Tom Hagen was German and Irish.

the mafia, from the start, extorted there own countrymen, in league with the rich, to line their own pockets. Check the facts dude. Italian Robin Hoods? Robbing Hoods more-like (sorry - dopey pun. couldnt help it)

Not only in Southern Italy where it started: everywhere that italian criminals migrated to, and set up shop, has relied, especially in the early days, on the exploitation of the fellow immigrants.

Why don't you show me the facts that say that?

Read any organized crime book.

In Australia, believe it or not, me have a "mafia", that is, organized criminals of Italian descent. The vast majority of migrant Italians in Australia being from Calabria (there are Napolitan,Sicilian and various Northerners, of course, but the bulk are Calabrese) the exported society is the N'drangheta, the Calabrian mafia.

There are many accounts of poor migrants being kept in poverty for decades through scams perpetrated by the local mobsters: google Maario Condello of Australia, this dirt-bag kept immigrant families poor fo decades by exploiting the ignorance of immigrant farmers, amongst his myriad other schemes. By flat out lieing to the people that depended on him (those that couldnt speak English and were still distrustful of government authority) about the value of their crops (he would sell at a much higher price than he let on), and by basically ripping of other elderly Italians that would come to him for help (one story has him conning an elderly Italian widower into selling his $300 000 property to him for $50 000.)

Italian produce-sellers in The Victorian Markets (the biggest produce market in the Australian state of Victoria) paid extortion money to the Italian syndicates for the right to set up shop and sell there produce for decades, well into the late 90's and still going on today by some accounts.

In America, the whole Black Hand saga was almost exclusively targeted at migrant Italians. And do you think the mafiosi who controlled the waterfront jobs, especially in the early days, really cared whether the labour they were exploiting came from an Italian or an Irishman?

Even in the real early days, the early 20th and late 19th century, there are people being murdered and extorted.

Sure they went after the rich, but the poor were targets as well if they failed their aquiesce to demands. Everyone paid the pizzo, from the buthchers to the beggars. A really good book on those early days: The HIstory of Cosa Nostra by John Dickie. Traces the earliest days of the Sicilian mafia through to today.

I have Cosa Nostra by John Dickie.

Well read it dude. They were rotten from the start.

I think you have your facts mixed up, I have read it, and they were NOT rotten from the start. First of all, I can tell you have your facts mixed up because you did not state the correct name of the book which tells me you either have never read it, read very little of it, or read it a long time ago and forgot the information. Second of all, your information is coming from a very small outcrop of the Mafia in Australia (if there even is a Mafia in Australia which I don't think there is, even though I have seen and read things about the Mafia appearing in Australia I think it's all bullshit and it's just some media lie to try to get people's attention), which is totally different from the Mafia in Italy and in the U.S.

Italian-Mafia_Boss,


I am interested to hear the facts that you know regarding the background of the Mafia and it's origin. Would you please share with us what the REAL story is, how they came to be and what made them go bad? I am a mafia historian buff and I would love to learn more from someone like you who seems to have the "real facts" as to how the mafia came to be and what they originally started out doing. Can you also provide some reliable sources such as books or articles that I could research and read? I'm looking forward to your sharing with us all the factual details that you seem to know.

I would be glad to, first of all I highly suggest the book Cosa Nostra: A History Of The Sicilian Mafia by John Dickie, you can find it by clicking here. That book contains all of the facts I state hear on this board. According to the book, the Mafia was originally created by Sicilian peasants, the peasants needed protection from the invading foreigners trying to take over Sicily since the foreigners were taking control of the peasants' lands, because of this, peasants were getting killed all the time because they did not want to give up their land, so a group of peasants created the Mafia and protected the other peasants, over a period of time the Mafia kicked the foreigners out of Sicily. After that they immigrated to the U.S. and protected the Italian immigrants there, over an even more period of time they started to get greedy with money which ultimately was the root cause of their downfall, greed and drugs brought the Mafia down. That's just a basic history but I suggest that you buy this book to get even more facts. If you click here, you will see a Wikipedia page containing other facts about the Mafia, myself and other Mafia historians have contributed to this page, I know Wikipedia isn't reliable, but it does have some good facts.

Everyone on this board knows all the information in the above post, i think DC was asking for the great secrets you claim to know on page 1.

Oh my good Lord...

Well most of the people on here seem to disagree with that information.

I maybe wrong,but they didn't emigrated to protect the immigrants. Most left Sicily as young children or in their early teens and discovered there way of life from then on and the mafia as we know it was founded/formed in the late 20's early 30's with the "traditions" of the old mafia... Of course it existed before but not as organised..

But you know best, who am i to tell you if wasn't..

Actually it was formed in the U.S. in the very late 1800's.

Sure..

You have made the distinction between the "Robin Hood" old Mafiosi and the scumbags in "Cosa Mia" today. Since you cite Wikipedia and your contributions to it, here are two excerpts from Wikipedia about the "old" Mafia in the US:

"Vito Cascio Ferro (January 22, 1862 - 1943), known as Don Vito, was a prominent Sicilian mafioso who also operated for a time in the United States, where he was a "pioneer" of sorts in the American Mafia. He was known for pioneering a new technique of extortion by the mafia within the Italian communities of Sicily and America where by businessmen would not be extorted for large sums of money at any given time that could possibly bankrupt them, instead they would be coerced into paying smaller sums on a regular basis that would not break them or put them out of business. This was known as the pizzu, named after the small beak of a bird and the mafia saying, to wet the beak as it applies to the extortion of money."

Don Vito spent several years in NYC in the first decade of the 20th Century. His purpose was to organize the loosely knit Sicilian underworld into what eventually became the Five Families, and to set up a heroin pipeline from Sicily to NYC. I don't infer any benevolence in his extortion and coercion.

The Matranga family of New Orleans is generaly considered to be the first US Mafia family. Here's what Wikipedia says about them:

Born Carlo and Antonio Matranga in Sicily, the brothers immigrated to the United States with their family and settled in New Orleans during the 1870s where they eventually opened a saloon and brothel. Using their business as a base of operations, the Matranga brothers began establishing lucrative organized criminal activities including extortion and labor racketeering. Receiving tribute payments from Italian laborers and dockworkers, as well as from the rival Provenzano crime family (who held a near monopoly of commercial shipping from South American fruit shipments), they eventually began moving in on Provenzano fruit loading operations intimidating the Provenzanos with threats of violence.

"Protecting" workers and shopkeepers? Or extorting them?

What's your point Turnbull? 3 Mafiosi using extortion tactics doesn't make the Mafia scumbags. And maybe I forgot to mention that the "Old Mafia" I was talking about was the one in Sicily, NOT the one in the U.S. But the one in the U.S. used to have the same honor like the one back in Sicily at one point in time back then, until they got greedy. I know you're trying everything to prove me wrong, but extortion does not prove that the Mafia is made up of all scumbags. The Mafia was not perfect, it had some bad things about it, but it did do some good things like the protection of Sicilian peasants and Italian immigrants.

I agree with ITB that not every single mobster is a lowlife. I'm not saying they were saints but I just don't think its fair to assume that every single person to ever be in the mafia was/is a dirtbag. Although the vast majority of them are. I also think that there was a teensy bit of honor in the early 20th century Mafia

I agree with TB that the mafia aren't robin hoods but extortionists. I never bought into the robin hood myth about the mob because they would threaten these people into paying and if they said no, their shops were trashed and sometimes they would be physically assaulted. It isn't protection, it's extortion

"Honour" is quite a vague abstraction, though, and romantic too. It's not beneficial, historically, to categorise anybody - be it Napoleon or a neighbourhood thug - as either honourable or a dirtbag. There's no real worth in that kind of thinking.

Crime isn't a product of individual will; it's a social problem. It's quite embarrassing to have to point out that organised crime - that under which the Mafia falls - seeks organisation, a collective harmony (its hierarchy, its rules, its secrecy; all of these result in notions/misconceptions of 'honour') that allows it to operate as a fully functional organism. And it's criminal not only because it's against the law, but because its fundamental operations, which it requires in order to function, are set up so as to gain wealth at the expense of other people.

If the historian is to be of any use, the Mafia must be studied as a major aspect of social crime.

Agreed

You seem to be drawing your own conclusions from Dickies information.

Excerpt from COSA NOSTRA: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (you pedantic douch you)
by John Dickie: Pgs xvi & xvii of the Prologue

"In 1890, the mafia was already a murderous and sophisticated criminal association with
powerful political connections and an international reach."

"We owe it to Falcone and his colleagues if the myth of rustic chivalry has now, at
last, been dispelled."

And then, Pg 25, Chapter 1:The Genesis of the Mafia 1860 - 1876, Sicily's Two Colours:

"It was during the troubled years of the 1860's that the Italian kingdom's ruling
class first heard talk of the mafia in Sicily. Without having a clear idea of what
it was, the first people to study the problem assumed that it must be archaic, a
left-over from the Middle Ages, some symptom of the centuries of foreign misrule...
...The great estates worked by droves of hungry peasants who were exploited by brutal
bosses. Many Italians hoped and believed that the mafia was a symptom of this kind of
backwardness and poverty, that it was destined to disappear as soon as Sicily emerged
from its isolation..."

Pg 33, Dr Galati and the Lemon Garden:

"Protection rackets, murder, territorial dominance, competition and collaboration
between gangs, and even a hint of a code of 'honour';...many of the central
components of the mafia method were being employed in...the early 1870's"

Pg 100,Chapter 3, Corruption in High Places 1890-1904 The Sangiorgi Report

"Among the innumerable documents now held in Italy's Central State Archive
in Rome is a restricted file containing a report, submitted to the ministry of the
Interior in installmants between November 1898 and January 1900. The report was written
by Ermanno Sangiorgi, Cheif of Police of Palermo....The report tells of 218 "Men of
Honour"...THe report tells of the mafia's initiation ritual and code of behaviour.
It sets out its business methods, how it infiltrates and controls the market gardens,
how it forges money, commits robberies, terrifies and murders witnesses"

The sad stoy of Bernardino Verro. He thought he could help the people with mafia
power but was killed basically when he lost faith and tried to leave a gang that put
profits over people.

You've picked a bad book to make your case. No-one could read that book and concur that
the mafia was at any time ever really beneficial to the people of Italy.

I wouldnt argue that there were friendly neighbourhood God-Fathers, guys that
everyone came to for advice, who donated money & gave food to the poor
(Shit, Joey Merlino tried it) and were known as the wise, genial village dons.

Those same "Dons" oversaw the protection rackets and extortionate practices that fleeced
the fathers and husbands of the same women and children they "provided" for.

Im sure your going to scour the book and find scraps of sentances that seem to prove
your point, but im positive they'll invariably go on to say that any such notions are
false. You've obviously made up your mind on the matter, so its cool. I mean, shit,
who am i to say that your great, great, grand-father wasnt one of the "friendly"
God-Fathers. And read more on the Ndrangheta.

Sorry for the long post.

What's your point?

that your wrong.

That post doesn't prove that I'm wrong.

Take this crap off the boards. If you two wanna continue, get a room somewhere.

I don't wanna continue, Mr. Meatballs over here for some reason just loves to be an asshole.

One more crack like that and you won't continue here. Stop it now. Be smart and don't even respond to this warning!!

EDIT: You've been suspended once before for this same crap. Take a month off now to think about what you're doing here. See you in October. (SC)

I remember reading and hearing about the Sicilian Vespers. It happened over 700 years ago when the French occupied Sicily. A pretty young girl was dragged into a church and raped by a French soldier. Her mother found out and ran through the street yelling "ma fia ma fia". The girls fiance found the soldier and stuck a knife in him, but the mothers cry ma fia bacame the cry of the united Sicilians as they kicked the French off their land. That's really how the Mafia was started, it really started off as a good organization. If you had a problem with your daughter getting raped or any other problems you could take it up with the local Don of your village, and he would take care of the issue if it was worth taking care of. These days It's nothing but an organization of double crossers. There's also a play about the Sicilian Vespers.

I started reading this thread, it was interesting. But all of a sudden it started becoming a flaming thread with a lot of crap. The last few posts are better again.

My first comments:

* We are comparing the Sicilian Mafia with Robin Hoods in some posts. But to do that we must first have a clear understanding of what a 'Robin Hood' is. Robin Hood also killed people, robbed and did stuff what isn't called legal.

* Also I think it's very hard to compare those two mafia's. Old vs. New. Totally different community, different ways of communication, different ways of economic fraude/crime, internet, feudal system and republic (or at least different ones)...in two words: not comparable.

True.