They would be squatters. The club built a kitchen, a
library and a café. Membership fees were instituted,
but they were (and remain) voluntary.
Mancuso’s club, as he built it, would embrace the
power of sport to be, as the UN has said, “an important
enabler of sustainable development...and peace in its
promotion of tolerance and respect.”
Still, not every brigand has avoided the pull of
organized crime.G
IOSUE DI PRIMA met Mancuso shortly before
moving to Librino in 2014, at age 16. His father
was doing a 15-year stretch in prison for attempted
murder, and his mother worked all day and night as
a cleaner. Eventually di Prima would make Briganti’s
first team—but then he got bored
and dropped out of school. Men
with fast cars and nice watches
asked whether he wanted to pull
off some robberies for them.
Before long, di Prima was deeply
entangled in the criminal world,
and those elements found their
way onto the rugby field. During
one game, in the southern town of
Agrigento, he attacked a teammate
and left the boy in a coma for three
days. Attempted murder charges
were lessened to assault, but he
was banned from playing any
contact sport on Sicily. (Around
the same time, di Prima was also
involved in and convicted of com-
mitting a robbery.) Ultimately he
left Briganti.
As di Prima tells it, it was as if
he’d been cruising down a high-
way, then suddenly found himself
heading into oncoming traff ic. “It
was really stupid,” he says of the
assault. “But at that moment, the
only thing I could think was: Al
diavolo tutti.” (In essence: F--- it.)
Panebianco knows di Prima’s
story as a cautionary tale. In 2018,
at 18, Panebianco graduated from
Carlo Gemmellaro High—he was
the only one of his siblings to
have continued his education that
far—and with job prospects slim
he focused on a dream career in
rugby. Italy’s national academydrafted him that year. But the academy’s funding dried
up, and Panebianco left soon after without having played
a competitive match. He returned to Briganti.
In his absence, the club faced its greatest challenge
to date. Catania had finally, formally, given Mancuso
the right to play at the San Teodoro. But at midnight on
Jan. 11, 2018, a blaze broke out in the Giuseppe Cunsolo
clubhouse, destroying almost everything inside:
shirts, equipment, books, computers. Authorities
never officially connected the fire to the Cosa Nostra,
who rely heavily on arson as an intimidation tactic,
but to Briganti it was a clear message from the mob:
We run Librino.
If club members were intimidated, they didn’t show
it. The following day, almost every player showed up
to train, running drills up and down the San Teodoro’s
concrete bleachers and clearing up the mess. Teams from
all over the world donated money toward a rebuild. “The
fire was a kind of second liberation of this place,” says
Marta Mazzucchelli, who plays for the women’s first78
BRIGANTI RUGBY