Extortion, beheading and death – the Sicilian MAFIA would stop at nothing to assert their

On February 10, 1986, a huge trial, a maxiprocesso, took place in Palermo, Sicily.

The defendants were escorted to the courtroom, which was built like a concrete bunker, via underground tunnels and confined to steel cages.

Outside, two tanks stood ready, several armoured vehicles, and no fewer than 3,000 extra police officers were drafted in.

In their cages the defendants looked bored or defiant, some dressed in tracksuits and trainers, others in sharp suits. These were the men who had run Palermo for decades, run Sicily, even the whole of Italy: the Mafia bosses. No one dared go up against them.

Captured: Members of the Sicilian Mafia

But that day in the courtroom, one brave woman addressed these thugs and bullies directly. Her name was Vita Rognetta, and they had killed her only son. ‘Come and kill me too,’ she taunted, ‘if you want to. I have no one left.’

But enough people did testify, the judge had not been bought, and 323 defendants were jailed for terms adding up to centuries.

One other figure felt vindicated that day: ‘Solitary, obsessive, erudite, brave and outspoken,’ the Sicilian novelist and essayist Leonardo Sciascia, had warned for decades about the Mafia, and how they corrupted the entire country with what he called ‘the whole mosaic of evil’.

And for decades he had been ignored, although deeply respected as a writer. An interviewer once asked him how it felt to be the conscience of a nation. ‘Bad,’ he said. ‘And alone.’

Unheard: Leonardo Sciascia spent years fighting against the power of the Mafia’s influence

Now prize-winning writer Caroline Moorehead, who was present at the trial, has given us this vivid and disturbing but utterly compelling biography of Sciascia, so astute and broad-ranging that it adds up to a modern history of Italy as a whole – with the Mafia at its very heart.

They may once have been known as a harsh but honourable lot. Sicily was for centuries so ruthlessly colonised, plundered and enslaved, by Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs . . .

Under these last, Moorehead shockingly tells us, ‘Christians had been forced to wear pictures of pigs on their shoulders; Jews those of monkeys’.

Not surprisingly, the impoverished Sicilian people themselves, ignored except as a source of revenue to their brutal overlords, became fiercely hostile to outsiders, turning inwards to family and clan as the only ones they could trust. Il sangue mio, they called family: my blood.

Even their own Sicilian grandees treated them no better, and after the island was reunited with Italy in the 1860s, Sicily was soon in rebellion. The Italian navy responded by bombarding Palermo, killing some 500 people.

These Italian ‘liberators’ described the Sicilians as ‘self-centred and dirty,’ ‘more like Africans than Europeans’. Not an auspicious start.

More summary executions followed, and the islanders retreated ever more into close-knit, suspicious Sicilianismo. Out of this relentless poverty and oppression grew a monster: the Mafia. As Nobel Prize-winning author V. S. Naipaul once grimly put it, ‘Hate oppression, but fear the oppressed.’

Sciascia was born into this world in 1921, in the little village of Racalmuto. In the Second World War he saw American soldiers in his village, and first encountered peppermint chewing gum.

The Americans, on the other hand, saw with disbelief a world barely changed since the Middle Ages, ‘people living in caves and threshing with mules’. And as soon as the much-needed food aid began to pour in, the Mafia took control of it. Of course.

In the 1950s, they took up a key role in the heroin trade, importing from Turkey and Syria, repackaging the drug inside sardine tins or wax oranges, ‘the exact size and weight of real oranges’, and then on to the US.

More money meant more ferocious competition, more violence. Their presence seemed to corrupt everyone, policemen, lawyers, even Franciscan friars.

Scenes from the Maxiprocesso di Palermo

One, Dr Michele Navarra, boss in Corleone, murdered an 11-year-old shepherd boy who had witnessed another murder.

Other Mafiosi beheaded the Alsatian dog of an undertaker who had refused to pay them extortion money. Anyone who still thinks the Mafia are ‘cool’ outlaws and free spirits will find this book educational.

Eventually, in 1961, Sciascia produced the first ever ‘Mafia novel’, The Day Of The Owl, but it’s no simple thriller, any more than his subsequent works.

In his fictional world, solitary, pessimistic figures battle with corruption that reaches into every corridor of power in Italy.

A s Moorehead says, it’s a world in which ‘reality is ambiguous, elusive, priests rapacious and ungodly, and the investigators themselves often meet death rather than solve crimes’.

Sciascia felt his books achieved nothing, changed nothing, but writing kept him sane. ‘I write, I console myself, I feel happy.’

As Italy grew more European, more globalist, the Mafia just grew more globalist with it, establishing vast criminal empires across America.

By the 1980s the death rate was staggering. Between 1980-82, 1,000 people were strangled, shot or poisoned in Palermo alone, one of them a 15-year-old boy. More recently they have been central to the vastly lucrative business of people smuggling, along with traditional drugs, prostitution and extortion.

A Sicilian Man is available from the Mail Bookshop

Sicily itself, most beautiful and richly productive of Mediterranean islands, is another character here, in all its ‘splendour and pomp, its harsh climate, the arrogance and melancholy of its people’, as Moorehead puts it.

Every Sicilian seems to long to get away, but somehow can’t. Sciascia too: he loved escaping to Paris, for instance, which he saw as a city of light and reason, intellectual vivacity, irony and joie de vivre, utterly different to crime-cursed Sicily.

But he could never leave his sun-baked, oppressive island home. ‘I hate Sicily,’ he wrote, ‘and am condemned to love her.’

He once joked, rather bleakly, that if he was obliged to live in Sicily, at least he hoped to die elsewhere. But he didn’t. He died in Palermo in 1989, aged 68, and is buried in his native Racalmuto.