Thread by @andreamatranga

I'm going to tell you a couple of three things about Omertà, since this might come in handy in the next couple of months. I'll use an example from The Day of The Owl by Sciascia, a very interesting detective novel set in a small Sicilian town.

Incidentally AFAIK it's the first novel on the mafia ever, published 8 years before the Godfather, for example.
My copy is in Palermo so I'm going off of memory.

In the opening scene, an intercity bus arrives in the dusty town square, and everybody gets off.

Some have people waiting for them, and there's also a few people milling about or crossing the square on their way somewhere. Suddenly a shot rings out, and a man falls to the ground in a pool of blood.

The police arrives, and starts interviewing the bus driver and the other people present. Nobody has seen either the victim fall, or the shooter. And yet the wound is from a sawed off shotgun, and must have been inflicted at close range. How can 50 people all have missed this?

The answer of course is Omerta', the Sicilian code of silence. The word comes from Omo, or man in Sicilian. To be a man is to follow Omerta', and to follow Omerta' is to be a man.
You do not talk to cops.

As the joke goes, "I wasn't there, and if I was there I was sleeping, and if I was sleeping I was dreaming about something else."

Surely these people are lying. They must have seen the killer! How could fifty people possibly not see a man with a sawed off shoot another man at close range and calmly walk away, gun in hand? The answer is with lots, and lots, and lots of practice.

It might be possible that a few people actually did see the shot, or the face of the man that took it, but it would be due to carelessness. Because to see something and lie to the authorities is really entry level Omerta', something perhaps a scared out of towner might do.

The real skill is in not seeing it at all. This is the paradox of Sicilian town, or neighborhood life. Everybody know everything, and saw nothing. Everybody already knows which of their fellow citizens have angered the bullies (Franchetti and Sonnino's word).

They know that it is best if their eyes just casually skate over them without ever really focusing.
Everybody knows who the hard men of the town are, and their behavior makes it clear when it really is best if you suddenly find something interesting in the other direction.

So if everything is working correctly, everybody can truthfully say that they didn't see anything. And why would they have seen it? Why look at something when you already know?

That is a novel, and my slight riff on it. But what about a real case? Meet General of the Carabinieri Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. He had recently finished tearing apart the fearsome Italian Red Brigades, and was sent to Palermo to stop the violence of the Second Mafia War.

He was also a close family friend of my maternal grandfather, and the day before the events I am about to describe he visited my grandfather with his wife. My father walked by and remember seeing his driver/bodyguard in the car outside. "Not safe enough" he thought.

The very next day, as he was being driven to a restaurant, he was killed along with his bodyguard and wife by men on motorcycles armed with AK-47s, the innovation of the Corleonesi. I read the investigation by Falcone. Here's the interesting bit.

Some of the information came from somebody who was living above the location of the ambush (he might have been a police officer, I can't remember). He said that he heard a loud motorcycle approaching and then the shots. Then he say he waited until he heard that the motorcycle...

... had left, before looking out the window to see what had happened, and calling the police. Not the important point. He knew he had to wait. Nobody would blame him for calling in the murder, somebody had to take away the body, but he made sure there was no way that he could...

... give any identifying information. That is proficient level Omerta'.

This is how codes of silence are sustained from personal life into institutions. People know when to look away, to minimize the amount of actual lying.

Why does a code of silence form? Secrets are psychologically taxing to keep. Well the silence is just one component of Omerta'. The main thrust of Omerta' is that if you are wronged, you should obtain satisfaction personally, or through a patron, but never through the state.

The code of silence is ancillary to this main goal. It ensures that the persone that is satisfying his duty to obtain revenge is not punished by the state. And why is it bad to rely on the state?

Well to begin with, states were fickle things in Sicily. Foreign rulers would come and go, and even during a specific occupation, we were generally controlled through some kind of envoy that would rotate out periodically. The competence and trustworthiness of the state cycled.

So over the centuries, it was well understood that to rely on the state was to virtually ensure you would starve or be killed. Only those that handled matters privately survived,and the code of silence gave this equilibrium stability.