When society took the land away from the mafia

From the fields of Sicily to the working-class neighborhoods of Rosario, the social reuse of confiscated mafia assets has become one of the most innovative strategies to weaken organized crime worldwide. This year marks its 30th anniversary.

From the same land that gave rise to the mafia, cooperatives were born.

The two-colored flag of Sicily symbolizes Palermo and Corleone. During the Middle Ages, yellow represented Palermo—gold, wealth, and the city’s prestige—while Corleone’s red evoked bravery and the blood shed on the battlefield. Sicily is a generous land: it produced the wheat that fed millions during the Roman Empire, the lemons introduced by the Arabs after conquering the island in the ninth century, and the sulfur that in the nineteenth century made Sicily one of the world’s leading suppliers. But the land’s generosity also brought tragedies that soaked it in blood.

The land, often owned by others, was worked by peasants and entire families who buried their hands in the soil simply to survive. When their bodies could endure the day’s labor, some studied at night by candlelight. Yet beyond the exploitation imposed by landowners, from the 1950s until the end of the twentieth century their lives were also subject to the will of Cosa Nostra.

From that very soil in which peasants buried their hands, the mafia was born. It emerged from the control of wheat, lemon, and sulfur production and trade. But the mafia evolved much faster than the state and eventually moved into the cities. With time, violence, wealth, and corruption, it became a constantly evolving phenomenon. Yet from that same land also emerged one of its greatest enemies: a peasant who studied by candlelight, organized in the labor movement, entered politics, and eventually became a member of parliament. He was among the first to understand that the power of the mafia did not lie in its weapons, but in its assets.

The Mafia’s Achilles’ Heel

That peasant was Pio La Torre. A union leader and member of the Italian Communist Party, he reached the Italian Parliament and, together with magistrate Cesare Terranova—murdered by the mafia in 1979—promoted some of the first modern measures to fight organized crime. In 1976, La Torre and Terranova introduced two proposals that would eventually revolutionize anti-mafia methods not only in Italy but far beyond.

First, they proposed introducing into the Penal Code the possibility of punishing anyone with up to ten years in prison simply for belonging to a mafia-type organization. At the time, Italian politics and society still debated whether the mafia even existed, whether crimes were organized or merely a series of isolated cases.

For mafia organizations, most members are expendable. The weakest links in the criminal chain are easily replaced. But the deputies’ proposal expanded the ability of the justice system to prosecute and convict all mafiosi, regardless of rank. The decision changed the logic of the system, prompting some mafiosi to begin collaborating with authorities. By providing information about the organization, they hoped to obtain reduced sentences.

Yet the real fear within the mafia lay in the second proposal: the confiscation of its assets. Because of his Sicilian origins, his background as a peasant, and his political activism, La Torre understood better than anyone the mechanisms through which the mafia controlled territory and communities. While physical violence remains the most visible instrument of such organizations, La Torre grasped that the mafia dominates territories through what is most abundant: property.

The assets obtained through money laundering gave the mafia enormous economic power. But above all they served as a powerful tool of social control. Communities had to know that the houses, businesses, shops, and even the food sold locally belonged to the mafia. These properties functioned as a kind of social panopticon, constantly reminding communities that the mafia was present.

The year 1982 was particularly bloody in Sicily. Pio La Torre was assassinated on April 30, along with his bodyguard Rosario Di Salvo.

On September 3, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, his wife, and one of his guards were also murdered. Dalla Chiesa had arrived on the island with the mission of defeating the mafia. The shock produced by these “illustrious corpses”—as part of public opinion described them—forced the national government to react.

The very next day, September 4, 1982, the Italian Parliament passed Law 646, introducing into the Penal Code the crime of mafia association (Article 416-bis) and the confiscation of assets belonging to mafia organizations.

When the Mafia Declared War

The panopticon was beginning to crumble. The new law caused panic among mafiosi, something confirmed by an intercepted phone conversation: “We need to leave Italy. They’re going to take everything.” Although the Italian judiciary would take several years to issue convictions under the new mafia association crime, judicial measures to seize mafia assets began to multiply.

Sicilian newspapers regularly filled their front pages with the many bodies the mafia left in streets, houses, and car trunks—often inside Alfa Romeo Giuliettas, the mobsters’ favorite car at the time. These attacks had several causes: mass arrests, corrupt politicians failing to guarantee impunity, and the growing number of assets seized by the courts.

A group of magistrates, led by Rocco Chinnici—assassinated in 1983—began investigating Cosa Nostra in a coordinated manner. As this small group made progress, the mafia responded by declaring war on the state, brutally attacking politicians, judges, union leaders, businesspeople, activists, and journalists.

Magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino became the driving force behind these investigations. They prepared the most important trial in modern history against Cosa Nostra. In a specially reinforced section of Palermo’s prison—designed to withstand missile attacks—the Maxi Trial took place. It resulted in the conviction of 360 mafiosi—including several bosses—to a total of 2,665 years in prison, not counting the life sentences imposed on fugitive leaders.

Falcone and Borsellino’s determination to investigate the mafia’s ties with key sectors of Sicily’s economy and the state placed them directly in the mafia’s crosshairs. Five years after the verdict, on May 23, 1992, Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three bodyguards were killed by a powerful bomb on the highway where they were traveling. Fifty-seven days later, Paolo Borsellino and five of his guards were also killed by a bomb outside his mother’s home.

For years, the mafia’s brutal killings had suffocated Sicilian society in fear. But the murders of Falcone and Borsellino changed everything. Their deaths awakened anger and hope throughout the island. Balconies were draped with white sheets in tribute to the magistrates. Their funerals became massive demonstrations of grief and protest. Political leaders were shouted out of the ceremonies. “They are our dead,” Sicilians cried.

The mafia had tried to strangle community life with fear. Yet through its assets, society would begin to rebuild it.

The Second Life of Mafia Assets

On a cold afternoon in December 1994, a diverse group of Italian organizations gathered in Rome at the initiative of Father Luigi Ciotti, founder of the Gruppo Abele, an organization dedicated to assisting people living in marginal conditions and struggling with drug addiction. They held a press conference to announce the creation of a cartel—like those of drug traffickers—but composed of organizations united against the mafia and convinced that fighting it was a responsibility shared by society as a whole.

At that meeting they publicly presented the association Libera —Associazioni, nomi e numeri contro le mafie— and launched a massive campaign to collect signatures demanding the social reuse of assets confiscated from the mafia and corruption.

Without websites or social media, the campaign relied on the traditional face-to-face method. Young people, adults, and the elderly stood behind plastic tables, banners, and flyers, speaking with passersby and inviting them to sign the proposed law. Over more than a year, organizations and hundreds of volunteers collected over one million signatures. On March 7, 1996—thirty years ago—the Italian Parliament approved Law 109/96, opening a new chapter in the fight against the mafia.

Confiscating mafia property was a crucial first step in dismantling the economic network and social panopticon the mafia had built across the territory. Yet before the passage of Law 109/96, bureaucratic inertia often reinforced that structure of surveillance. Houses, buildings, and fields remained empty. The mafiosi had been expelled, the state did not occupy them, and communities avoided them. The mafia still lingered in the landscape.

Once those properties began to be assigned to regional, provincial, and municipal governments—working together with civil society organizations to give them new life—the mafia’s panopticon began to collapse.

One of the most emblematic examples occurred in 2001 in the small town of San Giuseppe Jato, on the slopes of Mount Iato. There, promoted by Libera, the state, and local farmers founded the agricultural cooperative Placido Rizzotto. Named after the Corleone trade unionist murdered by Cosa Nostra in 1948, and established on land confiscated from mafia bosses such as Riina, Bagarella, and Brusca, the cooperative became a turning point in the fight against organized crime and in the policy of social reuse.

The challenge of founding a cooperative on mafia land was far from simple. Bernardo Provenzano—the Cosa Nostra boss who had been a fugitive for over forty years—would only be arrested in 2006, hiding in the same region where the cooperative operated. Perhaps for that reason, mafiosi sent their flocks onto cooperative land to destroy crops, while local machinery dealers refused to sell or rent equipment.

On the day scheduled for the cooperative’s first harvest—attended by local residents, government officials, and social leaders—not a single tractor driver showed up. All had stayed away after receiving threats from Cosa Nostra. A police officer stepped behind the wheel, began the harvest, and sent a clear message: we will not stop.

The mafia panopticon had begun to turn into a social synopticon. With the community managing these properties and launching new projects through them, society itself began to observe, monitor, and weaken the mafia.

Despite all obstacles, the cooperative succeeded. With support from the state, local communities, universities, social organizations, trade unions, and business associations, its products are now sold throughout Italy. It employs more than thirty people and has become a model replicated across the island.

According to data from Italy’s National Agency for the Administration and Destination of Seized and Confiscated Assets from Organized Crime, 23,026 properties have been confiscated and assigned to public institutions and social organizations under the Anti-Mafia Code, while another 20,848 are still awaiting assignment.

From Sicily to the World: Expanding the Model

Asset confiscation is a widely used tool against organized crime around the world, but their social reuse remains—for now—an Italian public policy. Since the adoption of Law 109/96, Libera and the Italian state have worked not only to improve mechanisms for managing confiscated assets, but also to promote the model internationally.

The European Union has issued two directives—one in 2014 and another in 2024—urging member states to adapt procedures so assets can be preserved more effectively, public spending reduced, and confiscated property reused socially to strengthen community initiatives.

In Latin America, through the ALAS Network—an initiative promoted by Libera—the concept of social reuse has evolved into concrete legislative and judicial proposals. In Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, Costa Rica, and even the United States, authorities already allocate certain assets for social use, despite the absence of specific legal frameworks.

What began in Sicily as a response to the power of the mafia is now emerging as a global public policy. The social reuse of confiscated assets poses a broader challenge in confronting organized crime, involving both state institutions and civil society. The goal is no longer simply to weaken criminal organizations economically or dismantle their panopticon, but to rebuild communities by returning control over territory, resources, and opportunities to the people.