Corleone is a strange little Sicilian town, its squares and streets adorned with plaques honouring famous anti-mafia campaigners. Methought they did protest too much: as I joined the Corleonesi on their evening stroll one Easter a few years ago, I couldn't help noticing that the young locals had styled themselves as extras from The Godfather.

Apart from lending its name to one of Hollywood's best-known fictional families, Corleone spawned an organised-crime clan of exceptional brutality, even by the standards of the Sicilian mafia. After the second world war, a local doctor, Don Michele Navarra, and his psychotic henchman Luciano Leggio, transformed the clan from a band of cattle rustlers into the masters of the town. Their ascendency was followed, in the 1970s and 1980s, by that of Toto Riina, who strangled, shot, bombed and poisoned his way to the position of capo di tutti capi.

Successive Italian governments either stood aside, embarrassed by the lawlessness of western and central Sicily, or actually connived in the corruption. But in the 1990s, the mafia, and the Corleone clan in particular, misread the end of the cold war. Their political cover in Palermo and Rome was removed by the collapse of the Christian Democrat and Socialist parties and several huge domestic political scandals. Above all, the murder of the two investigative magistrates, Giovanni Falcone and Paulo Borsellino, turned Palermo's embryonic anti-mafia movement into a powerful political force.

John Follain tells the Corleone story as a straight narrative. There is no attempt to analyse why Sicily fell to the tyranny of the mafia, while his explanation of the alleged relationships between the Corleonesi and political godfathers such as the former prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, is perfunctory. This is very much a kings-and-queens history of the post-war rise of the Corleones.

The effect is to create two books. The first half is little more than a gore-fest with detailed descriptions of murders committed by the Corleones: although not especially enlightening, it is written with enthusiasm and features some good descriptive passages. But after the murder of the police commander, Alberto Dalla Chiesa, in September 1982, Follain suddenly gets out of second gear.

The history is well known. Dalla Chiesa's murder was a seminal moment that was followed by the appearance of the first supergrass, whose revelations led to the so-called maxi-trial of the late 1980s. After the killing of Falcone and Borsellino in 1992, Riina believed himself invincible and permitted a horrific new round of internecine bloodletting. But now the state, the people and even his competitors in the mafia decided the time had come to fight back.

Riina was eventually arrested, while his successor, Bernardo “the Tractor” Provenzano, was forced into hiding for several years until a police commander tracked him down at a farm just outside Corleone.Although the story has often been told, Follain brings real suspense to its retelling. His prose is gripping and he is especially good at describing the difficulties faced by the police involved in the anti-mafia fight. His account of Falcone's murder makes you feel as though you are preparing the assassination along with its mastermind Giovanni Brusca, known by the grizzly nickname “the cutter of Christians' throats”.

Ironically, the violence deployed by the Corleone clan led to a collapse in mafia power in the late 1990s just as the world was becoming a big market for organised crime. When the Sicilian mafia dropped the baton, the Neapolitan Camorra and the 'Ndrangheta from Reggio Calabria were waiting to pick it up. The Corleone clan may be finished but organised crime in Italy has rarely looked more ambitious and successful.

The Last Godfathers by John Follain

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