May 18, 2024, 07:28
8 min read
Two days, 17 and 18 May, of studies on the mafia and anti-mafia, in Palermo, at Palazzo Steri, seat of the rectorate. The national multidisciplinary conference on “Mafias and anti-mafias today” is organized by the University of Palermo, by the departments of Political Science, Law and Economic Sciences. We publish the speech of the journalist Roberto Puglisi of Livesicilia.it, at the information round table.
The boss’s sunglasses
For a reflection on the representation of the mafia it may be useful to start from the capture of Matteo Messina Money. With a premise that must accompany us: representation is perception. And with a question: what’s behind the sunglasses of MMD, the acronym with which his bloody shadow is summarized?
We all remember that January 16, 2023, we remember where we were, what we did. How we remember everything: what we were doing, where we were, on May 23rd and July 19th 1992. And this is the first objective data to establish.
Our generation, like previous ones, she had been accustomed to preserving her memory in the crystal case which contained a tragedy and therefore a defeat for the State such as the death of Giovanni Falcone, Francesca Morvillo, Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro, Vito Schifani, Paolo Borsellino, Agostino Catalano, Emanuela Loi, Vincenzo Li Muli, Claudio Traina, Walter Eddie Cosina (when we remember the martyrs of the massacres, they should all be named by name and surname).
Then, with subsequent generations, we learned to remember the details of the state’s successessuch as the capture of Totò Riina, Bernardo Provenzano and, indeed, Matteo Messina Denaro.
Arrest and denialism
But precisely with the capture of the super fugitive a phenomenon that was in some ways unprecedented, at least in its dimensions, occurred: the extremist denialism of those who minimized the dynamics of a great investigative coup, resulting from the professionalism and self-sacrifice of those who wrote a significant and memorable page.
Let’s remember those surreal allusions to the fact that the boss ‘had handed himself in’. Apodictic statements that are not missing in the background of every excellent arrest, but which, in this case, caused much more sensation and noise. Why did this happen?
There are some answers in an interview with Professor Costantino Visconti, published on LiveSicilia.it, nine days after Messina Denaro’s arrest, on January 25, 2023.
The first answer is in the form of a question and is the professor himself to choose the rhetorical formula of the question that allows us to glimpse the physiognomy of an explanation.
“Because we are not able to express unanimous satisfaction for the capture of the last exponent of a bloody era? – says Visconti -. Why are there those who start from the surreal assumption that she was almost staged? Many have thought about a negotiation, to use a fashionable term. First there was the negotiation that justified the fugitive, then the negotiation to explain the capture. In short, a perennial negotiation. Why?”
“Because there is a general mistrust in the state. A form of atavistic distrust towards institutions. A subculture that generates both the mafia and a part of the anti-mafia of suspects. There is an underlying root, a communicating vessel between those who are on the bad side and some who, being on the good side, cannot help but fill every event with conspiracy thoughts. This objective link is, precisely, distrust in the State. Obviously I distinguish very well and know the difference between friends and enemies of the mafia. But it’s a paradox that I encounter.”
And again: “The prospect of living without the mafia scares us. As if we couldn’t psychologically give up even a negative point of reference, a horrendous certainty, but certainty nonetheless.”
Professor Visconti himself, with another jokethis time for the newspaper Future, commenting on the turning point in the investigation into the murder of the trade unionist Mico Geraci, stated:
“Cosa Nostra is a social animal that adapts to the times. Continuity is constituted by the exercise of violence as a form of domination over the territory. The change lies in the recruitment mechanism which, thanks to the uninterrupted repression of the State, now no longer allows the availability of highly criminal personnel”.
Cosa Nostra – recalls Visconti – has difficulty proposing criminal personnelso to speak, ‘quality’, because the State reaches where it did not reach before.
The State, therefore, changed the trend of the game and it is winning, at least in terms of repression. Can it be denied? It being understood that it is always necessary to monitor, investigate and control.
The ‘invincible’ mafia
Obviously, a different world of meanings passes through between the very fierce mafia of yesterday and the mafia considered eternally invincible. But the second definition is much more rooted than the first in the feeling of time. The mafia that can’t be beaten is a much more popular idea than the mafia that can win, but can also lose. Once again, then: why? Why do you think that a boss cannot be defeated by investigators who are better than him? Why does such a representation-perception exist?
This is the intersection where everything comes together. The astonishment at the capture of the Messina Denaro boss considered untouchable is the litmus test of the idea of an equally impervious mafia. Or defeated only by his will. Once again: why? Here are some hypotheses.
Because we were all traumatized by the blood of the heroes and of the innocents that were scattered. The horrendous myth of Cosa Nostra was confirmed in ’92, with the terrible and profoundly mistaken idea that an organization capable of killing two judges, protected by a massive escort, was capable of any bloody undertaking, as well as unbeatable. Subsequent reporting showed that this was not the case.
There is also a temporal and psychological factor to do with it. For many generations the fight against the mafia has almost represented a collective redemption, after years in which Sicily has culturally ‘tolerated’, at least in part, a certain subcultural mafia which, perhaps, was not technically the mafia, but fished in the same polluted sea. The discovery of a true horror in 1992 led to the rebirth of an authentic anti-mafia culture.
But, due to a law that may perhaps seem paradoxical, in much of the shared imagination, the anti-mafia lives with more vigor, if the mafia is very vigorous. By direct contrast. We have rightly defined ourselves with an identity contrary to our historical enemy, but it is as if we had remained entangled in his very breath.
And it’s as if just imagining him weakened, that enemy, would also weaken our laboriously achieved conscience. This is an understandable suggestion which, however, must be overcome. The anti-mafia does not need the mafia to survive. If one day the mafia disappeared, the relevance and value of a vaccine, of a social antibody, would remain to prevent a new spread.
Marketing and anti-mafia
And then there is another conjuncture – in the background, not too much in the background – which does not concern the anti-mafia itself, which is the symbol of a clear story of redemption, but its residual marketing. For this slice of a world, which has transformed a noble commitment into a career prospect, the mafia is the cornerstone. If it fails, the preamble to every climb ceases to exist.
Nor should the haziness arising from the fragmentation of the anti-mafia be underestimatedso it is no longer possible to give a unitary form to the word anti-mafia.
In fact, there are many anti-mafia groups, made up of respectable people, by sincere researchers of truth and justice, which, in some components, reflect an absolute and non-dialogue conception.
This trend has created a climate of division and mutual excommunications. A scenario that further confuses the ideas of those who would like to approach it with a critical, non-prejudicial approach. The sore issue is not the diversity of views and never will be, but the way in which it is agitated, precisely, to excommunicate someone.
And finally it has to do with it – and here we come to the final point – in the scenography of the supposedly invincible mafia, a certain representation that outlined the myth, albeit negative, of Cosa Nostra, rather than its physiology. An objective description was not possible, having to deal with a closed universe, explored by investigations and timely investigations, but always consigned to its obscurity. This is why the gaps have sometimes been filled with an evocative narrative.
Comics and reality
Messina Denaro himself has sometimes been shown as a comic book character à la Diabolik, with the availability of relationships and luxury cars in quantity. A James Bond of crime. A ‘living ghost’, complete with sunglasses and symptomatic mystery. A negative ‘myth’, of course, but still a myth, positioned alongside the bloody myths of Riina and Provenzano, credited with a repugnant guardianship of tradition, almost with an abject ‘sacredness’. And we know that the myth – even the myth that comes from an obscene story – carries with it an aura of invincible consistency.
The reality, however, in the case of Messina Denaro – behind his dark glasses – revealed a man – certainly endowed with support and power – sick and alone, with that loneliness which is not a material lack of company, because it is a total absence of humanity, even in the midst of a multitude.
A man as ferocious as he is banal, after all. A dull companion on an elevator ride, net of its proclaimed abjection. A derelict who ended his life locked in the prison of a tragic destiny that had been built with his own hands. Anything but a giant of news and history. An absolute loser.
The Cosa Nostra crime novel
The conspiracy theory, the lack of critical analysisthe confusion also arises from representations centered on the criminal novel of the mafia, rather than on the atrocious reality that surrounds it and which must be demystified: there is no greatness, not even sinister.
Naturally, this does not intend to diminish the very high and widespread value of all the news that allowed us to peek into an abyss.
But we cannot ignore a karst, popular and, perhaps, populist ‘literature’ either, at various levels, which, meeting the predisposition of a portion of the public, contributed to building the myth of the mafia in our perception. With what follows from it.
And where there is a myth there is always an alteration of the original things and facts. An anomaly that prevents correct analysis. An obstacle that can swamp the circuit of a true and informed anti-mafia. In the cone of shadow of a pair of sunglasses that are no longer in use.
Published on
May 18, 2024, 07:28
