The clans in the North already planned to grab a good contract for the Expo. But how do they win the contracts? The technique is to offer the lowest bid. The company that submits the lowest price for completing the project wins. Large firms are successful at being awarded big contracts because they subcontract to Mafia companies, which are cheaper: they ask for less. They are parasitical with regard to the state and good value for the developer. The clans win because they are able to offer competitive prices. They win because they control the waste sector and drug trafficking. They win because they are able to launder money in one of the largest telephone companies in Europe. They win because they control distribution to supermarkets. So they win even before pointing the gun, even before making the South pay a steep price for money that will then be poured into banks up North and given to entrepreneurs in the North who sometimes don’t even notice the stench. Even government initiatives – like the former Finance Minister Giulio Tremonti’s ‘tax shield’, which allowed for the legalization of hidden assets without having to pay back taxes or face prosecution for related crimes such as accounting fraud, or the law restricting electronic surveillance, which fortunately was not approved, or the bill regarding short trials, also thankfully not approved – are all measures or proposals that are likely to facilitate crime.

When we talk about organized crime, we reach a rather sad conclusion: what can we do, faced by all this? In reality things are not all dark, and it’s crucial to talk about it. There is an army of individuals who battle criminal organizations on a daily basis, not only with machine guns and the scales of justice, but by doing their jobs well. One of the things these organizations fear most is people acting: acting with dignity, not yielding, not asking for what’s rightfully theirs as though asking for a favour. Every time we think of organized crime as a problem that doesn’t concern us, every time we say ‘let them kill one another’, we are handing the Mafia a huge gift. Every time a news broadcast manipulates the facts, we are doing the clan a favour. But when you feel that you are acting because these stories are your stories, when you hear that a mayor has been killed because he was doing his job well, and you feel like that mayor was your mayor; when you feel that these stories concern you because they rob you of your happiness, your rights, because they force you to go begging for a job, deny you a year-end bonus, and make you pay an exorbitant price for a house because the organizations invest heavily in cement, monopolizing the entire real-estate market in a big city; when you feel all of this, then something is changing.