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There are other rules that, strictly observed, keep the Syndicate a tightly knit network closed to outsiders and so efficient that its activities—legal and illegal—are estimated to bring in more than $30 billion a year. The strength of the Mafia is based less on the corporate structure of a criminal organization than on the social organization of Sicily and southern Italy, whence most of the Mafiosi spring. There, notes Sociologist Francis Ianni, the rule of law is replaced by a social structure that is regulated by a code: each man must protect the family's honor and avenge any sullying of that honor. The code, says Ianni, is "an integrative behavioral system which binds families to each other throughout each village and town in a ritualistic web difficult for the southern Italian to escape but just as difficult for the non-Italian to understand."
Thus, to the Mafia, even murder is not abhorrent if it advances the fortunes of the family or wipes out a blot on its honor. "It's just business," killers in The Godfather explain to rivals whose friends and relatives they have machine-gunned or garroted to death. Not only that, but it is business with honor, and takes precedence over the law. Inside his family, says Ianni, the Mafioso is "highly moral and self-sacrificing." But outside, he recognizes no ethical force. Family members, as in Sicily, are bound together by "the web of kinship; of the participants at the famous Apalachin meeting, almost half were related by blood or marriage." Within that web, which is really "a pattern of social obligation that has more permanence than religion," favors become obligations and wrongs become "debts which demand redress."
So enduring is the web of kinship that only two things can alter it. One is the American value system, which is causing the Old World family structure to crumble and is weakening some of the once-powerful crime dynasties. According to Historian Humbert Nelli, the Mafiosi's respect for authority—a trait that used to cement loyalties—is decaying. For this reason, more and more Mafiosi are deciding to go straight. In one Mafia family that Ianni studied, only four out of 27 fourth-generation Italian-Americans are connected with organized crime. Of the remaining 23, one is a university professor, and all the rest are doctors, lawyers or legitimate businessmen.
The other force for change in the Mafia is less subtle. It is what Ianni calls "drastic action"—the kind being carried out on the streets of New York.
For a discussion of the psychology of murder, see Essay, page 54.
*Named for a Mafia contingent that originated in the Sicilian town of Castellammarese del Golfo.
*A family, in New York Mafia usage, is a gang of from 75 to 1,000 men, all of Italian descent, who are bound by a loyalty oath of blood and fire and organized into regimes, or squads, under the command of capos, who in turn take their orders from the underboss and the boss. Family members are often but not necessarily related by blood.