, of the guardians of the fields in the Palermitan countryside, and of the large number of smugglers. . . . It is a sect with little or no fear of public bodies, because its members believe that they can easily elude them. —Niccolò Turrisi Colonna, 1864

The term mafia found a class of violent criminals ready and waiting for a name to define them, and, given their special character and importance in Sicilian society, they had the right to a different name from that defining vulgar criminals in other countries . . . . Someone who had just arrived might well believe that Sicily was the easiest and most pleasant place in the entire world. But if the traveler stays a while, bit by bit everything changes around him . . . . The violence and the murders take the strangest forms . . . After a certain number of these incidents, the perfume of orange and lemon blossoms starts to smell of corpses. —Leopoldo Franchetti, 1876

Between 1978 and 1992, agents of the Cosa Nostra murdered virtually every public official in Sicily who interfered with the mafia’s business . . . Along with this extraordinary string of political assassinations, a newly dominant group within the Sicilian mafia undertook a major mafia war, a veritable campaign of extermination intended to eliminate its rivals within the organization, as well as any friends or relatives who could offer them support. The result was a bloodbath in which some one thousand people were either murdered or made to disappear. —Alexander Stille, 1995

Mafia is the consciousness of one’s own worth, the exaggerated concept of individual force as the sole arbiter of every conflict, of every clash of interests or ideas. —Giuseppe Pitrè, 1889