A raid and a secret tape exposed a Sicilian mafia that is shrunken, whiny and clinging on for survival | John Dickie

A historic number of arrests were made, but the days of targeted murder or massive political influence are long gone

Palermo has not seen anything like it for years. Helicopters in the pre-dawn sky. Carabinieri barracks across Sicily emptied, with all 1,200 officers deployed. The Cacciatori - red-bereted shock cops - brought over from the wilds of Calabria. The Carabinieri's own film units serving up a morning montage of flashing blue lights, balaclava-wearing officers with submachine guns, police dogs sniffing, cottage doors breaking, and burly, handcuffed men ushered into Alfa Romeos. And then, of course, in the press, the humiliating wiretaps of gangsters sharing their secrets. Cosa Nostra is back in the headlines, and back under the cosh.

Italian law enforcement is good at this stuff. Not a single one of the 181 men and women targeted for arrest on 11 February managed to go on the lam before the crackdown. Based on the numbers alone, this raid was the biggest anti-mafia operation since the 1980s. But Sicily was a very different place back then. It teetered on the brink of becoming a narco-state, and Cosa Nostra treated the Italian institutions with contempt, murdering any prosecutor, police officer or politician who got in its way.

You've got to get by on a slab of hash? Is that how far we've fallen? The guys from the old days, the ones who've tragically been sent to prison for life, would they be talking about a slab of hash? If they talked about hash, it was because a shipload was due in ... We're down in the dirt lads. We think we're doing business, but it's others who are really at it.