Capi blood orange typical sequence of the ceremony according to several distinct descriptions has common features. First, the new recruit is led into the presence of other members and presented by a member. The association is explained, including its basic rules, then his finger is pricked with a needle by the officiating member.
The first known account of the ceremony dates back to 1877 in Monreale in an article in the Giornale di Sicilia in an account about the Stuppagghiari, an early Mafia-type organisation. One of the first life accounts of an initiation ceremony was given by Bernardino Verro, a leader of the Fasci Siciliani, a popular social movement of democratic and socialist inspiration, which arose in Sicily in the early 1890s. I entered a mysterious room where there were many men armed with guns sitting around a table. In the center of the table there was a skull drawn on a piece of paper and a knife. To be admitted to the Fratuzzi, had to undergo an initiation consisting of some trials of loyalty and the pricking of the lower lip with the tip of the knife: the blood from the wound soaked the skull. He was killed by the Mafia in 1915 when he was the mayor of Corleone. As a result of the Apalachin meeting, the membership books to become a made man in the mob were closed in 1957, and were not reopened until 1976.
The Mafia solicits specific people for membership—one cannot just choose to join up. In Tommaso Buscetta’s testimony for the Pizza Connection Trial, he was asked what he did to get into the Cosa Nostra. He answered, “I didn’t make out any application to become a member—I was called, I was invited. The ceremony is a dinner or a meeting. Several people may be inducted at once. When inducted, ” they are ‘made’ or ‘baptized’ or ‘get their badges. Other terms used are wiseguys, a friend of ours, good fellow, one of us, and straightened out.
I sit down at the table. Someone put a gun and a knife in front of me. 38 and the knife was what we call a dagger. Maranzano motions us up and we say some words in Italian. Then Joe Bonanno pricks my finger with a pin and squeezes until the blood comes out. Maranzano says, ‘This blood means that we are now one Family. You live by the gun and the knife and you die by the gun and the knife.
Valachi was inducted with three others. There were about 40 members present, so the new initiates could “meet the family. During the Patriarca crime family’s induction of 1989 that was taped by the FBI, several other details were discovered. Before the inductee Tortora took the oath, he was told that he would be baptized. You were baptized when you were a baby, your parents did it. But now, this time, we gonna baptize you.