How do bureaucracies respond to political corruption? Does the performance of bureaucrats increase or decrease as a result of political corruption? The effect is theoretically ambiguous. Corruption is widely considered to be an obstacle to the proper functioning of the public sector in general and of bureaucracies in particular, yet surprisingly little attention has been paid to the consequences of political corruption for the bureaucracy. This paper fills this gap. We focus on an extreme form of political corruption, mafia infiltration of Italian municipal governments. We leverage a matched difference-in-differences design to study the impact of dismissing city councils infiltrated by organized crime. Results show that once organized crime is removed from local governments, bureaucratic performance goes up: payment delays go down and bureaucrats are more present at work. Analysis on the composition and characteristics of the bureaucracy show that the effect is in part driven by higher turnover post dissolution.