European Voice, 10 February 2011
By Alvise Armellini and Cristina Marconi
Pino Arlacchi is not afraid to take risks and has some very grand plans.
Even to his detractors, Pino Arlacchi is a man of extraordinary qualities. As a budding sociologist in the late 1970s, he published ground-breaking research on the Mafia's entrepreneurial skills – three decades before Roberto Saviano's “Gomorrah” became a worldwide sensation. In the 1980s, as he rose through the ranks of academia, he entered the inner circle of Italy's anti-Mafia movement, striking up friendships with iconic figures such as Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, two pioneering magistrates whose murder by the Mafia shocked the nation in 1992.
In the aftermath of those tragedies, he entered politics, serving in both chambers of the Italian parliament for the formerly communist Left Democratic Party (PDS). This earned Arlacchi, a father of two, death threats from Totò Riina, the jailed head of Cosa Nostra. “Until then, I had fought the Mafia by crafting the bullets that others used to shoot. Now it was time for me to take the gun into my own hands. I was no longer, and could no longer be, just a professor,” he recounts, dramatically, on his website.
Tana de Zulueta, a former correspondent for The Economist (a sister publication of European Voice) and a colleague in the Italian parliament, says that top magistrates and policemen looked up to Arlacchi. “He had the trust, the friendship and the attention of these people, who saw him as somebody who could bring a wider perspective on criminal matters,” she says.
