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Such murders, Buscetta told authorities, were not only the product of territorial rivalries but also the result of battles for top positions between new bosses, who had not previously been accepted by the majority of Mafia members, and old bosses, who often found themselves abandoned by their families. Much of the combat was between the Sicilian Mafia's two major factions, the Palermo gangs and the Corleone families. This ended a year ago, when the Corleone groups established a degree of hegemony and took four places on the ten-member commission.
Buscetta's revelations offered authorities in both the U.S. and Italy a deeper understanding of the ties between the New York and Sicilian Mobs. They challenge the widely held view of the Mafia as a centrally organized entity with branches in the U.S. and Sicily. Instead, they depict it as a looser network of groups in Sicily, the U.S. and elsewhere, linked by a combination of business, personal and family connections. Buscetta's disclosures, in fact, confirmed what investigators had first suspected several years ago, that there are really two Mafia groups working in the U.S.: one composed of the old families that began operating in the U.S. during Prohibition and later branched out into gambling, prostitution, labor rackeleering and, more recently, toxic-waste disposal, and the other a "branch office" established by one of the factions of the Sicilian Mafia. The Sicilian branch cooperated with the U.S. Mafia but did not take orders from it.
Buscetta showed, though, that these two Mafias need each other. The traditional U.S. families began with the immigrant "mustache Petes." They were succeeded by the gangsters of the 1920s and '30s, who were quick to settle their differences with violence. These founding godfathers eventually gave way to more sophisticated criminals, who discovered that buying politicians and law-enforcement officials was just as easy as, and more effective than, shooting them. But the modern U.S. Mafia has fallen on hard times, say federal authorities. With their sons and heirs becoming assimilated and choosing the boardroom over the back room, and with their ranks depleted by the Government's limited but expanding success at prosecution, U.S. capi since the early '60s have found themselves increasingly short of manpower. The Sicilian families have provided the new blood, sending over a generation of immigrants who are very tough and far more willing than their U.S. counterparts to submit to the discipline required of anyone who joins the Mafia's underground army.
The American dons liked the newcomers, who offered them the respect that they got all too rarely from their own offspring. But as one East Coast capo told TIME Correspondent Jonathan Beaty, the hot-blooded Sicilians have also escalated the level of violence in a world that already had too much of it. "This new generation," he sighed. "All they know is shoot, shoot, shoot."