Italian journalist and crime expert Antonio Nicaso recently gave a talk at Trinity College about the Mafia and how its depictions in the media glamorise a grimy reality.
Italian journalist and crime expert Antonio Nicaso recently gave a talk at Trinity College about the Mafia and how its depictions in the media glamorise a grimy reality.
The award-winning author is an internationally recognised expert on organised crime, and is himself a survivor of a Mafia attempt on his life in 1989. Following that he left for Canada and then the United States, where he taught at Middlebury College in Vermont, before returning to his home country where he is now living under escort.
Nicaso said he was aware of the Mafia since he was a young boy.
At the age of 16 he reported in a local newspaper on a car bombing in his native region in southern Italy, and since then he became deeply involved in the issue, feeling the need to encourage people to fight the attitude of omertà – or code of silence – that pervades in Italian society.
According to Nicaso, he had “two choices: between knowledge and indifference”.
He went on to discuss the spreading of the Mafia idea throughout the world, as well as similar criminal organisations such as the Yakuza in Japan and Russia’s vory v zakone, or thieves in law.
Nicaso explained how at the beginning of the 20th century, with five million Italians among the countless numbers of immigrants who flocked to the United States, criminal organisations found the right place to expand their business, especially during the prohibition era of the 1920 that “created the stage for the expansion of the criminal network”.
Even today these criminal networks persist, because of their deeply embedded connections with politics, said Nicaso. “The relationship with politicians is the backbone of Mafia power.”
