Salvatore Lima

Hello, everybody.

Welcome to No Gods, No Mayors.

This is the first time, this is the first time today

that the three of us are opening the show.

And my God, is it clean?

I definitely haven't one-shot both Massey and myself with Somerset James L.

Jones.

What's important, I was saying, is that we get our sillies out before we record because we don't want the episode to be too goofy.

Okay.

No.

No, no, no.

This is it.

Look.

Riley, this is a free episode.

You want to impress new people so they'll sign up for Patreon.

This is like very important that we look our best.

We literally have company right now

and we're being goofs.

Like, honestly.

When we're wearing the uniform, we are representing the podcast.

It doesn't matter if you're like all the time.

The No Gods No Mayor's recording uniform, by the way, that we're all wearing right now, and I need you to remember that we're wearing every time you listen to an episode, is we are wearing a sash with our name on it and nothing else.

Yep, that's right.

That's right.

Uh-huh.

We are standing far back from our webcam so we can all see each other's private parts.

Of course.

That's right.

And when you're listening.

Hey, can I ask a question?

Just a quick question.

Why is there a targeting reticle on mine?

Oh, that's for room to.

Don't worry about that.

Yeah.

Okay, fine.

Okay, that's fine.

That's Aston answered.

and of course, the No Gods, No Mayors live show uniform, which is exactly what Maddie describes, but also the boiler suits from the Beastie Boys Intergalactic video, and also the robots, yeah, and the hard hat.

What is that?

And also, the robot or in the robot from the Beastie Boys Intergalactic video.

I just, things

in my life take such a course that occasionally either I or one of my friends will say something into a microphone, and then six months later, I will be standing on a stage in a reflective jumpsuit and a hard hat with a cardboard robot behind behind me, going, how are these two events connected?

To be direct.

It's not really a butterfly.

This is like saying the butterfly effect is like a butterfly flaps its wings and then you're standing next to a butterfly and you feel the butterfly's wings flap on your face.

I guess they are pretty closely connected.

Yeah.

Yeah.

The logical connection there is pretty easy.

I just, I

don't know.

Sorry, God.

No, no, no.

I was just going to say it's more the implausibility of being on stage in the intergalactic jumpsuit at that point.

Yeah, yeah.

It's more like a butterfly flaps its wings and then completely unrelated to that, you're on stage in the intergalactic jumpsuit.

No.

However, look, here's the thing: this is a free episode.

We are here wooing new members, right?

So

we need to be concise to the point.

We need to give them something valuable.

This needs to be news.

It needs to be reviews.

It needs to be things they can use.

Sure.

Right.

Right.

Do we have a segment for that?

Do we have a segment?

Then does that segment have a name?

So we do have

the Hiaw Patrol,

which of course we're going to be doing.

I hate you.

Which

is AIAB, all items are bastards.

It's called Municipal Roundup.

Everybody, it's Municipal Roundup.

Or is it sometimes called Hia Patrol?

Hia Patrol.

By the way, we're recording slightly out of order, so I'm going to remind my co-hosts to save New York Minute updates for the next episode recording, which is the previous one you've heard.

There's nothing confusing about this.

I am going to do the next episode, which will have been the last episode.

So I hope it was good.

And if you're listening, I want you right now to remember what we'll say in the future to us, but to the past for you and smile to yourself and remember what we said.

Yeah.

Hey, why don't you enjoy the dramatic irony that right now you know stuff that we don't as far as you're concerned?

We're talking to you across time, like that movie where the guy talks to his dead dad over the ham radio.

Okay.

No, it's called frequency.

Do you want my item?

I have an item and I would like to

item?

I have an item.

Please take my item so I can go on it.

I have a mouthful of water for all of that and I've never experienced swallowing being such a time-consuming process.

Do you want my item?

Do you want my item?

Don't you want it?

Okay, fine.

Item me.

Item me.

Okay, we're hitting you with the items.

Liberland.

Ow!

Liberland?

Home of Wieti Edlichke?

Yeah.

Well, not home of Witty Elichke, basically.

Home away.

Away from home.

Yeah, I was going to say, home of one cop of the parachute, I believe.

Yeah.

Home away from home of Wiet Yedlichke, who is the head of the government in exile of it.

Well, for how long?

Because as we talked about in the episode, the founder of Tron, Justin's son, who has been pardoned, blockchain, who's been pardoned by the U.S.

government, who's now bought a huge amount of Trump coin, basically who just bribed the shit out of the president, and now has his blockchain that's being used to publish GDP data because they say we're going to put GDP on the blockchain for whatever reason.

Anyway, he's

don't worry about it.

It's Nazis.

There's nothing to understand.

Don't worry.

Okay, I'm pushing Trashy Jorali back out of the room.

Yeah, don't worry.

Hey, get out of here.

Get out of here.

You're here to talk about Wittya Lichka, not the blockchain.

Sometimes they're hard to separate.

Anyway, Justin's son, who's now this like former financial fugitive turned close advisor to the president after a 45 million dollar investment to world liberty financial crazy

calling it the most plenary indulgence ever so um uh he said as you know i personally invested uh 30 30 million dollars he later upped it into the trip crump trump trip crump toe

into the drum engine okay well that's the group chart

crumptuous okay let me just real quick it's been so long since i got to do this to you it's really good.

That's the new Star Wars character in season three of Andor.

So at the Trump crypto project, World Liberty Financial.

And so basically, this was his pitch to all the Liberland people.

He was like, hey, I bribed the shit out of the president.

So, you know, we're going to have a lot of allys.

That's a pretty good pitch.

You can't agree with that, can you?

Like, he did bribe the president, and maybe that is going to be helpful.

Maybe Trump's going to invade the Danube.

Like, if he was playing Crusader Kings 3,

he's a city-state ruler who just kept spamming send gift, send gift, send gift.

Absolutely.

So, because many countries follow the lead of the United States, Sun told the people who are voting for him.

Liberland could achieve a

big breakthrough in diplomatic relationships if it could ingratiate itself with the Trump administration.

I think President Trump is a bold man and he likes to make unprecedented

moves.

Just the one, just the one move.

He's got one move.

He keeps spamming it.

His one move is that he he moves knights, but three forward.

He doesn't have to take them one to the side.

He spent quite a few days in the White House, said Yadlichka.

I cannot really tell you the details of these things.

It's all too hot.

In general, his task is to help us get Liberland recognized and up and running.

I'm happy he's not taking it lightly.

And so basically, what they've now done is

they have opened a beach bar and treehouse in Liberland with Gedlichka still can't go.

And they're hosting the after party for the Liberland national chess tournament.

Gedlichka said, our people have never left liberland um we've been there since time immemorial yeah funding a bunch of archaeological digs to find crypto that was buried 3 000 years ago yeah it's weird there's um there is a physical bitcoin that we found underneath this uh this this um uh the tree yeah it sank to the bottom of the ocean but we still know who owns it it's very fancy so they always um they always live there in some shape or form but not in the best conditions mostly camping but four months ago uh the last four months have been very good i have to give croatia credit.

So basically, they've now had people like live there semi-permanently.

They might get recognized because it's a good way to do a free favor for Donald Trump, essentially, if you're Croatia.

And Serbia never gave a shit.

The thing is, this is how every micro-nation that still exists started.

So in 500 years' time, if you're like, why is there a Prince of Liberland?

You know, like, why is there a Liechtenstein?

Why is there a monaco?

The answer will turn out to be someone bribed Donald Trump at the right moment when he thought he was dying of COVID or whatever.

And he was like, yeah, sure.

Why is there a pretty genuine Liberland?

And he's wearing clogs and a cowboy hat ceremonially.

I'm just trying to figure out what happened.

Oh, yeah, the clogs keep your feet nice and dry because it's on a floodplain, you know?

They float.

The water comes up.

Away I go.

The group also, this is from a Wired art.

Wired's a really good coverage of Liberland.

This is

this person from Wired said in one of their meetings and says, when the group began to discuss the Liberland space program, my ears perked up.

After Justin's son rocketed into orbit aboard a Blue Origin spacecraft in August, Yedlichka said proudly, he's the first prime minister to ever fly in space.

I guess that's probably true.

I suppose so.

I suppose so.

And Yedlichka said, Liberland is planning to plant its flag on an asteroid as they have entered negotiations with Lifeship, a company aiming to deliver a payload to an asteroid in 2026.

Additionally, in the meeting, they discussed awarding Ron Paul their lifetime order of merit.

So Ron Paul is basically as close as you can get to a knight in Liberland.

I hope they send him to space too.

Yeah, he should go plant the flag.

He's going to be leaning out the side of a spaceship, throwing it at an asteroid as they go by it, missing it.

It's going to be dragging.

So basically, basically, they want to also erect a monument on Liberland, but they can't agree to what?

To some kind of like obelisk that's going to sink into the swamp.

Well, quite.

So they want to build the track, the great leg, trunkless legs.

And, you know, they're like, basically, they're starting to take it more seriously.

They have 12 people living there, but they're thinking, hey, we're going to get, we get Licha is finally going to be able to go.

The funniest thing would be if he can finally go and he's like, I hate this island.

It sucks.

I don't want to be here.

Yeah, guessing what you wanted and being mad about it.

A sort of classic of the genre.

Of course.

Now, anyway, look, I have a lot of

Salvatore Salvo Lima to talk about today.

I wonder what language this guy speaks and which of like three countries he's from.

So

I've got this thing for some reason where I'm on a real tear of like non-global North mayors.

I mean, Portugal is in the global north, but it's in the European South.

Like non-anglophone, non-global North mayors.

Portugal, by the way, you know, completely undeveloped country.

In order for me to make the point that I'm, you know, I'm doing like a per kind of peripheral mayor.

I'm not really a local mayor, I'm more of a mayor of the world.

I think Eric Adams told the FBI this once.

I'm a third culture mayor.

No, what I mean is mostly non-Anglophone, but non-Anglophone in global South because South Africa is obviously Anglophone.

Anyway, I'm continuing my tear with

Salvatore Salvo Lima, the mayor-turned government minister who was basically why

Andreotti, the sort of seven-time Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, and the pillar of Christian democracy was so wrapped up in the Sicilian mafia.

And was Andreotti's link to the Sicilian mafia?

The mayoral bagman.

Yes, he's the mayor who was also the bagman to national politics.

Incredible.

And he was so crucial to

Christian democrat power that when he was assassinated in 1992, obviously he was killed.

He's like the mob guy.

He was the sea change of a mob thing by a quote-unquote salvo of bullets.

I thought of that while I was walking around earlier.

That's very good.

That's really good.

Thank you.

That's the shower principle in action.

You got to go walk around for the really good stuff to get generated.

Yeah, very few good things come in salvos, I find.

You never endure a salvo of praise.

A salvo of free cash.

Well, it depends whether you're the one like firing the salvo, right?

Like, probably feels pretty good to light off a salvo against your enemies.

A withering fuselade of

good times.

Anyway, absolutely.

So when he was assassinated in 1992, it literally brought down the Italian Republic and ended the Christian Democratic Party forever.

Is this the first mayor we've done that got assassinated, or have we done?

Are we counting the Kenny Cunene sort of like bonus mayors?

No, because

Carter Harrison III was killed, the mayor of Chicago.

He was the one that was killed on the general train.

Yeah, sure.

He was the one that the guy just walked into his house and shot him while he was hating at him.

Yeah, yeah, okay, sure.

So, yeah, so this is our second assassinated mayor, but he was assassinated when he was an MEP, so beyond his mayoral career.

He did not die in sashed.

Thank you.

He was shriven of his sash before he was killed.

So, Salvatore Lima was born in Palermo, Sicily, in 1928.

Too late to strangle Austrians, too early to machine gun Australians.

Or sorry, the other way around.

Too early to strangle Austrians, too late to machine gun Australians.

Doing really specific birth year stuff where it's like 1914, 1915, 1916, where it's like born too early to die on the Piave, born too late to die on the Piave, born just in time to die on the Piave.

So a lot, and a lot of what we know about his life comes from Mafia turdcoats who testified to various mafia commissions starting in the 70s up to the 90s.

The amount of like Pentiti could do this, you would think would have destroyed the mob's brand of like omata,

but not at all really.

People still think, ooh, mob very secret.

The mob love snitching on each other.

They love it.

They cannot get enough of it.

They love to like come off badly in a mob war and be like, okay, well, I guess I gotta live with like four police bodyguards for the rest of my life

and get moved to like the ass end of Italy.

Or I guess because they're from the ass end of Italy to the like, you know, the north end of Italy and just kind of stay there forever.

They love to do this.

Yeah, I can't believe I have to go live in Balsen.

I have to go hang out with Gunther Steiner in Sutirol.

So

it's angrily strapping on my skis as I'm sitting there.

I got to go ski with the rats.

Oh, I hate being sent to the Valdosta.

This is terrible.

This is awful, you know?

Oh, the dolomites are the worst brand of relaxation and ski and ski fun.

Being handed a hot cocoa by the police.

The Italian witness protection program has a really high casualty rate, but none of them are assassinated.

They're all just falling off via Ferrata.

Yeah, it's like that's you're it's like the end scene of good fellas, but you're being handed instead of like egg noodles and ketchup.

You're like, and it's elderflower and Prosecco.

They call it a Hugo fucking Spritz.

Anyway.

All right.

So basically, Sal Lima is born, born in 28.

He's like a very smart kid who's known to be a very smart kid.

It's like he's almost, he's almost like kept aside from the other boys.

Also, because his father is like a middle-class dude.

He is the figured ladyfinger McFlurry, fancy little boy.

More like he's like Matt Damon's character in The Departed.

Where he's like, you're going to be a little bit more.

He's the one guy who knows how to read.

Yeah, sure.

So

his father was a municipal archivist, but more importantly, his father was a man of honor.

His father was a made man in the Palermo family.

Sure.

What the fuck?

The Hugo Spritz was only invented in 2005?

This is bullshit.

Really?

How did they not come up with that earlier?

It's so good.

City authentic is happening to you in South Tyrol, apparently.

Oh my God.

If it was only invented in 2005, what were they drinking in the Italian witness protection program for 100 years?

I wish I knew, but I don't.

If you're in the Italian witness protection program, write in in between sort of like skiing and afro skiing and let us know.

Wait, in like while taking your boots off.

Yeah, like while you're on the like,

you know, while you're in the visual

of the afro ski thing or while you're in the

gondola back down, that's the point of that.

Put your Soliato and write in.

Yeah.

Yeah.

All right, right.

Sometimes the snow has melted too much and you can't go all the way down.

If you're worrying about the kind of incoherence that I'm demonstrating on this recording, I do feel physically quite bad.

I don't know whether it's my old friend and enemy, the gas, is back or what, but like...

Or the gas isn't back.

I do feel a bit like someone has hit me in the front of the head with a hammer, which would be a really, really funny thing to have happen on a, on a, like, a recording is just stroke instantly.

But

in the meantime, we keep doing the jokes.

We'll talk about...

Maybe you'll hearing about Salvo Lima will help.

I hope so.

I hope so.

And listen, if I die, remember me as as a peacemaker.

So, Vincenzo Lima, municipal archivist, also a made man in the Palermo family, which was headed by the La Barbara brothers.

They call him Vinny Archives.

They call him Vinny the Dewey System.

He's got.

Hey, he's got, you don't be careful.

Vinny the Dewey System is going to file you.

Vinny Dewey.

He's going to alphabet.

Why don't you fit him for a cement library card?

Organize him, boys.

All right.

Hey, if you don't, if you don't fucking smarten up, we'll get it.

Your nose is going to end up in travel, and then your fucking rest of your face is going to end up in fiction.

Do you understand me?

Literary fiction.

They fiddling for a cement bookcase.

Because sissy archivist, I can see all of the things that you can do with that.

You can do the like Chinatown kind of scam, right?

Oh, you think you own this land?

I was just in the archives and it says I own this land.

However, Vinny de Bookcase.

Yeah, so he was father Vinny de Bookcase Lima.

I was a municipal archivist and a made man.

And this was like the two big figures are the La Barbara brothers, as far as like we're concerned in terms of the mafia family that Salvo Lima is involved in.

The Hanna-Barbera brothers.

They're always running against static backgrounds.

You say that the La Barbara brothers sound like the two most successful drag queens in like 70s Manhattan.

Yeah, I was going to say, you can always tell when the Barber Brothers man is on you because you can hear the bongos approaching.

So,

and Vincenzo Lima, by the way it's not just he was suspected of being a maid man like no we know this he had a very long police and judicial record which is very funny for a municipal archivist where he was in charge of the records so you know it's just like i have to carry my own file around maybe he was trying to make himself seem more like dangerous maybe he was just or conversely maybe they were adding charges he was going through with the correction fluid and just trying to like take them out as they added them.

He had charges of like threats, theft, aggravated theft, carrying a revolver without a license, fraud, injury, and fraudulent insolvency.

Tommaso Buschetta, one of the most famous pentiti, in 1996, reported that Vincenzo Lima was formally introduced to him as a maidman of the Palermo family by the La Barbara brothers and he reckoned and had recommended Salvo to the La Barbara brothers so that they could support him electorally.

So here I have some training.

He was quite literally groomed for office then.

Yeah, literally, yes.

And as he grew up, he went to law school, graduated, came back, and became a city counselor at 21.

He never campaigned ever for anything.

He never once campaigned.

Wow.

Okay.

So here's a transcript of that discussion with Boschetta.

So again, this is translated.

So electorally, the La Barbara brothers, this is Boscheta talking.

Electorally, the La Barbara brothers were very interested in Lima at that time.

And they were interested in the usual way.

I don't know how to explain it.

Political interest is a difficult thing that changes.

At least in Sicily, it's not like pasta or a pair of shoes that you can give.

In Sicily, it's the influence of the representative of the neighborhood has in the district.

And then in that district, you can just determine the number of votes that there will be for the Christian Democratic candidate.

So, yeah, it's like, no, it's not like we're giving them out shoes and pasta.

It's just they know who to follow, basically.

They know who the guy is who they can get the pasta from if they need the pastor, or conversely, who is going to threaten them with being like, you know, those archival bookcases that close with a big wheel, like closed in between two of those.

After Lufthansa, everybody started getting filed.

This is a relatively serious one, so I'm glad we're finding Tommy vinyl the bookcase.

We're talking about the Italian mafia, which means like blood-drenched reign of terror with absolutely no comedy in it, like serious challenge to the state Operation Gladio shit.

And then we're doing jokes about the Italian-American mafia, which is moderately blood-drenched, but extremely funny.

Yeah, they're a little more silly with it.

Yeah, I would say so.

The later deposition of Angelo Cino, who is another pentito, he gave independently confirmed Sal's association with the mafia before becoming mayor.

He said, that's practically what I hear, which is what was said is that Lima was the son of a man of honor, a man of honor belonging to the Palermo central family.

So practically he was held a certain consideration.

And then my favorite translated adverb here, mafiosly speaking.

He said mafiosly.

So mafiosly speaking.

That is, he was a smart boy.

They said he was doing well.

He would make it to things like that.

In fact, he always walked the retinue of people, political or otherwise, who were also traceable to Mafiosi.

So he really was groomed then?

Like no choice of career.

You are just like, you're the one of us who can like look convincing wearing a suit.

So that's what you're going to do with your life or else.

100%.

That's exactly what happened.

I mean, as a kind of like mob prince kind of way, but still.

Yeah.

I mean, the story really that we're going to tell over the next sort of like little while is definitely what he was like, he was an enigma.

he didn't talk much a lot of what we know is about testimony about him he gave like one interview one time you know yeah we hear about him from giuseppe di Squila yeah he barely intervened when he was in parliament he was like all of his positions were always sinecures that he used to like just bolster the power of the mafia basically but he sort of enjoyed you can sort of see that he enjoyed bits of it which we'll get to so back to buschetta in 96.

He says Salvo Lima had been introduced to him around the late 50s by other prominent mafia figures such as Ferdinando Brende Leone, Giacoccino Panino the Elder, and the La Barbara brothers who are the most important ones.

He said, I met Lima at the end of the 1950s, and he ran for counselor, got many votes, and then

a few years later became mayor of Palermo City Council.

During the period when he was mayor and I was free in Palermo, we frequented each other often.

Every year at the opening of the Teatro Massimo Opera House in Palermo, he would send me tickets for the entire season and we became good friends.

So literally, this is how you campaign then.

It's no, you're barely even talking to people because you have people for that.

It's just just like the people who matter you get them like opera tickets or whatever yeah and like it's not just there's a little bit more which we're going to go into which is further from um bosqueto's testimony he says i remember that when help was offered to the candidate we'd never throw leaflets out of a car or anything or the candidate requested help for a particular neighborhood we would just go to that particular neighborhood in the company of the candidate and we would find the Cosa Nostra representative of that neighborhood to just have a coffee visibly, nothing else.

So people could see that the representative of the neighborhood had received a visit from the mayor or the next candidate, and the votes would flow that way.

Jesus.

That is

grim.

Crazy.

And also, just like, I love the idea of just everyone in town just wandering around the plaza waiting to watch who, who like the mafia mayor of the area gets a coffee with and just like writing it down.

Oh, yes.

Well, because this concept of the friend of a friend that comes up again and again and again in the testimony.

It's there's a man of honor, there's a friend, and then there's a friend of a friend.

A A man of honor, you're in, you're made, you're, you're untouchable.

A friend is we're working with you.

A friend of a friend is, it would be a favor to me if you would support this guy.

It's exactly like Broadway, off, Broadway, off, off, Broadway.

It's the exact same system.

If you kill Rum Tum Tugger, then you have to get permission from the rest of the council of the Commission of the Cats.

That's right.

But that's the how of like Sal Lima.

He's the mafia's man on the inside, clever guy who was groomed from his birth, basically, to be counted on to support whatever they wanted to do in Palermo.

And the thing to remember also is that at this time,

the Italian mafia was transitioning from a rural to an urban organization, right?

For a long time, the mafia existed largely because like there was no state in southern Italy, really, but there were a lot of private landholdings springing up, which means you needed to be able to like, defend them, especially against like the remaining peasants who might want some land also,

This is one of the reasons why like, you know, the mafia has been happy to ally itself with sort of anyone on the Italian political spectrum, but it's why the left tend and the mafia tend to get along worse, right?

There are fewer alliances between the left and the mafia, none, but fewer, because the mafia's roots are basically as a kind of protection racket for on behalf of landowners, just they also compelled the landowners.

Yeah,

it's like a it's a it's a non-state policing force, effectively.

Like it's it's it's like civil law enforcement.

Like like the whole man of honor thing is like ostensibly you can use them as like a neutral arbitrator in like land disputes and stuff because everybody respects them everybody trusts them right that's the kind of self-mythologizing as opposed to everyone is terrified of them because they have the capacity to use violence right yeah well

they they generated from first principles the u.s senate they just need overrepresentation of landowners from rural areas

hey he's a friend of ours and he's talking about a senator.

Ronnie Paul.

Ronnie Paul's a friend of a friend.

All right.

Anyway, so the notion of a senator is Italian.

Ridiculous.

Oh, God.

Perish the thought.

By the way, anyone who's ever read political, sort of modern political theory has probably had Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State, and Utopia put in front of them.

It's very funny because he theorizes that in a place without a government,

protection associations would naturally form and we'd have a voluntarist basis for the state.

Well, guess what?

Here's a place to have a government.

There are your protection associations.

Congratulations, Robert.

You invent the mafia.

Yeah, it's voluntarist in the sense that I volunteer not to get shot in the kneecaps.

Well, quite.

Anyway, after the Second World War, Italy urbanizes so quickly for a lot of different reasons, right?

Part of that is just like a lot of farmland is destroyed.

Like a lot of like...

rural ownership is being shaken up in the wake of the Marshall Plan.

Like there's a lot of, and the mafia, they all move with the people they're terrorizing and protecting into the cities and they just insert themselves into urban, into the urban economy.

It would be really funny if they hadn't and the like Sicilian countryside had just depopulated and there were a bunch of mob guys left standing around being like, well, what the fuck?

Who do we extort now?

Yeah, we like the sea.

We like the countryside air.

Where's my peasants?

Yeah.

Oh, anyway.

So this is why in the 50s, this was super important, right?

They're like, we now are an urban organization primarily.

We need to own city government.

And so that's why, and very quickly, it just became like the furniture, right?

Oh, no, this is the La Barbara brothers have everything from this square to, you know, like Via Roma Nuova or whatever, right?

They have all that.

And so if you want to, and you can have a fine, quiet life, if you kick up to them, people won't fuck with you.

You know how to vote.

You don't care about voting.

What do you care about voting?

So you know to tick in the box next to the people that they go have coffee with and all this.

Yeah, as long as you did, and as ever with Italy, right, the important thing to say is that all of this was developed in large part because there was a very real threat that if people voted, they might vote for the communists.

And that will come in.

Yes.

Yeah.

That will come in very directly.

So in 56, he's re-elected the municipal council and he's appointed assessor for public works under Mayor Luciano Malgheri, who died suddenly.

Oh, oh, okay.

Wouldn't you guess who this?

Sam Hill was also vice mayor?

Why?

It was Salvo Lima.

Oh, well, Well, that's convenient.

That's so convenient.

Unless you're Luciano Margheri, I guess.

Yeah.

Hey, faxed?

Maybe he was facts.

So here's the other thing.

They're finding him in the archives like 50 years later.

We found him in the archives.

What did the record say?

No, no, no.

We found him.

So the most famous part of Lima's mayoralty of Palermo.

Because he's mostly famous for stuff that happened after, but his most famous act as mayor of Palermo was overseeing what the Italian press called the sack of Palermo.

So this is from a quote from Judge Cesare Terranova's 1964 indictment stating, It is clear that Angelo and Salvatore La Barbara knew former Mayor Salvo Lima and maintained relationship in such a way as to ask for favors.

The undeniable contacts of the La Barbara Mafiosi with one who was first citizens of Palermo constituted a confirmation of the total infiltration of the mafia in many sectors of public life.

Yeah, I mean, obviously, you would say.

Terradova was, of course, then several years later killed by the mafia.

Yeah.

Finally, finally checked him out

of the library.

Because this guy's dad was an archivist, which is not even really the thing that I'm doing.

But the thing is, we take one detail and then we just hammer that into the game.

We haven't read forever.

Kind of like a guy that made an archivist angry.

We just hammer him forever.

Honestly, that's the business model at this point.

That's right.

so basically, before I get to the sack of Palermo, though, I don't want to say it's all he did because

he would do lots of favors for Mafiosi around Palermo.

So, this is another, another Pentito.

The Pentito or why we can do this episode.

The Pentitis.

Thank you to Snitches.

Yeah.

This episode is brought to you by the Italian Rat Council.

Making episodes of podcasts possible in quotes.

Yeah.

In between, in between, like skiing.

Yeah.

So the Mafia turn goat

Antonio Calderon recalls his time as a fugitive in Catania.

That's pretty darling.

So this is in Catania.

So not in Palermo, but also

like Salvo is like the head of Christian democracy in all of Sicily.

Like he's important at different levels.

Yeah,

he's in charge of a Catan.

He's got a monopoly on the sheep.

He bricks the sheep.

All of it.

So thank you.

Not the wood, though, or the stone.

So Calderon says he was a fugitive in Catania at the time.

And all the cops basically just said, don't worry, we're going to ignore that you're here.

Because they were told to, of course.

Yeah, of course.

The only exception was one police officer who played by his own rules called Francesco Cipolla.

This is a great movie setup.

I assume that guy's going to triumph.

Imagine a sort of Italian serpico.

Yes, serpico.

So we had tried to get him transferred from Catania, says the Petito, but we hadn't succeeded.

And so we turned to Nino and Ignazio Salvo, who are are the Palermo tax collectors who were also mobbed, like mobbed up businessmen.

There's a whole like other story about them, but they got the concession to collect taxes from Sicily at 10 rather than 3% commission from Salvo Lima.

Oh, so like 3%, 3% state tax, 7% mafia tax.

The mafia is outraising money in Sicily by like, you know, twice what the government is doing.

The mafia is built on the subway system, but just for them?

This is really interesting.

So basically, they said, okay, well, we're going to, because they're friends of friends, the Salvo brothers, they get confusingly, Salvo Lima, different guys.

And they say, don't worry, we'll sort it out with Salvo Lima.

And Salvo Lima will get this guy transferred, essentially, which he does.

So yeah, he's the mayor.

He's the mafia's man in City Hall.

And he's got this other guy, Vito Cedcomino, who's the Commissioner of Public Works.

And as we say, Italy's urbanizing.

Palermo in particular is devastated by the Second World War.

Its population rises by like hundreds of thousands in the 1950s.

And also, to be clear, the processing that I described doesn't start with Lima.

It starts in 52, but it gathers speed under him.

There had been like long since contact between the Americans and the Mafia before, like before the invasion of Sicily, in order to prepare for it as like, you know, kind of allies on the ground and then afterwards during occupation.

So America is also in on this, and that's your link to the Italian-American mob is

the Fed sort of like asking like italian american mobsters hey can you like talk to your cousin about us or whatever oh yeah like john gaudy is heavily involved in some of the other like the elements of the story that involves like lima a little bit less but like he pops up quite a bit in like

in parts of this story this is one of those like sort of keystone like guys who you you can get into like anything like parapolitical through i feel like oh a hundred percent like you can like salvo lima is it's weird that he's in so much and he's so important but he himself is a total sphinx.

You know, he is, is impenetrable.

But that's how you get to be that guy.

You know what I mean?

You don't want a bag man who, especially in the years of the Italian Rat Council, you don't want a bag man who has a personality.

You want a guy who has been like selected from birth to do this and who is just like very, very reserved.

His personality is that he's very refined, basically.

He loves his opera.

He has a beautiful home that becomes the center of all political activity in Palermo.

Basically, nothing goes on at City Hall.

It's so, so evil that this guy gets to live that life off of like everybody else's kind of fear.

And not just off of Sicilian fear, but also off of like, as we'll get to, utterly destabilizing,

in fact, locking the Italian political system into a very hard rightward drift for like basically its entire post-war history.

But we'll talk about the sack of Palermo.

So the motto of good Christian democracy at that time, and as much as they needed one, because they even basically didn't bother contesting elections because they always just won, was Palermo is beautiful.

Let's make it more beautiful.

So this is now described in op-ed from the 1990s by Franco Cozzola as the years of hands-on the city, where there was lots of weapons where construction companies were fighting and killing each other.

Trucks were loaded with TNT.

Desperachidos were swallowed by the pillars of buildings under construction.

There was this period of enormous, unregulated,

substandard, unplanned concrete, concrete, concrete.

You're sort of like living in like a cheap apartment in Palermo that was built in the 50s.

And you're like, why is this wall shaking?

And the answer turns out to be it is mostly load-bearing snitches.

Well, quite.

Well, yeah, that's the snitches they got.

Yeah, I was going to say everything was made with concrete because they needed it anyways to fit people for

cement library cards.

Yeah, I mean, the mafia is like jazz.

It's about the snitches you don't kill.

Yeah, who go on to inspire podcasts.

So, and a lot of this is documented in 1961 by a journalist called Roberto Cioni, who, and I can't believe I'm about to tell the story of the anti-mafia Palermo newspaper owned by the Communist Party.

How were these guys not all killed immediately?

It's the most killed man of all time.

Yeah, so the paper was called La Ora.

And Ciani recalled in 48, there was this alliance of the big and small, the character of the old fascist administrations, all who've been rebadged as Christian Democrats.

Wow.

I can't believe that happened.

Mysterious.

It's something that like communists always used to say about

Christian democracy, and then nothing ever happened.

Yeah.

Well, I guess it happened in Italy, but that's because it was allowed to implode under the weight of its own contradictions.

Yeah.

Not enough load-bearing snitches.

It's going to implode like that.

And with significant involvement.

from SockGen, which

was basically the Vatican Bank, or the second largest bank of the Vatican.

Well, yeah, of course, exactly.

It's the same as like, like,

say, like Argentina, right?

Which was like a partially ecclesiastical fascist dictatorship.

Like,

of course.

Like, it's the other power base in Italian society.

You need those guys on side.

Yeah.

And by the way, when I say Socjed, I mean, sorry, SGI.

So Societia Generale Immobliare, not Socjed and the French Bank.

Yeah, the immovable general society.

Yeah.

Well, it's very immovable.

Society must be immovable, said Foucault.

So yeah, this is like the Vatican owns 15% of this bank.

So this is their route in.

the weird thing is, the mafiosi, while the fascists were in power, hated the fascists because the fascists would like snub them.

But the fascists, that's that's always the thing is that the fascists, as much as they had like one million fellow travelers, it's like you get the revolutionary face of fascism, which is like more prominent in Italy still.

Um, you're like, no, those guys are the past, yeah, and you know, they're not interested in fucking cars like I want to do because I'm a revolutionary fascist, right?

Just clip that for any purposes of blackmail anyone anyone wants.

That's fine.

Yeah, it's like, yeah, there's no shout of Jove, Jove, Jove, when you're talking to like a fat 70-year-old whose job is just like, you know, making kind of a shrugging and then four people are killed.

Exactly.

You know, anyway, so at 48, though, they all get together because fascism has been deposed.

It's useful again.

The Vatican, the Mafia, they're all there.

And they gathered together in Sicily to show what it was possible to do with the state, which is you could defeat the communists and get rich while doing it.

So Cioni said, they are not mercenaries attacking, but they are also university professors, industrialists, landowners, lawyers, anyone in short, who gets along with the Curia.

It's a sack condusted with maps and cadastral papers in hand.

So in four years.

It's cadastral.

Very nice.

It's really good.

Again,

so in four years, the municipality granted over 4,000 building licenses.

Of these, in just one month, 3,000 of them were released to five people.

Salvatore Milazzo is a homeless guy.

Lorenzo Ferrante.

That's why he needs all those homes.

Yeah.

Francesco Lepanto and Giuseppe Mineo.

All three are retired, have no connection to the building trade.

And then Migele

Cagetgi, who is the closest to a builder, who is a coal seller with no building experience.

None of these people are at all related to the companies that they're being

given permits for.

This is all straw applications.

One of the most striking cases was also the Villa Deliella, considered one of the architectural works that most like, was the most emblematic of Sicily at the time, was demolished in one night on New Year's Eve, Eve, Eve in 1959.

December 29th.

Yeah, so like it's currently New Year's Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve.

Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve.

Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve, Eve.

So anyway.

So yeah, this is, and it's not also like, oh, they're demolishing the beautiful palaces to make way for housing for workers.

No.

Yet they are demolishing.

They're concreting over every green space.

They are demolishing houses, but palaces, but what they're building is sort of quite

substandard.

What they're building is often dangerous.

Yeah, but that's the thing.

You can become a slumlord of that,

which is the point.

And so Le Barbara brothers, as well as this guy Francesco Vasallo, who is called Don Ciccolo, Don Franke, or King Concrete, who is, again, a former Teamster who'd never worked in construction before.

They're the real winners here, along with the Valle Gio

Business Consortium, which combined the names of Francesco Vasallo, Salvatore Lima, and Giovanni Gioya, who was the head of the Christian Democrat tendency that Lima belonged to before he eventually switched to Andreotti.

So, this continued, by the way, while Laura was reporting on it, that Palermo was being destroyed, concreted over by this mafia-filled construction speculation by this mobbed-up city government.

And Lima, ever the whiner, said, I denounce Nesticcio and Faranella, who were the director and deputy directors of Laura, for defamation, saying, The newspaper Laura has achieved its goal of involving political leaders on a personal basis, accusing me, me, Salvo Lima, of collusion with the mafia with a clear intention of drawing political advantages for the party that the same newspaper supports, i.e., the communists.

Why would they accuse me of being in the mafia just because my dad was in the mafia and then I'm in the mafia?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Why would they accuse me of being in the mafia just because I always get all the votes from the districts where I go have coffee with the guy from the mafia and have never been seen campaigning?

Local opera enthusiast and sometime mayor.

So he was perceived as

the, this is from a history of La Ora,

which is from a paper called Hands Over the City, the Mafia La Ora and the Sack of Palermo, which was published in Urban History last year.

I've been reading academic papers with this shit.

It says, public opinion perceived Lima as the Sindaco della Agne Violenti, the mayor of the violent years, and the greatest symbol of Palermo's political mafia power.

Nevertheless, although the debate tended to personalize the problem, the responsibility for the misgovernment of the city and the damage it created remains with the entire ruling class, especially with the Fanfani group of Christian Democrats, his group.

Of course,

everybody knew who these people were and were terrified of them.

And this affair basically taints them both locally, as both politicians shifted their allegiance from Fanfani and Gioia to Giulio Andriotti.

And by the way, Chen Kimano was mayor for two weeks in 1970 before Laora published a series of articles about him that embarrassed him so much he quit.

That's pretty good.

That's funny.

So, the legal proceedings, the defamation suits by Lima and Chanchiamo, constitute only one aspect of a larger operation devised by the Palermo establishment to the detriment of the newspaper.

I'm a little bit distracted by the newspaper because this is another fun story.

So, Telstar, an evening newspaper was set up in 63 by a guy called Arturo Cassina, who's a member of the Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulchre, good friend of Cardinal Ruffini, and the holder of extensive no-bid contracts for road maintenance and sewage in Palermo.

That's the idea.

It's like you know, he's a good guy because the church likes him.

Yeah.

And he also, look, he's keeping the roads clean.

He's a public servant.

Yeah.

So Laura had been campaigning against him for a long time, highlighting how like he always failed to supervise contract extensions.

So he started like Fox News of mid-century Sicily called Telstar.

The aim was to keep the left-wing newspaper.

This is from the article again, the journal article.

under constant pressure to show how its campaigns discredited Sicily to the advantage of the communists.

Telstar did not have a long life.

When Takare stepped down, the newspaper editor at the time, the newspaper was left without direction and could only rehash its stance as a champion of anti-communism until it closed permanently in 1968.

That is really funny to be like, by noticing that I am in the mafia, you are embarrassing Sicily in front of the rest of Italy.

Kind of.

You're talking Sicily down.

Yeah, it's the real Omerta.

There's another important event that happens while Lima is mayor, which is the first mafia war in 62.

Us, the two main clans in Palermo, the Grecos and La Barbaras, they're riding high.

They control the peasantry in the countryside.

They control irrigation.

They control cattle wrestling.

They control all their traditional countryside activities, but they also control building.

They also control drugs transshipment, which is really important in Sicily at the time, Turkey.

Until one day, a consignment of heroin comes in a little light.

They both suspect each other of stealing and an escalating campaign of murders begins between them.

And yeah, it begin playing the Mountain Goats album, Bleed Out.

And the funny thing, not the funny thing, but then what happens is they finally get Riley.

Riley thinks this next part is funny.

I want you all to get fucked up.

Riley thinks it's so funny.

It's funny when Italians die.

When Italians are killed and die and are murdered and put into buildings and then some of them have to go skiing.

Riley thinks that's funny.

I don't think you think that.

It's just a crazy thing that you think that's funny.

That's just so interesting to me.

How about this?

The strange part

is that

what brings the Italian statement.

Riley thinks that human suffering is unusual in history.

That's in many ways.

Riley doesn't think that we've normalized violence.

Yeah, no, especially not in the form of the state.

But speaking of the state, what brings the Italian state's attention to Palermo more at this time is that seven army officers in Carabinieri are killed in a car bomb attack that was intended to be a decapitation strike against the Greco's.

1,200 mafiosi are arrested, and thereafter guys immediately start flipping and then mafia commissions start to become possible.

in a way it takes a it takes and this is like when the roll-up of the mafia starts yeah it's not having an understanding of the state as a kind of like superseding entity you know

and it's like it takes a long time oh sure like because there are a few times where they genuinely like made war against the state sometimes it was a kind of like alliance sometimes it wasn't but like ultimately it was it was like this process of never understanding the thing that a lot of more successful organized crime groups did, which is that like monopoly on violence, right?

There is the state is always the bigger fish, right?

And they just didn't.

What they did understand was control of politicians, but they did not understand the administrative state because fundamentally they only see the world in terms of patrimony.

Yeah.

And so they're like,

who's in charge of the state?

I'm going to make him have a little coffee with me.

Yeah.

And they didn't see that there's all this other stuff.

Yeah.

It like it works for a while in a kind of patrimonial politics because there is a guy in charge of the state that you you can make have a little coffee with you but he's not the state yeah he's not the state and he doesn't control and that he's for example separate from the judges maybe you control some judges can you always rely on them to be trying your cases can you always rely on the guy who the the the guy you have the coffee with to shift the judges around so you have those so you have the um uh you know the right judge like you can't pretty simple you got to have a bunch of coffees you're going to be up on night yeah you're not going to sleep yeah they so it's like as you say the state is just so much bigger than they can comprehend.

And as you get from the 70s to the 80s and eventually the 90s, when the power of the Sicilian mafia and anything like it would have been in the first half of the 20th century is just, it's infinitesimal.

The only way that this makes sense as a thing that keeps happening into the 70s and 80s is as a tool in the toolbox of people who do understand the state, which is the CIA.

Not quite fundamentally.

And we're going to see some little bit of see shadows of that in Lima's story.

So any case uh but this is this the aftermath of the first mob war is when this actually this is the curtain call it's just a very long curtain call so 64 the year off being mayor he has lima has one year not as mayor of palermo he's mayor from 64 break he takes a longer break so he switches to giulia andriotti's faction within christian democracy Giulia Andriotti is a relatively small player at the time with just a power base immediately around Rome.

Basically, he's the Pope.

And he enables, basically, he says, look, look, I will bring you every vote in Sicily and

you're not going to have to worry about campaigning in Italy's quite left-wing north.

We're going to using Sicily and the South, we're going to cement the Christian Democrats into power unshakably.

It's literally like, by the way, we are going to conspire to subvert Italian democracy.

Yeah.

In a thing that is already extremely subversive, but we are going to just

flagrantly

disenfranchise basically the most populated and left-wing part of it.

It's fucked up that you think that's funny, but you know, it is hilarious.

So, of course, Lima, ever the whiner, denies all of this.

He gives a very rare interview in 1970, speaking with a journalist called Giorgio Fresco Polara of L'I Unita, where he denies any relation between the mafia and politics at all.

Palermo is the only city in Italy that does not know building speculation.

Sure, why not?

It's so orderly here.

How could there be crime?

If there was crime here, how could it be so organized?

Yeah.

If there was crime here, you would have seen trucks exploding all the time or perhaps a communist newspaper's newsroom getting bombed.

So Palermo is the only city in Italy that doesn't know about building speculation.

And I admit that I met Salvatore La Barbara.

He came to me to ask for a parking permit, which I granted to him.

That's all.

Okay.

Is it a little bit you have friends, Your Honor?

Pretty, pretty, pretty quick meeting, probably.

I have no difficulty in admitting that some people unintentionally accepted the votes of the mafia, but this happened when I was very little.

Never collusion.

Your honor, I'm just, I'm just, uh, I'm just however old he was at the time of that.

I'm just a 50-year-old little boy, and the things that happened.

Well, yeah, he was a fucking kid.

So it says 18 years old, you sick fuck.

I was only 50 years old.

So

he says, good faith, sub-smears.

You know, at election time, the politician is blind.

So basically, it's like, what do you mean, Bafia?

I never heard Mafia.

Maybe one guy I gave a parking permit to.

Maybe I accepted some votes.

Is that like a known

expression in like Italian at election times the politician is blind?

Because that sounds terrifying.

What the fuck?

In the land of the mayor, the blind man is voting.

Yeah.

So

again, this might be an archive.

What I found is that translating articles produces things that sound like sayings.

Yeah.

Well, here's the thing.

The other thing about this is I feel pretty certain you will end up eventually becoming like fluent in Portuguese for the purposes of recording these.

Absolutely.

Italian, not that much of a stretch.

Yeah.

Don't worry.

I'm going back to Belusophone probably after this.

I was really worried about you.

So Lima.

I was fucked up that you're doing in Italian, actually.

I was concerned.

Yeah, I thought it was funny.

I did it Italian.

So Lima basically, as we say, is like this pillar of Giulio Andreotti's support.

Giulio Andreotti is known.

He's like seven times prime minister of Italy.

He is cemented into that office.

And it basically comes up from Sicily.

And it was, in fact, there's this famous instance where it was discovered that Andriotti.

received a kiss from Salvatore Rina, the ranking member of the Corleonese family, while Sicily.

Is it illegal to have a little kiss?

Yeah, it's totally.

Is it illegal to kiss the homies?

Yeah.

Yeah.

But this, and he was sitting on Lima's couch next to Lima when this happened,

essentially.

What does he live with his mom?

Like, come on, dude.

Can you host or can't you?

Like,

okay, to be fair, Italian guy, maybe he does live with his mom, but yeah.

H and H.

Can you host?

But there's just like in the background, you just see like a

four foot tall woman wearing all black.

She's here.

Because these days that would be the mesimore, but you know.

So anyway,

some very, very specific racial preferences that they've used on Grinder.

I need Nona in-house.

In-house.

Setting my Grinder to like only show me Matthiosi.

I need Mafiosli DL.

Yeah, I'm cruising Matthiosly.

I'm looking for a Toured.

The legitimate Toured.

I know too much.

I'm getting coffee with the local trade.

Like the head of local trades, all the other trades.

Exactly.

You don't need to arrange anything yourself, right?

You just have one little cappuccino or whatever.

No building permit refused.

I really feel like I know too much.

I need to get men in black flashy thinged.

Or transition.

Either one.

It's got to be one or the other at that point.

What's interesting is that the neuralizer actually does change your gender.

That's true.

We do that.

That is true.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So, anyway, Lima, by the way, is made Secretary of Budget 1974.

Well, he clearly knows how to manage money.

So the first Anti-Mafia Commission is impaneled in 63 as a result of the first mafia war.

It publishes its results in 76.

It mentions Salvo Lima by name 149 times

it's a lot of times he is so very obviously like the pillar of

like cosa nostra authority in government in sicily it is undeniable

this is the thing it's this stuff is not that secret because it doesn't need to be it doesn't rely on that it just relies on normalization yeah in fact it only kind of works if everybody knows right Like, that's the whole thing.

Yeah.

It only functions correctly if it is an open secret.

Like, that's how the mafia works.

Yeah.

That's why it's men of honor.

Your honor is known.

That's right.

But, any case, and this is why it's like the mafia, even though the mafia was core to the political running of Italy, it was anathema to the running of Italy as a modernizing state.

And so it's like these anti-mafia commissions become very important in heightening that contradiction between, hey, it seems like organized crime rather than the state is planning what Palermo looks like.

We can't have that, but also the prime minister is very keen to protect him.

And in fact, he has parliamentary immunity.

So even though his name comes up 149 times, we can't go after him.

He's just, it's like, okay, well, you're in the mafia.

Everyone knows you're in the mafia.

Do you want to be the Undersecretary of Budget still, I guess?

Because he's made an MEP after this.

This happens later.

Italy's so cool.

Well, 150 times probably would have done it, but the 149 is just under the.

Just under the Just under the

so by the way, the

chamber of deputies, they reject four requests for authorization to proceed with charges against him.

They vote this down as a block, the Christian Democrats.

It's probably nothing.

The rest of his career and life, to be honest, is spent as an MEP.

So we can also talk about Andreadi's relationship with the mafia in Lima, because Sicily was this insanely important for Italian reactionary politics overall.

As we said, it's like...

They just outvote the socialists in the north.

And interestingly, this is from another academic paper by the American Economic Association on mafia penetration in the Italian economy generally and Christian democracy specifically.

To uphold their half of the agreement, the paper says, the Christian Democrats used several channels to repay the mafia.

Many of these channels, such as advocating for softer legislation on mafia crime, are difficult to quantify.

However, they were doing it.

The authors are also able to analyze changes in the construction industry, where the mafia is famous for reinvesting the revenue from its illicit activities.

Politicians could have bolstered the industry by encouraging new development or awarding public procurement contracts to companies with mafia ties.

And in fact, they find on like when people like Salima are in power, which Christian Democrats are in power, the more powerful they are in parliament, the more construction permits get issued, the higher proportion of Sicily's population works in construction.

Everybody's building buildings.

Everybody's cementing snitches into foundations.

And everyone's skimming off the top of the cement order.

I mean, you can either be the cementer or the cementee.

You get to choose.

So the 90, the 93 Commission report stated unequivocally: the commission considers certain the connection between Salvo Lima, the men of the Cosa Nostra, and he was the maximum exponent in Sicily of the Christian Democrat current that reports to Giulio Andriotti the most they could say, Giulio Andreatti was as involved as Salvo Lima.

He was as involved in the mafia, or maybe he was one step of remove, but he was very, very involved.

So anyway, this sort of whole tension, not just strategy of tension, the tension between the Italian administrative state and the existence of the mafia as a pillar of power in Italy comes to a head with this thing, the Maxi trial, where hundreds of mafiosi are arrested all at once.

Like the hundreds of convictions are secured.

There's like they build a special courthouse in a bunker to try these guys, right?

Like this is enormous.

And Andreotti said, okay, what we're going to try to do is we're going to try to adjust the mafia-related trials.

We're going to get mafiosi release after sentencing.

And so on and so on.

He'd appoint judges called sentence killers who would simply say, I'm releasing you in a technicality.

And Lima specifically was the mafia boss's channel through which this promise was extracted, right?

They were like, okay, we need to get Corrado Carnevale, the sentence killer.

We need to get him on this trial.

But they weren't able to make this happen.

Andreotti didn't have the political capital to do it.

Lima had no one else he could ask.

His power base had waned.

And the rest of Mafia power.

The Maxi trial is also crazy for how low rent it made the mob look

compared to the state, which was the point of it, after all.

Yeah.

And it's just a bunch of like old guys arguing with each other in court as, you know, sort of surrounded by armed police.

Yeah, it was, it was in part a humiliation ritual that worked.

Yeah.

It worked incredibly absolutely.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Highly recommend a kind of trashy but still fun Italian TV show called El Cacciatore, The Hunter, about an anti-mafia prosecutor in Palermo.

And because this is mostly about Lima, right, the story leading up to the Maxi trial is also fascinating.

It also is terrifying.

Like if you were someone who in Italy wanted people to be able to, like, I don't know, go to the shops and buy something without their knees being broken or like not have their sons just like taken from them by the mafia to be like, he's a soldier now.

Goodbye.

You know, if you wanted that not to happen, there was a good chance you were just going to get killed in a car bomb.

You know, if you were to try to use the power of the state to make that, it was genuinely a war.

Yeah, that makes the joke I was spinning up about them having to build an extra ski lift at the Dolomites for all the guys coming out of the trial.

It makes it less funny because I was trying to work out which dolomite had the best skiing so I can make the joke about the town that they were going to have to build the extra chalet in.

Kind of kills the vibe in my joke.

No, no, no.

Riley, it's not your fault.

It's kind of the mafia's fault.

It's not your fault.

It's kind of the fault of the stuff that happened in the past.

But just I'm just going to say that I had, I was working on the joke.

I was working on it.

And now it's, it's gone, it's gone.

It's gone now.

And I guess, I guess we should keep moving.

So everybody's been so interested in how organized crime ruined cities recently.

It's okay.

It's fine.

It's just, I mean, again, I do want to point out, I want to apologize to the listeners.

I'm so sorry that Riley thinks it's funny.

I think it's real good.

Well, it's because they all wore those clown noses.

Anyway, so in January 30th, 92, the Supreme Court confirms the Maxi trial convictions.

They couldn't get Carnavale to throw them out.

And Lima, before this happens, in like late 91.

uh in like November 91, again, he's being interviewed, a rare interview in

Correa de la Sera with a guy called Enzo Biaggi, and he says, I am afraid.

Quite rightly so, because on March 1992, he was assassinated near his villa in Mondeo at the age of 64.

The Pentidi, again, they say, the maffiosi believed that Andrea and Lima could make sure Carnavelle was going to be put on the

on the on the sort of committee, the sentencing committee, who would basically make the whole process of the Maxi trial sort of moot by being, okay, you're six months.

You know, they say, you know, what do you really do?

Order the, what, oh, you order the deaths of 12 people.

Oh, so you can't have a phone call now, you know?

Many, a couple of them probably would have been dead by now, anyways, if you think about it.

Yeah, we, no one really knows what happened.

Maybe Lima overstated Andreotti's ability to like get Carnavale on.

Maybe Andreotti didn't know to do it, but whatever it was, the mafiosi thought that they would be sent to like reverse an appeal.

It didn't happen.

You never want to over-promise for your guy, you know?

So, Gaspare Mutolo explains the reason for Lima's murder, journalist.

Lima was killed because he was the greatest symbol of that part of the political world, which, after doing favors to the Cosa Nostra and favor for its votes, was no longer able to protect the interests of that organization.

Lima was killed because he did not uphold or couldn't uphold the commitments he had made in Palermo.

The Supreme Court verdict was a disaster.

Just being, just the mob doing, after sort of like years, decades of faithful service, being like all these fucking

like, you know, parasites being like, well, what have you done for me lately?

And when the answer is, you know, kind of not enough, they just have you killed.

Well, the other, the other thing, right, is that the dominant family of the Sicilian mafia had changed.

It was no longer like the La Barbaras, the Brantigliones.

It was all centered under the Corleonese.

The Corleonese were much more transactional, much more brutal.

And all of a sudden, that friendly opera ticket buying relationship that you might have with Tommy Buschetta and the La Barbara family.

You don't have that with the Corleonese because this isn't like I do something for you, you do something for me, we're friends.

This is no, you work for me.

And so these are the guys also that kill Giovanni Falcone famously, right?

This is who they are.

Anyway, kind of the Maxi trial, you know, takes out the smart ones or the smarter ones, and then you just end up with the, you know, stupid killers.

Well, indeed.

So

this is the sort of conclusion in what happens to Andreotti.

It's counterinsurgency as well.

It is counterinsurgency, right?

These are people who are embedded in the countryside.

They're either liked by or terrify the people that you're trying to get to tell them about them.

You know, they're able to work through that.

Yeah,

it's all very David Kilcullen.

Yeah, absolutely.

So Susanna Lima says of her father, a month after the murder of my father, Giulia Andreotti wanted to meet me in Rome.

And as soon as he saw me, he asked if I had heard any news about the murder and if Vito Cianchimino had anything to do with it.

I think Andreotti hoped that it was Vito because this is not a connected guy.

And Andreotti, I think, knew.

Say says, ex-Justice Minister Claudio Martelli said, Senator Andreotti was frightened either because he didn't understand or perhaps because he had understood too well.

Now, Andreotti was later charged with mafia association.

However, he escaped punishment due to illegal technicality.

It was passed a statute of limitations.

Most of his direct dealings with the mafia happened in the 60s and 70s, and he was being tried in the 90s.

But his political career was effectively destroyed by the revelations stemming from Lima's assassination.

Cause you're like, wait a minute, why did the mafia kill the mayor and MEP?

Why would they do that?

And then you start digging and you're like, oh, it seems like that guy never campaigned for any office, was clearly in the mafia and just delivered you Sicily every election.

Are you in the mafia, Andreon?

Which he's not really

digging.

You just turn over the fucking shovel at that point.

Yeah.

You just look.

It's just on the surface.

So his political career was over.

Christian Democracy in 1992 gets its worst vote total since 48.

It gets only 29.7% of the vote.

And by March 27, 93, Andreotti was formally charged with Mafia Association, but as you say, he gets off it on the basis that like, you know, the statute's limitations have passed.

But by 94, Christian democracy is formally dissolved after 50 years of being, of Italy being like a one-party state.

The 2004, by the way, Supreme Court cassation confirms the ruling that Andriotti had maintained a friendship with the mafia and favored ties between them and used Lima as a go-between.

But again, we can't, it's like, yes, this is true, but we can't do anything about it because of the statute of limitations.

Anyway, all of this, let's go just one step back to 94.

But the Institutional Conservative Party in ashes, what's a reactionary Italian to do?

And on to the stage of the shows that exist exclusively to demonstrate topless dancers steps Silvio Berlusconi with a broad smile and a plan.

Of course.

So that's how one bright young boy from 1920s Palermo kicked into, or at least was a major part in, the machine that broke Italy and produced Silvio Berlusconi.

Never be good in school.

Never get good grades.

Never show anyone that you know how to read.

If your child is good in school, send them away.

Yeah.

That's right.

Oh, all right, Paul Pot.

Rusticate your intelligent child.

Anyway, anyway,

this is the story of Salvo Lima.

What a beautiful story it is.

An enigmatic, awful person.

Yeah.

Anyway, this has been my mayoralty of No Gods, No Mayors.

I've built thousands of buildings.

Well, in just the recording time of this episode,

and this was a free

one.

It was a free one.

Uh-huh.

So, Maddie, what mayor will you be doing?

On the bonus next week, which you can get at no gods, no mayors.com for just $5 a month.

What mayor will I be covering?

Oh, gosh.

That's a great question.

Hey, November, can you remind me really quick who you did last week?

Because I forgot or will forget.

Last week, I veered again and the Metaculous took me to Patrick Balcani, former deputy of the French National Assembly

and longtime mayor of L'Evalois, Pere.

Okay.

In that case,

since, of course, I remember that happening, of course.

Of course.

What episode it was?

Since it was last week.

I definitely didn't just say that guy's name aloud for the first time.

Well, you didn't, because you said it a bunch of times before.

Exactly.

And you'll note that I got better and better at saying it over the course of that episode than crated in this one.

So no information retention.

The same head injury happened to you that happened to me on the Witted Lichka one.

Yeah.

So I think what's interesting about that is having known that and now remembered it, of course, I'm remembering that I think I'm going to get Mr.

William de Blasio ready for next week.

William de Blasias.

Oh, Billy DeB.

Billy DeB.

Well, well, well.

New York's oathist mayor.

It's not so easy to find a mayor that doesn't suck shit.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think then I might even take Matty's Lee doing New York.

I might do another Toronto mayor after that.

Do some more.

Yeah, because it says, because last week was, of course, our year anniversary of No God's No Mayor.

So now it might be time for some more hometown heroes.

Yeah, probably should have.

I'm glad we remembered to mark that last week.

Of course, we, oh my God.

And what an incredible anniversary segment we had prepared.

Yes, yeah, I would say so.

Thank you so much, both of you, for preparing it.

I really appreciate you doing that to take the work off of me while I was writing Patrick Balcani.

Mr.

Balcanio Balcony.

The most important important thing was that we all got together to do that big, to do the song from a chorus line.

You all know the song from a chorus line that we did, of course.

Yeah.

I think Mancy really carried that one.

Yeah, yeah.

I was a bit desultory and you were distracted because you were still trying to write.

I was still, I was just trying to say the guy's name.

I was sort of on that, the singular sensation they would say.

Yeah.

Come on.

We gotta go.

We gotta go.

Thank you, Buddha, subscribers!

Okay, thank you, Merry Subscribers.

Bye, Baddie's book.

Bye.

Bye,

Bobby.

One

singular sensation, every little step she takes.

One

thrilling combination, every move that she makes.

One smile, and suddenly nobody else will

do.

You know you'll never be lonely with you.

No

who

she walks in.