Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture. Leoluca Orlando

the national Christian Democratic Party. But what was the relationship between Moro’s kidnapping and Piersanti? He didn’t tell me that on the same morning he had received his first death threats—not from the Red Brigades, but from the Mafia.

      The fifty-five days that followed were filled with anguish for the fate of Aldo Moro and discussions at the highest level on whether to negotiate with the terrorists. Then on May 9, Moro’s body was found in a red Renault, deliberately parked equidistant between the Christian Democrat and Communist headquarters in Rome. The country reeled under the shock.

      All this was a godsend to the Mafia. Italy was preoccupied with rising Cold War tensions and especially with terrorism. During the 1970s there were some three thousand acts of violence, less than 10 percent of them in Sicily. As the Red Brigades soaked up police attention, other issues receded in importance. It was no accident that the Antimafia Commission, which had been keeping tabs on Cosa Nostra since the First Mafia War of the early 1960s, was now disbanded. This left the false impression that it had taken care of business—despite the chilling conclusion of its final report: “There exists a criminal structure which, in putting up an impenetrable wall to noncompromised authorities, operates for the support and protection of Mafia criminal activities.”

      What the commission didn’t say—and didn’t know—was that the Mafia was now supplying close to half of the heroin smuggled into the United States. It had opened a number of refineries in Sicily by the end of the 1970s. Between 1976 and 1980, when the first of these refineries were discovered, several metric tons of pure heroin were exported, worth an estimated $600 million in profits.

      My office as legal advisor to the president was on the first floor of Palazzo d’Orleans, once owned by the Duke of Paris, a beautiful building on the square behind the Norman Palace. Mattarella’s rooms were on the second floor, and I spent as much time there as in my own office.

      In the two years that I worked as Piersanti’s legal advisor, we designed several laws, the most important of which was a law that transferred the responsibility for a large part of the regional budget from the regional commissioners to the cities of Sicily. It was a revolutionary law in its way. Over the years, the position of regional commissioner had become too powerful, able to move millions of dollars in one direction rather than another on the strength of a single signature. Without checks and balances, the position had become vulnerable to Mafia penetration. The aim of our law was to put this money directly into the hands of the various municipalities that were supposed to be the beneficiaries of the spending, thus making the sum spent with a single stroke of the pen less appetizing. I worked hard on the details of each article of the law, which was finally approved by the regional parliament.

      Piersanti was also responsible for passing a law forcing Sicily to comply with building standards that had been in effect in the rest of Italy for over a decade. Such a measure seemed innocuous enough, but it was a step onto dangerous ground. No past president of the Region had dared become involved with building rules and regulations of Sicily, and especially of Palermo, where they were exclusively controlled by the Mafia and its front men in the political world.

      Without any oversight, the city of Palermo, for instance, had let six contracts for the construction of six schools in six different districts of the city. For each contract only one construction company submitted a bid. This would be unusual in any city, but it was astounding in a city where there was such a hunger for work and where the construction business—however hideous its product—was flourishing. Piersanti commissioned an investigation into the circumstances of such deals and discovered, without much effort, that the six construction companies that submitted winning bids were connected to the capimafia of the six districts where the schools were to be built. When Piersanti’s advisors discussed this discovery with him, I had to keep myself from smiling. How could those bosses be so stupid as not to permit another company to submit a bid, if for no other reason than to create the appearance of open competition? My amusement showed how ignorant I still was of the Mafia mentality.