Sciascia’s home was the small village of Racalmuto in western Sicily, the traditional mafia stronghold of dry dusty plains and empty mountains. He was, he said, able to write about the criminals because he had grown up observing the pressure put on the villagers by local bosses, and the way that jobs and positions went to those who obeyed mafia orders. He could feel the mafia in his bones, and, in some fundamental sense, felt he was a mafioso himself.

Having decided to base his book on the true story of a local contractor, murdered for refusing to give in to extortion, Sciascia resolved to deliver his message in clear, unmistakable terms. The mafia, he wrote, was not as some suggested a part of colorful Sicilian folklore — but a highly effective secret criminal organization, made up of bosses and middle men, who used kidnapping, kneecapping and execution to extort money and leverage power. It had already moved, Sciascia continued, from its original base in the Sicilian countryside into the cities, where it was feeding on Italy’s postwar building boom. And, unless checked, the mafia would keep going, up through Italy and far beyond. Sciascia then recommended a line of action: the only way to crush this organized criminality before it was too late was to follow the money, check bank accounts and tax returns, and establish why seemingly unemployed grandees were enjoying sumptuous lives.

Few, in 1961, chose to listen. Politicians, churchmen, industrialists and lawyers lined up to say that the mafia was nothing but an invention in the fevered minds of the Communists, traditional opponents of financial malfeasance. As for the author himself, Sciascia was dismissed as a malevolent critic of his beautiful island home, and interested only in the sales of his books. It would take 20 years and the deaths of many brave and principled investigators, some of them his personal friends, before Sicily began to come to grips with its mafia. By then, the mafia had spread just as Sciascia warned it would, digging its tentacles into every corner of Sicilian life, dominating first the fish, meat and citrus markets, then water, then cigarette and drugs. Its bosses were very rich men — with yachts in Palermo harbor and vast estates in the hills beyond — and would soon become wealthier still.

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From boyhood, Sciascia had been fascinated by the idea of justice. As he saw it, Sicily had been overtaken, since soon after the unification of Italy, by corruption at every level. He railed against ministers who took bribes, contractors who made their money through kickbacks, priests who condoned what their parishioners were doing. He kept turning out his gialli, targeting the Church, politicians both in Rome and Palermo, bureaucrats and industrialists too readily seduced by mafia money or  intimated by threats.

Il Contesto — published in English as Equal Danger — was about the venality of the political and legal establishment and its “degraded and impenetrable” power. Todo Modo, One Way or Another, is partly about the Christian Democratic Party. Dominating postwar Italian politics right until the Nineties, Sciascia always hated it for its endless compromises and corruption. Todo Modo is also about clerics, depicted as accomplices in crime. Readers loved him, praising the honesty of this outspoken, melancholic, tenacious man, scourge of Italian immorality. In political and judicial circles he had few friends. He lost even more when he turned his attention, in 1978, to the kidnap and murder of the former Prime Minister Aldo Moro by Red Brigades terrorists. Once again, Sciascia assailed the Christian Democrats, rightly accusing the party, which feared incriminatory revelations by Moro, of wilfully failing to save him. When it was published, The Moro Affair sold 100,000 copies in three weeks.

From the first, Sciascia built his gialli around a single figure, usually a carabiniere detective, sometimes an intrepid magistrate. These were lonely men, staunch, skeptical, obsessive upholders of the law, highly cultured and above all incorruptible. They read the world using their considerable intelligence, deciphering secret, buried things, even when they seemed capricious and every trail led only deeper into the undergrowth. They solved their cases, identified the killers, challenged mafia henchmen and their political backers. But they never won. In no Sciascia novel is a culprit brought to book. This has not stopped a generation of young carabinieri recruits attributing their choice of career to their admiration for Captain Bellodi, the detective in The Day of the Owl.

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As violence in Sicily intensified through the Seventies and early Eighties, bringing bodies to Sicilian streets as clans fought for supremacy, Sciascia went on writing and accusing. Asked why it was that he was never murdered, he would simply say that the mafia did not read fiction. Some of his books dealt with cases of past injustices. These he called inchieste — investigations — where he delved into unsolved stories about disappeared scientists and wrongly accused prelates. Watching the growing number of attacks on prosecutors who grew too close to the truth, Sciascia followed the long corteges of grieving Sicilians bearing their coffins through the streets of Palermo, mourning them all. By now he had become one of Italy’s best-loved writers. One of his last books, translated as Open Doors, was about a “piccolo judice”, a little judge, who refuses to obey the order given him by his superiors to pass a death sentence, though he knows that this will spell the end to his career. The little judge was a “uomo solo”, a man alone, the kind of man that Sciascia loved most, and someone very like himself.

Sciascia died in the autumn of 1989. He lived long enough to see much of what he had written and warned about confirmed. The mafia had indeed moved north, to spread the trade in drugs throughout Europe and cause epidemics of addicts. Three years earlier, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the two immensely brave magistrates who spearheaded the battle against the Sicilian mafia, had managed to bring 471 mafiosi to trial, in a “maxi-processo” (mega-trial) that took place in a concrete bunker built specifically inside Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. They had done so largely by pursuing the money, as Sciascia had proposed, through bank accounts and international financial transactions. Sciascia was in court to watch proceedings and noted that, finally, the immunity that had long protected the mafia had been lifted.

Towards the end of his life, questioned repeatedly for his opinions, Sciascia would say that he had grown afraid of his own prescience, and that in any case the old mafia, retaining a code of honor amid the brutality, was gone. As bad as things were in the Sixties, killings back then were controlled, and senior mafiosi obeyed, something which vanished as the violence spread and more and more players arrived.

By the end, Sciascia claimed he no longer understood what had replaced the mafia of his youth. Just as well, perhaps, that he was no longer alive when Falcone and Borsellino were murdered by mafia bosses enraged at the success of the maxi-processo. Yet Sciascia also didn’t live to see the Italian state finally act against the corruption endemic at the heart of national life, when the “Mani Puliti”, the “clean-hands” group of Milanese magistrates, uncovered and prosecuted a vast number of politicians, civil servants, army officers and industrialists on charges of bribery, fraudulent accounting, kickbacks and misuse of government funds. Among them were many Sicilians.

Yet even now, with the Sicilian mafia paralyzed, Sciascia’s grim premonitions proved accurate. Falcone and Borsellino’s killers were jailed — but since the author’s death, Italian organized crime has spread its wings still further, moving seamlessly into money laundering, prostitution and the smuggling and trafficking of people, using cryptocurrency to conceal its transactions. Along the way, the ‘Ndrangheta, operating out of Calabria, in the remote, impoverished toe of Italy, overtook the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in power and wealth. A loose association of some 500 clans, with over 60,000 members in 84 countries, the ‘Ndrangheta is said today to have an annual income of £49 billion. Perhaps 80% of Europe’s drug trade is channeled through Gioia Tauro, on the coast of Calabria and Italy’s largest container port.

And on it goes. Recent prosecutions have uncovered operations involving shell companies, white-collar intermediaries, prepaid untraceable cards and online foreign exchange platforms — all to launder millions of euros acquired through cocaine, extortion, gambling and human trafficking. Indeed, as prophetic as Sciascia was, he certainly never envisaged the complexity and reach of the modern mafia, a phenomenon that embraces not just Sicily and Calabria but Campania, home to the Camorra, as well as many other associations operating both independently and together, in every continent. In 2023 police across Europe, having staked out an ice-cream parlor in Germany, arrested 108 members of the ‘Ndrangheta for traffic in drugs and weapons. Using Chinese money brokers in Italy, the Calabrians were found to have been running weapons to South America, supplying Brazilian criminal gangs in exchange for cocaine. In response to what is now a global phenomenon, an international police alliance, bringing together 13 countries, has been set up, financed by the Italian Ministry of Public Security.

No Sicilian writer has claimed Sciascia’s mantle as scourge of the mafia — though Andrea Camilleri, a fellow island novelist, often said he imbued his hero Montalbano with Sciascia’s deep shyness. Even so, other brave prosecutors have followed Falcone and Borsellino. One is Nicola Gratteri, who has staged his own mega trial of 331 ‘Ndrangheta suspects in Calabria. Like his famous predecessors, he lives in fear. “I often talk to death,” Gratteri told a journalist not long ago, “because you have to rationalize fear in order to move on”. As the gangs spread yet further, moving into new markets, exploiting every new twist and turn in technology, their crimes copied by loosely associated groups, it is as Sciascia feared: unless checked, in law and in culture, the mafia will always be one step ahead of its pursuers.

***

A Sicilian Man: Leonardo Sciascia, the Rise of the Mafia and the Struggle for Italy’s Soul is published by Chatto and Windus on 2 February, 2026.

The mawkish affection the Krays inspired, along with fear, has become something of a cliché. Yet their business model — clubs, protection rackets, loan-sharking and the occasional robbery — really did have rules of engagement: avoiding “civilian casualties” chief among them. Like other criminal outfits, meanwhile, the Krays also indulged in performative acts of community engagement, donating to charities and the poor. In 1966, they quietly gave £100 to the Aberfan disaster relief fund, the largest single donation the organization received.

Such philanthropy might explain why, when Reggie Kray died of cancer in October 2000, his send-off was a schmaltzy Cockney pageant, featuring a cast of C-list celebrities and aging villains. Reggie was laid to rest near Ronnie, ending an era of antiquated villainy. It feels apt that one of London’s last old-school heists, the ill-fated Millennium Dome robbery, took place just a month after Reggie passed.

As a London policeman, I witnessed the death throes of old-school London gangsterism. This was the era when the Adams family was finally taken out by MI5. One of the infamous Hunt brothers ended up in court too — after The Sunday Times accused his organization of murder and drug trafficking. Hunt lost his libel fight, and certainly by this point, English organized crime was increasingly centered on narcotics and money-laundering. Yet it soon found itself playing second fiddle to bloodthirsty foreign competition. I’m thinking, here, of the Eastern European gangs unleashed by the Soviet Union’s collapse, to say nothing of the dirty capital, cheap labor and drugs waved in by globalization.

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In this, the decline of English gangsterism has parallels with the wider white working-class, and indeed with the British economy more broadly. It’s tempting, too, to cast analogue villains like the Adams as dinosaurs, vaporized by a meteor storm of foreign narcotics. There’s something to this analysis — but detail is where the devil lurks, and chasing devils is what detectives used to do.

Consider, for starters, the role played by the authorities. By the time Reggie Kray died in 2000, the Metropolitan Police was disrupting English organized crime on several fronts. The first involved aggressively attacking corruption via the fabled “Ghost Squad”. The second encompassed an overhaul of informant-handling, restricting covert relationships between criminals and cops to specialist, heavily supervised units. These were shadowed by a third and accidental shift. By encouraging graduates to join the force, CID offices were less often staffed by detectives who’d attended the same schools as the criminals they investigated.

And if all this helped stymie native organized crime, so too did foreign competition. An uncomfortable truth is that working-class English gangsterism was replaced by foreign competitors. Crime is Hobbesian, and it turned out that foreign criminals were simply more vicious. Notice how London’s gangsters, for instance, have yet to develop the minerals to set up shop in Tirana or Mogadishu. Meanwhile, the Albanian mafia makes softly-softly England its playground. At the same time, English laws and police forces remain configured for the relatively genteel crime lords of yore, not the ruthless bandits of war-torn Africa or the Balkans.

At this point, sociologists and criminologists might point to the structural similarities, say, between the Krays and their Albanian successors. Both involve, do they not, notions of class, family, honor? And, as my Adler family legend implies, English mobsters clearly had a capacity for violence; Reggie himself notoriously stabbed a man to death at a Clapton house party. Yet as a former detective, all this is a bit like saying all food consists of protein, fat and carbohydrate. It’s fundamentally true, but hardly insightful. It’s difficult to imagine the Krays selling heroin to schoolkids, or sanctioning hits in crowded family restaurants.

As for the drugs themselves? They’re clearly important: Albanian gangs have carved out an estimated £6 billion niche in Britain’s cocaine market. In the end, though, it’s again more subtle than that, with the type of drugs also explaining the decline of white English gangsterism. Crack, especially, has become an accelerant of “acquisitive” crime, its addictiveness prompting waves of hit-and-run burglaries. For their part, protection rackets and bank robberies have become niche pastimes. A friend serving on the Met’s Flying Squad bemoans the demise of the old-school blagger. “When I joined we looked at proper people, second generation Eastenders, tooled-up with shotguns.” These days? He’s more likely to be chasing moped-riding kids. Another old colleague, serving on the Met’s Project Team, rolls his eyes when I ask about his work. “Same old shit,” he shrugs. “Drugs and guns, mate. Nothing but drugs and guns.”

In other words, then, the dynamics of the modern drug trade leave less space for the kind of organized heists the Krays became famous for. And there’s something else here too. As the English know full well, it’s easy to be cruel when you’re not on home turf. Our working-classes have cheerfully exported violence abroad, from the Black and Tans to Heysel. But back in England, Gen Z’s white, working-class organized criminals have given up on becoming crime lords. Nor is that especially surprising. The hard Victorian slums their grandparents knew are a distant memory, particularly from the vantage point of a three-bedroom semi in Swanley.

If they’re criminals at all, they’re more likely to operate underworld service industries, oiling the wheels of international narcotics cartels. From county lines drug dealing to City money laundering, English criminals are, increasingly, vassals. Either that, or second-tier dealers, big fish in small ponds — what I call the “Etsyfication” of boutique crime. For the sort who binge “Essex Boys” murder stories and stream TV gangster slop, the height of their ambition is shifting parcels of overcut, third-rate gak.

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As for the old ways? Extortion and blackmail? It’s moved online, replacing shaven-headed men demanding money with menace. Now, teenage nerds bring multinationals to their knees from their bedrooms. Occasionally, they don’t even demand money, merely indulging in cheery digital nihilism. For their part, British police forces struggle with online fraud and hacking. It’s a transnational and highly specialized field, far beyond the ken of the average copper. Hacking is also being co-opted by parastatal organizations, deployed as a hybrid warfare tactic by China and Russia.

To Ronnie and Reggie and their ilk, all this would have felt like mind-blowing science fiction. But though white, working-class Londoners have largely given up on gangsterism, their social superiors haven’t got the message. Film and television show no hint of mercy for the dead horse of Kray-inspired crime — and, as usual, the floggings are delivered by posh boys. I recently enjoyed Mobland, directed by gangster film supremo Guy Ritchie and starring Tom Hardy, who turned in a barnstorming performance as both Ronnie and Reggie Kray in the 2015 flick Legend.

Hardy and Ritchie both attended private schools. Hardy grew up not in Tower Hamlets, but the gilded Borough of Richmond-upon-Thames. Again, that’s unsurprising: the middle classes have always lionized working-class crime. I suspect it’s partly “noble savage” syndrome, partly an enduring English fondness for Robin Hood defiance. Either way, and whatever their entertainment value, shows like Mobland retool an extinct age of English villainy for the 21st century, even as the Krays’ legacy remains a lodestone, an origin myth, for the kind of person who’s never even seen a hatchet, much less wielded it in anger.

There’s one more irony here too. The fact is, it’s never been easier to make drug money, launder it, then scurry off to the Gulf. Just ask Scotland, where indigenous thuggery has endured in a way it hasn’t down south, and where Dubai has become a sunnier alternative to Glasgow. So if you can almost hear the old Eastenders in their Essex bungalows, lamenting Reggie’s passing and shaking their heads at his brutal successors, such nostalgia misses the point. Were the Krays alive today, they’d happily be filling their boots with coke and dirty money too, then sharing the spoils on TikTok.