Mafia looms large in Sicilian regional elections

– After 20 years as an anti-mafia expert, prosecutor Ambrogio Cartosio is under no illusion as to the threat organised crime poses to the upcoming regional elections in Sicily.

Tomorrow will see the populist Five Star Movement (M5S) challenge the incumbent centre-left Democratic Party (PD) and a resurgent centre-right for leadership of one of the oldest parliaments in the world.

The days of shootouts and car bombs may be gone, but Cosa Nostra has been growing fat instead on political deals.

“We have greatly weakened the military apparatus of the mafia, the massacres are over, murders are rare. But the mafia has undergone a genetic modification,” Cartosio said.

“The political sector has lent itself greatly to organised crime’s infiltration of the social fabric” and, as a consequence, “the mafia presence in the political sphere is much greater than before,” he said.

With so-called “unpresentables” across the political spectrum – candidates who are under investigation for corruption, standing trial for buying votes, or charged with ties to the mafia – fears of vote-buying are rife.

In his 35 years as a prosecutor, Cartosio has seen politicians involved in everything from embezzlement to murder.

“The quality of political representatives in Sicily has not been very inspiring recently from a judicial point of view,” he said wryly, noting that “numerous politicians have been given heavy sentences for a whole host of crimes”. –