A New Look at the Mafia

The Mafia Mystique, by Dwight C. Smith, Jr. New York: Basic Books. 399 pp.

When I told a friend that my Sicilian grandfather had died in jail, he asked without hesitation whether he had been killed by the Mafia because he “messed up.” I had great difficulty in persuading him of a far less vivid reality: my grandfather was a poor immigrant storekeeper accused of buying goods stolen by other poor immigrants; he could not defend himself in court because he spoke no En...