In a corridor, Ciotti and the boy started playing soccer with a balled-up napkin—the boy had a lot of pent-up energy, but it wasn’t safe to play outside. The priest returned to the table with a flushed face. He has been undergoing treatment for a severe illness for a decade. He used WhatsApp to let L. watch a live video of volunteers sweeping and painting her new house. “At five-thirty this afternoon, this will be yours,” he said.
Ciotti was born to a bricklayer and a stay-at-home mother in 1945, in the Belluno province, in a valley in the Dolomites. Italy was economically devastated after the Second World War, and Belluno was poorer than most places in the north. When Ciotti was young, his family moved west to Turin, the embodiment of Italian affluence and sophistication, and his father found work in construction. Ciotti doesn’t remember much kindness toward his family growing up. His intolerance of injustice showed itself early. In first grade, when a teacher called him a hick, Ciotti threw an inkwell at her.
Ciotti began training to become a radio technician. Every day after school, he came across a homeless man who was underlining passages in a book with an elegant red/blue editing pencil. The man told Ciotti that he was a disgraced doctor. He’d performed a procedure on a friend’s wife while inebriated, and she had died. Ciotti offered to help him. “I’m old and don’t need anything,” the man told him, then pointed at some street kids nearby who were using drugs and alcohol. “Do something for them if you can.”
Ciotti took the advice. Instead of becoming a radio technician, he started working with charities that assisted people living on the streets. In 1965, with funds he’d received from a local priest, he opened the organization that came to be known as Gruppo Abele, in honor of the Biblical Abel—he would be his brother’s keeper. In the early seventies, when addicts were viewed as criminals or morally deficient, Gruppo Abele became a nonjudgmental refuge for homeless people and juvenile offenders. Anyone could come in for a hot meal and a place to sleep.
During these years, the Catholic Church’s social conscience was on the rise. A movement of clergy calling themselves Azione Cattolica gained prominence. Its doctrine held that priests had a responsibility not just to prepare souls for the afterlife but also to fight for the rights of the poor and the oppressed. The movement’s message appealed to Ciotti, and, in 1963, he decided to enter the seminary. “I had a girlfriend, not a very serious one,” he said to me. “But I told her, ‘Look, I have to see if this is my calling.’ ” He recounted, “During the day, I dedicated myself to my studies.” At night, he rode a motorcycle around Turin, offering aid to strangers.
In 1972, at the age of twenty-seven, Ciotti was ordained by Michele Pellegrino, a left-wing cardinal. He was assigned to the Archdiocese of Turin, where Pellegrino allowed him to continue working as a street priest instead of having him head a parish where he would have to focus on christenings, marriages, and funerals. Ciotti summarized his theology to me by quoting his friend Tonino Bello, the Bishop of Molfetta: “I don’t care who God is. It’s enough for me to know what He stands for.” When other priests criticized his social activism, Ciotti remembered, Cardinal Pellegrino told them to “come back when they’d done something to help people.” Ciotti celebrated one of his first Masses at Le Nuove, a historic prison. When it got cold in Turin, he sometimes slept alongside homeless people and drug users who sneaked inside trains that were parked overnight at the Porta Nuova station, and offered them a sympathetic ear. In the late eighties, after aids hit Europe, Ciotti provided free assistance to the sick. His politics were progressive and not always in line with the Church’s—among other things, he supported distributing free condoms, including to addicts. He is vocal in his support of gay and trans rights.
In Ciotti’s memoir, “L’Amore Non Basta” (“Love Is Not Enough”), from 2020, he writes that he became known in Turin for offering sex workers a safe haven at Gruppo Abele. He was more interested in aiding victims than in punishing criminals, but his work inevitably drew him into the orbit of drug traffickers, pimps, and others who lived outside the law, and he received many threats. When he was forty-three and visiting his parents for an Easter meal, two men lurked on a landing outside their apartment. A watchful neighbor screamed, and the men ran off—all Ciotti saw was their shadows. At about this time, Ciotti agreed to let the Turin police follow him around town. As the threats grew more intense, Ciotti recalled, an officer told him, “We don’t think you should keep using your car. You should travel in ours.”
Italian organized-crime groups were not significantly affected by Ciotti’s efforts in these early years. He was an irritant only in Turin, far from the southern regions, where their power was centered. Besides, he was a priest, and the Mafia claimed not to kill priests. But in 1992, when Ciotti was forty-seven, the Cosa Nostra shocked Italians by using bombs to assassinate the most important anti-Mafia prosecutor in Sicily, Giovanni Falcone, and his lieutenant, Paolo Borsellino. Shortly afterward, an anti-Mafia priest in Sicily, Don Pino Puglisi, and a priest outside Naples who opposed the Camorra, Don Peppe Diana, were also killed. For two centuries, the Mafia had been a parasite in Italy; now it was threatening to destroy its host. Ciotti, who knew three of the victims, was appalled not just by the murders but by their savagery—eight bodyguards also died in the attacks, as did Falcone’s wife. He decided to add fighting the Mafia to his life’s mission.
In 1993, Ciotti launched Narcomafie, an anti-Mafia magazine, and its unsparing reporting on such vicious crimes as the assassination of Borsellino made it harder for Italians to view people in the Mafia as romantic antiheroes. A year later, Ciotti founded Libera, and soon became the champion of a proposed law that would allow the government to give nonprofits land that had been seized from organized-crime groups. The bill passed in 1996. “We gathered a million signatures for it,” Ciotti told me. Previously, people were too afraid of reprisal to develop property formerly owned by the Mob. Now the confiscated land became agribusinesses and educational projects for teen-agers. The Mafia, Ciotti understood, would hate the idea of young Italians gathering on seized farmland to discuss how they could rid the country of organized crime, as if it were some sort of mid-tier social problem, like pesticide runoff or drunk driving. The law cunningly reframed Italy’s fight against the Mafia: taking away their land domesticated them, shattering the mystique that had allowed them to maintain control.
Ciotti was also instrumental in passing a law to establish March 21st as a day of remembrance for innocent victims of Mafia violence—now estimated at more than a thousand people. For the first time, families of victims could receive public consolation for their loss, rather than feel frightened and isolated. The day has become an eventful one in Italy, with commemorations, marches, and speeches. Every year on the holiday, Ciotti hosts a prayer vigil for family members of organized-crime victims. In 2014, at the Church of St. Gregorio VII, in Rome, Pope Francis joined Ciotti to bless the families. An image of Ciotti and the Pope walking into the church while grasping each other’s hands—allies in battle—was broadcast around the world. A newspaper in Bergamo praised the “delicate, disarming gesture.”
Libera’s actions may be largely symbolic—the ’Ndrangheta alone makes an estimated fifty billion dollars each year, and Ciotti’s group has done little to change that. But he believes that the Mafia’s status in Italy depends on a fragile mixture of inevitability, invisibility, and apathy on the part of some Italians. A small crack might cause a bigger rupture, he told me. The key to breaking the Mafia in Italy, he added, was to convince Italians that it could be beaten, and that it was not an inextricable part of their society. He uses the word mafiosità to describe the attitude of Italians who adopt the unscrupulous behavior of mobsters.
Ciotti’s campaigns—from the exposés of Narcomafie to the lobbying by Libera—turned him into a household name in Italy, and they have also infuriated the Mafia. In 1993, Salvatore (Totò) Riina, then the chief Mafia don, who had ordered the assassinations of Falcone and Borsellino, was convicted of murder and Mafia association and was sent to a maximum-security prison. While incarcerated, Riina was secretly taped giving a confederate some orders regarding Ciotti: “You’re going to get out, and I’m not. When you’re out, I want you to kill this son of a bitch.”
“Are you going to give me warning before you oust me from my post?”
Cartoon by Liza Donnelly
In 2018, on the final day of an anti-Mafia conference in Calabria, a man with a hidden weapon sneaked past a barricade and into a conference hall where Ciotti was speaking. Ciotti’s security detail spotted the man moving through the crowd toward him, and wrestled the man to the ground just twenty feet from where the priest was standing. Within minutes, a helicopter had spirited Ciotti away.
The state now provides Ciotti with five bodyguards and an armored car; whenever he travels to a new place, the local police sweep the area. Ciotti calls his security team “a deterrent” to assassination but said that the Mob could still kill him if it really wanted to. (Riina, who died in 2017, once said, with grudging admiration, that Ciotti was so relentless that he should have been a police commissioner, not a priest.)
Ciotti told me, “My protective detail is now part of my house. They’re part of my family.” He has officiated at marriages and christenings not just of members of his detail but of their parents and children.
One night, in the summer of 2021, I met Ciotti at a restaurant in Rome, in the working-class neighborhood of Ostiense. He travels almost every day—giving presentations; meeting with lawyers, prosecutors, magistrates, police, and other priests; supporting the workers and volunteers under the Libera umbrella. The restaurant was crowded and loud, but, for security reasons, Ciotti and an assistant were in an empty room in the back. At a table near them, five burly men with soft stomachs—Ciotti’s security guards—were quietly enjoying a meal and watching a soccer match on TV. Their guns were out of sight.
Ciotti speaks only Italian. He is lithe, and his skin is pink and mottled. That evening, he was wearing what I came to recognize as his usual priestly ensemble: a long-sleeved dark-blue knit shirt, black trousers, black lace-ups. (He doesn’t like to wear a clerical collar outside church; “I just feel more at ease in other clothes,” he told me.) With his light eyes, strong nose, and long bangs swept across his forehead, he could be mistaken for Liam Neeson—if Neeson never slept in the same place two nights in a row.
Ciotti may live on the run, but that does not wall him off from the joys of ordinary experiences. He enjoys good restaurants, supports the Turin-based soccer team Juventus, and is able to discuss brutal crimes while savoring a vitello tonnato. His frantic travel schedule clearly suits him. He told me that he had visited the U.S. several times. (Once, in New York, he was repeatedly recognized by Italian tourists while he roamed around moma.)
Ciotti ordered one of his favorite dishes, carciofi alla giudia—deep-fried artichokes—and a glass of the house white. As we ate, I asked him what had motivated his anti-Mafia work. He said that it was part of a lifelong attempt to grant dignity to the powerless. “My two points of reference, as a man and a Christian—as a person—are the Gospels and the Italian constitution,” he explained. He added that, wherever he goes in Italy, he tries to do two things: meet with the families of Mob victims, and recite Mass with a priest at a local church. “There isn’t a province in Italy I haven’t celebrated Mass in,” he told me.
