Edoardo Contini, left, a fugitive described as possibly Naples' most dangerous crime boss, was captured in the Italian city last month. Click through the photos to see more crime bosses captured.
Bernardo Provenzano, Italy's reputed top mob boss, was captured last year after decades on the run after police followed a package of freshly washed laundry being delivered to his hideout.
Salvatore Lo Piccolo, another Italian crime boss who was reportedly trying to strengthen ties with U.S. mobsters, was captured last month.
Lo Piccolo, his son, Sandro, and two alleged local mob bosses were detained after a police raid on a villa suspected of being a mafia hideout outside of Palermo.
Both Salvatore and Sandro, above, were on the lam for the better part of a decade and have received life sentences in abstentia for murder.
The number of rebels on the Web
site is still tiny compared to Palermo's businesses overall, but their movement
has helped to chip away at the Mafia's psychological hold on Sicilians - long
conditioned to believe that defiance would bring ruin or a death sentence. And
any consistent crumbling of that culture of fear could ultimately lead to Cosa
Nostra's undoing.
The businesses are openly defying the Mafia by signing on to a Web site called "Addiopizzo"
(Goodbye Pizzo), which brings together businesses in the Sicilian capital that
are resisting extortion.
The campaign was launched in 2004 by a group of youths thinking of opening a
pub. They started off by plastering Palermo with anti-pizzo fliers, reading "An
ENTIRE PEOPLE WHO PAYS THE PIZZO IS A PEOPLE WITHOUT DIGNITY," and eventually
brought their campaign online where it struck a profound chord with Sicilians
fed up with Mafia bullying.
Confindustria, the industrialists' lobby, has also
boosted the movement with a threat to expel members who pay protection money.
Its Sicilian branch has gone through a list of pizzo-paying companies found in a
raid on a top Mafia boss' hideout, and this month began summoning heads of those
companies to demand to know if they indeed had been paying and should be drummed
out of the politically influential lobby.
In one case, the director of a private clinic said her institution wound
up on Cosa Nostra's list because a mobster was treated there, although it
apparently was unclear during his hospitalization that he was a Mafioso.
At the same time, authorities are ratcheting up the pressure on business owners,
aggressively prosecuting those who refuse to testify against the Mafia in
clear-cut cases of extortion. Under Italian law, a businessman who denies paying
up despite flagrant evidence - such as being caught on a surveillance tape - can
be charged with "aiding and abetting" Cosa Nostra.
"Now it is a bigger risk for us to pay than not to pay," said Ugo Argiroffi, an
engineer who recently added his Palermo construction company, C.O.C.I. to
Addiopizzo's list (http://www.addiopizzo.org
in Italian with an English link).
While the nearly 230 businesses on the list are only a fraction of Palermo's
thousands of stores, offices and factories, a similar group has sprouted up in
Catania, Sicily's second-largest city.
Perhaps most significant, the rebellion has taken root in strongholds of the
most ruthless Mafia clans - places such as Gela, a drab, industrial coastal
town. Some 80 Gela businessmen in recent months have denounced extortion
attempts.
It is a dramatic turn since the early '90s, when a Gela merchant who denounced
extortion was slain by the Mafia, and a Gela car dealer, whose showroom was
repeatedly torched, had to move his family and change his name after he
testified in court.
In another prominent case, Libero Grassi, who had a Palermo clothing business,
was gunned down by the Mafia in 1991 after he made a futile public plea for
other merchants to join him in denouncing extortion.
Prosecutors trace the extortion rebellion back to the scramble for power after
Bernardo Provenzano, the alleged "boss of bosses," was captured last year near
his hometown of Corleone.
For years, Provenzano - who reputedly took the helm of Cosa Nostra in 1993 - had
employed an extortion strategy of "let them pay a little but make everyone pay,"
according to Piero Grasso, a former Palermo prosecutor who is now Italy's
national anti-Mafia prosecutor based in Rome.
The Mafia chief feared excessive greed and violence would draw a fierce police
crackdown, Grasso said in an interview.
But in the struggle to succeed Provenzano, Palermo area boss Salvatore Lo
Piccolo ruthlessly dispensed with the low profile.
Under Lo Piccolo, according to Grasso, the small army of henchmen who shake down
merchants was doubled, from 500 to 1,000 men, judging from entries in
confiscated extortion ledgers.
The extortionists received monthly "salaries" worth $3,000, generous by Sicily's
standards, plus an extra month's pay as a Christmas bonus, Grasso said.
A rash of arson attacks on businesses this past year apparently reflected Lo
Piccolo's determination to press extortion demands.
The strategy appears to have backfired: The harder the Mafia squeezed, the more
their victims resisted. Crucially, no businessmen or their relatives have thus
far been killed for their defiance, although some may have lost Mafia-wary
customers.
In one high-profile case, Vincenzo Conticello, owner of Antica Focacceria San
Francesco, a landmark Palermo restaurant that specializes in sandwiches stuffed
with calf's spleen and lung, spent $1.8 million buying supplies from "friends"
of a gangster who had elbowed into his business.
Eventually the restaurateur got fed up and went to police. At the trial, he
pointed out the three gangsters who had extorted him and in November they were
jailed for 10 to 16 years. Conticello was granted police protection.
When Mafia boss Lo Piccolo was arrested in November outside Palermo, police
found a list of hundreds of names of those who paid the "pizzo" plus a breakdown
of how the money was divvied up - a treasure trove of information on how the mob
operates.
In December, police scored another coup when they shot dead Daniele Emmanuello,
the reputed boss of the Gela area's extortion rackets, as he fled from a
farmhouse hideout.
Emmanuello didn't take time to change out of his
pajamas, but he did swallow some handwritten notes. Authorities are examining
them for more information on the pizzo racket.
Until now, the money figures had been largely guesswork. But taking
advantage of the confiscated Mafia ledgers, Antonio La Spina, a University of
Palermo sociology professor, has pieced together the clearest picture for a
report given to The Associated Press before its publication this week in a book
called "The Costs of Illegality."
His researchers calculate the pizzo payments averaging $1,200 a month add up to
nearly $260 million in Palermo province alone.
"For a street vendor, 'pizzo' ranges from 50 to 100 euros a month, a
neighborhood bread store 150-250 euros, a simple clothing store 250 euros, a
jewelry store, 1,000 euros, your local mini-mart 500 euros," said Attilio
Scaglione, one of the researchers. A euro is worth roughly $1.50.
These days, the Mafia appears to be trying to pick symbolic targets rather than
punish the pizzo-refusers en masse.
At Rodolfo Guajana's company, a wholesaler for hardware stores across Sicily
since 1875, attackers this summer punched a hole in the roof, poured in gasoline
and torched the warehouse.
Guajana believes the Mafia attacked him
because it was known that his family had a history of refusing to pay.
"What happened here was the Mafia was saying to all merchants: `What
happened to Guajana can happen to you if you don't pay,'" said Guajana.
Across the island in Agrigento, industrialist Salvatore Moncada described
himself as proof businessmen can stand up to mobsters.
He has repeatedly refused demands made of his 180-employee company, Moncada
Costruzioni Srl, Italy's fifth-largest producer of wind energy. In one case,
Moncada's testimony helped jail a mobster who demanded $7,500.
At one point, Moncada wore a wire to a meeting with a mobster. "I was sweating a
little bit," he recalled. But no threats were made and the gangster wasn't
arrested.
But Moncada said he can understand why some businessmen decide it pays to pay
off the Mafia.
A pizzo of 2 percent of a contract's value is a lot less than the price of a
24-hour guard, he said. "In the end you say, 'Sorry, I'll pay and that's that.'"