Causes and consequences of the Sicilian Mafia
voxeu.org
voxeu.org
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jan/12/crime.mafia
> The Neapolitan Camorra, or "the System" as it is known by those on its inside, is a vast, pullulating world of gangs. They form, split, descend into vicious feuds, and re-emerge in new alliances only to be annihilated in some new internecine war. Whereas a Sicilian capo can confidently expect to see his grandchildren set out on their criminal careers, a senior camorrista is lucky if he reaches 40... Following a series of highly credible death threats, since autumn 2006 Saviano has been given an armed escort at public expense.
https://www.esquire.com/style/news/a50424/italy-mafia-counte...
> Quoting Italian journalist Roberto Saviano from his 2006 book Gomorrah: Italy's Other Mafia, the article points out that: The workforce in clan operations is highly skilled, with decades of experience under Italy's and Europe's most important designers. The same hands that once worked under the table for the big labels now work for the clans…Which means that the clothes made by the clans aren't typical counterfeit goods…but rather a sort of true fake. All that's missing is the final step: the brand name, the official authorization from the motherhouse.
> Basically how it works in Italy is that multiple factories would bid on a job to produce clothes or accessories for a fashion brand. The brand would then supply fabrics and designs to each of the factories, and whichever one supplied the garments fastest and with the highest quality would be paid. Those factories that didn't win the bid would then re-brand the clothes and sell them through the Camorra's retail network. It's part of the reason why today, nearly 10 percent of all fashion related-products sold in Europe are counterfeit.
The book itself is a shocking read - highly recommended.
I remember from the book how Camorra controls most of Europe's drug trafficking, how they test the new stuff with junkies in Scampia and only spread them to the north if the junkies don't die. For German/English party-goers to consume.
Or how they just basically dump toxic waste to the nature, spoiling one of the best kitchens in the world. How would you know the buffala mozzarella is not contaminated, or the delicious tomatoes...
My personal biggest takeaway from Naples was a question of what happened between Italy and America that the food lost something. This is probably true of all cuisines that migrate to new countries and don't have access to their original ingredients. After Naples and Amalfi, I became that annoying friend that comes back from Italy and raves about how great the food was over there.
In terms of sightseeing, the things I still remember a few years later:
- Madre is a great contemporary art museum there and they were featuring lots of Italian artists when we went
- We really enjoyed the Piazza Bellini neighborhood both during the day at night. There's an art school there and it just has a really good vibe. At night it's also a popular spot.
- We did two underground tours of their cisterns. The one that meets in front of Caffè Gambrinus [0] feels more grassroots (like a couple folks who do this as a weekend hobby) and hopefully your group will only have 2-6 people. The larger one is at Via dei Tribunali. This one has a more corporate feel as tour guides are seasonal staff that know how to speak English. The sights are more stunning here, though.
- We rode the funicular up to Vomero in the west which is a wealthier neighborhood, hung out in the park there, then climbed up to Castel Sant'Elmo. Poked around its lovely courtyards and art collection, and walked down the backside while enjoying the view
- Pizza. Pizza. Pizza. Lots of blogs have written about this. Get there early, otherwise don't go at all because you'll waste half your day waiting.
Lastly, you're in the middle of everything. Mount Vesuvius and Pompeii are right there. Or take a ferry to Sorrento and explore the Amalfi Coast. The only thing is that it's super popular in the summer, so you'll need take in consideration dealing with the other tourists and higher prices.
[0] Gambrinus - http://www.lanapolisotterranea.it/orari_ing.htm
GC/MS would be cheaper and faster...
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/may/29/roberto-savian...
appears to have significantly reduced literacy,
increased infant mortality, limited the provision
of a variety of local public goods, and may also
have significantly reduced local political competition
If you look at your typical in-group microcosm, a leader often refuses to accept the leadership of others. This promotes that individual to their own level of incompetance, so to speak. Leaders usually attract people less capable than themselves, and extremely domineering personalities enjoy lording over people they perceive as their lessers. I've watched this concept cut across tons of low-level menial jobs and up into higher level executive cliques.
Meanwhile, violence as an action to produce an effect has differing effects at the scale of a populace in which strangers co-exist, than within the individual microcosm. Alternatives to violence might include exile, which for the social group has an effective outcome that matches crippling injury, murder or jail. An individual is removed from the game. Clashes in leadership are at the core of violence. But violence is unsophisticated, and it's usually not your geniuses resorting to it reflexively.
For an extreme example of the sustained effect of violence removing participants from a society, look at Afghanistan, which has been dealing with violence as a fact of life since the 80's. Brain drain, orphans everywhere, no parents, no one going to school, because learning to survive at all is the only education that pays off.
On a gradient, the premise of continued violence between strangers in a small town scales similarly, and all the worse if every town in a region is dealing with the same shit. The less time anyone has to sit and think about some trivial diversion, the dumber society is on a whole, and the less everyone gets back from the benefits of permitting others to sit and think, in return.
However, according to Wikipedia: "Some historians emphasize that the leagues were engaged in class struggle against a coalition of landowners and mafiosi and ignore evidence of strategic alliances between the Fasci and the Mafia."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fasci_Siciliani#Mafia_involvem...
I wonder which is it. Perhaps the Mafia was opportunistic and would ally with the Fasci (the workers) or the landowners depending on the local conditions. Its not like the Mafia is one single entity but composed of smaller (themselves warring) factions.
The "Fasci" "workers" became the Fascist government that went on a murderous rampage across Europe
I googled this and couldn't find any relations between them. Could you provide a link? Also, why did you put workers in scare quotes, were they something else?
If you took all the public data, and tried to trace all the economic output, as it fell into the pockets of individuals, and tried to follow the spending patterns of individuals, tracing the return path acting as inputs to fund all the legal businesses out there, you probably can quickly notice a gap too large to chalk up to inefficient friction and people hiding money under their mattresses, and it probably looks more like a willful diverting of funds to parts unknown.
By induction and intuition you might hazard a guess about the story behind such phenomena.
They immediately jump to "the Mafia causes a decline in literacy" without even considering that the Peasant Fasci might have been responsible for said decline in literacy.
How the hell did this get published?
no checking against population density / structure of environment e.g. rural/small town/urban center - would not urban areas produce more poverty or provide more 'cover' for illlicit activities, or conversely more prosperity, etc etc
no cross-checking checking against economic structure - more specifically access to shipping/ports, whatever industry, etc. might exist - all of which could create cover business, access to distribution, etc
connection/lack of connection of those poorer sicilians affected by the mentioned famine, etc to US immigration and increased opportunity for international criminal activity especially as concerns the vast rise of us/italian mafia during prohibition.. maybe all the 'smart people' from the mafia areas simply left for the US to become gangsters, as one exaggerated potential counterpoint..
zero discussion of local / regional political factors w/r/t the italian unification, etc, which was a massive event co-occurring with the early time period related to the being discussed..
zero discussion of socio-philosophical/cultural/religious aspects aside from the singular 'fasci' socialist group.. much mafioso folklore is tied with romanticized notions of protecting ones people, creating war against enemies, etc, and the relation of corrupt members of the vatican to the mafia are not exactly fiction..
assuming a certain progression of trajectory as 'natural' and equally applicable to all areas implicitly, and further that deviations from this 'norm' are attributable to the pre-presumed causes due to correlative effect ..
etc etc etc.
Dead babies come from accidental or unwanted pregnancies, particularly when combined with drugs and alcohol.
If the underground black market has a strong supply of prostitution (and not just human traffic sob stories, but also prostitution as party time and consenting my-vagina-my-choice power plays, aka: porn without the camera) and the johns are kept in line with strong arm tactics, you get a lot of ladies offering services, and a cross section of pregnancies that represent a poor business decision.
Charting an uptick in dead babies and unattended children running around is a bellweather for women doing whatever, and having whatever done to them, in larger quantities. Really large quantities, over a sustained span of time looks more like big business producing unsavory norms, the kind associated with vice.
In the periphery of legal pornography production there's a quantity of abortions that, in the early 20th century would have cropped up as "infanticide" and "infant mortality" for lack of better terms.
Low literacy rate is a measure of the unwanted pregnancies that lived. Kids that have parents that don't care about them won't bother with compulsory education when they approach ten years old, and dealing with other students starts to become truly unpleasant. Individuals may obtain pragmatic reading skills, but creative writing and reading for fun would decline right along with an uptick in other adversities.
Worth pointing out that the group at play in Southern France seemed to be predominantly Corsican - though not to say that Scilians or the Scilian Mafia were not involved.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Moral_Basis_of_a_Backward_...
From Wikipedia:
The Moral Basis of a Backward Society is a book by Edward C. Banfield, a political scientist who visited Montegrano, Italy (Montegrano is the fictitious name used by Banfield to protect the original town of Chiaromonte, in the Southern Italian region of Basilicata) in 1955. He observed a self-interested, family centric society which sacrificed the public good for the sake of nepotism and the immediate family. Banfield as an American was witnessing what was to become infamous as the "Mafia" or families (in Sicily and other parts of Southern Italy) that cared only for its own "members" at the expense of their fellow citizens. Banfield postulated that the backwardness of such a society could be explained "largely but not entirely" by "the inability of the villagers to act together for their common good or, indeed, for any end transcending the immediate, material interest of the nuclear family".