Break The Honor Promise: Reasons Why Calabrian Mafia Affiliates Decide To Collaborate With Justice

Mafia can be undoubtedly classified as secret society, i.e. a social group that makes of the secret its form of existence and its constitutive element. In fact, secrecy is an essential condition that characterizes all the specific features of the mafia world – its relational structure, its values, its symbolism, its business – especially in the Italian Mafia, in which the “ability to know how to be silent” it is an indispensable affiliation requirement. The affiliation to a totalizing group like mafia association is “for life”, not only because the chances of defection are rare, but above all, because it is rare the intention to betray the clan (for an affiliate, to betray the clan often coincides with the betrayal of his own biological family). In this context, there are still few so-called pentiti (i.e. subjects affiliated to the Italian organized crime who decide to leave the mafia world by offering their collaboration to the State in order to facilitate law enforcement actions), despite the jurisprudence evolution about the incentives and the protection of these subjects has encouraged a considerable increase of this cases in recent years. For these reasons, I think that a study on motivations, causes and circumstances that induce the hard choice of collaborating with justice may be a valid contribution to the sociological analysis of the wider mafia phenomenon. Here I propose a case study concerning two Calabrian clans active in the city of Lamezia Terme, which in recent years have undergone a considerable and constant increase in the number of mafia turncoats: in fact, in the period between 2007 and 2013 the two clans have seen the collaboration of no less than twenty-two associates, a figure that has grown further in the following years. Specifically, the research aims to identify the factors that have triggered this “domino effect” which has also involved leading members of the Calabrian Mafia, forcing the clans to quickly and constantly reorganize their internal configuration and to considerably redistribute the territorial distribution of power. In order to meet this target, the statements of former gangsters reported in various judicial documents have been read and analyzed using qualitative techniques of the Content Analysis. From the same documents, information about the network of relations that defines the two clans have been also collected, which has been reconstructed through the techniques of Social Network Analysis. The integrated use of these two analysis methodologies, in my opinion, allows us to simultaneously investigate cultural, symbolic, strategic and relational factors that can trigger the “domino effect” of collaborations, all elements of primary importance for understanding a social phenomenon by its very nature mutable and elusive to the scholar's eye.