Evicted From Eternity_ The Restructuring of Modern Rome - Michael Herzfeld [98]
The role of these bosses in mediating thefts was symbolized by the emblematic phrase, Ci penso io literally, "I'll think about it"), which also signifies mafia involvement to many Italians. One man remarked that the typical attitude of such people was "a me nun me frega on cazzo" ~Me, I don't give a frigging shit); their swaggering insouciance warned others not to take liberties with them. In restoring stolen property, moreover, they placed the victims of theft under a lasting obligation of respect.
Today this system is all but dead; the old reciprocities no longer work.12 Around 1997 someone stole one of the side mirrors from a student's motorbike; the student told the man who repaired his bike that he would be prepared to pay the value of the mirror if he got it back. The repairman found him a mirror that was not the missing one. Probably, remarked the student in recalling the incident, this man had stolen the second mirror as well, in order to get the money. Two years later, someone stole the student's license plate; but this time, he said, he went straight to the police, as the plate was not something a local thief would have taken. A few years earlier a glassmaker had a camera stolen; he had noticed a young man hanging around near his shop, so he asked him if had any idea who had done this and whether he could help track down the camera; the youth replied that he knew ~conosco) certain people and agreed to undertake the task-and showed up the next day with a camera, for which the glassmaker paid him 5 0,000 lire.
The victim was convinced that the young man was himself the thief; his assistant pointed out that the thieves could not easily fence such goods, so that this was their best chance of making some money from the theft. But the incident also illustrates how easily what had once been more of a system of reciprocity and authority among local residents could now be exploited by strangers who knew enough to apply the old rules to new and far less socially embedded forms of petty crime. What still persists, on the other hand, is the preference for negotiation over confrontation; the glassmaker resigned himself to the moral certainty that he was dealing directly with the thief, but pragmatically realized that this was the only way he could get his camera back. Anger would have gained him nothing. His assistant added that out in the suburb of Casilina, where she lived, someone stole a car radio, restored it to its owner, and then, two or three days later, stole it again!
Many Monticiani view the old pattern of controlled petty crime with affectionate nostalgia as a mark of the district's village-like social life, a mark of a southern idiom of social relations to be contrasted with the "cold" crimes-the deliberate violence for simple profit-that they associate with the north as well as with the foreign mafias that have come, so they allege, with the recent upsurge in immigration from eastern Europe. One man pointed to the killing of two child molesters in Torre Annunziata, near Naples, as typifying the certain dignity tuna certa dignity) that also once marked the Roman bosses' refusal to tolerate the hassling of women. It is in this sense that the restitution of stolen property, while also profitable for the bosses, served above all as a boundary marker, an index of intimacyso much so that even a boss with a reputation for financial