Basta! : From the Parishes of Palermo to the Hillsides of Corleone, The People of Sicily Say ‘Enough’ to the Cosa Nostra

Giovanni Falcone, the most important judge in Italy, died on a soft Saturday evening in May, 1992. He was a tough Sicilian who attacked the Cosa Nostra on its home turf with unprecedented tenacity and success. Falcone sent hundreds of Mafiosi to jail, thereby giving unforgivable offense to criminal bosses on an island where the Cosa Nostra has ruled for decades as a parallel state. He liked to say that his account with the Mafia would not close until he died--one way or the other.

The 53-year-old judge flew from Rome to Palermo’s Punta Raisi airport that Saturday on a small government jet. He was perhaps the most heavily guarded man in the country and, like all of his movements, the flight to Sicily was supposed to be secret.

A strong-willed man, Falcone had wrung a concession from his guardians: to drive himself. When his armored sedan pulled up to the door of the plane that afternoon, Falcone got behind the wheel, a fatal mistake. His wife, Francesa Morvillo, 46, also a judge, got in the front seat with him. The police driver sat in back.

About 10 minutes into the high-speed run from the airport, Falcone’s motorcade crossed a culvert packed with high explosives. The tremendous explosion tossed the lead car into a field, killing three bodyguards. Behind them, Falcone and his wife were mortally wounded in the blast that destroyed seven vehicles, sent 17 people to the hospital and tore up a long stretch of highway. Falcone’s police driver, in the back seat, was critically injured but survived.

When the state he served with unswerving commitment came to bury Giovanni Falcone in his native Palermo, a furious crowd of Sicilians, sniffing hypocrisy, hurled curses and coins at official mourners, who included the president and the prime minister of Italy. It was a fierce early squall in what would become a still-raging storm of popular disgust buffeting a corrupt political system and its longtime collusion with organized crime.

In recent years, Mafia killings have backfired, stoking public outrage in Sicily and on the mainland. This swelling anti-Mafia resistance has created a new political party that, in bellwether elections last month, swept its founding leader into the mayor’s office in Palermo.

Falcone was not the first judge to die at the Mafia’s hands, or the last, but his murder may prove the worst mistake the Cosa Nostra ever made in Sicily. Fifty-seven days after Falcone’s death, the Cosa Nostra blew up his friend and judicial successor, magistrate Paolo Borsellino, and five bodyguards in Palermo. The murders continue: five passers-by killed by suspected Mafia bombs last summer that damaged art galleries in Florence and Milan and two historic churches in Rome; parish priest Giuseppe Puglisi, who undermined Mafia control of a Palermo slum, executed on Sept. 15.

In the aftermath of Mafia slaughter, it is Rosaria Schifano who stands out. She was 22 and pregnant, the wife of slain Falcone bodyguard Vito Schifano. She is a Sicilian woman, product of a culture that long ago learned to turn away from events that should not be seen, people who should not be remembered.

Rosaria Schifano did not turn away. Standing near the three bodyguards’ caskets at the nationally televised funeral, she humiliated her husband’s killers: “Men of the Mafia, I know there are some of you here. If you have the courage to change now, I forgive you--but you should get down on your knees.”

Everybody in Italy remembers when Giovanni Falcone died in an explosion and Rosaria Schifano wept on the altar, for nothing has been the same in Sicily since.

FOR MORE THAN 2,000 YEARS, MOUNTAINOUS SICILY HAS PROVED RICH bounty for invaders, Greeks to Romans, Normans to Nazis. Today, savagely exploited by its own underworld, much of Sicily’s urban sprawl is Third World appendage to one of the world’s richest countries. For decades, the writ of the Italian government ended at the Strait of Messina, which separates the island from the mainland. Even now, Sicily violently spins in its own orb, prototype of a South that can’t catch up.

Sere and beautiful Sicily, so long the island outcast, so long the national enigma, today has one-twelfth Italy’s population--and more than a quarter of the country’s murders. Cosa Nostra families are traffickers by the ton in Asian heroin and Colombian cocaine. Masters of many other rackets, they are obscenely rich. Their money and influence still reach into the highest levels of government, business and society in all parts of the country.

But the stereotype of Sicily-in-the-clutches-of-the-Mafia no longer holds up under close scrutiny. The Mafia betrays signs of weakness, disaffection and internal unrest. International police agencies still see the shape of the formidable octopus, clutching its criminal activities and reaching for more, but change is in the wind. In Sicily, organized crime is under assault by courageous judges and police openly cheered on by public opinion. A whole generation of bosses is in jail or on the run.

A decade ago, no Mafioso had ever talked. Members proudly cloaked themselves in omerta , the protective silence of complicity. Fear kept everybody else’s mouths shut. No more. Today, hundreds of Cosa Nostra soldiers, including sworn uomini d’onore --men of honor--and even senior bosses, are talking, buying judicial leniency with information. Francesco Marino Mannoia, the leader of a Sicilian drug-trafficking family, told a magistrate he became disgusted with the mob’s uncontrolled brutality. “To strangle a man, especially if he’s young and strong, you need three or four people, and the whole thing, contrary to what you see in films, lasts for some minutes, not a few seconds.”

Mafia murder, like the sun and daily routine of life on an ancient island, continues in Sicily, but there has been an astonishing change among ordinary Sicilians. They are turning on the Mafia, making it increasingly an outsider on the island where it was born and where it matured into a role model for criminal gangs around the world. Particularly since the judges’ deaths, a cry more of outrage than anguish has echoed across the island. Where there was indifference, there is action. Where there was silence, there is protest.

Last month, in one of the most stunning election victories in recent Italian history, Palermo elected maverick anti-Mafia reformer Leoluca Orlando, a lawyer, its mayor with 75% of the vote. The Sicilian church, led by reformers like Father Bartolomeo Sorge, a Jesuit, and ghetto priest Paolo Turturro, is also tellingly emerging as a powerful and ominous enemy for the mob.

When Salvatore (Toto) Riina, capo di tutti i capi , the Mafia’s boss of bosses, was arrested in January, the old people in his hometown of Corleone reacted as prudence and tradition taught them: “Riina who?” But the young people of Corleone--and a local anti-Mafia newspaper--celebrated the arrest. A few years ago, street demonstrations against the Mafia in Sicily were unthinkable, Now they are commonplace.

Riina, a stolid, gray-haired capo who cultivates the obdurate cunning of a peasant, was a fugitive nobody pursued very hard for 23 years. Now he is serving two life terms for murder and awaiting trial on other charges. Dozens of other leading Mafia figures who once scoffed at arrest warrants are also serving long sentences. The Cosa Nostra’s mainland cousins--the Camorra around Naples and the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria, the toe of the Italian boot--are also under assault. (The Cosa Nostra, Camorra and ‘Ndrangheta are often collectively called the Mafia.)

The context for Italy’s greatest successes against organized crime since World War II is the blazing demand for political change, which is likely to climax at national elections early next year. They promise to dispossess a handful of parties that have shared power for nearly half a century. These same parties have been shaken by the kickback scandal Italians call tangentopoli , in which more than 3,000 business leaders, political figures and government officials have been implicated in swapping multimillion-dollar payoffs for government contracts, resulting in arrests and nearly a dozen suicides.

Nobody, the reformers least of all, talks about a new dawn breaking across mob-tossed Sicily anytime soon. But the recent commitment of church and government signals that Sicily’s long night may at last be ending.

THE MAFIA BOOT GRINDS DEEP IN SICILY’S CAPITAL of Palermo, a stolen-blind metropolis on the northwest coast that is an embarrassment to Italy. In the Borgovecchio neighborhood, it is still possible to inspect, hulk by hulk, the bomb damage from 1943, when the Allies invaded Sicily at the start of the Italian campaign. Near the port, one quartiere still draws its drinking water from a big steel tank in the middle of a dirty piazza. In the rest of the city, rich and poor alike are by now inured to dry taps except for a couple of hours every other day. The water scandal, everybody tells you with a shrug, is not the fault of God, but of man.

Even by Palermo standards, the slum called Brancaccio, where I go to meet a young priest named Gregorio Porcaro, is ugly and dangerous. Luciano Violante, the head of the Italian Parliament’s anti-Mafia commission, had called at the rectory in Brancaccio a few days before to offer encouragement--and condolences. “We asked him what he thought of Brancaccio, and he looked at me and said: ‘It’s like being in Beirut.’ He didn’t expect it,” Porcaro recalls with a wry smile. “We are in Europe in an industrialized country, yet really it is the Third World. This quartiere lacks services of every sort.”

And progress is not aided by the superstitious, secretive poor of Palermo, who will not reach out for help. “When someone falls ill, gravely ill, their hair falls out, cases of typhus, they only hide the sick person, out of shame, and let them die,” Porcaro explains. “They mustn’t be seen. If the doctor goes, he must go in secret, no one must see him.”

Porcaro, a 34-year-old dynamo wearing jeans and a navy blue polo shirt this morning, is a priest of the new breed in a culture locked in time. He had worked closely, a zealous apprentice, with Giuseppe Puglisi, pastor of San Gaetano church in Brancaccio. With great patience and dedication, Puglisi was pulling the Mafia out of Brancaccio by its roots, finding jobs for people, keeping children in school. “Padre Puglisi and I are not the types to live under the church tower. We had to go out among the people and try and understand them, and doing this, you touch high tension wires of people who don’t want to be disturbed,” says Porcaro.

In September, Puglisi was executed by the Mafia. One shot in the back of the head.

Porcaro explains: “When you take the work force away from the Mafia--the petty crime of purse snatchers, drug peddlers and pimps--you obviously annoy certain people. Padre Puglisi never said anything. He didn’t talk much, but surely he must have had threats to mind his own business. But he was unperturbed. I think they killed him for this reason. Because he gave trouble here, which, in Palermo, means doing good.”

Brancaccio, largely rural only a decade ago, is fertile Mafia territory: The people are impoverished and ill-educated. People live jammed together, sometimes 16 to a room, the filth compounded by the lack of water. They are easy marks for mob promises of jobs and fast money. There is crime, young prostitutes, drugs on the streets.

To combat them, Puglisi went into debt to buy an old house and convert it into a community center for his parish. Instead of just preaching Christ’s Word, the way Sicilian priests have traditionally fulfilled the requirements of their church without awakening Mafia ire, Puglisi also preached self-respect. He took kids off the street and brought their parents together in the parish center.

“He went to the people and said, ‘You’re a person. You have your own dignity, so try and maintain it,’ ” Porcaro says. People began seeking out Puglisi and his young assistant for practical reasons: how to find a job, how to get a pension. Sometimes the priests could help. Often they could not because the bureaucracy was Mafia-controlled.

His account is interrupted by plainclothes policemen investigating Puglisi’s death. Porcaro bashfully admits that he had a death threat the night before.

“I don’t deny that fear is there,” Porcaro admits. “But I see it as an energy. If I can’t cope with this fear, it will squash me sooner or later, and I won’t be anything. But if I can manage it, direct it, transform it into initiative. . . .”

ABOUT AN HOUR SOUTH OF PALERMO, BY COUNTRY ROAD THROUGH THE dun-colored hills, lies the safest place in Italy. Corleone, a town without architectural or cultural distinction, lives under a pax Mafiosa. Some of Sicily’s most famous Mafia bosses were born here, and one shrewd estimate puts Mafioso families, accomplices and relatives between 300 and 400 of the 12,000 Corleone residents.

Corleone gangsters shot their way to control of the Cosa Nostra in a bloody clan war in the early 1980s. Today the soft-spoken and semiliterate Riina and other Corleone bosses are behind bars, but criminal corruption is stamped deeply into the life of their town. Funds to develop a Corleone along the straight and narrow have disappeared in a morass of payoffs and corruption. There’s little to show for government money earmarked for two dams, a milk plant and a freeway.

“These four projects have cost several lives and hundreds of billions of lire,” says Dino Paternostro, a 41-year-old bespectacled Corleone native who works for the local health department and edits an anti-Mafia newspaper with the help of young volunteers. “The dam has been built but never filled, so for the last 10 years not a drop of water has reached the agricultural areas. The second dam has been contracted out twice, but work has never started. The milk center has been built but never worked, so it’s falling to bits and the machinery rusting. The road--the work has never started.”

Still, Paternostro says, many people in Corleone are protective of their criminal neighbors under an old Sicilian adage that holds that the outsiders are enemies and you must defend what is yours, right or wrong. “It is difficult to convince the average Corleonese that the Mafia of Corleone is evil. They say, ‘Well, but they guarantee us that here there is no selling of drugs, that you don’t get robbed, there are no muggings. Compared to the city, here we are in paradise.’ ”

Among the young, though, it is easier to break through the wall of submission. “They feel this desire for freedom, they no longer want to feel shame for their town,” Paternostro explains in his newspaper’s storefront office. Corleone’s first anti-Mafia demonstration was staged by schoolchildren on Christmas Eve, 1991. Then, after Falcone’s murder, 800 children filled a piazza that would later be renamed after the slain prosecutors Falcone and Borsellino. “It shocked public opinion to see these kids with their teachers march through the town,” the editor recalls.

Now, he says, many townsfolk have come to recognize his newspaper as “a small beacon of hope.” Called Citta Nuova, it began publication in 1989 and has survived some early contretemps (like the firebombing of its offices) to achieve a monthly circulation of about 2,000, by Paternostro’s count.

Being an anti-Mafia leader in a small town where the Mafia looms large is not for the fainthearted, he says. “In the small towns, you live next door to the Mafioso, you meet him in the bar, in the town council. You have coffee together. If he’s your neighbor, what do you do? You greet him, especially if officially he isn’t known as Mafioso, although in a small town everyone knows everything, especially the police, who know but never find proof. I can talk badly about some national politician, and I’ll probably never meet him. If I write about Riina and all that he’s done, perhaps I won’t meet him because he’s in jail, but I’ll meet his wife and children, cousins, mother, and so forth, and they certainly won’t say ‘ Complimenti about what you’re writing.’ ”

Italy’s crackdown on the Mafia has had dramatic impact on towns like Corleone. With bosses in jail, families that hid with them have returned home to live openly. Riina’s wife takes the kids to school, goes shopping. The sons and daughters of mob bosses are suddenly part of the student body at Corleone schools, where some teachers and students alike have become openly anti-Mafia.

“Certainly their presence is felt. They don’t feel embarrassment, but our kids see their presence with some fear,” Paternostro says. “The other day my 14-year-old daughter, in her first year of high school, said, ‘Papa, if I am in school with the daughter of Toto Riina, I’m afraid to talk against the Mafia because we all know that Toto Riina is capable of taking someone and dissolving them in acid. Suppose he decides to dissolve you in acid?’

“Obviously if a child thinks like that, one has to convince oneself to carry on the battle, because they mustn’t win. And the battle will be won if there are a lot of us waging it. Anyone alone is very exposed. That’s what I said to my daughter,” Paternostro says.

TOTO RIINA, PROUD, UNBENDING AND ABOVE ALL SILENT, IS, BY THE ACcount of police and his former colleagues, a merciless killer: He broke out Champagne to celebrate Falcone’s death, Mafia turncoats say. But the dour gang chieftain may be the last of his unlettered breed. With the boss serving a life sentence, it is not known who now sits atop the Cosa Nostra. Change, even for the mob, may be generational. Computers will count more than cordite as the mob enters a new century. The Cosa Nostra is modernizing far beyond its Sicilian roots to keep pace with a changing Europe, international police authorities report. It is becoming more sophisticated and multinational, but it is hurting.

The crackdown has cost the mob money and influence: The national government confiscated more than $2 billion in cash and property from Mafia suspects in the first half of 1993, and police arrested 117 organized crime figures across Italy, including Riina himself.

After a landmark investigation, Italian police, aided by the FBI, last month accused 18 Mafiosi from nine different mob clans of carrying out Riina’s orders to kill Falcone. In their investigation, detectives learned that Riina was not responsible for the car-bomb murder of Borsellino, Falcone’s friend and judicial successor. Rather, investigators now say, Borsellino was killed by a rival clan in Palermo vying for power with Riina’s Corleonesi and upset over Borsellino’s inquiry into Mafia links in Germany.

The nuclei of major clans have been reduced: Riina’s Corleonesi mob family now numbers only 38, including those in jail and those on the run, according to national police chief Vincenzo Parisi. Their average age is now 62. Most wanted among Cosa Nostra fugitives is 53-year-old Leoluca Bagarella, who is ambitious and well-connected: He is Riina’s brother-in-law and may be an heir apparent. Whoever sits atop the mob, it remains an insidious power.

FBI Director Louis J. Freeh, who built his reputation fighting organized crime in the United States and worked closely with both Falcone and Borsellino, planned a visit to Palermo last week to call on Sicilians to throw off the yoke of the Cosa Nostra. The FBI director and his aides also scheduled talks in Rome to organize a U.S.-Italian offensive against the mob.

James Frier, a deputy assistant director of the FBI, told a meeting of international police agencies in London that the abolition of border controls in Europe offers “unparalleled opportunities” for crime to expand. “We will see the Italian organized crime groups expand . . . through agreements with the stronger Russian and Eurasian criminal organizations as well as with Asian criminal groups, the South American cartels and the (American) Cosa Nostra,” he said. In his annual report to the Italian parliament on organized crime this year, Interior (Police) Minister Nicola Mancino noted that recycling of Mafia drug money increasingly takes place outside Italy. In Eastern Europe, particularly, Mancino said, “hunger for capital is drawing colossal sums of money of illegal origin.” Cosa Nostra clans are known to have bartered drug money for rubles, he said. Germany and Austria have become Cosa Nostra bridgeheads looking east, with the Sicilians shopping for real estate in Russia and other states of the former Soviet Union.

But all is not expansion. In his annual report of Parliament’s anti-Mafia committee, chairman Luciano Violante characterized the Italian mob as destabilized and wounded: A senior secret service officer in Palermo and eight Sicilian magistrates are under investigation for alleged Mafia links. Cosa Nostra has lost some political interlocutors in the south; 22 city councils were dissolved in Sicily this year by the central government for Mafia infiltration.

Salvo Lima, the most prominent member of the Christian Democrat party in Sicily, long suspected of Mafia ties, was murdered by the mob in 1992. Turncoats, called pentiti , later told investigators that Lima was executed as punishment for failing to deliver on promises to overturn convictions of mob members.

Earlier this year, several pentiti alleged that Lima’s longtime friend and political ally Giulio Andreotti, seven-time Italian prime minister, served as a key Mafia ally in Rome. Andreotti, a pillar of Christian Democrats, who have dominated Italian politics since World War II, denies the allegations and is collaborating with an ongoing investigation he says will clear his name.

And, according to pentiti , Riina said that he had been instructed to have Falcone killed. By whom? Riina is certainly not talking. Now, with Falcone’s actual killers identified--14 of the 18 accused are already in jail--Giancarlo Caselli, Palermo’s chief prosecuting magistrate, says the next step is to track “those who ordered it and to establish their motives. Today we must uncover the evident political collusion with the Mafia.”

ON AN ISLAND WHERE BODYGUARDS ARE THE ROUTINE PRICE OF ANTI-Mafia commitment, Father Bartolomeo Sorge is protected by a squad of Italian army troopers in combat dress. They screen visitors and alertly prowl the garden of the portly Jesuit priest who may be the Mafia’s most formidable enemy. Sorge, a teacher, came to Palermo from Rome nearly a decade ago to attack the mob by fighting blood with brains.

At a postgraduate political institute that is drawing widespread international support, Sorge aims to build a new generation of Sicilian leaders through advanced courses that focus not only on management and performance but also on ethics and accountability. Sorge applauds anti-Mafia progress, but says it is not intellect but violence that has turned Sicily against the Mafia.

“The blood of Borsellino and Falcone is a very high price,” Sorge says, “but it has marked a turning point in the struggle against the Mafia. I did expect it; for the last nine years I said, ‘Until the city moves, nothing will happen. There must be a revolt of the people.’ ”

I ask if the revolt means that the Mafia is dying. “Dying, no. I’ve always said we’ll need two generations, but by now you can begin to count.”

Sorge believes that a national referendum last April in which voters rebelled against scandal-tarred political parties marked the arrival in Italy of a political tidal wave. The vote also trumpeted fini for the “collusion of organized crime with politics.”

“Toto Riina was able to wander freely round Palermo for 23 years and could say to the presiding judge, ‘Mr. President, I was not in hiding, no one caught me. I went to the bar, my children were baptized--you can see the registries of the parish church--they went to school.’ What happened was that political collusion guaranteed support for Toto Riina. So he was never caught,” recounts Sorge.

“As the political system fell, so did the Mafia. The killing of the two judges and now of the priest are clear examples that the Mafia has gone off the rails. The killings have provoked the moral revolt of Palermo. The Mafia lives like a fish in water as long as people are afraid, are passive and closed up. Now we have seen human chains, poor people who cry basta (“enough”) from their windows. It’s not just a gesture, but a mobilization.”

Into this ferment last spring strode Pope John Paul II. On a visit to Agrigento in the heart of Mafia country, the pope excoriated the mob in some of the strongest rhetoric of his reign. “Rise up, Sicily,” he summoned, calling for popular rebellion against organized crime, which represents “a culture of death, profoundly inhuman, anti-evangelical, enemy of the dignity of people, and of civilization.” John Paul spurred his church to join anti-Mafia forces to “overcome the moral sickness of your land.”

The denunciation amounted to what is known in Sicily as uno sgarro , a lack of respect to a Mafia boss. Sorge thinks two bombs that savaged two historic churches in Rome last summer were the Mafia’s response to the sgarro . That same trigger may have also played a role in the murder of Father Puglisi in Brancaccio.

“It’s a sign that the Mafia had gone crazy, because no one has ever gone against the Pope. There were limits: Never kill women, children, the church. These rules have gone and, so, losing their heads, they don’t realize they are being self-destructive because they are fueling the people’s moral revolt. It’s open war against the church by now, because the church is taking labor, the work force, away from the Mafia by pulling the children off the streets, taking the Mafia out of the hearts of the people.

“This is the end, the day the Mafia has no hold over the poor people. It is finished,” says Sorge, preparing class lectures under the watchful eyes of his protectors. “Their root is in mentality. The army can shoot, but the church can change the mentality. The church is now in the front line.”

Father Paolo Turturro’s front line runs between his Santa Lucia church and the giant Palermo prison called Ucciardione across the street where, in 1986, more than 400 Mafiosi were prosecuted simultaneously in a giant courtroom aptly called “the bunker.” The trial, whose architect was Giovanni Falcone, showed mob vulnerability to a determined state for the first time.

Brancaccio’s slain Father Puglisi was a quiet man, working far from public gaze. By contrast, Turturro, who hails from Bari and claims he is distantly related to actors John Turturro and Sylvester Stallone, is a grass-roots reformer with a much higher profile.

Sometimes sounding more like a general than a priest, Turturro says his mission is to recover ground from the Mafia, to establish the Sicilian church “to occupy territory which has been forgotten by those who should look after it.” Territory is a physical place but also a state of mind. He is fighting the Mafia for the street kids of Palermo. Across the city, there are other priests like him. “Ten years ago, we were four or five, now we are scores,” he says.

The Mafia has always flourished in the absence of the state. Now, the priests of Sicily are filling the gap in the lives of poor people left by inattentive or corrupt government. And in its own belated anti-Mafia assault, the Italian government dispatches judges, police, even 8,000 soldiers to patrol the streets. But too late; in Sicily, nobody trusts government.

“A new mentality happens when people understand that the priest is the guarantee of their voice, that the priest is not a betrayer, like the police, or the politicians, or the state,” says Turturro. His battleground is for the 12,000 souls in Borgovecchio, which has sent many times more of its sons to Ucciardione than to university.

Slowly, the tide is turning. Turturro gives lunch to about 150 kids each day, then offers them a place to play and study off the streets after school. Some nights, neighborhood fathers bring their kids’ books to the parish center for some studying of their own.

“The moment we gave them a spark of hope, people came out of their hovels, began to talk, began to put out their banners and openly combat crime,” Turturro says. “Over the years we saw local bosses who took over these children, they sent them to Marseilles, New York. After a while, they came back with lots of money and cars, trained as killers. We have substituted another game.” Every Halloween, kids turn up from all over the city. Turturro gives them a soccer ball or a game in exchange for weapons and drug paraphernalia, the playthings of Palermo streets. It has become an annual event.

The Mafia’s power in Borgovecchio is eroding, Turturro says. “The social action of the church is like a drug against the Mafiosi; it makes them die. For the past five or six years here, instead of turning to the local boss, people have been turning to the church. The territory we have taken control over, they have seen slip through their fingers. “

IN HIS ASSAULT ON THE MAfia that sometimes seemed a one-man crusade, Giovanni Falcone was as dedicated as any priest. Guarded at every turn, Falcone surrendered his freedom to a quest that even many of his friends thought was quixotic.

“Giovanni’s life was a torture,” says his elder sister, Anna. “I don’t know how he resisted. When they tell me he was a hero, I say it was not for his death but for his life. For 10 or 12 years he led a life I wouldn’t wish on anyone. Even prisoners have an hour of freedom. He couldn’t even go buy a necktie alone.”

The Falcone family in which Giovanni was raised in Palermo was well-to-do and apolitical. It lived a thick economic and social wall removed from the Mafia. The poor didn’t talk about the Mafia because they were frightened. The rich didn’t talk about it because it seemed remote. Organized crime was not the sort of problem that troubled Giovanni Falcone’s social friends or even his professional peers.

“When my brother came back to work in Palermo 12 years ago, his own colleagues said, ‘You are fixated with the Mafia.’ I don’t know if it was a problem too great for them, but there was a sense of refusal even of the idea of fighting the Mafia. Or others would say, ‘But the Mafia kills among itself, so what do you care?’ As if it was a thing apart. Giovanni saw it as a threat. He used to say that the Mafia was different from other organizations. It is founded on the degeneration of principles. They call themselves men of honor, because they respect--exaggeratedly--ideas like family and courage, which would be values, if they weren’t perverted,” Anna Falcone recalls, sipping iced tea in an apartment building guarded by a brace of soldiers.

There is more infantry on the street outside the apartment house where Giovanni Falcone used to live. A large magnolia tree there bears strange and moving fruit. Letters, flowers, children’s paintings from around Sicily, from around the world, hang from the branches and cover the trunk, all of them tributes to a dead judge.

It is disturbing to Anna Falcone, but perhaps apt in a Sicily she calls “the land of exaggeration,” that it is almost as if her brother had to die to prove his point.

“Giovanni was continually obstructed, public opinion was only marginally interested in what he did,” she says. “Then when he died, it seemed as if the revolution had happened. Perhaps many people instinctively realized what he was doing, but for the most part they were indifferent.”

Indifference is a vanishing commodity in Sicily now. In the reformist current, the Falcone family sponsors a foundation in Giovanni’s memory to help train young magistrates. Anna and her sister Maria are both prominent anti-Mafia crusaders.

“Giovanni has left an inheritance, to go on with his ideas, and that phrase of his has by now become famous: ‘Men pass on, ideas remain and will walk with other people’s legs,’ ” says Anna Falcone. “Now people want to know everything about Giovanni, the human side of him. Especially the young people. Sometimes they touch me, as if I was a relic. It’s something that gives comfort and pleasure, Giovanni’s ideas.”