Word: buscetta
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Dates: during 1984-1984
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Poor assassins too. Buscetta is reported to have named those involved in Dalla Chiesa's murder and in other killings. He has also drawn a detailed picture of the entire structure of the Sicilian Mafia and explained how its elements relate to each other. The picture surprised some authorities, because it shows an organization that is more collegial than they had imagined...
According to Buscetta, the Mafia structure resembles a pyramid, whose base is composed of cosche, families or clans whose territorial and operational boundaries are strictly defined but whose chiefs bear little resemblance to the almost feudal Mafiosi depicted in The Godfather. In a startling statement, Buscetta disclosed that the capifamiglia, or family bosses, are elected and sometimes even fired by a vote of family members. He asserted that few such men were oldtime "men of honor," the occasionally benevolent criminals who were fully initiated into the codes and rituals of the Mafia. Only 8% to 10%, he said, met these...
...Buscetta explained it, the second tier of the pyramid is made up of provincial commissions throughout Sicily. These, he said, play a mediating and coordinating role among the families. The Palermo commission used to be the most important, Buscetta went on, but in recent years, the Corleone commission has displaced...
...assassination of an uncooperative Mafioso in New York. Sometimes this system works. But on numerous occasions, says Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist on the staff of the Italian legislature's anti-Mafia commission, it does not. In fact, Arlacchi warns against giving too much importance to the structure Buscetta has described. "Certainly there are divisions of territory, and Mafia chieftains do meet periodically to coordinate activities," says Arlacchi. "But more than 500 murders in two years of the Mafia's internal wars offer ample evidence that there is no structure that can always impose peaceful settlements of internal dispute...
Such murders, Buscetta told authorities, were not only the product of territorial rivalries but also the result of battles for top positions between new bosses, who had not previously been accepted by the majority of Mafia members, and old bosses, who often found themselves abandoned by their families. Much of the combat was between the Sicilian Mafia's two major factions, the Palermo gangs and the Corleone families. This ended a year ago, when the Corleone groups established a degree of hegemony and took four places on the ten-member commission...