Jonathan F. Shulz (2016) has shown that not only is consanguineous marriage highly significantly correlated with mafia activity, “cousin marriage is a highly significant and robust predictor of democracy.”
The Mafia without godfathers
Cousins, many times over
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 →
Three coasts
There were three men named Marino, on both sides of the Leggio-Navarra war in Corleone. One is related to two Mafia bosses. In my first post on the relations among defendants at the 1969 Corleonesi trial, I focused on the Leggio-Riina connections. Another set of defendants with a common surname are the Marinos, whose paternal... Continue Reading →
Legacy of the Rapanzino gang
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 →
A family business
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 →
The 1969 Corleonesi trial
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 →
Killer Queens
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 →
Mafia Genealogy 