A military policeman stands by after a shooting by the Camorra in April 1998

Into the Heart of the Mafia: A Journey Through the Italian South
By David Lane
Profile £15, 261 pages
FT Bookshop price: £12

History of the Mafia
By Salvatore Lupo
Translated by Antony Shugaar
Columbia University Press, £21.95, 336 pages
FT Bookshop price: £17.56

It is a strange coincidence that two powerful new books about the Italian Mafia should both bear the same cover photograph. The image is of six men in square-cut suits, viewed from behind, walking down a dilapidated street, as if heading for a high-noon shoot-out. Yet each of these books, one by a foreign journalist, one by an Italian academic, has a very different perspective.

In Into the Heart of the Mafia, David Lane, the Economist’s business and finance correspondent in Italy, journeys south, delving among organisations that include the Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the ‘Ndrangheta in Calabria, the Sacra Corona Unita in Puglia and the Camorra around Naples.

Lane explains how the Mafia has successfully infiltrated the economy and power structures of the nation. But this is also a sensitive portrait of heroic, often isolated individuals who have fought against 150 years of criminality. With meticulous reporting he meets the people who have encountered and resisted the Mafia: prosecutors, policemen, bankers, clerics, businessmen, academics and local politicians.

“Either you accept the Mafia’s rules or you challenge them,” says Rosario Crocetta, who was elected mayor in the Sicilian town of Gela in 2003 despite a Mafia attempt to rig the vote for his opponent. After he was then elected to the European parliament this June, Crocetta’s first act was to propose establishing an anti-Mafia committee, to recognise that an originally “Sicilian regional phenomenon” has expanded into pan-European mafias.

While Lane’s travelogue explores the penetration of the Mafia into modern-day society, Salvatore Lupo’s History of the Mafia delves into the roots of Sicily’s Cosa Nostra, exploring how it survived Mussolini’s attempts at eradication and blossomed after the second world war.

A theme of both books is that, despite hopes to the contrary, economic development in Italy has provided the Mafia with new opportunities rather than undermining an organisation originally based on exploiting poverty-stricken populations.

Lane shows, for example, that the construction of a refinery in Gela in the early 1960s attracted Cosa Nostra to the port, drawn by contracts it sought to corrupt and workforces to manipulate. “Tenders were a matter over which one could die,” says Crocetta, who now lives under constant armed guard.

There have been some successes in the fight against crime. A 1982 law allowed for sweeping confiscation of known Mafia assets; it was so damaging that one of its initiators was killed by the Mafia four months before it was even passed.

But the organisation’s strength lies in its reach. Lane finds, for example, that a rural co-operative founded on seized Mafia land in central Sicily still struggles to survive in the face of organised crime. Flocks of sheep are driven across the crops, properties torched and banks reluctant to give loans – either because the co-operative is seen as a Mafia target and therefore not an attractive client, or as a result of direct Mafia pressure. Financial rescue has eventually come from a Bologna-based co-operative in the north, which provides a sales outlet for lentils, chickpeas and pasta. All carry a label: “From land freed from the Mafia”.

Lane visits sites of historic ambushes, assassinations and massacres. But this is also a personal journey. Shortly after publishing an article on crime and morality in the Economist, he revisits the village where his Italian wife was born, a place he has known since 1972. There he has his own encounter with the local gang when his car tyres are slashed: “For the first time I felt uneasy in Tramutola, knowing and understanding the small village less well than I thought,” he writes.

The book concludes with an indictment not of the Mafia, but of the Italian government and of Roman Catholic establishments, for failing to take the lead in combating organised crime. This is epitomised, for Lane, by the protection and honouring of Giulio Andreotti, former prime minister and now a senator for life. In July 2003 an appeals court acquitted Andreotti on charges of complicity with the Mafia, but upheld the prosecution’s case that he had been engaged in criminal association with Mafia bosses until 1980, a crime that fell under the statute of limitations.

Berlusconi’s terms of office, he argues, have been characterised by a weakening of the magistracy and the justice system. Italy is now “wandering without a moral compass”, says Lane. “With their huge wealth and great power, can Italy’s Mafias ever be beaten?” he asks.

This question is also at the heart of Lupo’s book. History of the Mafia goes back to Italy’s unification in the 19th century to explore the origins of the Cosa Nostra, an organisation that exploited the faltering process of land reform, first as intermediaries and “protectors”, and later as owners.

Lupo is a professor at the University of Palermo. Though his book is academic, it provides a useful spectrum of first-hand historic sources. He uses parliamentary and court hearings to vividly reconstruct the Mafia hoods, beginning with Antonio Giammona, first boss of Palermo.

Born in 1819, Giammona started as a small-time bandit, became a leaseholder of citrus groves and then a land owner himself, controlling a small but important bloc of votes at a time when suffrage was limited. Lupo describes Masonic-like induction rituals, including oaths and blood promises, inflicted not by a needle but with a bitter-orange thorn from the citrus groves.

Though this is a historical account, some of the analysis could equally apply to Italy today. Lupo writes of Raffaele Palizzolo, for example, a member of parliament tried in the early 1900s for a Mafia-related murder: “He was exceedingly popular, if popularity consists of being easily accessible to people from every walk of life, every class and every sort of morality… He welcomed them all in, made promises to all of them… and conveyed to his visitors how many powerful friends and acquaintances he boasted.”

Frustratingly for a foreign reader, Lupo skates over some momentous events that shook Sicily, such as the Portella della Ginestra massacre reconstructed by Lane. But the book does build a comprehensive picture of how the Mafia took advantage of weak and corrupt central governments, until they “flooded the system” to become a dominant rather than just parasitic force.

Many believed that the Mafia would vanish once locomotive whistles echoed through the villages of the Sicilian hinterland, Lupo writes, but instead they adapted, “old but not afraid of modernity”.

Guy Dinmore is the FT’s Rome correspondent