Mob Rule.(Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture)(Review)

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 ...