Social identities and political conflicts in internal areas
This article analyses the trials against organized crime in order to
highlight the net of relationships, both horizontal (territorial mobility,
parental relationships and property acquisitions) and vertical (bonds with
the political sphere and with the institutions of the state and the society),
through which the careers and the fortunes of characters, families and
groups of mafia of modest social origin are built. What comes out is an
image of the Mafia that goes well beyond the horizon of the latifundium
and the town hall. In fact, it appears as an organization with ability of
social control and projection in economic and political circuits of such
wide dimensions as to guarantee the persistence of a phenomenon to which
for too long it has been refused to apply the label of organized crime.