Cosa Nostra - “our thing” (trans.: Italian)

This is a name that sometimes refers to the Sicilian Mafia that originated on the East Coast of the U.S. during the late 19th and early 20th century during the Italian diaspora as waves of poor immigrants landed on the shores of the East Coast of the United States of America. Some people say that this is the secret name of the original mafia in Sicily and that the Cosa Nostra in the U.S. is an off-shoot of that organization.

The Mafia in the United States of America is associated almost exclusively with organized crime, and many of the individuals who associate themselves with the Mafia are in fact criminals. However, the origins of the Mafia in Sicily arose from the need of the common people to create a system to protect themselves from powerful oppressors. Some of these oppressor were the official, but disreputable, rulers of the territories where these common people lived who often came to power themselves by conquest and violence visited on the locals.

In the United States the neighborhoods filled with poor immigrant Italian families were the perfect breeding ground for the same ideas to flourish. Many of these neighborhood were sites where the previous immigrants to the United States began to take advantage of these newly arrived Italian immigrants, preying upon them and taking advantage of their poverty. These predators often included police, lawyers and judges who denied these people either justice or opportunity. So the natural reaction seemed to be for these people to take the law into their own hands.

In these terms the Mafia is often seen by the locals as the alternate law in the land. The Mafia from this perspective referred to outlaws who had taken back the local territory from the occupiers and oppressors, and were in fact the protectors and benefactors to the locals.

The basic form of organization in the Mafia is a system of “families” who control a certain territory. The members of this family include both members who are such by virtue of blood ties as well as those who join regardless of the lack of these direct blood ties. All members who are accepted into the “family” must swear an oath called “Omerta.”

Omerta is basically a blood oath of silence and loyalty to the death. Omerta preexists the Mafia and was kind of code of honor among local families who would keep their secrets whatever they might be from the outsiders who occupied the land, including anyone representing the laws these outsiders imposed upon the locals.

An interesting thing that carried over to the original Mafia that arose to take back what the locals considered to be theirs in the first place was the unique concept of honor as it is prescribed in the law of Omerta. Even if someone was accused of a crime they did not commit they were not to speak a word in their own defense. They would instead accept the consequences and then seek their vengeance on their own or be avenged by their own for accepting the consequences of keeping the oath of silence. Of course this made it extremely difficult for outsiders to control or impose their rule of law with the locals. This idea strengthened the original Mafia and the more it strayed to criminal activity the more this historical pattern served them and made it difficult to investigate their activities and convict them of crimes they might commit.

There is surely little honor in being a criminal, yet it is still interesting to note that the source of the ideas that became distorted in what is currently referred to as the Mafia sprang from deeply honorable ideas and sources. Ultimately those who are in power at any given point in time get to say what is just or unjust, and history then views them from the perspective held by the historians. While it would be difficult to agree with any criminal behavior as being just it is clear that what is considered just behavior at one point in space and/or time can be viewed as criminal from another space and/or time, e.g.: slavery, regardless of the fact that every agricultural civilization in history had some form of it, or profiteering such as seen in what are now considered to be the scandals associated with significant, legitimate businesses such as Enron, WorldCom and Tyco or the activities of the mega oil companies reaping outrageous profits during gas shortages and the inflation of oil prices worldwide.