Mafia Origins: Santa Flavia and Prizzi in Italy

Hey everybody. Thanks for tuning into the Milwaukee Mafia podcast. Episode number two. I am Eric Wulterkens. I am Gavin Schmitt. And today’s topic is, well we actually got a mailbag. What is the mailbag question? This question comes from Justin. Justin writes “What can you tell us about the Italian origins of the earliest presence of the mafia in Milwaukee?”

le out of the third ward. By: 1915

Okay Justin – The mafia as most people know comes from Sicily. Sicily is an Island off the coast of the southern part of Italy. What I find interesting is that each different mafia group in the United States, whether it’s Milwaukee or New York or Chicago or Los Angeles or any major city that has one they come from different cities in Sicily. I find that fascinating because it’s like entire villages picked up in Sicily and moved to these other cities.

Now in Milwaukee the primary city that people came from is Santa Flavia. There are probably more people in Milwaukee today that are descended from Santa Flavia than there are people in Santa Flavia. I don’t know what everybody’s motivations were but for whatever reason the original people chose Milwaukee they started inviting their brothers, their cousins, whatever. These Sicilian towns are small, very small.

Everybody is somebody’s cousin. Sooner or later more and more people move over and it was finally like 3,000 people who had picked up and moved to Milwaukee by the end of all this. It was a sizable number of people. Just about all of them are related in one way or another.

Milwaukee was their destination. Santa Flavia is on the coast of Italy. They have two big businesses there. One is grapefruit and the other is fishing. Now grapefruit is going to do you any good in Milwaukee but when they started moving they had this idea that Milwaukee was going to be this great fishing place. They could start these fishing businesses because it’s on Lake Michigan. This ended up not working out as well as they thought because they were used to being in the Mediterranean which is significantly different than being in Milwaukee. They didn’t fully grasp the weather – you can’t fish year round on a commercial basis.

Some people that did settle in Milwaukee did later end up moving out to California – like San Jose where they did successfully become fisherman. That was one of the main reasons they chose Milwaukee.

Sicily was always a very poor island. Southern Italy in general is always just poverty. I don’t know why this was the time that they decided they were going to pick up and move – why they didn’t do it twenty years sooner. Milwaukee just seemed right.

Other villages picked other places. You can say that if you are from Santa Flavia it’s a very good chance that you picked Milwaukee to settle in and if you are in Milwaukee it’s a very good chance that you are from Santa Flavia. There’s just a strong overlap. And it’s like this everywhere. Madison, in comparison has a much smaller Sicilian population. They came from a village called San Giuseppe.

Does Santa Flavia still exist today? It does. So how big is Santa Flavia? Not big. It is a few thousand at most. It’s only a couple square miles. It is a very small village.

What is the Italian population of Milwaukee today? It would be hard to say at this point because so many have married in and they are a half or a quarter Italian now. At one point there were 3,000 Italians in Milwaukee that were pure Italian. Now the number would be higher but they would not be pure Italian.

When you move to Milwaukee you are not going to be growing a lot of grapefruit. It’s interesting that grapefruit was something they did in Santa Flavia and presuming still do today because grapefruit plays a really important role in mafia history. On Sicily they have grapefruit, they have lemons, they have oranges, they have all these citrus fruits that they grow. It's one of the ways the mafia got really big. In Sicily they would take jobs as Security Guards at these orchards. They found out that this was a good way to make money. They were like – “If you pay us, we will protect your orchards but if you don’t pay us enough you might come back in the morning and mysteriously your trees are cut down”

They were protecting them from themselves. This is basic extortion. Whey they came here they weren’t doing it with grapefruit but they were doing it with other things. We will get into this further in other episodes but there were things called “blackhand letters” and things like that where they would be “Hey it’s a really nice business you got there. If you pay us, we’ll make sure your business is okay.” Which of course the owner’s thought there was nothing wrong with their business but if they didn’t pay all of the sudden their windows get smashed. But that is a whole other topic.

This is a running theme of how the mafia starts out. It’s not a well oiled machine early on. It’s very brute force, just breaking things.

The mafia does not keep records but it is my belief that there is that direct connection there that the first people in Milwaukee who were mafia members were already mafia members in Sicily. And they could have been doing grapefruit schemes, they could have been doing what else but there is a direct connection between what they were doing there and what they were doing here. I don’t think people in Milwaukee started this idea from scratch. I’m pretty sure these were people who were – again 99% of the people that came over – great people – but that 1% come over with their cousins and their brothers and whatever and they are going to start the same crap all over again.

I don’t have records of who was in the mob in Santa Flavia – I don’t know that but I do know who was a member in Milwaukee. And these guys that were coming over were like 60 years old so I am fairly confident tat they were doing the same crap when they were 20, 30, 40 years old in Sicily.

nta Flavia but briefly in the: 1940

People are very territorial about where they are from. It’s not like you are from the mafia, I am from the mafia we’re cool. It’s you’re from the mafia in this city and I’m from the mafia in this city so we are not cool.

There was the big group and the smaller group and ultimately, they become one group. They figure out that working together is better for everybody than fighting all the time. The two groups start out at odds with each other.

You will see that the early mob murders in Milwaukee are seeing who is going to be the big guys in town. Santa Flavia ends up winning because they have the numbers.