Mayor Leoluca Orlando said that Letizia Battaglia played "an emblematic part in the process of freeing Palermo from the Mafia's control." On an island (Cicily) where 'omerta', the code of silence, was all but law, Battaglia used her Leica camera to speak out before going on to become a local politition with the Green Party, working with investigative judges to bring convictions against 474 members of mafia clans in 1986. As the first Italian woman photojournalist at a daily newspaper, Battaglia used her images as weapons to fight back , bearing witness to mafia's relentless campaign of terror during the 1970s and 1980s. She became a voice for the murder victims and their families, putting her life on the line to create over 600,000 images that reveal the death and destruction of organized crime. "I was sure they'd kill me. It gave me courage," she said in the 2019 documentary film, Shooting the Mafia. She photographed both the victims and the mafia themselves, denying them the protection of silence and invisibility.  But the constant exposure to trauma and stress eventually took its toll, and after 20 years behing the camera, Battaglia left photojournalism. One of her final photographs is of a young boy who was killed after seeing his father murdered. "It was never the same," Battaglia said in the film. "You can never be happy after that kind of horror."