Cosa Nostra
From the mafia's origins in the 1860s to its current tense relationship with the Berlusconi government, this is a vivid and gripping history of the Sicilian Mafia's inner sanctum.
Stats for nerds
2recommend
5mentions
4people
2012–2021years
60% recommend40% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- This book [1] goes into great detail on the history and origins of the mafia - including the lemons. It's a great read.
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Cosa-Nostra-History-Sicilian-Mafia/dp...
- For anyone interested in the history of the Italian mafia, I can't strongly enough reccommend this book: http://www.amazon.com/Cosa-Nostra-History-Sicilian-Mafia/dp/... (no affiliate link, I promise!)
It covers, in detail, this incident and talks about how it was a major turning point in people's perception of organised crime in Italy, and the change in attitudes of Italian people towards it.
- You're right.
Some people don't understand the importance of Mafia in all the world - maybe 100 years ago it was limited to Italy, then it moved to USA, to East-Europe and so on, but mass-media still say it's limited to Italy. Ok, keep on living in the wonderland, I can't say any more..
They're "using" what they've earned in decades of selling drugs, prostitution and so on. Now they're honest employers recycling money. That's it.
I suggest you to read some books from Salvatore Lupo (Giovanni Falcone's "Cose di Cosa Nostra" too is a good introduction, ...), an Italian historian, whose activity is centered to study mafia and its origins.
- Perhaps see the book Delizia!: The Epic History of the Italians and Their Food by John Dickie:
> In this “revelatory history of gourmet Italy from antiquity to today” (Publishers Weekly), the fascinating story of how one vast country comprised of uniquely distinct regions came to produce some of the most delicious and beloved foods of all time is expertly revealed.
* https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Delizia!/John-Dickie/...
(He also wrote Cosa Nostra, about the Sicilian mafia, and Blood brotherhoods: a history of Italy's three mafias.)
- It is not so easy, even to explain. Many books have been written about organized criminality in Italy and many have to be written yet. Consider that Cosa Nostra (the Sicilian Mafia) at the beginning of '90 had so much power that managed to start a negotiation with high functionaries of the Italian government about which laws could pass and which not (la "Trattativa Stato-Mafia", the "State-Mafia Pact"). In those regions, Italian government and organized criminality have been the same thing for a lot of time. Would you fight yourself?
Also, let me add that a radical approach had been taken by two judges, Falcone and Borsellino. They almost destroyed Cosa Nostra, at the cost of their own lives. They have been both murdered by Cosa Nostra, along with their security, in the 1992. For the curious, this is the wiki page of the State-Mafia Pact: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State-Mafia_Pact
