 "Photo:")
If you don't think the Mafia exists, you are in line with what organized crime wants people to think, according to noted political reformer and former mayor of Palermo, Sicily, Leoluca Orlando, when he spoke at Miami University Thursday.
"Saying you have no Mafia is an invitation for the Mafia to come as soon as possible," Orlando said.
Orlando's talk, "Fighting the Mafia and Renewing Sicilian Culture: Combining Identity and Human Rights" portrayed the Sicilian Mafia differently than what Americans see in The Godfather or The Sopranos.
"Please believe me, the majority of people in Sicily are anti-Soprano," Orlando said.
With complex organization and widespread influence, Orlando said the Mafia are not like normal criminals.
"Please excuse the use of normal," Orlando said, who differentiated between the Mafia and normal criminals by explaining that the Mafia is a type of "identity criminality."
According to Orlando, identity criminality lies within a society.
"The Mafia needs to be inside," he said, "inside the state, the bank, the church."
It is its infiltration of these institutions, Orlando said, that makes the Mafia different from "normal" criminals.
"When you fight against normal criminals police is enough, to fight against (the) Mafia, police is not enough," Orlando said.
Orlando described the prescription for fighting the Mafia in terms of two wheels. According to Orlando, there is a wheel of legality and a wheel of culture, and in order to have any affect on the Mafia both of these wheels must be spinning at the same speed.
"Our past is rich of glory, it is not only shame," he said. "If you want to fight identity criminals you need to promote your identity."
Orlando was a legal adviser to Piersanti Mattarella, the president of the Sicilian Region before entering Italian politics after Mattarella was murdered by the Mafia in 1980. Taking a strong public stand against the Mafia,
Orlando was elected to the Palermo City Council in 1980, becoming the mayor or Palermo in 1985.
As mayor, Orlando believed in promoting a culture and economy of legality and in an effort to do so launched cultural and educational initiatives in the 1990s that promoted civic renewal and a new culture of lawfulness in a period that has come to be known as "The Palermo Renaissance."
"The Mafia uses culture to further its criminality and using that hurts the culture as much as it hurts the people that die (because of the Mafia)," said Laura Smith, a diplomacy and foreign affairs who graduated from Miami in 2008.
Orlando has worked to fight identity criminality by promoting identity, however, according to him, the identity of the Mafia is changing.
According to Orlando, images similar to those portrayed in The Godfather of weapons and murder and men sitting around in dark restaurants are images of the old Mafia. The "new" Mafia looks different and is a global enterprise that infiltrates banks and shies away from mass murder.
"The Mafia today is using and perverting global venues," Orlando said.
As Orlando has said many times in many countries, fighting identity-based crime, such as the Mafia, is the only way to promote human rights.
"We cannot take criminality out of humanity, what we can do is take crime out of the church, out of the bank, out of the state," Orlando said.
