Give me a few more days.... finding evidences is time-consuming!
In the meantime, here's a thought-provoking backgrounder....
The Mafia, the highest stage of capitalism.
G. Jaeger, 1997.
The financial mafia: The illegal accumulation of wealth and the financial-industrial complex
(first published in "Segno", 69-70, april-may 1986)
UMBERTO SANTINO Sicilian Center of Documentation, Palermo, Italy
It is the duty of the bank to accept offered funds.
If you came into my office with one million dollars in your suitcase, I would take it.
A high official of the Central Bank of the Bahamas.
There are two kinds of sin which one can commit: one is venial and the other is deadly. The former is running away with the cash; the latter is giving somebody confidential information.
Enrico Cuccia, President of Mediobanca, giving practical instructions to newly hired bank clerks.
Premise
These notes are the first draft of a research project on the financial aspects of the mafia as it is today and of other kinds of organized crime, as well as on the process of financialization of the contemporary economy. Mafia and organized crime have come to be considered systems which accumulate vast amounts of capital within which illegal and legal methods are interwoven. Such systems operate on a world scale in a global context ruled by the so-called 'financial-industrial complex', i.e., a hegemonic aggregation of multinational corporations and large financial groups, whose hidden methods make it possible to introduce illegal capital into international financial networks.
Such research requires a remarkable investment of energy and considerable means at one's disposal: an international staff, adequate documentation, and a sophisticated multidisciplinary methodology. At present, it is merely a project based on insufficient documentation and practiced with the help of the inadequate resources of the CSD (Centro Siciliano di Documentazione), a private documentation center operating in Sicily. This region represents, on the one hand, a 'privileged' observation-post; on the other hand, it certainly does not provide a favorable ground for scientific research on such a delicate question, especially when one considers that, with the exception of a few individual efforts, universities and cultural institutions with public funding never contribute to research on the mafia.
Data reported in this paper have been drawn from material (books, magazines, legal documents, etc.) collected by the CSD in collaboration with lawyers, university professors, scholars, journalists, and on research trips in many countries, including the United States. Preparatory legal documents of the Palermo maxi-processo have also been consulted.
Current stereotypes tend to portray the mafia as essentially deviance and criminality, as the product of specific situations, as the remains of an archaic irrationality, as a subculture and a subversion. All of these points of view are based upon common ground: the dichotomy between a basically healthy society and a series of phenomena which are considered pathological (mafia, 'ndrangheta, camorra, organized crime from different countries, such as the United States, Turkey, Japan, China, Latin America, Australia, etc.).
This analysis of the mafia is aimed at overturning current opinion by starting from the assumption that the mafia is the organic product of a social ecosystem. We are assuming the mafia to be a social group belonging to the ruling classes, or about to belong to it ('borghesia mafiosa': middle class mafioso), a group which uses, in a more or less open and direct way, violent and illegal methods in order to accumulate capital and to reach and manage prominent positions within the ruling system as a whole. From time to time it works in alliance, competition, or conflict with the other ruling groups.
Historically, the evolution of this phenomenon should be seen as a process involving both continuity and transformation, two remarkable elements among the most important which are specifically relevant when examining the Sicilian and the Sicilian-American mafia. However, during the last twenty years, we have been observing a process of assimilation of the different forms of organized crime, in which we can recognize the same general elements, together with specific features.
[snip]
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