WEB BUZZ MAFIA

ITALIAN mafiosi have been pocketing hundreds of thousands of euros from European farm funds for years thanks to a legal loophole, according to rulings from Italy's Court of Auditors. Convicted gangsters and suspects under police surveillance were able to receive Common Agricultural Policy payments of up to €153000 without triggering more in-depth controls on their criminal history. "Until two months ago we didn't even have a list of mafiosi to check against when making payments," said Giancarlo Nanni, director of Agea, the Italian government agency that handles European agriculture funding. Court rulings demanding that the funds be returned to the state showed that payments of more than €2-million had been made over nearly two decades, including to mafiosi who were in prison at the time. Around €1.8-million was distributed in Sicily alone, where there were dozens of rulings against "farmers" for illegally obtaining public funds. Under...

Openly gay, devoutly Catholic, left-wing and an enemy of the mafia, Rosario Crocetta broke the mould when he was elected governor of deeply conservative Sicily last month. The island has long been better known for its machismo, corruption and homicidal mafia dons than progressive politics, but the chain-smoking former communist says he will bring a "revolution" after winning a regional election. "I will demonstrate that this region can be the most liberal in Europe. Certainly I will be exposed to opposition from the old political system, to layers of powerful mafia patronage, but I am ready for the battle," he told Reuters in an interview. Crocetta, 61, who has escaped at least three mafia assassination plots and was elected to the European parliament in 2009, could not be more of a contrast to his predecessors, under whom Sicily has come close to bankruptcy. He replaces Raffaele Lombardo, who stepped down in July after being charged with m...

Hot property: the survival of the 1,600 businesses confiscated from the Mafia , many of which are in Palermo, above, depends on deploying skills and judgment such as recognising that local people may depend on them for jobs If running a large hotel in the middle of a financial crisis and a shrinking market sounds difficult, try pulling it off when the 14-storey building has been confiscated from the Mafia . “Call it fearlessness or perhaps stupidity, I’m not sure which it was, but I took this on as I would any other job,” says Luigi Turchio, the soft-spoken court-appointed administrator of the San Paolo Palace hotel and conference centre in Sicily . Intimidation from the local crime boss and finding that the crime boss’s mistress was on the staff are just a few of the challenges Mr Turchio has faced in the 19 years since a court appointed him to manage the 283-room hotel on the edge of the Mafia -infested Brancaccio neighbourhood of Palermo, the Sicilian capital...

History The genesis of Cosa Nostra is hard to trace because mafiosi are very secretive and do not keep historical records of their own. In fact, they have been known to spread deliberate lies about their past, and sometimes come to believe in their own myths. Post-feudal Sicily Modern scholars believe that its seeds were planted in the upheaval of Sicily's transition out of feudalism in 1812 and its later annexation by mainland Italy in 1860. Under feudalism, the nobility owned most of the land and enforced law and order through their private armies. After 1812, the feudal barons steadily sold off or rented their lands to private citizens. Primogeniture was abolished, land could no longer be seized to settle debts, and one fifth of the land was to become private property of the peasants. After Italy annexed Sicily in 1860, it redistributed a large share of public and church land to private citizens. The result was a huge boom in landowners: from 2,000 in 1812 to 20,000 ...