11 – An Anti-Mafia Law

When some people hear the word ‘mafia’ they think of American gangster movies with back story sequences in a dreamy Sicily of a century ago: black hats, white shirts, and rifles hanging over shoulders of people going to church.

Racketeering is a far more sophisticated crime. It’s business groups and families securing their interests, clearing the path ways for their hotels, their casinos, their totemic vanity construction projects.

They befriend politicians and bribe administrators to get the permits they want. They support election candidates to take office and help them get a public contract they don’t properly deserve.

You do what they need for them or you’ll be sidelined. Your career will get stuck. Your election campaign will run out of money. The threat of losing their friendship is almost always enough.

Sometimes, but only when it’s necessary, they will bare their teeth and it won’t be to smile. Rarely someone ends up dead, blown up in their car, for having refused to be otherwise persuaded to dance to their tune.

Many people think that as long as they don’t see men in black hats with rifles on their shoulders going to church, there’s no mafia in Malta. The mafia likes it that they think that.

Not only those who pull the trigger are guilty of a crime.

Anyone who gets rich through their association with a mafia organisation forms part of the mafia and deserves to go to prison.

We need a law against organised crime to catch whoever hides in plain sight the wealth they derived from crimes committed by others in their name.

Written by Manuel Delia
Video Production & Voiceover: Michael Kaden