Cosa Nostra

Set alongside a road that climbs through the tangerine groves of Ciaculli, there is a monument commemorating one of the worst of the many horrors perpetrated by Cosa Nostra. Perhaps fittingly, the monument is not particularly attractive: a tall wedge of pink marble crowned with seven metal stars that perch in wisps of wire. On it are chiselled the names of four carabinieri, two military engineers, and a policeman. A glance at the list reveals that the mason made a small mistake as he began his work. Beneath the first name—Lieutenant Mario Malausa of the carabinieri—one can see signs that the name of another man with a lower rank has been chipped gently away. Absurdly, but somehow touchingly, someone must have pointed out that the hierarchies of military life must be preserved even in death.

The monument is set in a tiny garden from which the view is both stunning and disquieting. Here in Ciaculli, perhaps more than anywhere in western Sicily, the power of the mafia is made visible in the landscape. With one’s back to the sea, one can see lines of tangerine trees rising towards the curved ridge of Monte Grifone. Turning to look at the ground below the monument’s base, one discovers small square wells feeding into narrow channels—the arteries of the citrus groves, the pressure points that the mafia once squeezed to exert its territorial control. From this point, rows of trees run down through Ciaculli and Croceverde Giardini, the fiefdoms of the two branches of the Greco dynasty that fought out their war in 1946–7. Villabate, where a cosca has been rooted for as long as the mafia has existed, lies at the foot of the hill. To Villabate’s west is the notorious new industrial quarter of Brancaccio; the carabinieri station here is a villa confiscated from the local mafia. So heavily fortified was it that the military police scarcely needed to do more than put a new sign over the door when they took over. Beyond Brancaccio and Villabate the sea stretches across the middle distance, an expanse wider than can be taken in with a single glance. Palermo lies further along the coastline to the west; its concrete arms stretch out eastwards to embrace what were once independent towns and villages of the hinterland. In the late 1980s, when a journalist asked a mafia defector from Brancaccio how he would tackle Cosa Nostra, his answer was simple: send troops along the two roads that lead up to Ciaculli and start shooting. ‘They are all there,’ he said.

As well as offering a panorama of a landscape that the mafia has helped shape, the monument at Ciaculli also marks a turning point in the mafia’s history. It bears the date 30 June 1963. Mid-morning on that day, a man phoned Palermo police headquarters to say that a car had been left on his land where the monument now stands. The car, an Alfa Romeo Giulietta, had a flat tyre and its doors were still open. It was immediately clear what this might mean: in the early hours of the same morning, a car bomb—another Giulietta—had exploded in Villabate, killing a baker and a motor mechanic. Responding rapidly to the call, the police and carabinieri coaxed their vehicles up what was then a potholed track to find the abandoned car. On the back seat, clearly visible, was a tank of butane with the burned end of a fuse attached to the top. On seeing it, they secured the surrounding area and called in the army engineers. Two hours later, two bomb disposal experts arrived, cut the fuse, and pronounced the vehicle safe to approach. But when Lieutenant Mario Malausa made to inspect the contents of the boot, he detonated the huge quantity of TNT it contained. He and six other men were blown to pieces by an explosion that scorched and stripped the tangerine trees for hundreds of metres around.

There had been bloodshed on the streets of Palermo before 30 June 1963, of course. In 1955–6, two mafia Families fought out a brutal conflict when the city’s wholesale market was moved from one territory to another. But most onlookers were relatively unconcerned. As one Rome conservative newspaper commented at the time: ‘When it comes down to it, reciprocal elimination is a method that brings benefits for public order in Palermo … These last remnants of Sicilian crime are destroying themselves on their own initiative.’

After the Ciaculli bomb, no one could shrug their shoulders and argue that ‘they only kill each other’ or that the mafia was in its death throes. The papers rightly called it the worst crime since the days of the ‘last bandit’, Salvatore Giuliano. The police response was immediate: Villabate and Ciaculli were surrounded on the night of 2 July, their streets illuminated by rocket flares; forty people were arrested and a large quantity of arms confiscated. It was only the beginning of what would become the biggest round-up of suspects since the days of the ‘iron prefect’. Three days after the tragedy at Ciaculli, under an enervatingly hot sun, an estimated 100,000 people, including the Minister of the Interior, followed the virtually empty coffins of the seven victims to Palermo Cathedral. The political pressure to take the mafia problem seriously became irresistible.

The Ciaculli car bomb marked a historical point of no return. Until then, every generation of Italians seemed doomed to ‘discover’ the mafia as if no one had ever heard of it before. Tajani’s speech to parliament in 1875, the Notarbartolo murder in 1893, the iron prefect’s Fascist ‘surgery’: with each outrageous killing or political crisis, an understanding of the problem had to be reconstructed from the ground up. Every time, as apathy, cynical politicking, and criminal complicity reasserted themselves, that knowledge crumbled once again into incoherent ruins. After the Ciaculli bomb, Italy began to remember and—slowly, painfully, confusedly—to learn.

The outrage of 30 June 1963 was a turning point for Cosa Nostra itself. It brought to an end what has become known as the ‘first mafia war’—the title itself betrays how short is Italy’s historical memory. The crackdown that followed scattered men of honour across not only Italy but the globe. Yet to this day, no one knows for certain who it was who left the Giulietta that morning in 1963. To this day, no one has ever been brought to justice for the murder of the seven servants of the state whose names are carved in pink marble above Ciaculli. However, one man is still strongly suspected of the crime: Tommaso Buscetta.

LIKE CHICAGO IN THE TWENTIES? THE FIRST MAFIA WAR

In late 1962 and early 1963, explosions, car chases, and shoot-outs suddenly became regular events in Palermo. The papers said—with unconscious irony—that the Sicilian capital had become like Chicago in the 1920s. At first glance, the war of 1962–3 does indeed seem like a Chicago-style cliché; it could come from one of the tiresome gangster yarns that fill the true-crime sections of British and American bookstores. The first mafia war looks, in other words, like the usual cycle of tit-for-tat killings. But internal conflict in the mafia is never that predictable. For within Cosa Nostra, deceit and politics are as important as guns and bombs. The first mafia war may in fact have been the most cunningly fought of them all.

One ‘Chicago’ cliché can be dispatched straightaway. It was often thought that because of who the leading combatants were, the first mafia war was a struggle between the ‘old’ mafia and the ‘new’ mafia, between venerable landed bosses and audacious young hoods grown precociously rich on drugs and concrete. On one side, it was pointed out, was Salvatore ‘Little Bird’ Greco, the son of the Ciaculli boss murdered by Piddu the lieutenant Greco in 1946. In other words, ‘Little Bird’ was a scion of Cosa Nostra’s most revered dynasty. Pitted against this mafia blue blood was Angelo La Barbera, the capo of Palermo-Centre. Angelo and his brother Salvatore came from nowhere; their father sold firewood for a living. From being street criminals they rose within the organization and took a major role in the sack of Palermo. Angelo La Barbera’s territory took in much of the area around via Libertà where the sack was initially concentrated; he also had a good working relationship with DC young Turk, Salvo Lima.

It is worth taking a closer look at the figure of Angelo La Barbera to see whether he was really as ‘new’ a mafioso as he seems. In fact he is unusual in that, while he was being held on a prison island some years after the events of the early 1960s, he allowed himself to be the subject of a series of fascinating interviews by a British-based Italian journalist, Gaia Servadio.

Servadio was struck immediately by La Barbera’s shrewd features, slick elegance, and ‘lupine teeth’. But the man beneath these physical traits remained elusive. Servadio is as engaging and astute as she is brave, so it is certainly not her fault if her portrait of La Barbera could hardly be tagged ‘intimate’. No gangster on trial for murder, as La Barbera was at the time of the interviews, was ever likely to give a great deal away; that much is understandable. But there is, one suspects, a more profound reason why Angelo La Barbera’s individual identity is not captured by Servadio’s pen: he probably did not have much of an individual identity to capture.

The mafioso was as rigidly stylised in his behaviour as an imperial Chinese courtier. Everything about La Barbera that Servadio observed was mannered: he had a slow, measured gait and openly disdained physical effort; he had a kind of pokerfaced generosity; and he habitually referred to himself in the third person. La Barbera was also what his interviewer called an ‘accomplished hypochondriac’—medical conditions make a good delaying tactic in court hearings. There is no way of knowing with any certainty, but it seems that all of his mannerisms had been learned from a time-honoured repertoire. One can only wonder how closely the way La Barbera carried himself would have aped the bearing of the ‘taciturn, puffed up, and wary’ Antonino Giammona back in the 1870s. ‘New’ mafioso he may have been, but Angelo La Barbera probably made sure he conformed to an old mafia style.

There is definitely nothing novel about the way Cosa Nostra acts as a ladder of social promotion for hard young men from poor backgrounds like Angelo La Barbera. The mafia has always been a meritocracy of violence. In fact there were blue bloods and barrow boys on either side in the first mafia war. An ally of ‘Little Bird’ Greco’s was Luciano Leggio, the child of a humble peasant family who rose through the ranks and took over the Corleone Family in the late 1950s. On the La Barberas’ side in the war was Pietro Torretta, a former member of Salvatore Giuliano’s brigand band, and now boss of Uditore—the same territory ruled by Antonino Giammona a century earlier. A Torretta is even mentioned in Chief of Police Sangiorgi’s report back in 1898. So neither side in the first mafia war had a better mafia pedigree than the other. The story about a ‘new’ mafia challenging an ‘old’ mafia—that staple of the true-crime genre—provides a misleading map of the battle lines.

And so to the war dispatches. The first mafia war was triggered when someone cheated on a drug deal. In February 1962, the La Barbera brothers and the Grecos were all members of a consortium that financed a consignment of heroin from Egypt, delivered to the southern Sicilian coast. A man of honour, Calcedonio Di Pisa, was sent to make sure it was safely forwarded to New York on an ocean liner. But the mafiosi in Brooklyn who collected the drugs found that the packages they received did not contain as much heroin as expected. The waiter on the liner to whom Di Pisa had handed the drugs was tortured but did not reveal anything. Suspicions began to fall on Di Pisa himself. At a meeting of the Commission called to decide on the case, Di Pisa was acquitted of having stolen any of the drug shipment. But the La Barberas made plain their displeasure about the decision.

On 26 December 1962, Di Pisa was shot dead in Piazza Principe di Camporeale on the western edge of Palermo. He had just parked his car and was heading for the tobacconist’s when two men fired at him with a .38 and a sawn-off shotgun. Other members of Di Pisa’s Family were soon attacked. Then, in January 1963, the retaliation began when Salvatore La Barbera became the victim of a ‘white shotgun’ killing: his Alfa Romeo Giulietta was all that was found, burned out. His brother and capo Angelo also vanished, only to pop up in Rome to give a press conference; it was a way simultaneously of telling his friends that he was still alive, and making himself too public a target for his enemies to kill easily.

Angelo La Barbera was determined to continue the war after his brother’s death. On 12 February, a huge car bomb—a Giulietta—destroyed ‘Little Bird’ Greco’s house in Ciaculli. Despite being unharmed, ‘Little Bird’ responded in equally spectacular fashion. At 10.25 A.M. on 19 April, a cream-coloured Fiat 600 pulled up outside the Impero fishmonger’s in via Empedocle Restivo. Some of the many housewives on the street at the time remembered thinking it odd that, in a drizzle, the car’s soft top was open. Before they had time to reflect further, two men stood up on the seats and showered the fishmonger’s with machine-gun fire. Two men were killed, including the fishmonger himself who was thought to be a La Barbera hit man; two people were wounded, one of whom was a passer-by. Whoever was in the shop at the time—probably Angelo La Barbera—was clearly expecting trouble because the occupants returned fire with a revolver and a shotgun. Later, as police recovered an arsenal of small arms from the shattered shop, Communist activists with megaphones toured the area in cars to demand action.

A Greco ally was the next to fall. The Cinisi boss was killed near the iron gate of his lemon grove by a bomb placed, inevitably, in an Alfa Romeo Giulietta. This dainty four-door family saloon was one of the symbols of Italy’s economic miracle—‘svelte, practical, comfortable, safe and convenient’, as the adverts proclaimed. But as the car bombs detonated in Palermo, the Giulietta was quickly coming to symbolize something rather more dangerous and, apparently, atavistic.

Investigators later surmised that this most recent Giulietta attack in Cinisi was a last desperate attempt by Angelo La Barbera to show that he could still reach his enemies. If it was, it did not work. La Barbera was finally put out of action in the early hours of 25 May 1963. What struck Italian public opinion about his shooting was not its ferocity—two cars pulled up beside him and their occupants fired repeated volleys of shots; nor was it the remarkable fact that La Barbera survived, despite being hit in his left eye, neck, chest, back, leg, and groin; nor was it even that doctors found another bullet lodged in his head from an earlier attack (perhaps he had some basis for his ‘accomplished hypochondria’ after all). What was surprising about the incident was rather where it happened. La Barbera was shot in viale Regina Giovanna, a residential street in Milan—the booming northern city where the Giuliettas were built. The headlines in the Corriere della Sera spelled out the city’s surprise, and hinted at its attitude to ‘typically Sicilian’ behaviour: ‘War between mafia cosche shifts to Milan. Sicilian, riddled with six bullets, tells police: “I don’t know anything.”’ When the mafia spread beyond Sicily, the issue moved up the whole nation’s political agenda.

If the first mafia war had really been no more than the usual chain of retaliatory killings set in a ‘Chicago’ built from true-crime stereotypes, it would have come to an end when Angelo La Barbera was arrested in a Milanese hospital; all the publicity that the war generated would have died down, and the Ciaculli bomb—which went off only just over a month after the La Barbera shooting in Milan—would never have happened. The war’s brutal coda betrays the fact that it was a subtler affair. Most of the subtleties involve Tommaso Buscetta.

* * *

There are two accounts of Buscetta’s role in the first mafia war. The first is the product of police work at the time and probably draws on anonymous mafia informers; the second is Buscetta’s own, written more than two decades after the event. The official version is, broadly speaking, more credible. Buscetta’s account needs to be treated with as much circumspection as the other parts of his testimony that have not been verified in court. He airbrushes drugs out of the picture and underplays his own cunning and aggressive role in the unfolding of hostilities. But as ever, ‘the boss of two worlds’ also adds both insight and intrigue to the story.

The official sources on the first mafia war place Buscetta on the La Barberas’ side at the outbreak of hostilities. Buscetta may well have been in the fishmonger’s that was machine-gunned by Greco men—he was certainly a frequent visitor. But it seems that when the Grecos began to look as if they would prove victorious, both Buscetta and Uditore boss Pietro Torretta decided to change their allegiances; losing mafiosi are rarely too proud to try and get a foot on the victor’s rostrum.

Nevertheless, according to the official version, when Angelo La Barbera was shot and arrested in Milan, the result was a power vacuum in the Family that he had ruled, Palermo-Centre. Both Tommaso Buscetta and Pietro Torretta considered themselves jointly to be Angelo La Barbera’s natural successors; Torretta proposed himself as capo of Palermo-Centre and Buscetta as his deputy. But the Grecos thought Buscetta in particular a dangerous man to promote. The protracted dispute gradually reignited hostilities between Buscetta, Torretta, and the Grecos. Buscetta and Torretta acted first by ambushing two of their enemies in Torretta’s house. A new spate of violence was just getting under way when, on 30 June 1963, the umpteenth Giulietta stuffed with TNT accidentally killed the seven members of the forces of order whose names are inscribed on the Ciaculli monument. The intended targets were once again the Grecos, but a puncture stopped the killers carrying through the attack. Whether those killers were Buscetta and Torretta in person, or merely men of honour acting on their orders, is not known.

By predictable contrast, in his own account of the first mafia war Buscetta presents himself as an impartial mediator and a good friend to both ‘Little Bird’ Greco and Salvatore La Barbera. He is much less kind about Salvatore’s younger brother and capo, Angelo La Barbera, whom he blames for escalating the conflict—he calls him ‘haughty and arrogant’. Buscetta admits to having accepted a contract to kill Angelo La Barbera, but claims that someone else carried out the shooting in Milan before he could. It is still not known for certain whether he was, in fact, involved.

The main thrust of Buscetta’s story is to blame another man altogether for starting the trouble: Michele ‘the Cobra’ Cavataio, the new capo of the Family that had lost out to the Grecos in the war over the wholesale market back in the mid-1950s. It was Cavataio, Buscetta tells us, who carried out the murder that set off the war in the first place—the shooting of drug trafficker Calcedonio Di Pisa outside the tobacconist’s. Buscetta’s theory is that ‘the Cobra’ killed Di Pisa in the knowledge that the La Barberas would be blamed and that a war with the Grecos would be the result. Cavataio it was, according to Buscetta, who was also responsible for the Ciaculli bomb. The first mafia war, in essence, was all the result of a trick designed to play the La Barberas and Grecos off against each other.

Reading through these conflicting accounts, one begins to get a sense of why mafia wars so often failed to end in successful prosecutions. But what also becomes clear is that it is slightly beside the point to try to sort out who murdered whom or, in the language of ‘Chicago’ schlock, to ‘finally reveal the shocking truth’ about the extravagant shootings and bombings of 1962–3. It is more important to realize that even the mafiosi involved did not really know what was going on. Both Buscetta and the official account make it apparent that one of the reasons that mafia bosses reflected for so long before approving a new capo for Palermo-Centre was simply that they were trying to work out what on earth had happened. The first mafia war—like many mafia wars—was a giant game of murder in the dark.

It was also politics in the dark. Buscetta disingenuously claims that the Commission was invented to be a parliament of felons; he presents it as an impartial institution designed to bring light and equity into the gloom and treachery of Cosa Nostra’s affairs. But in its own way the Commission was as much an instrument of struggle within Cosa Nostra as were the Giuliettas loaded with TNT. It was designed to impose rules across Cosa Nostra that would make life easier for the ‘enterprise syndicate’ mafiosi operating in the transatlantic heroin trade. But the Commission soon became a power in its own right. It was, for example, beginning to act like a joint stock company for the heroin traffickers; or at least that is the implication of the fact that both the La Barberas and the Grecos—mafiosi from opposite sides of the city—were jointly funding a heroin shipment in 1962. So the Commission’s growing influence was running into conflict with the long-established power of the individual Families.

Buscetta believed that behind both ‘the Cobra’ Cavataio and La Barbera was an alliance of bosses from the north-west of Palermo who resented the Commission’s growing power, and the influence thereby enjoyed by south-eastern Palermo men of honour like ‘Little Bird’ Greco. Amid the intrigue and confusion, the root cause of the first mafia war was a problem as old as the mafia itself, the same problem it had had to manage when its main interests were lemon groves and cattle rather than construction sites and heroin: that is, the conflict between its role as a shadow government and the business interests of its members—between the territorial structure of the cosche and the highly lucrative smuggling networks that cut across the map of Family domains.

Truth, territory, and business are always at stake in mafia wars. And by the 1960s, whatever happened within Cosa Nostra in Sicily also had diplomatic ramifications. At about the time that the first mafia war started, the American Cosa Nostra was coming under unprecedented pressure from the Kennedy administration. Robert Kennedy had built his political profile through his scrupulous work on the Senate Labor Rackets Committee. As attorney general, part of his brief was to tackle the mob. Under Kennedy, convictions of racketeers by the Organized Crime Section and the Tax Division trebled between 1961 and 1963; they nearly doubled again in 1964. Tax law, famously the instrument used to catch Al Capone three decades earlier, was still the main weapon against organized crime.

In 1962, faced with the electric chair, imprisoned Gambino soldier Joseph Valachi started to talk. He did not make a particularly compelling witness when he appeared before the Rackets Committee, and many people were very sceptical about what he said. But Valachi did at least succeed in getting J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to take the syndicate crime issue seriously for the first time. In 1959, the New York office of the FBI had 400 agents investigating American Communism, and only four working on organized crime. Valachi led to a change in priorities: by 1963, the New York office had 140 people in its rackets team. In 1964, FBI hidden microphones recorded Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa in a series of business exchanges with the Detriot mafia.

Inevitably, the Kennedy anti-racketeering campaign lessened the influence of the American mafia in Sicily. As a result, the Sicilian bosses whose interests were centred on the territorial dimension of Cosa Nostra’s operations probably calculated that it was a good time to settle accounts with the drug traffickers on the Commission now that their American protection had weakened.

It is probably also highly significant that the first mafia war followed only a few months after Lucky Luciano died of a heart attack while waiting to meet his biographer’s plane at Naples airport. Lucky was known to be close to the La Barberas, and it is strongly suspected that the relationship was based on narcotics. When Lucky Luciano died, it left Angelo La Barbera having to prove to both the Families and the Commission that his power within Cosa Nostra was based on more than his American friends. Despite all the Giuliettas filled with TNT, he failed.

Angelo La Barbera was sentenced to twenty-two years for his part in the first mafia war in 1968. In 1975, the representative of the ‘new’ mafia died the most traditional of ‘old’ mafia deaths when he was stabbed in a prison yard.

* * *

Whatever the truth behind the intrigues of the first mafia war, the results of the Ciaculli bomb that brought it to a close were dramatic. There were close to 2,000 arrests. ‘The police seemed to have gone mad,’ was Buscetta’s comment. Faced with this backlash, the mafia adopted the simplest self-defence method of all: it went into hiding. In the summer of 1963, the Commission met and decided to dissolve itself. The Families disbanded; according to one pentito not even protection money was collected in Palermo. Mafia crimes dropped to almost zero over the next few years. A number of leading bosses fled abroad. ‘Little Bird’ Greco went first to Switzerland and then to Venezuela. Tommaso Buscetta’s wanderings took him to Switzerland, Mexico, Canada, and then the United States.

As Lucky Luciano had done when he was expelled from the United States in 1946, many Sicilian men of honour simply changed the direction of their careers within the organization: from becoming power syndicate criminals—statesmen of the mafia’s shadow government—they evolved into enterprise syndicate leaders, international paramilitary businessmen. As they did, the Italian political system once again became the chief player in the mafia’s history.

THE ANTIMAFIA

The years before the Ciaculli bomb were a depressing time for anyone prepared to speak out against the mafia. With both the Church and the DC intent on denying not only the seriousness of the problem but even its very existence, only marginal voices broke the silence. The most important of those voices was a collective one; the fight to expose the truth about the mafia during the 1950s was led by the independent left-wing newspaper L’Ora. The title had begun life as the organ of Florio interests in Sicily at the turn of the century. In the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, it created an astute blend of incandescent sports coverage and girls in bikinis with sophisticated writing on literature, music, and art. But for all these attractions, it was L’Ora’s courageous investigative reports on organized crime and corruption that were often its main selling point. When it published the names, interests, and political contacts of leading mafia bosses in 1958, there was a devastating dynamite attack on its offices. L’Ora refused to bend and carried on its campaign. (In the early 1970s, two L’Ora journalists, Mauro De Mauro and Giovanni Spampinato, would pay with their lives for their work.)

Inspired by the example provided by the Kefauver hearings on organized crime in the United States, in the 1950s the Italian Communist Party began to call for a parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia. Impetus to those calls was added by the bombing of L’Ora’s offices, but the impetus would never be sufficient as long as the mafia issue remained solely the political property of the Left. As late as 1959, a DC junior Minister of the Interior dismissed the need for a parliamentary inquiry, and blamed mafia crimes on the islanders’ tendency to ‘take justice into their own hands out of a misplaced sense of honour’.

Yet by then the political map of Italy was already changing; the DC was divided, and some of its factions were beginning to look to the Socialist Party as a potential coalition partner. The Socialists were the mafia’s historical enemies; they had not forgotten the slaughter of trade unionists and other militants in the post-war years. This new political environment was one in which the calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the mafia could find a sympathetic hearing even within the ranks of the DC. In September 1961, the Sicilian Regional Assembly got its first ‘Centre-Left’ government which included both the DC and the Socialists, and was given issue-by-issue support by the Communists. Early the following year, the Assembly voted unanimously to ask the Italian parliament to set up a commission of inquiry into the mafia. Even the mafia’s own politicians voted in favour because they now considered an inquiry so inevitable that opposition at this stage would be both useless and conspicuous.

As the country’s centre of political gravity shifted gently to the left, the voices that had spoken out about the mafia became louder. One of them belonged to Leonardo Sciascia, a schoolteacher from the unremarkable little town of Racalmuto in the sulphur region near Agrigento. Leonardo Sciascia’s The Day of the Owl, an elegant, bleak novella about a detective’s failed investigation into a mafia killing, was published in 1961. The Day of the Owl—a work of fiction, it should be stressed—was the first book to put a face on the mafia and words in its mouth, in the unforgettable figure of Don Mariano Arena.

It is now known that, in the same year that Sciascia’s novel came out, there was a meeting of the Cosa Nostra Commission in the province of Palermo to discuss the organization’s response to the Italian state’s awakening interest in the mafia issue. It was decided to keep killings to an absolute minimum until the politicians lost interest. But the truce held only for a year before the latent tensions over business and territory led to the outbreak of the first mafia war in December 1962. The renewed killing spree cranked further political momentum into the plans for a parliamentary inquiry.

Less than a week after the Ciaculli car bomb, the parliamentary commission of inquiry finally began its work. It was the first official inquiry into the mafia since 1875, but the political conditions were now much more favourable to a serious investigation than they had been in the year of Tajani’s revelations in parliament about police collusion with criminals in Palermo. The Socialist Party was moving into government with the DC, pulling it in the direction of reform and transparency, as the cross-party support for the parliamentary inquiry seemed to show. Expectations in society were high: public opinion seemed ready to hold the politicians to account for the way they responded to the crisis. Thus the Antimafia—as the new inquiry became known—began at a brisk pace. Within a month it had made strong recommendations including, for the first time in Italian history, criminal legislation specifically targeted at the mafia. Italian democracy seemed finally ready to confront organised crime in Sicily.

It is, alas, all too easy to tell the story of the Antimafia as one giant anticlimax. The indignation that followed the Ciaculli bomb of 1963 faded rapidly. With the mafia all but silenced, there were few outrages to fuel the Antimafia’s work. The commission of inquiry’s opening sprint rapidly slowed to a gentle amble that would continue for no less than thirteen years. The Antimafia dragged on until it became the longest parliamentary inquiry in Italian history. It came to seem less like a response to an emergency than a permanent and dreary part of Italian political life.

Interest in the Antimafia’s work revived periodically following some particularly sensational revelation, but sensation repeatedly failed to translate into effective political measures or judicial action. Even the criminal law passed in 1965 as a result of the Antimafia’s recommendations proved to be partially counter-productive. The law stipulated that mafia suspects could be forced to live far from their homes. It was an effort to break contacts between mafiosi and the society around them—as if the mafia was caused by an unhealthy exhalation of the soil in western Sicily. Dozens of men of honour were posted all over the peninsula under these ‘obligatory residence’ measures, with the unintended result that the mafia gained new bases for its operations right across Italy.

Each leak or scandal emerging from the Antimafia about a politician with connections seemed to be blunted by denials and libel suits. It is also, quite simply, extremely difficult for evidence of discreet, face-to-face collusion between politicians and the mafia to reach the standards of proof required by criminal law. Vito Ciancimino—the DC young Turk in the hands of the Corleone mafia—was forced to resign following revelations made by the Antimafia in 1964. He surfaced again in 1970 when, incredibly, he became mayor of Palermo. The national scandal that followed ended in his resignation. In 1975, he submitted a lengthy self-defence to the Antimafia. Its breathless, page-long opening sentence complained about the ‘denigratory publicity’, ‘corrupting sophisms’, ‘personal rancour’, ‘servile demagoguery’, and ‘affront to Latin legal traditions’ to which he, as a man who had ‘sacrificed himself for society’, had been subjected. He remained a power behind the scenes of Palermo politics until he was finally arrested in 1984.

Part of the problem with the Antimafia was a turnover in personnel. When a new president of the Antimafia was appointed in 1972, he confessed that everything he knew about the mafia came from reading Mario Puzo’s The Godfather. But this lack of continuity in the Antimafia’s membership was only a symptom of its main handicap: the deep-seated factionalism of Italian political life. Apart from the legacy of Fascism and the fact that Italy was on the front line of the Cold War, there were also other fissures, notably between Catholic and lay world-views and between different regions of the country. Rather than being a ‘ship of state’, Italy often seems more like a flotilla of boats, each piloted according to a different chart, each competing for access to the most favourable winds, yet each afraid of being isolated from the other craft. Like all government institutions, the parliamentary commission of inquiry became the subject of factional tussles, with each group trying to put its own members into the chairs around the Antimafia table. The reason for this was that the word ‘mafia’ remained the same political weapon that it had always been ever since it entered the Italian language back in 1865. It was a weapon that no party or faction, least of all the DC, was prepared to leave in other hands.

Among the members of the Antimafia commission were some outstanding figures like Franco Cattanei of the DC and Girolamo Li Causi of the Communist Party (he was the Resistance veteran who survived a grenade attack by Don Calò Vizzini in Villalba town square back in 1944). It was politicians like these who tried to make the Antimafia into an impartial expression of the national interest. Their task was not an easy one. In 1972, a new government was formed in which two Palermo ‘young Turks’, with links to the mafia that had been revealed by the Antimafia, were given ministerial office: Salvo Lima was undersecretary at the Ministry of Finance, and Giovanni ‘the Viceroy’ Gioia was Minister for the Mail and Telecommunications. One of Gioia’s supporters was even placed on the Antimafia commission; the man in question was not only on record as stating that the mafia did not exist but had himself been investigated by the commission at an earlier stage. The result was a five-month bout of political squabbling during which the Antimafia’s work came to a complete stop. It is only one example of the way in which the vitriolic factionalism of the Italian system undermined the unity and authority of the country’s response to the mafia.

When the Antimafia finally concluded its work in 1976, its most substantial legacy was a mountain of paper. Between the ‘tomes’ and ‘parts’ of the documentation it gathered, the interim reports, concluding report, and minority reports (for there was no political consensus on the lessons to be learned), the Antimafia bequeathed nearly forty fat volumes to the few libraries that had enough shelf-space to stock them. Anyone with the patience to read, for example, the turgid prose of the interim report of 1972—all 1,262 pages of it—will get a pretty good picture of the mafia. The report talks of the association’s systematic use of an ‘unparalleled, bloodthirsty violence’, its parasitical relationship to business, its links to local and national government; it explains that the cosche ruling different areas have a ‘tacit accord’ that is not broken even when there is pitiless fighting between them. The papers of the Antimafia are a vast and rich source of material for historians. So vast and rich, in fact, that the thousands of pages smothered the ‘powder keg’ of revelations about political collusion that one early president of the inquiry promised would emerge. It was during the long years of the Antimafia that post-war Italy became acquainted for the first time with mafia fatigue.

The Antimafia’s results were undoubtedly a huge disappointment when compared with the expectations of 1963. But the commission did at least bring a substantial increase in Italy’s awareness of the issue. Some of the stories that surfaced from the investigations lodged themselves in the public memory, like the town of Caccamo where, next to the mayor’s seat in the council chamber, a special chair for the mafia boss was permanently set. In the wake of the commission of inquiry, through well-informed authors like Michele Pantaleone (the left-wing activist who had tangled with Don Calò in his native Villalba), studies of the mafia came to command a small but solid readership in Italy, as they still do to this day. Partly as a result fewer politicians had the brass neck—or the ‘bronze face’ as the Italian idiom has it—to deny completely that the mafia existed. The mafia was now no longer an issue that was restricted to the Left. All told, the Antimafia slightly increased the price (in terms of a loss of credibility and national influence) that politicians who colluded with the mafia risked paying. It was not much to show for thirteen years of work. But it was something, and that something had been achieved democratically.

‘A PHENOMENON OF COLLECTIVE CRIMINALITY’

One hundred and seventeen of the combatants in the first mafia war were sent to trial in Catanzaro, in Calabria, in 1968. When the verdict was issued in December of that year it proved as big a judicial anticlimax as the Antimafia was a political anticlimax. At Catanzaro a small handful of leading mafiosi received long sentences: Uditore boss Pietro Torretta was given the longest term—twenty-seven years—for the murder of the two men in his home; Angelo La Barbera was sentenced to twenty-two and a half years; ‘Little Bird’ Greco and Tommaso Buscetta, both tried in absentia, were sentenced to ten and fourteen years respectively. But most of the rest of the defendants were either acquitted or received short sentences for membership of a criminal association. Given the time they had already spent in captivity while awaiting trial, the vast majority were freed immediately.

The Catanzaro verdict is often viewed as a prime example of how toothless the Italian legal system has been when dealing with mafia crime. It seems in many respects like a dispiriting replay of the 1901 trial based on the Sangiorgi report. But there is a difference: in this case there are no suspicions of collusion between the judiciary and the mafia. In fact Catanzaro is an example of just how objectively difficult it was to construct a legally convincing picture of Cosa Nostra in the days before Tommaso Buscetta decided to collaborate with justice. In Italy judges prepare public documents to explain their decisions. The Catanzaro ruling, 461 pages long, provides a fascinating glimpse into the thinking behind a big mafia court case, and explains just how judicially slippery Cosa Nostra was even when the Italian legal system was working well.

Much of the work that the members of Cosa Nostra carried out to avoid conviction in Catanzaro went on well before the case ever came to court. As happened in Sangiorgi’s day, the police found that witnesses emerged from deep within the mafia environment to give evidence during the early stages of investigations. But their evidence was then retracted at a later stage as fear took its toll.

A striking case is that of Giuseppe Ricciardi who suffered a long sequence of injustices at the hand of the La Barbera brothers. First they murdered his father, a man of honour. Then they intimidated him into selling them his father’s trucking business at a knock-down price. Subsequently they used him—without his knowledge—to bring two of their enemies to Brancaccio station on Greco territory; Ricciardi watched as Tommaso Buscetta led the two away at gunpoint never to be seen again. Not long after recounting these events to magistrates, Ricciardi made a complete retraction, proffering a forlorn stream of explanations for his turnaround: he did not know anyone, he was ill, he had lost his well-paid job just because he was his father’s son, he was afraid of everything and everyone and just wanted to live a quiet life. He protested that the police had beaten his story out of him, but then withdrew even that accusation—which the judge took to be baseless. It is little compensation to investigators to prosecute such sorry individuals for withholding evidence.

Like Sangiorgi more than sixty years before, the prosecutors at Catanzaro were forced to rely on anonymous sources to provide a map of the battle lines in the mafia war; such sources were vital in providing a framework that made sense of what would otherwise seem like a random sequence of crimes. When it came to the trial, there was no disguising the fact that the evidence was thin in proportion to the number of defendants and the seriousness of the charges. So the prosecutors made an explicit plea for the bigger picture to be taken into consideration. The defendants’ criminal records, their fearsome reputations, the signs of a deliberate plan to contaminate evidence and intimidate witnesses: it all pointed to a pattern, and that pattern was the organization known as the mafia.

Defence lawyers can hardly be blamed for arguing that there was not enough concrete evidence to make this pattern into anything more than a legal hypothesis. They claimed that the pattern was actually invented by prosecution lawyers as a way of making up for glaring gaps in the evidence. What if the mafia were not an organization but a widespread Sicilian attitude of hostility towards the law?

Corruption, collusion, and intimidation explain a great many of the acquittals for insufficient evidence that mafiosi listed on their CVs. But the Catanzaro verdict on the first mafia war shows that at the centre of the problems faced by the judicial system was simply the enigma of the mafia itself. Both the pre-trial judge, who made a preliminary evaluation of the prosecution’s evidence, and the trial judge discounted the theory that the mafia was a centralized pyramidal organization. But in doing so they were unable to grasp the fact that Cosa Nostra can be organized without being a rigid bureaucracy of crime. The judges also discounted any suggestion that the mafia had ‘norms’ and ‘criteria’ common to all its members. The trial judge’s final ruling wordily conceded that the mafia could indeed be considered ‘a psychological attitude or the typical expression of an exaggerated individualism’. But it did point out that these social factors were only the background to what was in reality a ‘phenomenon of collective criminality’. The picture he had in mind was not of one criminal association but of many independent ones, whether they be local cosche or networks of traffickers, all of which blended at their edges into the generalized lawlessness of Sicilian society. In short, the Italian judicial system was moving towards an acceptance of the fact that the mafia was a thing and not an idea, but it was still too indistinct a thing to be caught in the legal net.

* * *

At a quarter to seven on the evening of 10 December 1969, five men in stolen police uniforms burst into a single-storey office building in viale Lazio in Palermo and began to machine-gun the occupants. There followed a furious gunfight during which one of the attackers was killed; his companions dumped him in the boot of one of the getaway cars before making their escape. In their wake they left four of their enemies dead, two more wounded, and over 200 shell cases. As soon as police arrived they realized which of the dead men was the primary target of the attack; he was found with his trademark Colt Cobra by his side. It was Michele Cavataio, the mafioso blamed by Buscetta for starting the first mafia war.

With its machine-guns and its getaway cars, the massacre in viale Lazio was the work of eminently modern gangsters. It took place in a new construction company office in a swanky residential quarter that had mushroomed during the sack of Palermo. Yet the murder of ‘the Cobra’ was a collective execution of exactly the kind performed in the same area by the men of honour cited in Chief of Police Sangiorgi’s report seventy years earlier. Pentiti have since revealed that the assassins disguised as policemen were representatives of different mafia Families from Palermo and beyond.

In fact, it is now clear that the attack in viale Lazio at the end of 1969 was the last act of the war of 1962–3, and it added credibility to Buscetta’s version of events. According to pentiti, the murder of Cavataio was instigated by ‘Little Bird’ Greco, who had come to subscribe to Buscetta’s theory about how the first mafia war began. His proposal to kill ‘the Cobra’ was accepted by an impromptu panel of leading bosses (the Commission was not reconstituted until soon afterwards). Thus it was that, with the Catanzaro verdict safely behind it, the ‘phenomenon of collective criminality’, which the judges had struggled so hard to define, decided to put the troubles of the mid-1960s behind it and go back to work.