Part II: The Fascist Interlude and the Re-emergence of the Mafia in the 
Postwar Period 

     With the Fascist takeover in 1922, the functions of social 
control and political mediation which were so crucial to the 
legitimation of the mafia in the eyes of dominant elites rapidly 
lost their raison d'etre.  Once the Fascist dictatorship was 
firmly established and elections abolished, many large 
landowners, recognizing in the Fascist state an equally effective 
and less burdensome means of maintaining public order and social 
stability, did not hesitate to sacrifice their former allies to 
the new regime: "Where the Fascist State guaranteed vested landed 
interests and established effective security in the countryside, 
mafiosi were rendered obsolete" (Blok 182).  Nor, in the absence 
of elections, did they any longer hold any meaningful leverage 
over regional and national political leaders.  The Fascist 
Prefect of Palermo, Cesare Mori, clearly understood the bases of 
mafia power when he argued that, in order to defeat the mafia, it 
was necessary to 

  forge a direct bond between the population and the 
  state, to anull the system of intermediation under 
  which citizens could not approach the authorities 
  except through middlemen..., receiving as a favor that 
  which is due them as their right (cited in Catanzaro, 
  1988: 141). 

The Great Transformation 
     From the mid-1950s on, the model of the traditional mafia 
(at least in its rural guise) experienced a deepening crisis as a 
result of processes of social, economic, and political change 
which transformed the face of the Italian South.  The most 
important of these processes were mass emigration from the 
countryside, a vast increase in state intervention in the South, and, 
linked to the previous two, the explosive growth of the 
large coastal cities (especially marked in the cases of Palermo 
and Naples).  Between 1950 and 1975 about 4 million people, 
primarily peasants and day laborers, left southern Italy to seek 
industrial jobs in the North or in the countries of central and 
northern Europe.  This massive exodus from the countryside led to 
the inexorable disintegration of traditional peasant society and, 
by providing peasants with an alternative short of long-term 
overseas migration, considerably weakened the leverage of the 
landowners and the mafia over local society.  Even more important 
was the expansion of the Italian welfare state and the decision 
to use the power and resources of the state to carry out 
far-reaching programs of social and economic change in the South. 
     With the enactment of agrarian reform in 1950, twenty 
percent of agricultural land in Sicily and two-thirds of the land 
occupied by the latifondo passed from large estates to small 
holders (Renda 1985: 63).  Yet, although its function as armed 
guardian of the great estates and privileged intermediary between 
the peasants and the landed elite came to an end, the mafia did 
not disappear with the disappearance of the latifondo.  The mafia 
did not abandon the countryside, but rather turned its sights to 
new sources of power and gain, in particular the newly 
established programs of regional and national intervention, at 
that time oriented almost exclusively toward provision of rural 
infrastructures.  As noted above, mafiosi imposed their 
intermediation in the land transactions resulting from the 
agrarian reform and were quick to take advantage of new policies 
for the modernization of agriculture, coming to dominate 
agricultural cooperatives (financed by contributions from the 
regional government), consorzi di bonifica (land reclamation and 
improvement agencies), and rural credit institutions, as well as 
claiming a disproportionate share of the agricultural subsidies 
and public works contracts given out by the Region and the Cassa 
per il Mezzogiorno (the newly established agency for the 
development of the South).  All these sources of economic gain 
laid the basis for a process of financial accumulation which 
would subsequently assist the entry of the mafia into new and 
even more lucrative economic arenas. 
     Thus, processes of state-sponsored development did not lead 
to the destruction of the mafia but rather to its expansion and 
reinforcement in new fields of endeavor.  Despite continued mafia 
interests in the countryside, by the mid-1950s it had become 
clear to the rural elite, landowners and mafiosi alike, that the 
promise of economic gain now loomed largest in the coastal 
cities, whose tremendous population growth since the war had 
opened vast new possibilities for enrichment, from traditional 
sectors of mafia control like the wholesale produce, meat, and 
fish markets to the booming construction industry fueled by rapid 
urban expansion (all sectors, however, where public regulation 
made political ties crucial for economic success).  By the late 
1950s, the mafia's grasp extended into virtually every sector of 
the economy of Palermo, still the economic and administrative 
capital of Sicily. 
     The extraordinary capability of the mafia to adapt to 
rapidly changing social, economic and political conditions after 
World War II, once again belying any description of it as an 
archaic phenomenon, a vestige of traditional society, was to a 
large extent made possible by its political connections.  In its 
increasing concentration on the urban arena, the mafia's links to 
political power, and in particular to the Christian Democratic 
Party, were further reinforced.  In the words of the 1972 
majority report of the parliamentary Antimafia Commission: 
              The most conspicuous causal factor behind the 
  persistence and expansion of mafia power in Sicily is 
  undoubtedly the relationships which the mafia was able 
  to establish with the public sector, above all with 
  administrative and bureaucratic structures and then 
  with political power (Antimafia Commission 1972, Vol. 
  1: 114). The nature of the linkages between the DC and this new urban 
mafia is most evident in the sector of real-estate speculation 
and construction, both because of the magnitude of the interests 
at stake and because of the direct responsibility of local 
administrations, dominated by the Christian Democrats, for 
regulation of these activities.  Control over the tempestuous 
processes of urban development which swept Italy in the postwar 
period has constituted the most important instrument of local 
political power, especially in the South where such power was 
exercised primarily along personalistic lines.  Mafia penetration 
of this key sector of the urban economy took place at several 
levels: (1) preferential access to credit, both from commercial 
banks and from regional credit institutions; (2) the winning of 
lucrative public contracts, from the public works projects of the 
Region to services like street maintenance contracted out by the 
city; (3) the complicity of the municipal administration in 
repeated abuses regarding the elaboration and implementation of 
the city plan, the awarding of building permits, and surveillance 
over construction projects; (4) a tight system of control over 
the construction sites themselves, with the mafia serving as an 
obligatory intermediary in the provision of building supplies and 
labor, as well as imposing its traditional "protection" system, 
with the price of refusal at best an exemplary theft and at worst 
a charge of dynamite.  By the early 1970s the construction 
industry in the city of Palermo was almost entirely controlled by 
the mafia.  The 1972 and 1976 reports of the Antimafia Commission 
underlined the political roots of such a situation, arguing that 
"there exists a parallel between the particular intensity of the 
criminal phenomenon and the administrative situation of a city of 
the importance of Palermo," which had, in the 1960s, "reached 
unprecedented heights in the unprincipled non-observance of the 
law, leaving behind irregularities of every kind" (Antimafia 
Commission 1972, Vol. 1: 873-952; Antimafia Commission 1976: 217). 
 The changes in the social and economic milieu in which the 
mafia operated were reflected in a change in the political 
climate as well.  In the early 1960s, a bloody war between rival 
cosche broke out in Palermo for control of the increasingly 
profitable economic opportunities brought about by rapid urban 
growth.  The ferocity of the struggle was unprecedented, reaping 
68 victims from 196l to 1963 and culminating in the "massacre of 
Ciaculli" on June 30, 1963, when an automobile loaded with 
explosives and left outside the home of one of the warring 
bosses, exploded and killed seven police and military officers 
sent to defuse it.  The tremendous public reaction to this event 
was a determining factor in provoking the immediate convocation 
of the special parliamentary commission to investigate the causes 
of the re-emergence of mafia violence in Sicily (known as the 
Antimafia Commission), which had been established six months 
earlier but never convened because of conflicting political 
pressures.  The creation of the Antimafia Commission marked a 
turning point in the traditional relationship between the mafia 
and the Italian state.  The central government affirmed its 
intent to reappropriate its monopoly over the use of physical 
violence, withdrew the tacit delegation to the mafia of 
substantial powers for the maintenance of public order, and, for 
the first time since the 1920s, launched a serious campaign of 
repression against the mafia.  These measures showed results in a 
sharp decline in mafia violence after 1963, such that many 
observers began to speak of the final stage of the struggle 
against the mafia, which was seen as having lost many of its 
traditional characteristics and subcultural ties and degenerated 
into urban "gangsterism"--more isolated and therefore more easily 
extirpated. 
    The mafia warfare of the 1960s did in fact signal the 
emergence of a new generation of mafiosi.  The withdrawal of the 
delegation of functions of social control by the state and the 
passage of functions of economic and political intermediation in 
large part from the mafia to the mass political parties, in 
particular the DC, undermined the sources of legitimation which 
had in the past led mafiosi to be recognized as respected members 
of the local elite.  As a result, the communitarian base of their 
power began to erode, giving way to a more exclusive reliance on 
the pursuit of economic gain through violence.  Although 
traditional mafiosi like Vizzini and Genco Russo had utilized 
violence to establish their position in the first phase of their 
careers, in the second stage they limited recourse to violence, 
turned to primarily legal sources of gain, and exercised their 
power in an open and legitimate fashion.  The new generation, on 
the other hand, does not share that dimension of openly 
acknowledged community power.  Their activities remain to a large 
extent in the illegal sector (in particular the drug trade), and 
their adult lives are passed, not in the public exercise of a 
position of respect and influence, but in prison or in hiding 
from the authorities.  The nature of their economic activities 
inspires intense competition, such that recourse to violence- 
increasingly brutal and often indiscriminate--cannot be abandoned 
for more legitimate pursuits.  In the eyes of the public, respect 
has to a large extent been replaced by fear. 
     Despite this transformation, the mafia was not so easly 
defeated.  Under the mask of quiescence it reorganized, regained 
lost ground, and expanded into new activities. The continued 
existence and political clout of the mafia are evidenced by the 
fate of the Antimafia Commission itself.  Although the Commission 
collected volumes of evidence and produced reports unequivocal in 
their portrayal of political collusion, no action--either 
judicial or legislative--was taken in response to its revelations 
or recommendations until a decade later, by which time, as we 
shall see, the mafia had reconsolidated its position on quite new 
and even more powerful grounds. 
     Behind the headlines, however, the real protagonists of the 
period from the mid-1950s to the mid-1970s in western Sicily were 
not the mafiosi, but a new generation of political elites, who 
had succeeded in transforming the Christian Democratic Party, by 
now solidly entrenched in power at both the national and regional 
levels, from a loose coalition of traditional notables into a 
powerful political machine controlling all major centers of 
political, administrative, and economic power at the local 
level. While the national DC was deeply divided by factional 
struggle, in western Sicily one faction, the fanfaniani (the 
followers of the national leader, Amintore Fanfani), had 
succeeded by the early 1960s in gaining a monopoly hold over all 
levers of local power.  Because of the tremendous expansion of 
state economic and social intervention in the South and the 
progressive interpenetration of the DC and the state 
administration through the party's permanent hold on national 
power, the Christian Democrats became above all a party of mass 
patronage, the managers of a vast network of “cliental” relations 
reaching into every sector of southern society.  As the scope of 
state intervention increased and the state administration became 
increasingly a fiefdom of the governing parties, the lines 
between the state and civil society blurred.  In the words of 
Sidney Tarrow, there was a "privatization of state power for 
personal political aims" (Tarrow 327), as the state was 
transformed into a reservoir of patronage resources with which to 
build political careers and party fortunes.  This new class of 
political brokers directly controlled the flow of public 
resources through the mass party and its privileged access to the 
centers of state power, thereby taking over the key function of 
intermediation previously performed by mafiosi. 
     The creation of a highly centralized patronage-based machine 
in Sicily was not due only to the privileged access of local DC 
leaders to the levers of national power.  Equally important was 
the existence of an autonomous regional government, created in 
1946 to forestall the Separatist threat.  Unlike the majority of 
the Italian regions, which only gained limited autonomy in 1970, 
the Sicilian Region was granted substantial independent power and 
resources, in particular in the spheres of social and economic 
policy.  With its massive budget and elephantine bureaucracy 
(both in the regional offices themselves and in a series of 
special economic agencies dealing with every aspect of the 
Sicilian economy), the Region has become the heart of a vast 
patronage machine.  Like the national government, the Sicilian 
Region has been controlled by the Christian Democratic Party 
since its inception.  The staffing of the regional bureaucracy, 
until 1963 carried out almost entirely on a patronage basis 
rather than through competitive examinations, provided the 
occasion for the direct integration of political clienteles 
(including mafiosi) into public positions with strategic 
importance for the political and economic life of Sicily. 
[Athough no exact data exist to document the presence of 
mafiosi or members of their families inside the regional 
bureaucracy, an indicator of such a presence is the 
overrepresentation of the "mafia" provinces of Western Sicily. 
Although the population of western Sicily is about 50% of the 
regional total, these provinces account for 73.2% of regional 
personnel (Arlacchi 1986: 73; Catanzaro 1988: 182).] 
     The penetration of the mafia into the regional government was 
criticized in the following terms by the parliamentary Antimafia 
Commission: 

   Instead of presenting itself as the antithesis of mafia methods   and mentality, the Region created new and 
  conspicuous opportunites for the practice of 
  illegality, protectionism, and intrigue--that is, all 
  that ordinarily constitutes the ideal humus for the 
  mafia (Antimafia 1976: 1202-3). 

      In this period the mafia no longer represented, as it 
      had before, the defense of certain class interests or 
      positions.  It sought, as always, stable and concrete 
      ties with bureaucratic structures and political circles, 
      but it sought them for the direct advantages 
      which they could provide in the exercise of the mafia's 
      own illicit activities....The individuals compromised 
      with the mafia found the counterpart to their support 
      not only in the usual electoral and political 
      advantages, but also in a concrete co-participation in 
      certain business affairs and speculative deals 
      (Antimafia Commission 1972, Vol. 1: 147).