Mobbed – Frank McNally on the image and reality of the Sicilian Mafia

The No Mafia Memorial Museum in Central Palermo presents an unflinching view of the history of gang violence in Sicily, much of it involving grim newspaper photographs from murder scenes.

Meanwhile, in the souvenir shops nearby, you can buy Godfather socks and T-shirts, with images of Marlon Brando and the slogan “I am the boss”: an ideal present for the would-be authority figure in your life.

The contrast is jarring. But it may be one of the legacies of the Sicilian Mafia’s romanticisation by Hollywood that its fame has now outstripped its local influence, widespread as that still is.

Souvenir shops aside, the beneficiaries of the Cosa Nostra’s high profile include Italy’s three other crime syndicates: the Neapolitan Camorra, the ‘Ndragheta of Calabria, and the least-known of the quartet, the Sacra Corona Unita (“Holy United Crown”) of Puglia.

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In drug-dealing and other traditional lines of business, the first two have long surpassed the Sicilian Mafia, but with only a fraction of the publicity.

One of the Camorra’s big setbacks of recent years, for example, was the “Spartacus Trial”, which ran for a decade until 2008 and convicted 36 members of the Casalesi clan.

Despite the catchy name – echoing the Roman slave whose rebellion happened in the same area – it received nothing like the coverage of the Maxi Trial (1986-1992), which had targeted the Sicily mob.

According to John Hooper, Italian correspondent of the Economist and author of The Italians (2013), the Processo Spartacus “was virtually ignored by the national media”.

Not that the over-promoted Sicilian Mafia has gone away. One of the reasons the island still lacks a bridge to mainland Italy – an idea first proposed in ancient times and the subject of detailed plans since the 1990s – is that it would be a boon for local gangsters, who have increasingly specialised in construction.

Everywhere you turn in the island’s capital, you can still see the effects of the “Sack of Palermo”, a building boom from the 1950s to the 1980s in which many historic and green-belt areas were bulldozed to make way for shoddy apartment blocks built by Mob-friendly contractors.

Poor construction standards have also often contributed to the death tolls in Italian earthquakes, including the one that destroyed several towns in western Sicily in 1968.

But the government contracts that follow such disasters are invariably compromised too. Hence the continuing official reluctance to commit public funds to a bridge with the mainland, although at their closest the two land masses are only 3km apart.

Food is central to almost everything in Sicily. This may explain why the smallest unit of the Cosa Nostra is known as the cosca, a Sicilian word for the head of an artichoke, with its tightly overlapping leaves.

The mob’s cells could once depend on keeping their members and operations similarly close. But the use of pentiti (literally “repentents”, former gang members who turn informer) have helped the Maxi Trial and other investigations prise them apart, albeit at a high cost in revenge violence.

The result, according to Hooper, is that: “On Sicily, at least, it can be argued that the mobsters are in serious difficulties.” Artichokes aside, however, another plant-based metaphor hints how the Mafia became a problem for Italy in general, including the north, which had thought itself immune.

In a 1960 novel, the Sicilian writer Leonardo Sciascia quoted scientists on the spread of what was formerly a southern phenomenon, palm trees. The “palm tree line”, or the “strong black coffee line” as Sciascia also called it, was advancing northwards at 500 metres a year, he wrote:

“It’s rising like mercury in a thermometer, this palm tree line, this strong coffee line, this scandal line, rising up through Italy and already [past] Rome.”

The infiltration of Italian politics – in Rome and elsewhere – may have been a factor in the deaths, 30 years ago this summer, of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two Palermo-born judges who had dedicated their careers to bringing down the Mafia.

The Maxi Trial was their big triumph. But first, on May 23rd, 1992, Falcone was killed, along with his wife and three policemen, by a bomb on the motorway to Palermo airport. Then, 57 days later, Borsellino met a similar end near his mother’s home in the city, together with five police officers.

The airport is now named after the martyred duo. Many schools and public buildings also commemorate them as Sicilian heroes, as does a giant mural unveiled on a gable wall in Palermo in 2017. It may or may not amount to them having the last laugh but the mural, “Giovanni e Paolo”, is based on a famous newspaper photograph in which the two friends are sharing a joke.