In Corleone, the Mafia goes to seed

Alan Feuer | Corleone, Italy | June 13

(NYT) - Corleone is a town of soil and blood.

For centuries, its fields and vineyards have produced the fava bean and the sweet moscato wine. For just as long, its narrow streets and alleys have produced a different sort of crop -- violent thugs who rose to power in the Mafia.

These days, Corleone, the Sicilian town that gave its name to Marlon Brando's jowly don in "The Godfather," is at the center of a continuing war. Tired of fighting with the Mafia, the government has linked up with a team of young agronomists to confiscate the property of some of the most notorious Mafiosi and to plant the land with melons, chickpeas, lentils, grapes and wheat.

"We make pasta on the land where Riina and Provenzano lived," said Luigi Ciotti, founder of a group called Libera, which oversees the team. He was referring to Salvatore (Toto) Riina, a onetime boss of bosses, and Bernardo Provenzano, another local gangster on the lam for more than 30 years.

Libera actually does more than just plant grain in Sicily. It opens community centers in the seized estates of Mafiosi. It even turns their former villas into inns.

A few miles from Palermo, in the town of Monreale, stands an old stone house belonging to the Brusca family. Giovanni Brusca was the pudgy mobster who, Italian prosecutors say, planted the bomb that killed Giovanni Falcone, a high-profile anti-Mafia investigator, on a highway near Palermo in 1992.

The Brusca house, which sits at the bottom of a bright green valley, is now run by the young agronomists, who have organized themselves into a collective called Placido Rizzotto-Libera Terra.

Gianluca Faraone, 30, is its president. He said the house, with 10 bedrooms and a dining room with space for 50 guests, had just opened as an ecological tourist destination.

So far, there have been no reservations for the rooms, although Faraone said he did not think this was related to the fact that 11 farmers celebrating May Day were slaughtered there in 1946 by members of a Mafia gang. But the largest cell phone company in Italy has booked a dinner.

"The menu will be all organic food," Faraone said proudly, pointing out that his chef will make use of crops grown on confiscated land.

Macaroni vs. Mafia

The collective's offices are a short drive from the Brusca house. There, one finds a mock-up of the advertisement for the pasta Faraone makes.

"Macaroni Fights the Mafia," the advertisement reads. The picture shows two tubes of smoking semolina made to resemble the barrels of a gun.

Antonio Castro, 31, is a Florence-trained agronomist who tends the vineyards and the fields. A visitor asked him whether blood -- of which much has been spilled in Sicily -- made for decent fertilizer.

"In Italy, blood is not permitted to help the growth of vegetables," he said. "But you can use it on flowers," he added, as an afterthought. "That is still allowed."

The vineyards owned by the collective are profoundly beautiful, smelling richly of the earth. It is strange to consider that near this plot two of Brusca's henchmen strangled an 11-year-old boy and then used acid to dissolve his body.

It is only natural to wonder if these agricultural experts, untrained in the violent local ways, ever worry for their safety.

"In the old days, it would have been impossible to do a project like this," Faraone said. "We'd be dead."

These days, though, it appears the gangsters stick to minor acts of sabotage.

A few years ago, they loosed a herd of hungry sheep to eat the wheat fields. Last year, they stole a tractor.

"Little things," Faraone said.

Sicily's other side

All of the collective's 10 employees come from Sicily, and so their work is informed by a sort of native pride. "Everyone knows about the bad parts of Sicily, the evil that is here," he said. "But not everyone knows how beautiful this place can be."

In just that vein, he said, not everybody knows that the collective hires the handicapped to do their office work and the mentally ill to labor in their fields.

The confiscation program, established under a 1996 law, requires all profits to be reinvested toward the public good. "We are doing that," Faraone said.

Of course, he would not mind a broader base of distribution for his wine and pasta. In fact, as the afternoon wore on, he said he would love to sell his products in America, although he did not want them to succeed because of a faddish interest in the mob.

The most important thing, he said, is to work against the Mafia while getting out a message.

"Sicily is not only Toto Riina and Gianni Brusca, but us," he said. "We are Sicilian, too."