Volume 42, Number 15 · October 5, 1995
The Crusade Against Cosa Nostra
By Adrian Lyttelton
Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic
by Alexander Stille
Pantheon, 467 pp., $27.50
A few years ago it was fashionable to deny the reality of the mafia as an organization. In Italy, it was said, Mafia (rather than 'the mafia') was just a set of common values and attitudes which made it possible for Sicilian criminals to communicate and cooperate with one another. The mafiosi worked through informal relationships of kinship, friendship, and clientage.[1] This view was a plausible reaction to theories of a vast, all-embracing criminal conspiracy, and was based on the well-founded observation that charges of mafia activity had often been made for political ends. Many scholars dismissed as pure fantasy the revelations of the American mafioso Joseph Valachi[2] before a Senate committee in 1963 about the structure of the American mafia.
Review, 5495 words
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