you quoted one of the mafia leaders in blood brotherhoods who said that “when you come to our children and talk to them about justice and freedom, they listen to you, but when they grow up and they need to provide for their families, they come to us”. How do you break that cycle?
you mentioned in your definition of organised crime that the mafia managed to infiltrate many different parts of Italian society. Would you say there’s any element of Italian society that is “clean”? That’s either never been infiltrated by the mafia, or been able to rid itself of the mafia influence, for example the armed forces or higher education institutions?
It’s not either its mafia or its clean, for starters. The commanding heights of the construction economy in a city like Milan have historically very often been in the hands of corrupt cliques of politicians and builders and people like that, which doesn’t necessarily make them Mafiosi.
So is it the most profitable sectors that are most at risk?
There is a stereotype that organised crime and mafia are a uniquely southern problem. How real or false is that assumption?
It’s certainly not true now, and very few people now dispute that. Not a day passes without some ‘Ndrangheta cell being discovered in the north.
This move to the north is really a phenomenon of the post-war period. But even before then, it isn’t true that it was just a southern problem. […] The political conditions that allowed the mafia to prosper involved politicians from all over Italy.
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We talked about Falcone a bit. His famous quote is “the mafia is a human construct, it had a beginning and it will have an end.” You write about how the mafia is able to adapt and change and fit itself to new circumstances, So do you agree with Falcone?
Getting rid of the Sicilian mafia will be the work of generations.
Even if the mafia were to disappear tomorrow, Sicily in particular, but Italy in general, would still be left with very profound problems of corruption, patronage, governance issues, that need to be addressed, and that in their own way can be just as damaging.
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CULTURA E SOCIETA