ITALY: The Blood of the Mafia

Blood, vengeance and silence is the ancient law of the lawless Mafia through out Sicily and southern Italy. One day last week, a witness in court broke the Mafia’s law. For the benefit of seven solemn judges sitting in an old stone courthouse overlooking the blue Tyrrhenian Sea, an ignorant peasant of Calabria and a former member of the organization told all that he knew. “I know they have sworn to kill me,” he cried, “but I don’t care. Justice will punish me for what I have done, and justice will punish them as well.”

In the Calabrian village of Presinaci, whose 100-odd mud-floored houses swarm with flies, black pigs and naked children, the Mafia leaders, in his telling, were a loutish collection of bullyboys dedicated to thievery, twisted honor and senseless violence. But the ritual they practiced was ominous with medieval significance. One night in 1941 Serafino Castagna was taken to a dimly lit hut for induction into the order. His arm was ritually slashed and his blood sucked by all the members present. With his wound still throbbing, he took the oath: “I swear by our noble ancestors, the Spanish Knights Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso, to be faithful to our honored society, to obey its code and to fulfill all duties imposed on me unto death.”

The Avengers. Serafino’s first jobs as a Mafia apprentice were relatively easy ones. He burned a farmer’s haystack to avenge an insult, stole a few chickens and an old pistol, memorized passwords and studied the elaborate cabalistic rituals. He went off to war, and when he returned in 1944 he was promoted from apprentice to “cabalist of the blood.” His cousin became chief of the secret society and began plotting crimes by the score. The gang pulled off about 30 jobs, though the biggest haul was a puny $65 hijacked from a touring motorist.

The new chief’s favorite pastime lay in avenging insults. Once Serafino was ordered to execute a fellow member for failing to pay a fine leveled by the Mafia. He succeeded only in wounding the offender, and though for his pains he went to jail for four years—and kept his ritual silence—the Mafia was not satisfied. After his release from prison, Serafino was ordered to kill a policeman who was being too nosy about slaughtered pigs. Serafino, out on three-year parole, pleaded for time.

While his superiors considered this suspicious request, Serafino reached a decision of his own. “That policeman,” he said later, “had done me no harm. I decided instead to kill off the Mafia.”

The Boiling Brain. “That night,” he told the court last week, “the blood boiled in my brains. I could not eat or sleep or even make love to my wife.” Next morning he rushed from his house to that of the Mafia chief. The chief was gone, so he killed the chief’s mother instead. An elderly couple approaching on the street tried to stop him as he left the house, so Serafino killed them both. Of the five people Serafino killed that day, only one was a member of the Mafia. “I wanted to destroy all my enemies,” he told the police, “but fate turned against me.”

During the next year in prison, Castagna did what he could to make amends, by giving the police a full account of his life in the Mafia. As a result, 19 of his former friends were jailed. Last week, gripping the bars of their cells with white-knuckled hands, they stared in cold hatred at their betrayer as he was led off to tell more of his story in court. “I’m innocent!” screamed one. But Serafino Castagna, on trial for murder, only shrugged. “We were all innocent,” he said, “when we sucked our mother’s milk. Now we have sucked the blood of the Mafia, and we are all guilty.”