Mafia, the map of the active districts in Palermo: the clans cooperate with each other The DIA report on the activities carried out in 2024. In the absence of a leader, Palermo returns to the center of gravity of the new Cosa Nostra structures
by Fabio Geraci
May 28, 2025
It no longer rules with force, but with balance. It does not rely only on terror, but on money, influence, consensus. The new Cosa Nostra, which emerges from the 2024 Report of the Anti-Mafia Investigative Directorate, is a complex system, without a visible leader but with many centers of power. An organization that "responds with a timely desire for reorganization" and that continues to influence the economy, the territory, politics and even prison. It is in Palermo that the most evident transformations are observed even if, throughout Sicily, the mafia network adapts, resists and in some way renews itself.
In the capital, the clans no longer have a single leader but cooperate according to a structure that the DIA defines as "intermandamental", the result of the "prolonged absence of a solid and recognized leadership". The families, the investigators explain, seek a form of stability between the new and old generations through the division of guidelines and the sharing of operational choices. It is a mafia that mediates more than commands, that tends to manage rather than try to impose its business and that has found in this flexibility a new way to exercise its power.
The Porta Nuova, Pagliarelli, Tommaso Natale, Resuttana, Noce and Brancaccio districts remain fully active, without internal conflicts but with consolidated agreements. As in the case of the Porta dei Greci 2 operation that dismantled a network in Vucciria: ten arrests for drug trafficking of "picciotti" believed to be close to the Porta Nuova district, but without them being charged with the mafia aggravation. A detail that confirms the low profile with which Cosa Nostra manages part of its business today.
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