Cosa Nostra

It was in the years following the Second World War that the Sicilian mafia probably began to refer to itself as Cosa Nostra—’our thing’. It may be that the most recent of the mafia’s many names is an American import. The theory has been put forward that the term originated in Sicilian immigrant communities in the United States; it was ‘our thing’ because it was not open to criminals from other ethnic groups. But because the mafia does not leave written minutes of its dense, cryptic internal conversation, there is no way of proving where ‘Cosa Nostra’ came from. In fact there would be little to be gained even if there was, because names are not very important to the Sicilian mafia. Most mafiosi would probably prefer it if ‘their thing’ did not need a name at all, if its existence could be intimated solely by the raising of an eyebrow or a stony glare. As was the case with the other titles that have come and gone over the years—the Brotherhood, the honoured society, and so on—the arrival of ‘Cosa Nostra’ does not signal any real change in the organization’s structure or methods.

Tommaso Buscetta himself believed that Cosa Nostra was an ancient name. There is no evidence that he is right, and this theory probably carries no more authority than his belief that the Sicilian mafia had medieval origins. Buscetta may have been a bad historian, but he was a good witness, and the testimonies and memoirs that he left stretch back over half a century. It is after the Second World War that Buscetta enters the mafia’s story. Between 1945 and 1963—the dramatic year in which he, like many other important mafiosi, fled abroad—he saw first-hand some profound developments in Cosa Nostra. It was between 1950 and 1963 that it established a new governing body—the Commission or Cupola—and remade ties with the American Cosa Nostra that drew it deep into the transatlantic heroin trade. It was in these years that Cosa Nostra found what was both a new source of income and a bond in its relationship with the political system: concrete.

Buscetta’s opinions are not always entirely reliable. For one thing, he remembered the 1950s as the ‘good old days’ of Cosa Nostra, when respect and honour reigned rather than greed and violence. As will become clear, he was far from right about that. For another thing, Buscetta spent a good deal of his career away from Sicily. So the history of the Sicilian mafia is not the same as either the story Buscetta told or the story he lived. But because Buscetta will appear and reappear in these pages from this point onwards, it is important to get a sense of both the man and the mafioso.

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There is a reason why so much is known about Tommaso Buscetta’s sex life. The first man of honour to explain Cosa Nostra’s rules to Judge Giovanni Falcone was also the first on whom Italian journalists could test a cherished theory: that mafiosi were prime examples of the archetypal macho, sensual, Mediterranean male. Buscetta’s famous features—the thick, generous lips, the round, sad eyes—made him look as if he had been cast for the role.

On one occasion in 1986, Italy’s best-known journalist and TV presenter, the genial raconteur Enzo Biagi, went to New York to interview Sicily’s most famous mafia boss and write what is still the most rounded and engaging portrait of his character. To do so he had to brave an elaborate Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) witness protection operation: a rendezvous at the Hotel St Moritz on Central Park with a security chief known only as ‘Hubert’, a long drive upstate, a change of car, and a thorough frisking. Biagi’s reward was to spend several days with Buscetta in an isolated, temporary safe house. After winning the mafioso’s trust by chatting about family and football (Buscetta was a Juventus fan), Biagi blurted out the question he had been burning to ask the legendary ‘boss of two worlds’, self-confessed multiple murderer, and keeper of some of the darkest secrets in Italian history: ‘Do you remember when you made love for the first time?’

Buscetta was happy to play up to what the chirpy Biagi called ‘gallismo meridionale’—’southern cockerel-ism’. After all, not long before, Buscetta had been recalling altogether more stressful memories in the vast, bombproof courthouse at the Ucciardone prison in Palermo. The questions he had had to field then were about international drug-dealing and bloodshed, and the audience were the mafiosi who had killed six members of his family in the space of three months. Talking about his sexual conquests with Biagi was a stroll on the Marina by comparison. It also got him on to one of his favourite subjects, his own magnetism: ‘Mother Nature gave me charisma, I’ve got something extra.’ It was his (less than entirely convincing) explanation for the fact that other men of honour so revered him.

For the record, Tommaso Buscetta lost his virginity at the age of eight. It was the first and only time he ever had sex with a prostitute; the woman in question also ran a roadside stall selling olives, cheese, and anchovies, and requested only a bottle of olive oil in return for her favours. Thereafter romance played a big part in Buscetta’s life. Of his three marriages—punctuated by countless infidelities—the first was contracted when he was sixteen, the second overlapped with the first, and the third was to a prominent Brazilian lawyer’s daughter who was twenty-two years his junior. In all, Buscetta had six children. He was also that very rare thing, a groovy don—at least as far as his dress-sense is concerned. One picture, taken in Brazil in 1971 or 1972 soon after he met his third wife, shows a smiling Buscetta in cream shoes, cream slacks, and a frilly shirt unbuttoned down to the solar plexus to reveal a delicate pendant. He even experimented with plastic surgery on his nose—this long before the US authorities asked surgeons to alter his appearance for his own protection.

Even if Buscetta was happy to present himself as a typical specimen of Mediterranean male, he was certainly not a representative Homo mafiosus in this respect. Discreet sleeping around is no crime for men of honour, but mistreating a wife certainly is. Buscetta’s marital record brought him trouble within Cosa Nostra. In the 1950s, he was suspended from the association for six months because of his infidelities. In 1972, he was extradited from Brazil and incarcerated in the Ucciardone prison in Palermo where he learned that the head of his Family had wanted to expel him altogether from Cosa Nostra for disrespecting his first two wives.

Buscetta was born on the eastern outskirts of Palermo in 1928 into a family without mafia connections. Although he was the seventeenth of seventeen children, he was not an urchin drawn to crime by dint of having no other chance in life. His father ran a workshop and employed fifteen people making and selling decorative mirrors. Like many Sicilian families, however, the Buscettas fell on hard times during the war, and the teenage Tommaso became a black marketeer. He also began stealing petrol, jam, butter, bread, and salame from the Germans, building up in the process an extensive network of contacts in the Palermo underworld. Once the Allies had liberated Sicily, Buscetta joined a group of about fifty young tearaways who went to Naples to fight the Nazis—partly out of a sense of adventure, and partly in the hope of booty. After two or three months of sabotage and ambushes on the Italian mainland, he returned to Sicily with his reputation greatly enhanced. It was then that he began to be approached by ‘cautious, mysterious men who expressed themselves in allusions, nuances, and hints’; he felt they were watching him, assessing him. One in particular—a furniture polisher—probed him about his attitudes to the police and magistrates, to family morality, and loyalty to friends.

The furniture polisher, one Giovanni Andronico, eventually proposed him for membership of the Porta Nuova Family of Cosa Nostra in 1945. Once the proposal was made to the capo, a note of Buscetta’s name was circulated to all the Families in the Palermo area so that they could undertake their own investigations into his reliability and check that neither he nor any of his family had any relations with the police. Once the investigations were complete, it was Andronico himself who pricked Buscetta’s finger with a pin during the initiation ceremony.

The Porta Nuova Family that Buscetta joined was comparatively small—there were about twenty-five men of honour in it—but very select. Among its members he discovered that there were four notables: the holder of the Sicilian franchise for a famous beer brand, a monarchist MP, a consultant psychiatrist, and Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile—the ‘friend’ of the mafia who was exercising his fiery rhetorical skills in the cause of Sicilian separatism. (This story, like some of the others that Buscetta relates about this period, has not been corroborated from other sources and must therefore be treated sceptically. They do, nonetheless, give a sense of the man’s style.)

In 1947, another famous figure was introduced to Buscetta: Salvatore Giuliano, the last bandit. The young Buscetta was awed by Giuliano’s presence, by the ‘special light’ that seemed to emanate from him. It seems that Buscetta was considerably less impressed by another man of honour he met early in his career, Giuseppe Genco Russo, the boss of Mussomeli, sidekick of Don Calò Vizzini, and the man whom other mafiosi referred to as ‘Gina Lollobrigida’ for his love of the media spotlight. For an urban sophisticate like Buscetta, Genco Russo embodied the coarse life of the Sicilian interior. He was by then a wealthy landowner and a DC politician, but he still kept his mule inside the house and the toilet outside (it was little more than a hole in the ground with a stone for a seat and no walls or door). This detail particularly struck Buscetta because, as he later recalled with horror, Genco Russo actually sat down and used the ‘toilet’ in front of him during their discussion.

Buscetta soon began to travel. He spent his first years abroad, from 1949 to 1952, in Argentina and Brazil. In 1956 he returned from another stay in Argentina with plans to resume the cigarette smuggling at which he had already proved to be adept. The Palermo he found on his homecoming was just beginning to be buried in concrete—and its burial would seal a new kind of pact between organized crime and political power.

THE SACK OF PALERMO

The ‘sack of Palermo’—the building boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s—still inspires a certain melancholy in Palermo residents. To get a sense of that melancholy it is enough to head north-west along Palermo’s main artery from the Quattro Canti, the crossroads where the four quarters of the baroque city meet. To walk along the via Maqueda, past the giant bronze lions guarding the Teatro Massimo, and carry straight on into via Ruggero Settimo, is to follow the path of Palermo’s expansion during the late nineteenth century. Via Ruggero Settimo in its turn becomes the broad avenue of via Libertà, where the fashion-conscious bourgeois of the Florio era promenaded in their carriages and built splendid Liberty-style homes. On the eastern side of via Libertà, just before the Giardino Inglese, the road opens out into Piazza Francesco Crispi, its centre now dominated by giant advertising hoardings. Almost lost below the hoardings are the rusting scrolls and spikes of an elegant wrought-iron railing—an oddly grand surround for the shabby open-air car park that lies behind. The railing is, in fact, all that remains of one of the jewels of Florio-era Palermo.

The Villa Deliella once stood here, surrounded by palm trees. Its watchtower, slim windows, grand balcony, and gently sloping roofs were designed in lush homage to the architectural idiom of the Tuscan Renaissance. On 28 November 1959—a Saturday—plans to knock down the Villa Deliella were submitted to the city council. They were approved in time for demolition to begin that very afternoon, and by the end of the weekend one of the most beautiful houses of the Liberty era was rubble. A month later the Villa Deliella would have reached fifty years of age, and therefore become protected by law. The loss of the Villa Deliella is only one minor tragedy of the many that together make up the story of the sack of Palermo.

When the Second World War ended, Palermo was still, in essence, the same city it had been in the Florio era. Beyond via Libertà, the Conca d’Oro with its villas and its lemon groves began. Palermo as a whole was ringed with countryside. But despite its beauty, it was a city in desperate need of renewal. Allied bombing was partly responsible; it had rendered homeless an estimated 14,000 people, many of whom lived in shacks amid the rubble of the old centre where the bomb damage was concentrated. The pressure to build more homes only increased in the 1950s when there was an influx of provincials seeking the public sector jobs available now that Palermo was, once again, a capital city, the headquarters of the new regional government. Between 1951 and 1961, the population increased by 20 per cent to 600,000.

A post-war building boom was inevitable—as it was in much of Europe. It was also inevitable that the often giddily high expectations for planned urban development would meet with disappointment. But the results of Palermo’s expansion in the 1950s and 1960s were far worse than anyone could have foreseen. When the building boom ended, a good portion of the city centre still lay in ruins; much of the rest was a half-abandoned slum; and some of its finest private homes—baroque and Liberty alike—had been demolished. The verdant periphery had disappeared under concrete; most of the lemon groves of the Conca d’Oro had fallen to the bulldozer. Before this transformation, it was hard to detect the signs of the city’s underworld in its fabric of buildings and streets. The sack of Palermo turned every crumbling baroque palace, every jerry-built council estate, every aspirational apartment stack, into a monument to corruption and crime.

But the story of the sack of Palermo is in essence political rather than architectural, and as such it begins in another city. When Italians complained that the mafia was ‘run from Rome’, they were expressing a simplistic version of an undoubted truth. The politicians, contractors, and mafiosi responsible for the sack of Palermo were at one end of a chain that led directly to the headquarters of the Democrazia Cristiana in Piazza del Gesù, Rome. It was there that a whole new structure of patronage government for the democratic era was invented.

The first link in the chain was Amintore Fanfani, a tiny, proud-chested university professor from Arezzo in Tuscany. When he became leader of the DC in 1954, he proposed a wholesale modernization of the party that aimed to put more power in his own hands. The DC dominated government, but was itself susceptible to the influence of outside powers: above it, the Vatican and the titans of Italian industry; below it, the conservative grandees who supplied packets of votes in the towns and villages. There was little to guarantee the DC’s claim on the support of these outside powers. To deal with them on at least equal terms, Fanfani believed that the party had to become a modern mass organization and a power in its own right.

In Sicily, as in much of southern Italy, the Fanfani revolution meant two things. First a new breed of political manager—the ‘young Turks’—emerged within the party. Second, the same men colonized every post they could in local or national government, in quangos and nationalized companies. Thus, in the new DC, the charismatic old notables had to come to terms with dynamic young bureaucrats of sleaze who set about ‘occupying the state’ on behalf of their party and themselves. The young Turks turned public resources into DC resources.

The young Turk principally responsible for implementing Fanfani’s programme on the island, and the next link in the corrupt chain linking Rome and the pillaging of Palermo, was Giovanni Gioia. Gioia did not have a high public profile—Tommaso Buscetta describes him merely as having a ‘glacial character’—and he never held any office in the municipality, but he was nonetheless fundamental to the history of the city in these years. Insiders called him ‘the Viceroy’ and regarded him as having sole power to choose who became mayor of the city. At twenty-eight, in 1954, Gioia became secretary of the DC in the province of Palermo and, just as importantly, the head of the party’s Organization Office, which supervised membership. Gioia, or one of his followers, controlled the Organization Office for nearly a quarter of a century thereafter. It was from this key position that the glacial Gioia would reinvent Sicilian machine politics.

Under the Fanfani reforms, local DC Party branches were set up across Italy for the first time; there were fifty-nine in Palermo, for example. The aim, ostensibly, was for Christian Democracy to reach out into the community, recruiting new members as it did so. Fanfani’s followers issued new party slogans proclaiming an end to ‘maccheroni politics’—votes exchanged for favours. The mechanics of this political modernization were simple: the DC’s new structure meant that card-carrying members elected party leaders; the members also voted for delegates who in turn selected election candidates. Or, at least, that was the theory. In practice, in Palermo, the power lay not in the hands of the members, but in Gioia’s. With Gioia in the DC Organization Office, party memberships were given out to friends, relatives, dead people, and names plucked from the phone book. The more members a local party section had, the more delegates it could send to conferences. In other words, the more members a local party chief like Gioia could boast, the more power he was able to offer upwards to the head of a national DC faction like Fanfani. The prodigious rise in membership on the island subsequently gave the Sicilian DC, and Fanfani, a disproportionate influence within the DC nationally. (The little university professor from Tuscany served as Prime Minister six times.)

All this power that ‘Viceroy’ Gioia won within the new Democrazia Cristiana in Sicily counted for nothing in itself; it only paid off if the party could distribute the jobs, licences, grants, and other valuable assets that came from control over local and regional government. The scene was set for the sack of Palermo, and for the emergence of its two principal villains: Vito Ciancimino and Salvo Lima, both elected to Palermo city council for the first time in 1956, and both supporters of Gioia. It was they who would turn maccheroni politics into concrete politics.

As characters, Ciancimino and Lima were almost diametrically opposed. Ciancimino was born the son of a Corleone barber. He was arrogant, loutish, bright, and ambitious. Photos of him from the sack of Palermo era show a weaselly man in a sharp three-piece suit, a garish tie, slicked-back hair, and a dark pencil moustache. Lima, the son of a municipal archivist, had a law degree and began his working life in the Bank of Sicily. With eyes bulging beneath neatly curling hair, he was as chubby, polished, and slippery as Ciancimino was thin, coarse, and abrasive.

Despite both being in Fanfani’s faction of the DC, Ciancimino and Lima had different mafia connections. Hence the fact that Tommaso Buscetta had a contrasting view of the two. He recalled Ciancimino as ‘a pushy Corleonese embezzler’ who only looked after his own interests and those of the men of honour from his home town. Buscetta—a long-standing opponent of the Corleonesi—channelled the votes under his own control towards Lima. The two were never on first-name terms, and they were both men of few words, but their business relationship was based on what Buscetta called ‘reciprocal respect and sincere cordiality’. Knowing Buscetta’s passion for opera, Lima would make sure he always had tickets for the Teatro Massimo.

Between them Ciancimino and Lima turned the seemingly humble municipal post of Officer of Public Works into Italy’s most shameless and lucrative patronage engine. Between 1959 and 1963—the hottest years of the construction fever, and the years when first Lima and then Ciancimino were at the Office of Public Works—the city council granted 80 per cent of 4,205 building permits to just five men. The bulk of Palermo’s economy depended on publicly funded construction at this time. So a huge proportion of the city’s wealth was routed through those same five names.

But they were not, as one might expect, construction magnates of national stature. In fact they were nobodies. The Office of Public Works was supposed to award licences only to civil engineers qualified to carry out the work. Yet someone had spotted a regulation dating back to 1889—before modern civil engineering qualifications existed. According to this regulation, companies that were granted a licence to build needed to have a ‘master mason’ or a ‘capable contractor’ on their books. The council kept lists of such approved persons. All five of the major licensees in the Lima–Ciancimino system were on a list that dated back to before 1924. Even then, it looked very much as if the qualifications they cited were false; one of the five men seemed to be nothing more than a coal merchant; another turned out to be a former bricklayer—he subsequently took a job as a doorkeeper and janitor in one of the apartment blocks whose construction he had supposedly supervised. When interviewed, he said merely that he was a guy who did what he had to do to get along; he had signed the licences as a favour to some ‘friends’.

Seen from the point of view of the ‘friends’ rather than that of the politicians, the sack of Palermo began on the ground, with the mafiosi who now kept watch over the building sites just as they had once kept watch over the lemon groves. Vandalism and theft could bring any construction project to a halt if the local boss chose. The second storey of mafia influence was a dense tier of small subcontractors who supplied workers and materials. Even if Lima and Ciancimino had not existed, politicians and construction companies would have had to come to terms with mafia power at this level. On the level above them were the great building entrepreneurs, men tied into corrupt webs of friends, relatives, clients, and cohorts. Those networks become thicker and thicker the more one probes, connecting local politicians, municipal functionaries, lawyers, policemen, building contractors, bankers, businessmen, and mafiosi.

At the centre of these networks were Gioia, Lima, and Ciancimino. The young Turks’ method was a form of carefully engineered chaos, as the story of the Palermo town plan shows.

It began its life back in 1954. Each time it looked close to being finalized, in 1956 and 1959, hundreds of amendments were made in response to applications from private citizens, many of whom turned out to be DC politicians, mafiosi, or their relatives and associates. The plan gained definitive approval in 1962. Yet by then the Office of Public Works had granted many building licences on the basis of the 1959 version; blocks of flats already stood on many areas that the plan was supposed to regulate. Even after 1962, people with access to Gioia, Lima, and Ciancimino could get the plan altered in their favour, or have breaches of planning law retrospectively condoned. Only in one case was the demolition ordered of an illegally built structure. No company dared come forward to take on the contract to knock it down.

There is, it must be said, a certain genius in these methods. The town plan, like the regulations setting out who could be awarded planning permission, was meant to prevent illegal building. Under Lima and Ciancimino, these measures only served to place firmly in the politicians’ hands the power to build illegally. It is a bitter paradox with which Italians are all too familiar: the more severe a rule is, the higher the price a politician is able to command for finding a way round it.

Then there is the fear factor. A glimpse into the fear that the ‘pushy Corleonese embezzler’ Ciancimino was able to marshal is provided by the Pecoraro case. In August 1963, Lorenzo Pecoraro, a partner in a construction firm, sent a letter to Palermo’s chief prosecuting magistrate, accusing Ciancimino of corruption. The case derived from an incident nearly two years earlier in which Ciancimino had illegally denied a building licence to Pecoraro’s company. At the same time, a licence to build on an adjacent plot was granted to another company, Sicilcasa S.p.a., despite the fact that this successful proposal broke planning regulations in a number of respects.

Pecoraro’s company responded to the block on their project by approaching Ciancimino through an intermediary, the mafia boss of the area in which it was hoped to build. The approach seemed to bring results; Ciancimino promised to release the licence. But then there was a delay caused by a council workers’ strike. By the time it ended, Pecoraro had, for reasons that remain unknown, lost the mafioso’s support. Ciancimino had also adopted a new tactic: the executives in Pecoraro’s company were told that they could only have their licence if they deposited a large bribe with Sicilcasa.

In his letter to the investigating magistrate, Pecoraro named a witness who had stated that Ciancimino was secretly a partner in Sicilcasa. Pecoraro also said he had a tape recording of Ciancimino boasting that Sicilcasa had given him an apartment for nothing. On another recording in his possession Pecoraro claimed a notary could be heard confessing that he was the channel through which huge backhanders paid for planning licences were passed to Ciancimino’s Office of Public Works. Between the events of the Sicilcasa case and Pecoraro’s report to the prosecutor, the mafia boss and three partners in Sicilcasa were arrested and charged with murder.

Despite all this evidence, the magistrate to whom Pecoraro had addressed his original report found no grounds for a prosecution. It was only the following year that the case came under the scrutiny of a parliamentary commission of inquiry. But when it did, Lorenzo Pecoraro submitted a letter to the inquiry, stating that his earlier accusations against Ciancimino were the ‘result of mistaken information’. Furthermore, he said, the rumours that Ciancimino was corrupt had originated with people who had a personal and political grudge against him. Ciancimino, Pecoraro concluded, had ‘always been exemplary for his decency and honesty’. The matter ended there.

Ciancimino and Lima were the most infamous DC politicians of their day, the fastest travellers on a new and serpentine road to wealth and influence. For decades, a horde of favour-broking politicians turned the Sicilian DC into a maze of clienteles, cliques, factions, counter-factions, covert alliances, and open feuds. Even experienced journalists despaired of ever making any sense of it all. At the end of the 1960s, one such journalist went to report on what he called a leading DC ‘personage’. On entering the politician’s new Palermo apartment, the journalist found

a marble interior, old master paintings, furniture of every style, splendid ancient gold artefacts in perfect condition; displays of jewels, coins, archaeological relics; priceless ivory crucifixes keeping promiscuous company with pot-bellied jade Buddhas. I was stunned, as if I had stumbled across a corsair’s swollen heaps of booty. The personage in question was there, dressed in a long dressing gown, smooching with his election chiefs who had come in from the area. This was the same man I had met at the beginning of his political career when he had been as poor as Job. I could not help wondering what witchcraft had caused that river of gold to spring from the ground around him.

The power that, along with others, Ciancimino and Lima first created for themselves in the 1950s would last for decades. Ciancimino was only arrested in 1984 and was not finally convicted until 1992—the first politician ever to be successfully prosecuted on charges of working for the mafia. On 12 March of that same year, Salvo Lima—at that time a member of the European parliament—fell victim to a less ponderous judicial system: he was shot dead near his home in Palermo’s beach-resort suburb of Mondello. Whether Lima was actually a man of honour, as some mafia ‘penitents’ claim, is not known for certain. Buscetta thought it unlikely, but said that Lima’s father had been a member of the central Palermo Family. What nobody doubts is that it was Lima’s former friends who brought his political career to its sudden end.

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As always, mafia stories raise questions about Italy as a whole; in this case about why Italian public opinion was not so outraged about what was going on in Sicily—and in large parts of southern Italy—that people tried to do something about it. The reasons, it need hardly be said, are related to both power and money.

The most frenetic years of the sack of Palermo coincided with Italy’s economic ‘miracle’. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the country’s economy launched itself into the era of mass industrial production. The vast funds channelled into the hands of the young Turks of the South derived from the surging profits made by the factories of Genoa, Turin, and Milan in the North. Yet big business was not inclined to protest about the waste. Many of the larger construction companies were northern owned. Northern industry also needed the consumer market of southern Italy to be primed by public spending. Much of the cash scattered with such abandon in Palermo and Naples found its way back up the peninsula to buy radios, fridges, scooters, and cars. As a political bonus, the Christian Democrat electorate of the South also helped keep the Communists out. For decades, many Italians preferred to follow a principle made explicit by a leading right-wing journalist in the 1970s: ‘Hold your nose and vote DC.’

And then, of course, through all the changes of the 1950s and 1960s, the DC could always count on the support of the Church. The Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo between 1946 and his death in 1967 was Ernesto Ruffini, a man who brought the Church in Sicily to the nadir of its culpable blindness towards the reality of organized crime and political collusion. Ruffini was from Mantua in northern Italy, but he was more Sicilian than the Sicilians when it came to his obstinate love for the island. Here, Ruffini imagined, faith went deeper than individual belief; it had sturdy roots in peasant customs whence it reached up into political life. Sicily was the closest thing the world had to the ideal of a wholly Christian society. Being Sicilian and being a believer were inseparable. If the Italians had a mission to bring the Church’s message to the globe, then the Sicilian people had a special mission in Italy: when the industrial North looked like succumbing to materialism, the happy island of faith would set an example and be a fortress against Mammon, Marx, and the Masons. In short, Ruffini’s was an entirely fabulous picture of the world.

The Cardinal Archbishop had a righteous terror of Communism and dismissed the mafia as the invention of Communist scare tactics. Back in 1947, after Salvatore Giuliano’s band machine-gunned peasant families at Portella della Ginestra, the Cardinal had written to the Pope to explain that, while he ‘certainly could not approve of violence’ from any side, ‘resistance and rebellion were inevitable in the face of the Communists and their bullying, lies and deceitful scheming, their anti-Italian and anti-Christian theories’. Before the 1953 general election he announced that it was a ‘grave obligation’ for believers to put their cross against the DC symbol on the ballot paper. More than that, to fail to vote against the ‘impending threat posed by the enemies of Jesus Christ’ was nothing less than a mortal sin. Despite this admonition, and despite five years of DC government in Rome, the percentage of the vote won by the DC in Sicily dropped dramatically, from just under 48 per cent to just over 36 per cent. There were clearly a great many mortal sinners on the island.

It was the beginning of a period of rapid social change that could only seem like a long wave of catastrophes to a man with Ruffini’s views. The ‘rampant apostasy’ of Communism spread through some regions of Italy in a dense network of cooperatives and housing associations. Then the economic boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s tore great numbers of southern peasants from the local fabric of their religion, and sent them to work in the building sites and factories of Genoa, Turin, and Milan. Even government and Church censorship could not stop Hollywood from schooling young people in the ways of immorality and consumerism.

Worse still, the Christian Democrat party, the Holy Church’s chosen vanguard in the crusade against the atheist Left, did not seem to be living up to its lofty mission. The DC’s disorganization, its vicious factional infighting, and its casual handling of public money were even becoming the subject of guarded criticism by senior churchmen. What is more, after its setback at the 1953 election, the DC was forced to rely on lay allies to its right or left in order to stay in power. Some of the party’s factions were trying to lure the Socialist Party away from its alliance with the Communists; the Socialists went on to form a government with the DC for the first time in 1963. At the same time, what the Church called free-market ‘liberaloids’ and ‘agnostics’ were gaining strength within the DC as it grappled with the reality of managing a modern capitalist economy.

None of these developments altered Ruffini’s support for the DC, or his lifelong struggle to keep the contemporary world at bay. But he could not dodge the mafia issue for ever. On Palm Sunday 1964, Cardinal Ruffini issued a pastoral epistle, entitled ‘The true face of Sicily’, which was the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s first ever official, explicit public statement about the mafia—ninety-nine years after the word was first used. ‘The true face of Sicily’ denounced a fiendish media conspiracy to slander the island; it was a conspiracy with three prongs. The first two were the most celebrated figures to be associated with Sicily in the 1950s and 1960s: Danilo Dolci, known as the ‘Sicilian Gandhi’, whose non-violent campaigning drew attention to the hardships endured by the fishing and peasant communities of western Sicily; and aristocratic novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of The Leopard (1958) with its sensuous, disconsolate portrayal of the island’s history. The third prong of the media offensive against Sicily was the mafia, which, Ruffini asserted, was nothing more serious than the same kind of crime that could be found elsewhere in Italy and around the world.

JOE BANANAS GOES ON HOLIDAY

Giuseppe ‘Joe Bananas’ Bonanno had the longest reign of any of the bosses of the five New York mafia Families. Born in the tiny seaside town of Castellammare del Golfo in 1905, he fled Mussolini’s Italy in the 1920s, fought with Salvatore Maranzano, his fellow Castellammarese, against Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria, and was then installed as capo of his Family following Lucky Luciano’s pacification of the New York mafia in 1931. For over three decades thereafter, Joe Bananas led the Brooklyn-based Bonanno clan. While he was in charge, it remained the most Sicilian of the New York Families. The island’s dialect was the language of choice; Bonanno himself always struggled with his English. Along with the Magaddinos in Buffalo, to whom Joe Bananas was related by blood, the Bonanno Family maintained close links with the mafia back in Castellammare del Golfo.

In 1983, Joe Bananas published A Man of Honour, a ghosted narrative of his life; its a book packed with absurdly self-justifying references to ‘my Tradition’—by which he means the mafia. One of the most interesting chapters in A Man of Honour tells of how, for several weeks in October 1957, the Brooklyn boss returned in style to where his ‘tradition’ originated. His account of what he calls his holiday in Sicily is replete with the usual old cant about a time-honoured Sicilian culture of family and self-respect. This was Bonanno going back to his roots, to a little world that he had forsaken in his search for freedom and success. On arrival, he expressed admiration for the Italians’ ‘art of living’ and ‘exuberance of warmth’. More perceptively, he called the Italian government machinery ‘appalling’, and his point was exemplified when he first landed at Rome airport, where he was pleasantly surprised to be given a red-carpet welcome by the DC Minister for Mail and Telecommunications—another native of Castellammare. ‘Wouldn’t my friends in the FBI have been astonished at this princely welcome?’ was Bonanno’s comment. Although there is no independent confirmation of the story, no one who knows about the Sicilian DC would be remotely taken aback if it were true. Once in Palermo, the visiting don was taken in hand by a deputation of dignitaries and men of honour who proudly showed him the splendid new motorways and office buildings that were mushrooming around the city. Perhaps not surprisingly, this early view of the sack of Palermo did not count among the highlights of his holiday.

Although one would never guess it from the humbug in Bonanno’s book, his holiday in Sicily was in fact a turning point for Cosa Nostra on both sides of the Atlantic. For it was then that the US mafiosi franchised out heroin-trafficking operations to their Sicilian cousins. Just as importantly, during the same trip the Sicilian mafia created a Commission on the model of the one instituted in New York at the end of the Castellammarese war. These two, intimately related developments set the stage for all the drama of mafia history over the next four decades. Everything that happened up to and beyond the staggering violence of the 1980s and early 1990s can be traced back to the time when Joe Bananas came to visit.

The surviving information about what actually went on during that trip is partial but highly suggestive. Making sense of the evidence, understanding not just the ‘what’ but the ‘why’, is a delicate matter. This is one of those occasions when Italian historians of the mafia have found it imperative to stretch a tissue of informed supposition across the nervure of available fact. What follows here is therefore a mixture of knowledge and supposition, a mixture created with one central aim: to get inside the politics of Cosa Nostra. The word ‘politics’ is important and it is not used loosely. For if the gearing-up of Cosa Nostra’s involvement in heroin was a matter of business, then the creation of the Commission was the mafia equivalent of constitutional politics. To non-Italians there is no longer any scandal in referring to mafiosi as businessmen; the mafia boss, seen as the sinister double of the company CEO, is now a cinematic cliché. However, outside Italy, writers are still reluctant to dignify the machinations of murderers and thieves with the word ‘politics’. But as those who strive to understand the Sicilian mafia in its homeland have learned over the decades, to use any other word is gravely to underestimate Cosa Nostra. For the Sicilian mafia has a politics in a very literal sense. As today’s investigating magistrates continually emphasize, Cosa Nostra will never be beaten unless it is understood that it is a shadow state, a political body that sometimes opposes, sometimes subverts, and sometimes dwells within the body of the legal government.

* * *

During the Palermo leg of his Sicilian jaunt, at a lavish five-hour luncheon at Spanò’s sea-front restaurant, Joe Bananas met Tommaso Buscetta—or at least he did according to Buscetta’s own version of events. At that time Buscetta—the future ‘boss of two worlds’ and history-making mafia defector—was only an up-and-coming Palermo soldier. So the meeting at Spanò’s understandably made a much bigger impression on him than it did on Joe Bananas, who did not bother to record it among his holiday memories. Buscetta, by contrast, effusively expressed the ‘enchantment’ he felt as he talked intimately with a man he described as ‘distinguished, elegant, endowed with a special intelligence’. Buscetta had evidently found a role model.

Apart from the then gap in status between Buscetta and Bonanno, there are many other differences between their two accounts. By the time Buscetta came to tell his story, he was a pentito living under a witness protection programme; when Joe Bananas told his in 1983 he was, at most, in semi-retirement. For that simple reason Buscetta is by far the more credible of the two. (Although it should be said that the US authorities took A Man of Honour seriously enough to call its author before a grand jury.)

It is striking, but hardly surprising, that both mafiosi left exactly the same highly significant hole in their stories: narcotics. Joe Bananas maintained that he never had anything to do with drugs, which were, he protested, completely alien to his Tradition. Buscetta scoffed at the very idea that Bonanno’s visit to Sicily had anything to do with heroin. Both men were lying outright, but both were also lying in a more interesting way than might at first appear to be the case. This was not just a question of two criminals trying to protect themselves.

Buscetta was undoubtedly a more interesting liar than his Italian-American role model. Until his death, he continued to deny that he had ever made any money from drugs. Rather contradicting himself, Buscetta also maintained that ‘There is no one in Cosa Nostra who is unconnected with narcotics trafficking.’ These statements bear all the hallmarks of the kind of tactical lie at which Sicilian men of honour are particularly adept. In fact, the signs are so clear that they are probably deliberate. Buscetta was making sure that anyone who knew how to decode him—Judge Falcone, for one—would understand perfectly well both that he was lying and that he was not prepared to say any more on what was evidently an important subject. It was such a big lie that he had to throw a cordon sanitaire around it to stop it infecting the credibility of the other things he had to say.

All this lying became necessary because, by the time Joe Bananas stepped off the plane in Palermo, Cosa Nostra was at a crossroads in the United States. In a sense it had to decide just how illegal it wanted to be. The American mafia has always worked most freely in those markets—like liquor under Prohibition or numbers rackets—which are ‘only just’ illegal and therefore not a source of embarrassment to its political friends. Gambling was another case in point; the 1940s and 1950s were years when organized crime invested heavily in the rapidly expanding, desert betting Mecca of Las Vegas. The same principles of semi-illegality apply to the mafia’s intervention in labour relations. It offered its services to employers to break strikes; or it worked with trade unions to extort money from workers and employers alike. Either way, Cosa Nostra did not move too far from the protective shadow of legal institutions and powerful interest groups in the upper world.

Drugs were a different kind of business. In 1950, Tennessee Democrat Senator Estes Kefauver picked up on alarming warnings from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics about the mafia’s international drugs network. The hearings of Kefauver’s ‘Senate Special Committee to Investigate Crime in Interstate Commerce’ were televised in 1951. Americans watched dozens of mafiosi taking the Fifth Amendment in the face of Kefauver’s questioning. Frank Costello, the former bootlegger and king of New York City’s slot machines, did not allow the camera to show anything above his shoulders; but the ‘hand ballet’ that accompanied his shifty explanation of his business interests became the emblematic memory of the hearings for many viewers.

In the wake of the Kefauver hearings, the United States rediscovered its fear of the mafia—a fear that had last gripped the nation nearly half a century earlier, in the days of the ‘body in the barrel’ murder and Lieutenant Joe Petrosino. This time round, the dread and fascination aroused by the mafia was also fuelled by a drugs scare. Politically motivated hype and a minor publishing boom followed; one writer, inspired by Kefauver, called the mafia ‘history’s greatest threat to morality’ and ‘the principal fount of all crime in the world’. America’s long post-war love affair with the mafia had begun.

For all the exaggeration and plain fantasy in the new American mafia scare, and despite the fact that J. Edgar Hoover, director of the FBI, still refused to believe that the mafia existed, the effects of the Kefauver hearings for men of honour were severe. They led the Federal government to introduce the Narcotics Control Act in 1956; it stipulated a forty-year maximum prison sentence for drug-related offences. According to one US police estimate, by the time Joe Bananas came to Sicily to ‘unwind’, as he put it, one in every three members of the Bonanno Family had been arrested on narcotics charges. The other New York mafia Families were faring even worse; the Lucchese clan had lost a reported 60 per cent of its personnel.

As both Buscetta and Bonanno later explained, the leadership of the American mafia introduced a ban on drug-dealing in response to the crackdown. (Both of them also claim, wholly improbably, that only other mafiosi broke it.) There are many other sources that confirm that there was indeed such a policy, and each of those sources also points out that the rule was routinely transgressed. It was, in fact, a façade intended to create the impression that the organization had distanced itself from ‘junk’. But it could only be a stopgap measure.

To make matters worse, in 1956–7, Cosa Nostra’s most important offshore base for its narcotics smuggling—the Caribbean island of Cuba—was also slipping from its grasp. Fulgencio Batista y Zaldìvar’s corrupt and brutal dictatorship was already crumbling in the face of Fidel Castro and Ernesto ‘Che’ Guevara’s much-publicized guerrilla war in the Sierra Maestra. The Americans finally withdrew military aid from Batista in 1958 and Castro entered Havana in January the following year.

So it does not take a very ‘special intelligence’ to work out why Joe Bananas came to unwind back in Sicily in 1957. His organization needed three things for its narcotics interests: a trustworthy source of manpower; a partner to which it could franchise out a business that had become too damaging to run hands-on; and a new transhipment base.

In Sicily, Cosa Nostra’s control of territory was far more thorough in the 1950s than it was in the United States—hence Bonanno’s delight at his red-carpet reception. But Italy’s attractions did not end with its gratifyingly ‘appalling’ government machinery; it also had a negligible rate of drug consumption, and therefore no political interest in addressing the problem. Moreover, because Sicilian men of honour moved around the Mediterranean in the course of their cigarette smuggling, it would not be much trouble for them to pick up refined heroin from the South of France while they were at it. A new wave of Sicilian emigrants was now heading west across the Atlantic too, taking their belongings in trunks that were the perfect vehicle for drug transportation. The only reason that Joe Bananas did not take his holiday any earlier is that the Kefauver hearings had caused high-level transatlantic contacts between the two mafias to be broken off.

Over four days in October 1957, Joe Bananas chaired a series of meetings between Sicilian and American mafiosi in Palermo’s Grand Hotel des Palmes. The hotel—the most splendid in the city at the time—was one of the Whitaker family’s town houses before it was converted, and Richard Wagner famously orchestrated his last opera, Parsifal, there in the winter of 1881–2. The Hotel des Palmes is now where most Italian journalists stay when they go down to Palermo to cover the latest mafia outrage or trial.

Although there are no first-hand accounts of those meetings, and although the police took little interest in goings-on at the hotel, the list of guests makes for instructive reading. Among those seen coming and going from Bonanno’s suite were his consigliere, Camillo ‘Carmine’ Galante, and other leading members of the Brooklyn-based Bonanno Family, including Giovanni ‘John’ Bonventre and the capo’s immediate deputy, Frank Garofalo, who had been in Castellammare del Golfo since the summer. The US delegation also numbered senior members of the Magaddino-run Family from Buffalo, as well as Lucky Luciano, who was living in exile in Naples after being expelled from the US in 1946. The most important Sicilian presence was the head of the Family in Castellammare del Golfo, a Magaddino like Joe Bananas’ relatives in Buffalo. The others also had strong transatlantic ties.

Some have suggested that Buscetta was there too. He flatly—and therefore suspiciously—denied that the meeting ever took place. Whether or not he was there, the names of those who certainly did attend give a pretty clear idea of what kind of meeting it was: the gathering in the Hotel des Palmes reforged a link between the most American of the Sicilian cosche with the most Sicilian of the American Families. In other words, this was not a conference between the American mafia and the Sicilian mafia as such. It was a business convention rather than a diplomatic summit. And drugs were the business on the agenda.

The Sicilian mafia’s involvement in the US drug trade was not a novelty in 1957. Morphine was already being smuggled through Palermo, in cases of oranges and lemons, back in the 1920s. Nick Gentile mentions how drugs would be hidden in shipments of cheese, oil, anchovies, and other Sicilian products. New York boss Joe Profaci’s Mamma Mia Importing Company was one of many commercial fronts for narcotics trafficking. But the pattern of arrests and drug seizures in the years after Joe Bananas’ holiday in Sicily show a marked increase in Sicilian involvement, and much closer cooperation between the two shores of the criminal Atlantic; the effects of the decisions taken among the red carpets and gilt-framed mirrors of the Hotel des Palmes are measurable. As a US attorney would later remark, everyone at the meeting was a ‘narcotics track star’. Heroin was to be the new transatlantic sport for men of honour.

* * *

There was one invitee at the Hotel des Palmes who stuck out like a toad in a tutu. It was Giuseppe Genco Russo—the ‘Gina Lollobrigida’ who had once voided his bowels in front of a young and incredulous Tommaso Buscetta. By the time of the Hotel des Palmes meeting, Genco Russo had succeded Don Calò Vizzini as the authority in central Sicily and now enjoyed the undeserved reputation of being the ‘boss of bosses’ of the whole Sicilian mafia. At the time, as Buscetta makes clear, there was no such post—and even if there had been, it would not have been occupied by a man of honour from isolated Mussomeli. Genco Russo was probably at the Hotel des Palmes only because one of the American mafiosi present was a relative. Genco Russo did not have the power in Palermo, let alone in New York, to contribute much to the discussion at the Hotel des Palmes. But from this semidetached perspective he did manage to pinpoint the political problem that came in a package with Joe Bananas’ business propositions. He was overheard in the lobby croaking, ‘Quannu ci sunu troppi cani sopra un ossu, beato chiddu chi pò stari arrassu’—‘When there are too many dogs going after one bone, it’s best to stay out of the way.’ In layman’s terms, access to the North American heroin market on the scale envisaged by Joe Bananas was bound to trigger rivalries.

It was in order to manage these business rivalries that the Commission was created. Although Tommaso Buscetta keeps an implausible silence on the matter of narcotics, he goes into detail about how the idea for a Commission evolved. He explains that, after the fall of Fascism and before 1957, communications within Cosa Nostra in Sicily were intense but compartmentalized. Small groups of particularly influential men of honour from different Families would meet to discuss things in their usual telegraphic, allusive way; decisions would only evolve slowly, after long rounds of consultation.

The decision to create the Commission evolved in just this roundabout fashion. It was at the lunch at the Spanò restaurant that Buscetta first heard Joe Bananas suggest the creation of a Commission to the three or four Sicilian men of honour sitting immediately around him; he probably aired the idea to many others during his stay. Everyone seemed to like it. Once a consensus was reached in the habitual way, Buscetta himself undertook to turn Bonanno’s suggestion into a working reality. Helping him were two young mafiosi who would play a crucial role in the coming history of Cosa Nostra: Gaetano ‘Tano’ Badalamenti, the underboss of Cinisi—where the cosca was closely linked to the Detroit Family; and Salvatore ‘Little Bird’ Greco—so called because of his small, delicate frame. ‘Little Bird’ was one of the Ciaculli Grecos who had survived the war of 1946–7. All three were to become major narcotics dealers.

This three-man constitutional working party—Buscetta, Badalamenti, and ‘Little Bird’ Greco—set the new ground rules for Cosa Nostra. Each province of Sicily was to have its own Commission. (It was not until 1975 that a Region or Interprovincial Commission would be created for the whole island.) In the province of Palermo, there were too many Families—around fifty—to make it feasible to have a consultative body in which all of them were represented. Thus there would be an intermediate level, the mandamento (district), combining three neighbouring families; together the three families would choose a single representative from their mandamento who would take a seat on the Commission. To avoid too much power being concentrated in the hands of a few people, it was forbidden for anyone to combine the roles of capo of their Family and representative on the Commission. And the Commission’s crucial function would be to make rulings on the murders of men of honour.

So the Palermo Commission was not a board of directors of the international heroin trade. It was actually a very carefully constructed representative mechanism—a creature of politics rather than of business. As such, there is nothing inherently new about it. It is now known from the Sangiorgi report that already in the late nineteenth century the cosche of the Palermo area had formal rounds of consultation and a unified system of trials. So—despite what both Buscetta and Bonanno themselves believed—the Commission was not a complete novelty in mafia history; it was a new solution to a problem as old as the mafia itself: how to combine territorial control with illegal commerce. That said, the creation of the Commission undoubtedly had epoch-making political implications; in effect, the power of life and death over other mafiosi was being taken out of the hands of the Family bosses.

The question is: ‘Why now?’ Why exactly did the gearing-up of Sicilian involvement in the narcotics business lead to the creation of such an elaborate constitutional apparatus? The answer that Italian historians have come up with leads to the heart of the relationship between business and politics within Cosa Nostra. And the best way to explain it is, once again, through the eyes of Tommaso Buscetta. For on this issue, as on so many others, Buscetta is a crucial but not entirely objective witness—crucial, in fact, for the very reason that he is not objective.

Buscetta sunnily describes the Commission as ‘an instrument of moderation and internal peace’, ‘a good way of reducing the fear and risks that all mafiosi run’. This description is very much in tune with how he likes to visualize life in the mafia as a whole. Buscetta thinks of Cosa Nostra as a noble brotherhood rather than as a hierarchy; in his mind, men of honour are all peers, and the bond holding them together is mutual respect rather than obedience to a capo. ‘We all felt we were part of a very special elite,’ he says. It is a nostalgic vision that fits with the image Buscetta is trying to portray of himself—as a kind of roving emissary of the underworld. As such it is as captivating, and as implausible, as a party political broadcast. In reality Buscetta had very hard-headed strategic reasons for wanting the Commission to take the shape that it did, reasons that are best explained by looking at his career path.

There are essentially two types of career in Cosa Nostra; politics and business. A man of honour can climb the shadow state’s internal ladder of promotion, becoming a capodecina, a consigliere, a capo, and so on upwards. Or he can develop his own commercial interests outside of his particular Family’s territory, travelling the world to exploit the mafia’s unrivalled criminal networking opportunities. Buscetta, despite the huge respect he commanded within Cosa Nostra, never rose above the rank of soldier, and he travelled very widely throughout his life of crime; thus he was a prime example of a mafioso who followed the second career path. As, for that matter, was Cola Gentile, the Sicilian-American man of honour of the early twentieth century.

Lucky Luciano is an interesting case in that he followed both routes at different stages in his life. Before he was imprisoned on pimping charges in 1936, his authority was territorial; he was at the head of what is sometimes called a power syndicate, a criminal gang that exacts an extortion tax from legal and illegal businesses in a given area. After being expelled from the US in 1946, Luciano did not settle in Palermo as might seem the natural thing to do for a Sicilian-born mafioso. He went instead to Naples on the Italian mainland whence he organized all sorts of illegal trafficking, including in narcotics. For the rest of his life he was therefore what is called an enterprise syndicate criminal, one who engages in illegal trade but does not have the power to control territory. A low-level Neapolitan crook once demonstrated this point in dramatic style by publicly slapping Luciano, who could do nothing to avenge this sfregio.

The point is that, as a man of honour who was more of an enterprise syndicate type than a power syndicate type, more of a narcotics businessman than an extortion-racket statesman, Buscetta had every interest in weakening the power of the heads of Families, in gaining more commercial autonomy for individual men of honour. With the surge in heroin trafficking between Europe and America, the high-flying young drug-dealers like Buscetta, Badalamenti, and ‘Little Bird’ Greco did not want their commercial wings clipped by the power syndicate bosses. The Commission was created—with Joe Bananas’ support—as a new mechanism of mafia government. But the aim of its founding fathers was not to centralize control over the mafia; it was to apply overall rules that gave more freedom to individual mafiosi. The Commission was supposed to make the mafia more like the association of autonomous men of honour that Buscetta thought it should be.

As it happened, in the early 1980s the Commission metamorphosed into exactly the reverse of what Buscetta hoped. It would ultimately become, in the hands of the Corleonesi, the instrument of a dictatorship. And yet before that historical irony could unfold, another would be visited on Joe Bananas’ plans to use the Sicilian mafia as tame manpower for the US Cosa Nostra’s heroin operation. Even Buscetta, a man with great sympathies for the American mafia, felt that US mafiosi in the 1950s and 1960s often patronized their Old World colleagues, treating them like ‘poor cousins’, calling them ‘zips’ because they spoke Sicilian so fast. But once the zips were allowed into the traffic in heroin in North America, they did not prove as obedient as had been hoped. By the 1970s, the zips would be running the once-mighty Bonanno Family’s drug operation.

When the Commission was founded in 1957 all of this still lay far in the future. When Joe Bananas got on the plane to return to New York, the constant struggle to reconcile business and politics within the Sicilian Cosa Nostra entered a new and turbulent phase. Only six years after being set up, the Commission was temporarily dissolved in dramatic circumstances.