ORGANISED CRIME:To most of us, TV's Tony Soprano and his henchmen are compelling entertainment, but, to Italians, the Mafia's grip is no laughing matter

The Honoured Society: The Secret History of Italy’s Most Powerful Mafia, By Petra Reski, Atlantic Books, 282pp. £17.99

FOR YEARS NOW, I have felt less than comfortable with the huge success of the US TV drama The Sopranos, featuring the New Jersey-based Italian-American mobster Tony Soprano. It is not that this was not a brilliantly acted, well scripted, cleverly directed show. It is rather that, like most Italians, I can see nothing funny or folkloric about organised-crime syndicates which every day traffic in drugs, arms and people, killing those who get in their way and doing huge damage to the economies of those areas in which they are profoundly rooted.

To some extent, that is the message of Petra Reski’s book The Honoured Society: The Secret History of Italy’s Most Powerful Mafia. The lynchpin for this book is the August 2007 killings in Duisburg, Germany, in which six men were killed outside a pizza restaurant, as part of a long running feud involving the ’Ndrangheta, the Calabrian mafia.

The killings shocked German society, forcing it to acknowledge the uncomfortable reality that criminal organisations such as the ’Ndrangheta were thoroughly rooted in good old Deutschland. Later, while answering questions on a book tour in her native Germany, Reski came face to face with her compatriots’ lack of Mafia awareness: “Behind the questions of German readers and journalists, I often sensed the belief that the Mafia was very far away. The Mafia for them was almost folklore, a phenomenon that mostly appeared in backwater villages in southern Italy, steeped in incomprehensible rituals and archaic blood feuds . . . Every bit as if the Mafia were an oppressed little ethnic group that was only trying to keep its customs alive.”

Reski’s book, written in an informal, first-person style rather than in academic mode, sets out to rectify this misapprehension. She takes readers on a journey through just about all the horror stories that Mafia crime has generated in Italy in the last 30 years.

For Italians and for those familiar with the Mafia, much of this is depressingly familiar. However, Reski is not writing for Italians or for Mafia experts, but rather for her compatriots and for those foreigners who continue to misunderstand a phenomenon which these days accounts for 7 to 9 per cent of Italian GDP. Earlier this year, the business association Confesercenti dubbed organised crime the biggest industry in Italy, with a turnover of €140 billion and with profits of €100 billion.

There is nothing new in Reski’s account of key Mafia events. In her ramble through Sicily, Calabria and Naples, she touches on all the obvious stories: the 1992 killing of Mafia investigators Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino; the trial of seven-times prime minister Giulio Andreotti, accused of Mafia “association”; the allegations of Mafia collusion against senator Marcello Dell’Utri, the long time political and business ally of former prime minister Silvio Berlusconi; Roberto Saviano’s Gomorra, an investigation in the Camorra, the Neapolitan mafia; and much more besides.

All of these are mentioned in passing as Reski moves through various Mafia hinterlands, taking time along the way to try to convey a “sense of Mafia”. She describes daily life in a southern Italy, where the landscape ranges from hypnotically beautiful countryside to horrendously ugly urban sprawl. Along the way, she attempts to describe the Mafia mindset. In between times, she recalls her favourite Sicilian restaurants and food.

She also talks about “Sicilian paranoia”, namely that uncomfortable feeling that journalists get when reporting Mafia stories in the heart of Sicily. You are sitting in a cafe or a restaurant and you look at the people around you and you wonder just how many of them are Mafiosi because, obviously, Mafia foot soldiers come from their own community.

Arguably, the most interesting element in this book, however, concerns Reski’s up-close encounters with various protagonists. When she confronts senator Dell’Utri at his trial in Palermo, he says to her: “Bellisima Signora, this trial is so boring, don’t waste your time on it. Go and look at the church of San Giovanni Degli Eremiti instead.”

Then there is Marcello Fava, the Mafioso killer turned state’s witness, who tells her how he went about his “business”: “Generally, the victim is brought to a house by a friend, his best friend if possible, so that he feels safe. Then they grab him, and if he still has something to say, he says it now. I’d like to see the one who doesn’t speak with a noose around his neck. But regardless of whether he speaks or not, he gets killed anyway.”

We also meet Fr Mario Frittitta, the Carmelite Sicilian priest who was once arrested for having heard the confession of the fugitive godfather Pietro Algieri. He tells Reski that “Jesus went to the sinners . . . so I went to them too”. At least he acknowledged that they were sinners, which was a lot better than a 20th-century cardinal of Palermo, Ernesto Ruffini, who, when asked about the Mafia, once famously replied: “Mafia? Isn’t that some form of soap powder?”

Or there is Cinzia Mangano. Her father, the infamous “groom” who acted as a bodyguard at Silvio Berlusconi’s Arcore residence in the 1970s, thanks to the intervention of senator Dell’Utri, was convicted on two murder counts as well as for extortion and drug trafficking. Cinzia tells Reski that “our father was someone with high moral principles”.

In relation to senator Dell’Utri, she also makes a point that regularly intrigues foreign observers, namely the extent to which the garantista Italian legal system makes it almost impossible to secure a definitive conviction because of the slow, three-level, two-appeals judicial system. In a 15-year-long trial, senator Dell’Utri was convicted twice of Mafia collusion, before, last March, the court of cassation (the court of last resort in Italy) controversially ordered that the appeal case be restarted. On that occasion, supreme court judge Francesco Iacoviello argued that “nobody believes any more in the crime of Mafia collusion”. Oh really?

Paddy Agnew is the Rome Correspondent of The Irish Times and has covered Italian Mafia issues since attending the Palermo Maxi-Processo in 1986