FOR decades the police have tirelessly attempted to crush organised crime in southern Italy. In 1963 Italy’s parliament acquired a dedicated, all-party anti-Mafia commission. But the fight against Italy’s four big Mafia groups also has a vast unofficial component: of businesspeople publicly refusing to pay for protection, investigative journalists and, above all, civil-society movements. The management of the mobsters’ seized wealth is a huge enterprise: in the 12 months to August 2015, €678m ($793m) was taken from them.
Over the past year, however, a string of scandals has blurred the line between the Mafia and their opponents. Indeed, the parliamentary anti-Mafia commission’s latest investigation, which began taking evidence in December, is aimed at the anti-Mafia itself, especially the unofficial parts of it, such as civil-society groups. Rosy Bindi, the commission’s president, says she aims to cut through the anti-Mafia’s “opaqueness and ambiguities”.
In the most blatant instances, standing up to the mobsters became its own route to personal enrichment. A woman who was a symbol of the fight against the Calabrian...Continue reading
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