So what is the Mafia? Short question — but it requires a lengthy answer that spans a lot of geography and history. It covers varying cultures and story lines: Some provable historical and some mythic.
The exact origins of the Sicilian Mafia are as obscure and as mythic as the stories of Romulus and Remus founding Rome. In America, the members of the organization just called it “Our Thing,” which was everything, and nothing.Some have claimed that the organization was born during the Sicilian Vespers. Others, that it sprouted at some point after one of Sicily’s endless conquests by foreigners. Others claim it never really existed (there is something Borgesian about this–see “The lottery of Babylon”).
Interestingly, the New England Mafia members themselves had their own mythology of their organization’s origins. A lengthy ceremony of baptism, over which Raymond Patriarca Jr. presided, offers a view into what the American Mafia thought of its own genesis. (We’ll get back to the ceremony later.)
Boston Mafia Beliefs We have an idea of what the New England members believed, even if wasn’t exactly derived by apply strict historical method. “Everybody fight this thing. They call it Cosa Nostra…they call it my organization, and this and that, and the Mafia,” said one Sicilian-born Boston mafioso.
Presiding over the notorious Medford baptism (bugged by the FBI, the gangster said: “It is Mafia. We got together to call it La Cosa Nostra, Mafia, or organized crime….In Sicily, they all get together because there was a lot [of] abuse to the family, to the wife, to the children….”
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