Book review: Blood Brotherhoods: The Rise of the Italian Mafias
THE Sicilian mafia and its Neapolitan equivalent, the Camorra, owe their existence to lemons and mozzarella cheese
Yes, other factors were involved. But as John Dickie’s magesterial account of the formation and early years of the southern Italian criminal fraternities makes clear, without those simple comestibles their life would have been so much
Dickie has followed his bestseller Cosa Nostra by looking beyond the shores of Sicily at the mezzogiorno’s two other secret societies: the Camorrista of Naples and the ‘Ndrangheta of Calabria. In Blood Brotherhoods he shows how, with the Mafia on the other side of the Straits of Messina, this triangulation has formed an alternative state within and without Italy since the nation was born.. Their ‘Ndrangheta has grown, silently, almost unobserved and undisturbed, to become in Dickie’s words “the most powerful mob of all”. Could that be, perhaps, because Francis Ford Coppola made no films about them?
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