Structure and Composition
Cosa Nostra is not a monolithic organization, but rather a loose confederation of about one hundred groups known alternately as "families", "cosche", "borgatas" or "clans" (despite the name, their members are generally not related by blood), each of which claims sovereignty over a territory, usually a town or village or a neighborhood of a larger city, though without ever fully conquering and legitimizing its monopoly of violence. For many years, the power apparatuses of the single families were the sole ruling bodies within the two associations, and they have remained the real centers of power even after superordinate bodies were created in the Cosa Nostra beginning in the late 1950s (the Sicilian Mafia Commission).
Today, according to the Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, Francesco Messineo, there are 94 Mafia clans in Sicily subject to 29 mandamenti, with a total of at least 3,500 to 4,000 full members. Most are based in western Sicily, almost half of them in the province of Palermo.
Read more about this topic: Mafias
Famous quotes containing the words structure and, structure and/or composition:
“With sixty staring me in the face, I have developed inflammation of the sentence structure and definite hardening of the paragraphs.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“Why does philosophy use concepts and why does faith use symbols if both try to express the same ultimate? The answer, of course, is that the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful.”
—Paul Tillich (1886–1965)
“The composition of a tragedy requires testicles.”
—Voltaire [François Marie Arouet] (1694–1778)