Meet The Modern Mob

The University of Palermo has given out its share of degress to mobsters' sons in recent years. Professor Giovanni Santangelo, vice-rector at the university, said the Mafia's move into the mainstream makes it both more invisible and more powerful. "The sons of mafiosi today, with rare exception, are all white-collar. They are programmed to be so." Santangelo says that in the past, university degrees were turned into law careers to provide a small army of legal defenders. "They've already got enough lawyers. They're diversifying," he says, into public fund administrators (to dip into billions of dollars of European Union aid money destined for southern Italy), engineers, computer programmers, bankers and financial managers — these are the new faces in the trenches of organized crime. Chain-smoking in his cluttered Palermo office, top anti-Mafia prosecutor Antonio Ingroia explains the pattern. A die-hard mafioso contacts a "mafioso businessman," who is the conduit to a "legitimate" businessman, who provides the ultimate cover to launder money through real enterprises all the way up to the stock market. The network stretches from Palermo to Milan to Switzerland, Luxembourg and Liechtenstein. "It's a chain," Ingroia says. "In our opinion, they are guilty of crimes at all levels."

The man thought to be responsible for smartening up the Mafia quit school at age 10. Bernardo Provenzano, now 69, became the capo dei capi of Cosa Nostra after his boyhood buddy from Corleone, Riina, was arrested in 1993 and subsequently sentenced for masterminding the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations. (Last week Italy's top appeals court annulled the convictions of 13 mafiosi who had also been found guilty of Falcone's murder and ordered retrials.)

Investigators say that Provenzano — who has been a fugitive since 1963 and is believed to be hiding out in the hills near Trapani on the far western tip of Sicily — decided that the Mob needed to cool its killer instincts after the state cracked down in response to the magistrates' slaying. In a move that symbolizes the shift in the Mafia's strategy, Provenzano — once known as the Tractor for clearing away rivals — is now referred to as the Accountant. Dino Paternostro, a Corleone native who has written several books on the Mafia, said Provenzano has succeeded in returning the Mafia to a state of normalization: "Now we come to the point where people start saying the Mafia isn't really a problem — or doesn't even exist." Just down the block, 76-year-old retired railroad worker Mario Governari says just that. "No, no!," he exclaims, waving off the question with his hand. "There's no Mafia in Corleone any more. There are just good kids here." Among the "kids" living nearby are the two grown sons of Bernardo Provenzano — Angelo, 26, and Paolo, 21 — who returned with their mother, Saveria, just a month before Falcone was killed in 1992. They haven't followed in their father's footsteps. Each son has attended university, and the family insists that they just want to be left alone to run their dry-cleaning business.

"The Mafia adapts, it can even change its core business," says Giovanni Colussi, a Rome-based organized crime expert. "But it always remains the Mafia. It can't become another thing." Same plot, new characters, still no happy ending.