Fighting the Mafia and renewing Sicilian culture / Leoluca Orlando.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Orlando, Leoluca.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Orlando, Leoluca.

Partito della democrazia cristiana--Biography.

Partito della democrazia cristiana.

Mayors.

Italy--Palermo.

Mafia--Italy--Palermo.

Mafia.

Mayors--Italy--Palermo--Biography.

Palermo (Italy)--Politics and government--1945-.

Palermo (Italy).

Genre:

Biographies.

Autobiographies.

Physical Description:

222 pages, 16 unnumbered pages of plates : illustrations ; 24 cm

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

San Francisco : Encounter Books, 2001.

Summary:

Growing up in an aristocratic family that seems almost to have stepped out of the pages of The Leopard, Leoluca Orlando entered the law and politics in the late 1970s as one of the young idealists challenging the Mafia's control of Sicilian life. At about the same moment, a new and particularly vicious Mafia sect centered in the town of Corleone was making its appearance. Fueled by profits from the international heroin trade, this mafia gangsteristica embarked on a reign of terror that made Sicily into an Italian Lebanon, and filled the international press with pictures of bloody bodies--not just of Mafia rivals of the Corleonesi, but of police and government law enforcement officials as well. One of the Italian figures most identified with the Mafia's eclipse, Orlando has endured repeated assassination attempts and he travels everywhere with a full bodyguard. Fighting the Mafia is his dramatic tale of witness and survival, of his effort to expose Mafia infiltration of the highest levels of Italy's national politics, and of the movement he helped to build--in the schools and churches, and at the ballot box--to recapture Sicilian culture and inspire a renaissance of democracy.

Notes:

Includes index.

ISBN:

1893554228

OCLC:

46828987