Because family is at the heart of the Mafia
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 →
How fascism moved from left to right, and the Mafia’s enduring relationship with Freemasonry. The historic relationship between the Mafia and Freemasonry is a fascinating one, for the role that its members have taken in world events. It’s a story that unfolds over centuries, crosses oceans, and takes many turns. But once I started asking... 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 →
Lucky Luciano built the Genovese monopoly on gay nightlife in New York City in the 1930s. The Stonewall Inn was the site of a violent protest against police raids---and against mafia involvement in gay bars. Ed "The Skull" Murphy (top right) was working the door of the Stonewall Inn the night of the famous riot. Of the... Continue Reading →
Are Toto Riina and Tommy Reina related? A few days ago, I discovered that I confused the histories of two different gangsters from Corleone, Toto Riina (b. 1930- ) and Luciano Leggio (1925-1993), in this blog, a couple of weeks ago. I wrote that Leggio’s father was killed in an explosion that was, in fact, based on... 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 →
Dr. Michele Navarra and his successor, Luciano Leggio, dominated the Corleonesi Mafia after World War II. A few months before Domenico Liggio married, in the summer of 1834, he lived with his widowed mother and an older brother, Salvatore, near the ancient Ospedale dei Bianchi in Corleone: the same hospital Dr. Michele Navarra would run,... Continue Reading →
"Mafia" is a feminine term that means beautiful and proud. Paradoxically, women are both essential to and excluded from the criminal organization. At the turn of the twentieth century, the mafia in Corleone was led by members of a new agrarian bourgeoisie (“nuova borghesia agraria”) of estate managers for absentee landlords. Author and labor organizer Dino Paternostro... Continue Reading →
The keys to finding a mafia connection in your own Sicilian heritage: know your family, and the world they lived in.
Mafia Genealogy 