In Sicily, Defying the Mafia | People & Places | Smithsonian Magazine
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4/22/13 In Sicily, Defying the Mafia | People & Places | Smithsonian Magazine Pow ered by In Sicily, Defying the Mafia Fed up with extortion and violent crime, ordinary citizens are rising up against organized crime By Joshua Hammer Photographs by Francesco Lastrucci Smithsonian magazine, October 2010, Until recently , Ernesto Bisanti could not hav e imagined he would face down the Cosa Nostra (Our Thing)—the Sicilian Mafia. In 1 986 Bisanti started a furniture factory in Palermo. Soon after, a man he recognized as one of the neighborhood’s Mafiosi v isited him. The man demanded the equiv alent of about $6,000 a y ear, Bisanti told me, “ ‘to keep things quiet. It will be cheaper for y ou than hiring a security guard.’ Then he added, ‘I don’t want to see y ou ev ery month, so I will come ev ery June and December, and y ou will giv e me $3,000 each time.’ ” Bisanti accepted the deal—as had nearly all the shop and business owners in the city . The arrangement lasted for two decades. “Sometimes he showed up with a son in tow,” Bisanti recalled, “and he would say , ‘Please tell my son that he has to study , because it’s important.’ It became like a relationship.” A stocky man with gray hair, Bisanti, 64, told me the money wasn’t that burdensome. “In their sy stem, it’s not important how much y ou pay . It’s important that y ou pay ,” he said. “It’s a form of submission.” Then, in Nov ember 2007 , police arrested Salv atore Lo Piccolo, the head of Palermo’s Mafia. A notebook found in Lo Piccolo’s possession contained a list of hundreds of shop and business owners who paid the pizzo—an ancient word of Sicilian origin meaning protection money . Bisanti’s name was on the list. The Palermo police asked him if he would testify against the extortionist. Not long ago, such a public denunciation would hav e meant a death sentence, but in recent y ears police raids and betray als by informers hav e weakened the Mafia here, and a new citizens group called Addiopizzo (Goodby e Pizzo) has organized resistance to the protection rackets. Bisanti said y es, took the witness stand in a Palermo courtroom in January 2008 and helped send the extortionist to prison for eight y ears. The Mafia hasn’t bothered Bisanti since. “They know that I will denounce them again, so they are fearful,” he said. This sun-drenched island at the foot of the Italian peninsula has alway s been a place of conflicting identities. There is the romantic Sicily , celebrated for its fragrant citrus grov es, stark granite mountains and glorious ruins left by a succession of conquerors. The v ast acropolis of Selinunte, built around 630 B.C., and the Valley of the Temples at Agrigento— described by the Greek poet Pindar as “the most beautiful city of the mortals”—are considered among the finest v estiges of classical Greece, which ruled Sicily from the eighth to the third centuries B.C. In the ninth century A.D., Arab conquerors built frescoed palaces in Palermo and Catania; few churches are more magnificent than Palermo’s Palantine Chapel, erected from 1 1 30 to 1 1 40 by Sicily ’s King Roger II during a period of Norman domination. Natural splendors abound as well: at the eastern end of the island rises Mount Etna, an 1 1 ,000-foot-high activ e v olcano, beneath which, according to Greek my thology , lies the serpentine monster Ty phon, trapped and entombed for eternity by Zeus. But Sicily is also known as the birthplace of the Mafia, arguably the most powerful and organized crime sy ndicate in the world. The term, which may deriv e from the adjectiv e mafiusu—roughly “swaggering” or “bold”—gained currency in the 1 860s, around the time of Giuseppe Garibaldi’s unification of Italy . It refers to the organized crime entrenched in www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&title=In+Sicily%2C+Defying+the+Mafia+%7C+People+%26+Places+%7C+Smithsonian+Magazine&urlID=4492… 1/6 4/22/13 In Sicily, Defying the Mafia | People & Places | Smithsonian Magazine Sicily ’s then-isolated, largely rural society . When Allied forces inv aded Sicily during World War II, they sought help from Italian-American mobsters with Sicilian ties, such as Vito Genov ese, to secure control of the island. The Allies ev en allowed Mafia figures to become may ors there. Ov er the next few decades, the Cosa Nostra built relationships with Italian politicians—including Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti (who serv ed sev en terms between 1 97 2 and 1 992)—and raked in billions through heroin trafficking, extortion, rigged construction contracts and other illegal enterprises. Those who dared speak out were usually silenced with a car bomb or a hail of bullets. Some of the most v iolent and consequential Mafia figures came from Corleone, the mountain town south of Palermo and the name nov elist Mario Puzo conferred on the American Mafia family central to his 1 969 nov el, The Godfather. Then, in the 1 980s, two courageous prosecutors (known in Italy as inv estigating magistrates), Giov anni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, using wiretapping and other means, persuaded sev eral high-ranking mobsters to break the oath of silence, or omerta. Their efforts culminated in the “maxi- trial” of 1 986-87 , which exposed hidden links between mobsters and gov ernment officials, and sent more than 300 Cosa Nostra figures to prison. The Mafia struck back. On May 23, 1 992, along the Palermo airport highway , hit men blew up an armored limousine carry ing Falcone, 53, and his magistrate-wife Francesca Morv illo, 46, killing them and three police escorts. Borsellino, 52, was killed by another bomb, along with his fiv e body guards, as he walked to his mother’s Palermo doorway less than two months later. But rather than crippling the anti-Mafia mov ement, the assassinations—as well as subsequent Mafia car bombings in Milan, Florence and Rome that killed a dozen people—galv anized the opposition. In January 1 993, Salv atore (“The Beast”) Riina, the Cosa Nostra’s capo di tutti i capi, or boss of all bosses, from Corleone, who had masterminded the assassinations, was captured near his Palermo v illa after two decades on the run. He was tried and sentenced to 1 2 consecutiv e life terms. Riina was succeeded by Bernardo (“The Tractor”) Prov enzano, who shifted to a low-key approach, eliminating most v iolence while continuing to rake in cash through protection rackets and the procurement of public building contracts. In April 2006, police finally tracked down Prov enzano and arrested him in a crude cottage in the hills abov e Corleone; he had been a fugitiv e for 43 y ears. Prov enzano went to prison to serv e sev eral consecutiv e life sentences. His likely successor, Matteo Messina Denaro, has also been on the run since 1 993. Ev en before Prov enzano’s arrest, a quiet rev olution had begun to take hold in Sicilian society . Hundreds of businesspeople and shopkeepers in Palermo and other Sicilian towns and cities began refusing to pay the pizzo. May ors, journalists and other public figures who once looked the other way started speaking out against the Mafia’s activ ities. A law passed by the Italian parliament in 1 996 allowed the gov ernment to confiscate the possessions of conv icted Mafia figures and turn them ov er, gratis, to socially responsible organizations. In the past few y ears, agricultural cooperativ es and other groups hav e taken ov er mobsters’ v illas and fields, conv erting them into community centers, inns and organic farms. “We’v e helped local people change their v iews about the Mafia,” say s Francesco Galante, communications director of Libera Terra, an umbrella organization led by an Italian priest that today controls nearly 2,000 acres of confiscated farmland, mainly around Corleone. The group has created jobs for 1 00 local workers, some of whom once depended on the Cosa Nostra; replanted long-abandoned fields with grapes, tomatoes, chickpeas and other crops; and sells its own brands of wine, oliv e oil and pasta throughout Italy . “The locals don’t see the Mafia any more as the only institution they can trust,” Galante say s. After I landed at Palermo’s Falcone-Borsellino Airport this past March—renamed in 1 995 in honor of the murdered magistrates—I rented a car and followed the Mediterranean seacoast toward Palermo, passing Capaci, where Falcone and his wife had met their deaths. (A Mafia hit team disguised as a construction crew had buried half a ton of plastic explosiv es inside a drain pipe on the airport highway and detonated it as Falcone’s v ehicle crossed ov er.) After turning off the highway , I drov e past row after row of shoddily constructed concrete apartment blocks on Palermo’s outskirts, an urban ey esore built by Mafia-controlled companies in the 1 960s and ’7 0s. “This is Ciancimino’s legacy ,” my translator, Andrea Cottone, told me as we drov e down Via della Libertà, a once-elegant av enue where the tenements hav e crowded out a few surv iv ing 1 8th- and 1 9th-century v illas. Billions of dollars in contracts were doled out to the Cosa Nostra by the city ’s corrupt assessor for public works, Vito Ciancimino; he died under house arrest in Rome in 2002 after being www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?expire=&title=In+Sicily%2C+Defying+the+Mafia+%7C+People+%26+Places+%7C+Smithsonian+Magazine&urlID=4492… 2/6 4/22/13 In Sicily, Defying the Mafia | People & Places | Smithsonian Magazine conv icted of aiding the Mafia.