ITALY'S SENIOR Mafia investigator, Pietro Grasso, believes that organised crime may well be making a systematic use of the internet, both for business and propaganda purposes, writes Paddy Agnewin Rome
Mr Grasso believes that pages which appear in the social networking site Facebook, apparently glorifying notorious godfathers like Toto Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, may be neither innocent nor naive.
Recently, relatives of Mafia victims in Italy have called on Facebook to remove sites which appear to pay tribute to Riina and Provenzano, each of whom served as capo dei capi (boss of bosses) of Cosa Nostra until their arrests, in 1993 and 2006 respectively.
One controversial fan site dedicated to Riina has more than 2,000 subscribers, some of whom recently wished the godfather a Happy Christmas. Another site dedicated to Provenzano, captured in 2006 after more than 40 years on the run, claims to "honour" a man who "fooled the state for more than 40 years".
Chief investigator Grasso, however, suggests that such sites may represent more than mindless bravado, pointing to the large number of site messages which question the validity of penal sentences handed down to convicted mafiosi.
He argues that organised crime has never been slow to adapt, telling Italian daily La Repubblica: "If you recall that up to a few years ago, there were Palermo Mafia godfathers who would sit in their drawing rooms talking about getting in contact with important journalists for a propaganda campaign, why would you doubt that today's Mafia would not use all available media possibilities?"
In the meantime, though, an anti-Mafia movement would appear to be gathering momentum on the Italian edition of Facebook, with more than 50,000 users this week signing petitions such as "Get The Mafia Out of Facebook".
One man not surprised by organised crime's invasion of the site is MEP Claudio Fava, whose father, journalist Giuseppe Fava, was murdered by the Mafia in Catania, Sicily in January 1984.
Speaking to Milan daily Corriere della Sera this week, Mr Fava called the construction of an online Mafia mythology "sick and frightening".
Despite such concerns, however, many commentators have pointed out that the Facebook site dedicated to the late investigator Giovanni Falcone, blown up by the Mafia in 1992, has many more subscribers (over 184,000) than those of godfathers Riina or Provenzano.