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You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking killers in true crime history and the authors that have written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. The Sicilian Mafia, a true crime travel Guide is the first book of its kind in any language, the ultimate Kozonostra experience, since author Carl Russo has photographed mafia hotspots on the Italian island of Sicily, where murders happened, where their godfathers lived, and their victims are buried, From the sun baked fishing villages of the Mediterranean to the
darkest valleys of Palermo. Western Sicily is the exotic backdropped for over a hundred meticulously researched tales of murder and mayhem,
with two hundred photographs of the actual locations. They include the childhood home of gangster Lucky Luciano, the hide outs of the fearsome bosses of Corleone, the tombs of the Robin Hood Bandit and the legendary downs the roots of the American and Canadian mafias, the Allied landing, pistol packing priests, political assassinations, playgrounds of the New Mafia, and even the
anti mafia movement. Whether you're planning a trip to Sicily or sticking to the comforts of your armchair, this provocative book will take you closer to the Sicilian Mafia than you dared to think possible. The book that we're featuring this evening is The Sicilian Mafia, a True Crime Travel Guide with my special guest journalist and author Carl Russo. Welcome to the program, and thank you for being to this interview.
Carl Russo, Hey, Dan, thanks for having me on. I appreciate it.
Thank you very much. It's a very interesting book and jam packed with information. So let's get right to it. I understand that you operate a blog called Mafia Exposed, and so tell us a little bit about your background and then tell us what compelled you to write this book, The Sicilian Mafia, A True Crime Travel Guide.
Well, you know, I never really have been a crime buff in the classic sense. As a kid, it was Godfather Fever, the Godfather movies by Francis Ford Coppolo, We're out, and I was only old enough to see those on TELL Television, so you know, that was my idea of the Sicilian mafia. And anytime there was a TV variety show, that'd be a comic spoof of the Godfather films. And
that was all I know, But it was everywhere. So at that time, I read the Volacchi papers and I read Vincent Terres's My Life in the Mafia, and I found them interesting, but that was it. I didn't read
anything after that. I lost interest, And it really wasn't until I started going to Sicily on a regular basis, just because I love it, because it was cheap to travel there, and it's just so endlessly fascinating with all the different cultural remnants that are there from the millennia, all the various conquerors from different continents in different countries,
foreign powers that took over Sicily. But as the more I started going, the more I was reading up on the history and just the recent news of Sicily, I realized, Wow, this is Silian mafia is still a real thing. It has nothing to do with Tommy guns and pinstriped suits. Or anything very glamorous at all. But it's there, and I got a whiff of it in Palermo right away when I started going in nineteen ninety nine. I can't see you on it.
Yeah, so you went in in nineteen ninety nine and you've been back every year. But what brought you to the decision to I mean even to the blog Mafia Exposed? Apparently it has something to do with the book itself, at least it's related. So tell us about the blog, and so again about your interest.
Well, the genesis of the whole project came in two thousand and six. It was my third or fourth trip over to the island, and a week before I arrived, they caught the number one most wanted fugitive in Italy, the Sicilian godfather, Bernardo Provenzano. This was April of two thousand and six. They found him. He'd been on the run since nineteen sixty three, and the circumstances under which
they found him were so strange. It was a ricotta cheese making hut in the mountains that overlook Corleone, and you know which is a reference of course to not just the movie but the Mario Puzo book. And the story was so bizarre. When they caught him, they rushed in, they busted down this little hut and there were posters of religious icons saints everywhere. He had bibles that were annotated, he had crucifixes around his neck, and he was smiling
like a saint himself, and it was so strange. It made headlines everywhere, but of course in Italy that was the news. And so I went to track down this little hut, which took a couple of days of bugging some of the people around Corleone, because it's not the easiest thing just to be an outsider and want to ask about these things. I finally found it, kind of stuck past some police that were guarding the street and
got some photos of it. And also on this trip, while I was there, I had been reading about the famous bandit Salvatore Juliano. He was gunned down sixty years ago. But the circumstances were so strange there too. It's one
of the great mafia mysteries. Banditry has a long history in Sicily, but this was the famous Robin Hood bandit who had worked with the mafia and was possibly killed by the mafia and I wanted to see the location where he had been gunned down at least one of the police stories, the original police story of how he was gunned down, or perhaps he was gunned down or killed elsewhere, and his body was laid out for journalists
to come and photo graphic. It was all such a strange mess to try and even get to the bottom of what happened with him. But I wanted to go and see the location because it was Salvatodi. Giuliana was also a film that was made by great filmmaker Francesco Rosi, who actually shot into the locations and used some of the people that had died in a massacre that Giuliano had fomented. So to make a long story short, I realized that there really was no book of this kind
that featured the actual locations. Another thing from my youth is that I always really enjoyed going to cemeteries and that sort of thing, taking photographs in my hometown in northern California, taking photographs, recording names, going to the library and looking up on microfilm who these people were from one hundred years ago, And so it all kind of came together. I thought this would make a hell of
a book. The more I got into it, the more I realized there wasn't even a list of these locations. So this actually took me six or seven years, not just to defind the locations, but just to find a reference in various articles online or going through court transcripts, or looking through the various scholarly books on the mafia, and actually going down and tracking them down. So it took a long time. And the book is finally here.
Yes it is, and two hundred photographs and just incredible photographs in this book. Tell us about Sicily for those that don't know, and we all don't know enough about Sicily and its importance to the mafioso and Cozonostra. So tell us about Sicily and why Sicily, As you say, Sicily is still important today. But tell us about the origins of Cozonostra over one hundred years ago, and tell us why Sicily was so important to that story.
Right, Well, it has everything to do with its location. It's right in the middle of the Mediterranean, and it's right in the middle of all the ancient profitable trade routes, the shipping routes, so that you had the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans that used it, conquered it, conquered
its people, practically enslaved them. Because by the time the Arabs came and conquered Sicily and sort of modernized some of the farming, you had the islanders under their yoke, having to raise the crops and give them up to their overlords. You had the Norman conquests around one thousand a d. As time went on, everybody had a piece of Sicily, the French, the Spanish, various parts of what is now northern Italy to the Sicilians. There never really
was a local, legitimate form of authority. It was always some absentee government that passed the laws that they had to live under and the foreigners that they were exploited under. So as far as local authority, it sort of fell to the local strong man, the padrone of a village, who sort of became corrupted because he did have so much power that people would take their disputes to him, or he would oversee some kind of a transaction end
up taking a cut. So this figure kind of tended to be the middleman between the people of Sicily and the far off government, particularly in the nineteenth century. And you had feudalism. You had some pretty brutal conditions, starvation conditions on the island. Even though ostensibly feudalism was outlaw in the early nineteenth century, he continued on practically into the twentieth century. But you had a guy that would be sort of the overlord of the farms, the estates
for the absentee landlords. It would be that well, they called him the Gabelotto. He would be on horseback, generally always had a shotgun, keep the peasants in line, and had a propensity for violence. And pretty soon he actually got powerful enough that he was able to kind of steal away or intimidate the landlords into giving up their
lands to him or through violence as well. Meanwhile, in the prisons, and not just in Sicily, but also around the Naples area of southern mainland Italy, you had an incredible recruiting ground there because you had mafia bosses that may have been imprisoned for some various crime thrown in the same dungeon with cut wrote and various rip off artists, and so they were actually able to sort of put together local clan so when they got out they had
quite enforcements on the streets for their own benefits.
Right, so it really does sound like the mafia already when you talk about they wrangled the land from the landlord himself, that sounds very much like the way the equation works once organized crimes involved in your business.
Right now. Of course, the general definition of the mafia has to do with the protection racket, which is what makes them different from other kinds of criminals. Famous scholar Diego Gambetta says that it is the defining trait of a mafia group is that they actually have protection rackets, essentially extortion. That's been from the beginning the framework over
which they enrich themselves and control the local people. Right to this day and unfortunately, Sicily still is a place where the majority of the merchants have to cough up cash to the local family, crime family, the local boss. They'll send around and it's that thorty that's a tax collector, generally once a month and they have to, you know, cough up several hundreds of euros or you know, depending
on how profitable the business is. But we're talking not just shopkeepers, but car dealerships, hotels and restaurants and gas stations. It's still a problem and when the police, the government has actually done some great crack cracking down on this, but there's always another guy that wants to move in and become the boss and take over the racket. They're always arresting would be UH racketeers extortioners right now. Fortunately, over the last decade or fifteen years, you have a
pretty strong and growing anti mafia movement. So now you do have the merchants standing up to these threats. There's a great group and I recommend them in the introduction to my book, a group called Adio Pizzo. Adio Pizzo means goodbye to the pizzo. The pizzo being the payment that these various merchants have to give to the crime family. So there's a list online of the merchants, about a thousand of them that have sworn not to participate and
give up any more money to the extortioners. That's a big part of my push for this book is it's not just a you know, for the true crime fan that wants to read about bloody murders, but it's also has an anti mafia tone because a lot of the figures that I profile in the book over the last hundred years stood up to the mafia at a time when nobody was standing up to the mafia, guys that generally dirt poor peasants that decided to rally them and take over some of the farms that were promised them
by the land, but promised by the government. There were some laws that would have given unworked land, barren lands that were still controlled by the mafia to those farmers that wanted to work it. So every village, it seems, in the interior of Sicily, has a favorite son who
was assassinated by the mafia. I will generally go into these villages, find a house, or at least find the tomb or the monument, photograph that, and that's sort of my little contribution to this incredible island which I love so much.
Now, tell us about the criteria for picking the stories and the corresponding photos that go along in your book. So the material that you included in your book, what was your criteria for picking it in the first place.
Well, first of all, I had to find a location on which to hang the story, and that was always a challenge, especially because you just don't go around and ask questions about it. I actually kept this. I did this aw with ed GPS, either at home online. I would find an old archival newspaper article and print out the little photograph of let's say a building. Let's say it was the home of a certain boss, but there
was no information about it, no address. So I would on these little cards in this little two ring binder scotch, tape them in and write down as much information about the location. Maybe a piazza was mentioned. But a lot of times I would have to go and take this photo and drive around in a rental car up and down these little winding alleys or matches, up to the mountains in the background. In some cases it took two or three trips before I found particular locations. Others I
never found. So unless I could put it in the form of a tour guide, which this book really is. It's kind of laid out in car tours, then you know some things I had to give up. Another challenge was putting them together, because we're talking about writing about two hundred different personalities here on both sides of the law, and putting them all into some kind of a narrative strain. The two pressures were always geography versus narrative and how
to put it all together that way. So I guess my criteria was geography first, tour guide, travel guide first, and narrative second. Because a lot of these figures crisscrossed time and space. You know, they had something to do on this in Palermo, the capital city, but they came from the interior, and they were connected to somebody on
the other side of the island. But I should say in fact that the book is strictly it strictly covers the western half of Sicily, because that's where all the real momentous and most infamous events in its history, in the mafia's history have taken place, from the rise of the rural agrarian mafia on through the takeover of Palermo by the Corleonese Mob, the mob from Corleone, all the horrible assassinations of the seventies through the early nineties, the
Pizza connection, all the heroin refle binaries that started sprouting up in the sixties and seventies, the heroine that made its way to the East coast. Pizzeri is probably familiar with. To go back to, you asked a question about my blog before I knew for sure that this was going to be a book. In twenty ten, I started blogging and putting a lot of these photographs online and hopes of forming it into something, but also trying to get
some publicity for it. So there are a lot of things that didn't make the book that are on the blog Mafia Exposed dot com. So there's my little plug. There you go a few Sorry.
So now we have the through your research and through this narrative that you're telling this story. It is quite unique to have this perspective conveyed in terms of are your position, which is anti mafia, So that's quite unique in writing this book and gathering any of these stories. Was there any resistance? Was there any criticism? Did you meet have any interesting encounters close encounters, we'll say, with somebody that was not so happy that you're doing this?
Well? Generally, when you show up and then it really doesn't matter whether it's a big city like Palermo or a little hilltop village, because in the interior you just have these tiny, little, beautiful villages on top of a hill and the vast planes in between. You always stick out, you know, they know when you're not from there, and there's a think on just a natural curiosity because these
are some really small towns. And also you have to realize that unemployment being so high, joining a mafia gang is not irresistible. But I mean, you know, it's very easy for a poor young kid to just want to
join up. So wherever you go, there are just young guys hanging out watching and you know, I definitely don't want to characterize the Sicilians as being all mafia because it's a very very small percentage that have anything to do directly with the mafia, aside from being shaken down by in fact that Sicilians are very wonderful and warm people, but they're you know, they do kind of keep to themselves.
But no matter who they are, all eyes are on you, on you, So walking around with a camera with a zoom lens and that kind of thing, you know, it's difficult. What I would often do, particularly if it's a heavily mob infested neighborhood, I will wait till Sunday morning, when everyone's still asleep or whether they're going to church. Generally it's the only time when you could find the streets completely empty, so that's when I'll get my shot. It's
real tough. I also had a real tiny camera, my girlfriend's camera in fact, for a drive by, which would be like trying to get a picture of the prison, which you're not supposed to do. And a couple of hideouts that were sort of set up along the streets that had tall walls and really maze like and it was really stressful. A couple of times I hopped out of the car and left the car running. My knees were actually shaking as I took the pictures of a one mafia boss's house, hopped back in the car and
took off. So yeah, it didn't all the way. There was nothing easy about this project.
Yeah, yeah, you did extensive research. It's amazing, like you say, going back two or three times just to be able to locate a certain place that you wanted for this book. So that's very interesting. Tell Us about Sicily's and the Cozin Nostra's importance to the mafia in terms of its importance in the world, Well.
The Sicilian mafia pretty much introduced, for instance, America and a lot of Europe to Heroin. You know, some of the old godfathers would say, oh, they'd have nothing to do with junk they wouldn't touch mafia wouldn't touch heroin. But in fact, the mafia has always been just rolling in heroin products. Even as early as the nineteen thirties. You had Joseph Bonanos kind of a pioneer, and you had heroin starting to come from the French to some
of the Corsican refineries. But the Sicilians, they're great innovation, which really caused a wave of heroin dependency. Junkies. Junkie culture, for instance in New York, sprang up in the nineteen fifties really as a direct result of the Sicilian mafia. When Lucky Luchana was who is Sicilian, was busted and imprisoned and for prostitution. When they exported him, they kicked him out and they sent him back to Italy, and that's when he actually got the original Sicilian mafia interested
in heroin. He had a big sum at a mafia convention as it were, in downtown Palermo, where he got together all the godfathers and he brought a coterie of his own Italian American gangsters along with them and sort of got them going on importing Asian heroin, refining it in northwestern Sicily. He had a lot of refineries that were set up and among the orchards, the orange orchards and so forth, and then shipping it across the Atlantic.
You had a lot of the big names in the pizza connection, Getano Bardo Lamenti, who comes from a tiny little village outside of Palermo, but he was a real instrumental in sending across all of this heroines, not the Gambino family of New York and some of the Montreal and Toronto godfathers who actually came over from southern Sicily themselves.
It was a very profitable and world changing crime. You know, the FBI got involved ultimately, and even late in the nineteen eighties, Rudolph Giuliani was pretty instrumental in working with the Italian government and breaking this up. But now the Sicilian mafia, as a result of all of the crackdown on both the US and the Italian side, has lost control of the international drug scene. And it's some of the other Italian mafia groups from mainland Italy who have
kind of taken over. You have the Camorra of Naples, and you have the Mafia of Calabria, the southernmost part of the Toe of the boodh of Italy called the Drangetta. In fact that just a couple of months ago they had some big busts. They found a reverse pipeline going. They were actually still involving the New York Gambinos exporting cocaine from South America into the big port in southern
mainland Italy and Calabria. There were a few Sicilian mafiosi that were involved with that, but that was just kind of shows that it was no longer a Cosonosa thing. It was some of these other mafia groups that have eclipsed the Sicilian mafia.
Right, what about with the recent appearance of Toto Rena.
Yes, well, but since your podcast is called the True Murder, Toto Rena is probably the most murderous of all of the Sicilian mafia gangsters. He is from Corleone. He rose to the top when his over boss, Luciano Lego from Corleone was imprisoned in the seventies. Toto Rena had a threesome er a foursome group of bosses from Corleone were absolutely brutal. They soon took over the Palermo mafia, which was, you know, no easy thing because that was a really
hardcore mafia there. You had the Bontate group working with the Inzarillo group in so Rillo's were intermarried with the new or Gambinos, and so they were very powerful and politician corrupting mobs. But through sheer violence and through sheer military tactical brilliance of total Rena, he was able to hit his rival mafia groups against each other so that they were killing off each other and not even realizing
that Brino was behind it. He was, I don't want to say psychotic, because he always there was always a method to his madness, but he really was is he's in prison now a pretty brilliant guy, which is not to say Britain. You know that he's anyone that that he's someone anyone should admire. So in the seventies and
the eighties you had these mafia wars going on. It's also a time when some of the great anti mafia prosecutors, under the leadership of Rocco Kinici, setting up the anti mafia pool at the Palace of Justice in Palermo, and these guys working on their own, some of these investigators and prosecuting judges are putting together a lot of the bank records and finding out all kinds of information without
really the blessing of the government in Rome. They didn't even get a computer, but they actually start to arrest some of the bosses based on their findings. You had the famous Maxi trials of the nineteen eighties where they rounded up four hundred plus mafia bosses. Maybe you've seen photographs of some of these trials where the bosses are in cages around this courtroom arena that was built underneath the old prison in Palermo. It's a big bomb proof
bu bunker. They put them on trial, convicted them, sentenced them, imprisoned them. This made Tosriina, who was still a fugitive, so outraged that he just launched a war on the government. He started ordering the assassinations of police officers and judges, journalists, anti mafia activists, anybody that stood in his way. He
mowed them down. And we're just talking. In addition to probably a thousand victims of the mafia wars, you have this new campaign of assassination that is just horrific, so that by nineteen ninety two, in Spring, he's ordered the assassinations of the two top anti mafia prosecutors Jovanni Falcone and Palo Borsellino, brilliant men, very much beloved in Italy. They were both blown up by bombs, horrific, horrific massacres, and the Italian people were so shocked and demoralized that
it really became the beginning of the anti mafia movement. Meanwhile, Toto Arena is living in luxury, secretly in a villa in downtown Palermo. He's got his wife from the old country, Corleone, and he's got four children that even though he was on the run on all these years, they managed to get birth certific kids.
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Details Church baptisms. But he's still fighting. The government parliament in Rome passed some very tough laws restricting the communication that a mafia boss could have once he's imprisoned. Very famous law called Article forty one B. It took years for some of the more anti mafia politicians to push this thing through. So this put the clamp on these mafia bosses that were imprisoned, so they can no longer conduct business as usual, you know which through visiting attorneys
and visiting relatives. So Arena is still on the war path and this is around the time where a couple of police officers allegedly go into negotiation with the mafia. And now if we want to continue on this subject, is something that's going on right now as a series of trials that are taking place across Italy having to do with collusion between the mafia and the governments. Are part of the government that would somehow get total Rena
to cease his campaign of massacres. So shall I continue or do you have a different question?
Okay, just if just if Silvio Beruscoloni is involved, you mentioned.
That, well, yeah, he certainly is simply because well k yeah, let me let me take a break, and and and just mentioned where Silvio Belusconi, the three time prime Minister of Italy formerly and his status right now, he was tried for mafia crimes or mafia association, I should make that clear about a year ago, and found innocence of that charge. He was found guilty of tax fraud for which he was sentenced to four years, which he has not seen any prison time nor will he ever. He's
just too powerful. Italy's were just man and still own so much media. But he's and he was also right now he's fighting charges of abusive office having to do with the Bunga Bunga parties and underage hookers and all that stuff the news that makes it over to the States. Here. However, his very good friend, former senator in his political party, Marcello Delutrie, was found guilty of mafia association was sentenced
to seven years in prison. Now over there, if you get sentence, that doesn't mean you're going to serve it. So he's appealing that and he's free to Rome right now. But what the court had found, based on testimony of the various turncoats, former mafia members that have ratted out the former clan. This Marcello Delutrie, the ex senator, set up a meeting way back in nineteen seventy four between Silvio beer Lusconi and the top mafia drug kingpin Stefano Bontate.
And the reason for this meeting was so that Belusconi could shovel a whole bunch of cash to the mafia in exchange for protection as Berlusconi built up his construction empire at the time and then later his media empire. So you have these real tainted politicians right now. It goes even deeper than that, with some of the connections having to do with a Masonic lodge. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but they're definitely very close connections between some
of these politicians and some of the mafia bosses of Sicily. Okay, so back to the more recent history. You had two police officers. They were pretty elite officers of the Carabagneri, which is Italy's militarized state police force, that approached a politician in Palermo, a very powerful politician named Vito cham Shimino. He was a short time from He was a mayor for a short time, but he was also more significantly the czar of public Works. He passed out hundreds of
building permits to mafia controlled construction companies. They remade the face of Palermo with all of these apartment buildings, tore out all the green belt, and some of the beautiful old mansions and parks of downtown Palermo got filthy. Rich is one of the top mafia associates without being a mafia boss himself. So these guys, these two officers, go into some kind of secret meetings with Vito Schansamino asking him how can we contact the mafia, how can we
get them to stop all these horrible assassinations. And this was about nineteen ninety two, like I said, right after Falcone and Borsolino were assassinated. And so allegedly you have some meetings going on between Tan Samina, the politician, and Toto Rena's partner, Bernardo Provenzano, because sort of the Arena is not just his partners, but not exactly as underboss. It was sort of the lesser of the two headed snake from Corleone. And so some of the meetings take
place in Shancamino's villa in Rome. His son gets involved, who wrote a very good book about this, also claiming a lot of the same things of the mafia turncoats. So evidently Rena draws up a list of demands in exchange for a cease fire. Changamino's son delivers it to these two police officers, who, by the way, have denied everything. They're still on trial. These demands that Arena comes up with are pretty ridiculous too. He wanted to release a
bunch of bosses. He wanted all of their assets returned to them. He wanted to kill Article forty one B the law that cut off their communication, a whole lot of nonsense, that there's no way the Italian government would go for you. At this time, also have Rena beginning to think that this is not going to happen, this deal is going to fall through, and so by a year later, nineteen ninety three, he starts ordering bombs to
be blown up in mainland Italy. So you had some of the other up and coming bosses who are still powerful today, such as a Tale Messina Danado that who's now the number one most wanted fugitive, planting bombs in some of the landmarks on mainland Italy, in Rome, Florence Milander, blowing up sections of churches and art galleries, just sort of as a way to move this thing along. It's only been fairly recently that this idea that some kind of secret pact was being attempted in secret that you know,
the court. Excuse me trying to keep it all straight here because it's so labyrinthing. But at any rate, there's so so many trials going on right now having to do with this. They call it latratativa or the deal that we're not sure where it's going to go because you have so many various players mafiosi saying various things. Meanwhile, total Rena, who's been silent for like two dozen years
now behind bars, suddenly ending up on tape. There was a I feel like I'm filibustering, so stop me, because I could go on and on about this, but this is this is very interesting because it shows us that
Arena has not really changed at all. They put a boss in his cell, so it's sort of a guy that was passing through another mafia boss from a separate mafia group Eastern Mainland mafia called the Sacra Corona Unita the United Sacred Crown, And for some reason, Rena spills his guts to this boss and the investigators got it all on tape, and Rena is saying, we have to have a new round of massacresions, just like the good
old days in Palermo. He started bragging about blowing up Rocco Keninci, the original founder of the anti mafia pool in the nineteen eighties. He says, we've got to make up dance to samba again, and he says it starts calling them tuna fish, which I found kind of humorous because that tuna fish was always the old mafia euphemism for victims, guys they wanted to kill, which hearkens back to the ancient Sicilian practice of beating the hell out of tuna in the oceans by the fishermen would stab
them and beat them and bloody the waters. So at any rate, we know that Tottorina has not reformed. He's still very interested in fighting the government his way, which is through assassination, and he's serving so many sentences now, so many life sentences, that he'll he'll always be imprisoned. His partner better now, the Provenzano, who is failing in health, has some serious problems. His family's trying to get him out of prison based on humanitarian causes or humanitarian reasons
because of his health. A lot of times they'll release an older prisoner who's sick into house arrest. But because these guys had such we're such an abomination in Italy, it doesn't look like they'll ever get out of prison. So that's that's where these guys stand now.
Now. In your book, you cover one hundred and fifty years, and you include, like you say, revolutions and politics and wars and popes and virtually you cover one hundred and fifty years of important history. Well, I was gonna say, is that, what did you find in terms of the how influential they were in terms of politics and the war and everything that involved in that one hundred and fifty years of history. How's important? How important was the mafioso, the closin nostra to all those events.
Well, in fact, one of the best ways that the mafia came up with to stay in power was to absolutely control local government and over the years work its way on up through straight into parliament. In Rome. It's very easy to corrupt a politician, as we all know. I'm speaking from San Francisco where UH Senator Leland Yee is up to his teeth in corruption having to do with the local Chinatown scandal and guy by the name
of shrimp Boy Chow. If you're following any of the news about this, it's always been easy to corrupt the politician. But over there, the Christian Democrat Party was particularly corruptible because you these were guys that they came they grew up with the mafia. The way you would corrupt a politician would would be to finance them. Basically, you could
promise them the votes of your people. In fact, you could you can actually tell a politician that you can deliver pretty much a majority of the votes of the entire area in exchange for political favors. Letting a boss get his hands on some of the development money that comes through. There was a lot of redevelopment money being sent to the South because it had always been quite a bit behind is the rest of Italy and Europe
was modernized. So not only could boss siphon off some of those funds coming in, but also be in charge of the hiring. Now, if you control hiring on the building of a hospital or the building of a bridge, you pretty much own the town because everyone is beholden to you. In fact, that's why the number one fugitive I mentioned, Matteo Messina Denado, to this day is still
kind of considered a hero in his hometown. Sometimes reporters go in and interview some of the locals there and they kind of see him as a god because he gave them a job, or gave their nephew a job in the supermarkets through which he was laundering money and that sort of things. So if you mentioned the war, of course, there are a lot of stories about how after Mussolini rid the island of the mafiosi that were
in power. You had the Allied invasion in nineteen forty three, the Yanks and the Brits coming in, chasing off the lingering Nazis and Fascists and removing these mayors that were fascists, and suddenly reinstalling some of the old mafia godfathers who had either been mayors or just the authority figures. There were a lot of direct connections with the US Army
and some of the mafiosi. There was Colonel Charles Polletti who was in charge of civil affairs getting things back in order right after the war, actually right after the defeated fascism Mussolini. He set up his headquarters in a hotel in downtown Palermo. His translator was Vito Genovese, the Italian American gangster, and he's politic three parties as they were attended by mafia bosses. Genovese did great during the war. He took a lot of Sicilian wheat and sold it
on the black market in Naples. So yes, Uncle Sam did have a hand in bringing back the mafia after the war.
And how strong. We had talked earlier about how the mafia different Italian groups other than Closonostra have taken power. But overall, if there's an anti mafia movement, that's pervasive everywhere in Italy and in other places as well. But tell us how strong that anti mafia movement is in terms of being successful combined with successful prosecutions over the last say twenty five years or so.
Well, because the government has actually gone on the offensive. They have rounded up so many of the big bosses. But they did that really at the behest of the people, because after those horrible assassinations of the nineties, you had Italians so fed up they took to the street, they marched, they hung sheets from their balconies with anti mafia slogans.
That was unforecedented. But they were just so angry, so frustrated, and felt that the government was either in cahoots with the mafia or totally impotent, that they just practically demanded it of the government. And so that's when you started finding that certain merchants or businessmen who stood up to the mafia suddenly finding support in the people because for so long guys were killed because they refused to cooperate or give up some of their money to the mafia.
There was a real sad case of a guy named Libro Grassi. I met his brother in Palermo, who still runs the same textile factory that Libro did. He just absolutely was adamant about not giving up anything to the local mafia. And of course he was threatened. They're always threatened, but he was killed on their photograph of the spot. In my book, back then, these guys were isolated, you know, they knew that they were probably gonna die for doing this,
but they stood up anyway, just on principle. Now you have groups of citizens that will go and support a merchant. The top anti mafia prosecutor right now, Nino di Matteo has been threatened. In fact, he's one of the names that Toto Rena that was caught on tape saying that he wanted to assassinate make him dance the samba. Well, you have what they're calling a civil escort or civil bodyguard.
So in Palermo right now, in front of the Palace of Justice, you'll often see a line of people that are standing there with signs in support of Nino di Matteo. In fact, the citizens are trying to they're pushing for a bomb jammer to be given to him, and for some reason there's some resistance higher up in the government. It's a bomb jammer is a hummer like vehicle. It's not a hummer, but it looks like one, and it would actually just sort of render any remote controlled bomb inoperable.
Just jam it. That's often how some of these politicians have been assassinated in the past. So you really just find a lot of support. There is also resistance too. You find that some of the tributes, some of the memorials, some of the statues that are commemorating anti mafia figures being defaced. In fact, yesterday or the day before. Giovanni Falconi, the anti mafia prosecutor assassinated in ninety two, whose marker is in the middle of the piazza where he grew
up as a boy he used to play soccer. Somebody tagged its spray painted all over it. Oh makes me so angry. Little things like that, which it sounds like a small thing, but it makes all the headlines over there because it's really such a great insult to these guys.
He was a soccer player Fabrizio Mikoli, who was caught on tape or I forget the circumstances, but he was also dissing Giovanni Falcone, saying that he was Fungo is mud, but when you say fongo, it's more like, you know, shi t He got kicked out of the Palermo soccer team and he's still playing for a mainland team. But at any rate, it's a great insult over there to actually disrespect some of these guys and to even you know,
make humorous comments about the Mafia. There's you know, I'm not sure how my book is going to go over there, because so far it's been off the radar. But I think that with a title like The Sicilian Mafia, a true crime travel guide, it has the potential to be read as something exploitative or something. You know, over there, they're quite upset about some of the mafia seemed pizzerias
in Spain. There was something in Vienna that actually it was a pizzeria that had men used pizza's name or Sam, which is named after some of the Mafia victims, but they did it in such a jokey way that it
was really disrespectful. I haven't seen anything about Godfather Pizza over there yet, but it's a very sensitive issue because not only are they very embarrassed by the mafia, but they just feel that the time is now just put it behind them, you know, get rid of the mafia and bring some sense of normalcy back to Italy and Sicily.
That is an interesting, you know, tide that has turned in terms of coming a long way to that kind of defiance because you have to be extraordinarily courageous, like you say, you're taking your life in your own hands when you stand up to these people at all. And that's really amazing to me to hear people go to
the streets and defy these people basically. So it is a interesting development that despite their power and over one hundred years of dominance, that you know that their time is maybe, you know, it's not a great time for a mafioso member. I don't think it's not their golden age anyway.
No, But at the same time, because it's always been such a lingering presence in society over there, you do have opportunists that want to take over the rackets, take over the neighborhood, and they keep trying. There may be two assassinations on average per week excuse me, no, not per week, but per month that make the news. And oftentimes it's two guys on a scooter. They just come and blow them away right in broad daylight. This is generally in some of the seedier areas of Palermo and
other cities. Little have I spoken of tonight about how fantastic Sisily is to visit from a tourist standpoint who really never sees any of this stuff because it is such a beautiful place, But there is that undercurrent and it's going to take a while. It really will.
Now you you just alluded to that tell us about the beauty of that. It really is on display in this book within the photographs. They're just amazing photographs. So people will have to if they want to go to your blog, they can take a look at some of the photos. But so tell us really about as a tourist what they could expect in terms of the visual feast that they would have going to.
Quite diverse, and you do have your really tony, luxurious areas. The resorts around Tarmina, the beaches are fantastic and one for all the hard work this project was. It took me to places that I never would have gone on my own, and I never saw any tourists of these old Baroque villages with the classic old church right right at the top of the hill ringing its lonely bell. You know, at ces to time when the streets are
completely empty, they're so untouched by tourism. They still speak Sicilian in these villages, even the kids, instead of Italian, which I do speak, but it's hard to understand Sicilian. There's just so much to see there. If you go in spring, you have the hills covered in red, covered in yellow purple from the wildflowers. It's so incredibly beautiful. You can't believe that this was a land of such violence,
especially in the interior like that. But of course from a touristic standpoint, you also have the ancient Greek temples that are in better condition than anything you'll find in Greece. There are like four complexes of these temples that are just amazing to see. One of my favorite areas as a beach in the southern city of Agrigento, and it's a they call it the Turkish Steps, which is a beautiful natural formation of these enormous steps that sort of
tumble into the seas the white rock. There's there's so much to see, uh, just from the museums of Palermo. I think one of the biggest draws to Palermo is actually one city over up on the mountain called Montreale, which has an enormous Christ figure inside the dome that's done in It's a mosaic with actual gold in it. It's so huge. It's absolutely on inspiring, whether you're religious
or not. So it's really endless. And you know that it's not even mentioning the food, which is so unique over there, generally based on fish and seafood, and the desserts, the cannoli and all the pastries they do, these amazing little almond pastries in the shape of various fruits, little tiny apples and oranges. It's endless. I always rewarded myself after driving endlessly all day, sweating looking for various mafia locations.
I would have a fantastic dinner, half of liter red wine and write my notes.
There you go, soaking up the entire atmosphere.
That's amazing.
And something a tourists really could look forward to as well. I mean that's part of the draw.
That's the initial part of going. I mean, this guy does not cover hotels and restaurants because you want to take your lonely planet or Rick Steve's book along with you. But if you really are the type of person that travels somewhere and reads up on the history about it, well, there's certainly no other way to know about the full story offully without learning about the mafia. I make it kind of easy in that you've laid it out in car to tours that you could cover in about a
day's time. Now, you're not gonna want to see everything because I do go to some of the harrier sections, but that's what the photos are for.
Yes, yeah, absolutely, And so how long did you say this took you five or six years to put this all together?
Six or seven years? Yes?
Wow, the labor of love. And when's your next visit back to Sicily?
And I'm not going this year? You know. I I've kind of been everywhere there. I know pretty much every neighborhood of the big city, so I probably won't be going back for a while. I also want to see if there's going to be any reaction, and the publisher is interested in doing an Italian translation of this book, so we'll see if it sells and we go into a second edition. It's possible that we could expand and
cover the whole island. Most of it would remain on the western side, but also there are some events that took place in Catanya and the areas around Messina in the eastern half that would certainly fit in with the rest of this book.
Did you have any sort of person author will say, say, mob author, or some mentor someone that you felt that you would want to show this book to to sort of gauge any kind of negative response you might have, I know, because of this unique nature of this and the anti mafia sort of perspective. Well, was there anyone that you kind of bounce us off of.
When I was searching for blurbs, promotional blurbs to put on the book, I did approach a very well known best selling mafia author who was so angry at the title. He didn't want to see the book, you know, and he said you should talk to the Audio Pizzo people. Well, I said, Audio Pizzo and their website is in my book. And he said, oh, okay, Well, I'll take a look at it if I have time. I sent him a PDF file of it, which he never downloaded. I thought it was kind of funny because his book is the
words are blood splattered red. You know, it looks very exploitation, although it's a very good book, and it's actually in my bibliography. A very sweet author named Claire Longrigg, who did who wrote Boss of Bosses, How Bernardo Provenzano Save the Mafia, and a couple of other mafia books. She liked it and gave me a blurb, and she had she had good things to say about it. So I don't know. I have not run it by the Italians yet, so we'll see.
That's a different ballgame, isn't it.
It is?
Yeah, well, well I wish you luck. I mean, I think it's it's handled as sensitively as you could possibly do. And I think, like a lot of other people that are and putting out dissimilar books to yours, but at least time does it doesn't heal, But it seems to be more forgivable given more time, right, right, And that's about all you could say. Maybe a bit more forgivable for various reasons. But I want to thank you very much.
For coming on and maybe you can tell us about if people are so inclined to contact you, you have the blog, so you can mention that again please and if you do Facebook and if people are so inclined to contact you.
Right, Yeah, everything is right at Mafia Exposed dot com. Right, it's e X P O S E D dot com and there they can you know, hook up with the Facebook, the Twitter, etc. And it's quite a body of work now they've been posting things and more recently I've been doing a lot of commentary on recent items in the news having to do with Sicily and the mafia. So it's I would say the blog is a companion to the book.
Right and and the publisher for those that might want to go to that site. I know there is some advantage of going to the site itself.
And right, that's the Strategicmedia Books dot com.
Sounds good. I want to thank you very much for coming on and talking about the Sicilian Mafia, a true crime travel guide. It's a great book. And thank you for a really engaging interview. Thank you very much, Carl.
Hey my pleasure. Dan, thank you very much.
Thank you have a great night, all right you two, Bye bye.