The Honored Society: A Portrait of Italy's Most Powerful Mafia by Petra Reski

draped with sheets scrawled with words like The Mafia suppresses us or Grow up honest! Oneteacher went up to her pupils and hissed: “Write something! Write something intelligent!”
    Inside, the two prosecutors were commemorated with a lot of speeches, a lot of noisy applause, and television films about the Mafia—films in which the mafiosi looked like action heroes with pump-action shotguns and the public prosecutors looked bold and incorruptible. They love films like that in Palermo, where the Mafia is now once more as invisible as it used to be. Aristocratic among aristocrats, bourgeois among the bourgeoisie. The bosses stopped being shepherds a long time ago, shepherds who could barely speak Italian; now they’re doctors, businessmen, politicians, the so-called white-collar Mafia. Palermo returned to its normality a long time ago. Only rarely are there diplomatic incidents like the one that year when a student asked the minister of the interior, Giuliano Amato, who was attending the Falcone-Borsellino memorial day, what he planned to do about all the MPs with criminal convictions, two of whom were even on the anti-Mafia commission. The minister didn’t say: “They will have to be thrown out.” Instead, he accused the student of being a little populist. A hint of the Eastern bloc wafted through the “aula bunker” and lingered in the air even after the minister had disappeared. A speaker addressed the schoolchildren sitting on the floor: “You are stronger than the Mafia!” And the children cheered, as if they were watching a school play.
    “ Niente ,” says Letizia, and draws on her cigarette. “We’re finished.”
    She doesn’t think for a second of lying to herself with the eternal “there’s-no-work-here-and-that’s-why-we’ve-got-the-Mafia” hypocrisy, with the romantic idea of the healing power ofculture, as if the Mafia could be got rid of like a typo. In her hoarse voice, she speaks the truth that no one in Italy wants to hear: “Barbarism rules on our island! People are stuck in a lawless mindset!”
    “And that wasn’t even Berlusconi’s fault,” she says; the Sicilians had been waiting for him as if he were a seller of dreams, someone who could at last let them forget. Her comrades-inarms fell silent, crept away. Lots of them jumped on the Forza Italia bandwagon, and when Berlusconi was deselected and everyone expected the Prodi government to launch a campaign against the Mafia with renewed zeal, Clemente Mastella was appointed minister of justice. This is a man who is seen as an ardent supporter of Giulio Andreotti and who has also demonstrated a certain familiarity with organized crime: in 2000 he was a witness at the wedding of the Sicilian mafioso Francesco Campanella, who had no hesitation in turning state’s evidence immediately after his arrest. Mastella’s first action in office was to introduce a mass pardon for convicts, benefiting not only Silvio Berlusconi and the Eritrean human-trafficker Ganat Tewelde Barhe, better known as “Madame Gennet,” but also countless mafiosi, who immediately returned to their daily business.
    Anti-Mafia public prosecutors uncovering the connection between politicians and the Mafia had long been isolated in the Anti-Mafia Pool. Some were withdrawn from investigations, and Leoluca Orlando, too, failed in his attempt to win back the city for himself. In Letizia’s eyes, Orlando was the only one capable of restoring the city’s dreams. He stood for mayor and only narrowly lost the election to the Forza Italia candidate. There was the usual talk of election fraud. It was said that people had been told to take pictures of their ballot papers withtheir telefonini to prove to the bosses that they had followed their electoral recommendations. In vain Orlando demanded that the election be declared invalid. A year later, the public prosecutor’s office brought an action for proven electoral fraud and arrested two electoral district officers.
    For a