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A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

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Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#71

Post by toyg »

alexpotato wrote: post #66

My mom, who is from Italy, has some great lines about the Mafia: "Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia" I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned: "The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got…

Carabinieri have been involved with (and occasionally fighting) the mafia since late 1800s. That's got nothing to do with how we got to the current situation of relative tranquility.

What happened between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s was that, because of continuous feuds among mafiosi that produced too many civilian victims, political connections broke down, particularly with a few especially vicious bosses. Laws were passed to isolate the worst offenders, new connections were brokered with more moderate mafia leaders, and eventually the "bad" bosses were magically found, hiding more or less in plain sight.

Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#72

Post by toyg »

rayiner wrote: post #41

Do all countries have something like an Italian mafia? Is there a German or British mafia of a similar scale and sophistication, but we just call them something else?

There used to be, but afaik modern networks are largely led by Balkan groups across the whole of Europe.

Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#73

Post by toyg »

lormayna wrote: post #52
newsclues wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sciascia Died in 89, Saviano was 10 years old and wouldn’t start writing until the early 2000s.

It's not about the year of birth, it's about the role. Saviano creates his own career with mafia and now is acting as opinionist to any other option (i.e. now about the constitutional referendum that "will enforce the mafia"). Falcone, Borsellino, Livatino, Don Puglisi (just to mention people that paid with their own life) fight heavily against mafia, but they never converted this fight in a career.

This is an unrealistic argumentation, usually deployed to paint contemporaries in a bad light by comparing them to "saints" who are, conveniently, always dead. And it's particularly funny that Borsellino is now in the "saints" category, when he was explicitly namechecked by Sciascia himself in the newspaper column that originated the term "anti-mafia professional". Falcone also got extremely close to becoming the national anti-mafia czar, because his career had been defined by that very subject. Both were killed precisely because they specialised in this area and refused to move elsewhere.

Sciascia was 67 when he wrote that column, and was likely just aggrieved by the fact that national response to the mafia was escalating to levels before unseen (for a number of reasons). He might have had a point about another name-checked personality, the politician Leoluca Orlando, who survived those terrible times and ended up ruling Palermo for more than 20 years - something a lot of people see as realistically incompatible with actually being the anti-mafia hardliner he is supposed to be.

Saviano, however, is just a specialized journalist.

Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#74

Post by toyg »

null_deref wrote: post #49
mikkupikku wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Organized crime doesn't like publicly visible violence. That's bad for business. They only resort to that when they feel they have no other choice. They do shit like bomb judges and get into shootouts with the police when they have to exert their power, not when they feel secure and business is good. A better measure of organized crime is the sort of crime they profit from, like the general availability of illegal dr…

But aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime? It seems to me there always be someone who thinks he can get more money by leaving a group and creating one of their own or some other group trying to expand revenue and territory

> aren’t car bombs and public shootouts between different crime groups an unavoidable by product of existing organized crime?

Check out the Japanese Yakuza. Yes, they are in decline, but even at the peak of their powers they didn't really do that sort of thing. Gangsters can be pretty private.

Besides, gangsters are not stupid. By now, Hollywood has produced tons of material about the rise and fall of criminals, with increasing realism; effectively, they educated the newer generations into not being as stupid as Tony Montana.

Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#75

Post by etherus »

antirez wrote: post #23

Sciascia, btw, is one of the biggest thinkers and writers of '900. It is not really defined by his mafia-related novels and takes. He used to be friend with Borges, and was regarded as one of the top men in humanistic culture. Disclaimer: I was born in a town (Campobello di Licata) near his town (Racalmuto), but I'm not saying this because of this fact. If you never read Sciascia, I suggest you starting from his last…

As an aside, do you use dvorak as your keyboard layout? The ' for 1 typo is quite rare with qwerty, but I could see you meaning '1900s, though that becomes two characters in a short space. Thanks for the recommendation!

Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#76

Post by arwhatever »

articulatepang wrote: post #6
weinzierl wrote: post #2

Reminds me of the story of Andre Camara , who photographed a favela drug war in the mid 80s. Take away: criminals are vain too.

For those who don’t know: the film City of God is based on this, and it’s a great movie. One of my all-time favorites. The directing, acting photography and storytelling are all very well done. Worth anyone’s time.

I could watch it once a year, indefinitely.

Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#77

Post by sooheon »

oriettaxx wrote: post #44
sooheon wrote: post #27

The 2020 adaptation of ZeroZeroZero, mentioned in this article, is one of the best crime shows I've ever seen, with basically zero buzz. Pretty interesting reading the reason for the authenticity.

where is it mentioned? ZeroZeroZero is by Saviano, article is about Sciascia.

My bad, went down rabbit hole and got my writers/links confused.

Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#78

Post by fragmede »

pizza234 wrote: post #68
alexpotato wrote: post #66

My mom, who is from Italy, has some great lines about the Mafia: "Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia" I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned: "The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got…

> the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US. Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb".

Depends how your bubble portrays the FBI to you, I suppose.

Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#79

Post by fragmede »

markus_zhang wrote: post #67
null_deref wrote: post #7

It angers me that Fascist Italy could push the Mafia to the brink of extinction but Democratic Italy can’t.

Mafia exists because legal entities refuse to take responsibilities —- oh it’s too expensive to do X so we will leave it alone or legalize it. So eventually the underground takes over and Mafia becomes quasi governments. To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as we…

Does it need to be centralized?

Re: A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

#80

Post by fragmede »

cucumber3732842 wrote: post #56
y-curious wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

America doesn’t have bribery! It has “lobbying”. This has been a problem long before Trump made it shameless.

This. We do't have bribery have made the bribery above the table to "legitimize" it and make the useful idiots and enablers simp for it. The "pure" act of lobbying is only the tip of the iceberg. There's all sorts of incestuous revolving door and distasteful but not illegal dealigns between government and the industries government favors. If I had a nickle for every time I read a "if you don't like your tax dollars b…

There's corruption, and then there's corruption. Yes, lobbying does look a lot like bribery, but it's a matter of degree, and the difference in the degrees matter.
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