Cosa Nostra Read Online Free PDF

‘many more than one hundred but less than two hundred people’. Here is what he says about the murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo:
    If I’d had a moment longer to reflect, a bit more calm to think, as I did with other crimes, then maybe there would be a hope in a thousand, a million, that the child would be alive today. But today it would be useless to try and justify it. I just didn’t think it through at the time.
    The terrifying thing about the Sicilian mafia is that men like ‘lo scannacristiani’ are not deranged. Nor are their actions at all incompatible with the code of honour or, indeed, with being a husband and father in Cosa Nostra’s view. Until the day he decided to turn state’s evidence and tell his story, nothing that Brusca did, including murdering a child not much older than his own, was considered by mafiosi to be inherently dishonourable.
    In the wake of the Capaci bomb, more mafiosi turned state’s evidence, and some of these ‘penitents’ justified their decision by saying that killers like ‘lo scannacristiani’ had betrayed traditional values, the code of honour. Tommaso Buscetta had used the same argument, along the lines of ‘I did not leave Cosa Nostra, Cosa Nostra left me’. But this is a flimsy claim, historically speaking, because within the mafia betrayal and brutality have been compatible with honour since the beginning. Giovanni Brusca is more typical than some mafia defectors would have the world believe.
    This new post-Capaci wave of pentiti has allowed researchers to flesh out the evidence about the mafia’s internal culture that had been provided by the earlier generation of defectors, including Buscetta. What is now clear is that the code of honour is much more than a list of rules. Becoming a man of honour means taking on a whole new identity, entering a different moral universe. A mafioso’s honour is the mark of that new identity, that new moral sensibility.
    Tommaso Buscetta first outlined Cosa Nostra’s code of honour to Falcone back in 1984. He told of its initiation rite in which the candidate for membership holds a burning picture—usually of the Madonna of the Annunciation—while swearing allegiance and silence until death. Rumours of this quaint ritual had previously been dismissed as folklore, and it is still a part of Buscetta’s evidence that seems to run counter to common sense. Yet it has become abundantly clear from the testimonies of Buscetta, ‘lo scannacristiani’, and others that mafiosi take such things in deadly earnest, as matters of honour.
    The initiation ritual shows that honour is a status that has to be earned. Until he becomes a man of honour, an aspiring mafioso is carefully watched, supervised, put to the test; committing murder is almost always a prerequisite for admission. During this period of preparation, he is constantly reminded that until he goes through the ritual of affiliation he is a nonentity, ‘nothing mixed with nil’. And when initiation arrives, it is often the most important moment in a mafioso’s life. The burning of the sacred image symbolizes his death as an ordinary man and his rebirth as a man of honour.
    At initiation, the new mafioso swears obedience—the first pillar of the code of honour. A ‘made’ man is always obedient to his capo; he never asks, ‘Why?’ One way to understand the implications of this obligation involves what is also a crucial test case for the code of honour as a whole: the murder of women and children. This has always been something of a delicate issue for the Sicilian mafia; indeed, mafiosi have frequently made the claim that they never touch women and children. It has to be said that many men of honour hold to that principle for as long as they can. Cosa Nostra certainly does not murder babies willy-nilly, not least because to do so would damage its image and alienate some of its closest supporters.
    Yet Giuseppe Di Matteo was far from being the first child whose life had been very