Hosted by Faisal Al Yafai
Featuring Ryan Gingeras
Produced by Finbar Anderson
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Historian Ryan Gingeras relishes an opportunity to discuss culture — especially when it intersects with the topic of his new book, “Mafia: A Global History.”
In “The Godfather Part II,” Gingeras tells Faisal Al Yafai on The Lede, we see how “the American mafia is not only a critical element of the country’s history, it’s reflective of some of the more formative elements in the making of the modern U.S.”
As demonstrated by his new book’s subtitle, while movies like “The Godfather” focus on criminal networks in the United States, such groups exist globally. Indeed, the international connections of a network would have been much more extensive than those portrayed in such movies, Gingeras argues.
“Mafias represent the most acute example in which immigration, identity, race, inequality — all these different things are all bundled into one big package.”
Referencing one of the principal antagonists in the first “Godfather” film, he says, “The [Virgil] Sollozzo character in real life more likely would have had second, perhaps even thirdhand connections to the opium fields. The people who would run those opium fields, they could have been Kurdish, they could have been Turkish. The people who brought the refined morphine could have been Armenian, they could have been Lebanese, most likely Lebanese Christians. And the people who actually brought him the actual heroin, the dope, most likely would’ve been French.”
Gingeras and Al Yafai’s discussion begins with American mafia culture, but expands both geographically and thematically, taking in how networks like those depicted on screen helped to build and shape the modern nations in which they now operate.
Gingeras himself, an expert in Ottoman history, came to realize the personal impact of such networks when travelling to Turkey for work. “It took me leaving not so much New York, but leaving the United States and coming to Turkey to figure out that this was something that was a bigger story,” Gingeras says. “People all over the world struggled with this idea of, ‘What does the world mean to me when mafias are such an important part of it?’ In New York, it’s second nature, but what we, especially in the United States, oftentimes fail to really grasp is that this is something people struggle with everywhere.”
Despite the fact they operate in the underworld, mafias matter to people everywhere, Gingeras argues, because they bring into relief the blurred edges of the nation-state. “Mafias are people with faces,” Gingeras says. “Mafias are people with histories. Mafias are people that are identifiable in really distinct ways. They reflect a broader anxiety or broader interest in immigration, in the bigger question of identity, the bigger question of the flow of people across the world. Mafias represent the most acute example in which immigration, identity, race, inequality — all these different things are all bundled into one big package.”
The proliferation of such networks is unlikely to diminish any time soon, Gingeras warns. “States everywhere are victims of themselves in attempting to regulate and create prohibitions on certain types of activities, because the ability to actually police them is quite hard. And the financial rewards that derive from exploiting these loopholes, or exploiting these gaps in the state’s ability to regulate things, are significant enough to create a constant churn of entrepreneurs.”