You’ve written a book about the Sicilian Mafia yourself. Given the subject matter, to what extent is this a dangerous activity? Are you putting your own life at risk?

It’s possible, yes! But since the beginning of the 1980s quite a lot of information has become available thanks to much more vigorous action by law enforcement agencies. So there are a lot of sources that you can read through and interpret in the comfort of your own room, without exposing yourself to any danger. But I did spend a year in Sicily in 1987, and those were extremely tense times, when the so-called Maxi Trial was happening and Judge Giovanni Falcone managed to indict 459 alleged Mafia members. And I was very, very careful, as you can imagine. My story was that I was researching informal dispute settlement – how did people manage to trust one another, or find ways to settle their disputes, in an informal way? I never said that I was specifically studying the Sicilian Mafia. If you go to Palermo and say, “I’m researching the Mafia,” they laugh a lot. First of all they laugh a lot, and then they kill you. Some of the things that happened to me – which, by the way, gave me an indication of just how subtle with communication Mafiosi can be – are described in my new book Codes of the Underworld. It’s real cloak-and-dagger stuff, like leaving a Neapolitan card, the Jack of Spades, on my doorstep. Which apparently in Southern Italy means something like, “Nosy fellow, should mind his own business.” Fortunately it was not the Queen of Spades. That represents death.

Your first recommendation, The Merchants of Violence, you describe as a classic 19th-century study of the Sicilian Mafia. Why did you choose this particular one?

I chose it because I think it is by far the sharpest early investigation of the Mafia. In 1875 Franchetti, the author, and a friend of his called Sidney Sonnino traveled around Sicily, and came up with a report on the conditions there, which was in two volumes. The one that was written by Franchetti was about the Mafia, which, incidentally, only got that name in 1863. Before that the Mafia wasn’t known as a collective entity. And one thing that Franchetti understood is that the Mafia’s origins were not to be sought in the remnants of feudalism, but, rather, should be seen as a consequence of the end of feudalism.

In what way?

Feudal laws had been repealed in 1812, which meant that there was a very fast increase in private property in the years following. People began to break up the big baronial and Church lands, to trade land, and private property began to appear. At the same time, another commodity was released on the open market: the armed guards that used to work for the feudal barons. They found themselves without jobs, as it were. And Franchetti understood that there began to be a market for their ability to use violence, mostly in connection with settling disputes. Those disputes arose from the fact that private property had emerged, without proper state institutions; property rights without customs that allow people to know how to handle property. So with the diffusion of land and property, there was also a diffusion of conflict. The different governments that succeeded each other before Italian unification didn’t provide sufficient governance so an informal form of governance began to appear.

Let’s go on to Cose di Cosa Nostra by Giovanni Falcone, who was assassinated by the Mafia in 1992.

Falcone was a Sicilian judge who did a tremendous amount of effective investigative work on the Mafia, with a level of knowledge, competence and energy that had not been seen before. And although he was then ultimately assassinated by the Mafia, he did manage to shift entirely the attitude of the Italian state towards the Mafia. So while it’s sad that he was assassinated, he most certainly did not die in vain.

Do you mean that before Falcone the Italian government thought: “We can’t do anything about the Mafia, let’s just leave it,” and afterwards they were proactive in going after them?

One thing Falcone tried to change, was to say: “We can’t continue to investigate this phenomenon by looking at each individual crime. We have to understand that the way in which the judiciary is organized in Italy – where each crime is investigated within the judicial district in which it occurs – doesn’t really fit well with this phenomenon, because this is an organization and we have to centralize the investigation, link the crimes across districts and we have to convict people simply because they belong to this organization.” Which is a difficult thing to say, from a liberal point of view. But given the situation, it was virtually the only effective solution that the Italian state could take. And that has become the practice now. Because the last thing Falcone did was to create a central anti-Mafia agency, which is still functioning today and has had a devastating effect on the Mafia. Most of the big Mafiosi are now in jail or dead.

There is a sentence in Falcone’s book that I particularly liked. He says: “We have to learn to think about the methods of Cosa Nostra calmly and with an open mind.” And that’s exactly what he did. He tried to understand the entity. And he managed to persuade Tommaso Buscetta, the first big Mafioso to turn state witness, to speak. Up to that point many people, including scholars, didn’t believe the Mafia existed as a formal organization. Falcone managed to understand how it functioned, the importance of language, the role of violence, the role of internal norms. Also, the fact it was – or what remains of it still is – a very well organized institution. It has lasted more than 150 years – so after the Catholic Church it’s the longest-lasting institution in Italy!