Mafia, politics and finance: an ever stronger bond.
The mafias now represent an increasingly transnational criminal phenomenon. There is now an indissoluble trinomial: mafia, politics and finance. The mafia can be defeated if these three bonds that allow organized crime to become more and more powerful and dangerous are broken. The mafia has fully entered politics, finance and the virtual world, which is why it knows no crisis.
The students of the School of Public Affairs and Administration at Rutgers University in Newark in the United States talked about it with Vincenzo Musacchio — a jurist, professor of criminal law and one of the most important expert of organized crime.
Professor Musacchio, why are mafias so powerful?
They are powerful because they have links with politics, the economic and financial world and with civil society. Mafias are accepted and tolerated because they often suit many. This is the real disaster.
Have they changed over time?
Absolutely yes! In recent years they have almost entirely replaced the use of violence with the corruptive method. Better to bribe than to kill. Corruption serves the mafias to produce and secure wealth in absolute silence.
Is it still linked to the territory or is it now a global phenomenon?
The logistical and command bases are always territorial (Sicily, Calabria, Campania, Puglia) but the organization of the new mafias is similar to a multinational that has branches added all over the world. The advent of drugs has enriched the mafias in an unimaginable way and globalization and international finance have made them become a transnational criminal phenomenon. The mafias today are real “mixed holdings” that do business in every sector of the legal and illegal economy and dominate the markets with their enormous financial resources. The money of the mafias is also suitable for the markets, consequently politics and economics often have interests in common with the mafia.
Is it so difficult for you Italians to fight the Mafia?
No, it is not at all. If you wanted, the mafia could be defeated just as terrorism was defeated. The problem is that since the end of the “Maxi Process” and with the death of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the fight against the Mafia has actually stopped. According to Borsellino, politics and the Mafia are two powers that live on the control of the same territory: either they go to war or they agree. I believe that after the massacres of Capaci and Via D’Amelio they reached an agreement. Today politics more and more often uses Mafia electoral support, in exchange it guarantees contracts and subsidies. In such a context, fighting the mafias is almost impossible.
What do mafias do during this global pandemic crisis?
Any crisis, of any kind, is an opportunity for the mafias to be seized on. Earthquakes, pandemics, financial and banking crises, are all situations where you can profit without mercy for anyone. This is the modern mafia that has great ability to adapt to the historical moment in progress. In times of economic crisis, those who have the money dictate the law and the mafias have it and many too.
How important is the school in the fight against the mafia?
I would say that it is decisive, especially in the future. My teacher Antonino Caponnetto argued, rightly, that the mafia feared school more than justice and that education removed grass under the feet of mafia culture. How to blame him? Knowledge and study are crucial in the fight against mafias. It is impossible to think of fighting them only with the laws, the police and the judiciary. School leads you to reason and to the mafia who thinks, and consequently is free, do not like it.
Don’t we also need new laws?
Obviously yes. To combat transnational mafias, international standards and cooperation between the police forces and the judiciary at the supranational level are needed. To highlight the mutability and evolution of the mafias, I tell you that when the state fought the mafias at a national level, they were already operating at a European level, and when Europe will have suitable legislation to fight them, the mafias will have already consolidated their power. internationally. This is to make you understand that the mafias are always one step ahead of the states that would like to fight them.
Vincenzo Musacchio, jurist and professor of criminal law, is associated with the Rutgers Institute on Anti-Corruption Studies (RIACS) in Newark (USA). He is a researcher at the High School of Strategic Studies on Organized Crime at the Royal United Services Institute in London. He was a pupil of Giuliano Vassalli and a friend and collaborator of Antonino Caponnetto.
