I remember the day as if it was yesterday – 23 May 1992, the day that changed Sicilians’ lives for ever. I remember my mother’s tears as she sat glued to the TV, watching what looked like an earthquake. Cars buried in rubble, streets ripped open, dozens of photographers and police officers on the scene of what in my mind could only have been a natural disaster.

I quickly realised that wasn’t the case – that a terrible murder had been committed. The white Fiat Croma buried in the dirt was carrying Cosa Nostra’s number one enemy, the anti-mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone. Mafia bosses had placed 300kg of explosives under the motorway between the airport and Palermo. As the convoy of cars surrounding the Fiat got closer, the bomb was detonated, killing Falcone, his wife and three members of his police escort.

Less than two months later, the same fate struck Falcone’s colleague Paolo Borsellino, killed in a car bomb attack with five members of his escort outside his mother’s apartment building in Palermo.

Following the killings, the bosses from Corleone ordered champagne to toast the judges’ murders. Five days later, the government dispatched 5,000 military personnel to contain what by that point had become an all-out war against the Italian state. I was 10 at the time, and for the next four years I played football in streets surrounded by soldiers carrying machine guns. It was a show of force unknown to Italy since the end of the second world war. “Palermo like Beirut” was the headline splashed across the front pages of Italy’s leading newspaper. Sicily was on its knees, and I felt as though it was the beginning of a catastrophe. On the contrary, the bloody summer of 1992 marked the beginning of the end of the world’s most powerful criminal organisation.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The scene on the highway near Palermo, Sicily, after a bomb killed anti-mafia judge Giovanni Falcone, his wife and three bodyguards in 1992. Photograph: Bruno Mosconi/AP

Now those events seem light years away. Palermo has been reborn from the ashes of those bombs and killings. On the windows of dozens of storefronts and restaurants in Via Maqueda, the lively street that runs through the city’s historic centre, is the “Addiopizzo” (Goodbye extortion) sticker, which is a pledge that the business owners have refused to pay protection money to mafia bosses. It’s just one of the many signs that today Cosa Nostra is the one on its knees.

The effective demise of the Cosa Nostra empire was declared last week by one of the most prominent figures in the Italian judiciary, the former chief prosecutor of Rome, Giuseppe Pignatone.

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In a rare interview on TV with La7, Pignatone, who recently retired after working for the main Italian prosecution offices in the south of Italy, said: “Today the Sicilian mafia is way less dangerous than before. Today we can say that the mafia – the one capable of killing magistrates and attacking the state – has been defeated.”

He is not alone in his assessment. According to numerous experts, the organisation that crafted its own mythology – inspiring films, books and television series – has never been weaker. Decimated by relentless arrests, weighed down by the recent economic crisis, short on cash and on foot soldiers, Cosa Nostra has become a paper tiger.

Dead? No, because it’s still embedded in Sicilian society; but transformed, yes: reduced, according to many, to the level of a neighbourhood gang.

“It is very probable that today’s mafia is the weakest in its history,” says Salvatore Lupo, a professor of contemporary history at Palermo University and a renowned expert in the history of Italy’s Cosa Nostra. “The Italian state has obtained unprecedented results. Judicial pressure and the crisis it has caused in recent years is something that mafia bosses have never experienced in the organisation’s history.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The No Mafia memorial museum in Palermo. In the background is a large portrait of murdered magistrate Paolo Borsellino. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/Observer

Since Falcone and Borsellino’s deaths, the police have arrested more than 4,000 mafiosi, including 361 in 2011 and 300 in 2014. One of the most important arrests following the magistrates’ deaths was that of Totò “the beast” Riina, one of the most ruthless bosses in the history of Cosa Nostra.

Riina, who ordered the magistrates’ killings and another 150 murders, was arrested in 1993 and sentenced to life in prison. In November 2017, he died in jail while in a medically-induced coma following cancer treatment.

“Riina formally remained the boss of the Sicilian mafia until the day he died,” says Sergio Lari, former anti-mafia prosecutor who for more than 10 years was head of the Palermo anti-mafia directorate and lead investigator in the Falcone and Borsellino killings. “It’s clear, however, that in recent years it was difficult for him to manage the organisation’s business interests, given his poor health and the fact that he was isolated in prison.”

The truth is that no one had enough authority to take his place. Today, the most respected bosses are all in jail or have died there. They have been replaced by younger criminals who don’t seem to have the same authority as their predecessors. Rosalba Di Gregorio, one of Palermo’s leading lawyers, defended the superboss and right-hand man of Riina, Bernardo “the tractor” Provenzano. She describes the mafia as in disarray, with “new bosses who are not really bosses at all. They are men who, once they’ve served their prison time and are back on the streets, put on airs as godfathers. They think they’re bosses. The truth is that this is no longer Cosa Nostra.”

Giovanni Falcone’s sister, Maria, says: “In comparison to yesterday’s bosses, who waged war against the Italian state, the new generation are chicken thieves.”

Some believe that the only true godfather capable of taking the reins of the Sicilian mafia is Matteo Messina Denaro, one of the world’s most wanted fugitives, who has been in hiding since 1993. But experts, and many mafiosi, disagree.

“Aside from being a dangerous criminal, the idea that Denaro could be the new super-godfather is just media rhetoric,” says Lupo, co-author of the book La mafia non ha vinto (The Mafia Hasn’t Won) with Giovanni Fiandaca. “We are persuaded to believe that his capture represents that ultimate defeat of Cosa Nostra, but Messina Denaro doesn’t even enjoy legitimacy among many Sicilian bosses.”

“Messina Denaro is the last Mohican of the old mafia,” says Lari. “He may be the boss of the entire province of Trapani, but he certainly isn’t the boss of bosses of Cosa Nostra. Internal dynamics aside, he could never be the superboss for one reason: Matteo Denaro is not from Palermo, and that role is normally held by men from Palermo.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Maria Falcone, sister of the judge Giovanni Falcone, during a commemoration of the 25th anniversary of the murder of her brother. Photograph: Alessio Mamo

Technological advances in the fight against the mafia have played a crucial role. First and foremost is the use of wiretaps and hidden cameras. Bugs placed in bosses’ homes and hidden cameras in mafia hangouts have shed light on the new mobsters’ activities. They have led to compelling evidence in court, with bosses often receiving long sentences in maximum-security prisons.

Following the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, the notoriously harsh prison regime, first introduced in 1975, was intensified, aiming at cutting off mafia inmates completely from their former criminal associates. The new regime banned the use of telephones, any association or correspondence with other prisoners, or meetings with third parties. In order to avoid living a completely isolated life, many mafiosi decide to turn state’s witness.

In Italy they are called pentiti, literally “repentant”. They are mafiosi who, in exchange for lighter sentences, have testified in court against their former associates, thereby contributing to additional arrests and the further weakening of Cosa Nostra. Today, more than 300 former mobsters are collaborating with authorities in Sicily.

The economic crisis, which has hit Italy hard, has also affected the mafia. One of the mafia’s most profitable earners has traditionally been the construction sector, in which companies with ties to mafia bosses would earn millions by skimming contracts for bridges, roads and buildings. In the mafia’s golden years of the 1970s, in Palermo alone mafia-controlled construction activity was worth more than £1bn.

Today the building sector in Sicily is at one of its lowest points: 73,216 people were made redundant between 2008 and 2017, and more than 5,000 businesses have closed, according to Italy’s largest trade union federation. Many mafia families have been forced to decrease the amount of protection money asked of business owners. Investigations in Palermo have even brought to light the technique of paying on an instalment plan, a strategy that, nonetheless, has resulted in arrests following reports from rebellious shopkeepers who are now less fearful of a weakened mafia and more confident that the law will be successfully enforced.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A stall selling Godfather themed t-shirts in Palermo. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/The Observer

In wiretaps, bosses have complained of the economic crisis and have admitted the organisation’s increased weakness.

“What kind of bloody mafia are we?” asked Alfredo Giordano, a former mafioso from Palermo caught on wiretap. “The mafia of lost causes.” He wasn’t even able to recover objects that were stolen from his daughter.

The mafiosi who speak today used to drive Mercedes down the streets of Palermo in the 1980s. Men who held in their hands the life or death of police officers and journalists have lost their power to intimidate.

The wife of mafia boss Salvatore Spica, in a wiretap, complained to her husband: “I used €100 for my mother’s groceries, €200 for the dentist. What’s left? All I have left is spare change.”

“If we had to draw a graph of the military and economic power of Cosa Nostra in the last 100 years,” says Lari, “the highest point on the curve would be the mid-1980s. From the 1990s on, with peaks and troughs, the general trend would be a decrease, up to today, where we’d find the lowest levels.”

Lari believes that one of the most telling examples of the mafia’s current state of crisis is the drugs trade, “where we’ve seen an absolute monopoly on the part of Cosa Nostra transform into bilateral and subordinate agreements, often with the powerful Calabrian ’Ndrangheta”.

In the 1970s, the mafia not only trafficked drugs, it also produced them. Morphine was often purchased in Switzerland and transported to Palermo, where it was processed in hundreds of refineries hidden in the countryside. At the time, 30% of the heroin in the US was produced in Sicily.

Today, the tonnes of cocaine on the streets of Palermo and Catania, as recent investigations have revealed, are moved by the Calabrian ’Ndrangheta. Once snubbed by the Sicilian bosses, today their Calabrian counterparts forge ties with Colombian narcos, control ports, and sell their goods to the Sicilians, who have been demoted to the status of “customers”.

Between 1978 and 1983, the Sicilian mafia killed more than 1,000 people. Hundreds died in the early 80s. Since the mid-1990s, the number of homicides has decreased significantly. The last five years in Palermo have seen only one homicide attributable to Cosa Nostra.

It was 22 May 2017 when two hitmen killed the boss Giuseppe Dainotti, who every morning around 7.50am would ride his bike to the grocery. He took one bullet to the head and a second to the body. The residents in the Noce quarter of Palermo couldn’t make sense of what had happened, as Dainotti’s body lay in a pool of blood for 10 minutes. People had become so unaccustomed to hearing gunshots that they mistook the sounds for fireworks.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Students of the Istituto Nautico Gioeni – Trabia in front at the mural of judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, killed by the mafia. Photograph: Alessio Mamo/Observer

Two obelisks were erected as a memorial on either side of the motorway where Falcone’s car was blown up in 1992. Hundreds of visitors stop, in both directions, to leave flowers and pray. They do the same in front of the memorial placard on Via D’Amelio where Borsellino was murdered.

Gigantic masterpieces of street art on the buildings of Palermo, depicting mafia victims, have taken the place of pro-mafia slogans. The city’s scars have become monuments and an indelible reminder that in the war between good and evil, good has gained the upper hand.

“The battle isn’t over,” says Maria Falcone. “My brother Giovanni said that the mafia is a human phenomenon, and like all human phenomena, it had a beginning and it will have an end. Well, despite the current crisis of Cosa Nostra, that end has not yet arrived.”

Maybe the end hasn’t come yet. But at least the mafia bosses who used to drive fancy cars, buy lavish villas and feel arrogant enough to take on the Italian state, like the boss Dainotti, now move and die on a bicycle.