A consultant to the United Nations International Drug Control
Programme provides penetrating analysis of Italy's century-old
struggle against the Mafia, a struggle that reached new heights in
1992 with the assassination of two prominent judges. Jamieson, who
has written on terrorism, organized crime, and drugs in both
Italian and English journals, has done her research. She
interviewed prosecutors, judges, politicians, priests, police
officers, and widows of Mafia victims; she examined newspaper
coverage, government documents, and court records; she put together
chronologies and compiled statistics. From these sources she has
constructed a narrative that takes a hard look at the successes and
failures of the current antimafia movement. After a brief history
of Mafia/government interaction, Jamieson studies four areas of
antimafia activity: political, law enforcement, civic or
grassroots, and international. Her primary focus is on the
political response, since it is central to the other efforts.
Jamieson finds that conflicts between the judiciary and the
executive have led to stop-gap measures rather than a concerted
effort to adopt positive policies aimed at neutralizing the Mafia's
threat. She considers the problems and assesses the effectiveness
of such law-enforcement institutions as the police, the army, the
intelligence agencies, and the witness protection program; she also
takes a critical look at the laudable but limited responses of
various other sectors of Italian society, including women's groups,
the Catholic Church, civic organizations, and schools. Italy,
Jamieson says, `stands at a crossroad in the antimafia fight`;
which road it will take is still unclear. International efforts to
fight the Mafia in such areas as drug and arms trafficking, fraud,
money laundering, and extortion have also increased since 1992, but
the author notes the slowness with which international and domestic
bureaucracies move compared with the speed of organized crime. Her
conclusion: organized crime, which now reaches every continent as
well as cyberspace, is likely to continue to expand. A troubling
but hard-to-dispute assessment backed by an impressive amount of
data. (Kirkus Reviews)
This exploration of the full diversity of the Italian Antimafia
draws on primary sources and interviews to provide a complete
analysis of social, political and grassroots efforts since 1922.
The murders of judges Falcone and Borsellino in 1992 caused an
institutional crisis in Italy, aggravated by evidence of rampant
corruption in political and business life. Since then, exceptional
law enforcement successes have been undermined by inadequate
efforts to address the underlying social and economic conditions
that facilitate the expansion of the Mafia. This study looks at
Antimafia initiatives within the context of international
initiatives against organized crime.
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