In Defeating Mafia, Palermo Reclaims Itself

PALERMO, Italy - After an intermission that lasted nearly 24 years, Palermo's famed opera house will finally hear an aria.

Tonight, a lavish production of Verdi's "Aida" will be staged at the freshly restored Teatro Massimo, Italy's largest opera house and, in the opinion of many, its most magnificent.

The occasion is more than a musical milestone. For civic organizations and individual Palermitani who have labored courageously to wrest control of their city from the mafia, the reopening of the Teatro Massimo is a celebration of tangible progress.

Their victory has been the piecemeal restoration and revitalization of Palermo's historic center - a big defeat for the mafia - and a sharp decline in the city's murder rate.

Closed in 1974 for "minor" repairs, the Teatro Massimo quickly became a sinkhole for billions of lire in state funds that apparently ended up lining the pockets of mafia-controlled contractors.

During the first decade of repairs, more than 20 billion lire - about $17 million - was poured into the Teatro Massimo, to no visible benefit. Instead, the roof started leaking, damaging the richly painted ceilings, said Giovanni Crivello, the architect who is overseeing the final touches of its restoration.

Mafia's grip strangled city

The Teatro Massimo's slide into near-ruin was only the most dramatic example of what residents of the Sicilian capital refer to as the "sack of Palermo," the abandonment of the city's historic center in favor of a forest of condos on the outskirts, a process that turned one of Europe's most beautiful cities into a contender for the ugliest.

Between 1950 and 1980, the number of people living in the center dropped from 125,000 to 39,000, even as the population of Palermo as a whole nearly doubled.

The main beneficiary of this shift was the mafia, which controlled the building trades. It found the construction of cheap concrete high-rises to be much more lucrative than the time-consuming restoration of the historic city center.

During this time, the mafia was running Palermo like its private preserve. It became infamous as a place where a murder could occur in broad daylight on a busy street, and there would never be a single witness.

The tide began to turn in the 1980s. Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino grew up together in the same Palermo neighborhood and would go on to fame together as crime-fighting prosecutors who showed that the mafia was not invincible.

They died within two months of each other in 1992 bomb attacks. The brazenness of the murders shocked the nation and marked a turning point in Italy's struggle against the mafia.

In Palermo, hundreds of thousands turned out for anti-mafia demonstrations, vigils and marches. A tree that grows outside Falcone's house remains a kind of anti-mafia shrine where people leave poems, messages and flowers.

"We found our conscience," said Mimmo Cuticchio, a puppeteer whose theater now flourishes in a neighborhood once infested with petty criminals.

Tide of opinion begins to turn

A year after the assassinations, Leoluca Orlando, a crusading anti-mafia politician, swept into the mayor's office with a resounding 75 percent of the vote.

With a flair for the theatrical and the zeal of a faith healer, he is fond of saying, "The only way to beat the mafia is for us to take the place of the mafia."

One way in which he is trying to do that is by reclaiming the city's historic center. More than $250 million has been spent restoring and revitalizing it.

The results have been striking, and it goes beyond showpieces such as the Teatro Massimo. Young people are moving back. Neighborhoods once dark and forbidding are now blossoming with artisans and small businesses.

"The city is lighting up neighborhoods that were always dark. It's picking up the trash. I know these are basic things, but they were never basic in Palermo," said Connie Transirico, a journalist who covers the mafia for a local newspaper.

Another indicator of the mafia's receding influence is Palermo's murder rate. Throughout the 1980s, Palermo averaged about 130 to 140 a year. Since the beginning of 1997, there have been fewer than 10, said Guido Marino, who heads the police mobile squad, the city's front-line defense against the mafia.

Mafia reduced to petty crimes

Still, Orlando is protected around the clock by 40 armed bodyguards. He travels in a bulletproof car. And he is the first to admit that although the mafia may be in remission, it has not been defeated.

But a growing sense among ordinary people that the mafia is not inevitable has greatly circumscribed its field of operations. These days a weakened mafia scrapes by on petty criminality: loan-sharking, fencing stolen goods and extorting the monthly "pizzo" - protection money - from local shopkeepers. An estimated 30 percent of the small businesses in Palermo are still paying the pizzo - a practice that greatly disturbs Marino.

"In the past it was unthinkable for a merchant to come to the mobile squad and report an extortion attempt," he said. "Today it is better, people trust us. But there are still some who don't understand that the only way to defeat the mafia is to unite against them."