Mafia: A Global History by Ryan Gingeras

Author:Ryan Gingeras
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Published: 2026-02-12T00:00:00+00:00

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The world media took in these and other conclusions with astonishment. Newspapers and television stations in Europe and elsewhere devoted ample space and airtime to the investigations led by the American Congress. In the Soviet Union, testimony before the Senate and the House of Representatives inspired the popular spy novelist, Youlian Semyonov, to pen his own version of the events that led to Kennedy’s death in Dallas. It was China, and not the CIA or Cuban mercenaries, who had the president killed, wrote Semyonov. Yet it was members of the Mafia, as he imagined it, who most probably pulled the trigger.139 Beneath the surface of this global fixation, events in the United States were leaving a more subtle series of impressions on international observers. By the close of the 1970s, the contemporary language of Hollywood and the American press resounded within the reporting of local affairs elsewhere in the world. Heads of Marseille’s crime families were less frequently referred to as caïds, but as godfathers, or parrain. Bosses in Mexico also came to be depicted as padrinos who led mafias of their own. In Turkey, the absence of any cultural equivalent to a paternal ‘godfather’ was of little relevance. Major narcotics traffickers, who previously were known simply as bosses or patrons, came to be called babas, or fathers, in honour of the translated titles of Coppola’s films. Before The Godfather, no one referred to the head of a local cosche as a padrino. They were known more affectionately as compare, the proper term for any man who becomes a godparent. With time, however, even notorious bosses in Sicily were pictured posing in a manner that mimicked Marlon Brando.140

These trends pointed to a new global consensus surrounding the nature and significance of organised crime. From the 1970s on, the term ‘mafia’ was used everywhere. Often despite the absence of evidence, many assumed mafias existed in their locality. The organisational structure or code described by Joseph Valachi became a near universal point of reference. Events in the United States, in other words, were increasingly internalised and became an instructive base of understanding or comparison. What many learned from Cold War scandals concerning the American Mafia went beyond issues of crime. Governments the world over, it seemed, were the keepers of terrible secrets. Mafias could be a part of a nation’s establishment, perhaps in tandem with officials, business leaders and celebrities. Calamities and acts of intrigue took on new relevance in the eyes of critics outside of the United States. What books and newspapers revealed about a country’s past or present was progressively looked upon as only part of the story. Great and small states possessed secret histories that only a select few truly knew or understood. Over time, the public everywhere came to suspect that mafias were a part of that history.

One cannot attribute these changes solely to the effect of The Godfather or the drama that unfolded after the death of JFK. They were symptomatic of the terror and disbelief generated by the Cold War.

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