One Sunday, a few men arrive discreetly in Corleone, a small Sicilian village famous for its mafia activities. It is noon, the sun is beating down, and fathers are parading around the main square. A typical Sunday routine in southern Italy. Suddenly, the visitors fill the square with wooden signs and photos: images of women and men shot dead in their cars or on their mopeds, victims of the mafia. In the blink of an eye, the square is black with blood. A few seconds later, it empties of its crowd, driven away by fear of reprisals from the local killers. The small group packs up and immediately heads back to Palermo, with a sense of accomplishment.

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Now living in Paris, Franco Zecchin remembers his years as a photojournalist. His beard is turning gray and his hair is sticking up in a ponytail, but his eyes light up when he talks about his adventures in Sicily. From 1975 to the early 1990s, the photographer covered the crimes of the Mafia in Sicily, a scourge that was tolerated by the public authorities and endured by the civilian population. At first, I didn't choose to work on the Mafia. I really liked Palermo and its climate. But being a journalist in that city meant dealing with the Mafia. Which I did, under the table, for the left-wing opposition daily L'Aurora. I belonged to the first anti-Mafia association in Palermo. The city's topography was heavily marked by assassinations: we didn't arrange to meet between such-and-such a street, but where Falcone was killed.

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From front-page headlines to illustrations of news stories, Zecchin (who is tuned into the police radio frequency and close to certain investigators) shows almost everything: the hysterical woman trapped by her husband's dead body at the checkout of her grocery store, the child discovering his father's corpse, the repentant man seized by a fit of nervous laughter after his conviction, a mafia kiss. Simply photographing corpses would not have been interesting. What I wanted to show was the life surrounding the dead, to contextualize the corpse. To bring it into the scene. It was very hard work psychologically, but we had this urgency...​

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​Taken on the spot, Zecchin's photos are nevertheless surprisingly well constructed. Invited by a family from a working-class neighborhood to visit their unsanitary apartment, Zecchin returns with a scene that is both biblical and funny, a mother changing her baby's diaper surrounded by a swarm of laughing children and worn-out knickknacks. Today, it would be impossible to take photos like this, Zecchin says, as the police would not allow it. Journalists no longer have the same access to crime scenes, and there are many reporters on the scene. At the time, I was the only one. Until that awkward administrative letter from L'Aurora arrived one morning in 1990, when the newspaper had just changed owners: Sir, we will have to part ways with you. Your trial period is over.