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

long time, Palermo has been governed by a triad of mayor, regional president, and president of the council. Political best buddies, who won’t be shaken by allegations of electoral shenanigans. The innovations of the last mayor, Diego Cammarata, stopped with the introduction of two double-decker buses for sightseeing tours. And the next thing he did was to commission a lawyer to take action against any journalist who criticized the city administration. Regional President Totò Cuffaro was sentenced in the first instance to five years’ imprisonment for supporting the Mafia and was forced to step down, but found brief consolation with a seat in the senate until his prison term began. He was replaced as regional president by a soul mate, his former party colleague Raffaele Lombardo. And the former council president Gianfranco Miccichè is a close friend of Marcello Dell’Utri, the senator and companion of Berlusconi who was sentenced in the first instance to nine years’ imprisonment for supporting the Mafia.
    “So you’ve met him, Micciché, when he was still council president,” Letizia says, “and what do you want me to tell you?”
    In fact, Shobha and I did once meet the minister, who isn’t really a minister now but is still addressed as such, at the Villa Igiea, the luxury hotel in the Bay of Palermo where the city’s upper crust meet, from ministers to Mafia bosses to cardinals. It was a remarkable encounter with a representative of Sicilian politics.
    Under Berlusconi, Forza Italia MP Gianfranco Miccichè was appointed deputy economics minister and secretary of state for development, but during his time in office he was better known to the wider public for an inglorious and quickly buried affair involving cocaine: a runner, a Sicilian Forza Italia activist, had delivered the drug straight to the ministry. In Rome, the minister was also responsible for deciding what EU sponsorship money went to Sicily, and was rewarded for this with the highest number of direct votes in the Sicilian election.
    At Villa Igiea he introduced his latest gift: a daily soap opera entitled Agrodolce (Bittersweet) —240 episodes, which were to be produced in Sicily. Supported by EU funding. You can’t always talk about the Mafia and nothing else, the minister says, you have to be able to see the positive side as well. In a freezing-cold conference room he presented the trailer to the journalists. He didn’t show trash in the streets or endless traffic jams; he didn’t show the skeletons of burned-out cars in the Borgo Vecchio or the weeds tearing up the motorways; he showed dolphins gliding through a sky-blue sea to the sound of melancholy accordion music, and Kalsa cathedral, which looked as if it had been dipped in honey, and at the end of the trailer the minister wiped tears from his eyes. Next to him sat another party colleague who was equally moved—he was one of the closest political allies of Miccichè and Marcello Dell’Utri: Angelino Alfano, who was appointed justice minister in the third Berlusconi government in 2008 and, since 2011, has been the secretary of Berlusconi’s party, Popolo della Libertà (People of Freedom).
    Later, after a generous lunch, Miccichè met up with a journalist from the Berlusconi newspaper Il Giornale on the hotel terrace. He didn’t want to talk to me because a German televisionteam had once called him a mafioso, and he had brought charges against the television channel. But Shobha and I stayed stoically on our wicker chairs and watched a circle of young people crowding around Gianfranco Miccichè and the journalist, Italian neocons with turquoise ties, young lawyers, and economists, and a young woman with Cleopatra eyeliner.
    “We’re the Gianfranco boys,” one of them said, and the minister casually rested his feet on the table.
    His young admirers were all members of the Marcello Dell’Utri Club: the senator, cofounder of Forza Italia and Berlusconi confidant, found guilty of