Cosa Nostra Quotes

“Tutti colpevoli, nessuno colpevole,’ as the Italian saying has it: ‘If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“the origins of the mafia are closely related to the origins of an untrustworthy state – the Italian state.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“the mafia kills in the way a state does; it does not murder, it executes.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Above all, mafiosi in both Sicily and the US continued to think of themselves as a breed apart from other human beings and even other criminals. American or Sicilian, to be a man of honour means to operate beyond society’s measures of right and wrong.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Capitalism runs on investment, and lawlessness puts investment at risk. No one wants to buy new machinery or more land to plant with commercial crops when there is a strong risk that those machines or crops will be stolen or vandalized by competitors. When it supplanted feudalism, the modern state was supposed to establish a monopoly on violence, on the power to wage war and punish criminals. When the modern state monopolizes violence in this way, it helps create the conditions in which commerce can flourish. The barons’ ramshackle, unruly private militias were scheduled to disappear. Franchetti argued that the key to the development of the mafia in Sicily was that the state had fallen catastrophically short of this ideal. It was untrustworthy because, after 1812, it failed to establish its monopoly on the use of violence. The barons’ power on the ground was such that the central state’s courts and policemen could be pressurized into doing what the local lord wanted. Worse still, it was now no longer only the barons who felt they had the right to use force. Violence became ‘democratized’,”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Mafiosi, for Franchetti, were entrepreneurs in violence, specialists who had developed what today would be called the most sophisticated business model in the marketplace. Under the leadership of their bosses, mafia bands ‘invested’ violence in various commercial spheres in order to extort protection money and guarantee monopolies. This was what he called the violence industry. As Franchetti wrote, [in the violence industry] the mafia boss . . . acts as capitalist, impresario and manager. He unifies the management of the crimes committed . . . he regulates the way labour and duties are divided out, and controls discipline amongst the workers. (Discipline is indispensable in this as in any other industry if abundant and constant profits are to be obtained.) It is the mafia boss’s job to judge from circumstances whether the acts of violence should be suspended for a while, or multiplied and made fiercer. He has to adapt to market conditions to choose which operations to carry out, which people to exploit, which form of violence to use.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“There is”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Mistrust has contaminated Italian democracy since its birth in the aftermath of the Second World War. Many Sicilians”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Maranzano’s death can be taken”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“The single most important turning point in the history of organized crime in America was not an execution”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“they named her Giuseppina Pace Umana—‘Josephine Human Peace’.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“The government”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“For a decade and a half after the unification of Italy”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“In its rules”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Evidently Dr Galati’s problems were not just the fault of a bunch of criminals; they came in large part because he could not trust the police”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“The Uditore mafia based their power on running protection rackets in the lemon groves.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“The mafia’s methods were honed during a period of rapid growth in the citrus fruit industry.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Humility – umiltà in Italian or umirtà in Sicilian – is a word that jumps off the page. It is now considered to be the most likely origin for the word omertà. Omertà is the mafia’s code of silence, and the obligation not to speak to the police that it imposes on those within its sphere of influence. Evidently omertà was originally a code of submission.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Rather than being a ‘ship of state’, Italy often seems more like a flotilla of boats, each piloted according to a different chart, each competing for access to the most favourable winds, yet each afraid of being isolated from the other craft.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“when feudalism ended; the legal preconditions were put in place for a property market. Quite simply, bits of the estates could now be bought and sold. And land that is acquired rather than inherited needs to be paid for; it is an investment that has to be put to profitable use. Capitalism had arrived in Sicily.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia

“Palermo also seemed like a stone palimpsest of cultures stretching back over many hundreds of years.”
― John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: The Definitive History of the Sicilian Mafia