The Godfather is a patron

The scene early in The Godfather film where Amerigo Bonasera meets with Don Vito Corleone exemplifies the conflicting institutions of American-style legal justice and Sicilian clientelism.

Bonasera was right about one thing from the beginning: he knew that he couldn’t straddle two worlds. Although he was bound to the powerful mafioso through compareggio — Don Vito was the godfather of their daughter — at first Bonasera chose to be a good American. He distanced himself, refusing to be drawn into the web of indebtedness and loyalty that friendship with Don Vito required. Through terrible misfortune, Bonasera discovered that he could never be satisfied by American justice, and begged the Godfather to let him back inside the traditional institution: not that of godparenthood, but of clientelism.

Friendships like this fictional one between a mafioso and an undertaker belong to a network of unequal relationships in Sicilian society, one that cleaves the social classes: binding them together at the same time that they maintain and highlight their stratification. This is clientelism in a nutshell.

Last month, when I wrote about the padrone who figures in so many early Italian settlements in the United States, I described “a man with a thousand friendships,” John Albano, who took a particular interest in every immigrant from his home region in Naples to Springfield, Massachusetts. He helped them find money to travel, a place to live when they arrived, employment, and every kind of service they might need as foreign laborers, from translation and remittance to rough justice. A padrone is a mafioso in a particular milieu and role, but everywhere you find them, mafiosi use their networks of clients — their partiti — to increase their own power.

Manutengolismo, or clientelism, is a system that is used throughout Sicily to do business. Clientelism is a traditional institution in Sicily: it’s how people there expect to get certain things done. The distinctive relationships of clientelism connect two people with different levels of status, wealth, or influence. These are not peer friendships. One of the friends is a patron and the other is a client, and it’s very apparent to both, who is who. 

Clientelism is pervasive in Sicily even today, and yet the institution is so alien to Americans that we look right past it. Peers are free to form a friendship for no reason other than that they enjoy one another’s company, but cross-class friendships in the Sicilian culture (and some others) have a deeper purpose. Don Vito expects his friends to be friendly: to invite his wife over for coffee, to bring a gift to his daughter’s wedding. He also expects them to be indebted to him. He can do favors few men in the world can pull off. When Bonasera kisses Don Vito’s hand, the Godfather accepts Bonasera’s friendship and agrees to do him a very large favor. This is not a friendship of equals.

Regardless of its social function as a point of exchange for goods and services between people from different classes, clientelist relationships are not without human sentiment. They take many of the same forms as friendships of equals, like bringing a gift or asking advice, and they are designed to last a lifetime. The client feels loyalty to his patron, and the patron feels a sense of obligation. It is mutual care, but with a vertical orientation, as between parents and their children, or a celebrity and their fans. 

The Mafia is built upon traditional Sicilian values and institutions including the extended family, compareggio, and clientelism. A cosca or Mafia gang is based on clientelist relationships. Members of the cosca are loyal to the boss. Bosses have partiti, or networks of loyal clients, each personally related to him in the same way as his soldiers, but with different, personalized obligations on either side. When Don Vito’s oldest son was killed, he brought the body to his good friend, who he could trust to do an excellent job. It was not that Don Vito had paid in advance, and now they were even: he could pay for such a transactional relationship if he chose. Vito Corleone demonstrated the depth of his friendship and Bonasera was socially bound to return it in kind. For the rest of their lives, neither would ever be free from the obligation of friendship to the other.

There is a romance to the Sicilian patronage system that the American or European alternative lacks. A disorganized set of patronage relationships, each of them fraught with human frailty and emotion, takes the place of a system of laws in which everyone is treated the same. Given Sicilian history, the human connection with a powerful person is much easier to believe in. Even today, there are doors in Italian society that are supposed to provide equal access, but which only certain people can open.

Patronage maintains the same hierarchies that its dyads bridge, and cements them with sympathy. The patron and his client genuinely care about one another, even if it’s in a different way than they care about their family and close friends. To a degree, they internalize one another’s needs and values. Don Vito and the undertaker understand very well what the other one is going through, what they want, and how best to help, and outside of a film in which the action must be explained to the audience, they would do it without a word.

The client knows exactly how much his patron needs him, and vice versa. After all, this is not a new arrangement. People have been using patronage ties to circumvent bureaucracy, unjust laws, byzantine courts, and other brutal realities for centuries. However, their genuine sympathy doesn’t bring their social classes any closer together. The patron doesn’t give away half of what he owns; he gives a tiny fraction, and gets something just as valuable in return. On the other hand, the client utterly relies upon what the patron will give him just to survive. Their positions couldn’t be further apart. The ancient dyadic bond separates and siloes the great majority so that each of them feels special and cherished, and nothing changes. 

Sources

Gambetta, D. (1993). The Sicilian mafia: The business of private protection. Harvard University Press: Cambridge.

Giordano, C. (2017). A disenchanted view of organized crime: mafia, personalized networks and historical legacies. Int J Res Soc Anthro (IJRSA) Vol. 3, Iss. 1. Pp. 9-18.

Lupo, S. (2009). History of the Mafia. Translated by Antony Shugaar. Columbia University Press. (originally published in 1993)

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