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thousand people had migrated to northern Italy, primarily to Milan and Turin—two hours apart by car—and to smaller villages on their outskirts.
    The southerners brought friction to their new home. To the more prosperous Turinese, their southern countrymen were illiterate embarrassments, crude and uncouth. Many of them came from Sicily, Calabria, and Naples, the home of Cosa Nostra and ’Ndrangheta mobsters since the 1800s. Indeed, by 1971, nearly 13 percent of Turin’s population hailed from Calabria, Sicily, and Campania, areas notoriously dense with Mafia.
    Such migration continued well into the twentieth century, as northern Italy continued to offer more economic opportunities and prosperity than the south. Notarbartolo was part of this migration; he was born in 1952 in Palermo, the capital of Sicily, and later moved with his family to Turin when his father sought work there as a truck driver.
    Of course Turin had been no stranger to crime prior to the influx of Mob families and their associates. But these newcomers brought with them a sophistication that the police were ill equipped to handle. Drug trafficking, illegal gambling, and prostitution bloomed to new proportions in the postwar years and took root, quietly but firmly. Mafia activity from the 1950s through the 1980s was so prominent in places like Naples, Palermo, Moscow, New York, and New Jersey that the organization’s expansion to northern Italy, especially Turin and Milan, went largely unnoticed except for those Italian anti-Mafia crusaders who spent their careers tracking the Mob’s movements.
    The Mob had a hand in everything from money laundering and real estate to politics and the administrations of Turin’s local football teams, Juventus FC and Torino FC. Another notorious mainstay of Mafia business—extortion—was also among their rackets. It was fundamentally simple: a business owner would receive a phone call or a visit from strangers demanding payments that could reach as high as $200,000. They usually got paid, though it sometimes took a few firebombs or pistol shots fired through windows to encourage the payments. In Turin, a tire factory was set on fire, along with its stock of 30,000 tires, when the owner refused to pay. Knowing the possible outcomes, most owners ended up making some arrangement. In the early nineties, it was estimated that 60 percent of all businesses in Palermo paid the Mob il pizzo , the term for this protection fee. In Catania, an estimated 90 percent of business owners paid up, so much that the local chamber of commerce proposed making il pizzo tax deductible.
    From the 1970s through the 1990s, detectives like Martino were inordinately busy trying to keep a lid on crime sprees that ended with bodies found in parks, in cars, and even on the sides of highways. Victims included not only casualties of rival factions’ turf wars, but also businessmen who refused to pay il pizzo, the occasional innocent bystander caught in the crossfire, and the police themselves. Detectives, politicians, and judges were often whacked in particularly dramatic fashions; one judge was blown to bits by a powerful bomb that detonated as he drove down a highway near Palermo. Throughout Italy, it was nothing short of war between those who upheld the law, or tried to, and those who profited from breaking it. Turin was no exception.
    Against this backdrop, attention to more pedestrian crimes like burglary all but evaporated. It was, in other words, a good time to be a crook in Turin. So long as they took care not to hurt anyone or display overt ties to the Mob, and as long as they covered their tracks well, chances were high that thieves would face at most a perfunctory investigation. The police were burdened by more pressing matters.
    There was one other aspect about the city that may have been a factor in the thieves’ long successful campaign in Turin, although it’s one that Martino may have thought wise to keep to himself if he considered