Because family is at the heart of the Mafia
While most of Rapanzino’s gang was exterminated by the police in the mid-1830s, their legacy continues, with a clear line of descent, all the way to the Five Families of New York and the Mafia in Corleone today. The Rapanzino gang of cattle thieves, active in the early 1830s in Palermo province, were closely related... Continue Reading →
There are many undocumented claims made about the relationships between notable mafiosi. One mafia writer who has led me on a merry chase for the mythical relations of Giuseppe Morello is Joe Bruno. In a blog post from 2005, he repeats the legend that Giuseppe had an older brother named Antonio. Antonio Morello was born... Continue Reading →
Sicilian names, first and last, are handed down through the generations. There has probably always been someone named Lucia Marino in Corleone. If we got into a time machine and went back to any of the last 400 years, not only could we meet a Lucia Marino in this town, we could also find a... Continue Reading →
Mafia leadership for the past hundred years in Corleone have all been related to one another, through blood and marriage. Cattle theft in Sicily, before the twentieth century, was like car theft today, in that it was a crime that required a village. A thief who takes a car needs a network of criminals to... Continue Reading →
In 1958, Luciano Leggio started a mafia war that lasted five years, and killed more than fifty people, starting with Dr. Michele Navarra, the former boss in Corleone. The victory was short lived, as police swept up dozens of mafiosi from Corleone and Palermo in the early 1960s. Three major trials were held in mainland Italian... Continue Reading →
The image of a saint was often burned in the initiation ritual into the mafia. The feast day of Saint Isidore, patron of labrorers, is 15 May. When the pioneering labor organizer Bernardino Verro joined the Mafia in the spring of 1893, he was inducted through a ritual involving his own blood, and the burning... Continue Reading →
At the height of the cholera epidemic, a foiled Republican plot for independence leads to mob violence. Strangers are the enemy in every story of Sicilian revolution. This is because the Sicilian story is one of constant invasion and foreign control. In 1282, during the Sicilian Vespers, anyone who looked or sounded French was killed.... Continue Reading →
There are two versions of the events of the twenty-seventh of May 1860 in Corleone. There is the version every person from Corleone knows and celebrates in a church festival each spring, in the month following Easter. And then there is what really happened. The popular story is that the revolution that birthed the Italian... Continue Reading →
The woods to the northeast of Corleone were a natural place to hide stolen cattle.
Even the biographies of well-known mafia figures like Giuseppe Morello are made up, in part, of rumors and legends. Morello was called “The Clutch Hand” because three of the fingers on his right hand were fused at birth. His birth defect did not prevent Morello from learning to write, or to fire a gun. It’s... Continue Reading →
Mafia Genealogy 