The Honoured Society: The Sicilian Mafia Observed

by Norman Lewis

The Honoured Society describes how the US army returned the Mafia to power in 1944, after Mussolini came close to destroying them. It looks at the Mafia in their homeland - how in attempting to preserve Sicily for the Sicilians in the face of countless invasions it infiltrated every aspect of the island's life, corrupting landowners, the police, the judiciary and even the church. In one chilling chapter Norman Lewis details the escapades of eighty-year-old Padre Camelo, who led his monks on sprees of murder and extortion, frequently using the confessional box for transmitting threats.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Italy, Crime, Travel, European History, Biography

274 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1964

About the author

Norman Lewis was a British writer renowned for his richly detailed travel writing, though his literary output also included twelve novels and several volumes of autobiography. Born in Enfield, Middlesex in 1908 to a Welsh family, Lewis was raised in a household steeped in spiritualism, a belief system embraced by his grieving parents following the deaths of his elder brothers. Despite these early influences, Lewis grew into a skeptic with a deeply observant eye, fascinated by cultures on the margins of the modern world.
His early adulthood was marked by various professions—including wedding photographer, umbrella wholesaler, and even motorcycle racer—before he served in the British Army during World War II. His wartime experiences in Algiers, Tunisia, and especially Naples provided the basis for one of his most celebrated books, Naples '44, widely praised as one of the finest firsthand accounts of the war. His writing blended keen observation with empathy and dry wit, traits that defined all of his travel works.
Lewis had a deep affinity for threatened cultures and traditional ways of life. His travels took him across Southeast Asia, Latin America, and the Mediterranean. Among his most important books are A Dragon Apparent, an evocative portrait of French Indochina before the Vietnam War; Golden Earth, on postwar Burma; An Empire of the East, set in Indonesia; and A Goddess in the Stones, about the tribal communities of India. In Sicily, he explored the culture and reach of the Mafia in The Honoured Society and In Sicily, offering insight without sensationalism.
In 1969, his article “Genocide in Brazil,” detailing atrocities committed against Indigenous tribes, led directly to the formation of Survival International, an organization committed to protecting tribal peoples worldwide. Lewis often cited this as the most meaningful achievement of his career, expressing lifelong concern for the destructive influence of missionary activity and modernization on indigenous societies.
Though Lewis also wrote fiction, his literary reputation rests primarily on his travel writing, which was widely admired for its moral clarity, understated style, and commitment to giving voice to overlooked communities. He remained an unshakable realist throughout his life, famously stating, “I do not believe in belief,” though he found deep joy in simply being alive.
Lewis died in 2003 in Essex, survived by his third wife Lesley and their son Gawaine, as well as five other children from previous marriages.

Reviews

[Maru Kun · Rating 4 out of 5]

“We were a single body…bandits, police and Mafia, like the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost”.

So says Gaspare Pisciotta, the deputy, best friend and in the end Judas to Salvatore Giuliano, the young, handsome, complex and - for a time at least - immensely successful Sicilian bandit pictured on the front cover of the Eland edition of “The Honoured Society”.

To a modern reader the most shocking of many squalid tales in Norman Lewis’ history of the Mafia in post war Sicily is the Portella della Ginestra massacre. The Mafia, the Italian Christian Democratic party, elements of the Sicilian police and Sicilian feudal aristocrats promise the charismatic but – and how else could it be - doomed Giuliano a ticket to a new life in Brazil on an aristocrat’s spare plot of land in return for his gang agreeing to machine gun the May day festival celebration of the village of Portella dell Ginestra.

On the day of the massacre the police make themselves scarce. Ambulances are only sent five hours after the shooting is over. Aristocrats and politicians toast the success of the venture - and the Mafia plays all parties like puppets. Eleven people die, including four children aged fifteen, eleven, seven and seven. Thirty three people are injured including a little girl whose jaw was shot off.

What awful act did these poor Sicilian peasants do to bind Pisciotta’s Trinity so firmly into one? What crime brought down its bloodshed upon them? Why, the peasants voted socialist of course. Or in the case of the murdered children, their parents did.

The truth of how ruthlessly and violently the poor of Sicily were brutally suppressed by a coalition of police, criminals and politicians seems forgotten history today. Until reading the ‘Honoured Society’ I had never heard of this massacre – an event of only seventy or so years ago. Perhaps it is more famous in Italy. More likely it is hidden well out of view. But this is a story whose time for retelling has come.

Could the Italian government or any government in Europe today collaborate in the machine-gunning of a group of defenseless people simply for their voting to improve their lot? Not in 2014 perhaps but in 1947 they could and the day they could once more may be far closer than we think. Read this book to be reminded of the narrow path on which our freedoms walk.

The ‘Honoured Society’ is a good companion to Why Nations Fail. The Mafia and the police are its “non-inclusive political and social institutions” exploiting the poor or powerless. But here they are familiar to us from Hollywood and closer to our own European experience than a modern African dictator or Mexican industrialist. As Norman Lewis explains later in the book many Sicilians were able to escape feudal exploitation by emigration. Regrettably the chance to emigrate seems less available to people today.

Of course Lewis chose his title with great care and a deep sense of irony.

The ‘Honoured Society’ is a myth as its members would often insist. Not because the Mafia did not exist. Rather because its members had no honour. Instead we have a tale of selfish criminals aided by police and politicians; a society that Italian history should view with nothing but the most profound sense of shame and regret

[Michael Finocchiaro · Rating 4 out of 5]

A commenter on my review of another book about Sicily suggested this book from back in the 60s and I was pleasantly surprised with how good it was. It is written by a veteran of WWII and the invasion of Sicily who married an Sicilian woman and got fascinated with the bloody history of the Mafia on this beautiful but troubled island. Having been to Sicily seven times myself, I realized how much of the western side of the island I had skipped and where many, many bodies are buried. The book covers the period of the help to the US invasion forces provided by Lucky Luciano and the history of the primary mob bosses, families, and feuds from the end of the war to the early 60s when the book was published. Not for the squeamish, it is an eyes wide open account of killings, betrayals, and terrorism that unfortunately is still a reality, no longer in Sicily but in the back-country of Naples and Calabria as well as Central and South America among other places.
A fantastic read.

[S.H. Villa · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is the other half of Jared Diamond's Collapse. Diamond tells us what went wrong in collapsed societies but not who was responsible and how it was a whole population, for example in the case of the Easter Islanders, could acquiesce in what must have been seen as the inevitable end of life as they knew it. Thanks to Norman Lewis, we now know how it's done. Or at least one way. The hard men of Respect simply turned their hard gaze upon someone to arrive at agreement. Backed up with brutality and murder, they held sway first in Sicily, other forms of the Mafia moving into Italy itself and into the United States. The US military after WWII even brought well known Mafia figures such as Lucky Luciano back to Sicily and Italy to assist in organising the post-war, anti-communist society.

Mussolini detested the mafia and weakened its hold, but it soon sprang back with force, as The Honoured Society makes clear. Following their natural anti-communist, pro-feudal philosophy, they manipulated bands of bandits on the one hand and politicians at all levels on the other.

Mussolini no doubt loathed them because he saw them as competition. The mafia in all its forms is fascism, rule by force, pure and simple, especially the Sicilian variety.

Lewis is on top form, writing from his own personal knowledge of people and place, plus research from newspapers, books and letters which he fits into the tale so unobtrusively that it all reads like a Shakespearian tragedy. And a tragedy it is. At the end, all you want to say is, Thank you, God, for not making me a Sicilian.

[Garry · Rating 4 out of 5]

This nonfiction work about the mafia in Sicily started out well with good narrative, twists and turns and lots of fascinating insights. Unfortunately, nearing the end, I was getting a bit lost in the never-ending small towns, new mafia villains and cascading vendettas and double cross murders. Lots of murder, extortion and retribution amidst a poverty-stricken landscape of Western Sicily.

[Julia Navrén · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's not hard to know why this is a classic in the genre.

[Peter Allum · Rating 3 out of 5]

Valuable account of Sicilian mafia, now somewhat dated.

Lewis provides a gripping analysis of the world of the Sicilian Mafia, historically known as "the Honoured Society", focusing on the two decades following WW2.

Under Mussolini, a crack-down on the Mafia had resulted in the jailing of a number of its members, an unusual achievement given the typical collapse of prior mafia-linked trials due to the lack of willing witnesses. This modest progress in constraining Mafia powers was set back enormously after the Second World War. According to Lewis, when the US army invaded Sicily in 1943 it used the local Mafiosi to encourage Italian soldiers to dessert their posts rather than resisting the invasion. Many jailed Mafiosi were also released under the fiction that they had been imprisoned for their anti-fascist resistance. And when the US set up an occupying administration, it was tricked (?) into nominating these Mafiosi for many of the local mayoral posts.

With the mafia returned to largely uncontested power after the war, they played a key role in the rapidly evolving politics of the period. Taking advantage of the wartime collapse of Italy, Sicily's feudal landlords saw opportunity to push for an independent Sicily. The Mafia, working with local bandits, were seen as providing the firepower to achieve this end. When this initiative faltered, the Mafia helped the landlords fight land reforms promoted by the national government, acting as hired guns for the big estates, killing labor leaders and intimidating their followers. Lewis also describes how links were established with Italy's Christian Democrat party, with the mafia bribed to enforce an anti-communist vote for the CD party.

Lewis is informative about the stylistic differences between the old-guard Mafia that had grown up in Italy and the newer Mafia comprising returnees from the United States, some fleeing prosecution. Historically, Mafia power was associated with restricting access to local resources (water, land, grazing rights) and exploiting this monopoly power from generation to generation. As a result, the local Mafiosi were generally against economic development, such as new dams which would undermine the rights of water well owners. The immigrant American Mafia, by contrast, were more interested in promoting large infrastructure projects, from which they could take a cut through bribery and extortion. Also, they introduced international drugs trafficking.

Lewis concludes his narrative in the early 1960s, with The Honoured Society published in 1964. His account is a depressing one, in that little or no progress has been been made, by that date, in tackling the pernicious impact of the Mafia. Lewis describes a society that has become so rotten that many men and their families emigrated to Northern Italy or the States in the '50s and '60s, rather than stay under Mafia misrule. Ironically, those moving to Northern Italy became ardent supporters of the Italian Communist Party, undermining the Mafia's intended fight against Italian communism.

What had changed relative to the pre-War period, however, was a growing amount of information about the world of the Mafia. Lewis is able to draw on a number of testimonies, investigations, and committee reports to reveal the awful impact of the Mafia, something that would not have been possible a generation earlier.

Lewis's 1964 book is supplemented in later editions by a 1984 epilogue by Marcello Cimino, a Palermo journalist working for the afternoon daily, L'Ora known for its stand against the Mafia. Cimino notes that little had changed in the two decades following the publication of The Honoured Society. More information had become available on the Mafia, but killings continued and Mafia trials continued to end with acquittals.

In practice, even with the epilogue, the book was rapidly overtaken by more positive developments. The "Maxi Trial" of 1986-1992 resulted in conviction of 475 Mafiosi based on the testimony of Mafia bosses turned informants. While this appears to have been a dramatic shift in the fight against the Mafia, it presumably owed its success to the gradual opening up of information on the Mafia through the efforts of journalists and prosecutors.

While The Honoured Society is a valuable source on the post-War Mafia, it does not have the ironic charm of some of Lewis's other travel writing. One of his strengths is an ability to find sympathy with the lives of others, something that is difficult with his Mafia subjects. There is some great descriptive prose on the barren Sicilian landscape and villages, but this is a minor part of the book.

[Simon Reid · Rating 4 out of 5]

As absorbing as Naples '44 (Lewis' memoirs from newly Allied-occupied Campania) but less of a travelogue, more a meticulous history. In explaining the Mafia's grip on Sicily up to the 1960s, Lewis discovers an island with one foot still planted in the feudal era, a people with a uniquely stubborn yet defeatist moral compass, and a catalogue of violence so appalling and so frequent that only a May Day peasant massacre can trigger any prolonged outrage.

Reading about the near-endless clan vendettas (omertá), and the tight-lipped ordinary folk whose lives were all touched by their murderous spiral, you can sense the frustration of the island's carabinieri growing with every page turn. It's especially heartbreaking to read about good men like Placido Rizzotto who tried to bring change. When Sicily is dragged into the twentieth century, it's on the Mafia's own terms – corrupt construction contracts and the conversion of Lebanon's opium into heroin to ship to the Americas.

Although he finds the landscapes so morose and un-Mediterranean, Lewis has a brilliant facility for describing them. Here is a choice paragraph describing the brooding atmosphere of a town whose name Mario Puzo later borrowed for The Godfather:

Corleone is built under a lugubrious backdrop of mountains the colour of lead, and its seedy houses are wound round a strange black rocky outcrop jutting up from the middle of the town. Upon this pigmy mesa is built the town lockup, and from its summit the crows launch themselves in search of urban carrion. Behind the cliff-shadowed menaced streets of Corleone stretches a savage entranced landscape of rock and grizzled pasture, for centuries the setting of a bloody routine of feuds and ambuscades. A few miles away is the famous wood of Ficuzza, a place of ghosts and legends, over possession of which the two families of Barbaccia and Lorello have been slowly destroying one another since 1918.

[Fionnuala · Rating 4 out of 5]

I absolutely love books like this -- in-depth dives into a subject I know absolutely nothing about. Considering that this book was first published in 1964, the writing is so unbelievably modern. It's very clear and thoroughly engaging, well-researched and illustrated, and reads more like a novel than non-fiction. It's really unlike anything I've read before, and I enjoyed it thoroughly.

This edition also comes with a few updates in the afterwords, which I really appreciated. As I mentioned, this book was first published in the mid-60s, and I did keep that in mind as I read -- that the information was about an incomplete story, one that was still ongoing. I was pleased to find that there had been some updates and revisions, even though any vast improvement on the situation was, as you could imagine, absent. My only complaint would be that there are a lot of names, nicknames, and towns to keep track of -- it could have benefited from a brief who's who for reference.

This is clearly a work of careful passion, and it shows -- I love books that pull me into a subject I have no clue about, and leave me with a decent working knowledge not just of the overview and context but the nuances too.

[Jack Ward · Rating 5 out of 5]

A fascinating, yet highly dispiriting history of the Sicilian Mafia, couched in a broader study of the island and its fractious, tormented past.

The abuse and exploitation of the Sicilian peasantry in particular makes for uncomfortable reading.

A brilliant book by Norman Lewis.

[Patrick Macke · Rating 3 out of 5]

Death and destruction in Sicily at the hands of the mob ... provides some interesting insights, if you're interested in organized crime, for the period between 1940 and 1965 ... in the book "Leave the Gun, Take the Cannoli" by Mark Seal, Mario Puzo mentions "The Honoured Society" as his first introduction to the town of Corleone (the reason why I decided to pick up this book) ... much of the book is dedicated to the story of Salvatore Giuliano, the somewhat legendary bandit from Montelepre in northwest Sicily, and this fact also has a connection to Mario Puzo in that his book "The Sicilian" is a fictionalized version of Giuliano's life blended with characters from The Godfather, it's thoroughly entertaining

[Martin Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Briefly: an absolutely fascinating insight into the history of the Mafia in the first half of the 20th century as observed by Norman Lewis. This is an unusual step-aside from Norman's more diarised works about his own experiences and moved into objective narrative. But as always his writing style is clear, easy to follow, if a little embellished and gilded round the edges. A really good read.

[Waleed · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was very excited to learn, while reading this book, that Mario Puzo read it before writing The Godfather. This is a more incisive study of crime and power than Puzo's book.

[Chrisp · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting. Not the most page turning account but very worthwhile background and history for anyone interested in “how did we get here” as it relates to Sicilian connection to the modern understanding of organized crime.

[David Cowen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great, in depth history. An amazingly tough book to do research for. Get many different first hand accounts etc. The author told the types of stories that are hard to get your hands on.

[Charlotte · Rating 5 out of 5]

Easy non fiction

[Lyona Rexedal · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lite rörigt och svårt att orientera sig bland alla italienska personnamn men boken är i allra högsta grad intressant och fullspäckad av fängslande information.

[Alan Suchley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written and researched story of the nightmarish world of the Sicilian people ensnared by mafia violence.
Norman Lewis’s books are simply amazing.

[P M E · Rating 3 out of 5]

None of the sparkle of Lewis's Naples 1944. Warned leftovers of existing newspaper records.

[Rico Caraco · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great overview of a topic i find fascinating. Dense and detailed though so will need a reread at some stage

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

Took me a while because I wasn’t exactly enjoying it.

[William Dove · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good read. Very interesting, beautifully written. I found it very hard to put down.

[Tiny · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this a few years back and am now re-reading. A brilliant (true) story, brilliantly written.

[Catrien Deys · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lewis' style of writing never disappoints, so reading about the horrors of the mafia is a treat too.

[Stevie · Rating 1 out of 5]

BAWS!!!