Omertà

So, the Sicilian Mafia, that's the illustration.

They have, or they had, in the kind of bygone times, the omerta.

Is that how you pronounce it? Omerta, Omerta? I'm not a kind of godfather person, so I don't really know.

The Omerta, it's the code of silence, right? They're very closed.

They just do their thing.

Nobody talks to any outsiders and any disputes.

They sort it out between themselves, right? Code of mutual honor, the Omerta, code of silence in the Sicilian mafia.

But in the 1970s and 1980s, the worldwide traffic in heroin came to Sicily and it completely blew the Sicilian mafia code of silence apart because the wealth that you could get from dealing in heroin just was... extraordinary compared to what the kind of petty crime that Sicilian mafia was doing.

You're going to do life anyway.

If you, if Omerta is the way you're going to do this, bro, it's LCN.

It's a modern version of it.

So I don't think it's actually LCN.

Grant, what do you think Farwell's play is here? What is his

play? Stand 10 toes down and hope he doesn't end up like Whitey at Hazleton.

Omerta.

But what, like...

Right, this thing of ours.

Omerta is the code.

There's a gradient, Campanella says, from a proper noun to a common noun.

So he breaks it down saying there's Mafia with a capital M, and then there's the Mob, capital M, and then there's just no capital M mob, and then there's mobsters.

Research associate Gabe Lugear, who's, for always being a boss.

And thanks to you, Ben, for, um, n- not having me whacked, yet.

Omerta's the code.

I am a legitimate businessman working in imports.

The street level drug dealer is viewed as a parasite, but the mob enforcer who shoots a couple in a car over stolen money is viewed as a man of respect simply enforcing the rules

This massive cognitive dissonance is held together by omerta, the mafia code of silence.

Omerta provides a romantic structural narrative that masks the ugly reality that these men are predators destroying their own backyard

And Robert's informal education in mafia math culminated in a very practical freezing cold final exam in the dead of winter

Yes.

These are the middle managers of the crime family, the men who command the street soldiers and insulate the boss from direct involvement in crimes.

And then there is the behavioral code, omerta.

Omerta is the absolute code of silence and extreme loyalty.

It physically demands that a person will go to prison for the rest of their life or face death rather than cooperate with official authorities.

As the article states, a culture learns a world by learning its nouns.

What is this? I was like, yeah, let's listen to a guy who exploited, exploited people for money all his life about what economic system we should use.

Let's listen to a guy who will sit there with your, with a straight face and tell you how, you know, how important Omerta is.

It's like never, never, um, acknowledge existence of the mafia.

And here he is making a living off of acknowledging existence of the mafia.

Please, go for it.

Right, let's listen to the guy who made his money exploiting people on what an economic system we in the straight world should use.

A guy who betrayed Omerta, which means nothing to me, but he will tell you what it means to him.

Get the F out of here.