Book presentation: The Mafia Before the Mafia: The Case of Messina

"The mafia in Messina had and has supreme and wise leaders, in second rank the good guys in yellow gloves, in third rank the stabbers and hitmen, in the last line the thieves": so reported Giuseppe Borghetti, prefect of Messina in 1875. And yet, Messina is a quiet province, it has always been claimed, ever since the mafia issue appeared on the national political scene in the aftermath of the Unification of Italy. Even then, the reports of questors and prefects, which denounced the presence of widespread criminal profiteering, were countered by the vigorous testimony of the local elite, which insisted in contrast on the tranquillity of the city and the other provinces of eastern Sicily. Making use of largely unpublished archival sources, the book dwells on the public debate on Messina's criminality, also in its overseas articulations, as it emerges from the debates and parliamentary enquiries of the 1870s, from the trials for association of malefactors, and from the coeval press. Within these ‘arenas’ of action and meaning, the discourse on the Mafia, and in particular the one in Messina, takes shape, intertwining with the more articulated scenario of political struggle and the management of public order. It is the mafia before the mafia that gives the volume its title.