Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture. Leoluca Orlando

      My office as legal advisor to the president was on the first floor of Palazzo d’Orleans, once owned by the Duke of Paris, a beautiful building on the square behind the Norman Palace. Mattarella’s rooms were on the second floor, and I spent as much time there as in my own office.

      In the two years that I worked as Piersanti’s legal advisor, we designed several laws, the most important of which was a law that transferred the responsibility for a large part of the regional budget from the regional commissioners to the cities of Sicily. It was a revolutionary law in its way. Over the years, the position of regional commissioner had become too powerful, able to move millions of dollars in one direction rather than another on the strength of a single signature. Without checks and balances, the position had become vulnerable to Mafia penetration. The aim of our law was to put this money directly into the hands of the various municipalities that were supposed to be the beneficiaries of the spending, thus making the sum spent with a single stroke of the pen less appetizing. I worked hard on the details of each article of the law, which was finally approved by the regional parliament.

      Piersanti was also responsible for passing a law forcing Sicily to comply with building standards that had been in effect in the rest of Italy for over a decade. Such a measure seemed innocuous enough, but it was a step onto dangerous ground. No past president of the Region had dared become involved with building rules and regulations of Sicily, and especially of Palermo, where they were exclusively controlled by the Mafia and its front men in the political world.

      Without any oversight, the city of Palermo, for instance, had let six contracts for the construction of six schools in six different districts of the city. For each contract only one construction company submitted a bid. This would be unusual in any city, but it was astounding in a city where there was such a hunger for work and where the construction business—however hideous its product—was flourishing. Piersanti commissioned an investigation into the circumstances of such deals and discovered, without much effort, that the six construction companies that submitted winning bids were connected to the capimafia of the six districts where the schools were to be built. When Piersanti’s advisors discussed this discovery with him, I had to keep myself from smiling. How could those bosses be so stupid as not to permit another company to submit a bid, if for no other reason than to create the appearance of open competition? My amusement showed how ignorant I still was of the Mafia mentality.