It was a bright, unexpected afternoon in Belgium when the phone rang. My father, a man who rarely calls and prefers text messages, spoke with an urgency I had never heard before.
“He’s dead. Is your newspaper covering this? It matters,” he said.
I was confused. “You mean Nitto Santapaola?”
The death of Sicilian mafia boss Benedetto “Nitto” Santapaola at age 87 in a Milan prison had made global headlines. The Cosa Nostra leader, serving multiple life sentences, had died in custody. His power base was Catania, the eastern Sicilian city where my family comes from. His death felt personal.
Even during my childhood, when Santapaola was already behind bars, his name was whispered with caution. Parents warned children in hushed tones to avoid anyone connected to it. In Sicily, conversations about the mafia happen behind closed doors, with lowered voices. We rarely name names. “That one” is sufficient.
My father and I had both left Sicily years earlier. He is not an emotional man and typically avoids difficult subjects. So why had he called about this?
When I asked, he insisted everything was fine. He simply said reporting Santapaola’s death was important because of our roots. But the tension in his voice and his evasiveness felt unsettling. In the months since, I’ve tried to understand that call.
Those reflections brought me back to my childhood in Catania, and events that reshaped my father’s life.
I grew up in the 1990s. Despite my parents’ divorce and seeing my father only once a week, I have good memories. I remember him often stressed, always on the phone. But when he turned to me, he smiled—always a big smile.
In Sicily, that’s what we do. We pretend everything is fine. We complain endlessly yet accept things as they are. My father said the same: everything was always “fine.”
He worked as a dental technician and poured his savings into opening a studio with another dentist. He built much of it himself—wiring, painting, even constructing a glass-brick wall. “The bricks were heavy,” he used to say, “but the result was solid.” He was proud of that wall.
The business grew quickly. Patients filled the waiting room. People stopped him at grocery stores and cafés to thank him. Once, an elderly man told me, “I can eat again thanks to your father.”
But success in Sicily attracts attention. When you run a thriving business and are not part of the mafia, the mafia comes to you. It’s called pizzo—protection money that functions as extortion. A “contribution” for the “brothers” in prison and their families, they say. Refuse, and there are consequences.
At that time, Catania was torn by violent power struggles between organized crime groups. The murder and attempted murder rate often exceeded 100 per year. Extortion was common.
Santapaola had been jailed for orchestrating the 1992 bombings that killed anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
As a child, I remember men standing near the dental studio, watching me and my father. I smiled at them, thinking they were grateful clients. It wasn’t until years later that my father revealed who they really were—and why the business closed after five years.
I first learned the truth one autumn day while visiting him in northern Italy. On the drive from the airport, he played Stevie Wonder, Whitney Houston, and Phil Collins—”soft music,” he calls it. Earlier that week, I had found old photos from the 1990s. For the first time, I asked why he closed the studio.
“You’re grown now. I can tell you,” he said. “But don’t feel bad.”
Men had begun visiting him, demanding money or free dental work. He didn’t know which clan they belonged to. He refused to pay. Then the threats grew darker.
“They said, ‘You see that little girl with curly hair? We will make her disappear,'” he told me.
To end the threats, my father contacted someone who knew someone who could negotiate with intermediaries. Like many Sicilians in his situation, he was too afraid to go to the police. Mafia infiltration within authorities meant we had to handle things ourselves.
Eventually, they left us alone. But the business declined. The last time I visited, only the dentist’s chair and my old desk remained.
After the studio closed, my father moved between jobs, gained weight, and his quiet confidence faded. Eventually, he left Sicily altogether.
From conversations since Santapaola’s death, I know the news made him reflect on being targeted. He told me he regrets not going to the police. I remind him to be gentle with himself—he did what he believed was safest.
His call wasn’t really about a news story. It was about how the mafia seizes hold of lives.
In Catania, authorities denied Santapaola a public funeral to avoid glorification. But criminal systems don’t die with one person.
Growing up, I watched classmates drift into arrests. Even today, the brother of a childhood friend was arrested before turning 18. It taught me a suffocating logic: keep your head down. Speak carefully. Shining too bright carries risk.
You feel powerless. You can’t trust authorities. Voting changes nothing. That’s what people say.
But there’s another layer that follows you even after leaving. No matter how far you go, you’re still “from Sicily.” And Sicily, in the international imagination, is too often reduced to one word: mafia.
Living alongside the mafia affects mentality. You learn not to wish for too much, because something bigger can take it away. You learn to be grateful for whatever comes.
Sometimes, only after leaving the island do you realize that personal safety, career opportunities, and labor protections should be basic rights, not favors.
Sicily is still linked to a glamorized image of the mafia. Tourists buy The Godfather aprons and take tours of movie locations. But for me, Sicily is not a criminal network or a headline.
It is the smell of fresh almonds and lemons. It is beer with friends while watching Mount Etna erupt. It is chaotic markets, loud and imperfect. It is relentless creativity.
Sicily is not Nitto Santapaola. Sicily is not the mafia.
Sicily is the people who continue to build despite pressure to remain small. It is the young professionals who leave, study abroad, and return with stubborn hope. It is citizens who refuse extortion, entrepreneurs who document threats, and journalists who challenge abuses of power.
Giovanni Falcone once said: “The mafia is not at all invincible. It is a human phenomenon, and like all human phenomena, it has a beginning and it will also have an end.”
I want to believe that. With stubborn hope.
My father left Sicily at 45 to start again from scratch. He recently turned 60. He still misses the sun, the sea, and the granita of Catania. But he rebuilt himself.
And for everyone who, even when forced to leave the island of fresh lemons, carries that same stubborn hope.