Where do we go when we follow the money? The political-economic construction of Antimafia investigators in Western Sicily

ABSTRACT

This paper traces the changing role of wealth and movements of money in investigators' evolving anthropological imagination of the social structure of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and its relationship with its surrounding in key moments of Antimafia investigations in one Sicilian province over the past 40 years. The routes of money, which initially marked exchange-based relations between two otherwise mutually extraneous actors, gradually indexed a more complex combination of reciprocity, exchange, and redistribution both within the mafia legally constructed and in its relationship to its surrounding. At the same time, the public and official anthropological imaginary of the mafia-politica nexus permits only exchange between mutually-external parties or reciprocity as an entity-creating internal thread. As a result, the complexity of wealth, which investigations reveal by 'following money,' requires constant reduction to individual bearers of monetary worth and interests.

KEYWORDS:

• Criminalization and organized crime
• Sicily
• political economy
• anthropology of knowledge
• wealth

Acknowledgments

For their comments and suggestions, I am grateful to Theodoros Rakopoulos, Knut Rio and the participants in our workshop, as well as to Ørnulf T. Gulbrandsen, Salvatore Lupo, Jane and Peter Schneider, and Andrew Shryock. Research for his paper was supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation Post-Ph.D. Research Grant, Gonville and Caius College, and the Harvard Academy for International and Area Studies.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For a recent jurisprudential consideration of the Italian Supreme Court’s 2005 articulation of the ‘concorso esterno in associazione mafiosa’ see Costantino Visconti’s article (2012). For a critique of a recent verdict that follows this articulation, see Gian Carlo Caselli’s op-ed on a case involving the same defendant, Calogero Mannino (2015).

2 I thank Theodoros Rakopoulos for this phrase (cf. Kelsen 1945; Moore 1978).

3 The ‘Omega’ (contro ACCARDO Antonino+78) trial, which concluded more than a decade of connected investigations regarding the various threads of the ‘Second Mafia War’ in the Province of Trapani, reached a sentence in the first instance – the Trapani Court of Assizes (Registro Gegerale Sentenze no. 5/2000), on 19 May 2000. The quote comes from the opening page of the Part II – the mafia association called ‘cosa nostra’, Section 1 – the mafia association called ‘cosa nostra’: structure and organization, page 6.

4 Some legislative and prosecutorial initiatives between Palermo and Rome have recently attempted to change this; mostly by developing new tools for confront corruption as an associative crime (“PROPOSTA DI LEGGE – Modifiche Alla Legge 25 Gennaio 1982  … ” 2017).

5 Sentenza, Sezioni Unite della Corte di Cassazione no. 33748, 12 July 2005 (def. Manino Calogero).

6 Reciprocity here refers to the kind of postulated social relationship that conditions actors through the interests (and ultimately the fate) they share – the sort of social relationship that has grouping effects (Herzfeld 1985; Dresch 1986; Shryock 2012; Scheele 2014).

7 Lupo’s critique of the Palermo Prosecutor’s project to indict Andrreotti drives this point home – through his insistance to distinguish between how mafiosi ‘viewed’ Andreotti and what ‘the Mafia according to Andreotti’ was (‘Andreotti visto dai mafiosi’ and ‘la mafia secondo Andreotti’; Lupo 2007, 39–55).

8 Doc XXIII, n. 2quater – Commissione Parlamentare D’inchiesta sul Fenomeno della Mafia in Sicilia (legge 20 dicembre 1962, n. 1720) Relazione sull’ indagine riguardante casi di singoli mafiosi, pages 11–39, 213–240.

9 The Banda Licari investigation, during which Giovanni Falcone served as Public Prosecutor (Pubblico ministero, or pm), informed his initial awareness to the role of money in the mafia and in the ways to reconstruct its structure (Falcone and Padovani 1991).

10 These traits include

the ruthless elimination of uncomfortable rivals …  the use of threats and intimidation …  formal and false respect for authority …  the ability to obtain favoritism and illegal measures …  continued and compromising support for political authorities …  acquittals for lack of evidence …  informative relationships and accommodating administrative concessions …  [and] enrichment achieved with whatever means. (Cattanei 1972, 13)

11 The ‘mafia of the latifondi’ – refers to the stalk figure of the ‘traditionalist’ mafiosi whose interests were wedded to the ‘age-old’ world of the agrarian political economy of Sicily, and who as such were supposed to be agents of stasis, not change (for the critiques of this view, see: Lupo 2009; Schneider and Schneider 1994).

12 Rapporto giudiziario di denuncia a carico di RIMI Natale e altri, October 1982.

13 R.G. sent. 2/2014, del 15.05.2014, R.G.N.R. – D.D.A. – PA 2253/97, R.G.Ass.TP n. 7/2010, pp. 575 et passim.

14 As in the case of the ‘the king of the wind’; R.G. Misure di Prevenzione (M.P.) 68/2010 Tribunale di Trapani, contro Nicastri Vito ed altri.

15 ‘Imprenditore che nasce come piccolo imprenditore viene portato in alto dalla mafia quando il mafioso diventa il suo socio.’

16 An argument could be made that such actors tend to operate in those places that anthropology’s great kinship theories usually shun (Herzfeld 1985; Schneider 1990; Shryock 1997; Scheele 2008; Piliavsky 2015).