I thought I'd share the Preface which is quite good!
"Once upon a time, three Spanish knights landed on the island of Favignana, just off the westernmost tip of Sicily. They were called Osso, Mastrosso, and Carcagnosso and they were fugitives. One of their sisters had been raped by an arrogant nobleman, and the three knights had fled Spain after washing the crime in blood.
Somewhere among Favignana's many caves and grottoes, Osso, Mastrosso, and Carcagnosso found sanctuary. But they also found a place where they could channel their sense of injustice into creating a new code of conduct, a new form of brotherhood. Over the next twenty-nine years, they dreamed up and refined the rules of the Honoured Society. Then, at last, they took their mission out into the world.
Osso dedicated himself to Saint George and crossed into nearby Sicily where he founded the branch of the Honoured Society that would become known as the mafia.
Mastrosso chose the Madona as his sponsor and sailed to Naples where he founded another branch: the camorra.
Carcagnosso became a devotee of the Archangel Michael and crossed the straits between Sicily and the Italian mainland to reach Calabria. There, he founded the 'ndrangheta.
BLOOD BROTHERHOODS IS A HISTORY OF ITALY'S THREE MOST FEARED CRIMINAL organisations, or mafias, from their origins to the present day. But no historian can claim to be the first person drawn towards the mystery of how the Sicilian Mafia, the Neapolitan camorra, and the Calabrian 'ndrangheta began. Mafiosi got there first. Each of Italy's major underworld fraternities has its own foundation myth. For example, the story of Osso, Mastrosso, and Carcagnosso (names that mean something like 'Bone', 'Masterbone', and Heelbone') is the 'ndrangheta's official account of its own birth: it is a tale told to Calabrian recruits when they prepare to join the local clan and embark on a life of murder, extortion, and trafficking.
As history, the three Spanish knights have about as much substance as the three bears. Their story is hooey. But it is serious, sacramental hooey all the same. The study of nationalism has given us fair warning: any number of savage inequities can be committed in the name of fables about the past. Moreover, in the course of the last 150 years, Italy's criminal brotherhoods have frequently occluded the truth by imposing their one narrative on events: all too often the official version of history turns out to derive from the mafia's myths, which are a great deal more insidious than the hokum about Osso, Mastrosso, and Carcagnosso might initially suggest. No ordinary gang, however powerful, has lasted as long as the mafias, nor has it had the same drive to control how its own past is narrated. The very fact that the mafias value history so highly betrays the outrageous scale of their ambition.
Mafia history is filled with many outrages much worse than this. Acts of appalling ferocity are the most obvious. The mafia's cruelty is essential to what they are and what they do: there is no such thing as a mafia without murder, nor has there ever been. Yet violence is only the beginning. Through violence, and through the many tactics that it makes possible, the mafias have corrupted Italy's institutions, drastically curtailed the life chances of its citizens, evaded justice, and set up their own self-interested meddling as an alternative to the courts. So the real outrage of Italy's mafias is not the countless lives that have been cruelly curtailed - including, very frequently, the lives of the Mafiosi themselves. Nor is it even the livelihoods stunted, the resources wasted, the priceless landscapes defiled. The real outrage is that these murderers constitute a parallel ruling class in southern Italy. They infiltrate the police, the judiciary, local councils, national ministries, and the economy. They also command a measure of public support. And they have done all this pretty much since the Italian state was founded in 1861. As Italy grew, so too did the mafias. Despite what Fascist propaganda has led many people to believe, the criminal fraternities survived under Mussolini's regime and even infiltrated it. They prospered as never before with the peace and democracy that have characterised the period since 1946. Indeed, when Italy transformed itself into one of the world's healthiest capitalist economies in the 1960s, the criminal organisations became stronger, more affluent and more violent than ever. They also multiply and spread, spawning new mafias and new infestations in parts of the national territory that had hitherto seemed immune. Italy is a young country, a modern creation, and the mafias are one of the symptoms of modernity, Italian style.
Today, in the areas of Italy where criminal power is strongest, it constitutes nothing short of a criminal regime. In a secret dispatch from 2008 that found its way onto theWikileaks site, the United States Consul General in Naples reported on Calabria. One might quibble with one or two of his statistics, but the core of the diagnosis is as true as it is dispiriting:
The n'drangheta organized crime syndicate controls vast portions of [ Calabria's] territory and economy and accounts for at least three percent of Italy's GDP (probably much more) through drug trafficking, extortion, and usury... Much of the region's industry collapsed over a decade ago, leaving environmental and economic ruin. The region comes in last of the politicians we met on a recent visit were fatalistic, of the opinion that there was little that could be done to stop the region's download ingeniously suggested that organized crime is no longer a problem... No one believes the central government has much if any, control of Calabria, and local politicians are uniformly seen as ineffective and/or corrupt. If Calabria were not part of Italy, it would be a failed state."
"Secret societies have existed among all people, savage and civilized... It is beyond question that the secret societies of all ages have exercised a considerable degree of political influence..." - Manly Hall in "The Secret Destiny of America"
~Bella
