Breaking the seals of silence: anti-Mafia uprising in Sicily.

• Author: Kelly, Robert J.

With the recent rash of assassinations, the Mafia has alienated the public that once tolerated it.

In the spring and early summer of 1992, it may have seemed to the outside world that the brutal assassinations of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were proof of the Mafia's invincibility in Sicily. Along with their bodyguards, the crusading magistrates were slaughtered in the most shocking criminal acts since the execution of former Italian Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the Red Brigades in 1978.

The murders were part of a protracted war that has raged incessantly for many years. Throughout the preceding decade, Mafia defectors had revealed some of the organization's secrets. As a result, the huge drug trafficking empire partially had been disrupted and dismantled by law enforcement actions; internal warfare broke out among the clans; and an entire generation of gang leaders were jailed, or forced into hiding and stripped of their wealth. Nevertheless, the Cosa Nostra - the criminal coalitions that develop out of Mafia culture - appeared to be as strong as always, perhaps even more so.

Yet, the Mafia is not a force of nature; neither were the murders of Falcone and Borsellino exceptional. They were just more brazen. During the 1980s, a number of public figures were assassinated, including five magistrates; a prosecutor-general; a state prosecutor; two police chiefs; a colonel and captain of the Carabinieri (national police force); a prominent journalist; the Christian Democratic provincial secretary; the Communist Party's regional secretary; the president of Sicily's regional government; and, in 1983, the anti-terrorist hero Dalla Chiesa. "Distinguished cadavers," Sicilians called them.

With such an appalling record of violence, it must be asked what prevented a democratic society from reacting and putting a stop to the Mafia as it had with the Red Brigades when their actions became intolerable? Why the lack of political will that allowed the bloodletting and murders to continue? Perhaps the tacit knowledge every Sicilian possesses that corruption infects state institutions so completely and thoroughly was unnerving enough to paralyze an entire nation. The Mafia never could have amassed its wealth and influence without the collusion of powerful political leaders, mainly in the dominant Christian Democratic Party. The strategic alliances with those in high office and key state agencies assured the Mafia's security, profits, and privileges.

Evidence of Mafia-state intertwinement began to emerge during the trials of 1986. From the Palermo epicenter, Mafia tentacles spread across Sicily to Calabria, Naples, and Rome. In Milan, a Mafia/Camorra (an organized crime group from Naples) liaison involving extortion, kidnapping, drug trafficking, and money laundering was uncovered, revealing its spread into northern Italy. This disquieting expansion did not mean a relaxation of its pernicious stranglehold on Sicily, which often has been perceived by many observers on the Italian mainland as distant, defeated, and even eccentric. Much of the criminal blemish Sicily bears is an ethnocentric conceit reinforcing prejudices about the uniqueness of the Mafia as an aberration endemic to the island's traditions and values. The attitude that the Mafia is as Sicilian as the sirocco - the hot, dust-laden wind that blows from the Libyan deserts - is distracting and self-defeating. The criminal violence the Mafia generates is more acute in Sicily, but no region is without a taint or trace of its insinuating danger. Sicily just happens to be the Mafia's most famous and most convenient victim.

In its way, Italy has managed to cope with other social crises. It took time to come to terms with the Red Brigades, but when they were perceived as a serious threat to the very integrity of the nation, their uninterrupted interlude of growth ended quickly. The seemingly pointless murder of Aldo Moro energized the civil society and establishment against them: intellectuals no longer shielded the Brigades as misguided comrades; the police and courts mobilized; and the political elites openly proclaimed Brigade actions as an attempt to destroy the democratic state. The nation closed ranks, and the Red Brigades' "long march through the institutions" was over.

With the Mafia, the awakening was equally jolting, but prolonged, and took much longer. Falcone and Borsellino's investigations disclosed a cozy, closely woven relationship among...