Excellent cadavers: the Mafia and the death of the first Italian Republic.

It is one of the moral failures of modern democracies that they appear incompetent to protect citizens from the malignant operations of the mafia and other organized criminals. Certainly, countless films have focussed on the mob. However, with rare exceptions (The Untouchables for one), directors have attended to the stories of the gangsters themselves. There is a touch of unreality about these tales of glamorous but doomed good fellas as they enter the world of big-time gambling, prostitution, extortion, etc. This leads to their rendevous with a bullet in a back alley or a crowded restaurant. What is often left out is any sense of just how much damage is done to lawabiding citizens.

So far as the written word goes, it has been left to the fine journalist, Alexander Stille, to cover, in a work of non-fiction, one of the great stories of the postwar years. In Excellent Cadavers, The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (1995), he provides the story of the Italian anti-mafia campaign. The title is a mafia term used to distinguish the assasination of prominent government officials from the hundreds of ordinary citizens and criminals killed in routine mafia business. At the center of this grim drama are two heroic magistrates who wage their dangerous, lonely battle against Cosa Nostra. This is essential reading to learn more about the corrosive effects of mob infiltration into all sectors of society. It is also a superb rendering of the lives and work of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, men who upped the ante in the war against the mafia in a way that inspires sheer awe.

Stille takes us to the heartland of the mafia -- Palermo and the surrounding towns and villages of Sicily. He forces us to see what 45 years of mafia-influenced government in southern Italy has resulted in. The links between this base and operations in northern Italy, elsewhere in Europe, and in North America are made abundantly clear. In Sicily, the author informs us that "democracy as we know it has ceased to exist." Consider this statistic: an estimated 10,000 people were killed by organized crime in Italy during the 1980s -- three times as many as have died in 25 years of guerilla warfare in Northern Ireland.

Excellent Cadavers takes us to the various crises in Italy in the 1970s, including the murder of Prime Minister Moro in 1978. This jolted the country to face up to the scandal of domination of society by terrorists and organized crime. Specially...