He was found dead, hanging by his belt in Palermo’s Pagliarelli jail. The apparent suicide of a 52-year-old Sicilian, Gaetano Lo Presti, on December 16th put a grisly end to what investigators claimed was a drive by the Sicilian Mafia to give itself a new leadership. Mr Lo Presti was among 89 alleged mobsters detained in one of the biggest-ever police operations in Sicily. Around 1,200 semi-militarised Carabinieri were deployed in raids there and (as an indication of Cosa Nostra’s long reach) in placid Tuscany. Only five of those wanted by the police eluded capture. “Cosa Nostra is in evident crisis,” exulted Italy’s chief anti-Mafia prosecutor, Piero Grasso. “It cannot manage to reorganise itself.”

In 2006 police seized Bernardo Provenzano, who was thought to have succeeded Salvatore “Toto” Riina (also known as “Shorty”) as supreme head of the loose federation that is the Mafia. Two months later, they captured several of Mr Provenzano’s alleged lieutenants. Last year they arrested his suspected heir-apparent, Salvatore Lo Piccolo.

The aim of this week’s Operation Perseus was to abort a bid by Cosa Nostra’s most senior mobsters at large to agree upon a new leader and to reconstitute its governing board. This “provincial commission” is not known to have existed since 1993, when Mr Riina disappeared into a high-security jail. The Carabinieri learnt of the plan when they eavesdropped on mob meetings, culminating in a summit last month attended by 31 leading Mafiosi. Other meetings were held in a garage, a dilapidated house and—yes—a barber’s shop. The idea, said one boss, was that “if we have to do something, we all take responsibility.” For what? Mr Grasso noted that the role of the provincial commission was to decide on big operations like the war the Mafia waged on the state with bombings and assassinations in the early 1990s.

... contd.