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A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived
https://archive.md/bzPSR https://archive.md/bzPSR
- alexpotato 8mo agoMy mom, who is from Italy, has some great lines about the Mafia: "Italy will never go bankrupt b/c we have the Pope AND the Mafia" I once asked her how the Mafia was reined in and she mentioned: "The Mafia was once trying to kill some judge or politician and they blew up several hundred meters of highway to do it. They also killed a lot of innocent people and the outcry was so big that the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) got involved."
- pizza234 8mo ago> the Carbinieri(Italian FBI) Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US. Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb".
- fragmede 8mo agoDepends how your bubble portrays the FBI to you, I suppose.
- toyg 8mo agoCarabinieri have been involved with (and occasionally fighting) the mafia since late 1800s. That's got nothing to do with how we got to the current situation of relative tranquility. What happened between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s was that, because of continuous feuds among mafiosi that produced too many civilian victims, political connections broke down, particularly with a few especially vicious bosses. Laws were passed to isolate the worst offenders, new connections were brokered with more moderate mafia leaders, and eventually the "bad" bosses were magically found, hiding more or less in plain sight.
- LtWorf 8mo agoThere's carabinieri in every 600 inhabitants village. Them being involved isn't any kind of big deal. I think people who don't live in italy and have no understanding about italy are allowed to not comment on things they don't know.
- easyThrowaway 8mo agoIt's... a bit more complicated than that. That episode, the Falcone Judge murder, was a bit of a last straw in the way most of italian political parties had dealt with mafia till that point. They realized the issue couldn't be contained to the sicilian cultural and political environment and they couldn't be... that much complacent (they still are, but at least they try to save face when they're found). Long story short, every political authority at the time was pretty much aware the murder was going to happen, they just didn't expect a terrorist-like approach. Once we got to that point, a newish department, the DIA[1] was given full authority to handle the issue... again, for a time. Then it went swallowed up too in the neverending whirpool of shit that is the Italian politics. In the meanwhile, the Mafia got smarter, and rather than going in a full frontal attack with the authorities, they became much more... diplomatic, offering indirect support trough some proxies to some newly political figures that emerged shortly after. You probably heard about that Berlusconi guy. [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direzione_Investigativa_Antimafia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direzione_Investigativa_Antima...
- jimnotgym 8mo agoI always thought it was fascinating how the Sicilian mafia started. Basically the English demand for lemons to prevent scurvy grew much faster than any institutions to control it. Protection rackets rose to control the trade. https://theconversation.com/citrus-fruits-scurvy-and-the-origins-of-the-sicilian-mafia-89986 https://theconversation.com/citrus-fruits-scurvy-and-the-ori...
- weinzierl 8mo agoReminds me of the story of Andre Camara, who photographed a favela drug war in the mid 80s. Take away: criminals are vain too.
- jama211 8mo agoYup, they want to be documented. Tale as old as time.
- articulatepang 8mo agoFor those who don’t know: the film City of God is based on this, and it’s a great movie. One of my all-time favorites. The directing, acting photography and storytelling are all very well done. Worth anyone’s time.
- arwhatever 8mo agoI could watch it once a year, indefinitely.
- barrenko 8mo agoI have to rewatch what, been a decade.
- noduerme 8mo agoFrom 2002. It's crazy how happy I was to have 360p mpeg rips back then. I'm gonna have to re-pirate it tonight.
- rayiner 8mo agoSame thing with the Taliban: https://apimagesblog.com/blog/2021/10/4/taliban-portraits https://apimagesblog.com/blog/2021/10/4/taliban-portraits By the way, there is a Taliban who looks exactly like Christian Bale: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/13EB0/production/_88448518_dfe037a7-d514-4ddb-b87b-3127fd2b72bb.jpg.webp https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/13EB0/pr...
- reddalo 8mo agoOff topic, but I'm always amazed by Archive.md/.is/whatever. To this day I don't understand how they manage to bypass a lot of paywalls. The mystery about the owner makes it even more intriguing.
- LordHeini 8mo agoI think archive has mostly news, random articles and such. And as they say nothing is more worthless than yesterday's news.
- ventegus 8mo agothetimes.com has a paywall if you visit it from the UK, and full content if you are in the US. entonces, US-based archive.org "bypasses" this paywall as well: https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.thetimes.com/culture/books/article/sicilian-man-leonardo-sciascia-rise-mafia-struggle-italy-soul-caroline-moorehead-review-lbsbd2p5w https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.thetimes.com/culture...
- jama211 8mo agoI just assumed they copied it into their own db
- amouat 8mo agoI assume they just pretend to be the Googlebot so the site just gives the text.
- dewey 8mo agoWon’t work for any popular site. You can try that easily by using extensions to set the user agent. If you are not checking the public list of IPs that Google publishes for the crawler you are doing it wrong.
- moffkalast 8mo agoGiven to how many people its existence must be incredibly infuriating, it's so odd that it's not being chased down with more haste than pirate bay was. I mean I'm glad it's not, but kinda surprised.
- null_deref 8mo agoIt angers me that Fascist Italy could push the Mafia to the brink of extinction but Democratic Italy can’t.
- markus_zhang 8mo agoMafia exists because legal entities refuse to take responsibilities —- oh it’s too expensive to do X so we will leave it alone or legalize it. So eventually the underground takes over and Mafia becomes quasi governments. To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as well so is not everyone’s cup. Some societies prefer a stronger central government and some don’t.
- fragmede 8mo agoDoes it need to be centralized?
- markus_zhang 8mo agoAfter a bit of thought, no it doesn’t. Actually a better way is to have strong citizens than a strong central government.
- locallost 8mo agoOne Mafia pushed the other out. No improvement for normal people.
- MrBuddyCasino 8mo agoThey can, they just don’t do it. This is the case in every western „liberal democracy“.
- alecco 8mo agoThey just loooooove the campaign contributions.
- newsclues 8mo agoModern version has spawned TV show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Saviano https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roberto_Saviano
- lormayna 8mo agoSaviano is exactly one of the "antimafia professionals" that Sciascia complained about.
- newsclues 8mo agoSciascia Died in 89, Saviano was 10 years old and wouldn’t start writing until the early 2000s.
- lormayna 8mo agoIt's not about the year of birth, it's about the role. Saviano creates his own career with mafia and now is acting as opinionist to any other option (i.e. now about the constitutional referendum that "will enforce the mafia"). Falcone, Borsellino, Livatino, Don Puglisi (just to mention people that paid with their own life) fight heavily against mafia, but they never converted this fight in a career.
- newsclues 8mo agoMaybe it’s lost in translation but my argument is semantic. Saviano may be the type that was warned about but not the one.
- toyg 8mo agoThis is an unrealistic argumentation, usually deployed to paint contemporaries in a bad light by comparing them to "saints" who are, conveniently, always dead. And it's particularly funny that Borsellino is now in the "saints" category, when he was explicitly namechecked by Sciascia himself in the newspaper column that originated the term "anti-mafia professional". Falcone also got extremely close to becoming the national anti-mafia czar, because his career had been defined by that very subject. Both were killed precisely because they specialised in this area and refused to move elsewhere. Sciascia was 67 when he wrote that column, and was likely just aggrieved by the fact that national response to the mafia was escalating to levels before unseen (for a number of reasons). He might have had a point about another name-checked personality, the politician Leoluca Orlando, who survived those terrible times and ended up ruling Palermo for more than 20 years - something a lot of people see as realistically incompatible with actually being the anti-mafia hardliner he is supposed to be. Saviano, however, is just a specialized journalist.
- antirez 8mo agoSciascia, btw, is one of the biggest thinkers and writers of '900. It is not really defined by his mafia-related novels and takes. He used to be friend with Borges, and was regarded as one of the top men in humanistic culture. Disclaimer: I was born in a town (Campobello di Licata) near his town (Racalmuto), but I'm not saying this because of this fact. If you never read Sciascia, I suggest you starting from his last, tiny novel: "Una storia semplice". I believe there are English translations that can be found around as ebook or used on eBay.
- silcoon 8mo agoTruly great Italian literature. Also “The day of the Owl” is another famous Sciascia’s book with old mafia theme.
- nine_k 8mo agoNit: I suppose you mean 1900s, not just "'900". I mean, one could reasonably suspect that good writers existed in Italy in early 10th century, too.
- Tom1380 8mo agoSee my other comment
- etherus 8mo agoAs an aside, do you use dvorak as your keyboard layout? The ' for 1 typo is quite rare with qwerty, but I could see you meaning '1900s, though that becomes two characters in a short space. Thanks for the recommendation!
- sooheon 8mo agoThe 2020 adaptation of ZeroZeroZero, mentioned in this article, is one of the best crime shows I've ever seen, with basically zero buzz. Pretty interesting reading the reason for the authenticity.
- rayiner 8mo agoDo all countries have something like an Italian mafia? Is there a German or British mafia of a similar scale and sophistication, but we just call them something else?
- j3th9n 8mo agoIn The Netherlands it’s called D66.
- toyg 8mo agoThere used to be, but afaik modern networks are largely led by Balkan groups across the whole of Europe.
- WorldMaker 8mo agoIn America some non-Italian mafias do get labeled as "a mafia" by the FBI. Generally the distinguishing factors between a "gang" and a "mafia" in FBI nomenclature is scale, sophistication, and organization structure/principles. In general, it being a "family operation" (trusting blood family over government or family as government) is a large factor, and often the "omerta" principle is a requirement (that's a strong, core collective binding to secrecy; "omerta" if held as a strong principal "breaks" the prisoner's dilemma game as a law enforcement tool). The Cornbread Mafia, taken apart by the FBI in the 1980s, is one interesting example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornbread_Mafia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornbread_Mafia
- Carrok 8mo agoMost just call them the government.
- lIl-IIIl 8mo agoDoes the government engage in human trafficking, prostitution, drug trafficking, illegal gambling, racketeering, identity fraud, etc?
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]