Mafia: How did the likeable, hospitable Sicilians manage to create one of the world's most vicious criminal organisations. Are they unusually evil, or is it just their misplaced code of honour?
Neither, says John Dickie, a London-based don (of the benign academic variety) in this well-written diagnosis of the wasting disease that is Cosa Nostra. Dickie rejects all explanations of the Mafia based on some general Sicilian "mentality", some vague original sin. He insists the Mafia is a discrete centralised organisation, shaped by historical forces, highly successful in adapting to changed circumstances. His findings - mostly convincing - are supported by careful research and copious documentation, all judiciously considered. Despite his racy narrative style, John Dickie is careful not to jump to conclusions - which are anyway hard to find in the stories he describes, with their tangle of atrocities, allegations and ubiquitous conspiracy theories. Dickie's basic materials are dark enough to justify the publisher's packaging of his work in a bulky, slightly bloodstained jacket. The book contains some powerful stories, scenes and surprises. Its abiding impression, however, is the appalling sadness of so many twisted, wasted lives.
The Mafia's origins reach back into the 19th century, when an inadequate Italian state conquered Sicily but failed to control it. The old feudal barons could no longer lay down the law, and the big estates needed protection. A criminal caste of middlemen filled the vacuum, extorting money from peasants and proprietors alike. These goons initiated their followers in fanciful rituals that drew on feudal and religious imagery - and official religion has often backed their efforts, either by complicity or through "culpable blindness". The current Pope finally denounced the "men of honour" in 1993; their response was a bomb in St John Lateran and the murder of an awkward parish priest.
The Italian state and the Mafia had come to terms as early as the 1870s: mainland politicians, even the seemingly upright, proved willing to work with criminal colleagues. The mafiosi themselves had no political agenda, being content to work with whoever held power. They developed an interest in financial services: their most prominent early victim, in 1893, was Emanuele Notarbartolo, an honest governor of the Bank of Sicily. The public outcry against the politician who had arranged Notarbartolo's murder was so overwhelming that the Mafia was deemed to be "in its death throes". Eleven years later, after two trials, Notarbartolo's assassins were acquitted for lack of evidence, and rumours of the Mafia's demise seemed to have been somewhat exaggerated.
Cosa Nostra has usually been able to count on a certain amount of collusion from policemen and judges. This happy state of affairs was rudely interrupted by Fascism, which in the 1920s adopted a jackboot approach to the men of honour. But all was not lost: in the US, Prohibition was delivering an incredible financial bonanza to their New York cousins (just as facile drug policies do today). When Mussolini finally fell, the patient mafiosi re-emerged triumphant, and threw in their lot with the Christian Democrats, who ruled Italy from 1948 into the 1990s, wedged into power by the Americans' veto on Communists in government.
There were two strands of Mafia business now: the territorial control of small districts in western Sicily, and the transnational organisation of trade in illicit goods. In the post-war years, Sicilian "families" set up a New-York-style commission to regulate internal disputes and keep everything smooth. Sicilians sub-contracted the heroin traffic for the American Mafia. Cosa Nostra companies were awarded government contracts to collect 40 per cent of Sicily's taxes. Times were good.
Then came the bloody internal wars of the 1960s and the 1980s, when hundreds of mafiosi died and hundreds more were jailed following a campaign by honest judges and policemen (duly assassinated).
Worse still, Cosa Nostra's Christian Democrat allies went into decline, and could no longer guarantee to have convictions sabotaged or overturned on appeal. Judges and even a leading politician were killed in reprisals by the supreme boss, Totò Riina. But Riina's ruthless paranoia drove many mafiosi to turn informer. Supergrasses, probably acting in bad faith, snared the longest-serving Christian Democrat statesman, Giulio Andreotti, in a trial for Mafia collusion. He got off.
One reason why the Mafia flourishes is a resistant strain of corruption in Italian public life, on a scale that leaves our own fiddlers in the ha'penny place. Will things improve under the current regime? Dickie dismisses the notion that Berlusconi could be a closet mafioso. The present prime minister is, however, extremely unsympathetic to those hyperactive magistrates who poke into his own business dealings. How warmly will he support their equally proactive colleagues who put the screws on alleged Mafia associates?
In recent years, the balance of public policy is shifting: witness protection for supergrasses has been undermined and their evidence devalued, while an enlightened Mafia leadership under Totò Riina's successor, the elusive Bernardo "The Tractor" Provenzano, is simultaneously offering reconciliation and enhanced welfare payments to any imprisoned comrades who might wish to recant unhelpful testimony.
Times could be good again for Cosa Nostra. It's a shame. Sicily is such a beautiful place.
• Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin is head of Italian at Trinity College, Dublin. As Cormac Millar, he has written a crime novel, An Irish Solution, to be published next month by Penguin Ireland