A series of eight contemporary documentaries.
5: Alcamo - The Anatomy of a Mafia Town
The Mafia itself is unfilmable - but the results of its malign activities are. Alcamo is a town of 45,000 people in Western Sicily. Since the war there have been 900 murders in Alcamo and its port Castellamare. But if the methods of the Sicilian Mafia are less gory today, they are no less pervasive. The tendrils of corruption encircle all pillars of society, the church, the law, politics and the land.
Gaia Servadio , journalist and author, analyses the concept of protection, extortion, paternalism and silence that is called ' the Mafia ' - in the island that gave it its name and in the town that gave it its notoriety.
Film cameraman jim PEIRSON Film editor MALCOLM DANIEL Producer ROGER MILLS
Narrated and directed by REX BLOOMSTEIN