With ‘friends’ like the new Mafia historiographers, Terroni don’t need ‘enemies’. ----Donna Gabaccia, the Keynote Speaker at the 2012 Italian American Studies Association, is the former president of the Social Science History Association (SSHA). As the title suggests, the scholars in SSHA do not make a clear ‘either/or’ distinction between historiography and the social sciences. Indeed, their website states: “The quality of historical explanation is improved by the use of social science theories and methods.” ---- Standing in stark contraction to the SSHA philosophy is John Dickie, the Keynote Speaker at the 2012 American Association of Italian Studies (AAIS), who argues that Mafia History is qualitatively improved since historians have separated themselves from the “fuzzy lines of sociological jargon.” ---- While Dickie is a ‘document historian’ par excellence and a ‘must-read’ for south of Rome students; nevertheless, a careful consideration of his work demonstrates the folly of attempting to write history in the absence of social science concepts. Thus, for example, as a document historian, he provides detailed descriptions of the different attitudes about prostitution held by the Sicilian Cosa Nostra and the Neapolitan Camorra. However, failing to provide a rigorous sociological theory of prostitution in the respective societies, his explanation of the difference is superficial at best. Further, as is typical in post-Marxist academia, the class character of crime generally is not even mentioned let alone described, analyzed and entertained as a causal hypothesis. In short, after all the document research done, Dickie falls back on the traditional ‘white hat good cowboys vs. black hat bad cowboys’ explanation of crime south of Rome.