Mafia hierarchy: ranks, titles, positions and history

[TonyGosling]

Mafia Ranks, titles, and Positions.
--LOWEST TO HIGHEST--
https://www.nationstates.net/page=dispatch/id=460904

Associates:
Associates are not actual members of the Mafia but rather anyone who teams up with them on a criminal enterprise of some kind. They could be someone who does business with the mob, including money-laundering bankers, crooked cops, lawyers, politicians, drug dealers, etc. There are also the Italian newcomers who have yet to be made, called cugines, and they play a minor role in the operation of the Mafia. Associates are also fair game on the streets, they are not protected by the organization. Anybody can be an associate in the mafia, however only Italians and Sicilians can be made.

Soldiers:
The lowest-ranking members of the hierarchy of the Mafia and La Cosa Nostra are the soldiers, the grunts of the organization who do the majority of the “dirty work.” It’s the place where the kids start off: running errands, making deliveries, picking up cash, and generally sticking out their neck in the hope of making a name for themselves by demonstrating their loyalty to the organization. Children as young as sixteen have been admitted

Capo:
The capo, or caporegime, is the captain or lieutenant of a division within the Mafia. He heads a crew of soldiers and reports directly to a boss or underboss, who hands down the instructions. He ranks much higher in the hierarchy of the Mafia. He is also in charge of handling most money.

Consigliere:
The consigliere, or chief advisor, is not officially part of the hierarchy of theMafia, but he plays one of the most important roles in a crime family. He is the close trusted friend and confidant of the family boss. The function of the consigliere is a throwback to medieval times, when a monarch placed his trust in an advisor whom he could summon for strategic information and sound advice. The consigliere is meant to offer unbiased information based on what he sees as best for the family. He’s not supposed to factor emotional concerns, such as retaliation and blood feuds, into his decisions. Unlike the underboss (see below), the consigliereis not required to be a direct relative of the boss. Instead, he is chosen solely for his abilities and the amount of knowledge he possesses. Generally, only the boss and underboss have more authority than theconsigliere in an organized crime family.

Underboss:
The underboss, or capo bastone, is second-in-command in the hierarchy of the Mafia crime family. His level of authority varies from family to family, but he is ready to stand in for the boss at any given moment. In the violent and volatile world of the mob, the underboss can easily find himself at the helm of the family so, for the most part, they are usually groomed for an eventual takeover, particularly if the boss’s health is failing or if it looks like he’s headed for a stay in the joint. A family may have two underbosses. An example of this was boss Carlo Gambino, who had Paul "big Paul" Castelano and Aniello "Mr. Neil" Dellacroce as underboss at the same time. However, one underboss is far more common.

Boss: (godfather)
The boss, or capo famiglia, makes all the important decisions, much like a CEO of a company would. Although each mob boss may run his outfit in a different way, they have one thing in common: they are greatly respected and widely feared by their subordinates. All of the men in his outfit pay him a tribute, so he is also usually an extremely wealthy man. He is usually called the godfather (Il Padrino in stamdard Italian), or more commonly, the word "Don" may proceed his first or last name.

Boss of all bosses: (head godfather)
There is one more position above the Mafia boss known as the “boss of all bosses” or the capo di tutti capi, although this role has not been filled in the American mob since the 1930s (by Salvatore Maranzano). He was the man who introduced the structure of the five main New York families who would control the criminal underground, with himself, of course, placed at the top. Following his assassination, the position of “boss of all bosses” was eliminated and has never been reintroduced, most likely due to the antipathy it generated among competing families and their bosses. These days the position is merely a de facto title bestowed on the boss of the most powerful crime family which, from the late 1960s to the 1990s, was the Gambinos.

[Drew Maloney]

The Pope - derived from the Greek word Pappa (father)

Speaks to God every day.

Lives in Rome, Italy.

The real God Father?

[TonyGosling]

Mob mentality: Mafia History
You need to be brave to investigate the bloody history of the Mafia. Here, author John Dickie explains why he risks the wrath of the Cosa Nostra with his work
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/mob-mentality-mafia-hi story-2294199.html

Wednesday 8 June 2011 00:00

Aren't you afraid that they're going to kill you?" Seven years have passed since I published Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia. It's been quite a ride: over that time I've taken the mafia on tour everywhere from Oslo to Perth. And everywhere I hear the same question.

Strangers squeeze my forearm. They look in my eyes and say how brave I am. One letter pleading with me to take care came from a British reader; the return address was one of Her Majesty's Prisons. When I tell people about my new book, Blood Brotherhoods (a parallel narrative which charts the rise of the other mafias – the Camorra and the 'Ndrangheta – as well as Cosa Nostra), the question is posed with still greater insistence.

Over time, I've stopped blushing. But I still haven't come up with a pat answer. One reason is superstition: I've never been threatened, but it seems hubristic to reply "no". Life is frighteningly cheap for mafiosi, camorristi and 'ndranghetisti.

A much stronger reason is that the question embarrasses me. I have friends who are journalists in the mafia fiefs of Southern Italy and Sicily. Lirio Abbate was the only reporter present in 2006 when Sicilian superboss Bernardo "the Tractor" Provenzano was netted after 43 years on the run. The following year a bomb was found under Lirio's car. Another friend, Peppe Baldessarro, works in Reggio Calabria; he is a walking encyclopaedia of the 'ndrangheta. In 2010 he received several bullets in the post and a warning spelled out in letters cut from a newspaper. Then there is Roberto Saviano, whose bestseller Gomorrah earned him a camorra death sentence. These people really know what it means to pit the pen against the pistol. It would be silly to entertain the suggestion that writing history books requires their kind of courage.

But although historians are not in the firing line of the fight against criminal power in Italy, the people who are have a hunger for news from the coal-face of archival research. Investigating magistrate Michele Prestipino is a case in point. He actually led the successful hunt for "the Tractor". Then he moved to Calabria to turn the screw on the 'ndrangheta. In a vain attempt to put him off, last year the local Honoured Society left a bazooka near his office. On my last trip to Reggio Calabria, I was surprised and rather overawed to find that Prestipino had read Cosa Nostra, and that he was happy to take an hour out of his day to argue with me about the origins of 'Ndrangheta as he filled my flash drive with recent investigations.

That is what I really found scary about researching and writing Cosa Nostra and Blood Brotherhoods. The feeling – which is very odd and rather nerve-jangling for a historian – of being relevant. In its own small way, history is part of the struggle to redeem Italian territory from the grip of gangs of murderers.

The relevance of mafia history is perhaps why it can spook people. Back in the bloody 1980s, when the bodies were piling up on the streets of Palermo, the pioneer of mafia history, Salvatore Lupo, went to the state archive looking for evidence. The archivists bluffed and blustered, or even blankly refused to help. "For your own safety. And ours," came the shame-faced reply.

In Reggio Calabria in 2009 I went to the archive and apprehensively announced that I wanted to solve the mystery of how the 'Ndrangheta began. The archivists did not blink, and even let me down into the bowels of the building to hunt for myself. That they did so is one measure of positive changes in the cultural climate: omertà is no longer the default.

The purest pleasure in any historian's working life comes from a discovery in the archives: nothing compares to the sensation that, as you read through a document, old certainties are liquefying, and new truths about the past are taking shape. But when the secrets of an occult criminal sect seep out from the yellowed papers of a trial – as they did when I found out how the 'Ndrangheta took root – the thrill of discovery mingles with a sense of menace. In mafia history, the musty smell of the archives is still laced with the whiff of sulphur.

For although Italy's hoods today are generally too busy trafficking and murdering to bother with what their forebears were up to, they do care about history. All three mafias have their foundation myths. The Sicilian mafia claims the Beati Paoli as its ancestors: they were a fictional secret brotherhood of hooded avengers. The camorra used to claim that it was descended from the Garduña, another fictional secret society from the 1700s. (Bizarrely, most historians take this hooey for fact.) 'Ndrangheta bosses tell new recruits the most elaborate foundation fable of all. They say three Spanish knights, Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso (or "Bone", "Masterbone" and "Heelbone"), were the ancient founders of the three Honoured Societies: mafia, camorra and 'ndrangheta.

One of the things that marks out mafiosi from mere gangsters is their sense of history – however mythical. The Kray twins never claimed to be the last of Robin Hood's merry men. They were not thinking for the long term, not strategising to hand their power and wealth down through the generations. They had no sense of history, because they had no long-term future.

There is one more reason why I waver when asked if I am in peril. In 1899, a Neapolitan playwright called Edoardo Minichini had a runaway success with The Foundation of the Camorra. The police took a lively interest in the show. As one local officer reported: "Given that the aforementioned theatre is frequented by an audience entirely made up of members of the underworld and men with prison records, the action being performed there is one big lesson at the school of crime."

The narcissistic feedback between mafia art and mafia life – the Get Shorty! loop that sees film stars hanging out with mobsters and mobsters queuing up for jobs as extras in mafia films – is as old as mafia crime itself. And however hard historians try not to glamorise the mafias – and I try with every word I write – they can still get caught in the same loop. Mafiosi are probably as fascinated as they are worried by research into their rise. That much was confirmed to me when the carabinieri raided a Russian crime boss's villa near Rome. Eager for publicity, they released a video. It shows officers in bullet-proof vests, burp guns levelled, as they creep past the topiary in the garden, dash through the entrance, and cagily check each opulent room. The film then cuts to the suspicious items uncovered in the search: weapons, foreign currency, and a copy of my Cosa Nostra in Russian translation. The line between writing a history of the mafia, and providing a handbook for mafiosi, is unnervingly easy to cross.



'Blood Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias' by John Dickie is published by Faber (£20). To order a copy for the special price of £17 (free P&P) call Independent Books Direct on 08430 600 030, or visit www.independentbooksdirect.co.uk

Triple trouble: Italy's three Mafias



The Sicilian Mafia

Known since the 1960s as Cosa Nostra ("our thing"), Sicily's Honoured Society was looked up to by the other criminal fraternities for a century before it acquired its modern name. It is traditionally the most centralised of the mafias, and the most successful at infiltrating the state. From the get-go, mafia bosses have been men of power and wealth: "middle-class hoodlums", they were termed in the 1870s. Their power and profile explains why the Sicilian word "mafia" has become the umbrella term for criminal organisations in Italy, and worldwide.



The Camorra

The Camorra today is not a unified organisation, but an unstable system of gangs that dominates Naples and the Campania region. Once upon a time, the camorra too was an Honoured Society – a Freemasonry of crime – although with much humbler origins. Camorristi were slum-dwellers rather than "middle-class hoodlums". The Neapolitan Honoured Society was destroyed in 1912 by one of the biggest and most bizarre gangland trials in history.



The 'Ndrangheta

It was not until 1955 that Italy became aware that for many decades there had been a third mafia lurking in Calabria, the region at the toe of the Italian boot. This mafia had a name so strange that many stumbled over its pronunciation: 'ndrangheta (en-drang-get-ah), which means "manliness" in the Greek dialect of the Aspromonte massif. But the once obscure Calabrian Honoured Society is now big news. Recent investigations have exposed 'ndrangheta colonies right across Northern Italy, in Germany, and in Australia. Canada, the USA and several South American countries also host cells. Fuelled by political corruption, extortion rackets and cocaine trafficking, Italy's third mafia, from the country's poorest region, is now its most feared.

[TonyGosling]

Origins of the Mafia
https://www.history.com/topics/crime/origins-of-the-mafia

The Mafia’s Sicilian Roots
The Mafia on the Rise in Italy
The Mafia in the 20th Century and Beyond
The Mafia, a network of organized-crime groups based in Italy and America, evolved over centuries in Sicily, an island ruled until the mid-19th century by a long line of foreign invaders. Sicilians banded together in groups to protect themselves and carry out their own justice. In Sicily, the term “mafioso,” or Mafia member, initially had no criminal connotations and was used to refer to a person who was suspicious of central authority. By the 19th century, some of these groups emerged as private armies, or “mafie,” who extorted protection money from landowners and eventually became the violent criminal organization known today as the Sicilian Mafia. The American Mafia, which rose to power in the 1920s, is a separate entity from the Mafia in Italy, although they share such traditions as omerta, a code of conduct and loyalty.

The Mafia’s Sicilian Roots

For centuries, Sicily, an island in the Mediterranean Sea between North Africa and the Italian mainland, was ruled by a long line of foreign invaders, including the Phoenicians, Romans, Arabs, French and Spanish. The residents of this island, which measures almost 10,000 square feet, formed groups to protect themselves from the often-hostile occupying forces, as well as from other regional groups of Sicilians. These groups, which later became known as clans or families, developed their own system for justice and retribution, carrying out their actions in secret. By the 19th century, small private armies known as “mafie” took advantage of the frequently violent, chaotic conditions in Sicily and extorted protection money from landowners. From this history, the Sicilian Mafia emerged as a collection of criminal clans or families.

Did you know? The Sicilian Mafia is one of four major criminal networks currently based in Italy; the other three are the Camorra of Naples, the Ndrangheta of Calabria and the Sacra Corona Unita of Puglia.
Although its precise origins are unknown, the term Mafia came from a Sicilian-Arabic slang expression that means “acting as a protector against the arrogance of the powerful,” according to Selwyn Raab, author of “Five Families: The Rise, Decline, and Resurgence of America’s Most Powerful Mafia Empires. Raab notes that until the 19th century, the word “mafioso” did not refer to someone who was a criminal, but rather a person who was suspicious of central authority. In the 1860s, a play called “I Mafiusi della Vicaria” (“Heroes of the Penitentiary”), about a group of inmates at a Sicilian prison who maintained their own hierarchy and rituals, toured Italy and helped popularize the term Mafia in the Italian language.

The Mafia on the Rise in Italy

In 1861, Sicily became a province of recently unified Italy. However, chaos and crime reigned across the island as the fledgling Italian government tried to establish itself. In the 1870s, Roman officials even asked Sicilian Mafia clans to help them by going after dangerous, independent criminal bands; in exchange, officials would look the other way as the Mafia continued its protection shakedowns of landowners. The government believed this arrangement would be temporary, lasting just long enough for Rome to gain control; instead, the Mafia clans expanded their criminal activities and further entrenched themselves in Sicilian politics and the economy. The Mafia became adept at political corruption and intimidated people to vote for certain candidates, who were in turn beholden to the Mafia. Even the Catholic Church was involved with Mafia clans during this period, according to Raab, who notes that the church relied on Mafiosi to monitor its massive property holdings in Sicily and keep tenant farmers in line.

In order to further strengthen themselves, Sicilian clans began conducting initiation ceremonies in which new members pledged secret oaths of loyalty. Of chief importance to the clans was omerta, an all-important code of conduct reflecting the ancient Sicilian belief that a person should never go to government authorities to seek justice for a crime and never cooperate with authorities investigating any wrongdoing.

The Mafia in the 20th Century and Beyond

The Mafia’s influence in Sicily grew until the 1920s, when Prime Minister Benito Mussolini came to power and launched a brutal crackdown on mobsters, who he viewed as a threat to his Fascist regime. However, in the 1950s, the Mafia rose again when mob-backed construction companies dominated the post-World War II building boom in Sicily. Over the next few decades, the Sicilian Mafia flourished, expanding its criminal empire and becoming, by the 1970s, a major player in international narcotics trafficking.

The American Mafia, a separate entity from the Mafia in Sicily, came to power in the 1920s Prohibition era after the success of Italian-American neighborhood gangs in the booming bootleg liquor business. By the 1950s, the Mafia (also known as Cosa Nostra, Italian for “Our Thing”) had become the preeminent organized-crime network in the United States and was involved in a range of underworld activities, from loan-sharking to prostitution, while also infiltrating labor unions and legitimate industries such as construction and New York’s garment industry. Like the Sicilian Mafia, American Mafia families were able to maintain their secrecy and success because of their code of omerta, as well as their ability to bribe and intimidate public officials, business leaders, witnesses and juries. For these reasons, law-enforcement agencies were largely ineffective at stopping the Mafia during the first part of the 20th century. However, during the 1980s and 1990s, prosecutors in America and Italy began successfully employing tough anti-racketeering laws to convict top-ranking mobsters. Additionally, some Mafiosi, in order to avoid long prison terms, began breaking the once-sacred code of omerta and testified against fellow mob members. By the start of the 21st century, after hundreds of high-profile arrests over the course of several decades, the Mafia appeared to be weakened in both countries; however, it was not eliminated completely and remains in business today.