Because family is at the heart of the Mafia
To study mafia marriages, first, you need to find the mafiosi. See Part 1 of this series. To study the marriages of Mafia members requires several steps. First, there is the identification of members of a secret, criminal organization. A few, like members of Giuseppe Morello’s family, and the bosses of Corleone, have been written... Continue Reading →
There’s a classic illustration of exponential growth, that goes something like this: a king agrees to play a chess match for a prize: a single grain of rice on the first square of the chessboard, two grains on the second square, and so on, doubling the number for each of the 64 squares. The king... Continue Reading →
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 →
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 →
"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 →
Cousin marriage, and double in-law marriages, reinforced familial bonds among the Fratuzzi of Corleone.
Mafia Genealogy 