Gandhi vs. the Mafia: an anti-crime crusade conducted by neither cops nor vigilantes.

• Author: Walker, Jesse
• Position: Addiopizzo

NOT LONG AGO, a prosecutor in Palermo heard something strange on a wiretap. A mobster was telling a henchman not to punish a store for failing to pay its pizzo, or protection money.

Palermo, the largest city in Sicily, is at the heart of mafia country. In the past, trade association surveys have shown that about 80 percent of the town's shops were paying pizzo. But now more than 900 Sicilian firms, a majority of them in Palermo, are publicly refusing to give money to the mob, thanks to one of the most remarkable social movements to emerge in the last decade. Addiopizzo--Italian for "Goodbye, protection money"--is resisting the racketeers with tactics you're more likely to associate with Gandhi or the Arab Spring than a campaign against organized crime. The store mentioned on that tapped telephone call was affiliated with Addiopizzo, and the mafiosi didn't think that trying to collect from it would be worth the inevitable trouble.

I read about that wiretap in Curtailing Corruption (Lynne Rienner), a recent study by Shaazka Beyerle of the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict. While most of the literature on civil resistance looks at nonviolent movements to topple dictators or kick out occupying armies, Beyerle's book shines a light on campaigns to end various kinds of corruption. Here you can read about a 30-million-strong protest in Turkey against organized crime's penetration of the state. Or a movement in Uganda that monitors and reports abusive cops. Or a group in India that prints zero-rupee notes, so that when an official demands a bribe a citizen can give him a bill worth precisely nothing. (That may sound like an empty gesture, but the group cites many cases of the official immediately retreating. The note, after all, advertises the facts that the citizen knows her rights and that an organization is there to back her up.) But the Addiopizzo story is especially interesting, because it shows how tactics devised for struggles against states can be adapted to a fight against private criminals.

The story begins in 2004, when seven friends were discussing the possibility of opening a pub. When one mentioned the shakedowns they'd soon be facing, the conversation turned to the ugliness of the extortion system, and soon the group was brainstorming ways to protest La Cosa Nostra's stranglehold on Sicily. Their first move: to plaster stickers all over the city that said Un intero popolo chepaga ilpizzo e unpopolo senza dignita--"An entire...