A decade earlier, the machine-gun murder of Gen. Carlo Dalla Chiesa, the Italian hero who had defeated the Red Brigades and was strenuously pursuing the Mafia, had stunned Palermo into despair. An anonymous citizen summarized the feeling in a sign on a wall near the attack site: “Here dies the hope of honest Palermo citizens.” After Falcone’s murder, however, the reaction was quite different. As the city’s then- mayor, Leoluca Orlando, recalls in his passionate and enthralling new memoir, the people of Palermo hung bedsheets outside their windows “with slogans painted on in red, as if with Falcone’s blood: ‘Down with the Mafia!’ ‘Truth and Justice!’ ‘Falcone lives!”’ On a tree near the assassination site, someone pinned a sign saying, “Today begins a dawn that will see no sunset.”
The book’s title aptly summarizes what had happened in the intervening years to turn despair into hope. As mayor, Orlando fought the Mafia not only through law-enforcement methods but by restoring the very institutions of civil society—the private, voluntary organizations and relationships that create a culture—that the Mafia had destroyed during its rise to power. The Sicilian Cosa Nostra, Orlando notes, “was always more intrinsic to the structure of society than its American cousins.” During the 19th century, the Mafia even “took on the functions of the
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