Mob Rule - Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture - Review

National Review, Oct 1, 2001 by S. T. Karnick

Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture, by Leoluca Orlando (Encounter, 222 pp., $25.95)

In May 1992, the heavily armored motorcade of Giovanni Falcone, a courageous prosecutor who had helped push the Sicilian Mafia to the verge of destruction, was hit by 300 kilograms of explosives. The bombs blew an enormous crater in the road, killing Falcone, his wife, and three of his bodyguards.

A decade earlier, the machine-gun murder of Gen. Carlo Dalla Chiesa, the Italian hero who had defeated the Red Brigades and was strenuously pursuing the Mafia, had stunned Palermo into despair. An anonymous citizen summarized the feeling in a sign on a wall near the attack site: "Here dies the hope of honest Palermo citizens." After Falcone's murder, however, the reaction was quite different. As the city's then- mayor, Leoluca Orlando, recalls in his passionate and enthralling new memoir, the people of Palermo hung bedsheets outside their windows "with slogans painted on in red, as if with Falcone's blood: 'Down with the Mafia!' 'Truth and Justice!' 'Falcone lives!'" On a tree near the assassination site, someone pinned a sign saying, "Today begins a dawn that will see no sunset."

The book's title aptly summarizes what had happened in the intervening years to turn despair into hope. As mayor, Orlando fought the Mafia not only through law-enforcement methods but by restoring the very institutions of civil society-the private, voluntary organizations and relationships that create a culture-that the Mafia had destroyed during its rise to power. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Orlando notes, "was always more intrinsic to the structure of society than its American cousins." During the 19th century, the Mafia even "took on the functions of the state: collecting taxes, providing a hierarchy of leadership, and raising little armies to enforce its 'laws.'"

Orlando's administration undertook the monumental task of redefining this reality as criminal. Previously, only Mussolini had succeeded in stopping the Mafia, by slamming an iron fist on the organization's low- level foot soldiers. In 1927, there were 278 murders in Sicily; in 1928, there were only 26. After World War II, however, the Mafia returned. The annual murder rate eventually rose into the hundreds. The Mafia took over the island's ruling party, the Christian Democrats, and, with Mafiosi as mayor and commissioner for public works in the early 1960s, established the city's infamous "Town Plan," which rapidly devolved into what Orlando calls the Sack of Palermo.

"Development," Orlando writes, "was forced into . . . areas invariably owned by 'friends of the friends,' which immediately skyrocketed in value." The city's poor were herded into boxy cement dormitories, often receiving no water, gas, or electricity-sometimes not just for days, but for years. The Mafia's construction-business front organizations made astronomical profits. The downtown area rotted from neglect. The Mafia even took over Palermo's educational system, says Orlando, "not only because it knew that maintaining ignorance among the people was the key to its power, but also because there was money to be made" by renting space to the government for the city's schools.

Orlando entered politics in 1976 as legal adviser to Christian Democratic reformer Piersanti Mattarella, who became president of the Sicilian Region two years later. The two men set out to break the Mafia's hold on the island, transferring budget authority from the corrupt regional government back to the cities and passing a law enforcing the same building standards used in the rest of Italy, thereby making the Mafia's building schemes illegal. At this time, however, the Mafia was becoming even more lethal. Massive profits from rapidly rising sales of illegal drugs brought out an increasingly cruel and openly lawless Mafia leadership. The Mafia fought back against the reformers-killing a police inspector, a deputy police chief, a judge, a police captain, two chief prosecutors, and hundreds of others both within and outside the crime organization. In 1980, Mattarella himself was gunned down by the Mafia. Orlando was despondent, but when the fallen president's brother and other associates urged him to run for the Palermo municipal council, he ran successfully, and was elected mayor by the town council in 1985. Thereafter, he too was in constant danger of assassination.

In 1984, however, the Sicilian government had finally begun a coordinated law-enforcement effort against the Mob, which soon bore fruit when Tommaso Buscetta, a Mafioso with powerful connections on both sides of the Atlantic, turned informant. Based on Buscetta's information, the government served a 42-volume indictment against 476 Mafia defendant. In 1987 the verdict came in: convictions for all the defendants except a few low-level operators, and a total of 2,665 years of prison and nearly $10 million in fines, with the 19 most important bosses receiving life sentences.

Even so, the murders continued. Previous attacks on the Mafia had always provoked worse bloodshed in response, and the resulting fear and silence invariably left the crime syndicate free to operate. To break this cycle, Orlando had begun a project of renewing the city's civil society. He established that the city government would treat every citizen equally and grant no special favors-a radical change. He removed the Mafia from the schools and instituted measures to build community spirit among the students. He began restoration work on public spaces and long-neglected public buildings and monuments. And he helped reform the media, by refusing to talk with the city's only newspaper because of its evenhanded, and therefore collusive, treatment of the Mafia. It was these measures that created the climate in which the public could-and did-rebel against the Mafia. After the murders of Falcone and a fellow prosecutor, the military was called in, and the Mafia's hold over Sicily was finally broken.