Sicily Guide

Corleone is a strange little Sicilian town, its squares and streets adorned with plaques honouring famous anti-mafia campaigners. Methought they did protest too much: as I joined the Corleonesi on their evening stroll one Easter a few years ago, I couldn’t help noticing that the young locals had styled themselves as extras from The Godfather.

Apart from lending its name to one of Hollywood’s best-known fictional families, Corleone spawned an organised-crime clan of exceptional brutality, even by the standards of the Sicilian mafia. After the second world war, a local doctor, Don Michele Navarra, and his psychotic henchman Luciano Leggio, transformed the clan from a band of cattle rustlers into the masters of the town. Their ascendency was followed, in the 1970s and 1980s, by that of Toto Riina, who strangled, shot, bombed and poisoned his way to the position of capo di tutti capi.

Read more at TimesOnline.com

On a sun-drenched morning last week in Palermo, the Sicilian capital, a bunker-like courtroom in the Ucciardone prison was the scene of a rare challenge to the mafia. Bosses and low-ranking “soldiers” stared fixedly from their steel cages as seven shopkeepers – hidden by shaded glass – identified those who had allegedly collected extortion money from them for years.

To date, 18 Palermitans – owners of bars and pizzerias, shops and car showrooms, even a street vendor who sells olives – have picked out their tormentors, for whom extortion rackets are the key instrument to control a neighbourhood.

Read more at the TimesOnline.com

After decades of Mafia rule in Sicily, locals are fighting back - and they are asking tourists to help them, by staying in B&Bs, eating in restaurants and shopping in delis that refuse to pay protection money.

It was Sunday lunchtime in Palermo’s Piazza San Francesco and the air was thick with charcoal smoke and chatter. A vendor poked an octopus as it roasted on the open grill, releasing a whiff of warm olive oil and lemon that mingled with the city’s characteristic scent of brine and dust. A girl carried a tray of sweet cannoli high above her head, navigating stalls of sardine rolls and anchovies frizzling in floury pans. The crowd went about its usual business - church bells chimed and a christening party spilt out of Basilica San Francesco D’Assisi, bobbing the newly baptized bundle as they strolled.

Read more at The Gurdian

I am not an expert and would be gladly to be disproved by real facts (you are free to do this here in the comments’ section). Also, I do not wnat to simplify what is much more complex, but my “impressions” are the following:

- A few excellent Mafia arrests during the Berlusconi and center right’s government (5 years, the longest ever in Italy after Mussolini);
- Some excellent Mafia arrests during the Prodi’s government (21 months in office, the shortest ever), plus Cuffaro (the Sicilian governor) accused and condemned of Mafia connections;
- A few days since the Prodi’s government failed a confidence vote in the senate and 90 Mafia arrests happen between New York and Sicily (read below).

Uhm? Any thoughts?

U.S. and Italian authorities teamed up in the biggest mafia crackdown in 20 years in an attempt to cut off renewed ties between New York’s Gambino family and Sicilian mobsters, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and Italian prosecutors said.

The FBI, state and local law enforcement forces made more than 60 arrests overnight, an FBI official said, while Italian police made about 30, in an operation called “Old Bridge,” Italy’s top mafia prosecutor Pietro Grasso said in a telephone interview. The last joint mob roundup on this scale was in 1988, when the FBI and Palermo authorities broke up a heroin trafficking ring known as “Iron Tower.”

Read more at Bloomberg News

I have to say the center-right is pro business, but I have nver seen so many excellent Mafia arrests happening as with this center-left administration.

According to BBC News, Italian police have arrested 39 people in the Sicilian city of Palermo on suspicion of involvement in the island’s Mafia. The arrests followed intelligence gathered after November’s capture of alleged Mafia boss Salvatore Lo Piccolo, police said. Those arrested in the latest swoop include Mr Lo Piccolo’s son, Calogero.

Read more at BBC.co.uk