pool. In the end, Librino “was not a happy place,” says
Paolo Romania, an artist and early resident. Instead,
the mob moved in. But the Cosa Nostra of the ’70s and
’80s was nothing like the pinstriped Corleone clan of
Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. They were tracksuit-wearing,
drug-smuggling thugs who murdered thousands in a
series of wars and bombing campaigns across the era.
Finally, in 1986, Sicilian authorities cracked down
and conducted the world’s largest trial, at a special-
made bunker inside of a Palermo prison. By ’92 pros-
ecutors had convicted 338 of the so-called Maxi Trial’s
475 defendants.
Later that year, mob assassins murdered those pros-
ecutors, shocking Sicilians, but the deaths were the last
convulsions of an underworld on its knees. In the fol-
lowing years the island’s Mafia grew more diffuse, with
a growing income divide. Wealthier mob-
sters moved into white-collar crimes such
as construction, political corruption and
gas-smuggling, from nearby Libya. Small-
time crooks battled for scraps in poor local
markets, such as Librino, peddling stolen
goods and drugs through kids, who stood
to face only reduced juvenile prison terms.
By 2010, when Panebianco was approach-
ing his teen years, Librino was drowning
in opioids. His building was known as an
easy score, and he often witnessed shootings
and police raids. One day, amid a turf war
between rival clans, mobsters set fire to the
door of his brother’s apartment.
Librino would eventually get a high
school, but dropout rates were, and remain,
among the highest on the continent.
“Where the state does not offer training
and education,” read a recent report by
Catania’s anti-Mafia commission, “orga-
nized crime does, with a system of seduc-
tion, values and recruitment that marks
children’s destinies forever.”
The Mafia hired several of Panebianco’s
school friends to work corners, but he
resisted. “Most of the time I stayed home,”
he says. “Because: Hanging around? It’s
not a good thing.”
Back then Panebianco devoted his free time to calcio,
or soccer; rugby was just some game enjoyed hundreds
of miles away, in frigid northern cities such as Milan
and Parma—or farther away, in France and Ireland
and England. Only a handful of sides played rugby in
Sicily. But in 2012, while searching for a spot to kick
around, Panebianco and his friends stumbled upon agroup of people tossing an oval-shaped ball on the f ield
of an old, abandoned sporting complex. That complex
was the San Teodoro. The club was named Briganti, or
“the Brigands.” They took the boys in, and Panebianco
played rugby for the first time.
“I completely fell in love with the game,” he says.
Briganti’s coach and president at that time was
Piero Mancuso, a middle-aged agronomist with salt-
and-pepper sideburns and a bushy Van Dyke beard, and
who had lived in Librino since 1993. He first brought
a rugby ball to the meeting of a Librino social club in
2006, but his project didn’t come to full fruition until six
years later, after unknown assailants ran a 13-year-old
club member, Giuseppe Cunsolo, off the road on his
moped, killing him.
Friends believed that Cunsolo had fallen in with
the Mafia, and Briganti would aim to prevent others
from following that route. Members named their club-
house after the slain teen, and they welcomed boys
and girls from as young as 5, all the way up to senior
men and women. They cleaved an explicitly antiracist,antifascist political line, but their name was decidedly
bellicose, borrowed from a Calabrian folk song called
“Briganti Se More” (or, roughly, “To Die a Brigand”).
The land is ours, and nobody can touch it, goes one line.
Let’s make our enemy tremble.
Mancuso knew what he was up against, and he chose
his sport carefully. He could have taught kids soccer,
76 overwhelmingly Sicily’s most popular pastime—but
BRIGANTI RUGBYHAVING A BALL
At the U-17 girls level, Briganti offers
light in a city where, one player says,
“there’s no future for [young girls].”