miércoles, 30 de agosto de 2017

miércoles, agosto 30, 2017

A chilling portrait of the workings of the world’s mafias

The forensic account of the world’s mafias, from Japan’s Yakuza to Italy’s ’Ndrangheta

by: Review by John Lloyd




Federico Varese, who has made organised crime a life’s work, is the capo di tutti capi of mafia studies. His desire to pierce ever more deeply through the layers of violence, comradeship, greed, corruption and pathos of men, at once parasitical on societies and contemptuous of them, plunges him into their worlds to discover that, different as the mafias are, at root they are the same. They destroy, and claim to create honour.

Two of the most chilling observations in this learned, fluent book is, first, that the mafias “put themselves forward as institutions of government, ultimately in competition with the legitimate state”. Second, that “mafias thrive in democracies”. Varese quotes Antonio Calderone, a Sicilian boss turned pentito (informer), as saying that he and his comrades were instructed to vote only for the Christian Democrats, who “were a democratic party, truly democratic. They’d share power. The Mafia could get along with that”.

Totalitarian regimes, such as the Italian Fascists, suppressed the mafia almost to extinction; democracy restored, they grew again. Only now — with massive policing, greater ease of sentencing, increased surveillance and pentiti — is the Sicilian mafia facing, if not extinction, then severe reduction. But the Neapolitan Camorra and above all the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta across the straits of Messina have grown and grow still. Calabresi families are rich on the proceeds of the heroin trade from the container port of Gioia Tauro (unfortunately Varese doesn’t say much about them here).

Mafia life is often short and usually tense. The Russian vory v zakone (thieves-in-law), spawned in Soviet prison colonies, live more than any other by their own law, spurning contact with state and police, vicious in their feuds. The Japanese Yakuza, who like to trace their lineage back to the samurai (Varese thinks their origins are in late-19th-century gamblers), settle scores with a sword — less because of samurai forebears, more because carrying a gun is a serious offence in Japan.

Mafias sometimes side with, and are used by, states. The Hong Kong Triads, facing pro-democracy demonstrations in 2014, took the side of the Chinese authorities in confronting the young demonstrators — and gained some credit with Beijing. Where mafia are powerful, as the drug cartels in Mexico and the Wa heroin refiners in Myanmar’s Shan and Kachin regions (said to process 45 per cent of world supply), they create their own “states” with laws, social provision and a savage punishment code.

These are male societies: in no mafia are women allowed to play a role (with exceptions, as when the Yakuza wife Fumiko Taoka took over, for three years, the 23,000 strong Yamaguchi-gumi group, after her husband died). Love is dangerous for men of honour, leading to confidences and possible betrayal. When, in 2014, I met Elisabetta Tripodi, the brave mayor of the ’Ndrangheta town of Rosarno, she told me that two ’Ndrangheta women had turned informer: “It was better for their children to co-operate with the police.” One was killed, her body dissolved in acid, and the other survived to testify against members of her own family. Resulting sentences totalled 600 years.

The life of a mafia boss is harried and risky. Using his own and other sources, Varese gives a detailed description of one Merab, a vory v zakone boss in Georgia, trying to arrange a grand meeting in Italy of fellow bosses that would produce some agreements and raise his status. With the police in Georgia, Russia and Italy aware of most of his moves, Merab finally pulls it off, and wins a bonus: the assassination of a powerful rival, Khasan.

Mafias like to see themselves represented with dignity, if not approval: they love the Godfather film trilogy with its emphasis on honour, love of family and restraint. A vor in the central Russian city of Kazan, Radik Galiakbarov, took to speaking like Marlon Brando’s Godfather, even jutting out his lower jaw. Mesmerising as the films are, they romanticise: Galiakbarov was a sadistic thug who ruled by terror for 20 years.

Varese does not romanticise. Forensically neutral in describing horrors, he ends by saying that “the pain caused . . . can never be condoned”. But it can be understood, and he assists us greatly in that.


The writer is a contributing editor

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