Reading Between the Bodies : The Mafia and the dispiriting corruption of Italy’s governing class : EXCELLENT CADAVERS: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic, <i> By Alexander Stille (Pantheon Books: $27.50; 412 pp.)</i>

What happens when a semiotician takes over the Mafia? You get a gangster who makes you an offer you can’t understand. That was a joke before the paradigms of the world’s political economies shifted. But former Italian Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, whose convenient faith in original sin combined with Cold War Realpolitik allowed him to deal with anybody, understood the offers quite well.

Alexander Stille’s “Excellent Cadavers” elucidates the heroic prosecutions of Sicilian Mafiosi in the 1980s, the semiotics of mass murder by the Mafia’s de-evolved leadership, and the dispiriting corruption of Italy’s governing class. Stille’s rigor allows our authentic empathy, frustration and rage, which raises his account far above the whiff-of-cordite “infotainments” for Mafia buffs. Dense with testimony and documentation, and with speculation presented as just that, “Excellent Cadavers” reads as if Stille had internalized both the mental processes of the prosecutors whose courage he celebrates and the truth of a sworn “man of honor.” His subject and approach make his book an essential addition to any reading list labeled “End of Century: Lessons Learned.”

The Sicilian Mafia he lays out is pretty intelligible. It’s a disciplined, hermetic organization that mastered subtle gesture and indirect language to control itself and rule by fear and favor. Its leaders survive by such acute sensitivities to behavioral nuance that they pass easily into paranoia. The organization gets money and power by providing illegal capital and services to legal or illegal businesses, and by selling contraband.

The Mafia rose with the modern Italian state a century and a quarter ago by usurping the state’s role as arbiter between Sicily’s peasants and aristocrats, providing a simile of that justice humans seem to need. The Mafia saw itself as a peer of the state, so it communicated the way a state does--by creating dead bodies or government appointments or public works projects--and was challenged only by the Fascist state. During World War II, the U.S. military restored arms to Mafiosi and after the war U.S. foreign policy operators, giddy on Realpolitik, funded what would become Italy’s dominant party, the Christian Democrats, which immediately and predictably allied with the Mafia. The Mafia provided votes for the CD and violence against leftists; the CD provided public works for graft and very little law enforcement.

The levelheaded Stille describes the wealth and power of U.S. organized crime as merely “parasitic” on our political economy, and this diction of comparison indicates the enormity of Italy’s problem.

Powerful organizations are magnets for psychopaths. Beginning in the 1960s, Mafia leaders from the town of Corleone attempted what underground leaders from Luciano to Mao to fiction’s model of organizational probity, Don Corleone, knew not to do: rule the organization. The Corleonesi puppeteers deceived other Mafiosi into murdering leaders of stable families, then played the killers against each other. Usually this sort of cannibalistic organizational restructuring is hell on the bottom line, but money was flooding in from graft and heroin, so rank- and-file Mafiosi did not find rebellion in their interests until friends started to strangle them.

“Excellent Cadavers” is the Mafia’s term for high-profile prosecutors, police officers and public figures killed as signals about the relative power of the government and the Mafia. Stille is more ambitious than conventional true-crime authors because he chooses to tell the stories of government prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino rather than the power-hungry criminal leaders and corrupt politicians who lack the moral imagination to foresee how good people react to evil. Stille finds good people finally more interesting than bad or weak people and trusts his readers to do the same.

When Falcone and Borsellino became prosecutors in the 1970s the government, press and intelligentsia were in the habit of describing the Mafia almost anthropologically, as a quaint tribe with no macro-economic clout and only local political influence, to be kept within “natural limits” so it didn’t screw up tourism (analogous to conventional wisdom on Los Angeles gangs). But Falcone, an austere man infatuated by Giuseppe Mazzini’s phrase, “Life is a mission and duty is its highest law,” began to diagram the matrix of Mafia economic relationships when he was assigned to the Spotola drug case in 1980.

Stille’s work on the relationships between prosecutors and informers is the stuff of Le Carre’s novels. Various informers trusted Falcone with their lives after the Corleonesi targeted or betrayed them. The most important Mafioso left with no survival options other than to ally with the state’s honorable man is Tommaso Buscetta. He taught Falcone the table of Mafia organization, the codex to Mafia diction of murder methods, and the necessity to take the Mafia as seriously as it takes itself. Falcone observed, as many have done, that the Mafia “expresses . . . the criminal extreme of certain values that, by themselves, are not bad: courage, friendship, respect for tradition.” Thus in his own work “the categorical imperative of the Mafiosi to ‘tell the truth’ became a cardinal principal. . . . Strange as it may seem, the Mafia taught me a lesson in morality.”

What Buscetta feared to talk about, however, was the government. After Falcone and Borsellino prosecuted 366 criminals in a specially built bunker courthouse--and convicted most in the 1986-87 “maxi-trial”--the government and the press attacked them. They knew the Mafia isolated its enemies politically, tarnished their integrity and only then killed them. Laws changed to release prisoners early, procedures changed to decentralize future Mafia investigations and appeals went to a judge called the “Sentence Killer.”

For a time it seemed that the Mafia would prevail by its usual methods. But the money-sotted Corleonesi overreached and thereby created high-echelon informers. Eventually Falcone and Borsellino were given the names of respectable citizens close to the God-fearing, longtime Christian Democrat leader, friend of Popes and chronic prime minister, Giulio Andreotti. When Andreotti, head of the government tasked with protecting Falcone’s and Borsellino’s lives, made the first phone call to Falcone after an attempt on his life failed, Falcone remembered what an old Mafioso told him years earlier: The first to send funeral flowers is the murderer.

Falcone and Borsellino and their body guards and family members were of course murdered, but Italy changed anyway. After the Cold War people expected more from governments everywhere than just staunch anti-communism, and the governing classes had to choose between being in business with the Mafia or with the European Economic Community.

The public that came to consciousness through the long series of prosecutions turned against the Mafia. The government even managed to arrest 23-year fugitive, Toto Riina, boss of the Corleonesi, for Falcone’s murder. Parliament dissolved itself and the judiciary created the equivalent of an FBI and an organized crime task force. Andreotti was indicted March 2, 1995, in Palermo, exposed as the Mafia’s political guarantor, not “a man of the government, but a boss of the Cosa Nostra.”

The story won’t end with the proceedings against Andreotti--if he survives the law’s delays. The excellent heads of NATO states required and received accurate intelligence, so the investigation of Andreotti may touch leaders of nations plagued by drug crime who knew Andreotti was the Mafia’s man.

Stille has books yet to write, for half a century of money and the political power it carries do not disappear. Some people somewhere have that money, or, more correctly, that money has some people. “Excellent Cadavers” is an act of faith that humans will work and sacrifice to live decently. It is a fine monument to those who died and those who live to act on that hope.