A novelist who took on the Italian mafia and lived

It's not a typo. In Italian, we call the nineteen hundreds the nine hundreds in speech. So when we write it, we use '900s. As 900s without it would be the actual 900s

Truly great Italian literature. Also “The day of the Owl” is another famous Sciascia’s book with old mafia theme.

As an aside, do you use dvorak as your keyboard layout? The ' for 1 typo is quite rare with qwerty, but I could see you meaning '1900s, though that becomes two characters in a short space. Thanks for the recommendation!

Nit: I suppose you mean 1900s, not just "'900". I mean, one could reasonably suspect that good writers existed in Italy in early 10th century, too.

For those who don’t know: the film City of God is based on this, and it’s a great movie. One of my all-time favorites. The directing, acting photography and storytelling are all very well done. Worth anyone’s time.

Same thing with the Taliban: https://apimagesblog.com/blog/2021/10/4/taliban-portraits

By the way, there is a Taliban who looks exactly like Christian Bale: https://ichef.bbci.co.uk/ace/standard/976/cpsprodpb/13EB0/pr...

Yup, they want to be documented. Tale as old as time.

where is it mentioned?

ZeroZeroZero is by Saviano, article is about Sciascia.

In America some non-Italian mafias do get labeled as "a mafia" by the FBI. Generally the distinguishing factors between a "gang" and a "mafia" in FBI nomenclature is scale, sophistication, and organization structure/principles. In general, it being a "family operation" (trusting blood family over government or family as government) is a large factor, and often the "omerta" principle is a requirement (that's a strong, core collective binding to secrecy; "omerta" if held as a strong principal "breaks" the prisoner's dilemma game as a law enforcement tool). The Cornbread Mafia, taken apart by the FBI in the 1980s, is one interesting example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornbread_Mafia

There used to be, but afaik modern networks are largely led by Balkan groups across the whole of Europe.

Most just call them the government.

in Iran it's called IRGC

In The Netherlands it’s called D66.

Carabinieri have been involved with (and occasionally fighting) the mafia since late 1800s. That's got nothing to do with how we got to the current situation of relative tranquility.

What happened between the end of the 1980s and the 1990s was that, because of continuous feuds among mafiosi that produced too many civilian victims, political connections broke down, particularly with a few especially vicious bosses. Laws were passed to isolate the worst offenders, new connections were brokered with more moderate mafia leaders, and eventually the "bad" bosses were magically found, hiding more or less in plain sight.

It's... a bit more complicated than that.

That episode, the Falcone Judge murder, was a bit of a last straw in the way most of italian political parties had dealt with mafia till that point. They realized the issue couldn't be contained to the sicilian cultural and political environment and they couldn't be... that much complacent (they still are, but at least they try to save face when they're found).

Long story short, every political authority at the time was pretty much aware the murder was going to happen, they just didn't expect a terrorist-like approach.

Once we got to that point, a newish department, the DIA[1] was given full authority to handle the issue... again, for a time. Then it went swallowed up too in the neverending whirpool of shit that is the Italian politics.

In the meanwhile, the Mafia got smarter, and rather than going in a full frontal attack with the authorities, they became much more... diplomatic, offering indirect support trough some proxies to some newly political figures that emerged shortly after. You probably heard about that Berlusconi guy.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Direzione_Investigativa_Antima...

> the Carbinieri(Italian FBI)

Carabinieri are actually military-status police force in Italy, which is a different setup from the FBI in the US.

Calling them the Italian FBI, is ironically quite funny, because in Italy they’re the butt of a lot of jokes - "carabiniere" is a common stand-in for "someone dumb".

There's carabinieri in every 600 inhabitants village. Them being involved isn't any kind of big deal.

I think people who don't live in italy and have no understanding about italy are allowed to not comment on things they don't know.

I assume they just pretend to be the Googlebot so the site just gives the text.

I think archive has mostly news, random articles and such.

And as they say nothing is more worthless than yesterday's news.

Given to how many people its existence must be incredibly infuriating, it's so odd that it's not being chased down with more haste than pirate bay was. I mean I'm glad it's not, but kinda surprised.

Maybe they have a paid account? I don’t think there’s much magic behind

I just assumed they copied it into their own db

thetimes.com has a paywall if you visit it from the UK, and full content if you are in the US.

entonces, US-based archive.org "bypasses" this paywall as well:

https://web.archive.org/web/https://www.thetimes.com/culture...

Saviano is exactly one of the "antimafia professionals" that Sciascia complained about.

They pushed them out of Italy, which forced mafia to adapt in the US, eventually becoming richer and stronger. A much more powerful transnational mafia returned back to Italy.

The purpose of democracy is to create stable governance with peaceful transitions of power, so that people feel confident about the future and are willing to invest in long term things that require long term stability. It's not because we think the plebiscite are really wise and effective at governing, they're not, but stability is more important and ultimately more humane than government which is truly effective but not stable in the long run.

Mafia exists because legal entities refuse to take responsibilities —- oh it’s too expensive to do X so we will leave it alone or legalize it. So eventually the underground takes over and Mafia becomes quasi governments.

To eradicate you need a stronger central government that is willing to send its probes into the deepest of the society and has a strong hand. Unfortunately this also has unforeseen consequences as well so is not everyone’s cup. Some societies prefer a stronger central government and some don’t.

One Mafia pushed the other out. No improvement for normal people.

Did they? I’m pretty sure that’s just political propaganda of the regime.

With Putin's Russia transition to authoritarian and recently becoming fully totalitarian, the Russian Mafia of 90s (with the 90s being the most democratic time in Russian history), is pretty much no more. FSB and police have replaced them in the protection and extortion domain. Thus nowdays an arrested colonel of FSB or police may easily have a couple cubic meters of money (euro and dollars) at home, to the envy of many mafioso around the world. Or Chechnja - instead of many smaller (and poorer and less organized) warlords of 90s, now there is only one with personal army of 40000 and exploiting the whole region in the style of the most cruel mafia.

I don't doubt that a fascist regime can solve problems like organized crime effectively. This is because they don't need to care about human rights or the rule of law. The problem is that once the mob is gone, the fascists stay.

That’s just the state mafia replacing the other.

They can, they just don’t do it. This is the case in every western „liberal democracy“.

Why does that anger you? Democracy is fundamentally unable to solve such issues.