Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture

by Leoluca Orlando

"Growing up in an aristocratic Palermo family that seems almost to have stepped from the pages of The Leopard, Leoluca Orlando came of age at the exact moment that 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 those of Mafia rivals of the Corleonesi, but of police and government officials as well.". "Fighting the Mafia is the story of Sicily's Thirty Years War and of the role Orlando played in the Antimafia. Drawn to politics, Orlando became a councilman in Palermo and then the city's mayor. Setting out on an independent course to create a culture of lawfulness, he became part of a triumvirate leading the resistance against Cosa Nostra. Along was Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, he would be marked