Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture. Leoluca Orlando
from the Vatican in response to the charge of a courageous Protestant clergyman that Sicily was controlled by the Mafia. Ruffini had responded with what had been his position—and that of the local church—for decades: Sicilians are decent, hard-working people libeled by such an accusation. There is no such thing as an organization called the Mafia; there are only individual criminals.
The private intellectual room my parents shared was suffused with that suffocating mutual understanding I had sensed on other occasions—when, for instance, we were all ready to depart for the country, our cases packed in the black Mercedes, and suddenly we would be told, “We’re not going now.” We couldn’t leave, not even traveling as we were accustomed to do: always by daylight, and whenever possible in convoy with other family members in several cars, the adults alert and cautious. This was considered not so much taking precautions, as simply the way we moved, part of our manner of life. Only many years later did I learn that there had been a constant danger of kidnapping. Eventually it stopped, not because the Mafia had a change of heart toward the inhabitants of their own land, but simply because this was a crime that brought too many carabinieri to scour the countryside, thus hampering other, more lucrative criminal activities.
I had the same feeling—that there was something out there I wasn’t quite getting—when my father would come home and say something like this to my mother: “I saw Cavaliere Peppino. He greeted me and I answered him politely. Fortunately he didn’t ask to come here to our home.” Or when I saw his reaction to certain distant cousins who had allied themselves by marriage to families whose surnames would be mentioned with a particular look or tone of voice. Such matters were so freighted with taboo that we children didn’t even ask each other—and even less thought of asking our parents—“What is this all about?” Certain things were just the way they were. If we were no longer leaving for the country, obviously there was a reason. If some people, even relatives, were not to be associated with, obviously there was a reason. But we didn’t speak of it.
So the feeling was familiar, yet this memorable lunch was somewhat different. It was when the idea of the Mafia as a reality, not just a word, began to inhabit my mind. It was not only evil, but ambiguous, perverse, contaminating. It stained those who were touched by it and even those who weren’t.
Later on, when I was engaged in my fight against the Mafia, rumors circulated that my father, morally the most impeccable man I have ever known, had himself been a Mafia consigliore. (The consigliore is an advisor who is outside the organization, unlike the consigliere, the lawyer/advisor who is inside the family.) He was guilty by syllogism: he was a man of power; Mafia men are powerful; therefore he must be connected to the Mafia. When I sued the author of this slander and got a final judgment for 100 million lire, these rumors immediately stopped.
The subject of the Mafia was never, in all my school years, mentioned at Gonzaga, not even in high school. Not that the subject was avoided; it simply didn’t exist. We all lived under a bell jar—not only the children of wealthy families attending Gonzaga, but all Sicilians. Our ignorance was willful; today it would be called “denial.” The Mafia might well be virtually invisible as an organization, yet it could be seen in its works, not just in the occasional death, but also in the changing face of our city. For it was in the 1950s and ’60s that what later became known as the “Sack of Palermo” was taking place.
After the war, there had finally been land reform. The effect, paradoxically, was not so much that a few peasants got a few acres of their own, but that many others were freed from the land altogether. Hundreds of thousands left farms for the city. Their arrival touched off a postwar building boom. In Sicily some 70 percent of the GNP is government, and government is always building, always spending money. But this building boom was unlike any other.
It coincided with the rise of two young men, Salvo Lima and Vito Ciancimino. Lima had Mafia in his blood: he was the son of a Mafioso named Vincenzo Lima. Ciancimino was a “made” member of Cosa Nostra. The two men moved into the leadership of Palermo’s Christian Democrats in the 1950s, the first generation of politicians with clear Mafia ties. By the early 1960s Lima was mayor of Palermo and Ciancimino was his commissioner for public works—by far the most important of all the departments. Together they supervised the design of the city’s infamous “Town Plan,” which became, in effect, the manifesto for the Sack of Palermo.
Development was forced into green areas on the outskirts of the city, areas invariably owned by “friends of the friends,” which immediately skyrocketed in value. A style of architecture that can only be called Mafia Modern sprang up there: boxy cement dormitories for the immigrants from rural areas, shoddy structures of indignity packed with poor people who received no municipal services once they were settled there. (Some areas in the city received no deliveries of water, gas, and electricity not just for days or even months, but for years!) Looking at these concrete jungles, one could understand why Sicilians were the largest per capita consumers on earth not only of olive oil, tomatoes, and anchovies, but also of cement.
Lima and Ciancimino oversaw the blueprint for the Sack, and allowed the Mafia to supervise it through construction-business fronts that made astronomical profits. Their construction was actually destruction in disguise. The wonderful Conca d’Oro (Golden Vale), once full of orange groves whose blossoms perfumed the air in springtime, was eaten up by cement. And the same fate overtook other areas like Piana dei Colli, famed for its magnificent seventeenth- and eighteenth-century villas.
My father managed to save our home by convincing the authorities to designate it as historically important. (This allowed him to tell those who approached him to buy and tear down and ultimately replace the building that unfortunately his hands were tied.) But many wealthy homeowners did not take these steps. In fact they collaborated with the construction Mafia. Beautiful art nouveau villas along the Via Libertà were destroyed to make room for apartments. Many of the structures protected by their landmark status were allowed to decay, the owners hoping that if they eventually became dangerous enough, demolition would finally be allowed.
The result was the destruction of a city and its spirit. In addition to the concrete warrens on the outskirts of town, there were surreal projects like roads leading to dead ends and factories that never produced anything, while the center of the city was left to implode from neglect. Magnificent Moorish buildings and Norman churches deteriorated amidst a bombed-out decay similar to that of New York’s Bedford-Stuyvesant. The population of the city center decreased from over a hundred thousand to less than forty thousand almost overnight, with those left living in Third World squalor.
And while all this happened—the remaking of Palermo into a Mafiapolis—nobody said a word. The Mafia code of omertà, silence, had long since become a national affliction.
CHAPTER 2
In 1965 I took my final high school exam. Called the Maturità, it is administered by a public commission and focuses on an area of academic specialization, mine being Greek and Latin. The most prestigious public school in Palermo was the Garibaldi, and there was a lively competition between its pupils, known as the Garibaldini, and the Gonzaghini, as we were called. On our part the rivalry was tinged with envy, not only because the Garibaldi was a co-ed school but also because it had as good an academic record as Gonzaga, but without the repressive atmosphere that characterized our school.
That year I had the highest marks of any Maturità classica in Italy. I became something of a phenomenon and ended up in all the Sicilian newspapers. In a sudden accession of pride and enthusiasm, my father ordered a magnificent car for me, a red Porsche. But after getting some perspective on my achievement, he decided that it would not be “educational” for an eighteen-year-old to have such a flashy and expensive vehicle, and he bought me a small Fiat instead. Since I had never even been allowed to own a moped, I was thrilled to have any car at all.
As it turned out, the local Communist afternoon newspaper, L’Ora, had staged a competition in which the student in the province of Palermo scoring highest on the Maturità classica would win ten days in Moscow,