Swords into plowshares, sort of

Joshua Hammer has an article in The New York Times about turning goombah houses into B&Bs:

It could have been the rural retreat of a hedge-fund magnate or an Italian prince: a two-story villa of beige stucco and stone, perched in isolation on a rise overlooking the Jato Valley in northern Sicily. The front doors opened onto a refurbished dining room with high ceilings, terra-cotta tile floors, and a row of stone arches that suggested a Roman amphitheater. Antique brass lanterns, pottery, and other curios hung from the walls. Soft light filtered through the windows. It was getting toward lunch and, in the spacious kitchen, three chefs were preparing dessert: miniature pastries made with honey and chestnuts cultivated in nearby orchards. A narrow staircase wound upstairs to the villa’s three rustic bedrooms, with ten beds, each of which looked out upon pale-green meadows sloping upward toward bald-faced granite mountains.
This 17th-century farmhouse once belonged to Bernardo Brusca, the capo of one of Sicily’s most brutal crime families. A member of the Cupola, the Palermo commission that directed operations and settled disputes within the Cosa Nostra, Mr. Brusca may well have used the place as a safe house from which to plan killings and other crimes. Mr. Brusca’s son, Giovanni, now 51, detonated the bomb that blew up the Italian prosecutor Giovanni Falcone, in 1992; the next year, he kidnapped the eleven-year-old son of a Mafia informer, held him for 26 months, then strangled him and dissolved his body in a barrel of acid. The younger Mr. Brusca later turned state’s evidence and went into a witness-protection program. Bernardo, a member of the Mafia old school that swore by omerta, organized crime’s code of silence, was captured in the 1980s, sentenced to multiple life terms for a string of murders, and died in government custody in 2004.
Acting under a law passed in 1996, the Italian government seized his properties and turned the farmhouse over to a consortium of municipalities in the area. Cooperativo Placido Rizzotto, named after a labor leader who was shot dead by the Mafia in 1948, was given the house six years ago. The cooperative now runs the property as a bed-and-breakfast and has turned Mr. Brusca’s neglected, overgrown fields into an organic farming commune.
“All the municipalities in the area were part of a long, violent mafioso history that they wanted to leave behind,” said Emiliano Rocchi, the head chef, who has worked there since the inn opened in 2004. “Turning these Mafia properties into socially beneficial projects is a way of doing that.”
The Brusca house, known as the Agriturismo Portella della Ginestra, was the first such Mafia property in Sicily to become a bed-and-breakfast, and it may have started a trend. Libera Terra Mediterraneo, an umbrella group of cooperatives founded a decade ago by an Italian priest, recently opened a second inn— once owned by the Sicilian boss of bosses, Salvatore Riina— across the Jato Valley, and has announced plans for more. These former Mafia villas offer guests a chance to soak up the island’s most beautiful landscapes and, perhaps, get a frisson of horror and excitement overnighting in places filled with ghosts from Sicily’s criminal past.
At Portella della Ginestra, where Mafiosi allegedly once gathered, tourists dine on such exquisite dishes as pasta alla Norma, made with a sauce of fresh tomatoes, eggplant, basil, and pecorino cheese, and zucchini in a beer batter. The wine, which bears the Centopassi label, is made from grapes cultivated in local vineyards that were all once Mafia-owned. Fields that were overgrown with weeds have been replanted with chick peas, tomatoes, wheat, and other crops, and are threaded with riding and hiking trails.
Beyond Mr. Brusca’s land, an imposing structure— mounted on trestles and known as the Strada della Liberazione, or Liberation Road— cuts a swath through a mountain pass and bisects the rolling landscape. Built a generation ago to link the valley with Palermo, the road met with fierce resistance from the Brusca family and other Mafiosi, who saw it as a threat to their domination of the then-isolated region. “It took the government years to build the last kilometer,” Mr. Rocchi said. “They had to send in the army to provide security.”
Just up the road from Mr. Brusca’s former villa, past his former horse stables (now run by the cooperative), is the mountain pass at Portella della Ginestra, the scene of one of Sicily’s bloodiest crimes: On 1 May 1947, a gang led by Salvatore Giuliano, a bandit and Sicilian separatist in the occasional employ of the Mafia, shot eleven peasants dead and injured 33 who were holding a protest in favor of land reform. (The director Michael Cimino recreated the killings in his 1987 film adaptation of The Sicilian by Mario Puzo.)
The curious village of Piana degli Albanesi, a five-minute drive from the inn, was settled by Albanian refugees five centuries ago, and is well worth an afternoon visit. Home to a community of 4,000 of their descendants who have maintained their culture and language, it’s a perfectly preserved Renaissance-era town, with cobblestone alleys winding up steep hillsides, several beautiful churches and stunning views of the Jato Valley below.
Across the valley is the mountain town of Corleone, which gave its name to Mario Puzo’s crime family in his epic novel, The Godfather. Corleone was also the domain of Mr. Riina, nicknamed Totò and otherwise known as the The Beast, or The Short One; for decades he was the fugitive capo di tutti capi of the Sicilian Mafia. A diminutive killer who personally gave the orders for the murders of magistrates, policemen and scores of rival Mafiosi, Mr. Riina was captured near his villa in Palermo in May 1993, after 23 years on the run. He is now in solitary confinement in a maximum-security prison outside Milan. Mr. Riina had a rustic property of his own about five miles outside of Corleone; his farmhouse was turned over to the Corleone municipal government, renovated with European Union funding and opened this April as the second bed-and-breakfast in the Libera Terra group. Adjoined by more than one hundred acres of farmland and pasture, that property, Agriturismo Terre Di Corleone, is down a precipitous gravel path, tucked out of sight from the main road. A handsome stone farmhouse, perched on a rise over cactus groves and stony meadows, has been turned into a dining room that had not yet opened when I visited in March; it seats seventy people, and serves organic dishes with ingredients produced almost exclusively on Libera Terra farmland. A path above the restaurant leads to Mr. Riina’s former stables, now the hotel: five comfortable rooms with sixteen beds, looking out on a bamboo-covered veranda and the Jato Valley beyond.
The estate’s isolation would have offered Mr. Riina a perfect environment to hide from the authorities and plot his reign of terror, but whether it was actually used by the capo has never been ascertained. “We know that Riina owned the place, from the property records at the Corleone municipality, and that his family cultivated the fields here,” said Francesco Galante of Libera Terra, “but we don’t have evidence that Riina ever came here personally.”
There’s no doubt, however, that Mr. Riina and his fellow Mafia chieftains maintained near total control of the surrounding area, and that the bed-and-breakfasts and similar projects are helping to break that domination.
“The people from the surrounding towns now get to choose where they work,” said Mr. Galante. “They no longer depend on the favor of Mafia firms, or Mafia-connected businessmen. They feel the difference.” It is a difference that visitors will feel as well, as they sip fine wine in rustic splendor and contemplate the villainy of the men who once ruled this corner of Italy.

If you go:
At Agriturismo Portella della Ginestra near Piana degli Albanesi in Sicily, (39-328) 2134-597 or (39-091) 8574-810, a single room costs 45 euros a night, about $54 at $1.20 to the euro, and includes a breakfast of toast, croissants, fruit, and coffee. Dinner for two, 30 to 40 euros.
At the Agriturismo Terre di Corleone outside Corleone, (39-339) 5247-626, rooms start at 40 euros, with a light breakfast.
Another farmhouse-inn in the Jato Valley that may be worth a stopover— though it is not part of the program for confiscated Mafia properties— is Agriturismo Sant’Agata, on the road between Piana degli Albanesi and Corleone; (39-338) 459-8654; agriturismosantagata. It has 24 beds, a pool, and a restaurant serving local food. Rooms are 60 euros a person for doubles, 75 for singles, with breakfast and dinner.
We had a good meal at the Leon D’Oro hotel and restaurant in Corleone; Contrada Punzonotto; (39-091) 846-4287. At Agriturismo Argomesi di Riolo Giorgio, (39-091) 856-1008, a country retreat outside Piana degli Albanesi, a nice dinner for two was 30 euros.