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Speaker 3: You are now listening to True Murder, The most shocking
Speaker 3: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 3: written about them Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker BTK. Every
Speaker 3: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 3: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your
Speaker 3: host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Speaker 4: Good Evening. The Sicilian Mafia, a true crime travel Guide
Speaker 4: is the first book of its kind in any language,
Speaker 4: the ultimate Kozonostra experience, since author Carl Russo has photographed
Speaker 4: mafia hotspots on the Italian island of Sicily, where murders happened,
Speaker 4: where their godfathers lived, and their victims are buried, From
Speaker 4: the sun baked fishing villages of the Mediterranean to the
Speaker 4: darkest valleys of Palermo. Western Sicily is the exotic backdropped
Speaker 4: for over a hundred meticulously researched tales of murder and mayhem,
Speaker 4: with two hundred photographs of the actual locations. They include
Speaker 4: the childhood home of gangster Lucky Luciano, the hide outs
Speaker 4: of the fearsome bosses of Corleone, the tombs of the
Speaker 4: Robin Hood Bandit and the legendary downs the roots of
Speaker 4: the American and Canadian mafias, the Allied landing, pistol packing priests,
Speaker 4: political assassinations, playgrounds of the New Mafia, and even the
Speaker 4: anti mafia movement. Whether you're planning a trip to Sicily
Speaker 4: or sticking to the comforts of your armchair, this provocative
Speaker 4: book will take you closer to the Sicilian Mafia than
Speaker 4: you dared to think possible. The book that we're featuring
Speaker 4: this evening is The Sicilian Mafia, a True Crime Travel
Speaker 4: Guide with my special guest journalist and author Carl Russo.
Speaker 4: Welcome to the program, and thank you for being to
Speaker 4: this interview.
Speaker 5: Carl Russo, Hey, Dan, thanks for having me on. I
Speaker 5: appreciate it.
Speaker 4: Thank you very much. It's a very interesting book and
Speaker 4: jam packed with information. So let's get right to it.
Speaker 4: I understand that you operate a blog called Mafia Exposed,
Speaker 4: and so tell us a little bit about your background
Speaker 4: and then tell us what compelled you to write this book,
Speaker 4: The Sicilian Mafia, A True Crime Travel Guide.
Speaker 5: Well, you know, I never really have been a crime
Speaker 5: buff in the classic sense. As a kid, it was
Speaker 5: Godfather Fever, the Godfather movies by Francis Ford Coppolo, We're out,
Speaker 5: and I was only old enough to see those on
Speaker 5: TELL Television, so you know, that was my idea of
Speaker 5: the Sicilian mafia. And anytime there was a TV variety show,
Speaker 5: that'd be a comic spoof of the Godfather films. And
Speaker 5: that was all I know, But it was everywhere. So
Speaker 5: at that time, I read the Volacchi papers and I
Speaker 5: read Vincent Terres's My Life in the Mafia, and I
Speaker 5: found them interesting, but that was it. I didn't read
Speaker 5: anything after that. I lost interest, And it really wasn't
Speaker 5: until I started going to Sicily on a regular basis,
Speaker 5: just because I love it, because it was cheap to
Speaker 5: travel there, and it's just so endlessly fascinating with all
Speaker 5: the different cultural remnants that are there from the millennia,
Speaker 5: all the various conquerors from different continents in different countries,
Speaker 5: foreign powers that took over Sicily. But as the more
Speaker 5: I started going, the more I was reading up on
Speaker 5: the history and just the recent news of Sicily, I realized, Wow,
Speaker 5: this is Silian mafia is still a real thing. It
Speaker 5: has nothing to do with Tommy guns and pinstriped suits.
Speaker 5: Or anything very glamorous at all. But it's there, and
Speaker 5: I got a whiff of it in Palermo right away
Speaker 5: when I started going in nineteen ninety nine. I can't
Speaker 5: see you on it.
Speaker 4: Yeah, so you went in in nineteen ninety nine and
Speaker 4: you've been back every year. But what brought you to
Speaker 4: the decision to I mean even to the blog Mafia Exposed?
Speaker 4: Apparently it has something to do with the book itself,
Speaker 4: at least it's related. So tell us about the blog,
Speaker 4: and so again about your interest.
Speaker 5: Well, the genesis of the whole project came in two
Speaker 5: thousand and six. It was my third or fourth trip
Speaker 5: over to the island, and a week before I arrived,
Speaker 5: they caught the number one most wanted fugitive in Italy,
Speaker 5: the Sicilian godfather, Bernardo Provenzano. This was April of two
Speaker 5: thousand and six. They found him. He'd been on the
Speaker 5: run since nineteen sixty three, and the circumstances under which
Speaker 5: they found him were so strange. It was a ricotta
Speaker 5: cheese making hut in the mountains that overlook Corleone, and
Speaker 5: you know which is a reference of course to not
Speaker 5: just the movie but the Mario Puzo book. And the
Speaker 5: story was so bizarre. When they caught him, they rushed in,
Speaker 5: they busted down this little hut and there were posters
Speaker 5: of religious icons saints everywhere. He had bibles that were annotated,
Speaker 5: he had crucifixes around his neck, and he was smiling
Speaker 5: like a saint himself, and it was so strange. It
Speaker 5: made headlines everywhere, but of course in Italy that was
Speaker 5: the news. And so I went to track down this
Speaker 5: little hut, which took a couple of days of bugging
Speaker 5: some of the people around Corleone, because it's not the
Speaker 5: easiest thing just to be an outsider and want to
Speaker 5: ask about these things. I finally found it, kind of
Speaker 5: stuck past some police that were guarding the street and
Speaker 5: got some photos of it. And also on this trip,
Speaker 5: while I was there, I had been reading about the
Speaker 5: famous bandit Salvatore Juliano. He was gunned down sixty years ago.
Speaker 5: But the circumstances were so strange there too. It's one
Speaker 5: of the great mafia mysteries. Banditry has a long history
Speaker 5: in Sicily, but this was the famous Robin Hood bandit
Speaker 5: who had worked with the mafia and was possibly killed
Speaker 5: by the mafia and I wanted to see the location
Speaker 5: where he had been gunned down at least one of
Speaker 5: the police stories, the original police story of how he
Speaker 5: was gunned down, or perhaps he was gunned down or
Speaker 5: killed elsewhere, and his body was laid out for journalists
Speaker 5: to come and photo graphic. It was all such a
Speaker 5: strange mess to try and even get to the bottom
Speaker 5: of what happened with him. But I wanted to go
Speaker 5: and see the location because it was Salvatodi. Giuliana was
Speaker 5: also a film that was made by great filmmaker Francesco Rosi,
Speaker 5: who actually shot into the locations and used some of
Speaker 5: the people that had died in a massacre that Giuliano
Speaker 5: had fomented. So to make a long story short, I
Speaker 5: realized that there really was no book of this kind
Speaker 5: that featured the actual locations. Another thing from my youth
Speaker 5: is that I always really enjoyed going to cemeteries and
Speaker 5: that sort of thing, taking photographs in my hometown in
Speaker 5: northern California, taking photographs, recording names, going to the library
Speaker 5: and looking up on microfilm who these people were from
Speaker 5: one hundred years ago, And so it all kind of
Speaker 5: came together. I thought this would make a hell of
Speaker 5: a book. The more I got into it, the more
Speaker 5: I realized there wasn't even a list of these locations.
Speaker 5: So this actually took me six or seven years, not
Speaker 5: just to defind the locations, but just to find a
Speaker 5: reference in various articles online or going through court transcripts,
Speaker 5: or looking through the various scholarly books on the mafia,
Speaker 5: and actually going down and tracking them down. So it
Speaker 5: took a long time. And the book is finally here.
Speaker 4: Yes it is, and two hundred photographs and just incredible
Speaker 4: photographs in this book. Tell us about Sicily for those
Speaker 4: that don't know, and we all don't know enough about
Speaker 4: Sicily and its importance to the mafioso and Cozonostra. So
Speaker 4: tell us about Sicily and why Sicily, As you say,
Speaker 4: Sicily is still important today. But tell us about the
Speaker 4: origins of Cozonostra over one hundred years ago, and tell
Speaker 4: us why Sicily was so important to that story.
Speaker 5: Right, Well, it has everything to do with its location.
Speaker 5: It's right in the middle of the Mediterranean, and it's
Speaker 5: right in the middle of all the ancient profitable trade routes,
Speaker 5: the shipping routes, so that you had the ancient Greeks
Speaker 5: and the ancient Romans that used it, conquered it, conquered
Speaker 5: its people, practically enslaved them. Because by the time the
Speaker 5: Arabs came and conquered Sicily and sort of modernized some
Speaker 5: of the farming, you had the islanders under their yoke,
Speaker 5: having to raise the crops and give them up to
Speaker 5: their overlords. You had the Norman conquests around one thousand
Speaker 5: a d. As time went on, everybody had a piece
Speaker 5: of Sicily, the French, the Spanish, various parts of what
Speaker 5: is now northern Italy to the Sicilians. There never really
Speaker 5: was a local, legitimate form of authority. It was always
Speaker 5: some absentee government that passed the laws that they had
Speaker 5: to live under and the foreigners that they were exploited under.
Speaker 5: So as far as local authority, it sort of fell
Speaker 5: to the local strong man, the padrone of a village,
Speaker 5: who sort of became corrupted because he did have so
Speaker 5: much power that people would take their disputes to him,
Speaker 5: or he would oversee some kind of a transaction end
Speaker 5: up taking a cut. So this figure kind of tended
Speaker 5: to be the middleman between the people of Sicily and
Speaker 5: the far off government, particularly in the nineteenth century. And
Speaker 5: you had feudalism. You had some pretty brutal conditions, starvation
Speaker 5: conditions on the island. Even though ostensibly feudalism was outlaw
Speaker 5: in the early nineteenth century, he continued on practically into
Speaker 5: the twentieth century. But you had a guy that would
Speaker 5: be sort of the overlord of the farms, the estates
Speaker 5: for the absentee landlords. It would be that well, they
Speaker 5: called him the Gabelotto. He would be on horseback, generally
Speaker 5: always had a shotgun, keep the peasants in line, and
Speaker 5: had a propensity for violence. And pretty soon he actually
Speaker 5: got powerful enough that he was able to kind of
Speaker 5: steal away or intimidate the landlords into giving up their
Speaker 5: lands to him or through violence as well. Meanwhile, in
Speaker 5: the prisons, and not just in Sicily, but also around
Speaker 5: the Naples area of southern mainland Italy, you had an
Speaker 5: incredible recruiting ground there because you had mafia bosses that
Speaker 5: may have been imprisoned for some various crime thrown in
Speaker 5: the same dungeon with cut wrote and various rip off artists,
Speaker 5: and so they were actually able to sort of put
Speaker 5: together local clan so when they got out they had
Speaker 5: quite enforcements on the streets for their own benefits.
Speaker 4: Right, so it really does sound like the mafia already
Speaker 4: when you talk about they wrangled the land from the
Speaker 4: landlord himself, that sounds very much like the way the
Speaker 4: equation works once organized crimes involved in your business.
Speaker 5: Right now. Of course, the general definition of the mafia
Speaker 5: has to do with the protection racket, which is what
Speaker 5: makes them different from other kinds of criminals. Famous scholar
Speaker 5: Diego Gambetta says that it is the defining trait of
Speaker 5: a mafia group is that they actually have protection rackets,
Speaker 5: essentially extortion. That's been from the beginning the framework over
Speaker 5: which they enrich themselves and control the local people. Right
Speaker 5: to this day and unfortunately, Sicily still is a place
Speaker 5: where the majority of the merchants have to cough up
Speaker 5: cash to the local family, crime family, the local boss.
Speaker 5: They'll send around and it's that thorty that's a tax collector,
Speaker 5: generally once a month and they have to, you know,
Speaker 5: cough up several hundreds of euros or you know, depending
Speaker 5: on how profitable the business is. But we're talking not
Speaker 5: just shopkeepers, but car dealerships, hotels and restaurants and gas stations.
Speaker 5: It's still a problem and when the police, the government
Speaker 5: has actually done some great crack cracking down on this,
Speaker 5: but there's always another guy that wants to move in
Speaker 5: and become the boss and take over the racket. They're
Speaker 5: always arresting would be UH racketeers extortioners right now. Fortunately,
Speaker 5: over the last decade or fifteen years, you have a
Speaker 5: pretty strong and growing anti mafia movement. So now you
Speaker 5: do have the merchants standing up to these threats. There's
Speaker 5: a great group and I recommend them in the introduction
Speaker 5: to my book, a group called Adio Pizzo. Adio Pizzo
Speaker 5: means goodbye to the pizzo. The pizzo being the payment
Speaker 5: that these various merchants have to give to the crime family.
Speaker 5: So there's a list online of the merchants, about a
Speaker 5: thousand of them that have sworn not to participate and
Speaker 5: give up any more money to the extortioners. That's a
Speaker 5: big part of my push for this book is it's
Speaker 5: not just a you know, for the true crime fan
Speaker 5: that wants to read about bloody murders, but it's also
Speaker 5: has an anti mafia tone because a lot of the
Speaker 5: figures that I profile in the book over the last
Speaker 5: hundred years stood up to the mafia at a time
Speaker 5: when nobody was standing up to the mafia, guys that
Speaker 5: generally dirt poor peasants that decided to rally them and
Speaker 5: take over some of the farms that were promised them
Speaker 5: by the land, but promised by the government. There were
Speaker 5: some laws that would have given unworked land, barren lands
Speaker 5: that were still controlled by the mafia to those farmers
Speaker 5: that wanted to work it. So every village, it seems,
Speaker 5: in the interior of Sicily, has a favorite son who
Speaker 5: was assassinated by the mafia. I will generally go into
Speaker 5: these villages, find a house, or at least find the
Speaker 5: tomb or the monument, photograph that, and that's sort of
Speaker 5: my little contribution to this incredible island which I love
Speaker 5: so much.
Speaker 4: Now, tell us about the criteria for picking the stories
Speaker 4: and the corresponding photos that go along in your book.
Speaker 4: So the material that you included in your book, what
Speaker 4: was your criteria for picking it in the first place.
Speaker 5: Well, first of all, I had to find a location
Speaker 5: on which to hang the story, and that was always
Speaker 5: a challenge, especially because you just don't go around and
Speaker 5: ask questions about it. I actually kept this. I did
Speaker 5: this aw with ed GPS, either at home online. I
Speaker 5: would find an old archival newspaper article and print out
Speaker 5: the little photograph of let's say a building. Let's say
Speaker 5: it was the home of a certain boss, but there
Speaker 5: was no information about it, no address. So I would
Speaker 5: on these little cards in this little two ring binder scotch,
Speaker 5: tape them in and write down as much information about
Speaker 5: the location. Maybe a piazza was mentioned. But a lot
Speaker 5: of times I would have to go and take this
Speaker 5: photo and drive around in a rental car up and
Speaker 5: down these little winding alleys or matches, up to the
Speaker 5: mountains in the background. In some cases it took two
Speaker 5: or three trips before I found particular locations. Others I
Speaker 5: never found. So unless I could put it in the
Speaker 5: form of a tour guide, which this book really is.
Speaker 5: It's kind of laid out in car tours, then you
Speaker 5: know some things I had to give up. Another challenge
Speaker 5: was putting them together, because we're talking about writing about
Speaker 5: two hundred different personalities here on both sides of the law,
Speaker 5: and putting them all into some kind of a narrative strain.
Speaker 5: The two pressures were always geography versus narrative and how
Speaker 5: to put it all together that way. So I guess
Speaker 5: my criteria was geography first, tour guide, travel guide first,
Speaker 5: and narrative second. Because a lot of these figures crisscrossed
Speaker 5: time and space. You know, they had something to do
Speaker 5: on this in Palermo, the capital city, but they came
Speaker 5: from the interior, and they were connected to somebody on
Speaker 5: the other side of the island. But I should say
Speaker 5: in fact that the book is strictly it strictly covers
Speaker 5: the western half of Sicily, because that's where all the
Speaker 5: real momentous and most infamous events in its history, in
Speaker 5: the mafia's history have taken place, from the rise of
Speaker 5: the rural agrarian mafia on through the takeover of Palermo
Speaker 5: by the Corleonese Mob, the mob from Corleone, all the
Speaker 5: horrible assassinations of the seventies through the early nineties, the
Speaker 5: Pizza connection, all the heroin refle binaries that started sprouting
Speaker 5: up in the sixties and seventies, the heroine that made
Speaker 5: its way to the East coast. Pizzeri is probably familiar with.
Speaker 5: To go back to, you asked a question about my
Speaker 5: blog before I knew for sure that this was going
Speaker 5: to be a book. In twenty ten, I started blogging
Speaker 5: and putting a lot of these photographs online and hopes
Speaker 5: of forming it into something, but also trying to get
Speaker 5: some publicity for it. So there are a lot of
Speaker 5: things that didn't make the book that are on the
Speaker 5: blog Mafia Exposed dot com. So there's my little plug.
Speaker 5: There you go a few Sorry.
Speaker 4: So now we have the through your research and through
Speaker 4: this narrative that you're telling this story. It is quite
Speaker 4: unique to have this perspective conveyed in terms of are
Speaker 4: your position, which is anti mafia, So that's quite unique
Speaker 4: in writing this book and gathering any of these stories.
Speaker 4: Was there any resistance? Was there any criticism? Did you
Speaker 4: meet have any interesting encounters close encounters, we'll say, with
Speaker 4: somebody that was not so happy that you're doing this?
Speaker 5: Well? Generally, when you show up and then it really
Speaker 5: doesn't matter whether it's a big city like Palermo or
Speaker 5: a little hilltop village, because in the interior you just
Speaker 5: have these tiny, little, beautiful villages on top of a
Speaker 5: hill and the vast planes in between. You always stick out,
Speaker 5: you know, they know when you're not from there, and
Speaker 5: there's a think on just a natural curiosity because these
Speaker 5: are some really small towns. And also you have to
Speaker 5: realize that unemployment being so high, joining a mafia gang
Speaker 5: is not irresistible. But I mean, you know, it's very
Speaker 5: easy for a poor young kid to just want to
Speaker 5: join up. So wherever you go, there are just young
Speaker 5: guys hanging out watching and you know, I definitely don't
Speaker 5: want to characterize the Sicilians as being all mafia because
Speaker 5: it's a very very small percentage that have anything to
Speaker 5: do directly with the mafia, aside from being shaken down
Speaker 5: by in fact that Sicilians are very wonderful and warm people,
Speaker 5: but they're you know, they do kind of keep to themselves.
Speaker 5: But no matter who they are, all eyes are on you,
Speaker 5: on you, So walking around with a camera with a
Speaker 5: zoom lens and that kind of thing, you know, it's difficult.
Speaker 5: What I would often do, particularly if it's a heavily
Speaker 5: mob infested neighborhood, I will wait till Sunday morning, when
Speaker 5: everyone's still asleep or whether they're going to church. Generally
Speaker 5: it's the only time when you could find the streets
Speaker 5: completely empty, so that's when I'll get my shot. It's
Speaker 5: real tough. I also had a real tiny camera, my
Speaker 5: girlfriend's camera in fact, for a drive by, which would
Speaker 5: be like trying to get a picture of the prison,
Speaker 5: which you're not supposed to do. And a couple of
Speaker 5: hideouts that were sort of set up along the streets
Speaker 5: that had tall walls and really maze like and it
Speaker 5: was really stressful. A couple of times I hopped out
Speaker 5: of the car and left the car running. My knees
Speaker 5: were actually shaking as I took the pictures of a
Speaker 5: one mafia boss's house, hopped back in the car and
Speaker 5: took off. So yeah, it didn't all the way. There
Speaker 5: was nothing easy about this project.
Speaker 4: Yeah, yeah, you did extensive research. It's amazing, like you say,
Speaker 4: going back two or three times just to be able
Speaker 4: to locate a certain place that you wanted for this book.
Speaker 4: So that's very interesting. Tell Us about Sicily's and the
Speaker 4: Cozin Nostra's importance to the mafia in terms of its
Speaker 4: importance in the world, Well.
Speaker 5: The Sicilian mafia pretty much introduced, for instance, America and
Speaker 5: a lot of Europe to Heroin. You know, some of
Speaker 5: the old godfathers would say, oh, they'd have nothing to
Speaker 5: do with junk they wouldn't touch mafia wouldn't touch heroin.
Speaker 5: But in fact, the mafia has always been just rolling
Speaker 5: in heroin products. Even as early as the nineteen thirties.
Speaker 5: You had Joseph Bonanos kind of a pioneer, and you
Speaker 5: had heroin starting to come from the French to some
Speaker 5: of the Corsican refineries. But the Sicilians, they're great innovation,
Speaker 5: which really caused a wave of heroin dependency. Junkies. Junkie culture,
Speaker 5: for instance in New York, sprang up in the nineteen
Speaker 5: fifties really as a direct result of the Sicilian mafia.
Speaker 5: When Lucky Luchana was who is Sicilian, was busted and
Speaker 5: imprisoned and for prostitution. When they exported him, they kicked
Speaker 5: him out and they sent him back to Italy, and
Speaker 5: that's when he actually got the original Sicilian mafia interested
Speaker 5: in heroin. He had a big sum at a mafia
Speaker 5: convention as it were, in downtown Palermo, where he got
Speaker 5: together all the godfathers and he brought a coterie of
Speaker 5: his own Italian American gangsters along with them and sort
Speaker 5: of got them going on importing Asian heroin, refining it
Speaker 5: in northwestern Sicily. He had a lot of refineries that
Speaker 5: were set up and among the orchards, the orange orchards
Speaker 5: and so forth, and then shipping it across the Atlantic.
Speaker 5: You had a lot of the big names in the
Speaker 5: pizza connection, Getano Bardo Lamenti, who comes from a tiny
Speaker 5: little village outside of Palermo, but he was a real
Speaker 5: instrumental in sending across all of this heroines, not the
Speaker 5: Gambino family of New York and some of the Montreal
Speaker 5: and Toronto godfathers who actually came over from southern Sicily themselves.
Speaker 5: It was a very profitable and world changing crime. You know,
Speaker 5: the FBI got involved ultimately, and even late in the
Speaker 5: nineteen eighties, Rudolph Giuliani was pretty instrumental in working with
Speaker 5: the Italian government and breaking this up. But now the
Speaker 5: Sicilian mafia, as a result of all of the crackdown
Speaker 5: on both the US and the Italian side, has lost
Speaker 5: control of the international drug scene. And it's some of
Speaker 5: the other Italian mafia groups from mainland Italy who have
Speaker 5: kind of taken over. You have the Camorra of Naples,
Speaker 5: and you have the Mafia of Calabria, the southernmost part
Speaker 5: of the Toe of the boodh of Italy called the Drangetta.
Speaker 5: In fact that just a couple of months ago they
Speaker 5: had some big busts. They found a reverse pipeline going.
Speaker 5: They were actually still involving the New York Gambinos exporting
Speaker 5: cocaine from South America into the big port in southern
Speaker 5: mainland Italy and Calabria. There were a few Sicilian mafiosi
Speaker 5: that were involved with that, but that was just kind
Speaker 5: of shows that it was no longer a Cosonosa thing.
Speaker 5: It was some of these other mafia groups that have
Speaker 5: eclipsed the Sicilian mafia.
Speaker 4: Right, what about with the recent appearance of Toto Rena.
Speaker 5: Yes, well, but since your podcast is called the True Murder,
Speaker 5: Toto Rena is probably the most murderous of all of
Speaker 5: the Sicilian mafia gangsters. He is from Corleone. He rose
Speaker 5: to the top when his over boss, Luciano Lego from
Speaker 5: Corleone was imprisoned in the seventies. Toto Rena had a
Speaker 5: threesome er a foursome group of bosses from Corleone were
Speaker 5: absolutely brutal. They soon took over the Palermo mafia, which was,
Speaker 5: you know, no easy thing because that was a really
Speaker 5: hardcore mafia there. You had the Bontate group working with
Speaker 5: the Inzarillo group in so Rillo's were intermarried with the
Speaker 5: new or Gambinos, and so they were very powerful and
Speaker 5: politician corrupting mobs. But through sheer violence and through sheer
Speaker 5: military tactical brilliance of total Rena, he was able to
Speaker 5: hit his rival mafia groups against each other so that
Speaker 5: they were killing off each other and not even realizing
Speaker 5: that Brino was behind it. He was, I don't want
Speaker 5: to say psychotic, because he always there was always a
Speaker 5: method to his madness, but he really was is he's
Speaker 5: in prison now a pretty brilliant guy, which is not
Speaker 5: to say Britain. You know that he's anyone that that
Speaker 5: he's someone anyone should admire. So in the seventies and
Speaker 5: the eighties you had these mafia wars going on. It's
Speaker 5: also a time when some of the great anti mafia prosecutors,
Speaker 5: under the leadership of Rocco Kinici, setting up the anti
Speaker 5: mafia pool at the Palace of Justice in Palermo, and
Speaker 5: these guys working on their own, some of these investigators
Speaker 5: and prosecuting judges are putting together a lot of the
Speaker 5: bank records and finding out all kinds of information without
Speaker 5: really the blessing of the government in Rome. They didn't
Speaker 5: even get a computer, but they actually start to arrest
Speaker 5: some of the bosses based on their findings. You had
Speaker 5: the famous Maxi trials of the nineteen eighties where they
Speaker 5: rounded up four hundred plus mafia bosses. Maybe you've seen
Speaker 5: photographs of some of these trials where the bosses are
Speaker 5: in cages around this courtroom arena that was built underneath
Speaker 5: the old prison in Palermo. It's a big bomb proof
Speaker 5: bu bunker. They put them on trial, convicted them, sentenced them,
Speaker 5: imprisoned them. This made Tosriina, who was still a fugitive,
Speaker 5: so outraged that he just launched a war on the government.
Speaker 5: He started ordering the assassinations of police officers and judges, journalists,
Speaker 5: anti mafia activists, anybody that stood in his way. He
Speaker 5: mowed them down. And we're just talking. In addition to
Speaker 5: probably a thousand victims of the mafia wars, you have
Speaker 5: this new campaign of assassination that is just horrific, so
Speaker 5: that by nineteen ninety two, in Spring, he's ordered the
Speaker 5: assassinations of the two top anti mafia prosecutors Jovanni Falcone
Speaker 5: and Palo Borsellino, brilliant men, very much beloved in Italy.
Speaker 5: They were both blown up by bombs, horrific, horrific massacres,
Speaker 5: and the Italian people were so shocked and demoralized that
Speaker 5: it really became the beginning of the anti mafia movement. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: Toto Arena is living in luxury, secretly in a villa
Speaker 5: in downtown Palermo. He's got his wife from the old country, Corleone,
Speaker 5: and he's got four children that even though he was
Speaker 5: on the run on all these years, they managed to
Speaker 5: get birth certific kids.
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Speaker 5: Details Church baptisms. But he's still fighting. The government parliament
Speaker 5: in Rome passed some very tough laws restricting the communication
Speaker 5: that a mafia boss could have once he's imprisoned. Very
Speaker 5: famous law called Article forty one B. It took years
Speaker 5: for some of the more anti mafia politicians to push
Speaker 5: this thing through. So this put the clamp on these
Speaker 5: mafia bosses that were imprisoned, so they can no longer
Speaker 5: conduct business as usual, you know which through visiting attorneys
Speaker 5: and visiting relatives. So Arena is still on the war
Speaker 5: path and this is around the time where a couple
Speaker 5: of police officers allegedly go into negotiation with the mafia.
Speaker 5: And now if we want to continue on this subject,
Speaker 5: is something that's going on right now as a series
Speaker 5: of trials that are taking place across Italy having to
Speaker 5: do with collusion between the mafia and the governments. Are
Speaker 5: part of the government that would somehow get total Rena
Speaker 5: to cease his campaign of massacres. So shall I continue
Speaker 5: or do you have a different question?
Speaker 4: Okay, just if just if Silvio Beruscoloni is involved, you mentioned.
Speaker 5: That, well, yeah, he certainly is simply because well k yeah,
Speaker 5: let me let me take a break, and and and
Speaker 5: just mentioned where Silvio Belusconi, the three time prime Minister
Speaker 5: of Italy formerly and his status right now, he was
Speaker 5: tried for mafia crimes or mafia association, I should make
Speaker 5: that clear about a year ago, and found innocence of
Speaker 5: that charge. He was found guilty of tax fraud for
Speaker 5: which he was sentenced to four years, which he has
Speaker 5: not seen any prison time nor will he ever. He's
Speaker 5: just too powerful. Italy's were just man and still own
Speaker 5: so much media. But he's and he was also right
Speaker 5: now he's fighting charges of abusive office having to do
Speaker 5: with the Bunga Bunga parties and underage hookers and all
Speaker 5: that stuff the news that makes it over to the States. Here. However,
Speaker 5: his very good friend, former senator in his political party,
Speaker 5: Marcello Delutrie, was found guilty of mafia association was sentenced
Speaker 5: to seven years in prison. Now over there, if you
Speaker 5: get sentence, that doesn't mean you're going to serve it.
Speaker 5: So he's appealing that and he's free to Rome right now.
Speaker 5: But what the court had found, based on testimony of
Speaker 5: the various turncoats, former mafia members that have ratted out
Speaker 5: the former clan. This Marcello Delutrie, the ex senator, set
Speaker 5: up a meeting way back in nineteen seventy four between
Speaker 5: Silvio beer Lusconi and the top mafia drug kingpin Stefano Bontate.
Speaker 5: And the reason for this meeting was so that Belusconi
Speaker 5: could shovel a whole bunch of cash to the mafia
Speaker 5: in exchange for protection as Berlusconi built up his construction
Speaker 5: empire at the time and then later his media empire.
Speaker 5: So you have these real tainted politicians right now. It
Speaker 5: goes even deeper than that, with some of the connections
Speaker 5: having to do with a Masonic lodge. I'm not a
Speaker 5: conspiracy theorist, but they're definitely very close connections between some
Speaker 5: of these politicians and some of the mafia bosses of Sicily. Okay,
Speaker 5: so back to the more recent history. You had two
Speaker 5: police officers. They were pretty elite officers of the Carabagneri,
Speaker 5: which is Italy's militarized state police force, that approached a
Speaker 5: politician in Palermo, a very powerful politician named Vito cham Shimino.
Speaker 5: He was a short time from He was a mayor
Speaker 5: for a short time, but he was also more significantly
Speaker 5: the czar of public Works. He passed out hundreds of
Speaker 5: building permits to mafia controlled construction companies. They remade the
Speaker 5: face of Palermo with all of these apartment buildings, tore
Speaker 5: out all the green belt, and some of the beautiful
Speaker 5: old mansions and parks of downtown Palermo got filthy. Rich
Speaker 5: is one of the top mafia associates without being a
Speaker 5: mafia boss himself. So these guys, these two officers, go
Speaker 5: into some kind of secret meetings with Vito Schansamino asking
Speaker 5: him how can we contact the mafia, how can we
Speaker 5: get them to stop all these horrible assassinations. And this
Speaker 5: was about nineteen ninety two, like I said, right after
Speaker 5: Falcone and Borsolino were assassinated. And so allegedly you have
Speaker 5: some meetings going on between Tan Samina, the politician, and
Speaker 5: Toto Rena's partner, Bernardo Provenzano, because sort of the Arena
Speaker 5: is not just his partners, but not exactly as underboss.
Speaker 5: It was sort of the lesser of the two headed
Speaker 5: snake from Corleone. And so some of the meetings take
Speaker 5: place in Shancamino's villa in Rome. His son gets involved,
Speaker 5: who wrote a very good book about this, also claiming
Speaker 5: a lot of the same things of the mafia turncoats.
Speaker 5: So evidently Rena draws up a list of demands in
Speaker 5: exchange for a cease fire. Changamino's son delivers it to
Speaker 5: these two police officers, who, by the way, have denied everything.
Speaker 5: They're still on trial. These demands that Arena comes up
Speaker 5: with are pretty ridiculous too. He wanted to release a
Speaker 5: bunch of bosses. He wanted all of their assets returned
Speaker 5: to them. He wanted to kill Article forty one B
Speaker 5: the law that cut off their communication, a whole lot
Speaker 5: of nonsense, that there's no way the Italian government would
Speaker 5: go for you. At this time, also have Rena beginning
Speaker 5: to think that this is not going to happen, this
Speaker 5: deal is going to fall through, and so by a
Speaker 5: year later, nineteen ninety three, he starts ordering bombs to
Speaker 5: be blown up in mainland Italy. So you had some
Speaker 5: of the other up and coming bosses who are still
Speaker 5: powerful today, such as a Tale Messina Danado that who's
Speaker 5: now the number one most wanted fugitive, planting bombs in
Speaker 5: some of the landmarks on mainland Italy, in Rome, Florence Milander,
Speaker 5: blowing up sections of churches and art galleries, just sort
Speaker 5: of as a way to move this thing along. It's
Speaker 5: only been fairly recently that this idea that some kind
Speaker 5: of secret pact was being attempted in secret that you know,
Speaker 5: the court. Excuse me trying to keep it all straight
Speaker 5: here because it's so labyrinthing. But at any rate, there's
Speaker 5: so so many trials going on right now having to
Speaker 5: do with this. They call it latratativa or the deal
Speaker 5: that we're not sure where it's going to go because
Speaker 5: you have so many various players mafiosi saying various things. Meanwhile,
Speaker 5: total Rena, who's been silent for like two dozen years
Speaker 5: now behind bars, suddenly ending up on tape. There was
Speaker 5: a I feel like I'm filibustering, so stop me, because
Speaker 5: I could go on and on about this, but this
Speaker 5: is this is very interesting because it shows us that
Speaker 5: Arena has not really changed at all. They put a
Speaker 5: boss in his cell, so it's sort of a guy
Speaker 5: that was passing through another mafia boss from a separate
Speaker 5: mafia group Eastern Mainland mafia called the Sacra Corona Unita
Speaker 5: the United Sacred Crown, And for some reason, Rena spills
Speaker 5: his guts to this boss and the investigators got it
Speaker 5: all on tape, and Rena is saying, we have to
Speaker 5: have a new round of massacresions, just like the good
Speaker 5: old days in Palermo. He started bragging about blowing up
Speaker 5: Rocco Keninci, the original founder of the anti mafia pool
Speaker 5: in the nineteen eighties. He says, we've got to make
Speaker 5: up dance to samba again, and he says it starts
Speaker 5: calling them tuna fish, which I found kind of humorous
Speaker 5: because that tuna fish was always the old mafia euphemism
Speaker 5: for victims, guys they wanted to kill, which hearkens back
Speaker 5: to the ancient Sicilian practice of beating the hell out
Speaker 5: of tuna in the oceans by the fishermen would stab
Speaker 5: them and beat them and bloody the waters. So at
Speaker 5: any rate, we know that Tottorina has not reformed. He's
Speaker 5: still very interested in fighting the government his way, which
Speaker 5: is through assassination, and he's serving so many sentences now,
Speaker 5: so many life sentences, that he'll he'll always be imprisoned.
Speaker 5: His partner better now, the Provenzano, who is failing in health,
Speaker 5: has some serious problems. His family's trying to get him
Speaker 5: out of prison based on humanitarian causes or humanitarian reasons
Speaker 5: because of his health. A lot of times they'll release
Speaker 5: an older prisoner who's sick into house arrest. But because
Speaker 5: these guys had such we're such an abomination in Italy,
Speaker 5: it doesn't look like they'll ever get out of prison.
Speaker 5: So that's that's where these guys stand now.
Speaker 4: Now. In your book, you cover one hundred and fifty years,
Speaker 4: and you include, like you say, revolutions and politics and
Speaker 4: wars and popes and virtually you cover one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty years of important history. Well, I was gonna say,
Speaker 4: is that, what did you find in terms of the
Speaker 4: how influential they were in terms of politics and the
Speaker 4: war and everything that involved in that one hundred and
Speaker 4: fifty years of history. How's important? How important was the mafioso,
Speaker 4: the closin nostra to all those events.
Speaker 5: Well, in fact, one of the best ways that the
Speaker 5: mafia came up with to stay in power was to
Speaker 5: absolutely control local government and over the years work its
Speaker 5: way on up through straight into parliament. In Rome. It's
Speaker 5: very easy to corrupt a politician, as we all know.
Speaker 5: I'm speaking from San Francisco where UH Senator Leland Yee
Speaker 5: is up to his teeth in corruption having to do
Speaker 5: with the local Chinatown scandal and guy by the name
Speaker 5: of shrimp Boy Chow. If you're following any of the
Speaker 5: news about this, it's always been easy to corrupt the politician.
Speaker 5: But over there, the Christian Democrat Party was particularly corruptible
Speaker 5: because you these were guys that they came they grew
Speaker 5: up with the mafia. The way you would corrupt a
Speaker 5: politician would would be to finance them. Basically, you could
Speaker 5: promise them the votes of your people. In fact, you
Speaker 5: could you can actually tell a politician that you can
Speaker 5: deliver pretty much a majority of the votes of the
Speaker 5: entire area in exchange for political favors. Letting a boss
Speaker 5: get his hands on some of the development money that
Speaker 5: comes through. There was a lot of redevelopment money being
Speaker 5: sent to the South because it had always been quite
Speaker 5: a bit behind is the rest of Italy and Europe
Speaker 5: was modernized. So not only could boss siphon off some
Speaker 5: of those funds coming in, but also be in charge
Speaker 5: of the hiring. Now, if you control hiring on the
Speaker 5: building of a hospital or the building of a bridge,
Speaker 5: you pretty much own the town because everyone is beholden
Speaker 5: to you. In fact, that's why the number one fugitive
Speaker 5: I mentioned, Matteo Messina Denado, to this day is still
Speaker 5: kind of considered a hero in his hometown. Sometimes reporters
Speaker 5: go in and interview some of the locals there and
Speaker 5: they kind of see him as a god because he
Speaker 5: gave them a job, or gave their nephew a job
Speaker 5: in the supermarkets through which he was laundering money and
Speaker 5: that sort of things. So if you mentioned the war,
Speaker 5: of course, there are a lot of stories about how
Speaker 5: after Mussolini rid the island of the mafiosi that were
Speaker 5: in power. You had the Allied invasion in nineteen forty three,
Speaker 5: the Yanks and the Brits coming in, chasing off the
Speaker 5: lingering Nazis and Fascists and removing these mayors that were fascists,
Speaker 5: and suddenly reinstalling some of the old mafia godfathers who
Speaker 5: had either been mayors or just the authority figures. There
Speaker 5: were a lot of direct connections with the US Army
Speaker 5: and some of the mafiosi. There was Colonel Charles Polletti
Speaker 5: who was in charge of civil affairs getting things back
Speaker 5: in order right after the war, actually right after the
Speaker 5: defeated fascism Mussolini. He set up his headquarters in a
Speaker 5: hotel in downtown Palermo. His translator was Vito Genovese, the
Speaker 5: Italian American gangster, and he's politic three parties as they
Speaker 5: were attended by mafia bosses. Genovese did great during the war.
Speaker 5: He took a lot of Sicilian wheat and sold it
Speaker 5: on the black market in Naples. So yes, Uncle Sam
Speaker 5: did have a hand in bringing back the mafia after
Speaker 5: the war.
Speaker 4: And how strong. We had talked earlier about how the
Speaker 4: mafia different Italian groups other than Closonostra have taken power.
Speaker 4: But overall, if there's an anti mafia movement, that's pervasive
Speaker 4: everywhere in Italy and in other places as well. But
Speaker 4: tell us how strong that anti mafia movement is in
Speaker 4: terms of being successful combined with successful prosecutions over the
Speaker 4: last say twenty five years or so.
Speaker 5: Well, because the government has actually gone on the offensive.
Speaker 5: They have rounded up so many of the big bosses.
Speaker 5: But they did that really at the behest of the people,
Speaker 5: because after those horrible assassinations of the nineties, you had
Speaker 5: Italians so fed up they took to the street, they marched,
Speaker 5: they hung sheets from their balconies with anti mafia slogans.
Speaker 5: That was unforecedented. But they were just so angry, so frustrated,
Speaker 5: and felt that the government was either in cahoots with
Speaker 5: the mafia or totally impotent, that they just practically demanded
Speaker 5: it of the government. And so that's when you started
Speaker 5: finding that certain merchants or businessmen who stood up to
Speaker 5: the mafia suddenly finding support in the people because for
Speaker 5: so long guys were killed because they refused to cooperate
Speaker 5: or give up some of their money to the mafia.
Speaker 5: There was a real sad case of a guy named
Speaker 5: Libro Grassi. I met his brother in Palermo, who still
Speaker 5: runs the same textile factory that Libro did. He just
Speaker 5: absolutely was adamant about not giving up anything to the
Speaker 5: local mafia. And of course he was threatened. They're always threatened,
Speaker 5: but he was killed on their photograph of the spot.
Speaker 5: In my book, back then, these guys were isolated, you know,
Speaker 5: they knew that they were probably gonna die for doing this,
Speaker 5: but they stood up anyway, just on principle. Now you
Speaker 5: have groups of citizens that will go and support a merchant.
Speaker 5: The top anti mafia prosecutor right now, Nino di Matteo
Speaker 5: has been threatened. In fact, he's one of the names
Speaker 5: that Toto Rena that was caught on tape saying that
Speaker 5: he wanted to assassinate make him dance the samba. Well,
Speaker 5: you have what they're calling a civil escort or civil bodyguard.
Speaker 5: So in Palermo right now, in front of the Palace
Speaker 5: of Justice, you'll often see a line of people that
Speaker 5: are standing there with signs in support of Nino di Matteo.
Speaker 5: In fact, the citizens are trying to they're pushing for
Speaker 5: a bomb jammer to be given to him, and for
Speaker 5: some reason there's some resistance higher up in the government.
Speaker 5: It's a bomb jammer is a hummer like vehicle. It's
Speaker 5: not a hummer, but it looks like one, and it
Speaker 5: would actually just sort of render any remote controlled bomb inoperable.
Speaker 5: Just jam it. That's often how some of these politicians
Speaker 5: have been assassinated in the past. So you really just
Speaker 5: find a lot of support. There is also resistance too.
Speaker 5: You find that some of the tributes, some of the memorials,
Speaker 5: some of the statues that are commemorating anti mafia figures
Speaker 5: being defaced. In fact, yesterday or the day before. Giovanni Falconi,
Speaker 5: the anti mafia prosecutor assassinated in ninety two, whose marker
Speaker 5: is in the middle of the piazza where he grew
Speaker 5: up as a boy he used to play soccer. Somebody
Speaker 5: tagged its spray painted all over it. Oh makes me
Speaker 5: so angry. Little things like that, which it sounds like
Speaker 5: a small thing, but it makes all the headlines over
Speaker 5: there because it's really such a great insult to these guys.
Speaker 5: He was a soccer player Fabrizio Mikoli, who was caught
Speaker 5: on tape or I forget the circumstances, but he was
Speaker 5: also dissing Giovanni Falcone, saying that he was Fungo is mud,
Speaker 5: but when you say fongo, it's more like, you know,
Speaker 5: shi t He got kicked out of the Palermo soccer
Speaker 5: team and he's still playing for a mainland team. But
Speaker 5: at any rate, it's a great insult over there to
Speaker 5: actually disrespect some of these guys and to even you know,
Speaker 5: make humorous comments about the Mafia. There's you know, I'm
Speaker 5: not sure how my book is going to go over there,
Speaker 5: because so far it's been off the radar. But I
Speaker 5: think that with a title like The Sicilian Mafia, a
Speaker 5: true crime travel guide, it has the potential to be
Speaker 5: read as something exploitative or something. You know, over there,
Speaker 5: they're quite upset about some of the mafia seemed pizzerias
Speaker 5: in Spain. There was something in Vienna that actually it
Speaker 5: was a pizzeria that had men used pizza's name or Sam,
Speaker 5: which is named after some of the Mafia victims, but
Speaker 5: they did it in such a jokey way that it
Speaker 5: was really disrespectful. I haven't seen anything about Godfather Pizza
Speaker 5: over there yet, but it's a very sensitive issue because
Speaker 5: not only are they very embarrassed by the mafia, but
Speaker 5: they just feel that the time is now just put
Speaker 5: it behind them, you know, get rid of the mafia
Speaker 5: and bring some sense of normalcy back to Italy and Sicily.
Speaker 4: That is an interesting, you know, tide that has turned
Speaker 4: in terms of coming a long way to that kind
Speaker 4: of defiance because you have to be extraordinarily courageous, like
Speaker 4: you say, you're taking your life in your own hands
Speaker 4: when you stand up to these people at all. And
Speaker 4: that's really amazing to me to hear people go to
Speaker 4: the streets and defy these people basically. So it is
Speaker 4: a interesting development that despite their power and over one
Speaker 4: hundred years of dominance, that you know that their time
Speaker 4: is maybe, you know, it's not a great time for
Speaker 4: a mafioso member. I don't think it's not their golden
Speaker 4: age anyway.
Speaker 5: No, But at the same time, because it's always been
Speaker 5: such a lingering presence in society over there, you do
Speaker 5: have opportunists that want to take over the rackets, take
Speaker 5: over the neighborhood, and they keep trying. There may be
Speaker 5: two assassinations on average per week excuse me, no, not
Speaker 5: per week, but per month that make the news. And
Speaker 5: oftentimes it's two guys on a scooter. They just come
Speaker 5: and blow them away right in broad daylight. This is
Speaker 5: generally in some of the seedier areas of Palermo and
Speaker 5: other cities. Little have I spoken of tonight about how
Speaker 5: fantastic Sisily is to visit from a tourist standpoint who
Speaker 5: really never sees any of this stuff because it is
Speaker 5: such a beautiful place, But there is that undercurrent and
Speaker 5: it's going to take a while. It really will.
Speaker 4: Now you you just alluded to that tell us about
Speaker 4: the beauty of that. It really is on display in
Speaker 4: this book within the photographs. They're just amazing photographs. So
Speaker 4: people will have to if they want to go to
Speaker 4: your blog, they can take a look at some of
Speaker 4: the photos. But so tell us really about as a
Speaker 4: tourist what they could expect in terms of the visual
Speaker 4: feast that they would have going to.
Speaker 5: Quite diverse, and you do have your really tony, luxurious areas.
Speaker 5: The resorts around Tarmina, the beaches are fantastic and one
Speaker 5: for all the hard work this project was. It took
Speaker 5: me to places that I never would have gone on
Speaker 5: my own, and I never saw any tourists of these
Speaker 5: old Baroque villages with the classic old church right right
Speaker 5: at the top of the hill ringing its lonely bell.
Speaker 5: You know, at ces to time when the streets are
Speaker 5: completely empty, they're so untouched by tourism. They still speak
Speaker 5: Sicilian in these villages, even the kids, instead of Italian,
Speaker 5: which I do speak, but it's hard to understand Sicilian.
Speaker 5: There's just so much to see there. If you go
Speaker 5: in spring, you have the hills covered in red, covered
Speaker 5: in yellow purple from the wildflowers. It's so incredibly beautiful.
Speaker 5: You can't believe that this was a land of such violence,
Speaker 5: especially in the interior like that. But of course from
Speaker 5: a touristic standpoint, you also have the ancient Greek temples
Speaker 5: that are in better condition than anything you'll find in Greece.
Speaker 5: There are like four complexes of these temples that are
Speaker 5: just amazing to see. One of my favorite areas as
Speaker 5: a beach in the southern city of Agrigento, and it's
Speaker 5: a they call it the Turkish Steps, which is a
Speaker 5: beautiful natural formation of these enormous steps that sort of
Speaker 5: tumble into the seas the white rock. There's there's so
Speaker 5: much to see, uh, just from the museums of Palermo.
Speaker 5: I think one of the biggest draws to Palermo is
Speaker 5: actually one city over up on the mountain called Montreale,
Speaker 5: which has an enormous Christ figure inside the dome that's
Speaker 5: done in It's a mosaic with actual gold in it.
Speaker 5: It's so huge. It's absolutely on inspiring, whether you're religious
Speaker 5: or not. So it's really endless. And you know that
Speaker 5: it's not even mentioning the food, which is so unique
Speaker 5: over there, generally based on fish and seafood, and the desserts,
Speaker 5: the cannoli and all the pastries they do, these amazing
Speaker 5: little almond pastries in the shape of various fruits, little
Speaker 5: tiny apples and oranges. It's endless. I always rewarded myself
Speaker 5: after driving endlessly all day, sweating looking for various mafia locations.
Speaker 5: I would have a fantastic dinner, half of liter red
Speaker 5: wine and write my notes.
Speaker 4: There you go, soaking up the entire atmosphere.
Speaker 2: That's amazing.
Speaker 4: And something a tourists really could look forward to as well.
Speaker 4: I mean that's part of the draw.
Speaker 5: That's the initial part of going. I mean, this guy
Speaker 5: does not cover hotels and restaurants because you want to
Speaker 5: take your lonely planet or Rick Steve's book along with you.
Speaker 5: But if you really are the type of person that
Speaker 5: travels somewhere and reads up on the history about it, well,
Speaker 5: there's certainly no other way to know about the full
Speaker 5: story offully without learning about the mafia. I make it
Speaker 5: kind of easy in that you've laid it out in
Speaker 5: car to tours that you could cover in about a
Speaker 5: day's time. Now, you're not gonna want to see everything
Speaker 5: because I do go to some of the harrier sections,
Speaker 5: but that's what the photos are for.
Speaker 4: Yes, yeah, absolutely, And so how long did you say
Speaker 4: this took you five or six years to put this
Speaker 4: all together?
Speaker 5: Six or seven years? Yes?
Speaker 4: Wow, the labor of love. And when's your next visit
Speaker 4: back to Sicily?
Speaker 5: And I'm not going this year? You know. I I've
Speaker 5: kind of been everywhere there. I know pretty much every
Speaker 5: neighborhood of the big city, so I probably won't be
Speaker 5: going back for a while. I also want to see
Speaker 5: if there's going to be any reaction, and the publisher
Speaker 5: is interested in doing an Italian translation of this book,
Speaker 5: so we'll see if it sells and we go into
Speaker 5: a second edition. It's possible that we could expand and
Speaker 5: cover the whole island. Most of it would remain on
Speaker 5: the western side, but also there are some events that
Speaker 5: took place in Catanya and the areas around Messina in
Speaker 5: the eastern half that would certainly fit in with the
Speaker 5: rest of this book.
Speaker 4: Did you have any sort of person author will say, say,
Speaker 4: mob author, or some mentor someone that you felt that
Speaker 4: you would want to show this book to to sort
Speaker 4: of gauge any kind of negative response you might have,
Speaker 4: I know, because of this unique nature of this and
Speaker 4: the anti mafia sort of perspective. Well, was there anyone
Speaker 4: that you kind of bounce us off of.
Speaker 5: When I was searching for blurbs, promotional blurbs to put
Speaker 5: on the book, I did approach a very well known
Speaker 5: best selling mafia author who was so angry at the title.
Speaker 5: He didn't want to see the book, you know, and
Speaker 5: he said you should talk to the Audio Pizzo people. Well,
Speaker 5: I said, Audio Pizzo and their website is in my book.
Speaker 5: And he said, oh, okay, Well, I'll take a look
Speaker 5: at it if I have time. I sent him a
Speaker 5: PDF file of it, which he never downloaded. I thought
Speaker 5: it was kind of funny because his book is the
Speaker 5: words are blood splattered red. You know, it looks very exploitation,
Speaker 5: although it's a very good book, and it's actually in
Speaker 5: my bibliography. A very sweet author named Claire Longrigg, who
Speaker 5: did who wrote Boss of Bosses, How Bernardo Provenzano Save
Speaker 5: the Mafia, and a couple of other mafia books. She
Speaker 5: liked it and gave me a blurb, and she had
Speaker 5: she had good things to say about it. So I
Speaker 5: don't know. I have not run it by the Italians yet,
Speaker 5: so we'll see.
Speaker 4: That's a different ballgame, isn't it.
Speaker 5: It is?
Speaker 4: Yeah, well, well I wish you luck. I mean, I
Speaker 4: think it's it's handled as sensitively as you could possibly do.
Speaker 4: And I think, like a lot of other people that
Speaker 4: are and putting out dissimilar books to yours, but at
Speaker 4: least time does it doesn't heal, But it seems to
Speaker 4: be more forgivable given more time, right, right, And that's
Speaker 4: about all you could say. Maybe a bit more forgivable
Speaker 4: for various reasons. But I want to thank you very much.
Speaker 4: For coming on and maybe you can tell us about
Speaker 4: if people are so inclined to contact you, you have
Speaker 4: the blog, so you can mention that again please and
Speaker 4: if you do Facebook and if people are so inclined
Speaker 4: to contact you.
Speaker 5: Right, Yeah, everything is right at Mafia Exposed dot com. Right,
Speaker 5: it's e X P O S E D dot com
Speaker 5: and there they can you know, hook up with the Facebook,
Speaker 5: the Twitter, etc. And it's quite a body of work
Speaker 5: now they've been posting things and more recently I've been
Speaker 5: doing a lot of commentary on recent items in the
Speaker 5: news having to do with Sicily and the mafia. So
Speaker 5: it's I would say the blog is a companion to
Speaker 5: the book.
Speaker 4: Right and and the publisher for those that might want
Speaker 4: to go to that site. I know there is some
Speaker 4: advantage of going to the site itself.
Speaker 5: And right, that's the Strategicmedia Books dot com.
Speaker 4: Sounds good. I want to thank you very much for
Speaker 4: coming on and talking about the Sicilian Mafia, a true
Speaker 4: crime travel guide. It's a great book. And thank you
Speaker 4: for a really engaging interview. Thank you very much, Carl.
Speaker 5: Hey my pleasure. Dan, thank you very much.
Speaker 4: Thank you have a great night, all right you two,
Speaker 4: Bye bye.