A British historian has spoken of the ‘virtuous minorities’ within the Italian state. A few countries are lucky enough to take certain things almost for granted, like the notion that everyone is equal before the law, or that the state should serve the interests of all its citizens rather than the friends and family of whoever happens to wield power, whether it be in a national ministry or in a local hospital. All too often in Italy—and not just in Italy—such values have to be fought for, day to day, by a virtuous minority of people from all walks of life and of all political persuasions. It is not, of course, that the majority of Italians are corrupt, or that Italian public life is entirely rotten. As is doubtless true of most societies around the world, the majority just adapt to survive in the environment in which they find themselves.
Italy’s virtuous minorities have rarely seemed so beleaguered as during the 1980s. The terrorist emergency slowly subsided, the labour movement went into retreat, support for the PCI declined, and a new economic boom began to gather pace. But at the same time sleaze sank deeper than ever into the fabric of society. The Socialist Party, now a permanent partner in governing coalitions, all but abandoned its reforming goals and strove to ‘occupy the state’ in the same way that the DC had done since the 1950s. These were the years of what Italians called the ‘party-ocracy’, when all state employees from the board members of nationalized banks down to school janitors seemed to have been chosen on the basis of party affiliation. For businesses in some towns and cities, winning a government contract of any kind inevitably involved paying kickbacks to party bag carriers.
Amid the constant horse-trading between factions in parliament, and with public opinion increasingly resigned and disillusioned, the Italian political class of the 1980s was hardly likely to slough its century-old habit of treating Sicilian society as if it amounted to no more than a squabbling band of politicians to buy off. Tragically, this same political class was called on to confront Cosa Nostra at a time when it became wealthier and more bloodthirsty than ever before.
The Sicilian mafia has always brought out the worst and the best in the Italian state, both its most duplicitous villains, and the most virtuous of the virtuous minorities. In the year before his death, Giovanni Falcone gave a series of interviews to a French journalist in which he famously explained that he was not some suicidal Robin Hood: ‘I am simply a servant of the state in terra infidelium’—in the land of the infidels. In a country that now had a respectable claim to be the fifth largest industrial economy on earth, Sicily was still a frontier zone for the rule of law.
Falcone was in many ways the figurehead of Italy’s virtuous minorities, and it is not hagiographic to say that he demonstrated their virtues in a pure form: courage, of course, but also devotion to his job and a legendary capacity for hard work. Falcone was also rigorously honest and correct in his dealings with people; it was a trait that could at times make him seem stiff and unfriendly. But more than a facet of his character, it was a calculated defence mechanism both for himself and for those around him. Anyone who had regular access to him, even the most upright of his friends, was a potential channel through which Cosa Nostra could make an approach.
Francesco La Licata, one journalist who often interviewed Falcone, experienced just such an approach at first hand. His bizarre encounter with the mafia began one morning over coffee in a bar when someone asked him, ‘Do you remember me?’ It was Gregorio, a man from the quarter of the city where La Licata had grown up; Gregorio lived on the margins of organized crime. ‘Let’s go for a ride, and we can talk about how things were when we were kids,’ he suggested. Warily, La Licata agreed to get in Gregorio’s red VW, but no sooner had he sat down than he noticed the handle of a pistol protruding from the seat pocket. ‘There are some people who want to talk to you, but don’t worry. Everything’s OK,’ Gregorio said with a smile.
During the journey La Licata tried to calculate how likely he was to be murdered. After a change of car, he was taken deep into a lemon grove in what remained of the Conca d’Oro. There he was brought face to face with a capofamiglia whom he recognized from a police mugshot. The boss began, ‘Please excuse us for the way we invited you here. But as you know I’m on the run from the law. We have found out about you. We know you are a reliable type and you do your job honestly.’ The mafioso then began to deliver a circuitous, maudlin speech in his own defence. All the while, La Licata struggled to follow what he was hearing while casting nervous glances at the deep water of a cistern near where they stood.
Finally the boss got to the point: ‘We know that you can talk to Judge Falcone. You have to tell him how things stand, that we are just family men who are the victims of a shameful smear. All you need to tell him is what I’ve just finished telling you.’ It was a classic opening gambit. Establishing even a vaguely compromising connection of this kind with a judge could open the way for an exchange of favours, blackmail, or intimidation.
La Licata knew that a blank refusal to act as go-between could easily be fatal. Thinking frantically and speaking with measured politeness, he explained that anyone making contact with Falcone on a mafioso’s behalf was likely to be put under investigation; he suggested that the boss could make his point through a newspaper interview instead. ‘I’m not authorized,’ came the reply. ‘We don’t do that kind of thing.’ La Licata’s second suggestion—a memorandum sent to Falcone and the press through his lawyers—met with a better reception. ‘Well done! Good idea! That way Falcone won’t take offence. He’s a nasty character.’
In the space of a brief exchange, La Licata had successfully staked his life on Falcone’s reputation for rigorous honesty and procedural correctness—what the mafioso called his ‘nasty character’. Feeling as if he had survived an air disaster, the journalist was taken back unharmed to the bar he had left a few hours before. He did not tell Falcone the story of his abduction until several years later. By way of reply, Falcone matter-of-factly confirmed that he would indeed have placed him under investigation. The two men became friends.
Emanuele Notarbartolo, the banker and former mayor of Palermo stabbed to death on a train in 1893; and Joe Petrosino, the New York policeman shot dead in Sicily in 1909: in the first century of its existence, the Sicilian mafia killed only two establishment figures, two men whose status in the world of business, politics, administration, journalism, justice, or law enforcement qualified them as cadaveri eccellenti. Since the late 1970s, as the power of the Corleonesi has grown, there have been dozens of these ‘eminent corpses’. A few of them were friends who failed to respect their pact with the bosses, but the vast majority have been Cosa Nostra’s enemies. After 1979, violence became the dominant note in the mafia’s duet with the upper world of the institutions. And the violence reached a crescendo as Falcone and other members of the virtuous minority made unprecedented advances in the struggle to defeat Cosa Nostra.
Looking back, the first sign of the new aggression came in 1970 with the disappearance of L’Ora investigative reporter Mauro De Mauro. It is still not clear what he had discovered, perhaps evidence of the heroin trade or of the neo-Fascist putsch that year in which Cosa Nostra was asked to take part. In 1971, the Palermo prosecutor Pietro Scaglione was shot dead after visiting his wife’s tomb. Considerable suspicion surrounded Scaglione at the time—although it is now known that he was the victim of mafia smear tactics which were aimed, as ever, at devaluing the life of an innocent victim. For that reason his death was easily dismissed in some circles as an internal mafia affair. Even the 1977 murder of a colonel in the carabinieri near Corleone could still be treated as an anomaly. Only in 1979 did the new pattern of mafia tactics became unmistakable. In that year, as if to demonstrate how comprehensive was its assault on the institutions, Cosa Nostra killed a journalist (the Giornale di Sicilia’s crime correspondent), a politician (the leader of the Palermo DC), a policeman (the chief of the Palermo flying squad), and a magistrate (Cesare Terranova, the man who had led investigations into the first mafia war). The mafia’s message was now clear: no matter how prominent, any public figure who stood in the way of Sicily’s state within a state was going to be killed.
The demonstrative recklessness and brutality with which many of these murders were performed by the Corleonesi bore its own message too. Terranova died in the street outside his Palermo home; despite the risk of being seen, the three killers fired more than thirty pistol and rifle shots, and even took the time to walk up to the old magistrate and administer a coup de grâce. Again and again, around the eminent cadavers were strewn the corpses of guards, drivers, family members, friends, and passers-by. Cosa Nostra was flourishing its savage might. The following year, 1980, saw three eminent corpses: the captain of the carabinieri in Monreale, the president of the Sicilian Region, and the chief prosecutor in Palermo. The latter was gunned down in the very centre of the city, within sight of the Teatro Massimo; it was the Sicilian equivalent of carrying out an execution in Piccadilly Circus or Times Square. (This murder was actually ordered by Bontate and Inzerillo to show that they could leave eminent corpses with the same abandon as the Corleonesi.)
Nineteen-eighty-one saw the beginning of the mattanza, with its almost daily spectacle of murder; bodies were left near police headquarters or simply burned in the street. One of the most prominent of the mafia’s victims fell at the height of the slaughter. Pio La Torre was a straight-talking peasant activist who had risen to become a Communist MP, the leader of the PCI in Sicily, and one of the most dynamic members of the Antimafia commission of inquiry. In April 1982, he was the victim of a carefuly planned ambush, again in a busy Palermo street.
The Italian state’s response was to send General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to be the new prefect of the Sicilian capital. Dalla Chiesa had a long track record of fighting the mafia, even serving in Corleone when Luciano Leggio began his rise. More importantly, the general had just made himself a national hero by bringing home great successes in the fight against left-wing terrorism. Before setting off, he made it clear to his political masters in Rome that he had no intention of being soft on the mafia’s political wing. A few short months after his arrival in Palermo, a firing party of about a dozen mafiosi blocked the road in front of his car in via Carini and machine-gunned him, his young wife, and their escort to death. The day afterwards, someone scrawled on the wall at the scene, ‘Here died the hope of all honest Sicilians.’ The funeral was televised live across Italy, and the nation saw the angry crowd throwing coins at the government ministers who attended.
The politicians had failed to give Dalla Chiesa the powers he wanted, and a campaign of journalistic sniping created the distinct impression that he was isolated, as his son explained five days after the murder:
During the fight against terrorism my father was used to having his back covered, to having all the constitutional political parties behind him—first among them the DC. This time, as soon as he arrived in Palermo, he understood that a part of the DC was not prepared to cover him. More than that it was actively hostile.
With General Dalla Chiesa given such lukewarm backing, Cosa Nostra felt entitled to treat his appointment as yet another empty gesture, and to calculate that the political price of killing him would be correspondingly low. It would be tempting to label the mafia’s tactics in the early 1980s as terroristic, except that terrorists usually see themselves as representatives of the oppressed, as lone fighters taking on a powerful state with the only weapons available to the weak and desperate. Cosa Nostra, by contrast, with its new heroin wealth and its old record of impunity, simply did not take the Italian state seriously. More than a campaign of terror, it was a campaign of scorn.
Further names were soon added to the roster of eminent corpses. Looking back through that catalogue of atrocity, one begins to sense how increasing numbers of Sicilians felt at the time, their exasperated hope that, finally, one of these murders would become a turning point, marking the moment when the Italian state found the resolve to stand up to the mafia threat. There were times when the government did respond. Following the death of General Dalla Chiesa, a law pioneered by the murdered Communist Pio La Torre was finally passed; for the first time it became a crime to belong to a ‘mafia-type association’, defined as a criminal organization that relied on systematic intimidation, omertà, and the infiltration of the economy through extortion rackets carried out on a territorial basis. It was the Italian equivalent of America’s RICO measures (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), passed in 1970. The law also allowed the state to confiscate a mafioso’s ill-gotten gains. These were hugely important new weapons in the fight to bring Cosa Nostra to justice. But the signals from the politicians remained ambivalent. It was never ‘the Italian state’ as such that took on Cosa Nostra. The turning point never came. The battle against the mafia continued to be fought by a heroic minority of magistrates and police, supported by a minority of politicians, administrators, journalists, and members of the public.
On 29 July 1983, Cosa Nostra deployed a car bomb in central Palermo to kill Falcone’s boss, the chief investigating magistrate, Rocco Chinnici; his two bodyguards and the concierge of the apartment block where he lived also died in the explosion. The first mafia war had seen journalists reach for parallels between Palermo and Prohibition-era Chicago; now Beirut seemed the only possible twin town for the Sicilian capital. One anonymous policeman described the desperate mood among investigators to L’Ora:
We are at war, but for the state and the authorities in this city, on this island, it is as if nothing is happening … The mafiosi are firing with machine guns and TNT. We can only hit back with words. There are thousands of them and only a few hundred of us. We set up spectacular road blocks in the city centre, while they stroll calmly about in Corso dei Mille, Brancaccio and Uditore.
Chinnici’s death did lead to a quiet act of extraordinary heroism, typical of the way in which a heroic minority was fighting the battle against the mafia. The news of Chinnici’s death had a profound effect on Antonino Caponnetto, a pale, timid magistrate whose hobby was keeping canaries. Caponnetto, a Sicilian with a safe and prestigious job in Florence, was nearing retirement. Yet within days of Chinnici’s assassination, he sent in an application to take the murdered magistrate’s place. As he later explained, ‘It was an impulse that partly came from the spirit of service that has always motivated my work. In part, it also came out of my Sicilian identity.’ When he entered his new office in Palermo’s Palace of Justice, he found a telegram of congratulations on his desk. It was supposed to say, ‘I wish you success,’ but it had been doctored to read, ‘I wish you dead.’ Caponnetto spent the next four and a half years living in a tiny room in the carabinieri barracks for his own protection.
No sooner had Caponnetto arrived than he brought together a small team of magistrates who would come to inflict colossal blows on the Sicilian mafia. His idea, borrowed from the campaign against left-wing terrorism, was to form a ‘pool’ of specialized antimafia magistrates to share information, and therefore reduce the risk of reprisals. Caponnetto chose his team to create an ‘organic and complete’ picture of the mafia problem; the pool comprised Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, Giuseppe Di Lello, and Leonardo Guarnotta. In the atmosphere of quiet determination created under Caponnetto’s leadership, they set about their work.
The public only became aware of just how stunningly successful the pool had been when Caponnetto gave a press conference at the Palace of Justice on 29 September 1984. The veteran magistrate announced the news that Tommaso Buscetta, ‘the boss of two worlds’, was collaborating with justice—366 arrest warrants had been issued as a result. Even ‘pushy embezzler’ Vito Ciancimino had been served with notification that he was under investigation; Buscetta revealed that he was in the hands of the Corleonesi. (Later, Ciancimino and both Salvo cousins, the barons of Italy’s privatized tax collection system, were arrested.) Many of the indicted men were already fugitives from justice, but the Palermo police still ran out of handcuffs when they came to capture all the defendants. With a broad smile on his thin face, Caponnetto spelled out the significance of the evidence that had been accumulated:
What we have here is not just a variety of mafia cases. The mafia as such is going on trial. So it would not be rash to say that this is a historic operation. At last we have succeeded in penetrating right into the heart of the mafia’s structure.
The huge trial that Caponnetto was referring to would aim to prove that the mafia was a single, unified structure—the ‘Buscetta theorem’, as the newspapers came to call it. It was to be a Copernican revolution in thinking about the honoured society.
The Corleonesi responded to the news of Buscetta’s defection with attacks on pentiti and their relatives: Leonardo Vitale, the capodecina who had turned to the police during his spiritual crisis, was shot dead in December, as was Buscetta’s brother-in-law. (Italy still had nothing resembling a proper witness protection programme.) And when the police got close to hunting down the bosses who were still in hiding, Cosa Nostra retaliated immediately. At the end of July 1985, Beppe Montana, the flying squad officer in charge of the hunt for mafia fugitives, was shot and killed at the seaside suburb of Porticello. Despite being off duty, Montana was using his little motor launch to spy on the summer homes of mafiosi. Word had gone round that the police had decided that two leading mafia killers were not to be taken alive. In killing Montana, Cosa Nostra issued its vicious response to this challenge: the assassins used dum-dum bullets. Montana’s girlfriend, only a few metres away when he was shot, was left alive to run from house to house, trying frantically to find a telephone as the streets of the town emptied and shutters closed. There could be no clearer image of the fear and omertà that gripped western Sicily.
Montana was the third man from his unit to die. The police union protested that in Sicily the state only made itself visible at the funerals of policemen killed by the mafia. But the problems for the police only increased when they caught a young semi-professional footballer and sea-urchin fisherman believed to be the killers’ lookout; he was tortured and beaten while in custody, and by the time he was taken to hospital it was too late. After attempts at a cover-up ended in a squalid fiasco, the suspect’s death was greeted with fury. The Minister of the Interior reacted with alacrity, and dismantled the group of police and carabinieri that had been responsible for most of the successes against Cosa Nostra in the previous few years.
Less than twenty-four hours after the Minister’s decision was announced, another senior flying squad officer, Ninni Cassarà, was ambushed and killed. The violence of his death was shocking even by the terrible standards of Palermo in the 1980s. A platoon of between twelve and fifteen killers occupied the building opposite Cassarà’s home and opened fire as he stepped from his bulletproof car. His wife could only watch from the balcony as more than 200 rounds were sprayed at her husband. Killed with him was twenty-three-year-old policeman Roberto Antiochia who, knowing how vulnerable his superior was, had returned early from his holidays to offer protection. Only a few days previously Cassarà had given an interview in which he said, ‘Anyone who takes their job seriously ends up getting killed sooner or later.’
The sense of isolation felt by the police exploded into rage. Members of the flying squad threatened to apply en masse for a transfer. They protested about the lack of witnesses coming forward, and turned away from police headquarters people seeking to renew their passports; one citizen who telephoned with a routine inquiry was simply told to ‘fuck off’. At Antiochia’s funeral, the presence of the Minister of the Interior and the President of the Republic nearly provoked a police riot outside Palermo’s 800-year-old cathedral. The dead officer’s colleagues spat at the two statesmen, shouting insults: ‘Bastards! Murderers! Clowns!’ Fighting broke out between the flying squad and the carabinieri. One officer vented his fury to a journalist:
We are sick of this. We don’t need these state funerals. It’s always the same faces, the same words, the same condolences. After two days public opinion calms down … and everything carries on as before. With us dickheads getting ourselves killed because we’re hit both by the mafia and by our leaders.
There has never been any suggestion that the two statesmen against whom the police chose to vent their rage were guilty of complicity with Cosa Nostra. But the message was nonetheless clear: it was not Italy that was fighting the mafia; it was an embattled minority bound together by fierce team spirit and a sense of duty.
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were old friends by the time they prepared the prosecution case in the maxi-trial (their job did not include being advocates in court). They were almost the same age, and had been brought up in the same small quarter of central Palermo by parents from the same kind of middle-class background; Falcone’s father was a chemist and Borsellino’s a pharmacist. The two men shared the same devotion to duty and the same unshakeable faith in justice. But they were very different, with different political leanings. Without ever associating with any political party, Falcone had left-wing sympathies. Borsellino joined a neo-Fascist group as a young man, and he retained a much stronger Catholic faith than his colleague. Both magistrates always meticulously resisted any overtures from political parties who sought to capitalize on their reputations.
Falcone and Borsellino also had different attitudes to the city in which they lived and worked. Falcone, perhaps in keeping with his more diffident personality, was more pessimistic about the degree to which Palermo supported his work. Every day he went to work in a speeding convoy of four bulletproof cars full of agents with machine-guns and bulletproof vests; a helicopter watched over their route. To judge by the contemporary letters pages of the Giornale di Sicilia, some Palermo residents thought that the traffic congestion created by these convoys was a far more serious problem than the mafia. Falcone was particularly upset when one of his neighbours wrote to suggest that he should be forced to move to the suburbs. Borsellino, a more outgoing man with a healthy streak of hedonism, was more sanguine: ‘They are cheering us on.’
Both men drew strength from the growing voice of Sicily’s antimafia movement. Students were staging demonstrations against the mafia in the streets of the city. Campaigners had set up a study centre named after Peppino Impastato. In Salvatore Pappalardo, Sicily now had a Cardinal Primate who was not afraid to use the word ‘mafia’ or to denounce the state’s inaction in the face of the slaughter. As a consequence, in 1983, the Cardinal’s Easter mass in the Ucciardone prison was boycotted by inmates. Some grass-roots clergymen were much more forthright in their opposition to the mafia.
Forces for change were even gathering within the Democrazia Cristiana. Leoluca Orlando, Palermo’s DC mayor elected in July 1985, was a vocal opponent of the mafia who ensured that the city council was represented as a ‘civil complainant’ in the maxi-trial. He presided over what became known as the ‘Palermo spring’—an exhilarating contrast to the grim winter of collusion that had held much of Palermo city council in its grip since the Second World War. Yet the attitude of most Palermitani to the magistrates’ battle remained one of nervous neutrality; as Falcone said, ‘It seems to me as if the city is watching from the window, waiting to see how the bullfight ends.’
The maxi-trial opened on 10 February 1986; it would last for the best part of two years. As proceedings began, a tense calm descended on Palermo. Cosa Nostra’s killers were under orders to lie low while the drama switched from the streets to a massive floodlit concrete bunker abutting the Ucciardone prison where the specially built courtroom was housed. The bunker showed that the public revulsion at all the eminent corpses had at last forced the Italian state into giving a tangible demonstration of its commitment to tackling Cosa Nostra. But it was a far from reassuring sight: one journalist said it looked as if a giant judicial spaceship had landed in Palermo. The main hall was green and octagonal, with thirty cages placed around the outside for the 208 most dangerous defendants. Of the total of 474 men who faced charges, 119 were still on the run, the most important being Luciano Leggio’s ‘beasts’, ‘Shorty’ Riina and ‘Tractor’ Provenzano. Leggio himself, dressed in a blue tracksuit and white tennis shoes, was the first to speak from Cage 23; he announced that he would be conducting his own defence against the charge that he had been running the Corleonese faction from prison.
As the trial opened, journalists sounded out the public mood. Many people in the streets of Palermo were reluctant to talk. Some were openly against the trial, saying that there was more unemployment now that the mafia was on the defensive. Most were sceptical: ‘It’s a farce. It will only get the ones who have stuck their necks out too far. The big politicians will decide how the trial ends.’ Buscetta had made it clear that he did not think Italy was ready to hear all his secrets yet; he was keeping to himself what he knew about the mafia’s links to top statesmen. Many people thought that the mafiosi who had fought out the mattanza were merely thugs, and that the real mafia were the string-pullers much higher up.
But doubts about the maxi-trial were not confined to vox pop interviews. Some of the most thoughtful opinion-leaders in Sicily simply could not grasp the trial’s real significance. For one thing, the sheer dimensions of the case were unnerving—Cardinal Pappalardo called it ‘an oppressive show’. In a much-discussed interview given just before the maxi-trial began, the Cardinal seemed to row back from his earlier firm stance on the mafia. He said that abortion killed more people than the mafia, and worried about the effect that all the media attention on the trial would have on Palermo’s image. Asked whether he would define himself as an antimafia prelate, he equivocated significantly: ‘You can’t build anything with a purely negative attitude. It is not enough just to be anti-something.’
Many people shared a fear that the maxi-trial was an attempt to deliver justice in bulk, and that it would be impossible carefully to measure each individual defendant’s guilt or innocence. Some suspected that the scale of the trial reflected only the scale of the magistrates’ egos.
The evidence of pentiti also raised doubts. Many onlookers had grave concerns about how reliable their testimonies would prove. In 1985, a prominent television personality had been the victim of a grave miscarriage of justice after false evidence supplied by a pentito from the Neapolitan Camorra. To many observers, using the testimony of Tommaso Buscetta presented the same risks on an even bigger scale.
There was precious little room for neutrality during the months of the maxi-trial. The Buscetta theorem flew in the face of profoundly rooted assumptions about the mafia, and about what it meant to be Sicilian. To grasp its implications would take a giant leap in understanding. It was a leap that even some of the mafia’s most outspoken enemies simply could not make. One famous and surprising name came to symbolize how hard it was for many Sicilians to accept what Falcone and Borsellino were doing, to see them as the solution rather than as part of the problem: Leonardo Sciascia.
Sciascia was the novelist who had done so much to bring the mafia to the public’s attention back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Even today it is to novels like The Day of the Owl that most non-Italians turn when they want to find out about the mafia. Everything about Sciascia’s background, his writing, his sense of his own Sicilian identity, had pitted him against the mafia for over three decades. Tragically, in January 1987, the same forces also brought him down on the wrong side of a city divided and perplexed by the maxi-trial.
Eleven months into proceedings, Sciascia wrote an article in the Corriere della Sera that would fatally undermine his reputation as an opponent of the mafia. The article took its cue from two recent events: the publication of a book about the iron prefect’s crusade against organized crime during the Fascist years; and Paolo Borsellino’s promotion. (Borsellino had just been put in charge of the office of investigation in Marsala on Sicily’s westernmost tip where the Corleonesi had close allies.) Sciascia argued passionately that the maxi-trial threatened to trample on civil liberties in the same way that Fascism had done. He fulminated against a climate—we would now call it ‘politically correct’—in which any criticism of the antimafia magistrates was treated as if it were a sign of complicity with the bosses. He concluded his polemic by accusing Borsellino of careerism: ‘There is nothing better for getting ahead in the magistracy than taking part in mafia trials.’
Sciascia’s outburst caused profound shock in Italy where the public tends to look to writers and intellectuals for the kind of moral leadership that politicians too often fail to provide. It was a role that Sciascia took very seriously; in his own way he viewed himself as a voice of reason in terra infidelium, as solitary and rational as the detectives in his novels who tried and failed to breach the wall of omertà. All the more reason for Borsellino to be deeply hurt by the Corriere della Sera article; he said that Sciascia had been an intellectual father figure for him. Some of the mafia’s politicians subsequently took a sneering delight in quoting the novelist against the magistrates he had inspired.
By the time he penned his attack on the antimafia magistrates, the author of The Day of the Owl was terminally ill. For many solitary years he had devoted all the subtleties of his art to understanding the mafia’s thought-patterns, and he resented the antimafia sloganeering that now abounded. But Sciascia’s polemic was more than the outburst of a balky, moribund old man. It was the voice of the distrust that generations of Sicilians seemed to feel towards both the mafia and the Italian state.
Sciascia was the self-taught son of a man who worked in the sulphur mines of Agrigento province. He had witnessed as a boy the hypocritical brutalities of the Fascist regime, and he had seen the mafia kill union leaders in the sulphur mines after the war. For him the mafia was an informal branch of the Italian police; both the state and the mafia had the same repressive reflexes. The lesson of both his life and Sicily’s history was that the island could expect nothing but trouble from the authorities. Sciascia’s pessimism about the Italian state was matched by his fatalism about Sicily. He had long believed that the mafia at its root was not a self-conscious organization but a mental condition that made a prison house for even the most rational of Sicilian minds:
When I speak out against the mafia it also makes me suffer because within me, as within every Sicilian, the residue of mafioso feeling is still alive. So when I struggle against the mafia I’m also struggling against myself; it is like a split, a laceration.
Thankfully for the island, Caponnetto, Borsellino, Falcone, and many like them were untroubled by Sciascia’s ‘laceration’ and had a very different idea of what it means to be Sicilian.
The verdict of the maxi-trial was announced on 16 December 1987. Of the 474 accused, 114 were acquitted; 2,665 years of jail were shared out between the guilty. The message in the numbers was clear: the court had upheld the ‘Buscetta theorem’, but it had demonstrably not dished out the kind of justice in bulk that many civil libertarians had feared. Even Luciano Leggio was acquitted for lack of evidence; it had not been possible to prove that he had still been giving orders from behind bars.
In the days following the verdict, the newspapers that supported the magistrates proclaimed an end to the myth that the mafia was an invincible and inseparable part of Sicilian culture. It was a premature reaction, uttered more in hope than conviction. The maxi-trial verdict would be subject to a long appeals process before it became an established truth, and confirmation of the verdict was far from a foregone conclusion. Leonardo Sciascia, for one, stuck to his sceptical guns, still unable to accept the ‘Buscetta theorem’: ‘My opinion has always been that the mafia is actually a confederation of mafias.’ Two years later Sciascia would go to his grave, to the end refusing to admit the hope that either he or Sicily could ever leave the mafia behind.
Falcone took the verdict as proof that ‘by respecting the rules of democracy we can achieve important results against organized crime’. He knew that notable progress was already being made against the mafia. Before the maxi-trial had even finished, investigations into Cosa Nostra had produced two further large-scale cases; all three maxi-trials were handled together by Caponnetto’s pool. An important new pentito, Antonino Calderone, was giving evidence that was due to lead to a fourth maxi-trial; 160 arrests were made in March 1988. Magistrates from other Sicilian cities were building a series of related prosecutions. But Falcone was at pains to emphasize that the maxi-trial was no more than a good starting point in the battle against Cosa Nostra.
He would have perhaps been even more downbeat had he known what pentiti later revealed. ‘We were sure that the maxi-trial would turn out to be a bluff. The final verdicts would not accept the “Buscetta theorem”.’ The word inside Cosa Nostra was that the maxi-trial was a political showpiece created as a response to the bloody years since the mattanza. There would have to be convictions in the first trial, but they would gradually and quietly be reversed on appeal; normality would be re-established in the end.
For a while it looked as if that was exactly what was going to happen. Because Italy’s legal system took so long to produce definitive verdicts, legislation was passed to prevent prisoners spending too long in custody awaiting the final outcome of their cases. And because of their complexity, mafia cases were particularly slow. Thus it was that mafia defendants were among the main beneficiaries of the legislation: by the beginning of 1989, only 60 of the 342 men convicted in December 1987 were still behind bars.
Then, in 1990, the Palermo Court of Appeal reversed some of the maxi-trial convictions and—crucially—failed to uphold the central plank of the Buscetta theorem: that the members of the Commission, by virtue of their position, were guilty of ordering the important murders that Cosa Nostra carried out. The case was then referred to the first section of the Court of Cassation where many observers expected that the verdicts at the original maxi-trial would be undermined still further.
There was insidious opposition to Falcone from within the judicial system. After the maxi-trial verdict, the founder of the antimafia pool, Antonino Caponnetto, decided to return to Florence. Falcone, who wept at Caponnetto’s leaving party, was the obvious candidate to take his place at the head of the investigative office. But at the end of a sordid story of politicking, corridor intrigue, and professional jealousy, thinly veiled by attacks on a ‘cult of personality’ that was supposedly building up around Falcone, the post went to Antonino Meli, a man two years from retirement who was inexperienced in investigating mafia cases. Falcone was not just humiliated and devastated, he was afraid. ‘I am a dead man,’ he said to friends. He was all too aware that Cosa Nostra would read any sign that the state was not backing him as an indication that he was vulnerable.
Unknown to the public, Meli then proceeded to share out mafia investigations among magistrates seemingly at random, to load the pool members with non-mafia cases, to add new members to the pool without consulting anyone as to their suitability, and to divide up mafia cases and distribute the pieces among investigators from different Sicilian cities. No doubts have ever been raised about Meli’s integrity or intentions, it was just that his was a method that went against the fundamental principle of Falcone’s work: that Cosa Nostra was a single organization that required a coordinated judicial response.
Viewing these developments with alarm from his new post in Marsala, Borsellino eventually felt the need to make his worries public. ‘I have the nasty feeling that somebody wants to turn the clock back,’ he said. There was an immediate political flare-up, and the national governing body of the magistracy, known as the CSM, met in special session and decided to investigate Borsellino’s claims. Falcone wrote to explain that under Meli’s leadership, antimafia investigations had ground to a halt. As the supposedly confidential CSM hearings into the affair were leaked by both pro-Falcone and anti-Falcone camps, and as the usual accusations of political bias and ‘cult of personality’ flew, all sense of the real issues was lost. Falcone offered and then withdrew his resignation. At the end of a time-consuming and demoralizing row, the CSM lamely ordered both sides to patch up their differences, leaving Falcone’s position even weaker. Palermo’s Palace of Justice became known as the ‘Poison Palace’.
The tale of Falcone’s troubles at the hands of some of his fellow magistrates in the wake of the maxi-trial is a depressing demonstration of how solipsistic Italy’s public institutions can be. In the eyes of many politicians and their allies in the magistracy, the antimafia pool was not seen as a more or less useful instrument for doing what the judicial system is supposed to do: protect the innocent and punish the guilty out there in the real world. Rather it was seen as just one more ‘power centre’ from which to exercise influence over rivals within the state. In trying to uphold the rule of law, Falcone and Borsellino sometimes gave the impression of three-dimensional beings who were forced to explain their thinking to the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world. The two magistrates could struggle all they might to point to the third dimension of legality, but the very notion that such a dimension existed was all but incomprehensible to men whose only coordinates were petty politics and procedural quibbling.
In June 1989, Falcone’s renewed fears about his vulnerability were confirmed when an Adidas sports bag packed with explosives was found on the rocks beside a beach house that he and his wife had rented just outside Palermo. Uncharacteristically, he said openly that he thought unknown politicians close to Cosa Nostra were involved in planning the attempt on his life. The following months saw affairs in the Poison Palace brought before the CSM once again, after Falcone was the victim of a campaign of anonymous defamatory letters probably written by one of his colleagues. The main accusation was that he had used a mafia defector to fight a dirty war against the Corleonesi. The following January, Leoluca Orlando, the antimafia mayor of Palermo who had gone as far as to ally himself with the Communists in an effort to change the climate of city government, was finally brought down by the DC leadership in Rome, who saw him as a political maverick. The prospects for Falcone, and for the antimafia movement, looked bleak indeed.
* * *
But in February 1991, Falcone—so often the victim of political opportunism—became its beneficiary. It was a moment when the fate of the antimafia movement was dramatically reversed. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the postwar pack-ice of Italian politics began to break up. The PCI dissolved and reconstituted itself as a social-democratic party; now Italians had much less reason to ‘hold their noses and vote DC’. The DC also looked vulnerable in its stronghold in north-eastern Italy; here the raucous Northern League was eating away at the Catholic party’s support by decrying corruption in Rome and the South. Reform was in the air. A crime wave, and the outrage in some sections of public opinion at the aftermath of the maxi-trial, gave an ambitious new Socialist Minister of Justice—previously a critic of the antimafia magistrates—the opportunity he wanted to increase his prestige as a defender of law and order. He invited Falcone to become Director of Penal Affairs in the Ministry with the responsibility for coordinating the fight against organized crime at a national level.
Despite the serious misgivings of some of his peers, Falcone took the job. And, in a little over a year, he used the unexpected change in the political climate to completely turn around the fortunes of the fight against the mafia. His main goal was to set up two national bodies that are still today the pillars of Italy’s response to organized crime: the DIA (Direzione Investigativa Antimafia), uniting the efforts of carabinieri, police, and other law enforcement agencies involved in fighting mafia-style organizations—it is a kind of Italian FBI; and the DNA (Direzione Nazionale Antimafia), a national antimafia prosecutors’ office, which coordinates twenty-six district antimafia prosecutors’ offices in various major cities across the country; each is obliged by law to keep a computer database on organized crime. Thus from the centre, in Rome, Falcone managed to do what he had been prevented from doing in Palermo: create a unified vision not just of Cosa Nostra, but of the whole Italian underworld.
Then there was still the fate of the maxi-trial to be decided. Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina took measures to ensure that the trial did not have a bloodless journey through the protracted appeals process. Palermo Appeal Court judge Antonio Saetta and his mentally handicapped son were shot dead in September 1988. Court of Cassation prosecutor Antonio Scopelliti was murdered in August 1991 by the Calabrian mafia (the ‘Ndrangheta) on Cosa Nostra’s behalf. (Three weeks later, mafiosi also shot dead Libero Grassi, a Palermo businessman who led a public campaign against extortion rackets, then estimated to provide an income of $25 billion for criminal organizations across Italy.)
These murders helped put further political weight behind Falcone’s reforms. In a way, they were a sign of failure, a sign that the Corleonesi’s scorn for the Italian state had finally begun to rebound. They may also have helped ensure that Cosa Nostra did not get the final verdict it wanted from the maxi-trial. The judge who presided over the first section of the Court of Cassation, Corrado Carnevale, had the nickname of the ‘verdict slayer’ because of his history of acquitting mafiosi on technicalities. At the time, the antimafia magistrates, sections of the public opinion, and even many men of honour were convinced that Carnevale was working in Cosa Nostra’s interests. A decade later, in October 2002, the Court of Cassation would overturn Judge Carnevale’s conviction for ‘external cooperation in the crime of mafia association’—the charge had been that he was using his influence to turn legal decisions in the mafia’s favour. One must conclude that he was merely, as he maintained all along, applying the law with particular punctiliousness. Nevertheless, in 1991 it was perceptions that counted. In that peculiar political climate, and with Falcone working in the Ministry of Justice, Carnevale did not get to preside over the Court of Cassation’s crucial hearing on the maxi-trial.
Thus it was that, on 31 January 1992, after proceedings lasting two months, the Court of Cassation overturned the Appeal Court verdict on the maxi-trial and confirmed the three central contentions of Falcone’s and Borsellino’s original prosecution case: that Cosa Nostra existed and was a single, unified organization; that the members of the Commission were all jointly responsible for murders carried out in the organization’s name; and that the evidence of mafia defectors was valid. The ‘Buscetta theorem’ was now fact, and the leaders of Cosa Nostra faced definitive life sentences.
After 130 years, the Italian state had finally declared the Sicilian mafia to be an organized and deadly challenge to its own right to rule; it was the worst defeat in the entire history of the world’s most famous criminal association. And with Falcone widely expected to take over the new national prosecutors’ office with the power to drive home the advantage in Sicily, across the country, and even internationally, it looked very much as if further defeats for the mafia would follow. Falcone seemed to have all the powers he needed for the definitive redemption of the terra infidelium to begin.