ABROAD

ROME Not Dying

No matter how many arrests are made, the supply of Mafiosi seems endless. Dr. Riccardo Boccia, newly appointed chief of the country-wide campaign against the Mafia, acknowledged that this was the case in spite of hundreds of arrests, some of them highly publicized, made in recent months through the confessions of Mafia pentiti. “Grave blows have been inflicted upon the Godfathers,” Boccia said, “but the organization is not dying at all. Its power is still alive and strong.” Boccia had just returned from Sicily where he had gone to investigate one of the most savage Mafia crimes ever recorded—a mother and her six- year-old twin sons killed when a car bomb exploded in Trapani in western Sicily. The bomb was intended for Carlo Palermo, a public prosecutor recently transferred to the island. It was so powerful it blew the children’s bodies two hundred yards away. Meanwhile, 37 suspects, many of them outwardly respectable business and professional men, have been indicted in Milan as belonging to the Mafia’s “White Collar Department.”

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ROME Not Dying

No matter how many arrests are made, the supply of Mafiosi seems endless. Dr. Riccardo Boccia, newly appointed chief of the country-wide campaign against the Mafia, acknowledged that this was the case in spite of hundreds of arrests, some of them highly publicized, made in recent months through the confessions of Mafia pentiti. “Grave blows have been inflicted upon the Godfathers,” Boccia said, “but the organization is not dying at all. Its power is still alive and strong.” Boccia had just returned from Sicily where he had gone to investigate one of the most savage Mafia crimes ever recorded—a mother and her six- year-old twin sons killed when a car bomb exploded in Trapani in western Sicily. The bomb was intended for Carlo Palermo, a public prosecutor recently transferred to the island. It was so powerful it blew the children’s bodies two hundred yards away. Meanwhile, 37 suspects, many of them outwardly respectable business and professional men, have been indicted in Milan as belonging to the Mafia’s “White Collar Department.”