This study examines the separatist movement's origins, its leaders and followers, the actions in which separatists engaged to establish a free Sicily, the factors that caused the movement's demise, and its legacy. This book also examines the relationship of the separatist movement to the United States, Great Britain, and the Sicilian mafia.
What should we make of the outsized role organized crime plays in conflict and crisis, from drug wars in Mexico to human smuggling in North Africa, from the struggle in Crimea to scandals in Kabul? How can we deal with the convergence of politics and crime in so-called 'mafia states' such as Guinea-Bissau, North Korea or, as some argue, Russia? Drawing on unpublished government documents and mafia memoirs, James Cockayne discovers the strategic logic of organized crime, hidden in a century of forgotten political--criminal collaboration in New York, Sicily and the Caribbean. He reveals states and mafias competing - and collaborating -- in a competition for governmental power. He discovers mafias influencing elections, changing constitutions, organizing domestic insurgencies and transnational terrorism, negotiating peace deals, and forming governmental joint ventures with ruling groups. And he sees mafias working with the US government to spy on American citizens, catch Nazis, try to assassinate Fidel Castro, invade and govern Sicily, and playing unappreciated roles in the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis.
An engrossing history that reads like a thriller. The Godfather meets Band of Brothers.' — Andrew Roberts 'Newark tells an extraordinary tale with pace and conviction, and impressively unravels what really happened from the pervasive myths.' — History Today 'A fascinating and compelling work on three of the most evil movements of the 20th century. It ought to be required reading for anyone looking for insights into the period.' — Richard Hammer The Mafia is the most powerful criminal organization the world has ever known. This book tells the epic story of how the Mafia was nearly destroyed by Mussolini, prospered in the US, struck a secret wartime deal with the US government, and then backed a bloody rebellion that nearly turned Sicily into an independent Mafia realm. It shows how Lucky Luciano won his freedom thanks to mobster help in World War II; how Jewish gangsters clashed with Nazis on the streets of New York; how Mafiosi nearly issued contracts to kill top Nazis including Hitler; how British bobbies patrolled the deadly streets of Palermo; and how Mafia-backed bandits conducted a guerrilla war for Sicilian independence. The Mafia at War is a provocative account of how a criminal organization exploited the grim realities of World War II to revive its fortunes and dominate global crime.
Using original documents, the Allied Occupation of southern Italy, particularly Sicily and Naples, is illustrated by examining crime and unrest by Allied soldiers, deserters, rogue troops and Italian civilians from drunkenness, theft, rape, and murder to riots, demonstrations, black marketeering and prostitution.
Even when armed conflicts formally end, the transition to peace is not clear-cut. This comprehensive volume explores the mounting evidence which suggests that it is rather ‘unlikely to see a clean break from violence to consent, from theft to production, from repression to democracy, or from impunity to accountability’. The authors analyse the complex endeavour of transitioning out of war, studying how it is often interrelated with other transformations such as changes in the political regime (democratisation) and in the economy (opening of markets to globalisation). They explore how, in the same way as wars and conflicts reflect the societies they befall, post-war orders may replicate and perpetuate some of the drivers of war-related violence, such as high levels of instability, institutional fragility, corruption, and inequality. This book thus suggests that, even in the absence of a formal relapse into war and the re-mobilisation of former insurgents, many transitional contexts are marked by the steady and ongoing reconfiguration of criminal and illegal groups and practices. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of political science and peace studies. It was originally published as an online special issue of Third World Thematics.
This book presents primary research conducted in Italy, USA, Australia and the UK on countering strategies and institutional perceptions of Italian mafias and local organized crime groups. Through interviews and interpretation of original documents, this study firstly demonstrates the interaction between institutional understanding of the criminal threats and historical events that have shaped these perceptions. Secondly, it combines analysis of policies and criminal law provisions to identify how policing models which combat mafia and organised crime activities are organized and constructed in each country within a comparative perspective. After presenting the similarities between the four differing policing models, Sergi pushes the comparison further by identifying both conceptual and procedural convergences and divergences across both the four models and within international frameworks. By looking at topics as varied as mafia mobility, money laundering, drug networks and gang violence, this book ultimately seeks to reconsider the conceptualizations of both mafia and organized crime from a socio-behavioural and cultural perspective.
This up-to-date introduction to the complex world of conspiracies and conspiracy theories provides insight into why millions of people are so ready to believe the worst about our political, legal, religious, and financial institutions. Unsupported theories provide simple explanations for catastrophes that are otherwise difficult to understand, from the U.S. Civil War to the Stock Market Crash of 1929 to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York. Ideas about shadowy networks that operate behind a cloak of secrecy, including real organizations like the CIA and the Mafia and imagined ones like the Illuminati, additionally provide a way for people to criticize prevailing political and economic arrangements, while for society's disadvantaged and forgotten groups, conspiracy theories make their suffering and alienation comprehensible and provide a focal point for their economic or political frustrations. These volumes detail the highly controversial and influential phenomena of conspiracies and conspiracy theories in American society. Through interpretive essays and factual accounts of various people, organizations, and ideas, the reader will gain a much greater appreciation for a set of beliefs about political scheming, covert intelligence gathering, and criminal rings that has held its grip on the minds of millions of American citizens and encouraged them to believe that the conspiracies may run deeper, and with a global reach.
This book addresses the numerous national movements of ethnic groups around the world seeking independence, more self-rule, or autonomy—movements that have proliferated exponentially in the 21st century. In the last 15 years, globalization, religious radicalization, economic changes, endangered cultures and languages, cultural suppression, racial tensions, and many other factors have stimulated the emergence of autonomy and independence movements in every corner of the world—even in areas formerly considered immune to self-government demands such as South America. Researching the numerous ethnic groups seeking autonomy or independence worldwide previously required referencing many specialized publications. This book makes this difficult-to-find information available in a single volume, presented in a simple format accessible to everyone, from high school readers to scholars in advanced studies programs. The book provides an extensive update to Greenwood's Encyclopedia of the Stateless Nations: Ethnic and National Groups around the World that was published more than a decade earlier. Each ethnic group receives an alphabetically organized entry containing information such as alternate names, population figures, flag or flags, geography, history, culture, and languages. All the information readers need to understand the motivating factors behind each movement and the current situation of each ethnic group is presented in a compact summary. Fact boxes at the beginning of each entry enable students to quickly access key information, and consistent entry structure makes for easy cross-cultural comparisons.
The bestselling author delves into his past and discovers the inspiring story of his grandmother’s extraordinary life She was black and a woman and a prosecutor, a graduate of Smith College and the granddaughter of slaves, as dazzlingly unlikely a combination as one could imagine in New York of the 1930s—and without the strategy she devised, Lucky Luciano, the most powerful Mafia boss in history, would never have been convicted. When special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey selected twenty lawyers to help him clean up the city’s underworld, she was the only member of his team who was not a white male. Eunice Hunton Carter, Stephen Carter’s grandmother, was raised in a world of stultifying expectations about race and gender, yet by the 1940s, her professional and political successes had made her one of the most famous black women in America. But her triumphs were shadowed by prejudice and tragedy. Greatly complicating her rise was her difficult relationship with her younger brother, Alphaeus, an avowed Communist who—together with his friend Dashiell Hammett—would go to prison during the McCarthy era. Yet she remained unbowed. Moving, haunting, and as fast-paced as a novel, Invisible tells the true story of a woman who often found her path blocked by the social and political expectations of her time. But Eunice Carter never accepted defeat, and thanks to her grandson’s remarkable book, her long forgotten story is once again visible.
