History of the Mafia

The year is 1949. The dismissive and minimalizing interpretation printed above feigns to be based on “field” observations. In fact, it is solidly based on a literary tradition and specifically on the usual Pitrè. The person who put it forth was Mario Scelba, the Italian minister of the interior (a cabinet-level post that oversees the national police), renowned for his harsh stance toward demonstrators of all kinds, both peasants and blue-collar workers. Scelba, moreover, was named by Gasparre Pisciotta, the lieutenant of bandit Salvatore Giuliano, as the man who ordered the massacre of demonstrators in favor of land reform at Portella di Ginestra in 1947. Thus, the Mafia does not exist, or else it can be reduced to nothing more than a pallid cultural category. In the 1950s, a substantial portion of Sicilian and indeed Italian society subscribed to this theory, as mafiosi gradually became an integral part of the majority Christian Democratic political party. The mafiosi entered that party even more easily than did the traditional governing groups who swallowed the bitter pill of land reform and maneuvered their way through a gilded age of decadence amidst regional financing and regional employment. The right-wing anti-Mafia vanished, and with it went the Anti-Mafia tension in state structures. These were the years in which Lo Schiavo sang the praises of Vizzini, Genco Russo, and the Mafia d’ordine (order-keeping Mafia).²

The Mafia won itself a certain number of rewards by choosing to take on the same adversaries as the government and the bourgeoisie. We may assign a certain symbolic value to the fact that, in the town of Sciara, the men who killed Salvatore Carnevale met in the same building that housed the barracks of the Carabinieri, though they entered by a different set of stairs. Both the Mafia and the Carabinieri had long applied pressure on the labor organizer to “stay clear of political parties” and to get out of politics: “Picca nn’hai di ’sta maladrineria” (“You’ll gain nothing from this villainy”),³ a campiere, or private guard of farmland, warned him. Another emblematic figure was that of the suspected mastermind behind the Miraglia killing, Gaetano Parlapiano-Vella, who had returned to the heights of power after his internal exile under the Fascists.⁴ The investigations of these murders remain masterpieces of mediocrity; they stumble and come to a halt at either the level of the police or the courts. They display defects more serious than idle ignorance but fall somewhat short of outright complicity. One official who became the target of furious attacks was Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a junior officer of the Comando forze repressione banditismo (CFRB), commander of the squadriglia, or squadron, of Corleone, who made some efforts to break out of the bureaucratic box.

And so the left was relegated to a solitary position of shouting and protesting against the Mafia, crying out for justice for its dead, denouncing the unholy alliances. The likelihood that those protests and denunciations would have any effect was all the more diminished by the fact that they came from a political party that was entirely isolated after 1948. The authorities in the United States seemed to have a radically different attitude. Moreover, impulses seemed to be coming from the United States for reopening the debate in Italy as well. In 1953, the publisher Einaudi brought out an Italian edition of the Kefauver Investigation,⁵ which can be considered the first book of the postwar years on this topic in Italy. That book was followed in 1956 by Ed Reid’s Mafia, providing the (somewhat confused) story of the Sicilian plot against virtuous America. This book was given the undeserved honor of an introduction by the great Italian jurist Piero Calamandrei, who specifically approved the idea that Sicily should be considered “the central incubator of American criminality,”⁶ and supported the idea that some pressure, perhaps an international investigation, might help to raise the lid to show what was simmering in the Christian Democratic cauldron. The Communist Francesco Renda opined that this was “a courageous book … that offers a bitter reminder of the extended silence that has characterized Italian literature over all these years.”⁷ The reasons for these expressions of approval are quite evident. Any acknowledgment of the existence of the Mafia from the United States came from the great protector, on the far shore of the Atlantic Ocean, of precisely the political forces in Italy that claimed the opposite: that the Mafia did not exist. American congressional committees and commissions served as models for the Italian left, which had been excluded from the governing coalition and harbored lingering suspicions of the repressive approaches entrusted to Scelba’s police. These developments pointed to the mobilization of a type of “frontline” press and publishing that the mainstream, central parties of Italy regarded with misgivings.

These words were written by Vittorio Nisticò, the editor-in-chief of the left-wing Palermo newspaper L’Ora, which, on two separate occasions, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, launched major investigative series that denounced the relations between the Christian Democratic Party and the Mafia. (There was also an astonishing dynamite attack on the offices of L’Ora.) The newspaper carried on a form of journalism that made extensive use of spectacular and sensationalistic headlines, but also ongoing efforts to dig deeper into the cases of Corleone and the architectural and structural ravaging of Palermo, and to establish the historical background of those stories by exhuming the old stories of Cascio-Ferro or accounts of trials from the 1920s. But there was an entire milieu of engaged journalists and intellectuals at the end of the period of centrismo, who examined or returned to the issue. One unusual individual was the Triesteborn sociologist Danilo Dolci, who introduced the hunger strike as part of the Italian repertoire of protest methods, built social centers in the Partinico area, and undertook research projects and wrote dossiers on banditry, poverty, and clientelism.⁹ Other notable individuals came from the depths of an ancient Sicily: a surveyor from Villalba, Michele Pantaleone; a doctor from Montemaggiore, Simone Gatto;¹⁰ and a schoolteacher from Racalmuto, Leonardo Sciascia. Pantaleone traced the Mafia back to the concrete context of a rural history and the figure of a local notable, Don Calò. Gatto established a context built on the theme of the classic meridionalismo (focusing on the Meridione, or southern Italy) that followed in the tradition of Franchetti. In a mixture of fiction and nonfiction, Sciascia explored the idea that the Mafia was an indicator of a more general corruption, and it was not clear whether it was generally Italian or specifically Sicilian.

In the view of these intellectuals, the Mafia was a phenomenon of power: an archaic power that issued from the alliance between the Christian Democratic Party and various right-wing forces, both the bourgeoisie and an older feudalism; and that therefore reproduced all of the worst defects of Italian and Sicilian political trasformismo (transformism). In 1959, Il gattopardo (The Leopard, by Tomasi di Lampedusa) was published, with its ideology of “everything must change so that nothing will change,” an ideology toward which the Italian left had a love-hate relationship. The left detested that ideology as reactionary, and yet, at the same time, it considered it a realistic portrayal of Sicilian conditions, and perhaps also a consolation for the left wing’s inability to do anything to alter those conditions.

Sicilian Communists and socialists managed to emerge from their ghetto in 1959–1960 with what they called Operation Milazzo. The operation took its name from the Caltagirone notable, Silvio Milazzo, a former separatist, and a leading figure in the schism within the Christian Democratic Party thanks to which an anomalous regional government was established, with the support of both the extreme right and the extreme left. In this government, the old political class of agrarian extraction made its last stand, winning votes on a platform of fervent Sicilianism. The belief is that a number of the mafioso groups, transitioning from right-wing groups to the Christian Democratic Party, supported this attempt to preserve some element of the old aristocratic autonomies in opposition to the new party machine created by Amintore Fanfani. That was certainly the case with Francesco Paolo Bontate, also known as Don Paolino Bontà, landowner and leaseholder of vast citrus groves, one of Palermo’s leading Mafia capos, and formerly a separatist and a monarchist. This political alliance also witnessed the debut of two entrepreneurial groups that would in later years be the targets of harsh attacks and polemics over their ties to Mafia milieux: the financiers Salvo of Salemi and the Catanian builders Costanzo. It would appear that the Salvo-Bontate group was among the groups that masterminded Milazzo’s fall, with a shift in orientation that would eventually provide the Salvos with a “sort of benevolence” from the entire Christian Democratic Party. That “benevolence” was expressed in an enduring monopoly on the municipal offices of rates and taxes with an aggio (that is, a percentage or bonus) amounting to 10 percent, as compared with a national average of 3.3 percent.¹² According to the pentito Calderone, the Mafia had supported Milazzo “with great effort and determination,” in part because of the laws aiding entrepreneurs in this early experiment in the politics of compromise.¹³ The idea that “Sicilian” finance and capital should in any case be protected, a typical feature of the perverse approach of the regionalist pursuit of unanimity at all costs, ensured that the past would lay the worst kind of dead hand onto the island’s future.

With the fall of Milazzo, the next coalition to take power was the center-left, and the regional assembly asked the Italian parliament to establish the parliamentary commission of inquest on the Mafia (Commissione d’inchiesta sulla Mafia) that had long been demanded by the left and that was finally created in 1963. It appeared that with a centrist Italy and a Sicily of large landholdings, the Mafia was heading for ultimate defeat. The commission began a very substantial project of gathering documentation, the results of which, however, remained hidden from most people. The chair of the commission, the Christian Democrat Pafundi, first of all openly announced that the archives of the commission contained a slowly growing “powder keg,” but then he continually put off lighting its fuse, until at last, at the end of the legislature (1968), the mountain gave birth to the ridiculous little mouse of a few, anodyne pages of a watered-down report. Those who had hoped for a public trial of the ruling class began to judge the anti-Mafia as a “missed opportunity.”¹⁴ The majority party, the Christian Democratic Party, that is, was unwilling to subject itself to judgment. At the worst, it was willing to admit that in the Christian Democratic barrel there might be a few, isolated rotten apples, such as the loyal follower of Fanfani, Vito Ciancimino. In contrast, the opposition party energetically insisted that a figure of this stature (mayor of Palermo, commissioner for urban planning, city secretary of the Christian Democratic Party) could only represent the personification of a larger system of power made up of clientelism and business interests, which was intricately intertwined with the city administration of Palermo. For that matter, for years the press had been making ironic comments on the so-called VaLiGio business consortium (Vassallo–Lima–Gioia, one builder and two Christian Democratic politicians), which held the monopoly over the ruthless ravaging of a city that was frantically expanding and swelling with new inhabitants. Previously, the investigation of a ministerial commission under the guidance of the prefect Bevivino (1964) had clearly identified a process that the documentation assembled by the parliamentary commission of inquest fully confirmed: the rampant destruction of both old buildings and vast expanses of public or private green space, the manipulation of regulatory plans, rigged contract competitions, licenses and permits in exchange for bribes, and false-front shell companies.

A typical successful builder, Francesco Vassallo, came from the Sicilian interior, the Tommaso Natale borgata. He served an apprenticeship as a scassapagghiara in the 1930s. Then he married into a local Mafia family that suffered two murder victims (both brothers of Francesco Vassallo’s wife) in 1961–1962. In the postwar years, Vassallo’s rapid climb in the business world took place through the vehicle of the cooperative, which in this and numerous other cases, mafiosi utilized, in preference to corporations with shares, “in order to create entrepreneurial microstructures in which they were not only partners, but could also extend partnerships to include individuals that were ‘collateral’ to the organization.”¹⁶ In short, at first Vassallo was short on capital but had plenty of connections. For instance, he had ties to a major shipping company and to the Montecatini plant in the Tommaso Natale neighborhood. Those connections allowed him to take part in competitions for public works contracts, as they offered reassurances as to his reliability. The road became smoother with the passage of time, thanks to low-interest, easily issued loans, useful variations in the zoning code, and exchanges of favors and services with the Limas, the Gioias, and such other local notables as Di Fresco and Giovanni Matta. Matta came into the spotlight when the Christian Democratic Party attempted to slip him in as a member of the anti-Mafia Commission, prompting the vigorous and successful opposition of the Communists under the leadership of Pio La Torre, who was later murdered by the Mafia.

A conflict was therefore brewing between the Christian Democratic Party and the Italian Communist Party, culminating in the opposition between the majority report (Carraro)¹⁷ and the left-wing minority report (La Torre) and the right-wing minority report (Pisanò), which marked the end of the first phase of the existence of the parliamentary commission of inquest on the Mafia (Commission) (1976). This, however, should not conceal the agreement that had come about between the second chairman of the commission, Cattanei, and his deputy, Li Causi. And from 1972 on, their cooperation led to the publication of a great volume of documentation. Generally, that cooperation served in the evaluation of the underlying foundations and the history of the phenomenon of the Mafia.¹⁸ With a retrospective view, the issue of political responsibility and involvement became less of a divisive issue. This meant that in part it was possible to discard the centralism with which the politician and premier (1954–1955) Mario Scelba was identified; this also meant that centralism was no longer as popular as it had been. More importantly, with it went the liberal state, which was blamed for all the problems afflicting the country, to the shared advantage of the two chief “anti-Risorgimental” forces, the Catholics and the Communists. The Communists in particular benefited from the fallout from the case of Salvatore Giuliano, and more in general from an analysis of the Mafia as a tool used by the large landholders against the peasants. The schematic opposition between bad guys and good guys became the overriding theme in an interpretation of Sicilian history that extended from the abolition of the feudal system (1812). That analysis of history was carried out by a varied array of writers with a shortage of analytical tools but with a great deal of Sicilianist ideology and in a left-wing version, based on a theoretical ongoing plot to prevent the Sicilian “people” from attaining its long-term (supposed) objectives: ownership of the land and regional autonomy. According to this interpretation, there was already a well-defined Mafia in the period of the Risorgimento. That Mafia allied itself with the forces supporting Victor Emmanuel II, and opposed Garibaldi, who wished to give land to the peasants. In 1867, this same Mafia supported the landed agrarian bourgeoisie against (invented) government projects for social reform. And of course, this Mafia was opposed to the Fasci.¹⁹ significantly, the Communist report overturned the very tradition of Grieco and Sereni, onetime leaders of the party, denying any independent role that might have been played by the intermediate classes (the gabellotti, or renters and sublessors of parcels of farmland), with the none-too-persuasive argument that the mere existence of a class-denominated power (that of the large landholders) necessarily made the Mafia “a phenomenon of the ruling classes.”²⁰ Thus, the Mafia itself was not only depicted as the mastermind controlling everything that had happened in Sicilian history, it was also recategorized as nothing more than a mirroring of politics and society at large. This went directly against the warning offered by Rosario Romeo that it was necessary to establish proper conceptual boundaries to the topic, and not to “give in to the temptation” to make the history of the Mafia somehow coincide “with the history of Sicily,”²¹ or perhaps more accurately, the temptation to make the history of the Mafia coincide with the depiction that would best match the version that is useful in political terms. This applied to the general reports of the anti-Mafia, not to the enormous mass of documentation assembled and then (in part) published in dozens and dozens of volumes, in which we can glimpse other tattered fragments of the truth and other interpretative approaches.

Meanwhile, the Mafia gave unmistakable and tragic signs of vigor. In 1960, the police commissario (detective sergeant) Cataldo Tandoj was murdered in Agrigento. The usual rumors started by people with ulterior motives attempted to lead the investigators and public opinion astray by striving to whip up a sordid provincial sexual scandal with the involvement of Christian Democratic notables, while in fact this was the far more prosaic story of a functionary who established excessively close ties to the cosca (Mafia family) of Raffadali, a cosca that was involved in the purchase and sale of large landholdings in the region. He paid for his indiscretions with his life. The big headlines, however, always had to do with Palermo. Between 1955 and 1963, the city was shaken by the battle for control of the Mercati Generali, or city markets. That struggle produced dozens of deaths. In 1962, the so-called first Mafia war broke out between the two opposing groups of the Grecos (from Ciaculli) and the La Barbera brothers. The La Barberas lost the war. One of them (Salvatore) vanished, a victim of the lupara bianca (literally, “white shotgun,” slang for a murder in which the body is simply made to vanish). The other (Angelo) fled to Milan, where the killers of the opposing family caught up with him, but amazingly he survived. This shooting attracted attention because it marked the first appearance of the Mafia in the very capital of industrialized Italy. Even more astonishing was the explosion of an Alfa Romeo Giulietta packed with dynamite in Ciaculli, on 30 June 1963. It had been intended as an attack on the Grecos, but instead it killed seven policemen. Cars filled with mafiosi roared through the streets, chasing one another. Bombs went off, and machine guns rattled as if it were Chicago in the 1930s. Milan, the Alfa Romeo Giulietta, and the dynamite all constituted unmistakable symbols of modernity. The latifondo, or large landholding, was dying, and with it was dying the traditional Sicilian society. Still, in defiance of all predictions, the Palermo Mafia prospered in the field of construction, as well as in smuggling and selling both cigarettes and drugs. How to draw a link between the past and this present? The parliamentary commission presumed a “transplant” of both Mafia and mafiosi from the countryside to the city, mechanically corresponding to the macrosocial phenomenon of the transition from a fundamentally rural society to an urban one. This watershed transition from one era to another entails the substitution of a “new Mafia” in place of an “old Mafia.” There seems to have been no awareness of the fact that this type of conceptual opposition had already been employed repeatedly in the past, in relation to other watersheds and turning points, both real and supposed. In any case, the thesis was universally accepted by a diverse array of observers, and so it was established as an unquestionable foundation for the formulation of questionnaires and interviews.

Villalba and Mussomeli, considered exemplary sites of the Mafia phenomenon, are difficult to compare not only with Palermo but also with Corleone, for numerous reasons, not least of which was the absence of a significant level of violence in these two towns in the Caltanissetta area. The way in which Leggio took power bears no resemblance to the mechanism of untroubled succession with which, according to Pantaleone, Genco Russo took over the role of king of the Sicilian Mafia, a role that had previously belonged to Vizzini.²² In the books written by Pantaleone himself, in the reports of the anti-Mafia, and in the journalism on the subject, we are clearly in the presence of an obvious overvaluing of the role played by these two characters in the Mafia organizational chart. That chart has recently been drastically revised through the revelations of various pentiti. Meanwhile, an improper generalization of the model of the Caltanissetta area has been propagated, even though the specific nature of that model was already pointed out by L’Ora journalist Felice Chilanti:

This “prefectorial” Mafia, which grew “under the eyes of the Honorable Aldisio and the Honorable Volpe,”²³ is not the real Mafia. It is a group that, since it had more obvious political characteristics, succeeded in attracting the attention of journalists at the same time as the debates over the struggles for land reform, separatism, and the confluence into the Christian Democratic Party. For that matter, in the long run the overvaluation of the importance of this case tended to deform the perception of the phenomenon as a whole. Suffice it to consider the difficulties in imagining an urban Mafia, or the impossibility of fitting into the conception of the Mafia an individual like Leggio, who was so bound up with a rough and ready violence. As a result, Leggio was for many years described as a “bandit” (or a “gangster”) in preference to the other term “mafioso.” The Don Calò model, on the other hand, focused on mediation more than violence, ultimately culminating in the paradox of a mafioso who had never ordered a murder, whose power represented a straightforward translation into a local idiom of a larger social power: the gabellotto-qua-notable thus corresponding ipso facto to the Mafia capo.

In the 1960s, a number of non-Italian sociologists who had come to Sicily to do field research on the Mafia encountered this phenomenon. We already know that the problem in question was American, not Sicilian.²⁴ The American investigations during the postwar years revived the view of the Mafia as a centralized entity bound up with the issue of ethnic identity and the idea of a foreign conspiracy, with an implicit accusation of the Roosevelt-led Democratic alliance, typically multiethnic, that supposedly was unable or unwilling to oppose the Mafia. Here lies the first misunderstanding in the broad Italian grasp of this issue. At least until Robert Kennedy, the American anti-Mafia was quintessentially a right-wing phenomenon, while American liberal culture attempted to distill everything to a congeries of clientelistic relations, bossism, small-scale criminality, and, in any case, disorganized crime, devoid of any particular ethnic connotations.

I am no expert on this topic, and so I will not explore the issue of the centralized and monopolistic nature of the various activities of the American Mafia, upon which the majority of the issues are focused.²⁵ What interests me is the feedback effect in Italy. Jeremy Boissevain, Henner Hess, Anton Blok, and Jane and Peter Schneider came to Sicily in the 1960s in search of a Mafia that mirrored the “traditional” society, with its hierarchies and its culture. The Americans would come to the conclusion that, as they suspected, in its original home as well, the Mafia was nothing more than “a system of godfathers and clients exchanging favors, services, and other advantages.”²⁶ This was a Mafia reduced to the general category of clientelism, which would inevitably wane as the country modernized. “Before there was the Mafia; now there is politics,” was the not-very-realistic epitaph that Blok placed on the turning point of the postwar years’ “great transformation,” at the conclusion of his book.²⁷ That thesis in various ways corresponded to those prevailing in Italy, ranging from Pantaleone to the general reports of the anti-Mafia. This was the state of matters when the scholarly debate turned in a new direction with Pino Arlacchi’s La mafia imprenditrice (1983; English translation, Mafia Business: The Mafia Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism [London: Verso, 1987]), which begins with an observation that is as unambiguous as it is a contrast with the empirical data. In the “two decades following the Second World War,” Arlacchi wrote, the Mafia experienced a phase of decline, a “profound crisis”²⁸ owing to the disintegration of the macrosocial factors (the “traditional” universe) of which it was said to be an emanation. And so, the old Mafia, he claimed, was on the path to extinction, making way for the new Mafia. Thus, La mafia imprenditrice adopted the interpretation of the anti-Mafia and carried out the politically important operation of focusing on the dynamic, and therefore dangerous, nature of the phenomenon. At the same time, it relegated the past to the chronicles, ignoring the significant and valuable connection with the present. Most importantly, Arlacchi either entirely overlooked the theme of the Mafia as an organization or explored it in a wholly misleading fashion.

I don’t know how frequently or extensively the questore (administrative director of the district police) of Palermo in 1974, Migliorini, read the social sciences, but it appears that a Mediterranean anthropologist must have been in part responsible for his description of a Mafia sinking into crisis for the collapse of the “sense of respect,” a Mafia made up of “individual associations” with order or hierarchies, associations that endure until they have “attained their individual objectives” and then are dissolved. The operative conclusion, then, is triumphally nihilistic: “The repression of the general phenomenon is impossible! Repression of what? Of an idea, of a mentality?”²⁹

Leonardo Vitale, son of the late Francesco Paolo, belonged to a venerable Mafia family—family in the sense of both the cosca and blood relations. In all likelihood, Vitale was a descendant of one of the two Vitale cousins, Filippo and Francesco Paolo, who were the suspected murderers of Francesco Miceli (1892) as well as clients of Palizzolo and Mafia capos in Altarello di Baida. Altarello di Baida is a borgata, or outlying suburb, in which, more than seventy years later, a senior position was still held by a certain Giovan Battista Vitale, Leonardo’s uncle, “and a construction contractor [who] in that field committed abuses and acts of violence both in order to purchase land on which to build and in order to sell apartments.”³⁰ Leonardo, therefore, was predestined to become a mafioso, however little there was in his personality to suggest the “hypertrophic ego,” the macho behavior, and other cultural traits that we have come to expect in our collective imagination of the mafioso, as consolidated, for the umpteenth time, in the 1970s. He was an emotionally fragile young man, orphaned from an early age, fascinated by the powerful figure of his uncle, to whom he felt a need to prove that he was a “real man,” in part to ward off his own doubts about the possibility that he was a homosexual. That was the root of the extreme conformity that he showed with respect to the Mafia environment and the group of mafiosi who surrounded him, as well as his inability to perceive himself as an independent individual. Later, he would reflect on this issue: “I cared nothing about myself, or my life … that is to say, I attributed importance only to others,” “I admired all the others.” He became a mafioso because he wanted to feel that he was a member of the gang (gregario). In order to prove his toughness, first he killed a horse and then a human being, with no other reason for his actions than that someone else wanted him to do so. It was 1960, and Leonardo was twenty years old. A short time earlier, his uncle may have made an attempt to pull him back from the brink of the abyss. “You see my hands?” he had asked him. “They’re stained with blood, and your father’s hands were even bloodier.”³¹ Then, however, it was his uncle who ordered him to commit his first murder and who then took him hunting afterward as a reward.

Immediately thereafter, Leonardo Vitale was inducted with the same ritual described long ago by nineteenth-century sources; a ritual whose existence Hess refused even to admit as a remote “possibility.”³² Hess’s skepticism was based on the evident reference to models that were impossible to reconcile with the family-and friendship-based models that social scientists seemed to fixate on. Meanwhile, other information had become available, in addition to that provided by nineteenth-century sources. Years ago Valachi revealed the systems for induction into the American Cosa Nostra. In Sicily, a certain Giuseppe Luppino stated in 1958 that he had refused to carry out a murder after swearing the oath of induction into the cosca of Campobello di Mazzara; that information proved sound after Luppino was murdered.³³ The Mafia clearly had handed down its rituals, keeping them intact in a variety of highly diverse contexts, unvaried from one continent to another, and almost never revealing them to outsiders. This offers an explanation of the persistence even of those who are obliged to acknowledge these gaps revealing aspects of the underworld: the affiliations, the organization by “families” and by zones existed in America, too, but only as artificial replacements for the natural “Mafia humus” that existed in Sicily; “rituals and secret languages” can also “emerge here and there … but they belong to archaic customs and ‘philosophies’ that have been rendered entirely obsolete.”³⁴ The mind recoils before the things that the ritual unveils: an organization rooted in a specific territory for generations, and therefore relatively impersonal and bound up with a profound self-awareness, which in the Mafia dei giardini, or citrus groves, of Altarello was expressed with the detail of puncturing the index finger, not with the usual needle, but rather with a bitter-orange thorn.

The judge for preliminary investigations, Aldo Rizzo, who heard Vitale’s confession in 1974, did his best to establish a juridical context for the phenomenon as a criminal conspiracy, which had an “indeterminate program” and was therefore distinct from other conspiracies that had specific limitations in terms of time and scope.³⁵ In effect, even in a very unfavorable cultural climate, those legal minds that intended to fight the Mafia still insisted on placing it in an associative context. Likewise, already as early as 1965, Cesare Terranova, whose verdicts never lacked some historical and theoretical aspect, emphasized: “[L]et us set aside the fantasies of the past, because the Mafia is not an abstract concept, it is not a state of mind, it is an organized crime structure, efficient and dangerous, articulated into clusters or groups or ‘families,’ or even more significant, ‘cosche.’ … There is only one Mafia, neither old nor young, neither good nor bad, there is only the Mafia that is a criminal association.”³⁶

Let us stop for a moment to explore the targets of this debate. They include conservative opinion that attributes to the old Mafia “a role, even, of preserving equilibrium, or in any case, a positive role in society, replacing or integrating powers that are lacking in the state.” They also include liberal or Christian Democratic notables, whose “indulgent and sentimental attitudes, in some cases accepted as authoritative, in other cases steeped in an unmistakable sympathy toward the Mafia or the old Mafia, have on the whole proved to be nothing more than an obstacle to the efforts made to rid our society of this disease.” They include lawyers such as Giuseppe Mario Puglia and (more prudently) the fundamental Giuseppe Pitrè. A basis for refuting the myth of the honorable and unbending mafioso is available in the records of the trials conducted under the Fascists, with the “cowardly behavior … of the defendants, who rivaled one another in their profusion of confessions, accusations of others, attempts at recriminations and vendettas, and pleading for clemency and pardons.”³⁷ The reference to “His Excellency Giampietro” should come as no surprise in the work of a leftist like Terranova. It serves to reiterate the point, made emphatically under Fascism, that the Mafia is per se a criminal conspiracy. That point is less obvious than it might appear nowadays. In the two major trials put together based on Terranova’s preliminary investigations, one against the Corleonese and the other against the top ranks of the Palermo organization, the fundamental juridical tool employed was the same one that had been employed over the past century by both the liberal state and the Fascist state: the relationship between the police and confidential sources who still do not want to be, and cannot be, “named” during the trial.³⁸ In order for the magistrature that presides over the trial to have full confidence in the basis and reliability of descriptions that are often unsupported by any factual evidence, it is necessary that the reputation (on the basis of which the mafioso is involved in the testimony and the trial) should be sufficient to demonstrate that he is truly capable of blood-curdling murders. This requirement tends to clash with the concepts expressed in a verdict handed down in 1964: “Even mafiosi have loved ones, even they live a life of human relations that may involve principles of social interaction and rectitude, if not that of honesty. It is not the man who characterizes the action; it is the action that characterizes the man.”³⁹

Quite to the contrary, it is precisely the fact of being a mafioso that characterizes an action—as long as that status is not confused with a harmless mafiosità, but actually represents the explicatory context in which actions and reactions are set, along with agreements, sgarri (or breaches of the criminal’s code), and reprisals, such as those that took place in the clash between Leggio and Navarra or in the first Mafia war, and as long as the array of interrelations among the various mafiosi serve to identify and explain the alliances in play. Certainly, there are those who might ask: “How can we speak of a criminal conspiracy, of an ‘associazione a delinquere,’ when the conspirators, instead of acting in concert, kill one another in turn?” This, however, is mere “nitpicking,” as was pointed out as early as 1929 by Natale Costa, prosecuting attorney in the trial of the cosca of Piana dei Colli,⁴⁰ and even earlier, by the investigators in the trials of the Amorosos and the stoppagghieri. In Mafia wars, there is always a “one” that splits into “two,” something unified that is then divided. Indeed, conflict is the most powerful evidence, deductive and circumstantial though it may be, of the existence of the organization that the pentiti of the 1980s always described with the esoteric name that was already familiar in the United States: La Cosa Nostra.

Buscetta conveys the impression that the term has always been used in Sicily to indicate the Mafia (“We exported it to America”).⁴¹ It seems plausible, however, that the oral tradition on which the pentito draws for his information has overemphasized the elements of continuity, and perhaps this is one of those feedback effects of the American model, considering the fact that in 1943 in Sicily there was no organization and it would take a new “Gospel of the Mafia” to found it. That new word might well have been brought back by the numerous undesirables, such as Luciano, Coppola, and Genovese, who had been expelled from the United States by the American authorities and sent back to Italy. Another American borrowing might be the use of the term famiglia (family) to indicate the cosca, or Mafia clan or basic organization. That term is used, among others, by Vitale and Buscetta. Buscetta, however, also emphasized the entirely Palermitan tradition of a Mafia organized wholly on the basis of the territorial unit of the borgata. In fact, the reality that emerged from those revelations was entirely “Palermocentric.” The same was true of the findings of the ambitious preliminary investigation put together by Terranova in 1965, which in 1968 led to the trial of Catanzaro. That preliminary investigation was based on Carabinieri and police reports, which, in the context of the establishment of the anti-Mafia, but especially in the wake of the massacre of Ciaculli, had stopped relying on the false comfort of the old bromide, “after all, they’re just killing one another off.” This bromide had been used to assuage the consciences of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century and, still, in the 1950s.

Here the facts speak a different language from that spoken by the Anti-Mafia. There is no evidence of the hypothetical transplantation of the large landholding into the city. If anything, there is evidence of a massive continuity in the settlement of mafiosi in the center of town and especially in the borgate, or outlying suburbs, of Palermo, confirming the facts we have already heard from the stories of the Grecos of Ciaculli-Croceverde and the Vitales of Altarello. This continuity would persist right up to the most recent period and would prove a source of astonishment even to a mafioso from a radically different background, such as the Catania-born Antonino Calderone:

This is the sort of background that distinguished the twenty-four capos of Palermo cited in the 1963 report by Carabinieri Lieutenant Mario Malausa, who was killed in the massacre of Ciaculli. They were all natives of the city or the surrounding area; they had all been the targets of prosecution (age permitting) during the trials in the Fascist period that took on the same Palermo cosche in which they were still soldiers; and they had been through the same political labyrinths as their colleagues from the interior of the island, right up to their universal affiliation with the Christian Democratic Party.

“He was a fervent supporter of separatism,” wrote Malausa about Benedetto Targia, “but when that movement began to lose power, he followed in the wake of other mafiosi, hopping from one party to another (liberal–monarchic–Christian Democrat). The distaste that he felt for legality clearly demonstrates that it was not a political belief that pushed him toward the Christian Democratic Party, but only personal self-interest.”⁴³

In effect, even this instrumentalization of the political sphere, in the wake of the separatist binge, represents a constant. Baldassarre Motisi, landowner of giardini, wholesale dealer in citrus fruit, Christian Democratic member of the city council who, according to Malausa, “had numerous affiliations with important individuals and who took advantage of them … in order to consolidate both his position as a mafioso and as a politician,” had the same surname and answered to the same description as Francesco Motisi, member of the city council in 1899, and a representative of the Mafia of Mezzomorreale. The twenty-four capos in the report were “criminals of the middle classes” as described by Franchetti: gabellotti, landowners and renters of citrus groves, middlemen, importers and exporters, the “industrious” and the “industrialists.” This does not rule out social mobility. The clash between the La Barberas and the Grecos involved a new Mafia and an old Mafia, both generated within the Palermo area, in accordance with a dialectic dating back all the way to the times of Palizzolo and the conflict and distinction between the western area and the eastern zone. As Terranova explains it, “The Grecos, we might say, had the necessary four quarters of nobility.”

Among the allies of the La Barberas there was a young Tommaso Buscetta, the son of a glassmaker who also came up “from obscurity.” There was also Pietro Torretta, a former confederate of the Giuliano gang and now capo of the Uditore cosca, of even greater mafioso nobility. Administrator of the possessions of the Marchesi Di Gregorio, a well-to-do man of the “greatest respect,”⁴⁵ Pietro Torretta is thought to have been the son of another Francesco Torretta, whom we find mentioned in the Sangiorgi Report as a member, and not a particularly high-ranking one, of the cosca in 1895. Among the other accusations leveled against the younger Torretta was that of the murder of a certain Salvatore Gambino, who was finished off with rifle shots, following a ferocious beating (1963). Just a few hours earlier, Gambino had murdered Filippo and Michele Bonura for frivolous reasons and had then gone to seek refuge with Torretta. Confidential sources attribute his death to the Mafia capo’s determination to exercise his role as a regulator and visitor of punishment upon someone responsible for an “unjustified” murder. Nonetheless, the court found that the motive was insufficient, given the minimal nature of relations between the Bonuras and Torretta, in contrast with Torretta’s role as godfather to Gambino. The matter might have been clearer if it had been known that sixty years earlier, in this same borgata, which represents the cradle of the Palermo Mafia, other members of the Bonura family had been the cosca capos of the elder Torretta; and that twenty years later another Bonura would serve in the same position in the same location.

Judicial investigations into various kinds of crimes provide occasional glimpses of this dizzying historical depth. Let us consider the 1970s for a moment. The engineer Giuseppe Di Benedetto, a construction contractor who was short on cash, was pursued for repayment by Baron Sebastiano Provenzano, who had made a loan to him of 30 million lire and who now wanted it back, with interest. Di Benedetto therefore reached out for the mediation of the old Mafia capo of Passo di Rigano, Rosario Di Maggio, who immediately offered to “fix” the situation; to the engineer, who was pleasantly surprised, he explained that he had been a “friend” of his father and grande elettore (major electoral lieutenant—translator’s note) of his grandfather, the Honorable Lo Monte, protector of the Mafia in the years following the First World War. There would be no interest to pay, and the payments would be spread out over an extended period: Rosario Spatola would take over the debt. He was the nephew of Di Maggio, a builder, banker, and money launderer in the group headed by Salvatore Inzerillo, successor to Di Maggio as the head of the cosca and chief of the largest gang of drug dealers on the Palermo–New York route.⁴⁶ Was this old Mafia or new Mafia? Classical Mafia of the borgate, an expression of the continuity of control over a territory that constituted the setting of speculation on land and the ruinous reconstruction, or “Sack,” of Palermo? The veto that Michele Greco had exercised on the sale of land that formed part of the hereditary Tagliavia property is explained in light of the traditional role that the Grecos played as leaseholders of that land, and therefore as a sort of Mafia “usucapion” (a mode of acquiring title to property by uninterrupted possession of it for a definite period—such as one year for movables or two for immovables—under a title acquired in good faith) supported by the Honorable Luigi Gioia, liquidator of the Tagliavia estate and a relative of the family. As such, he was in all likelihood at the center of an old network of relations involving the Grecos themselves. “It was unthinkable,” commented the preliminary investigators of the maxiprocesso, or maxitrial, “that Michele Greco would allow others to purchase, even in part, lands that he already considered to be his property.”⁴⁷ As beneficiaries of the parceling out of building sites on the Scalea estate, we are not surprised to see the names of the children of the mafioso Gaetano Cinà,⁴⁸ formerly curatolo of those giardini and probably a descendant of another Gaetano Cinà, who already, at the end of the nineteenth century, was a member of the organization.

Let us add another consideration. This is the Palermo of aristocratic decline, the Palermo that still (until the mid-1950s) was governed by a liberal-moderate coalition, and therefore a city that allowed itself to be won over by the (Christian Democratic) political class, originally from the Sicilian interior, which assumed control of the region.⁴⁹ We might say that the mafioso class was the only urban “political” class that was able to defend and expand its own power.

The case of the Corleonesi would appear to be an exception, considering the central role that they took on in this story. It remains to be seen whether they were truly interior Mafia. Navarra was the Mafia capo of Corleone. Leggio almost always remained in hiding and spent most of his time in Palermo, where his cattle-rustling interests focused on the meat market. He maintained a permanent garrison in the very heart of the old Mafia dei giardini in Piana dei Colli, with a shipping company run by Giacomo Riina and his young nephew Salvatore, who would in fact assume the leadership of the group. What happened in the Corleone area, however, had immediate effects in Palermo. Following the elimination of Navarra, Leggio was summoned to an interview with Salvatore Greco, who demanded he explain his actions, prompting a furious reaction from the new boss.⁵⁰ Apparently, the Mafia dei giardini was in agreement with Navarra on blocking the construction of a dam to take water from the Corleone area to the Conca d’Oro. By so doing, it would have broken the monopoly on water distribution. Instead, however, Leggio intended to exploit the business opportunities offered in the construction of the dam.⁵¹ The problems of Corleone, then, were not limited to the town itself; instead, they extended along “the chain that, via state route 118, leads to the capital of Sicily.”⁵² Along that chain there was created a subprovincial space in which the mafiosi of Cinisi (Cesare Manzella and Gaetano Badalamenti), Corleone (Leggio), and Caccamo (Giuseppe Panzeca) played a considerable role. The center, in any case, remained Palermo, the capoluogo, which, with the establishment of the Italian region of Sicily, became a capital once again.

What activities safeguard and promote the network of Mafia affiliations? In what way is the Mafia useful?

Let us return to Leonardo Vitale, who—like Henry Hill in Goodfellas, who became a gangster because he wanted to “park in front of a fire hydrant and not worry about getting a ticket”—set fire to the car of a Calabrian movie house owner who made the mistake of not offering him free tickets. That was the sole occasion on which Leonardo Vitale acted on his own personal initiative. On every other occasion, his crimes and murders formed part of the daily routine of a collective entity, the cosca, or family of Altarello–Porta Nuova, under the leadership of Pippo Calò. His job was to obtain positions guarding giardini and construction sites, collect protection fees, make threatening phone calls and write threatening letters, poison watchdogs, set fire to machinery now and again, and, when necessary, murder someone with the old-style shotgun from concealment behind a wall or, in a more modern version, standing up in a Fiat “Topolino,” with the top open. Like their fathers and their grandfathers had done, Vitale and his fellow mafiosi generally killed other criminals, such as lemon thieves [sic!], rivals in the Mafia hierarchy. Once a businessman died in the course of an attempted kidnapping: if he hadn’t made an unexpected move, one of the associates involved in the attempt commented bitterly, “he’d still be alive and we’d have the money.”⁵³

This mechanism of territorial control made no distinction among the sectors agriculture, construction, and business. The important consideration was that a monopoly over certain sectors of activity, first and foremost protection and guarding, should be the province of the cosca and that all other activities should be carried on only with its permission, along with a kickback from the profits from those activities. This was also true for what little manufacturing and industrial activity was carried on in Palermo. The shipyard owned by the Genoan Piaggio Company hired out the Acquasanta cosca to perform a number of internal services, including responsibility for maintaining order among the employees, using various methods of bland clientelism or harsh repression. The latter was the case in 1947, when Zu Cola D’Alessandro and his picciotti (lowerlevel mafiosi) drew their guns. Another Genoan company, which founded a branch company called Elettronica Sicula, began with the very purchase of the land on which it planned to build its plants. In that context, the company relied on the mediation of the Mafia capo of S. Maria di Gesù, Don Paolino Bontate. Don Paolino exerted his authority, among other things, to overcome local resistance to the drilling done to gain access to the water table, a topic that was always contentious in the Palermo area. When the time came to inaugurate the plant and put it into operation, a “truly depressing … spectacle” unfolded. The new plant director, Aldo Profumo, had only just begun his speech when he suddenly realized he had lost his audience. The “numerous group of representatives and functionaries from the regional government and the city administration” that had been seated listening to his speech suddenly leapt to their feet and, as one man, ran toward the door. It was a race to see who could be the first to greet and bow to Don Paolino, who had just walked into the hall. We have to assume that the Mafia capo, in a bid to acquire “productive” investment, must have called in chits on many of his relationships as a former monarchist, now a Christian Democrat, perhaps even relying on his blood ties to the member of parliament (also a Christian Democrat), Margherita Bontate. In exchange, he was given say over the hiring of the factory workers and the contracts for supplying the factory cafeteria, as well as some substantial cash payments. In 1959, he personally demanded, and his request was granted, that the CGIL (Italian labor union) should be prevented from running its list of candidates for the internal commission. As Profumo declared, “Paolo Bontà is useful to me, because he makes sure that I have water, he gives me the land to expand the factory, and I rely upon him to find workers for the factory.”⁵⁴

The relationship between the engineer and plant director Profumo and Don Paolino is useful in understanding the continuum linking protection, mediation, and partnership, and how that continuum should be considered in the familiar phenomenon of the conversion of guardiani (rural watchmen) into Profiteers, gabellotti, and businessmen of all sorts. The mediocrity of the crimes of someone like Leonardo Vitale represents nothing more than the ground-floor level of Mafia activities. The same tools, when placed in the hands of more skilled individuals, led to quite different outcomes. Let us take the case of the La Barbera brothers, whose point of departure was much lower down the social scale. They were a pair of punk borgata muggers. In fact, the anti-Mafia described them as “common criminals who have infiltrated their way into the meshes of the Mafia nework.”⁵⁵ As in Leggio’s case, there was a continuing tendency to place excessive emphasis on the old stereo type of the mafioso-qua-notable, with a corresponding underestimation of the role of violence in establishing the Mafia hierarchies and propelling quick and ambitious rises through the ranks. The two former thieves were soon transformed into extortionate protection-providing guardians of villas, then construction sites. In this context, they served an ancillary role that was a customary one to Salvatore La Barbera, who from his youth had served in the position of garzone carrettiere (apprentice teamster), in the Partanna borgata. Finally, the two brothers founded a company working in construction, serving contractors and entrepreneurs who enjoyed—and paid for—Mafia protection. The Mafia capo Bartolo Porcelli put them in touch with Eugenio Ricciardi, the right-hand man of the builder and developer Salvatore Moncada. Of course, the career of the protector and profiteer needed to proceed within the context of a Mafia group. In this specific case, that group was the “central Palermo” family. It was in that context that relations with other aspiring rivals had to be moderated. Here, in fact, Angelo La Barbera brought his rivalry with Ricciardi to a head by luring him into an ambush with Gaetano Galatolo, also known as Tanu Alatu (1952). This murder marked the beginning of the two brothers’ climb into the heart of the Mafia power, at the leadership of the group of families that included the family of Altarello-Porta Nuova.

The La Barberas replaced Ricciardi not only in terms of status but also in his various businesses. When Giuseppe Ricciardi, son of the victim, found the trucks of his father’s small shipping company stripped of wheels and theatrically jacked up on hoists, he understood that it was time to sell everything to the victors, and he found a job in a store selling house hold appliances. But the environment remained the same. The young man’s new employers, Giulio Pisciotta and Vincenzo Maniscalco, were scheming against the cosca’s leadership. They pooled forces with other questionable individuals and wound up putting forward an extortion scheme targeting none other than Moncada (1960). Maniscalco was killed in an ambush. Then the La Barberas presented themselves, along with Tommaso Buscetta and Salvatore Gnoffo, in front of the Brancaccio train station, where Pisciotta and his partner Natale Carollo, accompanied by Ricciardi, had come to take delivery of merchandise for their store. It had been Ricciardi himself who had provided (involuntarily?) accurate information to the men who had murdered his father. At gunpoint, Pisciotta and Carollo were invited to come along to a “meeting of the minds” from which they were never to return. Ricciardi was told to go home and forget everything he had seen. At least, that was the first version that Ricciardi provided. He later changed his account of events, saying that he had been subjected to torture. Finally, he denied even that detail in a desperate round of contradictions, claiming “that he knew no one, that he was a sick man, that he had lost a well-paid job because he was his father’s son, that he was afraid of everything and everyone,” and that all he wanted was to “be allowed to live in peace.”⁵⁶ Clearly, the life of the son of a Mafia capo is not an easy one.

The primitivist and ruralist lenses through which most observers filtered their views were the main factor responsible for the astonishment that greeted the presence, immediately after the Second World War and thereafter, of mafiosi along the international smuggling routes, both for cigarettes and for drugs heading for the United States. The trans-Atlantic trade represented one of the initial characteristics of the history that is narrated here, first of all with the citrus exports, without which there never would have been the Mafia of the giardini and the giardini themselves. Hidden, in fact, in the crates of citrus fruit were opium and morphine, which were traveling from Palermo to New York in the 1920s, in sufficient quantities to trigger a series of trade restrictions from the American authorities in reprisal.⁵⁷ Alongside the traffic in merchandise of various sorts was a trade in people, with the flow of emigration beginning at the turn of the century and subsequently, even though these flows steadily declined in volume. Among others, individuals like Calogero Orlando continued to cross the ocean. Calogero Orlando was born in Terrasini in 1906. He left for Detroit in 1922 with $400, and he returned home in 1928 with $800. Over time he became wealthy in the course of a steady series of voyages between America, Sicily, and Spain, with an oil and cheese import-export business and with the processing, packaging, and sale of sardines and salted anchovies. At least, that is what he claimed. According to the police, the merchandise he was trafficking in was drugs.⁵⁸ Let us keep in mind that in the 1930s, Lucky Luciano was already importing drugs from Europe, perhaps through individuals such as Pietro Davì, also known as Jimmy l’Americano, who returned from the United States in 1934 and had already been arrested in Milan in 1935 for this unsavory traffic. In 1950 he resurfaced as an importer of morphine from Germany. But this was already after the Second World War, when it was America that came to Italy, with the Marshall Plan and a flow of “undesirables.”

Foremost among these undesirables was none other than Luciano, released early from prison and sent back to his birthplace following an obscure negotiation with his former nemesis, Governor Thomas Dewey. It was unquestionably Luciano who got the operation started again, beginning with the identification of the “gold-bearing vein” that was available for profitable mining in the pharmaceutical industries in northern Italy, for a steady supply of raw materials.⁵⁹ Luciano then proceeded to establish relationships with drug refiners in Marseilles. Once they had freed him, the Americans seemed obsessed with Luciano; they considered him the “king, or at least a member of the royal family,”⁶⁰ guiding a traffic that was pouring into their country. Hence protests arose aimed at Italian authorities, whom they accused of overlooking these illegal activities. In effect, the Italians were reluctant to construct an investigative mechanism capable of tracing the complex meanders of the drug trade. Luciano was a respectable foreign businessman; perhaps his business was illegal, but it was harmless to Italy, where no one produced or (more importantly) consumed drugs. The social alarm triggered by smuggling was inevitably mild: here it was inaudible.

The “lieutenant of Lucky Luciano in Palermo” was Antonio Sorci, also known as “Ninu u riccu” (“Nino the Wealthy”) because he had made good use of the profits from drug dealing to purchase land from the breakup of the old Villa d’Orléans.⁶¹ He was joined by Rosario Mancino, a former longshoreman who had become the owner of a company exporting citrus fruit, at least apparently, though in reality the main export was heroin. That heroin might well have come through Lebanese channels procured by Mancino, who was quite at home in Beirut. One of those mixed citrus-heroin shipments was received in America by Gaetano Badalamenti (1951). Badalamenti was a mafioso from Cinisi who often enjoyed the hospitality in Detroit of his brother Emanuele and the local Mafia. Apparently, there was a Luciano–Sorci–Mancino–La Barbera network, corresponding perhaps to the Palermo organization for drug and cigarette smuggling. The sources of the Guardia di finanza (Italian treasury police) stated that that organization was under the command of Pietro Davì, whom we have already encountered. Whether this could be a “monopolistic structure governed by Luciano” cannot be stated.⁶² Also according to the same source, aside from Davì’s organization, there was another (competing?) organization of international drug traffickers operating in Palermo under the command of Gaspare Ponente. Ponente was killed in 1958 and was replaced by Salvatore Greco “l’ingegnere” (“the engineer”). Independent of Luciano, another Sicilian American, Frank Coppola from Partinico, went into the drug business. He was later caught red-handed, thanks, apparently, to a tip from none other than Luciano. Although the exact links were unclear, there were others in the same line of business, such as the Caneba brothers or Serafino Mancuso, from Alcamo, who went back and forth between the United States and Italy, negotiated with the Marseilles drug traffickers on the quality and price of the product, and arranged shipments.

At this point, it would be reasonable to explore the question of why the heroin trade passed through the hands of the Sicilians; it was produced in the form of opium in the Near and Far East, transformed into heroin in France, and consumed in the United States. The fact that the drugs were hidden in the trunks of Sicilian emigrants offers a first clue to the way in which the networks linking Sicily and America were reutilized. The Nice-born Pascal Molinelli, for instance, worked with mafiosi (Buscetta) because they arranged “to find customers and negotiate with them.”⁶³ The Sicilian drug traffickers possessed a strategic resource: trust-based relationships that linked them to the buyers for the product. In fact, they were trustees of the purchasers—hence the role of groups that, even in comparison with the “grand” Palermo organization, seem to have specialized in working both shores of the Atlantic Ocean. Especially to the west of Palermo, an area with age-old ties to Tunisia and therefore with clandestine emigration, there were cosche that were notoriously linked to drug trafficking and were distinctly Sicilian American, such as the cosche of Cinisi, Alcamo, and Partinico, and especially the cosche of Castellammare del Golfo, the hometown of the Bonannos of New York and the Magaddinos of Buffalo. Castellammare del Golfo produced an outsized share of the mafiosi of the United States, even though it claimed no such role in the Mafia of Sicily. Here Gaspare Magaddino and Diego Plaja, relatives and friends of the American bosses, still reigned. As at the turn of the century, the circuit of migration triggered a network of commercial Mafia “colonies” that were in some sense comparable to the close-knit Jewish or Greek colonies that managed the long-distance trade of the modern age; or else the British and the Americans at the beginning of the nineteenth century, who sent their sons to Sicily to organize the citrus imports, transfer financial resources to ensure the citrus crops were produced reliably, and ship these perishable goods across the ocean aboard fragile sailing ships. In all these cases, the fiduciary bond, whether it was based on family ties or ethnic ties, served to reduce the great risks that were intrinsic to the transaction. In the drug trade, the risks were confiscation by the police, but also the bidone (or rip-off), the fraud that always lay in ambush.

These organizations do not correspond to the “families” of Palermo’s Cosa Nostra, inasmuch as they work in terms not of territorial control but of long-distance trading. Two distinct organizational models are at play here, and in order to analyze them we can begin with the dialectic, suggested for the New York case by Alan Block, between power syndicate and enterprise syndicate. A power syndicate essentially tends toward “extortion, not business,” while enterprise syndicates “tend to operate in the arena of such illicit undertakings as prostitution, gambling, smuggling, and drugs.”⁶⁴ In Palermo, we describe as a power syndicate the territorial structure of the families, with their rigid affiliations, their formidable stability over time, their military force, and therefore their ability to perform, beginning with the mechanism of the guardianìa, the function of substituting the institutions responsible for law enforcement throughout the circuit of the administration of extortion and protection. An enterprise syndicate, on the other hand, represented the far more mobile business network that already existed in the nineteenth century for cattle rustling and smuggling, and that now managed the trade in cigarettes and drugs. The fact that the soldiers of the cosche themselves should be involved in those networks does nothing to invalidate the distinction, either conceptually or empirically. Buscetta explained that the families did no more than to issue to their adherents “permission” to participate in various illicit businesses. For that matter, the network could not be entirely mafioso in nature. Among those involved in the network were natives of Tangiers (Tangerines), Americans, Neapolitans, Marseillais, and Chinese, adventurers, women, the honorable and the dishonorable, thugs or scassapagghiara, and bankers. That is what happened with the smuggling of cigarettes, a line of commerce that developed out of the initiative of “groups of international adventurers, mostly Americans” who took up residence in the free ports of Tangiers and, later, Gibraltar. They extended their reach from there toward Genoa and Sicily, respectively, through contacts with Marseillais and mafiosi; relying upon “certain import-export companies in Tangiers and in Switzerland, and on Jewish-controlled banks in Tangiers for the financing.”⁶⁵ The traffic required

We find mafiosi such as Badalamenti, Buscetta, Angelo La Barbera, Calcedonio Di Pisa, and Vincenzo Spadaro waiting for deliveries on the beach, moving from country to country, negotiating with such notables of the Corsican and Marseillais underworld as Paul Paoli or with Milanese gangsters like Romano Scarabelli. We find them establishing contacts with the Neapolitans to create another terminus in the distribution network when the police began to monitor the Sicilian coasts a little too closely. A fundamental role was played on a trans-European scale by Salvatore Greco “l’ingegnere,” “the financier who was also in charge of contacts with foreign organizations,”⁶⁷ working in close coordination with the other Marseillais boss, Elio Forni. But there were also lower levels at which the mafiosi came into contact with individuals who had nothing in common with their myths and their rituals or with their ethnic and cultural extraction. The pregnant wife of a Tangerine smuggler who was arrested in 1960 claimed for herself and her child-to-be the money owed by the “friends of Palermo” to her jailed husband: “You over there are numerous, and with all your numbers you’ll never notice a little contribution to one person…. I feel certain that if you were [in my position] you would already have drawn your pistols.” Then she threatened vendetta, adding, “I’m not afraid of your Mafia.”⁶⁸ Here we should note not only the recklessness of a “foreign” woman using the word “Mafia” in writing (which could represent a threat that she would reveal secrets to the authorities), but also the absence of internal solidarity in the group of smugglers, in clear contrast with the care customarily devoted to the families of members within a Mafia group who had been arrested.

This diversity led to negative consequences in terms of security. In contrast, the security of the power syndicate had been well protected by the organization’s compact structure. This was a root cause of the great power of Sicilian American families (both Mafia families and blood families). The drug traffickers were in greater danger from betrayals and tips, and in any case were involved in activities that inevitably left evidence (ships, merchandise, telephone calls, letters, bank accounts and transfers), and they were occasionally caught red-handed. Their level was always on the surface and visible, and subject to forensic proof of crime, while the level of the territorial organization remained mysterious and subterranean. There was also a potential conflict between the two organizational spheres. Buscetta described being temporarily posato (expelled) from his family in 1958 for having established too many outside contacts. “Smuggling cigarettes involved people that did not share the Mafia mind-set.”⁶⁹ Let us recall the concerned notes from the American families in relation to the drug trade. Moreover, in the management of large-scale traffic, the mafiosi necessarily had to work side-by-side not only with “outsiders,” but also with members of different cosche, with the risk that family solidarity might be outweighed by business loyalties. Shared affiliation entailed a simple, generic right to enter into the business of fellow-affiliated members. In practical terms, however, in order to exercise that right, managerial skills and more importantly, financial resources, were needed. “In the drug trade, everyone worked on their own. If you had more economic resources, you got more work.”⁷⁰ This explains the vast economic and social differences among the individuals operating in the Mafia universe and within the individual cosche. And among them (as in any other universe), there were both rich and poor.

The territorial structures could provide limiting or moderating influences, through more-or-less instrumental internal polemics, or they could rebalance access to resources among the affiliates, but they could never hinder the development of profitable activities: the conversion of guardiani into profiteers is a phenomenon that is repeated continuously throughout the entire history of the Mafia, a phenomenon that should be considered an essential part of that history. Broken down, then, into vast networks of relationships, the affiliation with the Mafia continued to encourage the identification of Sicilian groups and Sicilian American groups, with their “similar customs, similar criminal philosophy, and a shared heritage.”⁷¹ This represented a privileged space for communication comparable to that of Masonic membership for politicians, officials, and businessmen. There existed, however, a more specific level of reciprocal functionality between the enterprise syndicate and the power syndicate. Illegal undertakings need protection as much as and more than legal ones do, since they cannot turn to the public authorities to safeguard their interests.

In the smuggling of cigarettes, the Italian Guardia di Finanza, or financial police, does not rule out “that certain Mafia cosche do no more than take a percentage of the earnings of the smuggling organizations (the so-called pizzu).”⁷³ The Mafia, Gambetta would further say, enjoys a commercial “brand” that is particularly respected as a result of the venerable age of the “company,” which means continuity in business and (presumably) honesty in business. But, I would add, there are other features, such as its (presumed) capacity to act as a “state,” to establish rules, to monitor, and to punish. This relation between common criminality and Mafia criminality also emerges in Reuter’s study of the New York case.⁷⁴ “The nature of my office is to determine if there has been abuse,” wrote Calogero Di Carlo, a member of the Gambino family, in the language of a ministerial inspector, to the drug courier from Marsala, Vincenzo Martinez.⁷⁵ In a broad array of circumstances, during the course of frenetic negotiations to resolve disputes, ascertain frauds, regulate payments, and attribute the ownership of goods and capital, the role of both American and Sicilian hierarchies appears to be that of guarantor.

Using these tools, let us attempt to reexplore the history of the Mafia in the 1950s. When Lucky Luciano first arrived in Italy, he took great care to refrain from any interference in restructuring territorial powers in Sicily: he had neither the interest nor the strength to enter into that issue. Instead he took up residence in Naples,⁷⁶ an ideal location from which to carry on relations with America, France, northern Italy, and Sicily. The man who was slapped in the face, without consequences, by a small-time local gangster at the Agnano⁷⁷ racetrack was not the head of the Mafia but a businessman and mediator. The famous Palermo meeting at the Hotel des Palmes (October 1957) represented an effort to shift the course of events into a new direction. In view of the imminent shutdown of the Cuban base of operations, the result of the burgeoning Castro revolution, Joe Bonanno and other American Cosa Nostra capos did their best to persuade the locals to agree to an amicable division of resources. That effort was not especially successful, at least according to the observation that is attributed to Genco Russo. Speaking to his American compatriot Santo Sorge in the luxurious hallways of the hotel, Genco Russo said: “Quannu ci sunu troppi cani supra un ossu, beato chiddu chi pò stari arrassu [“When there are too many dogs fighting for a bone, you’re lucky if you can stay far away from it,” a comment overheard by an undercover policeman].”⁷⁸ Aside from this colorful but anomalous individual, the other attendees represented the more typically Sicilian American Mafias: the Badalamentis of Cinisi-Detroit, perhaps a few people from Alcamo, certainly the Magaddinos and the Plajas, and the Castellamarese Frank Garofalo, who had just returned that year to Sicily from America.⁷⁹ Seen from the point of view of the Bonanno and Magaddino families of New York City and Buffalo, that is to say, from the terminus of the migratory chain, Sicily might have seemed like a minor appendage of Castellammare del Golfo where everything is subordinate to the American connection; that, however, would be an optical illusion.

According to Buscetta,⁸⁰ it was the Americans who suggested creating a commission in Sicily based on the New York model. However, we should explore to what degree the results matched the intentions. A decision-making body for the Palermo provincial area was established, from which the Trapanese were necessarily excluded. Initially, second-rank figures (simple “soldiers”) were seated on the commission, not family capos, an element that was symbolically meant to emphasize the fact that the territorial leadership of the cosche remained sovereign. Despite the fact that thereafter the powers of the commission rapidly expanded, within it the commanding groups, the Grecos, the La Barberas, Torretta, and Leggio, were independent of the Americans. Indeed, to the best of our knowledge, they had no trans-Atlantic blood relations of any importance. Certainly, the traffickers had their points of contact in Palermo. Luciano was most frequently in touch with the La Barberas, while within the Greco group, there was an especially close interaction between the two cousins: the great smuggler (“l’ingegnere”) and the cosca capo that everyone described as the true leader (“chicchiteddu”). The fact that Luciano (and therefore, the Americans?) should have supported the La Barberas⁸¹ was not enough to save them from defeat. This is a useful demonstration of the fact that the enterprise syndicate cannot settle power struggles within the power syndicate. Following the initial period of control by the Caccamese Giuseppe Panzeca, chicchiteddu took over as head of the Mafia Commission. According to the Carabinieri and the police, that commission was founded in response to the formation of the anti-Mafia Commission: the official state continued to constitute a good model for the anti-state. Even Terranova described as “vague and unconfirmed”⁸² these police reports, which instead displayed an admittedly relative capacity to penetrate secretly into secret matters. I do not believe that the commission was founded merely as an imitation of the American model, nor do I find decisive what Bonanno wrote: “The commission was not a part of my Tradition; there was no body of this kind in Sicily.”⁸³ In Palermo there existed a supervisory body at the end of the nineteenth century, and probably there was such a body in other periods as well. As early as 1951, the Palermo Centro families expressed a common decision-making structure, and there were a series of meetings with other city groups.⁸⁴

Indeed, the principle of the territorial monopoly is easy to set forth but difficult to maintain, except through the reciprocal recognition among the various groups, with negotiations to obtain permission to act in territories controlled by others or to establish the degree of advantage (a percentage, an exchange of favors) that can be obtained by allowing others to operate in one’s own territory. A portion of Leonardo Vitale’s daily life was devoted to precisely this sort of negotiation, and in order to simplify them it was necessary to establish a permanent venue for those negotiations. In order to resolve a dispute between the Altarello–Porta Nuova cosca and the Noce cosca over the right to impose bribes over a certain zone, Salvatore Riina, Leggio’s former hired killer, who had now risen to the rank of person of authority, was appointed to manage, mediate, and coordinate the negotiations. From the little island where he was confined, Giovan Battista Vitale accepted the decision that had gone against him, while still insisting that in any case Altarello needed to be given a “taste.”⁸⁵ In some cases, the victim of extortion reached out to mafiosi from other areas. That was what the businessman Silvio Faldetta did. When he was faced with the demand for 50 million lire (an especially daunting sum in 1983), he set out to find his “usual interlocutor.” This time, however, he was unable to track him down. The zone was in fact controlled by Pippo Calò, capo of the Porta Nuova cosca, and it was to Calò that Faldetta was obliged to turn for the negotiations.⁸⁶ In some cases, however, this intersection produced clashes. A nephew of Buscetta who owned a construction firm that operated in Termini Imerese, for instance, received a series of threats and attacks from the local Mafia capo Pino Gaeta. Here the territorial jurisdiction clearly clashed with the eminent authority of a Cosa Nostra notable of the stature of Don Masino Buscetta. When Don Masino attempted to reason with Gaeta, Gaeta responded with a defamatory accusation. Buscetta’s nephew, he said, spent too much time hanging out with policemen. In the end, a compromise was reached through Calò’s mediation. In other cases, however, the differences of opinion would have bloodier consequences.

Evidently, relations span territorial boundaries, and influences intersect and overlap. Not only the vast networks of international traffic, but also the more restricted network of city business follows power axes that cannot be limited within the perimeter of the territorial sovereignty of individual families. The boundaries are not so clearly definable, and here we are not talking only about the topographic meaning of the term. A mafioso can control the political relations necessary for activities to be performed in various areas. A company may need protection in all the geographic contexts in which it operates, and it may turn to a single cosca for that protection; a company providing construction-related services such as the one run by the La Barberas might have clients in various locations around the city (or even in other cities). I don’t believe that Recredit—Società di riscossione crediti per conto di aziende private, or Company for Collecting Debt on Behalf of Private Companies—can be restricted to the territories controlled by a single family; Salvatore Inzerillo was a partner in the company. Likewise, the two mafiosi hired by a northern company involved in the construction of the Palermo–Mazzara autostrada necessarily worked over broad geographic areas, as they had been assigned to oversee “the issuance of permits by the landowners involved in the execution of the work, in order to ensure that construction itself should immediately get under way.”⁸⁷

A single group, the Acquasanta group, controlled the guardianìa of the Hotel delle Palme and of Villa Igea, both of which were managed by the same company but located in two different sections of the city. The Acquasanta group demanded that the management make use of its own suppliers for the meat purchased—this is indicative of a move toward a monopoly over a given sector rather than over a certain territory. A new development such as the move of the general markets from the Zisa quarter to the Acquasanta quarter (January 1955) provoked a ferocious fight. In that fight, the groups that controlled the system of advances to producers and commercial intermediation were on one side, along with the more traditional Mafia of the giardini, where the Grecos were consolidating their power, especially following the death of Antonino Cottone. On the other side was the cosca that claimed to have the right to control the market owing to territorial jurisdiction.⁸⁸ There were dozens of killings. In the Ciaculli group, a Francesco Greco, a “wholesaler dealing in fruit and vegetables,” was killed. The Acquasanta cosca paid a much heavier price in blood. Two of its chiefs were killed in rapid succession—the previously mentioned Tanu Alatu and Cola D’Alessandro; a third capo, Salvatore Licandro, was pursued all the way to Como and murdered there.⁸⁹

The Mafia war proved that the rules of territorial jurisdiction were not automatically applied when major overriding interests were in play. We could certainly seek the reasons for the disagreement in the very nature of the market, in the system of relationships among producers, middlemen, promoters, and wholesalers. We could accuse the authorities of having failed (or declined) to find a way to encourage free competition, instead of conniving in the perpetuation of the monopoly over which these groups were battling. Here, however, we are focusing on the external, surface nature of the phenomenon, as if the Mafia were continually regenerated from given economic or social conditions. In reality, however, there already exists a power that considers certain sectors of the economy as a strategic objective. That power is capable of imposing its will with the application of a form and degree of terror such that it renders moot any internal modifications of that sector. The triggering factor of the war consists of an interference, a short circuit between the network of potential interests and territorial powers. The claim has been made that the elimination of Mafia violence from the sector in the most recent period is a result of the antimonopoly policy adopted by municipal authorities, and that the market was thus responsible for defeating the Mafia.⁹⁰ It is my view that the real factor at play was a shift in the equilibrium among the cosche; for instance, the weakening (and subsequent destruction) of the Acquasanta cosca. These developments made possible the reestablishment of a market dialectic, while at the same time, among other things, facilitating certain “courageous” decisions made in the municipal bureaucracies. The determining factor lay in the power syndicate’s decision of whether to occupy or abandon a given sector. Among other considerations, let us point out that green markets, fishing facilities, slaughter houses, and construction sites are the setting, not necessarily the cause, of conflicts. Drug dealers may shoot one another, but drugs may not be the triggering cause, or the sole cause, of these wars.

Let us attempt to analyze the reasons for the first Mafia war (1962). It all began, we are told, with a large drug deal organized by Cesare Manzella, an Italian American in Cinisi, with the involvement of the Grecos and a group that financed it; the La Barberas also formed part of that group. The person who directly and physically managed the transaction as a trustee for Manzella and his partners was Calcedonio Di Pisa. Unfortunately, Di Pisa delivered to the investors a sum that was lower than the expected yield, by “many millions of lire,” claiming that one of the American buyers had defrauded him. The La Barberas made inquiries in America and concluded that, quite to the contrary, it was Di Pisa who had pocketed the money. But the commission responsible for the investigation decided otherwise, and Di Pisa was allowed to go unpunished. The decision did not settle the matter for the La Barberas, who decided to take measures on their own against Di Pisa and against Manzella. Both men were killed, triggering a murderous reaction from the Grecos, a series of actions and reprisals. The final outcome was the ruin of the La Barberas and the dissolution of the family of central Palermo (Palermo Centro).

It is quite evident even in this reconstruction that the failure to find a solution to the conflict that developed out of the drug traffic was attributable to other questions. The Grecos and the La Barberas who financed the business in partnership were, however, split by rivalries inasmuch as they represented two potentates that were expanding, respectively, in eastern Palermo and in western Palermo. As the battle grew, groups split along existing lines of division and, in all likelihood, were unable to reconcile their differences because of preexisting rivalries. Another factor was the independent attitude of the La Barberas, which called into question the commission’s capacity to govern, judge, and punish (or acquit). I should, however, point out another interpretation that was offered by the Mafia itself, that is, by the two pentiti Buscetta and Calderone.⁹¹ According to them, the person responsible for the death of Di Pisa was Michele Cavataio, successor to Tanu Alatu as the capo of the Acquasanta Mafia; they claimed that Cavataio intended to put the blame for the killing on the La Barberas in order to provoke a split in the commission. The problems were only made worse by the refusal of certain senior Mafia figures to implement the rule that called for each of them to choose between the position of family capo and that of representatives seated on the commission. Clearly, such a rule was intended to reduce individual power in favor of a more collegial style of supervision, and perhaps also to accelerate the pace at which young blood would be introduced into the leadership. The two interpretations are not mutually exclusive, but the second version focuses more on the internal problems of the power syndicate in creating and applying a common law through the commission, while military power was left in the hands of the individual families. Even if all the groups accepted a rule, they could always arrange to sabotage that rule through self-serving moves, misinformation, and the cunning ploys of the members. In the ongoing battle between the eastern sector, controlled by the Grecos, and the central and western zone of Porta Nuova–Altarello–Acquasanta–Piana dei Colli, that is, La Barbera–Cavataio–Torretta, the Grecos continually emerged victorious but never could manage to bring the fighting to a halt. The bomb at Ciaculli brought a thundering collapse to the commission’s attempts to ensure peace, that is, an equilibrium among the groups.

After the massacre of Ciaculli, the generation of the Grecos, the La Barberas, the Buscettas, and the Leggios (all born between 1923 and 1928) encountered for the first time an antagonist that had been largely absent throughout the course of the 1950s. That antagonist was state repression, guided not by the ordinary administrative considerations, but by a more specific political will. At first, the impact was substantial. A new law relegating mafiosi to internal exile and the preliminary investigations being carried out by Terranova unhinged and dismantled the Mafia’s organizational structures, triggering the dissolution of the commission, and a general and complete paralysis of the families. “Cosa Nostra no longer existed in the Palermo area after 1963. It was out of operation.”⁹² A number of the leaders went into hiding. The Grecos did not emerge from hiding again, while Leggio seemed to be in intermittent clandestinity. Leggio was arrested and then released, managed mysteriously to elude the restrictive measures imposed by the police, and then vanished, only to be caught, arrested, and finally brought to justice in 1974. By this time, however, we are firmly in the midst of a phase of revival for the Mafia groups. That revival was encouraged by the outcome of the trials of Catanzaro (1968) and Bari (1969): most of the bosses emerged undamaged and unpunished. Those were the years in which the Mafia networks extended to cover northern Italy, in part through an unintended consequence of the measures of internal exile, based on the usual prejudice that saw the Mafia as a simple by-product of a “primitive” environment, and not something that could take root and flourish in the “developed” world. The “developed” world, quite to the contrary, proved to be a market that was perhaps more fruitful even than Sicily. Among the new business opportunities were kidnapping and drug dealing. For varying periods of time, and in some cases, permanently, Pippo Calò and Luciano Leggio (among others) moved to the Italian mainland.

Meanwhile, the problem of the man who was by now identified as the common enemy of the cosche of Palermo, Cavataio, had come to the forefront. After a series of inconclusive negotiations, Salvatore Greco decided to cut the Gordian knot of that situation. He sent a team of killers disguised as policemen to the offices of the building company in Viale Lazio where Cavataio had his lair. Cavataio was one of several who were killed in the furious shootout that followed (December 1969). The membership of the squad of killers offers a clear X-ray of the alliances at work. There were two Corleonese killers, including the group’s chief torpedo, Bernardo Provenzano. There were two men from the Bontate family, and a certain Damiano Caruso, who lived in Villabate but was a member of the Riesi family.⁹³ For the first time, we see the capo of a Caltanissetta cosca, Giuseppe Di Cristina, drawn into the resolution of an internal matter of the Palermo power syndicate, at the request of the Palermitans themselves, precisely in the role of an outsider. He was appointed to negotiate with Cavataio and, ultimately, to betray him, along with the Pippo Calderone of the Catanian family of Cosa Nostra.

There thus emerged especially close ties between Palermo and the rest of the island. Certainly, two particular cases, the Caltanissetta area and the Catania area, were different. On the Sicilian interior, there are numerous noteworthy cases of historical continuity: in Riesi, Favara, Raffadali, and Siculiana, the network of Mafia affiliations must never have been interrupted. Di Cristina was the son of a Mafia capo; Leonardo Messina, the young pentito from San Cataldo in the 1980s, could boast a genuine Mafia pedigree: “My family is one that has belonged by tradition to Cosa Nostra, and I am a seventh-generation member…. I was not affiliato, or made a member, because I was a robber or because I was capable of killing people; it’s because by family tradition I was destined to be a member.”⁹⁴

In these areas, the Mafia—which seemed on the verge of extinction, destined to go the way of the large landholdings and the sulphur mines—was revitalized by a new contact with Cosa Nostra; Messina says “regenerated.”⁹⁵ The regional government represented an important element of centralization around the focal point of public spending. One emblematic case concerns the dam of Solarino, built by the Rendo group of Catania. The construction of the dam was subcontracted to satisfy the appetites of the mafiosi of Caltanissetta, such as Giuseppe Madonia, leaving a trail of murders.⁹⁶ Di Cristina took a position with the Ente Minerario Siciliano (Sicilian Mining Agency), a big, inefficient regional pork barrel that managed the decline of the sulphur mines of the Sicilian interior.⁹⁷ From there, he cast his eyes toward Palermo and worked his way into the heroin market. The Mafia of the town of Siculiana was likewise regenerated, but by the emigration to Canada of the members of the Cuntrera-Caruana family, formerly campieri for the Baron Agnello, who later moved to Venezuela to supervise a gigantic drug-trafficking business.

In contrast, the Mafia of Catania was new Mafia, even though the local cosca was founded in 1925, imported by Nino Saitta, uncle of the Calderones, the veteran of a period in hiding in the Madonie (with the Farinellas?).⁹⁸ For the 1950s, there are reports of another cosca in Ramacca, founded by mafiosi who had come up from Agrigentino along a line that, as we have seen, is typical of communications between the western and eastern sections of the island of Sicily. As the ties of friendship and comparaggio between Pippo Calderone and Di Cristina seem to indicate, the other path was the one linking Mazzarino and Riesi, the ancient road along which sulphur was transported to the refineries and the seaport of Catania. It appears that the Santapaola family was composed of sulphur transporters; this family produced another of the cosca’s notables, Benedetto Santapaola, also known as Nitto Santapaola. Last of all, there is solid proof of the Catanians’ involvement in cigarette smuggling, alongside the Grecos and the Badalamentis.⁹⁹ On the whole, this group influenced the reputation of Catania very little, up until the 1960s and even beyond. In Catania, everyone attributed the Mafia (with a certain hint of gratification) to the rival city Palermo and the western part of the island, which was viewed as less developed and dynamic. Catania was fond of depicting itself as the Milan of the south. It was a city of traders, builders, businessmen, and speculators, governed by the political machine assembled by Nino Drago, yet another member of Fanfani’s political court.¹⁰⁰ The city’s criminals, of various extractions, may have constituted small cogs of that machine, though the more attentive sector of Catania’s public opinion had perceived various unsettling signals for some time. For instance, one such signal came at the beginning of the 1960s, when Giovanni Leone, a leading criminal lawyer, a leader of the Christian Democratic Party, and a future president of the Italian Republic, came down from Rome to Catania to defend an unknown member of the unknown cosca (Franco Ferrera). Catania preferred to identify itself with the Cavalieri del Lavoro (an honorary appellation translating roughly as “knights of labor”—translator’s note), Costanzo, Graci, Finocchiaro, and Rendo, major builders with interests in private and public construction on a regional scale. The city overlooked or tried to overlook the fact that these builders, in the course of their business dealings all over Sicily, regularly came into contact with Mafia groups and that, in accordance with the usual model, they assigned subcontracts to the mafiosi in exchange for protection. Many northern companies adopted this same attitude, but the effects tended to be much more deleterious because of the closer nature of the connections. According to the confessions of Antonino Calderone (Pippo’s younger brother), Carmelo Costanzo was connected to Luigi Saitta, from his very beginnings as a capo-mastro, or supervisor, and then passed under the protection of the elder Calderone during the course of his climb up through the ranks of the grand bourgeoisie in the period of Silvio Milazzo. Again, according to the pentito, the mafiosi of both Catania and Trapani (the Minore family) won subcontracts, facilitations, and cash payments from Costanzo. Santapaola appeared at the entrepreneur’s side whenever he went out to mingle with his workers. He purchased a Renault dealership, frequented the drawing rooms of respectable Catanian society, and in short became part of the city’s establishment. What remains in the documentation is a portrait of the city, a photograph taken at Giuseppe Costanzo’s wedding. The photograph shows, all in a row, the mayor of Catania, the president of the province, the provincial secretary of the Christian Democratic Party, the honorable Social-Democratic member of parliament, Costanzo’s nephews, and Nitto Santapaola.

In a certain sense, Catania in the 1970s resembled Palermo in the 1870s, with a Mafia group that found its link to a ruling class that was willing to close one eye, or perhaps both, if needed. The hundred years of history that the mafiosi of Palermo have at their backs, however, makes a substantial difference. The mafiosi of Catania lacked a sense of deep roots in their territory, and as soon as they could, they fled the ghetto quarters in which they were born and went to live in the residential areas. It was impossible for them to extend claims of territorial control: the only local cosca managed a vague and ill-defined space (the space of the Costanzo companies?) with its thirty-five members, and it requires a considerable stretch of the imagination even to attempt to compare it to the fifty-four families of Palermo, with their roughly three thousand affiliated members. Those families covered the entire territory, and as they grew they fished among the bright young men to staff their growing ranks.¹⁰¹ Traditionally, in Catania, the territorial grid served the purpose of easily identifying the ’ntisu (well-known) individual to whom one could turn, in each quarter, in order to recover a stolen car or other purloined objects. This regulatory mechanism, however, broke down in the 1970s along with many others, while from the belly of the city there began to spread an aggressive and anarchic criminality that first devoted itself to purse snatchings, then local armed robbery, and (with rapid air travel) even armed robbery in northern Italy. These criminals began to shake down shops and companies. The Mafia group, whose network of relations aimed both upward (the local establishment) and outward (Cosa Nostra), viewed “common” criminals with aristocratic disdain. The younger Calderone and Santapaola condescended on one occasion to take part in a country festivity held by the group of the carcagnusi, but, accustomed as they were to the hospitality of the Costanzos or the Salvos, they could hardly help but feel ill at ease among the grilled chickens, with Vespas zipping in every direction, and rough backslapping:

Relations were not always so friendly. Indeed, Santapaola decided to take the role of protector of public order and began killing off blackmailers without pity. With that objective, the family found itself obliged to expand its ranks, admitting to membership a great number of efficient killers, who would be capable of sustaining the level of combat. In any case, the idea of bringing order to the city proved to be fairly illusory. Catania remained a battlefield for warring groups. As the cosca expanded, it, too, split into groups. The Mafia model spread, but it proved impossible to attain a comparable degree of compact solidarity with the zones where the Mafia had the deepest and oldest roots.

When asked his view of the proportional influence and presence of the provincial groups inside Cosa Nostra, Buscetta responded: “From 1 to 10: Palermo, 10, Agrigento, 8, Trapani, 8, Caltanissetta, 6, and Catania, 4.”¹⁰³ This ranking, though it refers to the present-day situation, also reflects to a certain degree the historical dimension as well. The reader should note the absence of Siracusa, Ragusa, and Messina, zones that were traditionally immune to the Mafia.¹⁰⁴ There was, however, a family in Mistretta, obviously affiliated with Palermo along with Gangi and S. Mauro Castelverde, under the command of a certain Giuseppe Farinella¹⁰⁵—a surname that is quite familiar. Even from inside the organization, matters can be viewed from a number of different standpoints, depending on the observer’s personal experience. Leonardo Messina emphasized the importance of the Caltanissetta area, even with reference to his own position: “In general, people think that unless the pentito is from Palermo, he has nothing of interest to say.”¹⁰⁶ Vincenzo Marsala, who was from Vicari (a village in the Palermo hinterland), offered a piece of advice: “Judge Your Honor, … unless you start with the villages, this evil plant will never be uprooted. The hinterland is the reservoir of the Mafia.”¹⁰⁷ Gaspare Mutolo, a certified native of Palermo, declared: “The Mafia, sadly, is native to Palermo,” and recounted a line of Rosario Di Maggio’s concerning Riina: “What does he expect to accomplish here in Palermo, if we are all in agreement? We’ll give him a kick in the ass and send him back to Corleone to grow wheat.”¹⁰⁸ It was in fact a wisecrack, since the only farming Riina ever did was cultivating the urban Mafia.

With the clarity of vision that came from being in a peripheral vantage point, to wit, Catania, the younger Calderone noted that the equality among families and provinces “was honored only in form,” while in reality there existed “a hegemonic power held by the Palermitans.” “In particular, the Grecos have held effective power over all of Sicily forever.”¹⁰⁹ It would be interesting to know what the pentito meant by “forever” (in the Italian, sempre). In the 1970s, Salvatore Greco “chicchiteddu,” and his cousin, also Salvatore, “l’ingegnere,” moved to Venezuela, and after returning once or twice to Sicily, disappear from this history. Unverified reports tell us that chicchiteddu died of natural causes, and there is silence on the fate of l’ingegnere. Buscetta describes chicchiteddu as disgusted, determined to pull out of the situation; this is in line with Buscetta’s thesis of a formerly noble Mafia, which was now in the process of degeneration and which would have found its last prestigious leader in the person of none other than Salvatore Greco, or “chicchiteddu.” It is reasonable, however, to question whether the two cousins actually meant to retire entirely. It was precisely in this period, with the Cuntrera-Caruana families, that Venezuela became an important base of operations for the drug business. We might hypothesize that, following the bloody Mafia war and the collapse of the overarching coordinating structures, the Grecos decided that the structure of the power syndicate of Palermo was no longer governable. Moreover, they might have chosen to invest their skills, relations, and capital in the area of the enterprise syndicate. In the network of trafficking and business, the South American territory began to constitute a significant terminus.¹¹⁰

In Ciaculli, the heritage of the two cousins was adopted by Michele Greco, the son of Don Piddu u tinenti, and therefore a member of the Croceverde Giardini faction. Chicchiteddu, a blood relation of both sides (his mother was from Croceverde, his father was from Ciaculli), had represented an ideal point of equilibrium and reconciliation. It was he, according to Buscetta, who had made the magnanimous gesture of taking the Croceverde cousins back into the family, even though Mafia circles recognized that “he would have been entirely right not to”¹¹¹ (that is: that Ciaculli had emerged victorious from the war). The resentments of the long-ago Greco-versus-Greco war could still be felt even in recent years. “L’ingegnere,” whose parents had both been killed in that war, attempted to disqualify Michele Greco by reminding his peers that Don Piddu had once broken every rule by appearing in court demanding justice for his son. Once again we see evidence of the sense of historical continuity with the Mafia dei giardini; more than thirty-five years had passed, if the reference is to the killing of Giuseppe Greco (1939). In his turn, when Michele Greco was arrested, he complained publicly that he had been the victim of mistaken identity, given the fact that the two Mafia capos, with whom he had nothing in common, shared his name.¹¹² This marks an unmistakable distancing. Therefore, the victors of the 1960s had abandoned not only the provincial organization, but even the family, and left them in the hands of a different and, in a certain sense, opposing group.

A triumvirate composed of Riina, Badalamenti, and Stefano Bontate (the son of Don Paolino) was appointed around 1970 to reorganize the Mafia of Palermo, reconstitute its families, and ensure its supervision and coordination. The Palermo Centro cosca (the former La Barbera family) was dissolved and then reformed; the Acquasanta cosca that had caused so many problems, from Tanu Alatu to Cavataio, was eliminated.¹¹³ Around 1973, the provincial commission was reconstituted under the chairmanship of Badalamenti; in 1975, the regional commission led by Pippo Calderone was formed. And that was not all. Several Neapolitan bosses were affiliated members who had been doing business for years with the Sicilians in cigarette smuggling; the Sicilians hoped that this move would help to keep the Neapolitans under control. The solution was basically formal; it would not prevent disagreements and reciprocal cheating and fraud. The already poorly functioning system of regulation in western Sicily was unlikely to bring into line even more distant and more diverse groups. In any case, it seems impossible to compare the Mafia, in the strictest sense, to similar phenomena springing up in the Mezzogiorno. In fact, as the younger Calderone repeatedly emphasized, the authority of the regional commission would never rise to the same level as that of the commission of Palermo. What was under way was an attempt to internalize (an unlovely but effective term used by social scientists), that is, to bring all the transactions under the umbrella of the territorial structure of Cosa Nostra, in order to eliminate the disputes of the past and establish a geometric and hierarchical order.

The Badalamenti administration began with the elimination of the small-time Camorrist who, many years before, had dared to slap Lucky Luciano in the face. The new leader took care to inform the Americans “that the insult had been washed away with blood, however belatedly.”¹¹⁴ Perhaps it was not belatedly, but very timely indeed. Badalamenti wanted to pay a compliment to his friends across the Atlantic, who had always been his own chief interlocutors as well as for the entire Mafia of Cinisi, at the very moment that he took power. The message did not please Leggio, who criticized Badalamenti “because he had informed the American Cosa Nostra that it was to his credit that the entire province of Palermo was now under control, and that he had become the ‘capo dei capi.’”¹¹⁵ The leadership of this major Sicilian American drug trafficker came to a sudden end in 1977, but not with a dramatic settling of accounts from his adversaries, nor with a negotiated succession. Instead, quite simply, Badalamenti was expelled from Cosa Nostra, in a painless but total manner. This suggests that his power had more to do with external relationships than with any force he himself wielded within the power syndicate. Buscetta, who described what happened, firmly refused to offer even the slightest attempt to interpret this episode. Calderone, on the other hand, recalled that Badalamenti, originally quite close to the Corleonese and to Michele Greco, was later accused by them of “having enriched himself by dealing drugs at the same time that many families were in financial trouble and many men of honor were practically going hungry.”¹¹⁶

The new capo, who was none other than Michele Greco, did not follow the same line as his more prestigious cousin, Salvatore chicchiteddu; instead he carried out a general reversal of alliances, with a close adherence to the Corleonese. In direct opposition, Stefano Bontate, capo of the Santa Maria di Gesù family, emerged as a powerful figure and made an alliance with the young Mafia capo of Passo di Rigano, Salvatore Inzerillo. The alliances were thus in place for new business and new and bloodier wars.

When a mafioso extends his protection to a businessman, he will brook no interference of any kind, even from other members of the organization. Let us examine the case of Pasquale Costanzo, for instance. The Calderones apparently considered the hypothesis of affiliating him. The final decision, however, was against it because it would have allowed Costanzo to have too much inside say in the interplay of pressure “on the part of all men of honor, who would have then felt that they had every right to contact him directly.”¹¹⁷ The decision, therefore, was made in order to protect not only Costanzo’s autonomy, but also the exclusive nature of communications with the Catanian family or with Calderone. Members affiliated with the Salemi cosca and mafiosi extending back numerous generations were the cousins Nino and Ignazio Salvo. Their status—according to Buscetta’s emphatic and convincing declaration—did not, however, derive so much from the positions they held within Cosa Nostra, as from their wealth and from their assiduously cultivated political relations within and outside of the Christian Democratic Party, with cash payments made strategically to ensure that no one would question their monopoly on the contract for tax collections. As the Christian Democrat Giuseppe Alessi stated in 1964, “this topic is red hot, because there are billions of lire at stake, and control can ensure life and prosperity to parties, to political currents, and to groups of people. I would not want us to chase away the sparrows, and then leave the predatory eagles undisturbed.”¹¹⁸

The fact that Badalamenti should have been “particularly proud” of the friendship of the Salvos, as well as fiercely determined to preserve it from the incursions of other affiliated members, shows a contact among peers between the hierarchy of Mafia power and the hierarchy of money. Even more long-lived and well established was Badalamenti’s relation with the Bontates, father and son. It is in this logical context that we can also place the kidnapping and murder of Luigi Corleo (1975), father-in-law of Nino Salvo. That killing made it clear to Nino Salvo that his connections and sources of protection would not be sufficient to keep him safe. When he was faced with accusations from the magistrature, Salvo claimed that he was not a mafioso, but a victim no different from all the other entrepreneurs in Sicily, and that he had turned to Bontate only to obtain his protection. He added an interesting note: “Until the kidnapping of my father-in-law Luigi Corleo, I believed that I had established a peaceful if somewhat uneasy coexistence with those organizations, wrongly thinking that it was sufficient to behave well in order to avoid having problems with anyone.”¹¹⁹

Here we can perceive the bewilderment of a Mafia that is attempting to join the grand bourgeoisie and that believes it has adequate protection from its network of prior relations in Cosa Nostra, only to discover that, even though it has “behaved impeccably,” it is still sucked back into the criminal universe by the competition between its protectors. On the other hand, a kidnapping industry proved to be unacceptable in Sicily, on the Sardinian or Calabrian model, because it would have violated the understanding between protectors and the protection that was first established in long-ago 1877, whose effects waned only in the chaos of the two postwar periods. Let me mention one case from 1976, which could, however, just as easily have taken place a century before. An independent gang from Trapani kidnapped a certain Campisi, to the displeasure of the “men of honor,” who expressed their disapproval by furnishing the usual tip to the Carabinieri via the Mafia capo of Partanna, Stefano Accardo. In reaction to that tip, the Trapani gang responded with an attempted assassination, which the mafioso miraculously survived. Then came the slaughter of all five gang members responsible for the twofold code violation.¹²⁰ Thus, the Mafia continued to insist on showing respect for forces outside of itself. This was the reason for the commission vote to ban kidnapping from Sicilian territory (outside of Sicily was a different matter, as can be seen from Leggio’s activities). The rule was, by and large, respected, though occasionally violated during especially hot periods of infra-Mafia competition.

In the case of the Salvos, the protection contract reveals something more than the usual ambiguity. Referring to the businessman Moncada, a close associate of the La Barberas, Terranova commented: “It is not clear whether he was a victim or an abettor of the Mafiosi, or perhaps both, depending on the various phases and the varying degrees of self-interest.”¹²¹ What was referred to in the nineteenth-and twentieth-century discussions as manutengolismo, or abetting of the Mafia, is today termed contiguità (contiguity), with the same indeterminate nature of the term’s actual significance. In the preliminary investigation of the maxiprocesso, or maxitrial, Falcone and the others noted that some of the businessmen described by Vitale as victims of extortion had, in the ten or fifteen years that had since passed, become partners, beneficiaries, and accomplices of their extorters.¹²² And in fact, the price demanded, even from shopkeepers, was quite often this: to facilitate, by becoming business partners, the transformation of the protectors into “entrepreneurs.” What needs to be analyzed differently are the cases of those who enjoy the benefits of the network of Mafia relationships and then suffer corresponding damage from that same network. Salvo denounced the state as being “practically absent from the struggle against the Mafia,”¹²³ with polemical tones that are age-old but, in this specific case, also purely self-serving. These are people who, like the Gucciones of the past, owe their positions of power precisely to their contacts with the Mafia network in a market from which all other competitors are excluded because of their lack of Mafia support. Is it possible to speak of a state of necessity when someone prospers from a more general state of necessity, a state in which others are obliged to live without enjoying the same benefits? This, for instance, is the case of the Costanzos, who did construction work and enjoyed profitable business, free of any intimidation thanks to the violent actions ordered independently by their Mafia protectors. In this context, we should mention the 1991 verdict of a Catanian judge with the illustrious name of Luigi Russo, in comparison with which the lifelines thrown to the large landowners in the trials during the Fascist regime are mere trifles. The magistrate ascertained the validity of most of the revelations offered by the younger Calderone concerning the Costanzos, but also determined that their actions were not subject to legal sanction because those actions were prompted by a state of necessity entirely comparable to that of a shopowner who was the victim of a protection racket. We are not interested in examining the matter here in judicial terms, but let’s just view it from the sociological point of view, which Judge Russo expands on with disconcerting emotional pathos. Judge Russo expresses sympathy for the plight of the multimillionaire businessmen who are forced to host Mafia meetings in their offices; he shares the distress of the Costanzos over the marriage of one of their nieces to a leader of the cosca, Salvatore Marchese (a Calderone cousin); and he subscribes to the thesis of the social utility of collusion with the Mafia. “The rejection of any dialogue designed to attain a certain point of equilibrium [with the mafiosi] would lead the entrepreneur to renounce the idea of doing business; and paradoxically this would happen precisely in those areas of the country in which maintaining and increasing employment should serve to encourage the population to break free of the presence of the Mafia.”¹²⁴

We are still engaged with the fallacious equation of underdevelopment and Mafia; from that fallacious correspondence one obtains the even more fallacious corollary according to which development counters the Mafia. This corollary has led broad sectors of Italian public opinion, both among entrepreneurs and labor organizers in Catania and elsewhere, to express worries about the “criminalization” of entrepreneurs. More original was Russo’s theory, which stated that even the possible affiliation with Cosa Nostra of the recipient of the threat would represent a defensive ploy, which could therefore no longer be classed as association with the Mafia, which is juridically a crime.¹²⁵ Historically and conceptually, such a defensive theory represents the very essence of the Mafia phenomenon.

The possession of one’s own capital of ties to the political and economic establishment seemed to constitute, within Cosa Nostra, a mechanism for power and advancement. In fact, we can describe as a notable anyone who, within an organization, is able to bring about a legitimization that is independent of the organization itself. First and foremost among the other factors at work in that direction is the prestige that is an essential factor in the role of the mafioso. For instance, according to Buscetta, Vincenzo Rimi had never held executive positions of any sort: “he was nothing more than a man of honor of the Alcamo family, whose capo I do not even know, but he was a person who enjoyed a very great reputation and influence within Cosa Nostra” on account of his qualities “of equilibrium and wisdom.”¹²⁶ It strikes me as excessive to claim, as does Buscetta with the pride of a self-made man, that Mafia power could in no way be handed down to one’s offspring or inherited. Otherwise, what sense can we make of the continuity of family dynasties like that of the Grecos? How can we explain the rapid rise of a young man such as Stefano Bontate to the leadership of the S. Maria di Gesù cosca in which his father had held the same position? Moreover, according to Calderone and Buscetta, Michele Greco was an “insipid” individual, who therefore rose to the head of the commission for no reason other than his illustrious surname. Since they had been wealthy and powerful for generations, the Grecos and the Bontates were also signori (“gentlemen”), which was not a bad credential in a traditionalist environment like that of Cosa Nostra. Mere wealth, on the other hand, did not establish “rank,” as we can see from the fairly modest prestige and reputation enjoyed by Tommaso Spadaro, even though he was a prominent boss in the sectors of cigarette smuggling and drug trafficking.

It is difficult to identify the rank of Tommaso Buscetta, who at various points was called the “boss of two worlds” because of his incessant travels through Europe and South and North America. Buscetta was pursued by the police forces of half the planet as a top-level drug trafficker, but then, in his renowned confessions, he claimed that he had never dealt drugs, that he had never held high Mafia office, that he was never anything more than a simple “soldier” of the Porta Nuova family commanded by Pippo Calò, and that he had always allied himself with the losing side, ranging from the La Barberas to Stefano Bontate. Buscetta probably did not wish to reveal his activities in the enterprise syndicate. And yet it remains difficult to understand the source of his great prestige among the mafiosi in prison or confined in the courtroom cages during the maxiprocesso. Those mafiosi listened to his accusations in respectful silence. We could, perhaps, accept the pentito’s psychological interpretation of his own reputation. “Mother Nature gave me a certain charisma, I have an extra something.”¹²⁷ But in reality there is a sharp discrepancy between the objectively modest role that Buscetta attributed to himself in his confessions to Falcone and the tones of the autobiography that he dictated to Enzo Biagi, as well as the revelations of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA). The director of the DEA, Frank Monastero, declared: “Buscetta should be considered to occupy the highest level of the Mafia, with contacts on three continents…. Valachi never had the same power, charisma, and rank in the organization that Buscetta enjoys.”¹²⁸

The divergence might be explicable in terms of the two different points of view, Sicilian and American, and the way in which a Sicilian American drug trafficker can act as a leader even though he holds no high offices in the Cosa Nostra hierarchy. The end of the 1970s was an unprecedented boom time in the narcotics business. That business inevitably spanned the two worlds, Old World and New World, in which Buscetta was a leading boss. From the New World came a surging river of cash, through banking channels that represented the trail that the new investigative bloodhound of the Palermo prosecutor’s office, Judge Giovanni Falcone, began to follow, thanks to his experience with financial crimes. And from the Old World there flowed a river of heroin, which in 1982 managed to supply 80 percent of the market in the northeastern United States.

At either end of the two rivers were two cousins, Carlo Gambino and Salvatore Inzerillo; thus, the most powerful cosca of New York served as the purchaser, while the capo of one of Palermo’s oldest cosche was the seller. In the middle were recent Sicilian immigrants, living on the east coast of the United States, in part to escape the repression of the early 1960s. They ran another link in the chain, the import link. The investigators came to the conclusion that there was a third Mafia, after the Italian American Mafia and the Sicilian Mafia, a Sicilian narcotics-trafficking Mafia commanded by Badalamenti.¹²⁹ The fundamental role played by this individual, who had just been expelled from the Cosa Nostra of Palermo, makes it clear that this Sicilian American group did not represent a branch of the main organization; it was not a terminus of the Sicilian territorial organization.¹³⁰ (Nor was it a subsidiary of the American organization.) Instead, it was a relatively independent enterprise syndicate, autonomous of both Sicily and America. It marked the reversal of the trend of the 1950s, when the purchasers came to Europe. Now it was the sellers who were going to America. We are still looking at an alternating flow of merchandise, money, and people who mixed with trade in the context of emigration. Now the trade was in drugs, just as it once had been in oil and citrus fruit, but it was still being moved by the “friends” and “family” of “tested loyalty” that for the past century had been moving in both directions, from one continent to the other. In the Inzerillo group “the incredible labyrinth of family ties,” Falcone observed, “is such that one struggles to keep it all clear, and it is interesting to note that, with each successive generation, the connections become increasingly close, with marriages between cousins.” This endogamy was methodically pursued in the context of an “apparent restoration of traditional values …, used in an instrumental bid to increase the cohesion and homogeneity of the group.”¹³¹ This was the old model of the narcotics-dealing Mafias of Cinisi and Alcamo, but now it was managed on a much broader scale from Palermo, where family ties replaced the structures of the territorial Mafia, unsuited to a transcontinental network.

Once the French Connection had become obsolete, at the end of the 1970s the former cigarette smugglers, now rich in cash and contacts they had developed in recent years, began to supply themselves directly from the Far East. Tommaso Spadaro, Nunzio La Mattina, and Pino Savoca were just three of these. Now, the Sicilians began to refine the heroin for themselves, by importing Marseillais technicians, and they also began to ship directly to America. They now controlled numerous links in the chain. In certain aspects, this management was unified, since all the mafiosi were able to take advantage of this “industrial” structure as well as the commercial channels, by financing a partial share of the merchandise. Nonetheless, there was an evident fragmentation and growing suspicion and mistrust among the various power centers. Giovanni Bontate, for instance, applied a system that was reminiscent of mechanisms employed in the protocapitalism of the modern era, the “putting out” system common in the Flemish economy. He did not merely hire refiners to process his morphine for a certain fee. First, he would sell the morphine to the refiners, then he would buy it back once it had been refined into heroin.¹³² Furthermore, there were two choke points in the free access to resources: the first lay with the importation of the morphine, which was firmly controlled by the three individuals named above. As a result, anyone else (for instance, the Corleonese) had to “make do with the share that was assigned to them.”¹³³ The second choke point lay in the export of the heroin to America, where Inzerillo exerted a certain degree of control—we cannot say to what extent it was exclusive. Falcone’s preliminary investigation, and prior to that investigation, the investigations of a police official who worked in close coordination with the DEA, Boris Giuliano, allow us to form some notion of the structure of that group. Around the group there flourished a vast system of entrepreneurs, bankers, and money launderers, with an internal division of roles between the drug-dealing sector and the larger business section. In the latter area, the most important individual was a cousin of the Inzerillos, Rosario Spatola, who was also notorious as the host of the Gambino family’s friend, the powerful banker Michele Sindona, at the time in serious straits, during his mysterious trip to Sicily (1979). The difference between Spadaro and his partners, on the one hand, and Inzerillo on the other, lies in the fact that Spadaro and partners had status purely in the area of the enterprise syndicate, while Inzerillo combined the role of large-scale drug trafficker with the rank of family capo of Cosa Nostra, and had ties, respectively, with the traditional Sicilian American controlling figure “of the international trade in narcotics,” Badalamenti, and on the other hand with Di Cristina and, ultimately, Bontate,¹³⁴ leader of the “minority” group in the commission. On both sides of the investigation, both American and Italian, the name of Buscetta appeared frequently.

In this crucial period, the annual profits from the Sicilian American drug trade were on the order of hundreds of millions (perhaps as much as a billion?) of dollars. In this context we can see the early roots of the so-called second Mafia war, already impending in the wings with the murders of Di Cristina and Pippo Calderone, and then fully in progress with the deaths of Stefano Bontate, Salvatore Inzerillo, and a substantial number of members of his (blood) family. That war came to an end over the course of two years (1981–1982) with the horrifying mass slaughter of around five hundred to a thousand individuals. Many of the businessmen in Inzerillo’s entourage were killed: among them were an early figure in the heroin trade, Antonino Sorci, former partner of Luciano; and Leonardo Caruana, from the famous Agrigento-Venezuelan family of heroin traffickers. There is a significant fact: even after the killing of Bontate, Inzerillo declared that he felt certain that Riina would never touch him, since Riina still expected to be paid many hundreds of millions as his share of a drug deal. His opinion was soon proved wrong by the burst of bullets from an AK-47 that penetrated the bulletproof armor of his automobile. The corpse of Salvatore’s brother, Pietro Inzerillo, was found in New York “with a wad of dollar bills stuffed in his mouth and wedged under his genitalia. Message: ‘You tried to swallow too much money.’”¹³⁵ This was the same message as the one sent by the carta d’oro (gold certificate) tossed on the dead body of Don Giuseppe Lumia, 120 years earlier. The power syndicate, and with it, the alliance of the “winners,” clearly intended to cut the Sicilian American component out of the deal and to take for itself not so much the profits from the narcotics traffic (which, as we have seen, was open to everyone, though to what degree we cannot say), but rather the fundamental levers of control over that trade. Here we should make a distinction between the commission, in which Greco and Riina controlled the majority, and the families, first and foremost the family of S. Maria di Gesù, the most numerous and powerful of all, which watched its prestigious capo murdered without the slightest reaction. Indeed, the “losers” did not even make an attempt to defend themselves. That is a disconcerting fact, if we compare it to the continuous and reciprocal reprisals in the first Greco–La Barbera war.

“When people talk about a Mafia war, I am not clear on the meaning of these words,” Mutolo declared. “There is a Mafia war when two or more Mafia families take up weapons and they know that they are fighting against another group of people. In Palermo, in contrast, in my opinion, according to the way I see things, there has been no such Mafia war; there was a betrayal.”¹³⁶

There had indeed been a “betrayal,” in the sense that the commission offensive carved straight into and through the families, highlighting the fragility of their internal cohesion. The cosca no longer represented the cell or base structure of the Mafia as an organization, subject as it was to the opposing and conflicting pressure of two forces: the centralization of military power in the commission and the centrifugal forces produced by the development of profiteering networks. Already Cavataio had created an occult and transverse alignment, that of the Corleonese: “When I say Corleonese,” explained Buscetta in the courtroom during the maxiprocesso, “I am not referring to a Corleonese as someone born in Corleone. I mean to refer to the Corleonese alignment.” “You mean the family?” asked the presiding magistrate. “No, the alignment,” reiterated the pentito.¹³⁷ Buscetta himself, aligned with Bontate and Inzerillo even though he belonged to the cosca of Calò allied with Riina, was an example of this redeployment of forces arrayed along the lines of the major trafficking routes. The two Bontate brothers, Stefano and Giovanni, were both narcotics traffickers, each keeping his activity concealed from the other. Certainly, that situation had some bearing on Giovanni’s decision to ally himself with the winning side, accepting (or encouraging?) his brother’s murder, in defiance of all codes of family loyalty. The rule that the family, as such, never manages business directly can lead only to the enrichment of some of the affiliated members, resulting in a sort of class war on the interior of the cosche. In this case, the Corleonese alignment could include most of the territorial and military structure of Palermo, rebelling against certain of its capos. That would explain the absence of a battle and the ease with which the leadership was changed.

The fact that not only were family capos killed without repercussions, but above all that members of the same families took the place of the capos means, without the possibility of the slightest doubt on the matter, that the replacements had come to a prior agreement on the elimination of the capos.¹³⁸

Here we can make the same argument made concerning the Leggio-Navarra war: money, external relations, both economic and political, Gambino, Sindona, the Salvos, and Lima were all on one side, and yet that side lost the war the minute the fighting entered a military phase. The Mafia is an expression of profiteering and notables, but it is not transformed into a club of notables and profiteers. In fact, when faced with a challenge, it reacts by accentuating its military nature, of which a man like Riina is the finest (worst) representative.

It should be stated at this point that this interpretation of events corresponds only in part with the version provided by Buscetta. The pentito, in fact, claimed that underlying everything that happened “there was no major motive. It was the Corleonese taking a strong position,”¹³⁹ a sort of power grab on the part of Riina and his partners. This analysis points to three types of contradiction: a clash between the business network and military organization; a clash between the individual families and the commission; and a clash between the “alignments,” which correspond neither to the blood nor Mafia families. This was the case of the two Bontate brothers or the two Badalamenti cousins, fighting on opposing sides.¹⁴⁰ The war was gradually transformed into a centralized operation that ultimately overwhelmed and swept away the independence of the families, concluding (though on this point Buscetta would differ) a process that Salvatore Greco “chicchiteddu” had already set into motion, though in a far more cautious manner. Clearly, however, the drug trade was the triggering factor, an obvious point that Buscetta admitted only generically as a decline in the “moral” tone of Cosa Nostra, “confusion” in its governing bodies. Not only did he deny, in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary, his own personal involvement in the narcotics traffic, but he also did his best to clear his friends of that involvement—not Inzerillo (that would have been impossible) but Stefano Bontate. Despite Buscetta’s protestations, of course, Stefano Bontate was an active narcotics trafficker, as was widely known and as other pentiti have confirmed. Buscetta even went so far as to claim that in the 1960s, the Sicilian Cosa Nostra had nothing to do with the narcotics business, and as we have seen, he provided alternative explanations (in reality, complementary explanations) for the outbreak of the first Mafia war. He was momentarily disconcerted only when Falcone replied that Di Pisa certainly sold heroin, since he had even tried to sell some to an agent of the Narcotics Bureau.¹⁴¹ Buscetta made the distinction between the Sicilian Cosa Nostra in America, which dealt heroin, and the American Cosa Nostra, which refused to engage in these activities. Buscetta was clearly contradicted by the involvement of the Gambinos in the Sicilians’ import-export business, but clearly he was interested in covering the North and South American areas,¹⁴² which were his territory at least as much as the Sicilian territory. Concerning that territory, he instead provided a harvest of clear and largely truthful information. It is significant that one of the few holes in his version involved the expulsion of Badalamenti in 1977, a crucial point in the Sicilian-American connection.

And yet, let us consider how matters concluded. Badalamenti on the run showed up in Brazil and went to see Buscetta. He asked Buscetta to come back to Palermo “to direct,” Buscetta explained, “in consideration of my recognized prestige, the fight against the Corleonese.”¹⁴³ Here, too, there is corroborating evidence: a number of tapped phone calls show that the Salvos were trying to contact him with this same objective.¹⁴⁴ Understandably, Buscetta considered the idea “crazy.” What could his personal “charisma” (and we still don’t understand the source of that charisma) do against the overwhelming military force of the commission, at a time when every day dozens of dead bodies were turning up in Palermo? The strange thing is that the “crazy” idea was proposed by extremely authoritative individuals and was taken so seriously by Buscetta’s enemies (who had mysteriously been informed of Badalamenti’s plan, but not of Buscetta’s firm refusal to cooperate) that they implemented a merciless preemptive reaction, killing two of his sons, his brother, and a number of other relatives. One is tempted to think that the “boss of two worlds” had been summoned to negotiate on behalf of someone else, located in one of these other worlds, and that the commission had decided to communicate with ferocious symbolism its refusal to accept any outside interference. We have the ambiguous testimony of Mutolo, according to whom, following the deaths of Bontate and Inzerillo, John Gambino came to Italy from the United States to begin a dialogue, “since the channels that had existed for communication had been recently interrupted,” and Inzerillo had been one of the links in the chain that “brought the largest volume of drugs to America.” On the other hand, in February 1984, Badalamenti phoned the United States from Rio de Janeiro reiterating (perhaps driven by desperation): “we have the license to import it [heroin]; no one else has the license.” Michele Greco on the other hand declared that he was ready to resume the trade on a different basis, but he asked that the Americans “strike a few ‘blows’ to fuck up Buscetta,” that they make an effort “to kill all those who had escaped to America.”¹⁴⁵ In Brazil, Buscetta was arrested, and, after being questioned by Falcone, he made up his mind to talk.

Corresponding to the years of the Mafia war was the beginning of a series of massacres of very prominent figures in Sicily. The string of murders began in September 1979 with Terranova, who had been elected to parliament on the Italian Communist Party ticket and had taken part in the anti-Mafia and had then gone back to being a magistrate. Next, among the magistrates, came Gaetano Costa (1980) and Rocco Chinnici (1983), to name only those killed in Palermo. There was no shortage of politicians among the victims, such as Piersanti Mattarella, the president of the Sicilian Region; Mattarella was not helped by the great number of good relations in Mafia circles that his father, Bernardo Mattarella, had built up. Another was Pio La Torre, the Communist regional secretary who was killed in 1982. There were also various policemen among the victims: the deputy questore Boris Giuliano, the Carabinieri officers Russo and Basile, and finally, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the Carabinieri general appointed prefect of Palermo in 1982. We are faced with a substantial dilemma in terms of interpretation here. With the exception of Notarbartolo, the Palermo Mafia had never produced cadaveri eccellenti (“excellent cadavers,” meaning “prominent victims”). At least, that was the case until 1971, when people of the time generally viewed the murder of the district attorney Pietro Scaglione as evidence that this magistrate had Mafia ties, in accordance with the interpretation that “they only kill one another.” Viewed from the context of the post–Dalla Chiesa years, however, the Scaglione murder instead appears to be the first of the many subsequent episodes of intimidation of the public institutions and the political system.

In a number of cases, the direction of the shots seems a good basis for the ensuing interpretation. Russo and Boris Giuliano were leading investigators, and in particular, Giuliano had close ties to the DEA. The same logical connections lead to Costa for the investigation against the Inzerillos and to Rocco Chinnici, who was killed in the brutal explosion of a car bomb while he was supervising the pool of magistrates working on the preliminary investigation against the “winning side” in the Mafia war. Here, an aspect emerges that is no less grounded in reality for having been the subject of great rhetorical emphasis and perhaps even exaggeration: the isolation that results in death. In the milieux of the police and the judiciary, the majority remain on the safe terrain of routine administration out of, variously, incompetence, laziness, fear, or complicity. If one reads through the interviews conducted by the parliamentary commission in the mid-1970s among the various professionals in the field, it is immediately clear which ones are fated to be killed: the few who give committed and intelligent replies. Among them was General Dalla Chiesa, a man of great prestige and great and widely acknowledged experience in the field, who was dispatched to Palermo to serve as a symbol¹⁴⁶ and who was immediately, and symbolically, assassinated. The old expedient, employed in other historical periods, of holding in reserve a high official who is well informed and is sent to Sicily when the situation demands it (let us name, for example, Sangiorgi or Mori), clearly no longer worked. It was easy to hit such a visible target, just as it was easy to hit Terranova, who even in the judicial circles of Bari was considered a “persecutor” of the unfortunate Leggio.¹⁴⁷ The same can be said of Costa, who had been obliged to sign, alone, in violation of standard procedure, the warrant for the arrests of the members of the Spatola-Inzerillo group, in order to overcome the hesitation and reluctance of his colleagues.

The repercussions were substantial. “For the policemen and the Carabinieri … the attack on Costa represented an unmistakable message. They now knew that the more seriously someone investigated the Mafia, the greater the danger to that person’s life.”¹⁴⁸ In order to have a full and convincing reaction, something quite different from the state that existed would have been required. The Italian state was profoundly tainted by the corruption of its political class, shackled by the lockstep of a committee-and assembly-driven governance, identifiable in the practice and theory of “weak government.” And that state was incapable, as was evident in the Dalla Chiesa case, of sending a clear and unmistakable signal to its component parts. Nonetheless, it was in the wake of the tragic assassination of Dalla Chiesa that a remarkable period of significant results ensued, a product of the work done by the anti-Mafia pool made up of the magistrates Falcone, Borsellino, Di Lello, and Guarnotta, under the leadership of Antonino Caponnetto. The team obtained the confessions of Buscetta and, in time, of other pentiti, and it completed the preliminary judicial investigation that led to the indictment of an astonishing 707 alleged affiliated members of Cosa Nostra. A manhunt ensued, designed to ensure that the cages designed to hold the defendants of what would be known as the Palermo maxiprocesso would not be empty during the trial.

Here police sources continue the story. The police had brilliantly dismantled the network of heroin refineries. And the police had provided the pool of magistrates with its report on “the 162” (that is, the 162 targets of the investigation), a map of the winning side. Already at the end of 1983, the Palermo mobile squad lost a man, the agent Calogero Zucchetto, who had identified in the citrus groves and the bars of Ciaculli the fugitive from justice Salvatore Montalto, in the territory of the Grecos and their allies the Prestifilippos. Apparently, the fact that the policeman had managed to infiltrate their ranks and that he had in some sense used them to lay the trap sealed his fate. In the Mafia circles, word spread that the dead officer’s superiors, Beppe Montana and Ninni Cassarà, had declared that Mario Prestifilippo and Pino Greco scarpazzedda (“little shoe”), the feared “superkiller” of the winning side, should be killed, not taken alive. It is conceivable that in the heat of the moment, out of rage and grief, they said such a thing. But the real question is through what mysterious channels could such a rumor have reached the enemy?¹⁴⁹ Meanwhile, Montana devoted himself to hunting the fugitives. He even made use of his vacation time to spy on the luxurious villas along the Sicilian coast from his powerboat. That is where he was killed, dressed in shorts and wooden clogs, in the summer of 1985. The entire mobile squad set out to catch the killers and arrested a certain Salvatore Marino. Marino died after being beaten in the questura (police administration). At Marino’s funeral, now that the cosca had suddenly discovered a profound attachment to civil rights, the head of the Italian Radical Party, Marco Pannella, led a protest. The Italian minister of the interior, Scalfaro, hurried down to Palermo, and with a celerity that had never been seen in other similar cases (first and foremost among them, the “accidental” death of the anarchist Pinelli), he dissolved the finest investigative team that had ever existed in Palermo, transferring the officers to the furthest corners of the Italian peninsula. The death of Marino proved to be a genuine boon for the Mafia. Cassarà only returned to his home at unpredictable intervals. He traveled everywhere in an armored car, with a bodyguard of two police officers. One of them, Roberto Antiochia, had cut short his vacation and hurried back to guard his superior’s back. It has never been determined how an army made up of at least fifteen killers succeeded in obtaining a tip that allowed them to attack the three, in the street outside the Cassarà residence, and finish them off in a hurricane of bullets. This was just twenty-four hours after Scalfaro’s decision. At this crucial moment, the men of the mobile squad were as isolated and alone as if they were the criminals, the subversives on whom the enormous power of a modern state was brought crashing down.

In this tragic story, the state rhetorically declared a great portion of the problems of a struggle, which was actually waged by only a few of its officials. These are people who work on their vacations, risk their lives to defend their friends, enter into polemics with their inept colleagues, encounter constant betrayal, but continue to do what they believe in, even though they know that “all investigators who are really doing their job wind up getting killed.”¹⁵⁰ It is precisely for this reason that they enter into a personal conflict with the mafiosi, which only facilitates the murderous reaction. Since all institutional involvement is unpredictable and contradictory, there would be no struggle if it were not for the esprit de corps, the cult of fallen victims, the point of honor of those who refuse to surrender. Then what happens is the sort of thing that happened at the funeral of Cassarà, with policemen and Carabinieri facing off, practically drawing their guns, with the coffin of the young Antiochia “removed by police officers from the official venue of the questura” and taken to the offices of the mobile squad, wrapped in the Italian flag.¹⁵¹ The second officer in the bodyguard escort (Natale Mondio) miraculously survived the attack, only to be killed in his turn in 1989. Scalfaro, Pannella, and the other easygoing exponents of the Italian political routine were incapable of understanding that there is an Italy “on the front line,” an Italy that fights and dies, I would venture to say, unremarked by one and all, even though the funeral was shown on live national television. This provoked a further sense of isolation, as well as conflicts that inevitably took on the appearance of factional splits. Let us remember the furious debates provoked by the activities of the pool, or the now proverbial veleni (toxins) of the hall of justice of Palermo and the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura (Superior Council of the Magistrature).¹⁵²

The same contradictions, but at a far higher level, appear in the debate that pitted against one another two alignments, which we identify as Giampaolo Pansa and Nando Dalla Chiesa on the one hand, and Leonardo Sciascia on the other. This was the period of the maxiprocesso, which began in February 1986. Pansa frequently described a Palermo that was insufficiently understood on the great occasion, where in fact there existed a “swamp” that stood ready to bog down and “swallow up the giant trial.”¹⁵³ Distinct from this Palermo was another Palermo, which was adopting the struggle against the Mafia as a lever for a general renewal. Corresponding to this shift was a movement within the political class that brought to the forefront of the Christian Democratic Party individuals such as Elda Pucci and Leoluca Orlando, an “Anti-Mafia” mayor supported by an atypical majority that wound up even including Communists. In opposition to them was the stance of Sciascia, suspicious, libertarian that he was, of a “culture of handcuffs.”¹⁵⁴ What could emerge from a political movement that claimed to have a say in a judicial matter? The danger is that the anti-Mafia front might represent a footstool that a few ambitious individuals, such as Orlando, intended to use in building their own careers. There would be an even greater danger if the ambitious ones were Falcone & Co. As these magistrates proceeded by deductive logic through the tools of pentiti and pentitismo (turncoats and state’s witnesses), they ran the risk of forgetting to ascertain carefully questions of individual guilt.

It is important to recall that the context for this polemic on the “professionals of the anti-Mafia” was provided by a review that Sciascia wrote of Duggan’s book on the Mori operation,¹⁵⁵ a book that, as we have said, lays out so exceedingly well the political instrumentalization that lay at the foundation of the fight against the Mafia in the Fascist period that along the way it lost any perception of what the Mafia was or could become. It is especially disconcerting that the author of Il giorno della civetta (English edition: The Day of the Owl) should have clearly failed to realize this. Sciascia may also have overlooked the fact that, leaving aside the case of the Fascists, ever since the time of the Destra storica (historic right wing) and the time of the socialist, pro-Rudinì bloc on the Notarbartolo case, the anti-Mafia front had always fought against the opposing front as one power against another, or even one faction against another, attempting to outflank its adversaries and take their place. (In each case, there were better factions and worse factions: the Palizzolos, the Lo Montes, the Cianciminos). Strangely and entirely unexpectedly, the review concluded with an attack against Paolo Borsellino and the pool of magistrates, who had nothing to do with political factions and ambitions. Here the general disputes came into play with which Italian socialists and radicals attacked the magistrature.¹⁵⁶ However, it is my impression that Sciascia foresaw that the maxiprocesso, or maxitrial, was going to transform itself into a liberty-suppressing operation for a reason that was much more specifically related to the problem under discussion here. He did not believe that Cosa Nostra was a subject that could be put on trial or even identified. This is no different from what he believed in 1973, when he claimed that a mafioso does not even know that he is one, because the Mafia is a behavior and not an organization.¹⁵⁷

The maxiprocesso aimed specifically at the power syndicate, in contrast with the focus of Falcone’s preliminary investigation against the Spatola-Inzerillo group. That investigation attacked the enterprise syndicate using, primarily, the tool of banking investigations to unveil the gigantic network of the drug-trafficking business. For the first time, Cosa Nostra as such became the target of a trial. Already in Catanzaro and Bari, at the end of the 1960s, it had been evident that the vox populi gathered in the transcripts of police interviews was no longer sufficient to win convictions of individuals. In 1974, Major Russo (yet another name from the long, sad list of men destined to die) expressed in a hearing of the anti-Mafia his frustration at “yet another demonstration of the power and intelligence of the Mafia,” demonstrated by the unsuccessful outcome of the trials: “When there are fiduciary reports that we have gathered, those fiduciary reports are given no weight; [telephone] tapping, by law, cannot be used in court; confessions are not believed. What are we then to do? Wait for a mafioso to declare that he is guilty of certain crimes? He will never do that.”¹⁵⁸

The existence of confessions, if Russo was referring to Leonardo Vitale, could have proven the opposite. Vitale, however, did not represent the stereotypical cliché of a big-time mafioso. In fact, he was dismissed as the quintessential “Valachi from the borgata,” as if the borgate that were treated so ironically weren’t the borgate of Palermo, and therefore the heart and breeding ground of the phenomenon of the Mafia. Nonetheless, paradoxically, Vitale was by and large believed, since the crimes he was reporting could be corroborated by objective evidence. The lack of interest, as usual, had to do with the topic of Mafia association, in part because of the juridical obstacles to bringing cases on that basis. Is it a crime to stick a needle in your finger or to burn a paper image of a saint? What is the importance of the fact that certain hierarchies issue permissions for certain other generic territorial influences?¹⁵⁹

By introducing the concept of associazione mafiosa (Mafia association), the La Torre law of 1982 marked a substantial step forward. It was subsequent events that showed the way. If in fact a clash inevitably indicates the existence of warring organizations, a series of crimes like those that took place in 1981–1982, no longer based on the logical sequence of an action followed by a reprisal as is typical of gang wars, points to the existence of a super-organization that judges and punishes. Here the contribution of the pentiti was crucial, no matter how much the members of the pool might insist, in an attempt to dampen public outcry, that “the pentiti, all things considered, play a fairly marginal role.”¹⁶⁰

The oversimplifications of the mass media and the limited understanding of the history of the Mafia did little to help anyone understand the phenomenon of pentitismo (turncoats and state’s witnesses). Buscetta and his ilk were not—as the media tended to claim—the first mafiosi to speak, the first to break the “ironbound” wall of omertà. Mafiosi have always talked to the police. They put the police on the trail of their enemies with anonymous letters, with confidential conversations, with back-scratching arrangements. In Terranova’s preliminary investigations the “informers” always knew everything, even of the existence of the commission. The ultimate case was that of Di Cristina, who, face-to-face with a Carabinieri officer, said everything that he could to damage the Corleonese.¹⁶¹ Indeed, while from the exterior the organization may seem perfectly compact, in part owing to the rule of omertà, on the interior there is the constant and perfectly opposite sensation of a normally impending betrayal. In fact, the mafiosi regularly accused one another of being spies, ’nfami or “infamous” (with a subtle assonance to the word “informer”—translator’s note) and tragediatore (or truth-teller). Thus, Giuseppe Luppino, speaking to the Carabinieri, emphasized that his enemies were the real spies; Vitale killed another affiliated member who was going around saying that his uncle was a police informer. The new development of the maxiprocesso was that the mafiosi were actually speaking in court. And so, we are not looking at a progressive barbarization of the law, as some claimed, but rather at the introduction into the mechanism of trial law a phenomenon that had previously been relegated to the domain of the personal, and necessarily ambiguous, relationship between mafioso and policeman. Therefore, the innovation was not absolute, and it could be found as early as trials from the Fascist era, in contrast with what Sciascia claimed. It was true, for instance, of Giuseppe Gassisi who accused Cascio-Ferro and associates.¹⁶²

In a maxiprocesso, identifying individual guilt is a daunting task. This was true both for the hundreds of foot soldiers of Cosa Nostra and for the members of the commission. They were accused of a great number of crimes both because of the avowed centralized nature of the organization itself and, in particular, on the basis of a rule stated by Buscetta. An “excellent” murder can only be committed with the authorization of the commission; a “normal” murder requires the permission of the family on whose territory the operation takes place. It is especially improbable that the obligation to tell the truth at all times among all members of Cosa Nostra actually exists and is regularly respected. If it were so, we would have to place the same reliance on events witnessed by a pentito in person and on information that he obtained in conversations with other affiliated members. In any case, Buscetta demonstrates that on a considerable series of occasions these laws are freely violated, prompting the unsurprising objection of one defense lawyer: “The rule that brooks no objections on page 14 of the deposition is subject to a vast number of exceptions in the other 400 pages.”¹⁶³ Sciascia drew the conclusion that the pentiti provided “a cross section that is reliable in its details, but unreliable taken as a whole. In the revelations, in short, there is an intrinsic and essential contradiction: it offers the statement that the Mafia is a unified whole, that like a cathedral culminates in a ‘cupola,’ and at the same time provides a depiction of great disorder, murderous internal disagreements, internal abuses of power and bullying.”¹⁶⁴

I will not explore the evidentiary importance of the issue.¹⁶⁵ For any overall interpretation of the phenomenon, Sciascia’s observation is misleading, however. The commission is not the cupola of a cathedral, nor is it the intelligent head of an octopus (in Italian, piovra, synonymous with Mafia—translator’s note). It is a coordinating organism endowed with concrete powers with which its members intend to endow it. The fact that the first group to violate the rules was the Riina-Greco “majority” only proves something that was already clear to everyone: Mafiosi are no better than other men who establish institutions and then attempt to turn them to their own advantage. The description of Contorno, the second pentito, and Bontate’s man of action, is simplistic and therefore absolutely perceptive: “The oath is like the Ten Commandments … don’t look at the women of others, always tell the truth,”¹⁶⁶ all precepts that no good Catholic actually respects. Calderone tells about the oath-taking of the thief who, when he heard the prohibition against theft, refused to go along. It was necessary to explain to him that it was only forbidden to steal from his Mafia brothers.¹⁶⁷ Buscetta’s description has the defect of “juridical” formalism for two reasons. First, explaining a system of rules to someone who does not know them means, by definition, rendering them absolute; the same problem occurs with any manual of law, because when a system of regulation no longer functions and tragically implodes, the most obvious solution is to attribute responsibility for the degeneration to the “ferocity” of one’s adversaries, by depicting the Mafia “of the old days” as a good organization that followed the rules. On the other hand, Buscetta knew perfectly well that might makes right and that the representative institutions in Cosa Nostra were a reflection of power relationships. Calderone emphasized the same thing in reference to the weakness of the regional commission in the face of the overwhelming power of the Palermo Mafia.

Why do people become pentiti? First, because they lose, and this is another way of carrying on the battle and pursuing vendetta. Buscetta denounced the crimes of his enemies and concealed the crimes of his friends as well as his own. In this sense, it is true that he preserved not only the sentire mafioso (Mafia mind-set) but also the agire mafioso (Mafia actions).¹⁶⁸ He held up a model of the old-school Mafia, abandoned by the Corleonese, and worked hard to convince others, and himself as well, that the true pentito was not really him but his enemies. In much the same manner, Valachi, according to the FBI agent who interrogated him, “did not consider himself at all a traitor to Cosa Nostra: in his view the true traitor was Vito Genovese.”¹⁶⁹ From the very beginning of his confession to Falcone, Buscetta intended to prove that he was credible by elevating his discourse to a higher plane: “I would like to point out, first of all, that I am not a spy, in the sense that what I am going to say is not dictated by the intention of winning for myself the favors of Justice. And I am not a ‘pentito,’ either, in the sense that my revelations are not dictated by tawdry considerations of self-interest.”¹⁷⁰

In this context, a dialogue, even a relationship of respect and trust, was established between the investigators and their superwitness. In the book/interview that was published a few months before his murder,¹⁷¹ Falcone spoke of Sicilianity as a shared symbolic and cultural code that allowed a judge and a mafioso to understand one another. If he was referring to anything more than an understanding of dialect or gestures, allow this author to express some doubt. The ability to create a personal contact is the product of a judge’s skill and commitment and his clear pursuit of an objective. The manifestation of a degree of empathy with the condition of a mafioso was meant as a way of offering a way out of Cosa Nostra to the increasingly numerous affiliated members living in fear of being crushed by that organization. On the very direct level of the relationship between judge and pentito, Falcone pursued the same reappropriation and reversal of the codes of folk culture that Mori attempted. It is necessary to demonstrate that the antivalues of the Mafia conceal, deep down, values that can be reutilized for purposes of civilization. On Buscetta’s part, this common ground could only be identified in the old concept of a Mafia d’ordine (orderkeeping Mafia), in opposition to a Mafia that is unrecognizable because it is terroristic, disfigured by greed and drug trafficking. Drugs in particular represent in and of themselves a factor that tends to subvert the social order. Because of this ideological objective, as well as other more practical considerations, the title of drug trafficker was attributed to the winning side and spared the losing side. However, if it were possible to make these distinctions, matters would actually stand the other way around.

The ideology of the Mafia d’ordine constitutes the terrain of communication between underworld and overworld. By this we mean not only the public institutions, but the vast array of clientele and sympathizers of the Mafia. Calogero Vizzini presented himself as someone who could “arrange” matters and forestall serious clashes. With these aims in mind, the word “Mafia” could still be applied, though it allowed for the technique of a rhetorical and polemical reversal that highlighted the inability of northerners truly to understand, as previously employed in the declarations by Pitrè, Morana, and Orlando, as well as in the previously cited epitaph of Ciccio Di Cristina, Giuseppe’s father, with its invocation of the “law of honor, defense of all rights.” This is not a holdover from the agrarian Mafia with its supposed patriarchal and protective characteristics. Leggio cites Pitrè in a learned fashion, conveying quite clearly the idea that his dimension, if not Mafia, could certainly be mafiosità (a coinage meaning, literally, “mafiosoness, mafiosity, mafianess”). Spatola, after working as an energetic entrepreneur in the field of money laundering, found time during his stay in prison to lay out in a few pages of notes his personal credo concerning the Mafia, and to wit—as he put it—on the kind of omertà that “helps the weak, and does not exploit them,” and that “always does good.”¹⁷²

The Mafia preserves an ideology of order-keeping because it continues to serve a function of order-keeping (as in the Mafia d’ordine). Every so often, the Mafia kills some purse snatcher or mugger. Indeed, Michele Greco, during one of the sessions of the maxiprocesso, expressed his own and his colleagues’ disavowal of the mysterious murder of the eleven-year-old son of the man who held the contract for the cleaning service of the courthouse. Apparently, this disavowal was followed by the exemplary punishment of the killers.¹⁷³ And so it is logical that the ideological breaking point turned on issues of this type. Certainly, Buscetta is one of the least likely figures in terms of identifying the old-school mafioso. He was divorced repeatedly and was therefore liable to change his women and his alliances too often. He was “vainglorious,” according to the unanimous opinion of the anti-Mafia and his former colleagues at the maxiprocesso, a new man, with no family tradition. Moreover, if the Mafia is not a form of behavior, then, despite what people seem to think, there is no such thing as a common human type that can be identified as a mafioso. There is a model, the model of the mafioso, who speaks only in maxims and parables, in the style of Michele Greco. If, however, we turn our attention away from the ideological depictions provided by both mafiosi and mafiologists and take a look at reality, we find all sorts of individuals: Buscetta, a great man and a disonorato (“dishonored one”), the various cunning or sadistic mafiosi, those who find flimsy excuses to get out of participating in a murder, like Antonino Calderone, and others who are miserable unless they are given a chance to kill someone. Giuseppe Sirchia discovered literature during his internal exile on the island of Linosa and carried on a correspondence with Leonardo Sciascia, claiming in his letters that he wanted only to live a peaceful life. Upon his return from exile, however, Sirchia was murdered, the victim of Bontate’s vendetta. And Bontate himself, the alleged gentleman described by Buscetta, was a man who could show up late for an appointment, apologizing and offering as a reason for the delay the fact that he had had to change a flat tire and stop to inchiaccare (strangle) a human being.¹⁷⁴ The only category that seems to stand out is that of the soldiers, extremely loyal to their capi—for instance, Caruso, the inept killer of Di Cristina, or the ferocious and nimble Contorno, who spoke at a rapid pace, the same pace at which he skillfully avoided ambushes. During one of those ambushes, on at least one occasion, Contorno found himself fighting a friend. “He was my longtime friend, when he came up to me, he had the face of a dead man, I understood completely: Finivu! [I’m done for] I thought.”¹⁷⁵

Another mafioso who acted out of a spirit of belonging was Leonardo Vitale. He could explain what the old Mafia was and justifiably employ its ideology, but he was insane, and perhaps in his insanity he was able to see more clearly: he smeared himself with excrement to purge himself of sin, he burned the clothing that he had purchased with the fee earned for committing murder, and he showed leniency toward and understanding of his uncle, but not for their shared heritage, which he considered the source of all his problems:

And in the end, when Vitale left the insane asylum, he emerged from the logic of the Mafia, and it was in this peaceful condition that the killers found him and mercilessly shot him down.

Evidently, while all mafiosi are not the same, neither are all the pentiti; nor does a break with the Mafia need to be based on insanity in order to be complete. Women, for instance, achieve that break with the Mafia early and more completely. Not all of them, of course. And it may be that some of them play the alleged role of vestal virgins of vendetta; however, at the time when it becomes necessary to change sides, they have displayed a mental flexibility that is greater than that shown by their men. The Mafia trials are filled with female characters, such as the wife of the campiere Comaianni, killed by Leggio, who found the courage to accuse him after lengthy hesitation. She encountered a prosecuting attorney, according to whom “we should not pay attention to a little woman who first said one thing and later said another.”¹⁷⁷ Serafina Battaglia lost her man, a mafioso, and was attempting to spare her son the same fate by turning to the boss Torretta who promised her protection and instead allowed the Rimi from Alcamo to kill him. At that point, the woman denounced her son’s killers and in the courtroom of the Catanzaro trial faced Torretta and openly showed him her defiance and contempt: “And you like to call yourself men of honor…. You are a man worth half a lira.”¹⁷⁸ Then there is the story of Felicia Bartolotto, the wife of Luigi Impastato of Cinisi, a mafioso dating back many generations, whose son, Peppino, was a militant in Democrazia proletaria (Proletarian Democracy), who openly railed in public meetings and over local radio broadcasts against such “excellent” individuals as Don Gaetano Badalamenti. Here the Mafia and the anti-Mafia came face to face in the same family, in a crescendo of hatred, threats, and ambiguous promises of protection. The father was killed, and the son too was killed. The Mafia had a prank in store for the son, Peppino: he was killed in the context of a frame-up, a staged dynamite attack, to be blamed on the young subversive. In honor of Peppino’s memory, Felicia learned to fight as best she was able, giving unfiltered interviews to journalists from the mainland:

Over the course of the horrifying year of 1992, the Mafia managed to land four murderous blows, assassinating two of its most estimable enemies, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, but also two of its most authoritative links to official power, Salvo Lima and Ignazio Salvo. Following these attacks, there was a state reaction that resulted in the deployment of the Italian army in Sicily and the arrest of numerous Mafia bosses, who had been in hiding as long as anyone could remember. Among them was Totò Riina himself—a pupil of Leggio, the leader of the Corleonese, the successor to Michele Greco as the head of the commission. Immediately thereafter, Giulio Andreotti was indicted. Andreotti could safely be called the most eminent politician in republican Italy (three times prime minister, and cabinet-level minister about a dozen times), and he was charged with collaboration with the Mafia, and specifically with a continual and frequent exchange of favors that originated with the adherence to the Andreotti current (a political group loyal to Andreotti within the now defunct Christian Democratic Party)—dating back to the end of the 1960s—of the most significant group in the Sicilian Christian Democratic Party. That group had once been followers of Fanfani but had broken away from Fanfani and from Gioia, under the leadership of none other than Salvo Lima. Andreotti, a former Italian prime minister, was also alleged to have ordered Cosa Nostra to murder the Roman journalist Mino Pecorelli. Even more clamorously, Andreotti was alleged to have been involved in the Dalla Chiesa murder. According to the Palermo investigating magistrates, the motives for the Dalla Chiesa murder lay not in the hostility of the Mafia but rather in a political plot originating out of the kidnapping and assassination of Aldo Moro. This outcome, astonishing and unpredictable, went hand in hand with the debacle of the parties in the governing co alition in the face of the raging cyclone of Tangentopoli (the Bribesville investigation). This state of affairs led many Italians to wonder just what relations existed between the Mafia and other powers that either openly or clandestinely governed Italy over the past thirty years. And in the mid-1990s for the first time an answer to that question emerged from the interior of Cosa Nostra, a harvest of information that seemed to confirm all the worst hypotheses that Italian public opinion had formulated concerning the relationship between the Mafia and politics.

In this case, the sources are numerous—in contrast with the situation in the 1980s. The sources were a substantial group of mid-and high-ranking mafiosi willing to collaborate with the law. It was an avalanche, a landslide, a general crisis that undermined the organization, triggered by an increasingly determined repression from the forces of order and by the simultaneous centralizing vise grip implemented by the Corleonese. Lacking, however, was the testimony of the leaders who interacted directly with major politicians; we hear nothing from Riina, nor from Badalamenti, much less from Bontate, of course. Then Buscetta finally admitted his age-old relationship with Lima, as well as his participation in the alleged attempt to free Moro; however, he too based his testimony on information from Badalamenti or Bontate.

It was therefore the Cosa Nostra grapevine, at all levels, that identified Lima’s and Andreotti’s ties with Bontate, first, and Riina later. The communis opinio, or common opinion, among mafiosi in and of itself represents a significant element, considering that in the interior of that secret organization, but extending over numerous continents and involved in diverse yet linked activities, there must necessarily be an instrument of communication that is acceptable and commonly accepted. That must be true even in contexts where it is not believed that the obligation always to tell the truth among affiliated members is actually respected in practice. In that context, the Mafia capo will explain to his colleagues and soldiers political events and their relations with politicians in accordance with codes that are prevalent among the mafiosi themselves, and he will give an interpretation that is suitable and accessible to himself and his fellow mafiosi of everything that happens in the “overworld,” in contrast with the “underworld” of the Mafia. Among the things that he will think and say are that Judge Corrado Carnevale is willing and will therefore always succeed in “fixing” trials, for money or for friendship; that Salvo Lima is willing to, and can therefore be relied upon to intervene in issues of judicial policy, out of loyalty and gratitude to those who procure votes for him; and that if Lima were to be out of the picture, then “Zio” Giulio (“Uncle” Giulio Andreotti), for the same reasons, would step into the breach and take Lima’s place. In exchange, a special effort will be made to obtain the objects that he is “crazy” about, such as, for instance, “a particular painting.”¹⁸⁰ On the other side of the fence, Falcone was viewed as someone who “wants to be powerful,” willing to do anything to avoid seeing the maxiprocesso collapse. As is evident in particular from the last instance mentioned, the portrayals of events might well not be false, but they are in any case twisted to fit a simplified schema. There was an assumption that in the overworld, just as in the world of Cosa Nostra, the rules that have been solemnly set forth will be respected only as long as they are useful. There is a certainty that, in comparison with personal relationships and, in the final analysis, the considerations of force, those rules will have no value or importance.

As the tide turned in the 1970s and 1980s, repression began to hit Cosa Nostra, which attempted to persuade its Christian Democratic partner to hinder the machinery of justice. The most obvious point of leverage ran through the control of votes. In his alleged meeting with Andreotti, Bontate is said to have exclaimed:

The threat was put into effect during the consulship of Riina, during the elections of 1987, when the order went out to vote for the garantismo (civil rights concerns) of the socialists and the radicals, and against the unreliability of the Christian Democrats. In the Palermo prison of the Ucciardone, the bloc of votes went as directed, and, apparently, the prisoners self-imposed a tax on behalf of the radicals. In certain lower-class quarters as well, the result was what the Mafia called for, but on the city, provincial, and regional levels the success of the socialists corresponded with the figures for the national vote. Indeed, the vote for the socialists went hand in hand with the success of the Christian Democratic Party, likewise in keeping with the general trend and in defiance of the Cosa Nostra boycott.

One is therefore forced to wonder where, on this occasion, all the votes went. And we are referring not only to the votes of the entire Mezzogiorno, claimed boastfully by Bontate, but the 180,000 votes that in 1988, in Palermo alone, according to the then judge Ayala, were supposedly controlled by the Mafia; or even the fifty or sixty thousand votes that since 1994—after state repression weakened the organization—and even today, according to the progressive members of parliament, have been controlled by Cosa Nostra.¹⁸² The inductive method whereby these estimates were made, by simply multiplying the presumed number of members of the cosche by a figure of seventy or eighty votes that were under the influence of each individual mafioso, appears, first and foremost, crude. It is reasonable to suppose that the single most important one of the 2,700 affiliated members (in 1988) or the 780 affiliated members (as of this writing) might influence eighty votes. Or even more; it is fair even to suppose that the second or third is able to do the same, but it is improbable to say the least that the hundredth-ranked member or the thousandth-ranked member, or the 2,700^th ranked affiliated member would be able to find, in the shared milieu in which he and all the others were fishing, in the clientelistic network of the Mafia cosca, an extra eighty votes lying around, available to be influenced, and not yet snapped up by his various superiors. To go any further, what is required is open propaganda or publicity, of other means, or a political machine—in other words, solutions that are different from the workings of the Mafia. Moreover, as Falcone noted at the time, criticizing his friend and colleague Ayala, “all this presupposes a unity of intent, let us call it a political supervision of Cosa Nostra that in reality does not exist. There are no meetings and votes of the board of directors of Cosa Nostra that communicate on various occasions what party or what candidate to vote for.”¹⁸³ Let us suppose that in an exceptional circumstance, such as in 1987, this does happen; then it may still be possible that the political instrument is not sufficiently flexible to change horses in midstream and that the capi-bastone neither wish nor are able to manage such a change. Finally, there is no assurance that new and improvised alliances are able to function better than the old ones. For instance, consider the case of Claudio Martelli, elected to parliament that year in Palermo on a garantista (civil rights protection) platform; as Italy’s minister of justice, Martelli would give Giovanni Falcone, Cosa Nostra’s most fearsome and powerful enemy, a very influential Roman office.¹⁸⁴

This approach seems to open up to discussion the idea of an exchange between Mafia and politics revolving around the electoral process. In order to understand what the Mafia gives to politics, it would first be necessary to examine more closely the way in which each of them interacts with “dirty” business, covering transactions that take place on a territorial basis (such as public works) and financial transactions. Mafiosi certainly do play the role of ward heelers and capi-elettori (electoral lieutenants—translator’s note), they help to guide electoral blocs, and they take part in the implementation of the workings of the political machine. It is questionable, however, whether in a large city or even on a regional scale—the case of individual towns and villages is another matter, as are corrupt neighborhoods or quarters—they could represent the executive function, the motor, the ideational, and decision-making circuits. If we look as well to the past, the Mafia’s intervention in the crucial junctures of Sicilian political life comes to relatively little. At a certain point, the Mafia focused on Sicilian separatism but was incapable of procuring major electoral successes on its behalf. It should also be considered that the MIS, although it never had the mass following that some have described, did enjoy a considerable popular vote and through no help from the cosche. Later, the mafiosi supported the Italian right, until the convulsive aftermath of Operation Milazzo. Only when the Christian Democratic Party was already triumphant did they flow into it, and even then—as Captain Malausa would have said—out of “personal interest,” inaugurating the long phase in which the Mafia and the Christian Democratic Party’s destinies were intertwined.

Cosa Nostra is not a political party, and it does not gather votes on its own behalf. That kicks the topic back into the court of politics, opinions, and material and symbolic transactions. For instance, in the success of Forza Italia in Palermo in the political elections of 1994, just a few months before the overwhelming majority victory that ushered Leoluca Orlando in as mayor (certainly under an opposing political trend), the Mafia mobilization followed, just as in the good old days of the Christian Democratic Party, the establishment of an alliance in and of itself capable of producing myths, ideas, projects, tools, and men for the governance of the public interest. The fact that Forza Italia focused part of its electoral campaigns in 1994 and 1996 on a specious platform of defending civil rights (an attack on the legislation rewarding state’s witnesses, on the measures for detention and security in the prisons, and on the very concept of Mafia affiliation and association) proves once again that the most important element is the political momentum of a proposal. In a certain sense we might say that many of the areas subject, according to the Palermo investigators, to the illegal, subterranean, and ineffective negotiations between Cosa Nostra and Andreotti over the course of the 1980s are now part of the open, official, and legal program of Forza Italia (Silvio Berlusconi’s political party, founded in 1993), targeting the interests of the Italian people and therefore of the Mafia lobbies as well.

Cosa Nostra therefore seemed incapable of properly managing its own electoral influence independently of the input of a political party, and to a far greater degree was incapable of guiding political developments. That explains why in the last fifteen or twenty years the Mafia’s obligatory path was unfailingly that of terrorism, as doubtful in its efficacy as it was murderous in its outcomes, and the Mafia chose that path in its attempts both to hinder its adversaries and to influence its allies, both current and potential. Piersanti Mattarella, for instance, is supposed to have been killed because, even though he came out of a family tradition that left him open to Mafia influence, at a certain point he made a clear and decisive alliance against the Mafia. But it was above all the inability of political power to keep firm control over the judiciary power at the time of the definitive confirmation of the outcome of the maxiprocesso that triggered the Mafia’s ferocious reprisal. Ignazio Salvo and Salvo Lima—the alleged great middlemen between the Mafia and Andreotti—were thus punished for their inability to ensure the protections that Riina and his partners expected. In the end, in 1993, the Corleonese Brusca and Bagarella planned to strike a blow against that cornuto (“cuckold”) Andreotti, either personally or against one of his children, because he had “turned his back” on his friends.¹⁸⁵ Both episodes may have gone differently from the way they were described by the pentiti and hypothesized by the investigating magistrature of Palermo, but in any case, this is the logic. I do not believe, on the other hand, that the “losers” of the Bontate-Inzerillo group truly made use of an opposing methodology—a “traditionalist” method, as the indictment of Andreotti puts it,¹⁸⁶ and as the indictment of the maxiprocesso put it earlier—to the one employed by the Corleonese. Indeed, the logic that initially pushed Cosa Nostra toward terrorism was common to the various groups within Cosa Nostra, rendered similar by their competition to control politics and politicians, similar to the competition to control business and smuggling, even before the second Mafia war, or the takeover of the commission. Buscetta, for instance, attributed to Inzerillo the murder of the magistrate Gaetano Costa. When he realized that Rosario Nicoletti (the Sicilian regional secretary for the Christian Democratic Party, who committed suicide in 1984) was negotiating with Riina, Stefano Bontate in person said to Mannoia: “If that crasto [cuckold or, less frequently, eunuch; a sexual insult] doesn’t start behaving right, we are going to have to kill him.”¹⁸⁷

During the course of the meeting that followed the Mattarella killing, again according to the pentito Mannoia, Bontate is said to have “warned the Honorable Andreotti against implementing any special measures or laws, because if that were to happen, there would be very grave consequences.”¹⁸⁸ We are not interested in establishing whether or not the meeting ever actually took place. What interests us here is the fact that the strategic line of Cosa Nostra, as it is set forth by the chieftains to the membership, calls for a transition from a relationship (either partnership or intimidation) with administrators for the management of business, contracts, and the like, to a step up, that is, to the level of attempting to influence, with promises and threats, the course of active legislation and, as it were, the larger political sphere. Only this further transition is capable of explaining the corresponding terrorist escalation. There are even clearer examples. Falcone, working in collaboration with Claudio Martelli, launched legislative measures against the Mafia, as well as a regular monitoring of the verdicts handed down by the Court of Cassation, Italy’s Supreme Court. It would appear that that effort managed to save the maxiprocesso from potential derailing. It was on this higher level of battle that Falcone’s adversary played the bloody card of murder. That card, however, did not obtain the Mafia’s hoped-for result. For that matter, what concrete result could ever have been achieved by the attacks on the Uffizi in Florence and on Via Fauro (1993), which were so similar to the attacks seen in the realm of political terrorism?

We see here, in extremely concise form, an interpretation of the entire question of the relationship between the major Italian leader and Cosa Nostra. Dalla Chiesa distinguished three different levels. First was the level of Andreotti himself, who carried on a relationship with the Mafia that was mediated, instrumental, and limited to the sphere of electoral issues; next came the level of the andreottiani, “the most thoroughly polluted political family on the island,”¹⁹⁰ the grandi elettori (Lima; the president of the Sicilian Region, D’Acquisto; the mayor of Palermo, Martellucci) in whom the major leader superficially placed his trust; third came the level of the electorate from which the grandi elettori drew their votes, the Mafia families as distinguished, specifically, from the political families. Here we are not very distant from the statement today of the former Communist senator Emanuele Macaluso: “Andreotti does not produce politics. De Gasperi, Fanfani, and Moro actually took on the complex Sicilian political situation. Andreotti didn’t. He used what he found or what was offered to him. In 1968 Lima arrived. And Lima was the one who engaged in politics.”¹⁹¹ And so, on the one hand, if Dalla Chiesa and Macaluso identified a multilinked network that tied Andreotti to the Mafia, a network they analyzed in the light of political responsibility rather than penal liability, on the other hand Andreotti himself in all his statements maintained a position of total closure, denying among other things that he had ever summoned Dalla Chiesa for a meeting, and even stating that “there was no mention of any of the topics that are noted on the page in his diary.”¹⁹² And he insisted on that point even though the conversation remains in writing, one might even say, carved, into the page of the diary of the man who was fated to die. On that page of Dalla Chiesa’s diary we read a description of Andreotti as, urged by Dalla Chiesa to express an opinion on the misdeeds of his own faithful followers, he suddenly turned the topic to Sindona and told the story of a certain Inzerillo, “who died in America, [and] arrived in Italy in a coffin and with a ten-dollar bill in his mouth.” Dalla Chiesa noted with some irritation that this point as well “offered further evidence” of Andreotti’s superficiality, and that unfortunately in these matters “folklore is still the predominant element.”¹⁹³ And yet here Andreotti—who now denies that this part of the conversation ever took place—seems to point out a trail, a code of interpretation, in a manner that is finally significant.

The Inzerillo in question was the brother of Salvatore, the great middleman of the trans-Atlantic drug traffic whose murder—accompanied by Bontate’s murder—marked the beginning of the offensive of the Corleonese. It would appear that the great Carabiniere investigator knew relatively little about all this, like nearly everyone in April 1981, while Andreotti, if only for the flash of an instant, appears to have been privy to secret matters. For that matter, the issue of conflicts among mafiosi concerning the great prize at stake, the narcotics traffic, immediately led to the figure of Michele Sindona. As we know, Sindona was supported by Andreotti and by the andreottiani even after he had been indicted by the Italian justice system, and even after the murder of the lawyer Ambrosoli at Sindona’s orders. Sindona came out of age-old ties with the Gambinos of New York, and as we have noted, he had other ties with Rosario Spatola. Sindona therefore was perfectly integrated into the Sicilian American connection that was so much the focus of the second Mafia war. According to the pentito Mannoia, Sindona represented for the Bontate-Inzerillo group the financial channel that the head of the P2 Masonic lodge Licio Gelli (and with him, perhaps, Roberto Calvi, president of the Banco Ambrosiano) constituted for the Corleonese. Mutolo instead stated more generically that both of them had invested in Sindona’s banks. Now that Sindona’s business affairs had turned for the worse, they were demanding “the restitution of their money.”¹⁹⁴

The bloody conflict that pitted the two wings of the militant Mafia in Palermo against each other did not necessarily entail a corresponding opposition between the financial channels utilized by those two wings in Milan or in New York, nor, for that matter, between their political sponsors. It is instead possible that an explosion of violence on this scale and with this degree of obviousness—let us consider the murder of Ambrosoli, the attempt on the life of the vice president of the Banco Ambrosiano, the mysterious murder of Roberto Calvi, and even the “suicide” of Sindona—may have rendered problematic the relations between these business-Mafia groups and their political sponsors. Based on these elements, we might attempt to reconstruct, on an entirely hypothetical basis, a consistent version as offered by Andreotti. When Andreotti suddenly changed the subject with Dalla Chiesa, he might have been trying to tell him that there were two wings of the Mafia, the Sicilian American wing tied to the drug trade and the political wing; that the really dangerous group was the Sicilian American wing; and that it was his responsibility to protect the interests of the second, political wing through Lima and the Salvos. This would explain how the measures taken against the narcotics traffickers, about which Andreotti still boasts today, should have been accompanied and are still accompanied by the defense of Lima. This would also explain Andreotti’s cryptic references to the vendetta of the drug traffickers and/or the Americans—which took the form of a terror attack against Lima and Salvo, and a judicial attack against Andreotti himself—as well as his polemic against Buscetta, who knew much more about the American side than he was ever willing to reveal.

Macaluso, setting forth in a certain sense Andreotti’s thesis, stated that drugs had created a wedge between the political class and the Mafia, terrorizing the political class and rendering the Mafia even more audacious and bold. This is a plausible, but not ultimately convincing, explanation, both in specific and in general terms. Speaking specifically, in the Mafia war and in the terrorist escalation we see not so much a conflict between narcotics traffickers and politicians as an attempt on the part of the commission to seize control of both drug trafficking and political ties. Speaking in more general terms, the Mafia is never reduced to an association of drug traffickers, or abstract financiers whose assets do their work purely in the virtual world of computers.¹⁹⁵ In recent years, the Mafia has enriched itself through drug dealing, but it has also utilized the increasingly profitable opportunities available in the Italian version of the welfare state; it has strengthened itself through the proliferation of illegal behavior at all levels; and most important, from its contact with a corrupt political machine, it has derived the idea—and it matters little whether that idea had any foundation in reality—that it could act as a protagonist on the stage of the battle for power.

The attempt to put all the blame on narcotics is also an indication of the need that some members of the political class feel to find a way of saving their souls, in bad faith, as I believe is the case with Andreotti, or in good faith, as is the case with Macaluso.¹⁹⁶ The history of relations between the Mafia and politics is not the true history of Italy, as those who published the indictment of Andreotti have claimed. Nor is it even the true history of Sicily. But among the other histories, edifying or less edifying, of civilization or barbarianism, it is one of the histories of Italy, and not the least important one. Part of that history comes out of narcotics, another portion comes out of the depths of Sicilian history and reality, and yet another comes from the political system. Of that history and of the role that he played in it, Andreotti chooses to say nothing, to such a degree that the lack of verisimilitude of his defense constitutes the greatest single piece of evidence of some degree of guilt on his part. He might have said that he supported Sindona in order to safeguard relations between Italy and the Vatican; that he knew the Salvos for electoral reasons; that he allowed Lima to carry on his regional politics and policies without understanding much of what he was doing; that he had talked about certain topics with Dalla Chiesa without assigning much importance to those conversations. But, if he wishes to be at all credible, he would have to admit that he failed to realize to what degree Lima, the Salvos, and Nicoletti were, at the very least, compromised and subject to pressure and extortion; that he failed to understand how dangerous and murky the influences that were growing in their entourage, which was directly or indirectly his own entourage, had come to be for them, and above all, for our common homeland, Italy. Andreotti must necessarily be aware of the role attributed to the Salvos as early as the preliminary investigation of the maxiprocesso; nor could he fail to be aware that the murder of Ignazio Salvo, along with the murder of Lima, and the massacres of Capaci and Via d’Amelio, constituted the most audacious and overt of all of Cosa Nostra’s offensives. Today, after all that has happened, Andreotti still considers the Salvos to be individuals of mere local importance. And that is the most unpersuasive and astonishing aspect of the entire story, even more than the alleged kiss that he exchanged with Riina.

The Andreotti case, and more in general the history of the Mafia over the past twenty years, are essential contexts in which to study a number of the interpretive questions from which we initially set out. The Mafia is an organization that links criminals together in an age-old, well-consolidated structure, rendered more compact by the ritual of the oath, capable of surviving, renewing itself, and growing ever stronger over the course of more than a century. From its very beginning, that organization has determined a series of specific internal hierarchies, independent of the more general hierarchies of the economy and of politics. Nevertheless, for the entire first period of its history, the Mafia remained a lesser power in relation to the power of the large landowners and the major notables, a power that could continue to function only if connected to those greater powers through a series of clientelistic networks. Frank Coppola, newly returned to Italy after many years of living in America, immediately declared that he was a “devoted follower” of Vittorio Emanuele Orlando and worked in favor of Orlando’s political interests. In turn, Orlando could excite the Mafia’s hopes and safeguard its interests, but only alongside the many other interests that Orlando was encouraging and safeguarding, if and when that was in his own best interest. Buscetta mirrored, with a certain degree of nostalgia, the prudent conception of the relationship with politics that “traditional” mafiosi preserved. He claimed that even a corrupt parliamentarian had to be allowed to vote in favor of a law against the Mafia, because any reasonable person will understand that the politician “must preserve that public image even if his actions redounded to the harm of Cosa Nostra.”¹⁹⁷ In other words, politicians had to respect the rules of politics, just as mafiosi respect the rules of the Mafia, because the only way for matters to function was to leave them in their natural order. Moreover, I would say, the traditional Mafia—both in the liberal era and in the early period of the Italian republic—had absolutely no notion that it might determine the content of legislation; it tended to leave issues of that sort not merely formally, but substantially as well, in the hands of major notables, or perhaps to the ability of some local lobby or some association of property owners to negotiate. Things, however, changed over time, and much more rapidly outside of Cosa Nostra than on its interior. As we have seen, Cosa Nostra showed signs of surprising stability over the long term. Major landowners vanished as a political and social power with such speed that one is tempted to think that it was Fascism that preserved them in an artificially prolonged existence for twenty years. The notables of Sicily made way for the party machine, as a result of the proportional electoral system, the hegemony of the Christian Democratic Party, and also the disintegration of the “traditional” rural society. This did not mean that the political system became impermeable to the mafiosi; if anything, they enjoyed a greater ability to exert pressure on the realm of politics and were better able to redistribute the swelling stream of resources that the political system was responsible for allocating, as well as having a greater ability to paralyze the administrative, police, and judicial apparatus of the Italian state, let alone the townships and the Sicilian regional governments, where it would be naïve at best to hypothesize any distinction between politics and administration.

At a time in which society in general was no longer rigidly structured by social standing and authority, the Mafia began to think that there was no lid capable of covering what was boiling in its cauldron. In the end, the organization attempted to transport the network within itself, to subordinate to itself all outside contacts, whether with profiteer or politician. Let us remember the answer that Buscetta himself offered when he was asked about Sindona’s secrets: “The secrets of Sindona were light as a feather compared with the secrets of Bontate”; perhaps because the latter secrets were weighed down with lead, Sciascia commented.¹⁹⁸ Here is a history in which the hierarchies are inverted: Bontate has weightier secrets than does Sindona, Riina is worth more than Bontate, and the sheepherder Leggio eliminates the notable Navarra.

In this sense, the intellectual battle, above and beyond the judicial battle, that Giovanni Falcone waged was especially important, as was the attempt to extract Cosa Nostra from the network of its external political and business relations, so as to be able to examine the Mafia itself. This was a problem of judicial and repressive strategy that coincided to a certain degree with the problem facing us scholars, inasmuch as that which cannot be distinguished cannot be fought. In particular, Falcone refused to consider the relations between politics and the Mafia according to a hierarchic scheme:

Similarly, the mafiosi who boast a particularly rich trove of outside relations, both political and business-linked, do not necessarily enjoy a corresponding degree of power within the organization. Nowadays, when pentiti are describing with a wealth of detail the highly placed contacts of Bontate in the “overworld,” we still should not forget how easily the boss of S. Maria di Gesù was eliminated. When we analyze the role of the Salvos and of Lima in the system of political and Mafia power, we should also keep in mind that Ignazio Salvo and Salvo Lima were gunned down no differently than any other poor resident of the borgata.

“Above the organization’s top levels,” Falcone insisted, “there are no ‘third levels’ of any kind, influencing or deciding the direction of Cosa Nostra.” Knowing full well that the world of the Mafia involved no marionettes or marionettists, no superagencies controlling the unsuspecting leaders of the cupola, he judged the idea of the grande vecchio (“powerful old man”), “who pulled the strings of the Mafia from the very top of the political sphere,” nothing more than a sign of great “intellectual crudity.”²⁰⁰ This thesis was later confirmed, not only by the courts but also by the murderous reaction of the Mafia as an organization. Already, it had been the cause of a crescendo of attacks from the “Anti-Mafia” front itself—and in particular from Leoluca Orlando—against Falcone, who was accused of having “sidelined” the most delicate and dangerous trials, the political trials, and of having refrained from attacking the Third Level, the much touted Supercupola. In this connection, we are familiar with Buscetta’s position on the subject. From the time of his first confessions, the pentito made it clear that he had very important information on this topic and that he was not yet willing to reveal it because Italy was not yet ready to accept it because the ensuing skepticism would have overturned the entire judicial procedure then under way. We may assume that first of all the pool decided to complete the maxiprocesso, which would culminate in the essential demonstration of the existence of Cosa Nostra as a centralized and organized entity, a proposition to which few indeed (including experts on the Mafia) might have been willing to agree only a short time before. Under the leadership of Giancarlo Caselli, the Turinese magistrate who took over the supervision of the investigations into Cosa Nostra after the murder of Falcone, the investigating magistrature of Palermo delved intensively into the connection between Mafia and politics, but inevitably focusing on the idea of Cosa Nostra’s “sovereignty” that had been so crucial to Falcone.

The political and Mafia-linked murders that still remain particularly obscure are difficult to interpret in this context. The problem has been nicely stated by Nicola Tranfaglia, who wondered whether the intertwining links between Cosa Nostra, terrorist groups, and occult lobbies might express “a coherent political project,” or whether they amount to nothing more than “tactical alliances, however frequent.”²⁰¹ We might view the murder of Dalla Chiesa in light of this second hypothesis if it were proved to be linked to the Moro case. There are observers who have attributed to Cosa Nostra a substantial role in an international front, perhaps originally inspired by an anti-Communist conviction. Mattarella and La Torre, on the other hand, were representatives of the left wing of the Christian Democratic Party and the Communist Party precisely in the historic phase in which these two groups were trying out a conflict-ridden accord; La Torre had been a leader in the struggle against the installation of the cruise missiles in Comiso; both Terranova and Costa were among the few high-ranking “red” magistrates. This is how in 1982 the Catholic-inspired magazine Segno, which represented (and still represents) a point of reference in the struggle against the Mafia, commented on those facts: “At a time when democratic institutions—the legal power—are undergoing the growing influence of the left and the various popular forces, the extralegal centers of power, accepting murder and massacres as political weapons, step into the field to have their say on the outcome and results of the political crisis of our country.”²⁰²

Among these right-wing antidemocratic efforts was a plan to take part in the Borghese coup presented in 1970 to Leggio by Salvatore Greco “chicchiteddu,” accompanied by Buscetta, which might have emerged from Italian and South American milieux (P2?) and for that reason was rejected. After the unhappy experience with Mori (who enacted a brutal, undemocratic, and largely successful campaign of suppression of the Mafia under Mussolini—translator’s note), the mafiosi had little fondness for Fascism. Then there was the story of Sindona, who in 1979 is believed to have attempted to organize a separatist revolt, of which, however, there was not the slightest indication in the press or in public opinion: evidently, this was a public mutiny so secret that not even the necessary protagonists of the uprising, the Sicilians, knew anything about it.

Since the Grand Plot remains an inscrutable, unknowable black box, we should point out that in both cases in question, the initiative came from the losing group in the second Mafia war. For those mafiosi, the political relations constituted a substantial portion of their total capital. That means that they were the wealthiest in both this area and in terms of narco dollars. That doesn’t necessarily mean that they really believed that they would be able to successfully implement these improbable projects. Rather, we can theorize that by taking them seriously, they would be likely to enhance their own prestige as mediators, both in the eyes of their outside contacts, with whom they were thus able to establish more intimate and profitable contacts, and in the estimation of their counterparts inside Cosa Nostra. This is true, for instance, of Bontate, who attempted to prop up his waning power inside the commission by offering his services to the Christian Democratic Party as a middleman for a negotiated solution to the Moro case. For the opposite reason, that is, to devalue Bontate’s prestige, his adversaries inside Cosa Nostra, Riina and Calò, did their best to hinder that project.²⁰³ If this is a plausible interpretation, then it is important to note that an event that was (in our view) absolutely fundamental to Italy’s recent history was instead treated by the mafiosi in an instrumental manner, in terms solely of their own internal conflicts. We thus can see clearly how, in their hallucinatory universe, everything is considered solely as a subordinate issue, seen through the filter of the Cose (or “things”) of Cosa Nostra (which of course means “Our Thing,” just as res publica, the Latin root of “republic,” means “public thing,” and a “thing” or “ting” is the name for governing assemblies in Germanic and Scandinavian cultures—translator’s note). This is a logic that all sectarian organizations seem to share. For instance, it is true of the terrorist organizations with which the Mafia established a relationship of interaction at the end of the 1970s.²⁰⁴ I would describe that relationship as primarily cultural rather than material. The mafiosi actually met the terrorists in prison, but they measured themselves against the actions of the terrorists. The Brigate rosse (Red Brigades), Prima linea (First Line), and other comparable organizations were actively competing to gain the support and allegiance of the various abettors and adherents. This rivalry took the form of a race to see who could strike the highest blow, hit the most “excellent” target. That was a crucial element in the killing of Aldo Moro. Cosa Nostra dubbed the assassination of Dalla Chiesa “Operation Carlo Alberto.” In the prisons, likewise, the Catanians celebrated and gained in credibility and respect in the eyes of those who believed that the killers of Santapaola had “carried out the assassination, with perfect operational efficiency.”²⁰⁵ When Salvo Lima was assassinated, a mafioso convict said, “Accuminciaru finalmente” (“At last they’ve begun”),²⁰⁶ reassured by the fact that his fellow mafiosi were finally beginning to carry out actions outside the prison walls as well. The Mafia does not publish newspapers or broadcast news reports, and therefore many of the actions that the Mafia carries out seem to have been conceived at least in part as messages designed to be amplified by the prison grapevine, by the rumor mill of the Palermo borgate, and in the conversation of drug traffickers in hotels throughout the world. It was true, for instance, of Badalamenti and Buscetta, who watched the evening news reports on television in far-off Rio de Janeiro and carefully decoded the message of the spectacular murder.²⁰⁷ Buscetta himself offered an interpretation of the murder of Costa, seeing it as having been ordered by Inzerillo less as a way to halt the investigation than as a way “merely to display the extent of his power,”²⁰⁸ that is, to offset the propaganda effect on the attentive audience of Cosa Nostra of the attacks carried out by the Corleonese.

The element of internal conflict between the factions is still overwhelmingly predominant. I believe that following the defeat of the MIS the Mafia had, and continues to have, only slight interest in large-scale politics, in which it is only marginally involved, and that without great enthusiasm. Nonetheless, those affiliated with Cosa Nostra are naturally interested in what happens in the day-to-day management of public affairs, and therefore in politics as machine far more than in politics as project. We have seen that in 1987 Riina was unable to administer a punishment to the Christian Democratic Party by draining away votes, perhaps in part hindered by resistance within the organization. This was true, for example, of Antonio Madonia, who continued to vote for the candidates of the Christian Democratic Party, in part to safeguard well-established relationships of “friendship.”²⁰⁹ More in general, the Madonias, although they continued to form part of the Corleonese alliance, still kept secret even from their allies their “close relations with the ‘people who matter’ in political, administrative, and economic milieux,”²¹⁰ because, evidently, they were reluctant to expose themselves to the risk that others might attempt to use those channels. Let’s remember that Pippo Calderone attempted to keep his relationship with Costanzo secret from his fellow mafiosi, just as Calò attempted to force his way into the exclusive relationship that tied Riina (before he became the top-ranking boss) to Ciancimino. Franco Restivo, a major notable in the Christian Democratic Party, was a compare (roughly, “godfather”) of Antonino Mineo, the Mafia capo of Bagheria, and obviously Restivo afforded him special treatment. For the La Barberas, and later for Stefano Bontate, the relationship with Lima was important. As a result, the ties with major businessmen and major politicians, in brief, with the establishment, do not appear to be subordinate to the rank held within the organization by a given mafioso. On the contrary, those who possess such relations necessarily find themselves in strategic positions as mediators with the outside world. “When a man of honor—even a high-ranking one, such as a capo-mandamento—needed to get in touch with a political leader, he had to pass through these channels.”²¹¹

We might say, though strictly limited to the context of this specific point, that the fact that a politician might actually be affiliated with Cosa Nostra, or merely in collusion, does not constitute a crucial difference: the channel of communication remains private, and the organization is not identified with the channels utilized by its members. The undeniable processes of centralization, then, do nothing to change the twofold character of the phenomenon of the Mafia, which we have identified as a feature stretching back to the very origins. Relationships with politicians and with profiteers constitute, along the borders and even in the interior of the organization, an array of fluid networks through which a series of traditional intertwinings are reproduced, linking underworld and overworld. These relationships represent for an individual Mafia capo his personal and private “capital,” or assets, comparable to the contacts utilized in narcotics trafficking, and it may even be that this capo considers it more to his advantage to be an integral part of a political machine than to pursue the supposed general interests of the organization.

The question then arises whether Cosa Nostra is capable of taking over (or even aspiring to do so) the direct management of political power. The parasitic conception of the relationship with politics necessarily and inevitably constitutes a daunting obstacle in this sense. In this context, we should also take into consideration the issue of the instruments with which the affiliates and even the capos of the Mafia interpret reality. They remain convinced that, as an old proverb frequently cited in nineteenth-century studies puts it: “If you have money and friends, you can ass-fuck the law” (“Chi ha denari ed amicizia va in culo alla giustizia”); now they add to that belief their faith in the effects of violent reprisals against friends who fail to keep their promises. That, however, is how things look when viewed through a keyhole, a visual angle that does little to allow one to perceive and appreciate the complexity of the mechanisms that regulate the operation of official power, the relationships among the various political groups and those linking the political system, the administration, and the magistrature, as well as the role played by public opinion. It is exceedingly difficult to condition this vast field of forces with a pair of tools as elementary as the carrot of exchanging favors and the stick of terroristic intimidation. Totò Riina believed that he could maintain Andreotti’s support by threatening him or by reminding him of his obligations with a reassuring and saccharine demonstration of the famous kiss during the second summit meeting. And if that notorious meeting really did take place, it represented less Andreotti’s recognition of the sovereignty of his counterpart,²¹² and more another demonstration of his own cynicism, of his ability to manipulate those who, looking at things from the underworld, preserved a naïve faith in the rectitude and loyalty of the powerful in the overworld.

Lastly, there is the question of the effectiveness of the terroristic actions that derived from the processes of centralization within Cosa Nostra. Here we may reasonably introduce the concept of unintended consequences. Just as Sicilian involvement in the world heroin trade tended to decline from the mid-1980s (as a result of the Mafia wars?), likewise it may be (let us hope) that as a result of the “militarist” approach there will be a corresponding decline in the influence of Cosa Nostra in Italian politics. The challenge and the response reinforced one another in a reciprocal dynamic, and surely part of the responsibility for the fact that for the past fifteen years there has been an anti-Mafia, and that there has been an increasingly lively and powerful resistance to the Mafia on the part of a number of public institutions²¹³ and from public opinion itself, can be laid to Mafia terrorism itself. At the end of 1996, as I write this chapter, most of the upper echelons and the leaders of the “shadowy partnership” have been found guilty and sentenced to prison. Still, how belatedly, and at what a high price in blood and civilization, and with what (permanent?) deformations of the country’s public spirit has Italy finally attained this commendable result!

The heavy cost paid by the nation is a clear demonstration of how unacceptable the cynicism and nonchalance of Italy’s political leadership have been over the past thirty years, both in political and ethical terms. “I had read one day,” wrote Andreotti in an apparently random point in his self-justifying book, “that a major Mafia figure had been arrested, a certain Michele Greco, better known as il Papa—the Pope.”²¹⁴ And so, Andreotti, then undergoing trial for association with the Mafia, was scarcely able to remember having read in a newspaper the name of the head of the commission during the years of his greatest power. It is here that the two opposing points of view, that of the underworld and that of the overworld, finally intersect and clash. Riina believed that he could control the political world with favors and threats; Andreotti felt that a major politician, and the large world of high-level politics, could brush against such a profoundly vulgar world and people without being substantially besmirched by it, that the Mafia itself was actually not really all that deserving of his attention.

For that matter, a great statesman like Vittorio Emanuele Orlando saw matters in the same light. And the political class of the liberal era of Italian politics and the first quarter century of the Italian republic viewed things similarly, as did the state officials, the notables, and the entrepreneurs of the beautiful island of Sicily. The only problem is that at a certain point this mechanism based on the laudable idea of tolerance began to run out of control, and the Sicilian Mafia increasingly tainted and polluted the consciences and the institutions of democracy, and even the basic possibility of there being such a thing as a democracy. The cases of Calvi and, most importantly, Sindona both demonstrate the degree to which, beginning from the watershed period that we have dated at the end of the 1970s, one of the profiteering Mafia networks grew, and that network came very close to flooding into the heart and nerve center of Italian economic, as well as political, power. (Sindona was a man who came out of nowhere and suddenly and rapidly rose to the highest levels of the financial world, international, Italian, and American. He went on to found “one of the largest, indeed perhaps the largest of all of Europe’s financial companies,” and ultimately attempted to take control of the fundamental institutions of Italian capitalism²¹⁵ through his ties to the Andreotti group, the P2, and the American and Sicilian Cosa Nostra.) From this point of view, no comparison can legitimately be made between the crimes with which Andreotti has been charged and the responsibility of a Crispi or a Giolitti, to which comparison is often, and irresponsibly, made. The exact same distinction can be made with regard to the unprecedented danger that the Mafia has posed over the past thirty years of Italian history.

Cosa Nostra linked itself in an absolutely new manner to high-level politics and business, that is, to the major period (which we hope and trust is over) of the welfare state and “weak” government, disintegrating among ad hoc institutions, laws crafted ad personam (for individual interests), lobbies, factions, clientelism and favoritism, local medical boards and regional governments, bribes for everyone, rampant profiteering, and concealed powers. In order to interpret such a system, which is the context within which the Mafia has metastasized, we would need a history of Italy, as a history of Sicily would be inadequate. However, to attempt to resolve the entire question of the Mafia in this context would amount to committing the same error as the anthropologists who believed that it was entirely a product of southern Italian society. Likewise, only someone who believes that the entire story took place between Italy’s political power centers, Palazzo Chigi and Montecitorio, can believe that the Mafia is political. The organization that today is known as Cosa Nostra, under various variant names, in different times and under different regimes, has been active for a very long time; it is old, but it is not afraid of modernity. Let us only hope that this formidable historical continuity can soon be interrupted.