Growing up in an aristocratic family that seems almost to have stepped out of the pages of The Leopard, Leoluca Orlando entered the law and politics in the late 1970s as one of the young idealists challenging the Mafia's control of Sicilian life. At about the same moment, a new and particularly vicious Mafia sect centered in the town of Corleone was making its appearance. Fueled by profits from the international heroin trade, this mafia gangsteristica embarked on a reign of terror that made Sicily into an Italian Lebanon, and filled the international press with pictures of bloody bodies--not just of Mafia rivals of the Corleonesi, but of police and government law enforcement officials as well. One of the Italian figures most identified with the Mafia's eclipse, Orlando has endured repeated assassination attempts and he travels everywhere with a full bodyguard. Fighting the Mafia is his dramatic tale of witness and survival, of his effort to expose Mafia infiltration of the highest levels of Italy's national politics, and of the movement he helped to build--in t
Chapter One
After long treating concept as taboo, linguists now speculate
endlessly about the origins of the word "Mafia." Some
say it comes from Mahias, Arabic for "bold" or "braggart." Others
say that its root is Muafirr, the name of a Saracen tribe that once
controlled Palermo. Less plausibly, it has been suggested that the
word comes from M'fie, the name of the caves that served as hiding
places for those Saracens and later for Sicilians who retreated
there in fear when Garibaldi landed in 1861.
The theory that has always seemed most reasonable to me holds
that "Mafia" is a corruption of the Arabic Mu ("strength") plus Afah
("to protect"). Yet what I find most intriguing about this word is
not the exotic etymologies reaching far back into Sicilian history,
but the fact that during the years of my youth, "Mafia" was almost
never said. I was aware that it existed—both the word and the reality
it stood for—but I apprehended it the same way that one catches
a faint aroma on the wind, something familiar yet not quite identifiable.
The spectral presence of the Mafia in Sicilian life has always
made me think of the comment by the Danish philosopher Sören
Kierkegaard that part of our human dilemma is to be condemned
to live our lives forward and understand them backward. We Sicilians
have lived for generations with the Mafia, while rigorously
excluding it not only from our conversation but even from our
thought. Only relatively recently have we begun to understand
backward the impact that "the Octopus"—a metaphor for Cosa
Nostra first used by a judge and soon after a common term—has
had on our history and culture.
Yet Sicily is the logical place for a phenomenon such as the Mafia
to have arisen. We are a people who never really ruled our own territory.
We were always a colony, and, even worse, a colony passed
from one ruler to another. If these rulers had been harsh and repressive,
they would at least have created a strong centralized government;
but this was not the case. Sicily was always a place to be
exploited more than governed. Until the nineteenth century, aristocratic
families controlled Sicilian life more or less independently
of whatever conqueror happened to be ruling at any given time.
These barons cared about their own property and prerogatives, but
not much else. Their ethos is beautifully portrayed in Giuseppe di
Lampedusa's The Leopard, where Fabrizio, the Prince, sleepwalks
through life, disconnected from his country, his fate, and even his
own ancestral holdings.
Eventually this aristocracy would collapse and disappear, but
without leaving a middle class to fill the vacuum it left behind.
Instead, as the barons moved to Rome, Vienna, Paris and other
more cosmopolitan areas, the administration of their lands fell to
middlemen called gabelloti. These administrators squeezed the sharecroppers
to pay the high rents demanded by absentee landowners,
and controlled the brigands who roamed the countryside. Backed
by a network of family, friends, and clients—the only groups able
to provide social stability in the absence of an institutional order—these
gabelloti became Sicily's New Men, archetypes of the capimafia
of the future. (Lampedusa's Don Cologero is such a man
avant la lettre.) The violent men they hired to enforce their power
would become the Mafiosi of Sicily's future.
Unlike its equivalent in the United States, which was based on
family (Gambino, Bonanno and the like), the Sicilian Mafia was
rooted in the land and organized around a place—Corleone, Prizzi,
and other communities. Eventually the Mafia groupings in these
places would build a bridge from the village to the developing urban
centers such as Palermo. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra was always more
intrinsic to the structure of society than its American cousins. It
developed because the state itself was atrophied and defective in
Sicily, and the people, conquered repeatedly by outsiders, never
expected to receive justice from "the system." They looked to the
charismatic uomini di rispetto to fulfill the functions that bureaucratic
governments served everywhere else in Europe. If your daughter
was raped, you looked to such a "man of respect" for redress
rather than to a distant and foreign police force.
The Mafia networks of the nineteenth century gradually took
on the functions of the state: collecting taxes, providing a hierarchy
of leadership, and raising little armies to enforce its "laws."
Political and economic life adjusted to these arrangements and
accepted them as reality. Later on, when legitimate government
tried to assert its authority, it would first have to redefine this reality
as "criminal." This was a monumental task. It is the subject of
this book.
The Mafia created an autonomous social order in Sicily, but it
could not have succeeded as well as it did, had it not also created a
myth: that its members were Men of Honor comprising an honorable
society that not only made the social order work, but made
it work according to principle. Mario Puzo, author of The Godfather,
got this aspect of the Mafia mentality exactly right: those who
chose this path believed that while they might be called upon to
perform tasks others might shrink from in serving their family and
friends, they were nonetheless superior to the corrupt and hypocritical
world surrounding them.
* * *
A sign of how deeply—and swiftly—the Mafia had penetrated Sicilian
life came in 1893 when a man named Emanuele Notarbartolo,
director general of the Bank of Sicily and former mayor of Palermo,
tried to overturn corrupt deals made by one of his directors, a politician
named Raffaele Palizzolo, who had links to the Mafia. Notarbartolo
bravely protested these criminal activities to ministers in
Rome. Before the issue could be brought to trial, he was stabbed
twenty-six times by an assassin on a train, becoming the first of
many "excellent cadavers" in Sicily's future.
The entrenchment of the Mafia, complete by the 1920s, made
this organization a public enemy for Mussolini. Upon coming to
power, the Fascists saw the Mafia for what it was even then: una
associazione per delinquere, in the words of Cesare Mori, "an association
for criminal purposes." Mori, who became known as the "Iron
Prefect" after Mussolini sent him to Sicily to bring the Mafia to
heel, famously swept into the centers of Mafia power and bluntly
laid out his intentions to the townspeople: "My name is Mori and
I shall have people killed. Delinquency must disappear just as the
dust disappears on the wind of the sirocco."
A measure of the cleansing power of his sirocco could be seen
in the fact that in 1928, the year that Mori took control, there were
only 26 murders in Sicily compared to 278 the year before. But
most of the "men of honor" he rounded up, killed, imprisoned or
sentenced to hard labor were at the level of the picciotti, or soldiers.
The bosses went into hiding or slipped away to the United States,
Marseilles, or even Tunis, pretending to be heroic figures of resistance.
And when, in 1929, Mori began to investigate the connections
between the Mafia and some high-level figures of the Fascist
regime, a telegram from Rome informed him that he had been pensioned
off. He was thus the first to understand what others would
see later on: it was far easier to deal with the Mafia militarily than
to root the organization out of Sicilian politics and culture.
After the Allied invasion of 1943, the Fascists fled to the mainland
as the Allies advanced on Palermo. American soldiers saw
chaos: criminals escaping from jails, peasants occupying land, people
settling private feuds with murder and arson, and everyone
stealing anything that could be carried. General George Patton
said of the Palermitans: "These people are crazy!" Such a view made
any structure of influence appealing. While it is a myth that the
Allies used American mobsters like "Lucky" Luciano to inspire an
anti-Fascist Mafia underground in Sicily, it is true that some Americans
naively failed to exclude the Mafia from the postwar social
order. In fact, in one letter to the secretary of state, the American
consul wrote: "I have the honor to report that on November 18,
1944, General Giuseppe Castallaro, together with Maffia leaders
including Calogero Vizzini, conferred with Virgilio Nasi, head of
the well known Nasi family of Trapani and asked him to take
part in the leadership of a Maffia-backed movement for Sicilian
autonomy."
The United States dropped the idea of Sicilian separatism once
the Germans were driven out of Italy, but didn't shed its naiveté
about the Mafia. After 1945, with the long-delayed issues of land
redistribution and union organizing finally coming to the fore in
Sicily, a force that could counterbalance the Left was vitally important.
Thus the Mafia was not only tolerated, but eased into an
alliance with the Christian Democratic Party, which would fight
the Communists in the political arena, collecting Mafia votes and
sometimes using the Mafia as its military wing. This devil's pact—which
resulted in the murder of dozens of Communists and Socialists
over the next few years and in the delivery of votes that kept
the Christian Democrats in power in Italy—would haunt Sicily for
a generation.
* * *
At the time of my birth, August 1, 1947, these facts of the Mafia
were not known, let alone written; the time for looking backward
at its history had not yet arrived in Sicily. My parents were uneasy
as they watched the Mafia use the crises of the postwar world as a
cover to enter our country's political and cultural bloodstream. Yet
they had more immediate concerns, notably their fear that the
pneumonia which had killed their firstborn son, Carmelo, a few
days after his birth in 1941 would now take me, too.
Penicillin was still an exotic substance in Sicily at the time of
my infancy. But through my mother's family connections and my
father's prestige as the most prominent civil lawyer in Sicily, they
managed to get the precious medicine—in this case from the Vatican
pharmacy—and I recovered. Yet instead of diminishing, their
fears about my health became an obsession that burst into near-hysteria
a few years later when it was discovered during a routine
physical exam that my heart was on the wrong side of my chest.
This discovery was made by a radiologist who, upon seeing an x-ray,
first furiously berated his assistant for having printed the film
incorrectly, only to realize after further examination that not only
was the image accurate, but all of my organs were reversed. Since
then I have always worn a gold medallion around my neck inscribed
with the Latin words Situs viscerum inversus—and I'm sure some
would say that I have pursued my political life in reverse order, too.
I had two older sisters, but I was given my dead brother's role
of firstborn son, a treasured position in a Sicilian family that requires
a loving diminutive, however old the boy is. I was "Luchetto," especially
when my parents were exhorting me to do those things they
hoped would ensure my survival. "Luchetto, put your coat on, otherwise
you'll catch cold and be seriously ill!" or "Luchetto, be careful,
you'll hurt yourself!" or "Luchetto, don't do that, remember
that you're very fragile!" In time I would have two younger brothers
and two more sisters, but in some peculiar way I would always
be the baby of the family as well as the "firstborn."
Not surprisingly, I grew up with the conviction that death was
anxious to claim me, and that I therefore had to live as well as I
could in the brief time I had been allotted. It is probably also why
later on, during the years when the Mafia had decided to kill me,
I found myself not particularly afraid; after all, I had been condemned
since birth. I feared the pain, but death itself had been my
companion for years.
The rhythms of a Sicily that was almost gone when I was a boy
and has now vanished forever were still part of my growing up. The
first twenty days of our summer holidays, for instance, were always
spent at Imbriaca, one of several vast agricultural properties belonging
to my father in an area near Corleone, about forty miles from
Palermo. Named after the Sicilian word for "drunk," Imbriaca bordered
on one of the many properties owned by my mother's family.
It was called Margi, which derives from the word "soaked." This
area, with its breathtakingly beautiful valleys, woods and towering
cliffs, has little rainfall but is very rich in underground waters, and
thus all the aqueous names.
The properties of Imbriaca and Margi are separated by a stream,
crossed by a small bridge which we children jokingly called the
Ponte dei Sospiri, "the Bridge of Sighs," a reference to the romantic
landmark all lovers visiting Venice feel obliged to pass under in
a gondola. This bridge at Imbriaca was where my father, Salvatore
Orlando, would meet my mother, Eleonora, youngest daughter of
the aristocratic Cammarata family and many years his junior, when
they were courting; so we imagined the romance of their trysts.
Theirs was a love match but also, by Sicilian standards, something
of a mismatch as well. The Orlandos were landed gentry, and
my father, whose family came from the charming town of Prizzi
(in whose central square the wedding scene in The Godfather Part
II, which supposedly takes place in Corleone, was actually shot),
became a civil lawyer, just as his own father and grandfather had
been. The Orlandos were part of that Catholic rural bourgeoisie
whose strong moral principles became even more rigid in my father's
case through study of the law in Heidelberg. His morality was
matched only by his piety. My father always paid his taxes fully and
punctually, while others in his social class scornfully evaded them.
He was seen as foolish for complying with the letter of the law, but
for him the letter was the law in microcosm.
My mother descends on one side from the Marquises of
Arezzo—of the oldest mid-Italian aristocracy—and on the other
from the Cammaratas, Barons of Corleone. In fact, the Cammarata
family palazzo in Corleone, which dominates the small central
square of the town, is now the seat of municipal government. The
Sicilian heritage of the Arezzos was literary in origin, beginning
when one of them wrote a biography of Charles V, Holy Roman
Emperor and King of Spain, Naples and Sicily. Charles was so
pleased with this work that he showered money, titles and Sicilian
land on the writer, and so the Arezzos joined the country's nobility.
The fact that my mother had technically married beneath her
class sometimes worked its way into her conversation. It was her
only strength against my formidable father, and she used it with
elegance and innuendo, often in the form of a melancholy observation
that for reasons not entirely clear to her, she did not frequent
as often as before the high society salons of Palermo where
she belonged by birth. In truth, it was because of my father's moral
rigor, not the stigma of his bourgeois background, that both had
chosen to shun this environment. Apart from close family members,
I cannot recall a single friend of my mother's or father's frequently
visiting our home. We were far more likely to entertain a
worker or foreman from one of our country estates than non-family
members of Palermo's high society.
All this struck me as quite odd when I was growing up. Eventually
I realized that it was my father's way of keeping us from possibly
being tainted by people casually associated (as so many
upper-class Sicilians have been) with the Mafia. Later on, after the
war against the Mafia had been fought and won, one of the wealthiest
and best-bred individuals in Palermo, a man who had not offered
any help when the fight was taking place, came up to me and said,
"I want to thank you for what you've done. We offered them our
fingers and they took our hands. You've given us our hands—our
freedom—back again."
* * *
There was no running water in our country house at Imbriaca, and
as a five-year-old my great joy was to sit astride a mule led by one
of the peasants who worked for our family, and go to fetch water
from the spring. The water was put into enormous day jars, attached
to stout hooks on either side of the mule's saddle, and brought back
to the house, where it remained sweet and ice cold. Imbriaca had
no electricity; illumination came from oil lamps, giving a dim,
romantic light to our quiet evenings together. It was not until the
1960s that my father finally had a generator installed, but it made
such an unholy racket at night that we switched it off and continued
to go to bed with our oil lamps.
After the mule came a small Sardinian donkey. It was a present
from my father and belonged to me alone. It took the place of
horses, which I was rarely allowed to ride because, as the movie
Gone with the Wind showed, they can cause one to fall and die. My
parents continued to fret about their precious Luchetto's mortality,
even though in fact I was as healthy as my brothers and sisters.
At the slightest sign of illness, Doctor Michele Navarra—referred
to as my pediatrician, although he was actually the only available
doctor in Corleone—was immediately summoned to thump my
chest and give them reassurances.
The word "Mafia" being forbidden in our house, it was not until
several years later that I learned that Dr. Navarra, who had a leasehold
on some of my mother's Cammarata family property, was also
the capomafia of Corleone. This was at a time when drugs had not
yet changed the nature of the Mafia, drowning it in money and
gratuitous violence, and it was still worth a man of honor's time to
administer the estate of an old aristocratic family. Some years later,
Dr. Navarra's star in the Corleonese Mafia's firmament began to
wane, while that of a particularly vicious criminal named Luciano
Leggio was on the rise. Leggio was a cattle thief who gained control
of a fleet of trucks after the Allied occupation. He used the
trucks to transport the cattle he stole and slaughtered in Corleone
to Palermo for sale on the black market. As Leggio's ambition grew,
he ran afoul of Dr. Navarra, who lured him to a meeting with the
intention of killing him. But Leggio escaped and later ambushed
my old pediatrician with submachine guns as he was crossing our
family estate in his car.
* * *
If Imbriaca was our retreat, the place where we lived according to
the rhythms that had guided Sicilian life for generations, our regular
home was a large building on Via Villafranca in the center of
Palermo. Our family had the entire third floor. Below us lived two
maiden sisters of my father's; and below them, another aunt with
her husband and their five children. With the seven of us, that made
twelve children between the two families, meaning plenty of playmates
without the need to import strangers. We first measured our
intelligence, power and daring in the Sicilian way: against blood
relatives. Our world was complete—and completely removed from
the reality of the city and the vast majority of its inhabitants.
Our home was beautiful; my mother wouldn't have allowed anything
else. It was serene and full of love. But not necessarily joy. It
was difficult to be joyful with our German governess, naturally
called Fräulein, who was always present and ready to remind us of
the rules and regulations that defined our lives. Fräulein was an
elderly, tall, angular woman who uncannily embodied all of my
father's rigorous principles, and perhaps for this reason clashed regularly
with my mother. She was not prone to smiles, let alone jokes.
But while I frequently thought of the things I would like to do to
her as punishment for her tyranny, neither I nor any of my brothers
and sisters dared to begin an insurrection. An assault on established
order was unthinkable. Instead, we vented our frustration
on each other, regularly bickering and fighting. We accepted
Fräulein's right to discipline each of us individually, but never to
regulate conflicts among ourselves. We were family, and no matter
how much we fought, no one who didn't share our blood had
any right to step between us.
In any case, the only punishment we truly dreaded was my
father's pointed silence. Father was a large, imposing, self-contained
man. But it was his eyes rather than his physical presence that cowed
us. His look of disapproval was scorching when he entered the room
and found us squabbling. We would all immediately fall silent. Possessing
the moral equivalent of x-ray vision, his eyes would indicate
who, in his opinion, was in the wrong. Without ever really
being reproached, the one subjected to that withering gaze would
run to his room, throw himself on his bed and cry. The next step
in this ritual was for a brother or sister to quickly follow and offer
consolation. The advice was always the same: "Go and apologize."
The last words of this stylized drama of guilt and repentance
were always the same: "Papa, I was wrong. I beg your pardon."
Whereupon my father's look immediately became tranquil and
soothing. The troublemaker was given a kiss and life returned to
normal once again.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture
by LEOLUCA ORLANDO.
Copyright © 2001 by Leoluca Orlando.
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be
reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Copyright © 2001 Leoluca Orlando.
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1-893554-22-8
The mayor of Palermo, Sicily's capital, Orlando is well qualified to tell the story of the fight against the Mafia in Italy, having been involved in Sicilian politics for well over 20 years. Even in his youth, Orlando's political beliefs were being shaped by his father and a priest who would become one of his most trusted advisers. A leader of the anti-Mafia movement, Orlando introduces readers to others in the movement and the brutal gangsteristica they challenged. Sadly, we barely get to know many of these brave citizens, for they often lost their lives for the cause. Throughout, Orlando demonstrates what it is like to live constantly in danger; for many years, he and his family were never seen in public together, even sitting apart in church. This first-person account is captivating and well written. Recommended for large public and academic libraries. Sarah Jent, Univ. of Louisville, KY Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
Orlando offers a different perspective on the Mafia than authorities like Pino Arlacchi and Nicola Tranfaglia. Born into an aristocratic Palermo family, he joined a small, honest faction of the corrupt Christian Democratic Party and became mayor of Palermo with over 75% of the popular vote in 1993. Cogently, dispassionately and engagingly, Orlando (no longer mayor of Palermo) analyzes the Mafia's decades-long reign. Equally important, he recounts the struggle to preserve the civic life of a great European metropolis. The Mafia has benefited from a perverse claim of being an "honored society," yet Orlando exposes a starkly different reality. The "Sack of Palermo," in which Mafia-controlled construction companies destroyed the city's architectural and cultural legacy by covering it in cement and shoddy construction, was the most visible Mafia transgression. More perniciously, with its enormous drug-trade profits and its ability to deliver votes, the Mafia became an alternative to legitimate government and, eventually, intrinsic to the ruling Christian Democratic oligarchy. Orlando was close to many illustrious persons who died fighting the Mafia, and he was marked to share their fate until a crime lord realized that Sicily, Italy and the world were outraged over the murders of politicians. By demonstrating the Mafia's power, such killings generally destabilized the national government, but finally the authorities cracked down effectively. Giulio Andreotti, seven times prime minister, was implicated in protecting the Mafia in exchange for votes, but Orlando skims over this episode. He cites the 1997 reopening of Palermo's Teatro Massimo ("temporarily" closed in 1974 for repairs costing millions of dollars that went directly to the Mafia) as a sign that the city, free of the corrupt power structure, is enjoying a renaissance. (Sept. 1) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.
