Originally Posted By: TheArm
Originally Posted By: Faithful1
Originally Posted By: TheArm
No one was "made" in the way we think of it today until around 1935, so I would guess the answer is technically no. The Mustache Petes had some sort of ceremony and while it was similar, it was much more nebulous and different than that used by the early LCN. My Grandfather told us he recalls being sat down and told you come in alive and you leave dead and asked if he understood, and that was about it. According to him the burning saint and the Sicilian diatribe was a 1930s creation


There are official government documents from Sicily back to the 1870s that include the ceremony, so it existed before then. I believe the ceremony started in the 1820s as a modified form of Italian Freemasonry. Scholars generally have a range between the 1820s and the 1860s, but I go with the earlier one because of a report from 1838 about a Mafia-like group that had been around since the 1820s (as far as the author of the report knew). Anyway, Italian Freemasonry was brought in by Napoleon and Joachim Murat, who was King of Naples from 1808-1815.


A Masonic ceremony would not include the burning of a saint. I never said there was no ceremony back in Sicily, I am just saying the one used proior to the Catalamari war and the creation of LCN was different than the one used by the early LCN, and today. My Paternal Grandfather was with Joe Masaria and as I said, he reported that his was a very informal ceremony


I didn't say that the Masonic ceremony included burning an image of a saint. I wrote that it originated from Masonry. The earliest Mafiosi added their own embellishments, but we know that as early as the 1870s the ceremony was basically the same as the one Joe Valachi said he went through in 1930.

Joe Masseria probably did have his own variation of the ceremony that was not standard, which is why Chicago's has been informal.