A Tourist Guide to ... the Mafia

LONDON, March 21, 2008 — -- Planning a trip to Sicily and wondering how to spot a Mafioso?

Augusto Cavadi, a Sicilian high school teacher and Mafia scholar, tells tourists everything they've wanted to know about the Mafia in a 55-page handbook.

"You know, I couldn't be bothered to always answer the same questions," said Cavadi, who holds seminars for tourists wanting to know more about Sicily's social and historic background.

But this is not only a book for tourists. As a high school teacher, Cavadi was required to plan school exchanges. One thing he found irritating were parents from the north of Italy who would stop their children from traveling to Sicily because they were afraid of what they thought as the "Wild West."

That was enough for a small, cheap and practical tourist guide about the Mafia to be written, distributed and translated into Japanese, French, German, English and Spanish.

Copying the style of a washing machine instruction manual, "Mafia for Tourists" includes answers to the 10 most frequently asked questions, such as: Does the Mafia kill children? Priests? Women? Why have 5 million Sicilians been unable to successfully jail 5,000 Mafiosi? What is the relationship between Mafia and politics? Has the Mafia always existed?

"Yes the Mafia does kill priests if they speak out against it," Cavadi said in an interview with ABC News and this is precisely his point.

"I don't want to diminish the fierceness of [the] Mafia, but I would like to make it absolutely clear that the Mafia doesn't care about tourists. It is not in its interests to attract the police attention and this is why it keeps petty crime under control. Areas where organized crime organizations are operating are as safe as Paris and Rome. Mafia kills those who speak against it: journalists, judges, doctors, politicians," Cavadi said.

In 150 years, only a couple of unlucky tourists have been wounded by Mafiosi. They were driving behind the car of Giovanni Falcone, a judge killed in a Mafia ambush in 1992.