0199217912.pdf by Nieizviestno

Author:Nieizviestno
Language: rus
Format: epub
Published: 2011-03-20T13:20:22+00:00

5

THROUGH THICK AND THIN

Thechildthankstheshopkeeperandwalksoutofthe

door, his loaf under his arm. As he leaves, a man steps across the threshold. He ignores the stock and does not make his business immediately clear, but the shopkeeper has a good idea what it is. The man has a proposition to make. There are threatening characters in the area, he says, who are liable to rob or wreck business premises such as the shop in which he is standing. For a regular payment, in cash, the organization which the man represents will protect the shop against such assaults.

To the general public, wise to the ways of organized crime through its viewing of television and movies, that kind of protection is a racket. The threatening characters are the man and his associates, who are demanding money with menaces.

They are simply parasites, doing nothing but harm to those whose money they take.

This may be the greater part of the truth, but it leaves the question of why the idea of the protection racket has become so established and familiar. Why have criminal groups apparently been so concerned to suggest that they are offering a service? From the account given by the sociologist Diego 76

through thick and thin

Gambetta, the answer appears to have roots in the policies of the Spanish Habsburg and Bourbon rulers who controlled southern Italy from the eighteenth century until the country’s unification in 1861.1 The watchword of each dynasty was divide and rule, the Bourbons taking particular pains to promote hatred between Neapolitans and Sicilians.

According to contemporary critics, the Spaniards destabi-lized commerce through capricious or corrupt financial measures and undermined the rule of law. Money was frequently counterfeit and bonds were false, discouraging trade and driving the cost of loans to exorbitant rates. The eighteenth-century political economist Paolo Mattia Doria even charged the Spanish rulers with destroying the relatively free and equal relations that had flourished between the sexes. After they had imposed their masculine code of honour, ‘a conversation with a woman seems more like worship at a shrine than a discussion.’2 Much of what they did, summarizes Gambetta,

‘can be seen as the promotion and selective exploitation of distrust’.3

The result, he suggests, is a society which finds it difficult to trust itself, and is correspondingly unable to achieve the kind of cooperation that has made the northern part of Italy economically dynamic. In Palermo, the capital of Sicily, it could not even manage to establish a radio-taxi service like those which operated in all the other major cities of Italy. The normal modus operandi in such services is that when a customer requests a taxi, a dispatcher announces the customer’s location, and drivers report how near they are; the nearest driver takes the job. This system requires a degree of trust through thick and thin

77

between the drivers, since it is possible for them to lie about their locations. A service was launched in Palermo in 1981, but it foundered amid accusations of cheating. If any driver had a good day, his fellows would be sure that it was for a bad reason.

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