During the two decades Francesco whiled his time away in New Jersey, radical changes took place affecting the economic, military and social subculture specific to the Mafia of Western Sicily. The age of easy acquittals and terrified juries was over.

Introducing a shining new age for Sicily, the two-year-long “Maxi-trial,” whose 474 indictments were drawn up by the anti-Mafia pool of magistrates under Giovanni Falcone, had brought 360 convictions. Not all was wine and tarallucci: within three years of the Maxi-trial in Palermo only 60 of those convicted remained behind bars, but even so, the atmosphere had changed. Palermo had an anti-Mafia mayor, Leoluca Orlando. The Church had an outspoken anti-Mafia archbishop of Palermo, Salvatore Cardinal Pappalardo, who died in 2006 after 26 years of generous, devoted duty. Civic groups like the Comitato delle Lenzuola, which hangs white sheets from balconies to show their rejection of the concept of the Mafia, sprang up after the murder of Judge Falcone, and have battled on. Courageous police and magistrates have taken the places of those gunned down or, like Falcone, blown up. Successful prosecutions related to the maxi-trial took place in Paris and in New York.

The battle against the Mafia was fought on the grass-roots level, including  in the schools. Students continue to make pilgrimages to the tree still growing in front of the fairly anonymous apartment building where Falcone lived. The youngsters attach letters to the tree, like this, signed “Selene,” one of many on line at www.palermoweb.com:

Feb. 2, 2008. I’m a girl, age 12, and I find myself by chance writing to thank Giovanni Falcone for having donated his own life and not having given up to the dangers his work meant, for his passion and his desire to defeat Mafia crime. Words escape me. I’m from Catania and at school we are talking about the ‘Mafia problem’. Quite often at school I see kids laughing and joking about the Mafia, but for me this is unjust.

From Flickr, by Wm Jas

From Flickr, by  DirectorUzi

From Flickr, by il_Medo

This left the vestiges of the old guard in Sicily with little choice but to turn back to the customary but more modest urban pursuits, beginning with systematic extortion. They looked longingly at the prospects for gigantic public works which, in Catholic Church parlance, just might be occasions of sin (think: bridges). But even here there were problems, for in Sicily industrialists and businessmen began to organize to refuse to pay for protection. What was to be done?

 When the once-despised Inzirillos began to return to Sicily from New Jersey, the Mafia powers-that-be in Palermo were tolerant, even welcoming. As La Repubblica explained it: “The truth is that everyone—those who did not want them [the Inzirillo clan] back in Sicily and those who wanted them—sensed that, through them, and above all through their American cousins, new business prospects, new economic and financial opportunities would open up. It seemed an extraordinary opportunity for Cosa Nostra, which was suffering from a liquidity crisis, and out of the leadership of international crime for many years. The Sicilian bosses rediscovered America, and they sent their most trusted men to the US.”

That rediscovery is at an end, everyone seems to agree, at least momentarily. The problems persist: new boys had muscled in on the drug trade—Albanians and Chinese and Russians—but some of the new crowd were Italians, including Camorristi families from Naples once allied to the Sicilians, but now operating, and wildly aggressively, on their own. The number of mob-related murders is showing a tendency to increase: today one out of every five violent deaths is mob-attributable. The traffic in mob-controlled human beings and in weapons continues, as do male, female and child prostitution, the recycling of money, illegal betting, usury and rackets, the manufacture of fakes of everything from handbags to machine tools, and the ecomafia, to name only a few. Any business, after all, can be mob business.

A prophecy made in the late 1980’s by Tommaso Buscetta, who was accompanied from Brazil to testify in Palermo at the maxi-trial by that same Gianni De Gennaro now spearheading the effort to cure Naples of its mob-related, 15-year-long garbage disposal crisis, tells the rest of the story. “When Cosa Nostra loses its protection from the state, it will become a criminal organization just like any other, and its history will be at an end.” Is this happening?

It is certainly evolving, but so is everyone else. Most recently, the ‘ndrangheta of Calabria—difficult to penetrate, still mysterious—seems to have taken over leadership in the Italian share of the drug trade. Grim statistics show relative stature: in 2005 eleven murders were attributed to the Sicilian Mafia, whereas in Calabria that same year saw twice that (23). The situation in Calabria is of sufficient concern that a magistrate has ordered viaducts and bridges to be inspected for safety because mob-connected builders may have used mushy, cheap cement instead of what the region paid for.

In all Italy, garbage-strewn Naples is considered the city most vulnerable to organized crime activity, with Mafia-style association alleged for 220 individuals out of every 100,000. Reggio Calabria follows, and only then, in third place, Palermo, the city which Francesco Inzirillo said his own people should quit because no longer a suitable place for a good mobster to hang out. That, at least, is progress.