COLUMN ONE : No Respect for Sicily’s Godfathers : A wave of bloodshed is carrying away residents’ admiration for the dons. Now affection is reserved for Mafia fighters, with its most emotional expression at their funerals.

After Don Paolino Bontate, one of the last traditional Mafia bosses of Palermo, died in his sleep in 1974, hundreds of citizens attended his funeral Mass. A newspaper reporter present in the Santo Curato d’Ars Church wrote that at least 500 people filed past the solid walnut coffin to kiss the cheek of Bontate’s eldest son, Stefano.

Five trucks loaded with flowers, including dozens of colorful bouquets given by politicians and bureaucrats who owed their careers to Bontate’s influence, followed the don’s funeral procession along the garlanded Via Villagrazia. A tearful parish priest eulogized: “Don Paolino Bontate was goodness personified.”

Stefano Bontate, gunned down by Mafia enemies in 1981, was buried with much less fanfare. And by the time of the gangland death of Bontate’s last remaining son and successor, Giovanni, in 1988, only a handful of family friends bothered to attend the funeral.

Longtime Mafia watchers here relate the tale of the Bontate funerals to illustrate how much, in the 14 years between the tranquil death of the father and the violent demise of the youngest son, public attitudes toward Sicily’s infamous criminal underworld have changed.

No longer are Mafiosi viewed as “men of honor” who perform quasi-civic favors, help common people out of jams and generally live in peaceful coexistence with the Italian state. The long-ballyhooed social aspect of the Mafia has disappeared under a wave of bloodshed.

Now it is the funerals of the Mafia’s most prominent victims--martyred judges, prosecutors and investigative magistrates like Paolo Borsellino, who was assassinated here last weekend in a Mafia car bombing--that draw the big crowds of mourners.

At Borsellino’s funeral in Palermo on Friday, more than 5,000 people assembled outside the small Santa Luisa di Marillac Church to pay their respects. Even hardened officers of the carabinieri, Italy’s tough paramilitary police force, fought back tears as speakers praised the slain magistrate.

When Antonino Capponetto, founder of the anti-Mafia corps of judges of which Borsellino was a member, spoke of “moral rebirth” for Italy, the church and the audience outside erupted into long rhythmic applause.

Many in the crowd wore paper signs pinned to their shirts proclaiming war on the Mafia. When the flower-draped hearse slowly made its way from the church, Borsellino’s weeping widow and three children leaning against the rear window in grief, thousands of Palermo residents came out on their balconies and joined in the applause. Graffiti on several buildings proclaimed: “Borsellino Lives!”

“This city has taken a great stride forward,” commented Father Ennio Pintacuda, a Jesuit priest in Palermo known for his crusading anti-Mafia efforts. “Twenty years ago, the funerals of the Mafia bosses were the big events. Now the people come to honor the men who struggle against the Mafia.”

In Sicily, the existence of the Mafia dates to the 17th Century, when it was formed as a secret society opposed to Spanish rule of the island. To protect themselves, its members developed a strict code of honor, including a vow of silence--called omerta --in which they swore not to discuss Mafia business outside the secret society formed by member families.

In the extreme poverty, rugged terrain and general lawlessness of old Sicily, the Mafia provided order where no other existed. By 1800 it was the main social, political and economic force of western Sicily. It moved to the United States with the great wave of Italian immigrants at the turn of this century. American law enforcement agencies first reported the presence of the Mafia in 1891.

By the 1950s, the principal activity of the Mafia was crime. Its great wealth today came after American and Sicilian branches of the Mafia, meeting in Palermo’s Hotel delle Palme, agreed to cooperate in narcotics trafficking, using Sicily as an important base. Despite the increasing criminalization of the Mafia, it still had a legacy of respect, at least on Sicily, until the most recent wave of killings of public officials.

According to Pintacuda, the shift in attitude began in 1979 with the killing of Cesare Terranova, a Palermo investigative judge and prominent anti-Mafia prosecutor. Since Terranova’s shooting, he said, the Mafia has conducted an unceasing, bloody campaign of intimidation and assassination against judicial authorities.

Borsellino, blown to pieces along with five of his bodyguards in a powerful car bomb explosion in residential Palermo last Sunday, is the 10th judge or prosecutor killed in Sicily in the past 13 years.

Also assassinated in that period was former Gen. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the hero of the successful Italian campaign against Red Brigade terrorists. He had been called to Palermo in 1982 to pick up the anti-Mafia fight.

“This is a very different situation than years past,” said Giovanni Pepi, executive editor of the Giornale di Sicilia newspaper. “The killings have changed the relationship between the people of Palermo and the Mafia.

“The Mafia,” he noted, “once had a strong emotional following. But it lost the popular support when it began to eliminate its enemies like Giovanni Falcone (Italy’s leading anti-Mafia prosecutor, assassinated in May) and Paolo Borsellino. This last killing left Palermo in a state of anguish and fear without precedent.”

The campaign of assassinations of public officials is believed to be the direct result of increased heat put on organized crime by Italian authorities. Beginning in the 1980s, a new breed of prosecutor developed in Italy with the Mafia as its target.

The biggest breakthrough came in 1987, when Falcone, a charismatic and effective prosecutor, persuaded Tommaso Buscetta, a Mafia boss who had lost 10 relatives to inter-family violence, to break the code of omerta and help government prosecutors. Buscetta’s testimony resulted in the conviction of several hundred Mafiosi in mass trials held in Palermo and Naples.

In the wake of the Falcone and Borsellino killings, thousands of anti-Mafia demonstrators and mourners filled Palermo streets. Never before have public attitudes toward the Mafia been so negative, sparking grass-roots efforts on several political fronts to purge Sicily of its dark influence.

La Rete (The Network), a progressive anti-Mafia political party with many young followers, has had strong showings in recent elections. On the other side of the political spectrum, the Movimento Sociale Italiano, a neo-fascist political party, has attracted votes with a strong law-and-order appeal that calls for the death penalty for Mafia hit men.

Yet, despite the encouraging wave of public reaction against it, the Mafia has never appeared more powerful. According to a friend who lunched with Borsellino only hours before his death, the magistrate knew he would be killed and that he was powerless to prevent it.

“The dynamite has come for me,” Borsellino reportedly said.

The back-to-back killings of Falcone and Borsellino, Italy’s two most knowledgeable Mafia specialists, delivered a profound blow to the criminal justice system, causing several magistrates at the Palermo Palace of Justice to resign out of fear for their own lives.

Italian President Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, in Palermo to attend the funerals of Borsellino and his bodyguards, met with Sicilian judges to urge them to remain at their posts. “Let no one move from their place,” Scalfaro urged. “We must hold on. Let us stay united.”

Many local officials and diplomats are skeptical about long-term chances of defeating the deeply entrenched criminal network that uses the island as its financial and logistic base. Despite its enormous influence, the Mafia has only 5,000 active members in Sicily, senior Italian government officials say.

But “Sicily is still the sanctuary of the Mafia, its headquarters, its base of operations,” one resident diplomat said. “It is encouraging to hear the talk of rebellion against the Mafia. It is a grass-roots movement that needs to be nourished. But personally, I’m pessimistic. The Mafia has infiltrated every level of the Sicilian economy. Will the Sicilians still be so determined when they realize how much of their prosperity is dependent on the Mafia?”

The diplomat noted that, in the last six months, he has seen a substantial increase in luxury vehicles--Mercedeses, BMWs, large Alfa-Romeo sedans--on Palermo’s streets. Without Mafia money, he contended, such ostentatious displays of affluence would not be possible here.

Sicily, with unemployment estimated in excess of 25% and little industry to speak of, is considered one of Italy’s poorest regions. Yet Palermo, the Sicilian capital, does a booming business in luxury goods on trendy avenues such as Via della Liberta.

Despite the warm climate on the Mediterranean island, one small stretch of Via della Liberta boasts, among other tony shops, no fewer than eight luxury fur salons that sell imported Canadian mink coats starting at $7,000.

Luxury shopping is not limited to Palermo. Similar boutiques can be found in the smaller coastal cities of Messina and Catania in the east, and the reputed Mafia stronghold of Trapani in the west. According to one diplomatic source, Trapani has more banks on a per capita basis than any other city in Italy, giving rise to the widely held belief that Sicily is a major money-laundering center for the mob.

Ten years ago, Sicily was also an important center for Mafia narcotics trafficking. Laboratories to process heroin were maintained in the isolated canyons in the mountainous center of the island. But with the rise of the Asian and South American connections, drug activities have mostly moved elsewhere, authorities contend.

But Sicily continues to have both nostalgic and strategic value to the Mafia. Many Mafia experts here, including Pintacuda, contend that the next area of development for the Mafia is Eastern Europe and the emerging states of the former Soviet Union.

“The Mafia has become a giant international holding company,” said Pintacuda, who spoke in terms of broad, international conspiracies when interviewed in his file-crammed office at his Palermo think tank specializing in Mafia studies. As he talked, one of his three bodyguards, 9-millimeter pistol tucked into his trouser waistband, ambled into the office to deliver a stack of newspapers. Nobody is anybody in Palermo without a bodyguard.

“The problem cannot be solved here in Palermo or Sicily alone,” Pintacuda continued. “The problem is international. To solve it, we need international help.”

Sensitive to the Sicilian dilemma, the U.S. Justice Department offered FBI investigative assistance to Italian authorities after both the Falcone and Borsellino killings.

Operating under the supervision of an Italian magistrate, a team of FBI explosives experts are in Palermo this week to seek information about the Borsellino bombing, a huge explosion that destroyed more than a dozen vehicles, shattered windows and cracked walls on two large apartment buildings.

The dramatic Borsellino slaying, coming only two months after the unsolved remote-control bombing death of Falcone, left Palermo riddled with self-doubt and a pervasive sense of impotence against a more powerful foe.

“They have shown their great power with these assassinations,” said Geni Gruppuso, a young volunteer with the emerging anti-Mafia political movement La Rete. “The Mafia has shown it can still do anything it wants.”

The young Rete volunteers pin their hopes on the charismatic leadership of Sicilian politician Leoluca Orlando. Elected mayor of Palermo in 1985 as a member of the Christian Democratic Party, a political party reputed to have a working relationship with the Mafia in Sicily, Orlando immediately assumed a strong anti-Mafia position.

After losing the mayor’s job in 1990, the dark, square-jawed Orlando left the Christian Democrats to create the Rete reform party. But his anti-Mafia stand made him a major target and he was forced to abandon his family home and live under special police protection, reportedly in a police barracks. Only when his young followers take action, such as their recent midnight occupation of city hall, does Orlando suddenly appear, like a masked avenger, from his secret hiding place.

He is portrayed in campaign posters as a knight in armor. But his supporters, like Antida Piazza, 23, a psychology student at Palermo University, insist that Orlando is no hero. “We don’t want any more heroes,” she said. “The Mafia kills heroes.”

Paolo Torturro, 46, a Palermo Roman Catholic priest, puts his faith in the future in the city’s disadvantaged young people, impoverished and troubled street urchins who live in dingy inner-city slums. From his church and school in the shadow of the notorious Ucciardone prison, site of the mass trial of Mafiosi in 1987, Torturro has offered a retreat and activity center for children 14 and younger. He considers himself in direct competition with the Mafia, which has traditionally exploited the same population for its child labor pool.

“We go out in the streets and pick them up,” said Torturro, an athletic, silver-haired man who wears open-necked sports shirts instead of a priest’s collar. As he talked, two youngsters ducked their heads into his office at the Santa Lucia Church.

One boy was small, face and arms dark with dirt, but with spirited, intelligent brown eyes. “His father is in prison for robbery,” Torturro said later.

The other boy was taller, thin and studious-appearing with thick eyeglasses. His “father’s a drug dealer,” Torturro said casually.

As a symbolic gesture against the violent values taught by the Mafia, every Friday the priest stages a bonfire for toy guns and weapons as well as syringes and other drug paraphernalia.

One day, he recounted, a boy came to the bonfire carrying a real handgun.

The boy said he was given the pistol by his grandfather.

“When you grow up,” he said his grandfather told him, “you must use this pistol to kill the killer of your father.”