A More Subtle Mafia

Here in the harsh, tawny hills of central Sicily, proud residents of Corleone are trying to take back the name immortalized by Marlon Brando and made synonymous with the Cosa Nostra.

That nasty reputation of their town as a home for murderous thugs is simply mistaken, they say. Oh sure, directions are often given in relation to the sites of famous slayings. (“Turn right where they offed the Bandito Giuliano ...”) And the wives and children of some of Sicily’s most notorious Mafia dons (jailed or on the lam) live in Corleone.

But take the town’s “Mafia tour,” as 1,700 visitors have so far this year, and you hear not only about the local history of organized crime, but also the efforts of a handful of brave souls to fight it.

Corleone is trying hard to shed its image. But is the Mafia ever really very far away?

“I think they’re laughing at us,” said Gino Felicetti, a young dentist who guides the Mafia tours. “They leave us alone for now. But if these tours ever take off and become moneymaking, they’ll want to be part of it.”

Like Corleone, the Mafia on this island of vineyards, ancient Greek temples and half-finished concrete buildings has spent the last few years carefully burnishing its public guise and courting a new air of respectability. But even if it rarely makes headlines these days, the Cosa Nostra is, in fact, flourishing.

Mafia capos have suspended their most viciously violent campaigns -- the ones where they might blow up a prosecutor visiting his mother or melt a young boy in acid -- and instead are running commercial enterprises, securing government construction contracts and calmly claiming protection money from vast numbers of Sicily’s residents.

They have become a gentler breed of criminals, harder to fight, virtually impossible to stop.

“The Mafia today is less violent, but much more infiltrated into daily life,” said Silvana Saguto, a judge 35 miles away in the Sicilian capital, Palermo, who, in 23 years on the bench, has sent many a mobster to jail.

Saguto oversees a program that confiscates Mafioso property and assets as part of the punishment meted out by the courts. In the last decade, she estimated, she has seized or “sequestered” about $7.5 billion worth of assets.

And yet, Saguto readily acknowledged, it’s a drop in the bucket. This is a losing battle.

“No economic activity is untouched by the Mafia,” she said. “As soon as we arrest one criminal, another takes his place.”

The Cosa Nostra, along with its counterparts in the southern Italian provinces of Calabria, Campania and Puglia, will this year rake in profits equivalent to 10% of the national GDP, or about $123 billion, according to the Roman think tank Eurispes.

Although drug trafficking is the biggest moneymaker for these criminal organizations, Eurispes said, business corruption, construction deals and public works projects constitute a major source of income, and Sicily’s Cosa Nostra leads the pack in such pursuits.

In Corleone, a town of 11,000, residents noted that the presence of an anti-Mafia center, inaugurated with great fanfare a couple of years ago and featuring life-size pictures of notorious crime bosses, would have been unthinkable in bloodier days. The center is an important stop on the Mafia tour.

Antonino Iannazzo, deputy mayor of Corleone, said residents who would have run in terror in years past were now happy to point out to visitors the houses where native-son mobsters lived. That courage seemed born of a kind of mutually tolerated coexistence.

“The Mafia is always active, but they are acting in a more hidden way,” Iannazzo, 30 and a member of the right-wing National Alliance party, said in an interview in his office, where three photographs of Benito Mussolini graced the wall.

One of the world’s most enduring criminal organizations, the Mafia was formed in Sicily’s central farmland to defend feudal barons, especially from peasants who eventually demanded land. By the middle of the 19th century it had evolved into a loose network of crooks, thieves and hired guns.

Built on the foundation of secretive Sicilian clans, the Mafia grew to control numerous Sicilian villages and towns by the early 20th century. When Italy’s Fascists rose to power, dictator Mussolini coveted the territory and suppressed the Mafiosi who were in charge, throwing many into prison.

His crackdown on the Mafia made its members natural allies of American forces that invaded during World War II. The Americans in turn allowed Mafiosi to become mayors across Sicily, and over time they moved from agriculture to urban businesses, construction in particular.

All Mafia clans were violent, but the most savage was the Corleone gang. Writer Mario Puzo gave the town’s name to his fictional “Godfather,” Don Vito Corleone, in his 1969 opus, which became the basis for the classic film trilogy.

The less vicious Mafia dates to just over a decade ago.

Although most of the thousands of Mafia killings had involved internal feuds and vendettas, the Corleone mobsters aimed their guns and bombs at public figures, including a raft of judges, police officers and noncompliant politicians. “The massacres,” is how the period is referred to here.

In 1992, the crusading anti-Mafia Judge Giovanni Falcone was murdered, blown up as he drove from the Palermo airport to the city. His wife and three police bodyguards were killed along with him.

Two months later, his associate and the chief prosecutor for Palermo, Paolo Borsellino, met a similar fate. A car bomb outside his mother’s apartment building killed him and five bodyguards as he arrived for a visit.

The carnage had gone too far and unleashed a backlash, what Sicilian political scientist Umberto Santino calls a boomerang. The Sicilian public rebelled, tougher laws and longer jail sentences were enacted and, for a period, authorities scored significant victories in their fight against the Mafia.

After the arrest in 1993 of Salvatore “The Beast” Riina, the capo di tutti i capi -- the boss of bosses -- the Mafia under his successor, Bernardo “The Tractor” Provenzano, made a strategic decision to temper its methods, lower its profile and stick to the lucrative but less visible business of corruption and protection rackets.

And thus it became what Palermo’s chief prosecutor, Piero Grasso, calls the Invisible Mafia. It keeps out of the limelight, uses persuasion instead of murder, and has gradually, quietly expanded its grip on Sicilian economic life.

Gone are the days when gangsters charged a handful of businesses exorbitant extortion fees. Now an estimated 80% of all Palermo’s shopkeepers pay some amount of protection money -- known as the pizzo.

It’s part of the new style, Grasso said, citing today’s mantra: “Pagare tutti, pagare meno,” which essentially means, everyone pays less, but everyone pays. And no one goes to the police, Grasso said during an interview at Palermo’s fortress-like Justice Ministry. Six of his bodyguards sat just outside his office.

All who live in Palermo know which Mafia family controls their neighborhood or the neighborhood of their place of business. Whether it’s recovering stolen property or getting a permit to open a shop, the Mafia has a hand in it. A legitimate business might secure a big building contract legally, but Mafiosi will then tell it where to buy cement or which ditch diggers to hire.

“The Mafia doesn’t even need to threaten anymore: People look to the Mafia and seek it out for favors,” said Enrico Bellavia, a Sicilian journalist and author of a new book on the Cosa Nostra. “People don’t ask themselves whether this organization is unpleasant or not -- they just see it as a force that can resolve their individual needs.”

Provenzano has eluded capture for more than four decades. The most recent photograph police have of him is from 1959, when he was 25. (They’ve used computer-generated magic to come up with a picture of what he might look like now at 70.) From his hide-out, Provenzano famously communicates his orders by sending instructions on small pieces of paper to his associates and followers. And they write back, as do a number of Sicilians asking him for favors.

Prosecutors acknowledged that it was quite embarrassing that he had not been caught, and there had been reports in the Italian press that a small group of national paramilitary police was helping him hide.

At the same time, several officials quietly admitted that Provenzano’s freedom in fact ensured the peace, such as it was. It was in his interest to keep the calm: As long as there were no massacres, he was free to conduct his business.

Anti-Mafia activists said they feared that the relative peace was lulling Italians into a false sense that organized crime was no longer dangerous. The gains after the Falcone-Borsellino slayings are gradually being eroded, they said, especially during what they see as a permissive climate fostered by Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi, a multibillionaire businessman who is on trial on bribery charges, routinely rails against judges and prosecutors as mentally deficient communists.

The Sicilian branch of Berlusconi’s Forza Italia (Go Italy) party has for years been accused of having mob connections. Party officials have denied the claim. A Mafia turncoat last year testified that Berlusconi once held a meeting with Mafia dons at his villa near Milan; the testimony came during the trial of one of Berlusconi’s old friends and business partners, who is accused of ties to organized crime.

Berlusconi’s infrastructure minister, Pietro Lunardi, whose office controls public works projects, touched off a political firestorm three years ago when he said the Mafia was a reality that “we have to live with.” (He later said he was misunderstood.)

A new debate beginning to grip Italy is whether some elements of the Mafia are hooking up with militant Islamic cells known to be active in parts of the country. Pierluigi Vigna, the head of the national anti-Mafia office, recently told journalists that investigators had found a link between “Islamic terrorist groups” and the Camorra, which is the Cosa Nostra’s counterpart in Naples. When pressed, he declined to give details.

Although it exists throughout Italy and certainly beyond, the Mafia has flourished especially in southern Italy, home to endemic poverty, distrust for central government, clannish ways and emphasis on family loyalty.

The corruption spawned by cooperation with the Mafia -- millions of dollars in public funds and foreign aid have reportedly been siphoned off -- only locks the region in economic misery.

In Corleone, unemployment is high and the pace is slow. But the streets are calm.

At the Excelsior Bar, overlooking Corleone’s scruffy main plaza -- named “Falcone-Borsellino” for the slain judges -- men drink Red Bull with vermouth and eye a stranger warily. One certainly won’t see a major anti-Mafia rally here.

Yet around the corner from the Excelsior, the local pasta maker is willing to use grains grown on land confiscated from Mafiosi. And when Riina’s son tried to open an illegal dry-cleaning business recently (police suspected that he was laundering something more than woolens) he was shut down and arrested.

“Corleone has changed a lot in 15 years,” said Maria Stella Lino, a 46-year-old homemaker. The fear that kept people in their homes after dusk, shuttered businesses and discouraged small-town social life is gone, she said.

Lino recalled how Mardi-Gras-style carnivals, typical throughout Italy, were banned for years in Corleone because authorities worried that mobsters would use the costumes as cover to kill their enemies.

“Now we have carnivals, with masks, every year,” she said. “The Mafia is part of the culture. But it’s hidden now.”

Felicetti, the young dentist who conducts the tours, and his partner, Fausto Iaria, like to surprise their guests with a first stop at the town’s cathedral. Corleone gave the world two saints, they tell visitors.

The tour also includes wine tasting at a local cellar, lunch on a farm and a visit to the “anthropological” museum that displays the evolution of farm tools. The main stop, however, is the anti-Mafia center, which also houses an archive of documents from major Mafia trials conducted in the 1980s.

Felicetti and Iaria said they hoped visitors would take away another impression of Corleone.

“But to be honest,” Iaria said, “they come here because of ‘The Godfather.’ ”