‘The massacre strategy failed’: Italians are no longer afraid of the mafia ‘Der Muzikant’ turns the Jewish music industry upside down

Campobello di Mazara is a sleepy, nondescript town in southwest Sicily: 11,000 inhabitants, dusty potholed streets, a few bars, a shabby community center, four churches.

But suddenly there is a lot of activity in the quiet city: countless detectives search apartments and hiding places, several TV teams report on every step of the public prosecutor’s office. Italy’s most wanted and most dangerous mafia boss, Matteo Messina Denaro, spent the last years of his 30-year run in the small town before being arrested at a hospital in Palermo last Monday.

In Campobello di Mazara, which is only five kilometers from Messina Denaro’s birthplace of Castelvetrano in the province of Trapani, the mafioso led a more or less normal life, completely undisturbed: he went shopping – albeit under an assumed name – did banking, greeted everyone Village police officers and chatted with the neighbors. “He was always nice and polite,” the locals say.

“The arrest of Messina Denaro is an important, a great success for the Italian rule of law: after all, he is the last important boss of Cosa Nostra,” emphasizes Francesco Forgione. The former chairman of Rome’s parliamentary anti-mafia commission is regarded as one of the country’s most experienced mafia experts.

“At the same time, it naturally leaves you speechless that Messina Denaro has been able to lead a normal life in his home country for years,” Forgione emphasizes. He explains this himself: “He could rely on the ‘omertà’, mafia-like secrecy, and on a reliable safety net that the ‘borghesia mafiosa’ of the city had set up for him.” This “mafia-like bourgeoisie” consists of Freemasons, entrepreneurs and local politicians who are not members of Cosa Nostra, but have in common with it.

Fear of the Clans diminishes

But, Forgione points out, something else happened in Campobello di Mazara and in Castelvetrano on the day the super godparents were arrested: “Hundreds of civilians, mainly young people, flocked to the streets to celebrate the arrest of the boss,” emphasizes the mafia. expert. They would no longer fear the Clans.

An official celebration is planned next week in the two neighboring towns: on January 25, the residents will march and meet halfway between the two towns, announces the mayor of Campobello di Mazara, Giuseppe Castiglione: “There is a lot of rule among the people more joy than fear, many of my fellow citizens say only one word to me these days: Finally! »

Indeed, much has happened in Italy since the two superbosses Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano and their most trusted assassin, Matteo Messina Denaro, murdered the two anti-mafia judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992 and provoked the state with bombings. “We have developed laws and tools that almost no other state has in the fight against organized crime,” Forgione emphasizes.

He recalls the introduction of Article 41bis, which provides for life imprisonment for convicted bosses – with no possibility of parole. The crime “in favor of the mafia” also allows the authorities to imprison for years people who cannot be proven to have committed a crime – it is enough that they somehow helped the clans.

The judiciary also hits the clans where it hurts them the most: with their possessions. In 1996, a law was passed that allowed authorities to confiscate the private wealth and lands of mafiosi and transfer them to non-profit organizations. Since then, the state has confiscated mafia assets with a total value of more than 30 billion euros: hotels and holiday resorts, villas and pizzerias, mansions, forests and meadows.

“The Cosa Nostra is in a deep crisis,” Mafia specialist Forgione emphasizes. The “carnage strategy” of the “Corleonesi” had failed, the leaders were either dead or in solitary confinement. The Mafia (almost) no longer kills: in Italy in the 1980s and 1990s, 500 to 600 people died annually at the hands of the clans; in the record year of 1991, more than 1,900 people died.

Today, the number of mafia murders is still around two dozen a year, and almost all of them are internal accounts: the mafia is decimating itself. The last police officer or judge was murdered years ago, and Palermo, the capital of Sicily with its 700,000 inhabitants and once infamous as the “firing range of Cosa Nostra”, had the lowest murder rate in Italy in 2019.

Business in the background instead of murder on the open stage

Messina Denaro was one of the first to realize that it would be better for the mafia to stop killing, go underground and continue their business unnoticed, says Forgione. Under him, the Cosa Nostra changed from a peasant mafia into a capitalist entrepreneurial and financial mafia that invests in wind turbines, supermarkets and private clinics – precisely with the help of the mafia-like bourgeoisie, which supports and earns a living from it.

According to the national anti-mafia directorate, the clans generate more than 30 billion in revenue per year domestically alone. And the mafia, especially the ‘Ndrangheta, has long since diversified its activities abroad, as Forgione showed in his 2009 book Mafia Export.

The cancer that kills the infected organism has become a parasite that feeds on its host without killing it. But the host, ie Italian society, has developed defenses. Even in the small Sicilian towns of Campobello di Mazara and Castelvetrano, where the bosses controlled everything twenty years ago – and where people are no longer afraid.