How new narratives are breaking the mafia’s code of silence

The rule was never to say the word aloud. However, the film In the Name of the Law breaks that silence within the first three minutes: a baron utters the word “mafia” right after a murder. It was the first time in the history of Italian cinema — and presumably worldwide.

What’s more, Pietro Germi’s 1948 movie was groundbreaking in anticipating the core themes surrounding the criminal organization: death, violence, omertà (the code of silence), the pizzo (local business extortion), family loyalty, so-called honor, a power structure parallel to the state, the complicity of official institutions, and the fight against the mafia led by a judge. A judge like Paolo Borsellino, who was killed with his bodyguards 33 years ago by a bomb in Palermo while on his way to visit his mother.

Even the ending of Germi’s film proved prophetic: the mob boss Massaro Passalacqua redeems himself and cooperates with the law. An early pentito (repentant), like many others who would follow. At the same time, it was criticized for glamorizing the mafia — a depiction that film and TV productions have continued for decades. Mafiosi are murderers, yes. But very elegant ones. Savage, yet bound by a code. Corrupt, but protective of their own. Villains — or maybe not so much.

From The Godfather to Gomorrah, from The Day of the Owl to The Sopranos, books, movies, series, theater, comics, and video games have portrayed Cosa Nostra, Camorra, or ’Ndrangheta with varying degrees of accuracy, respect, success, and criticism. They have served both to denounce and to confront these organizations — and also to boost their allure. Even the criminals themselves have later adopted the styles and phrases attributed to them in fiction.

“The element of seduction is there. And the risk of glorification is evident. The Godfather was a film that showed a lot of fascination with that world,” points out Emiliano Morreale, author of a bluntly titled book: The Imaginary Mafia: 70 Years of Cosa Nostra in Cinema. He says that when Giorgio Castellani filmed I Grimaldi, a movie about his father, the boss Michele Greco, he made him look like The Godfather’s Don Vito Corleone. “Even the best moral intentions of a bad movie do a poor service to anti-mafia culture,” adds Gian Mauro Costa, co-author of the 2024 book Mafia in Cinema.

These issues and debates have resurfaced following the new installment of the Mafia video game saga. The original Mafia ended with the protagonist’s murder — a digital reminder that the criminal family never forgives. Starting August 8, Mafia: The Old Country aims to tell the origin story of the phenomenon, putting the player in the shoes of a young man rising through the ranks of crime. Once again, there is a mix of blood and allure. The only critical mention in the game’s promotional videos is that the boy’s rise comes “at a cost.” Otherwise, it boasts of its realism, graphics, adrenaline, sound — though characters speak in English — and historical research.

“There’s something intriguing about the mafia, and that’s led to its branding for products, restaurants, and even board games!” says Caterina Chinnici, member of the European Parliament (MEP) and author of È così lieve il tuo bacio sulla fronte, a book about her father Rocco Chinnici, a judge assassinated in a 1983 attack that foreshadowed Italy’s so-called massacre season.

This year, Chinnici raised before the European Commission the “potential public order concerns” posed by the board game Famiglia: The Great Mafia War, considering it harmful to the dignity of Sicilians and the memory of the victims. “Although such a finding is not enough to prevent it from being sold,” she adds.

In fact, in 2018, the European judiciary banned the restaurant chain La Mafia Se Sienta a La Mesa (The Mafia Sits at the Table) from registering its trademark, yet its outlets remain open throughout Spain. A Chilean jewelry company also capitalizes on the organization’s name. Just weeks ago, a preschool cafeteria in Madrid included “mafia spaghetti” on its menu. One might wonder if they would also serve four-year-olds “ETA paella,” in tribute to the now-defunct Basque terror group.

The fact is, very few criminal organizations enjoy a better image: perhaps only Pablo Escobar has achieved similar success, as seen by the controversies surrounding the Narcos series.

The legal battle against the mafia continues. And in Sicily, it has even caught the last fugitive boss, Matteo Messina Denaro. Meanwhile, the battle over the mafia narrative is moving more slowly.

“When I was a child, and there were murders in Palermo, they told me ‘Don’t worry, they’re just killing each other.’ That idea of minding your own business and not snitching needs to be dismantled. Sicilians have been like ostriches, spectators who watch without taking a stand. I’m not interested in a necessarily negative portrayal of the mafia, but a realistic one. It’s not an industry that creates jobs and solves problems, but an entity that melts a 12-year-old child in acid,” shares Mario Conte, judge and member of Progetto Legalità, the foundation that honors the memory of Borsellino.

The play Self-Portrait by Davide Enia also explores what that Sicily was like — where anyone could mourn a family member lost to the mafia — and Costa is writing a book linking Cosa Nostra to shadowy powers, the heroin boom, and the defeat of a generation. “It is and remains a criminal organization characterized by its structure and use of violence to obtain enormous economic profit through illicit activities,” says Chinnici.

Few books on the mafia

According to Morreale, culture itself was slow to take the issue seriously. “There was no relevant literature on the subject until the 1990s,” he notes, with the unanimously recognized exception of The Day of the Owl by Leonardo Sciascia. Or The Vineyard of Black Grapes (La vigna delle uve nere), by Livia De Stefani, one of the first writers to denounce the mafia, back in 1953.

Today, beyond the seminal Gomorrah by Roberto Saviano, celebrated works include the novel I’ll Eat Your Heart (Ti mangio il cuore), and non-fiction works like A Human Fact (Un fatto umano) (in comic form), Understanding the Mafia (Capire la mafia), and Things of Cosa Nostra (Cose di Cosa Nostra), which compiles about 20 interviews with Giovanni Falcone — the other famous magistrate assassinated in 1992 along with his wife, judge Francesca Morvillo, and their escort, when a bomb blew up part of a highway near Palermo. Just 57 days later the mafia would also kill Judge Borsellino.

All this happened amid the impotence — or was it complicity? — of the state. As the podcast Mattanza reconstructs, the magistrate himself knew he was doomed, especially after discovering mafia infiltrations in secret services and high government circles.

For Morreale, at least, the tragedy marked a fundamental turning point: “By then, all Italians knew about the mafia.” He identifies another key moment three decades earlier, in the 1960s: “Its existence was acknowledged and a parliamentary investigative commission was created. Sciascia’s novel and Francesco Rosi’s film Salvatore Giuliano appeared. But little changed, because cultural portrayals remained tied to stereotypes.”

According to the experts interviewed, portrayals of the mafia have ranged from epic or even heroic narratives to stereotypical, almost farcical caricatures — what Costa describes as a “local anthropological vice.” This was true both in Italian cinema and Hollywood. “There’s been a rather dangerous sensationalization, which sometimes still persists,” says Conte. The 1987 film The Sicilian, by Michael Cimino, is cited as an example of all this.

It took the work of Rocco Chinnici, Falcone, Borsellino — and many others — for another crucial advance: the so-called Maxi Trial. More than 450 mafiosi were brought to court and ultimately sentenced, in January 1992, to a total of 2,665 years in prison. This was also thanks to the testimonies of the first famous informant, Tommaso Buscetta, whose story was retold in the acclaimed film The Traitor by Marco Bellocchio.

“Before, we didn’t even know the organization’s name. At last, mafiosi began to be seen in their true characteristics: petty, morally and intellectually small,” says Costa. “Judges started to expose the organization from within,” adds Morreale. The proof that they hit the mark lies in the murderous fury unleashed by Cosa Nostra.

“My father laid the foundations of the modern anti-mafia system and paid for it with his life. It is based, then and now, on coordination and investigative and judicial cooperation [with the creation of the first specialized team of magistrates], asset seizure, and legal innovation [with the introduction of the crime of mafia-type criminal association],” reflects Chinnici.

Chronicles of deaths foretold

All this, and more, is reconstructed in Mattanza by Giuseppe Pipitone. Across eight episodes, the podcast explores how the murders of Falcone and Borsellino were plotted — and wonders how it was possible that these two deaths foretold actually came to pass. Falcone himself had warned that “extremely refined minds” collaborated with Cosa Nostra.

The many sources gathered by Mattanza question whether assassins — clever and experienced but sometimes semi-illiterate — could have conceived and carried out such complex and flawless attacks alone. Amid the mysteries, the podcast recalls that reality itself surpassed fiction: the number of errors in the investigations into Borsellino’s death would be unbelievable even in a novel.

The final episode of Mattanza reviews Silvio Berlusconi’s possible mafia ties and the time the late tycoon met with capo Stefano Bontate to secure protection in exchange for money, as revealed by several pentiti.

The creator of Mattanza was born in Sicily. The same goes for Franco Maresco, director of bold films like The Mafia Is No Longer What It Used to Be and Belluscone; Piero Melati and Francesco Vitale, authors of the book Living to Die (Vivi da morire); and journalist Salvo Palazzolo, who has been forced to live under police protection due to his work.

However, those interviewed don’t believe a person needs to come from Sicily to address the issue of the mafia. They also understand that, as happened in Scampia during the filming of the series Gomorra, locals grow tired of their home always being described in the same terms. “The risk of forgetting if we don’t talk about it is secondary to the danger of embedding the narrative within a certain spectacle. Just talking about it doesn’t mean we’re doing something good,” Morreale states.

The issues sparked by the Gomorra TV series adaptation are a good example of this dilemma. The series shows the Camorra’s brutality but has also created charismatic icons, idolized even by real crime bosses. Furthermore, some actors from the production were later arrested due to criminal ties. Another warning sign that the mafia infiltrates everywhere, even blurring truth and fiction. “It’s like a weed,” explains Judge Conte.

“Someone from outside can come [to portray the mafia], the important thing is that the project is clear and well-verified,” adds Costa. According to several interviewees, the miniseries Il capo dei capi, about Totò Riina, did exactly the opposite. The series La piovra, by the Roman Damiano Damiani, has received mixed opinions — both praise and criticism. For their video game, the U.S. creators of Mafia: The Old Country turned to photographs, old documents, and even a trip to Sicily with local hosts — the video game development studio Stormind. “They took us on the most incredible journey, taking in so many different locations,” admits a team leader in a promotional video.

Morreale argues that the wave of Sicilian and Neapolitan filmmakers tackling the mafia since the 1990s highlights the importance of direct experience. But he argues that the “best film about the ’ndrangheta” is Calabria, by Francesco Munzi from Rome.

According to Chinnici, “those who live where the phenomenon is rooted, who have experienced it firsthand, obviously have a more conscious perspective and the tools to understand mafia culture, to perceive the meaning of a gesture, a word, a silence. An artist who wants to tell it should first know the territories, visit the places of pain, and find those who experience them from within.”

Another of the most acclaimed feature films, One Hundred Steps, was filmed by Milan-born filmmaker Marco Tullio Giordana. It tells the story of Peppino Impastato, a man who was born into a mafia family, but becomes an activist for the rule of law, using a radio station program to broadcast his ideas. Cosa Nostra made him pay for his work with his life. “I want to write that the mafia is a pile of shit. We must rebel,” Impastato shouts in the film. His words still resonate today, thanks in part to a comic book called Peppino Impastato: Satire Against the Mafia by Lelio Bonaccorso and Marco Rizzo.

Humor

To denounce the code of silence surrounding the mafia, Pierfrancesco “Pif” Diliberto took a very different route: humor. The comedy The Mafia Only Kills in the Summer was a smash hit in Italian cinemas in 2013, and Pietro Grasso — a Sicilian lawmaker, then president of the Senate, and a magistrate for half a century — called it “the best film about the mafia.” Its success also led to a TV series. It showed that any genre can address the issue of the mafia, as long as there’s sensitivity and quality.

Many years earlier, Roberta Torre had even dared to depict a mafia killing in the form of a musical with To Die for Tano. There may not be many artistic taboos left to break — but there are still many subjects left to confront.

Chinnici identifies at least two overlooked topics: “The often hidden role of women. Within the family, they are guardians and primary transmitters of mafia cultural values. And outside, we’ve seen wives, sisters, or daughters of bosses who have been killed or imprisoned take on leadership roles traditionally reserved for men.”

She continues: “Another issue rarely explored is the dramatic phenomenon of ragazzi di mafia — children harshly trained to commit the most atrocious crimes. They represent a low-cost, easily recruited workforce from impoverished neighborhoods or even online.”

The first of these themes appears in the Disney+ series The Good Mothers. The second is addressed in the documentary Robinù by Michele Santoro and in Roberto Saviano’s book The Piranhas (La banda dei bambini).

Saviano also tackled another subject rarely covered by mainstream media or cultural institutions: the mafia’s expansion into northern Italy and its modern “white-collar” face — an effort that earned the author fierce criticism from the League, a xenophobic far-right party. “We should not be afraid that the mafia kills or makes headlines, but that it seeks money and territorial control,” adds Conte.

The book Mafia Export by Francesco Forgione goes beyond Italy’s borders, unpacking the mafia’s global operations. And veteran journalists like Attilio Bolzoni urge us to focus on the “mafia bourgeoisie,” the respectable front behind the bosses.

More broadly, Saviano is also credited with the most significant book on the Camorra. While acclaimed filmmakers like Paolo Sorrentino and Matteo Garrone have tackled the mafia in their films, Mario Conte sees no literary equivalent in Italy to Patria in Spain — a novel that deeply explored ETA. In the works of Andrea Camilleri, perhaps the most well-known contemporary Sicilian author, the mafia is present, but always in the background.

One expert notes that writing about such a complex phenomenon demands more direct knowledge than the use of images does. Conte recommends reading My Name Is Giovanni (Per questo mi chiamo Giovanni) by Luigi Garlando — the story of a boy who comes to understand why he was named after Falcone. He still gets emotional recalling the only time he saw the fellow judge in person: the day before Falcone was killed.

Families of victims have called for the focus to be placed on the anti-mafia struggle and its symbols, rather than on the criminals themselves. Though Costa offers a caveat: “There are similar risks — anything based on preconceived ideas carries them.” In this case, the risk lies especially in overly idealized hagiographies. The critic draws on his experience as the artistic director of a cinema in Palermo as an example of the many ways to combat organized crime: through the spread of critical thinking and culture — not necessarily limited to content about the mafia.

Chinnici echoes this, sharing the deeply moved messages she still receives from readers — or from audiences of the theatrical or film adaptations — of her book about her father, Rocco: “A cultural work can reach a much broader audience than a conference and, more importantly, stir emotion. The message is direct, it leaves a stronger impression, and it can raise awareness about the phenomenon.” At the same time, from her seat in the European Parliament in Strasbourg, the lawmaker is pushing for a continent-wide approach to the fight against the mafia.

Civic organizations like the Addiopizzo committee have been doing their part for years, becoming symbols of the right side of the fight. And for over a decade, the Libero Cinema in Libera Terra festival has brought art and film to areas hardest hit by the mafia. In 2014, they screened The Mafia Only Kills in Summer in Casal di Principe, the birthplace of some of the Camorra’s most powerful families.

“When I started this work, mafia trials dragged on for years and often ended in acquittals because society refused to cooperate. This is not just a battle for judges — it’s a fight for everyone. Today, trials are shorter and almost always end in convictions,” says Conte.

In recent years, the anniversaries of the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino have been commemorated with growing public interest. Rita, Borsellino’s wife, used to say: “Paolo, Giovanni, and the others were honest people who did their duty to the very end. I don’t like thinking of him as a hero.” They were real people. Heroes without capes. If they had a superpower, it was their commitment — a legacy within everyone’s reach.

Sign up for our weekly newsletter to get more English-language news coverage from EL PAÍS USA Edition