Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture

by Leoluca Orlando

New in Paperback

Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture

Growing up in an aristocratic family that seems almost to have stepped out of the pages of The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Leoluca Orlando entered the law and politics in the late 1970s as one of the young idealists challenging the Mafia's control of Sicilian life. At about the same moment, a new and particularly vicious Mafia sect centered in the town of Corleone was making its appearance. Fueled by profits from the international heroin trade, this mafia gangsteristica embarked on a reign of terror that made Sicily into an Italian Lebanon, and filled the international press with pictures of bloody bodies-not just of Mafia rivals of the Corleonesi, but of police and government law enforcement officials as well.
       One of the Italian figures most identified with the Mafia's eclipse, Orlando has endured repeated assassination attempts and travels everywhere with a full bodyguard. Fighting the Mafia is his dramatic tale of witness and survival, of his effort to expose Mafia infiltration of the highest levels of Italy's national politics, and of the movement he helped build-in the schools and churches, and at the ballot box-to recapture Sicilian culture and inspire a renaissance of democracy.

Leoluca Orlando is mayor of Palermo, Italy. A former member of the Italian Parliament and the European Parliament, he was given the Bayard Rustin Human Rights Award for 2000 by the American Federation of Teachers.