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  The three unknown knights represent demonic forces that must be overcome by a sgarrista. Significantly, the name Michael signifies “he who is like God,” and that is exactly what a high-ranking ’Ndranghetista is supposed to aspire to be. A half-burned image of the Archangel Michael—the kind used in initiation rites of the ’Ndrangheta—was found in the wallet of one of the victims massacred in a Calabrian family feud carried out in Duisburg, Germany, on August 15, 2007.

  The use of such rituals, however, raises the question of conscience and how the mobsters reconcile religion with criminality. The reconciliation can, perhaps, be explained with cognitive dissonance theory. The term was coined by the American psychologist Leon Festinger, who defined it as the strategy of explaining a condition of conflict or anxiety resulting from an inconsistency between one’s beliefs and one’s actions.[21] People will seek out information that confirms their own attitudes and views of the world or reinforces aspects of conditioned behavior, avoiding information that is likely to be in conflict with their worldview, since this will bring about cognitive dissonance (a sense of anxiety).

  Festinger initially conceived of the theory after reading an item in a newspaper that bore the headline “Prophecy from Planet Clarion Call to City: Flee That Flood,” in reference to a UFO doomsday cult that had been told by the leader that the end of the world would come to pass on a certain date. The prediction, however, did not come about. The disconfirmed expectancy caused dissonance in all group members. Some abandoned the group when the prophecy failed, but most attempted to downplay the event by accepting a new belief, namely, that the planet was spared because of the group’s resolve and faith. Festinger claimed that when people become uneasy and anxious after facing information that conflicts with their belief systems, they develop strategies to attenuate the dissonance they feel and often turn the contrasting information on its head, so as to make sense of it in terms of their belief system. One cannot simply join the Mafia or the ’Ndrangheta off the streets. He must wait to be admitted by showing his mettle and evaluated as a potential “knight of the order.” This might involve killing someone. This act binds the member to the clan for life, since the alternative (viewing the act as one of brutal murder) would create dissonance. The murder is thus justified as part of an honor code.

  The aforementioned rituals do indeed allow criminals to resolve cognitive dissonance since they evoke religious feelings and thus a higher cause. This is also why at each successive point of passage to the higher echelons of the clan, the religious symbolism becomes ever more binding. For example, in the ’Ndrangheta, the use of keys alludes to the biblical story when Jesus gave Saint Peter two keys—one gold and one silver—the former opening the kingdom of heaven and the latter symbolizing the spiritual authority of the pope on earth.

  A transcript of a recording made by the New Jersey police on July 19, 1990, in a house in the Bronx of five initiates into Cosa Nostra, brings out all the implicit premises, concepts, oaths, and beliefs connected with the initiation rite itself. We provide relevant excerpts here from that transcript (AP = Anthony Piccolo, acting boss; PM = Pasquale Martirano, prominent member of the Philadelphia crime family; GF = George Fresolone, an initiate):

  AP: If you stay you become part of us, then you have to do the right thing. Here it’s no bullshit, plain English. This is a family, you stay with the family, I’m your family. We can help each other. It’s got to be with the family. No outsiders. Anybody approaches you, it’s another place, it’s another family, you report to your man, whoever’s in charge. Don’t let nobody try to bullshit you, say hey this and that. This is our family, and that’s the way it stays.

  PM: You’re supposed to live by the gun and die by the gun, live by the knife and die by the knife.

  AP: This is a thing of honor. This is not a thing of business. A lot of people misunderstand that. This is honor. You’ve got to be a honorable person. . . . You don’t talk about none of your friends, because we become brothers. You don’t talk behind them, you got something to say, you see who’s in charge, get it squared away, and that’s the end of it.

  [Beginning of ritual of puncturing the finger and burning a sacred image]

  PM: Here know what you do? Come on George [an initiate]. I need a match. Or a cigarette lighter. . . . Give me your hand George. Got no blood George.

  GF: (laughs) That’s alright.

  [As the initiates hold the burning image in their hands each one speaks]

  “May I burn in hell if I betray my friends in the family.”[22]

  Initiation rites are found also in many motorcycle gangs. To join the Hells Angels, a prospective member must undergo an apprenticeship or trial period. The member must also know quite a lot about motorcycles and take part in “runs” as part of his apprenticeship. Once the member is accepted, he must assume a series of servile tasks to show his loyalty, including cleaning the clubhouse and washing motorcycles. After this period, the member is given his color, designating his rank. He can now vote at meetings. Like a Mafioso, a “member is required always,” writes Lunde, “to place the group before his family and business interests,” and those “who breach the rules can expect severe punishment and expulsion from the organization.”[23]

  The policeman W. P. Morgan gave the world a glimpse into Triad initiation rites in 1960, by publishing an account of his interviews and experiences with the gang. The rite takes place in a lodge, which represents the mythical “City of Willows,” and is headed by an Incense Master dressed in white alongside the group’s leader, dressed in red. All other members present are dressed in black. Color plays a significant role in marking rank and importance. The rite starts with a dance, as the prospective member approaches from the east gate, where he is challenged by another member, with whom he is expected to exchange a ritual handshake. Next he passes under swords held in the form of an arch and through three more gates guarded by statues of famous Triads. He then reaches the altar, stepping through a bamboo hoop. This has historical significance. It alludes to the legend of monks escaping from the Shao Lin monastery, and it symbolizes the member’s rebirth into his new family. He then takes the thirty-six oaths (as previously mentioned). His finger is pricked and dipped into a bowl containing spices, wine, ashes, and the blood of a rooster. The concoction is then shared by everyone in attendance.[24] It is important, again, to note how common blood symbolism is in criminal organizations. Some street gangs even name themselves after it, as do the Bloods, a gang originating in Los Angeles whose gang color is that of blood. As the “life fluid,” it defines what family groupings are all about, literally and figuratively.

  Rites (explicit or implicit) govern virtually every aspect of clan life. To commemorate the death of another Mafioso, the women are expected to dress in black and display their grief at the funeral by crying and praying out loud over the casket, as part of their family duties. As the weeping takes place, the capo, or some other high-ranking member, goes to the mother or wife of the dead Mafioso and attempts to hug her to console her. She is, however, expected to rebuff his consolation, beating her breast with her fists. The Mafioso must nonetheless insist on providing consolation, whereby she finally gives in and allows him to hug her until she stops sobbing to show resignation to the death. By so doing, the woman shows acceptance of the role of the Mafia in her life and acknowledges her submission to its principles of omertà. Such rituals are embedded throughout Mafia culture. As Lunde explains, “The true Mafioso looks after his crime family like a father, often serving as godfather to the children of his underlings, attending their weddings and funerals, and holding frequent, almost ritual banquets, where the seating arrangement reflects each person’s status in the family.”[25] The son of a Montreal Mafia boss, murdered in 2009, was buried in a gold casket, the ultimate in funerary ostentation. Significantly, a common tradition in the Mafia is that the person who ordered a murder will send flowers to the victim at his funeral, which is also seen in a part of the original Scarface movie of 1932,
when John Lovo, after ordering the murder of Big Lou Costillo, asks Tony Camonte to send a wreath of white carnations in the form of a cross to the Costillo family.

  The Mafia has adopted its own model of the patriarchal family, adapting it to define its own raison d’être. In so doing, it shows its rejection of the larger society’s nihilistic deconstruction of the family. The subtext is obvious: The Mafia, like Catholicism, respects traditional values and morals based on the family. This is perhaps what makes the Mafia so attractive to Godfather- and Soprano-crazy popular culture, which sees the Mafia as an oasis of traditional values in a morass of an “anything goes” culture.

  But Mafia culture twists these values for its own criminal objectives. The biblical commandment “Honor thy father” is warped to read “Honor thy capo.” The Mafia is all about power—power over women, power over other men, power over the government, and, subconsciously, power over death, since the Mafioso believes that he alone will decide when and how he will die. But such power is achieved, as Sir Walter Raleigh once put it, by devious means and thus has no real import on social development outside the clan: “All, or the greatest part of men that have aspired to riches or power, have attained thereunto either by force or fraud, and what they have by craft or cruelty gained, to cover the foulness of their fact, they call purchase, as a name more honest.”[26] And as the American writer James Baldwin so eloquently phrases it, the “relationship of morality and power is a very subtle one. Because ultimately power without morality is no longer power.”[27]

  The Power of Symbols

  Rituals without symbols would be meaningless. From the beginning of time, people have created symbols to help them understand the world. The Greeks symbolized the sun as the god Helios driving a flaming chariot across the sky, and the Egyptians represented the sun as a boat. In Babylonian myth, the hero Gilgamesh searched for a magical herb that made all who ate it immortal. Symbols stand for the phenomena of everyday life and transform them into abstract diagrams of these events, bearing great meaning. They assign a memorable form to events in the world, requiring no theory or explanatory science to grasp their meaning. They speak their own form of visual language.

  The symbols used by the Mafia tap into this “symbolic instinct.” As we have seen, the symbols of blood, fire, and hands are common ones. Blood is connected to life and rebirth and to family lineage (“related by blood,” “blood is thicker than water,” “bad blood”). Blood is also a pivotal part of the Catholic Mass, which is centered on the transformation of the body and blood of Christ into wine and bread. And blood binds people together. Many Asian organized crime organizations allow members through the requirement of guanxi, which loosely translates as “blood connections,” implying that they must be related by blood or marriage.

  The symbolism of blood ties in Mafia culture is explained cogently by Lunde as follows:

  In a world where power was arbitrary, safety lay in the family. The larger and more extended the kinship group, the more protected the individual, especially in a social system of vendettas, where honor demanded that no offense should be allowed to pass unavenged. An army of brothers and cousins was the best protection in an unjust world. Nothing is as important to a Sicilian as the ties of blood.[28]

  Symbolism affects people emotionally. Take, for instance, the symbolism of stabbing the hand (mentioned earlier). Murder cannot be carried out without hands; hands are indicative of collaboration (una mano lava l’altra, “one hand washes the other”); and, of course, the hand is a source of fear if it holds something hidden or dark (La Mano Nera, “the Black Hand”).[29] These meanings are all imprinted in the stabbing symbolism.

  The “Black Hand” symbol, discussed several times in preceding chapters, is particularly interesting. There is some controversy among historians regarding its origin. Some say that the early twentieth-

  century gangsters borrowed it from a Serbian secret subversive society following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary. His murder blocked the possibility that his sympathy for the Slavs would ease tensions between Austrians and Hungarians and the Balkans. He had organized a tour of Bosnia-

  Herzegovina with his wife, Sophie. As they made their way through Sarajevo on June 28, 1914, an assassin jumped onto their automobile, firing two shots and killing Franz and Sophie almost instantly. The murderer, Gavrilo Princip, was linked to a Serbian terrorist group called the Black Hand. Gangsters in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century were, purportedly, inspired by this episode.

  But, as Cawthorne and Cawthorne observe, this is not a viable theory, because the Black Hand in the United States had been in operation before the assassination in Sarajevo. In that era, journalist Lindsay Denison attributes the use of the symbol to an older secret society. Writing in the September 1908 issue of Everybody’s Magazine, he states that Black Handers traced their roots to a “secret society [that] fought the government and the church in Spain during the Inquisition and the [era of] secret societies of Southern Italy.”[30] The president of the United Italian Societies of New York during the era, Gaetano D’Amato, believed in a similar source for the symbol. He claimed that it had been used in Spain in the 1860s by a group of bandits who proclaimed themselves to be protectors of the downtrodden and that the term migrated to the United States “probably by some Italian desperado who had heard of the exploits of the Spanish society and considered the combination of words to be high-sounding and terror-inspiring.”[31]

  Whatever its origins, it is clear that the Mano Nera symbol, as D’Amato correctly remarks, shows how symbols can be used to instill terror in people. And as Denison goes on to say, it was also effective because the “very names of the Black Hand’s big chiefs are names of terror.”[32] It was not a Sicilian symbol, however, because “in Sicily,” writes Dickie, “this kind of abuse of a criminal logo used by the honored society would have been unthinkable.”[33] Black Hand criminal syndicates operated in such major U.S. cities as New York, Philadelphia, New Orleans, San Francisco, Detroit, and Chicago.[34] The idea of a Mano Nera coming out of the dark to crush anyone who did not comply with its demands inspired fear and guaranteed compliance to the extortion schemes. A Black Hand letter of threat would also contain some accompanying terror symbol, for example, a noose or gun, and it was signed in frightening black ink. It is reported that the great Italian American tenor Enrico Caruso received a Black Hand letter on which a black hand and a dagger appeared demanding $2,000. Caruso reported the threat to the police, dropping off the money at a prearranged location. Two Italian American businessmen showed up to retrieve the money and were arrested on the spot.

  Why would so many people be intimidated by such a symbol? In large part, it was a matter of the lack of trust in the American authorities, which Italian immigrants saw as taking a naïve stance with respect to the criminal gangs, as Cawthorne and Cawthorne point out, stating the following:

  Italian immigrants felt that American law had no understanding of their situation and no power to help them. They knew that the threats in Black Hand letters were likely to be carried out if they did not pay up. Italians were armed. According to an official at Ellis Island, the clearing station for immigrants, two-thirds of all male immigrants landing were carrying knives, revolvers, or blackjacks.[35]

  A group of Italians calling itself Mano Bianca (“The White Hand Society”) was eventually formed, claiming that they understood the character of the gangsters better than the U.S. authorities. The White Handers declared war on the Black Handers in vigilante style, but they did not succeed. The reason was simple: Italians did not believe that they would be any more effective than the authorities in stemming the power of the Black Handers. The code of secrecy that was brought along from the old world reared its ugly head in the new social environment. In Chicago, there was a famous incident involving the notorious “Shotgun Man” in the 1910s, who murdered more than a dozen people in the same area of town, the corner of Oak an
d Milton (known as “Death Corner”), in broad daylight during ten years of terror. The murderer was never identified, despite witnesses. The code of secrecy allowed the killer to go free. Black Hand practices disappeared toward the end of the 1920s, after public outcries to put a stop to them. The mobsters, however, were resilient, using more subtle methods to carry out extortion.

  The Black Hand symbol may be older than many think. Lunde traces it back to Corleone in Sicily:

  A notorious Black Hander was probably the first Mafioso to establish himself in New York. Antonio Morello headed a large family from Corleone, in Sicily. The town remains the base of the most powerful Mafia family on the island and was made famous in Francis Ford Coppola’s 1972 film The Godfather. Morello is said to have killed up to 40 people in the 1890s. Members of his family continued to operate until the 1930s, and some of his descendants are said to be involved in U.S. organized crime to this day.[36]

  Such symbolism is effective because it allows communication to take place by suggestion or innuendo rather than directly, thus creating a “menacing atmosphere” that allows for threats to be made more successfully than if the threats were blatant. The symbols of criminal gangs reach deep into our mythical past. As Reynolds puts it, “Much of the glamour and intrigue that outsiders associate with Cosa Nostra flows from omertà, the code of honor sealed in a secret induction ceremony that presses the sanctity of the code upon is members.”[37] It is no coincidence that the symbol of the ’Ndrangheta is the biblical tree of knowledge and that it is the rosary for the Sacra Corona Unita, a breakaway faction founded in Trani Prison in 1981 by Giuseppe Rogoli to resist the attempt of another crime group to move into the region of Puglia. The rosary symbolism taps into a deeply fervent belief system in the Virgin Mary, which is characteristic of Italian Catholicism in general, but particularly of its practice in Southern Italy.