Corleone Agricultural College is a curious building, hardly what one would expect of a state educational institution. Brand new, standing three storeys high on a residential road, it has underground parking, lifts, integral air-conditioning and heating, and a neat paved garden. At the front it is overloaded with showy metalwork, with balconies, decorative railings, an imposing gate, and coach lamps. Inside, the desks, blackboards, and computers sit incongruously among black and red marble floors, heavy hardwood doors, and stuccoed walls. In fact the Corleone Istituto Professionale di Stato per l’Agricoltura did not begin life as a college but as exactly what it seems to be: a luxury villa built by a local self-made man, one Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina.
Nobody has ever asked Riina quite what he intended to do with a home he never got to occupy. But it is likely that this is where he planned to gather his extended family around him when his long career came to an end. This was the retirement home Riina constructed on the assumption that he could arrange to have the verdict of the maxi-trial reversed and return home to enjoy the fruits of his labours. So although it is easy to poke fun at the gaudy taste of the Riina villa, it is difficult not to be impressed by the confidence that it displays, by Riina’s sheer inability to comprehend that the state might actually have any right to object to a fortune made from decades of murder.
Thankfully, Riina’s confidence has turned out to be misplaced. By the end of 1995, around £125 million, mostly in property, had been confiscated from the boss of bosses. This extraordinary figure almost certainly does not represent the full extent of ‘Shorty’ Riina’s fortune. His Corleone villa was confiscated in 1992 and then, in 1997, given to the town following a civil suit against the family mounted by a brave young antimafia mayor. The people of Corleone knew what they were doing when they made the Riina villa into something so ordinary—a public, educational institution. Cosa Nostra treats all public wealth, no matter how essential—water sources, roads, hospitals, schools—as potential plunder. As a result, for generations it has denied to all the Sicilian families who do not fall within its orbit these banal but crucial paths to progress. And when the state makes good, ordinary things from mafia property in this way, it does not just hurt men of honour financially; it strikes at the heart of their justification for what they do. With treachery and death all around them, they can at least hold on to the belief that they are doing it all for their loved ones.
Since Buscetta turned state’s evidence back in 1984, Riina had been promising his men that if intimidation and corruption failed to stop the judicial opposition to Cosa Nostra in Palermo, then his political contacts would stop it in Rome. The problem he faced in making good these promises was that Cosa Nostra’s relationship with the DC was in a slowly accelerating tailspin. The outrages carried out in the 1980s led directly to antimafia legislation that Cosa Nostra badly wanted to reverse. Riina now needed to influence headline government policy and not just win piecemeal favours behind the scenes. But the more ‘eminent corpses’ there were, the more reluctant politicians were to expose themselves in the mafia’s defence.
The problem came to a head when Falcone went to Rome in 1991. Mafiosi interpreted his move to the capital as a sign that he would soon be safely sucked into the quagmire of Italian politics, discredited, and rendered powerless. Falcone’s achievements in the Ministry of Justice were a startling reversal of these expectations. It was a hair-raising spectacle for mafiosi who were used to regarding the governing parties as their passive partners in misrule: here was Cosa Nostra’s mortal enemy shaping the crime policies of a Socialist Minister of Justice under a Christian Democrat Prime Minister. Among many other changes, 1991 saw new laws to prevent money laundering, allow the use of phone taps on mafiosi, and give the government powers to dissolve town councils infiltrated by organized crime.
Worrying though these developments were for Cosa Nostra, the organization’s grass roots were led to believe that ‘verdict slayer’ Judge Carnevale was the ultimate guarantee that things would turn out right in the end. So the Court of Cassation’s verdict in January 1992 was a shocking blow to Riina’s plans for his family’s future and to his prestige within Cosa Nostra. Here was the final proof that the most powerful boss in the mafia’s history had made the organization into a political orphan.
Riina’s very survival was now at stake. As investigating magistrate Guido Lo Forte explains, ‘In the mafia you can’t hand in your resignation. You simply get eliminated. It was a case [for Riina and his men] either of accepting their own elimination or of trying to reaffirm their own power in the eyes of the whole membership.’ Riina chose to reaffirm his power through a stunning escalation of Cosa Nostra’s conflict with the Italian state. The mafia needed to influence the political process more than ever, but had only one means of influence left: violence. The state was to be bombed into backing down over the things that mattered most to Riina and his cohorts: the maxi-trial verdict, and the 1982 law that allowed the authorities to confiscate mafia wealth. ‘We must make war in order to be able to mould the peace,’ Riina was heard to say. The Commission’s death sentences against Falcone and Borsellino—long outstanding—were reactivated within days of the Court of Cassation’s pronouncement.
These years, 1992 and 1993—the aftermath of the Court of Cassation’s historic decision—were the most dramatic in the whole history of the Sicilian mafia. Riina’s confrontation with the state grew into a full-scale terrorist bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. This unprecedented military action was to end in a defeat so serious as to bring the organization’s very survival into doubt for the first time since Mussolini. Both Cosa Nostra and Italy are still living with the consequences of Riina’s failed retirement plans.
‘Vito, my Vito. My angel. They’ve taken you away. I’ll never be able to kiss you again. I’ll never be able to hold you again. I’ll never be able to caress you again. You are mine alone.’
At the state funeral of the victims of the Capaci bomb, it was Vito Schifani’s tiny, pale widow Rosaria who gave a harrowing voice to her own desolation and to a city’s rage. Her husband, with fellow officers Antonio Montinaro and Rocco Di Cillo, was in the car that took the full force of the blast that killed Judge Falcone. Standing at the lectern and looking out into the congregation, before the cameras of several national television stations, she cried out, ‘To the men of the mafia—who are here in this church too—I want to say something. Become Christians again. I ask you, for Palermo, a city you’ve turned into a city of blood.’ Before the Cardinal had even finished saying mass, the families and colleagues of the dead policemen moved to prevent any dignitaries getting near the five coffins—‘They are our dead, not theirs,’ one was heard to say. Rosaria Schifani, still weeping uncontrollably, let a bottle of water she had been given slip through her fingers and smash on the floor; without seeming to notice, she implored the congregation once more: ‘Men of the mafia, I will forgive you, but you will have to get down on your knees.’ Her words were repeated again and again on news bulletins.
The moral pressure on Italy’s politicians to prove that they were not complicit in the murder of Giovanni Falcone at Capaci was irresistible. In the days following the funeral, some of the people who had endured the dense waves of rain to crowd the streets outside the church of San Domenico, who had looked into the weeping eyes of unknown fellow citizens and seen the same desperate resolve reflected back, began doing their bit to try to turn grief into change. Across the centre of the city, slogans sprayed on bedsheets were hung out of windows: ‘Falcone lives.’ ‘Palermo wants justice.’ ‘Get the mafia out of government.’ ‘Stop killing this city.’ A ‘Sheets Committee’ became one of many new grass-roots antimafia organizations. Rosaria Schifani’s words—‘Mafiosi: on your knees’—were printed on T-shirts worn during a human chain that ran through the city a month after the attack. A tree outside Falcone’s house—by a sad irony he lived in a street named after Emanuele Notarbartolo—was turned into a shrine adorned in flowers, photographs, and messages.
Inconceivably, on 19 July 1992, Cosa Nostra showed that the state could not even protect the man who had stepped into Falcone’s shoes, Paolo Borsellino. The explosion that killed him and five members of his escort could be heard halfway across the city. Three days after Borsellino died, Rita Atria, a teenage girl from a mafia family who had started to give evidence to the magistrate after her father and brother were murdered, jumped to her death from the balcony of her safe house in Rome. Her suicide note said simply that there was no one left to protect her. It was a summer in which, as one campaigner wrote, Palermo seemed like a bloody, badly written tragedy: ‘We want to get out of the theatre, but we’re locked in.’
Despite their stunned dismay, many Palermitani still found the will to protest. Among the countless unforgettable images created by the many sit-ins and processions at the time was of a little boy who took part in a demonstration that marched from the centre of the city to the site of Borsellino’s death; he wore a tiny sandwich board with ‘I want to be worthy of Falcone’ written on the front, and ‘I want to be worthy of Borsellino’ on the back. For a few extraordinary months, the virtuous minority made Palermo its own and convinced a large part of the population of the urgency of the antimafia cause.
The situation in Sicily was a national emergency. Seven thousand troops were sent to the island to relieve the police of more mundane duties so that they could participate in a gigantic manhunt for Riina and his teams of killers. The law enforcement officials who had not managed to protect the two magistrates were removed. The head of the Palermo prosecutors’ office, a man who had repeated run-ins with Falcone, asked to be transferred. In yet another act of exceptional personal courage, a magistrate from the northern city of Turin, Gian Carlo Caselli, volunteered to take up the vacant Palermo job and inject new drive into the fight against Cosa Nostra. Dozens of arrests followed. A law to protect pentiti was passed, and they were subsequently given the chance to change their identities. The DIA and the DNA, the new national antimafia institutions designed by Falcone, were brought on stream. The police were given the power to infiltrate the mafia, using simulated drug deals or money laundering operations. Most importantly of all, new, tougher prison conditions were stipulated for mafiosi so that they could not continue to run their empires from behind bars as had been the pattern in the past.
But, as so often in the history of Cosa Nostra, these were paradoxical successes. The political system that seemed finally to have found the resolve to address the mafia problem in 1992–3 was actually liquefying in the heat of a raging corruption scandal. It began in February 1992 when a Socialist politician in Milan was caught as he tried to flush 30 million lire in bribe money down the toilet. ‘Operation Clean Hands’, as it was called, rapidly spread to other parties and other cities as investigators revealed an ingrained system of spoils-taking that linked business, administration, and politics. The ‘party-ocracy’ was being overthrown. By the end of 1993, one third of all members of the Italian parliament were under investigation for corruption, and both of the major governing parties—the DC and the Socialists—had ceased to exist. Disbelieving and often amused, the Italian people watched a revolution unfold on their television sets.
The climate inside parts of Cosa Nostra, if nothing like revolutionary, was also undergoing a profound change. Sensing what lay ahead after the Court of Cassation’s final verdict on the maxi-trial, men of honour had begun handing themselves in to the police even before the Capaci outrage. Nothing like this had ever happened before. When Riina showed no signs of a switch in tactics after the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, many more mafiosi began to turn state’s evidence. Gaspare Mutolo had been initiated by Riina himself in 1973 and became a major heroin dealer. It was he who, in October 1992, explained to magistrates that Cosa Nostra had completely underestimated the damage that Falcone could do to them from his position inside the Ministry of Justice, and that it was the Court of Cassation’s verdict in January that had triggered the murders of Falcone and Borsellino. Magistrates now had a very clear picture of what was driving Riina’s thinking.
It was information from a mafioso on the run from Riina’s vengeance that led directly to the capture of the boss of bosses himself in January 1993. Identifying Riina was the primary problem: the last photo that anyone had of him dated from 1969. But captured man of honour Balduccio Di Maggio picked out Riina’s gardener, his son, and his wife in a video of a villa that the carabinieri had under observation because it was frequented by a member of the Commission. Early the following morning a snatch squad was ready when Riina was driven from the villa in an inconspicuous family saloon. Four men pounced on him and his driver at a traffic light at Piazza Einstein; he offered no resistance, and showed clear signs of fear that only dissipated when he was told that he was a prisoner of the carabinieri and not of his mafia enemies.
At last Italy could put a face to the dread name of Totò Riina. One magazine put his blunt, baggy-eyed features on its front cover under the headline ‘The Devil’. ‘Shorty’ himself feigned disbelief at this satanic public image. When brought face to face with Tommaso Buscetta in court, Riina refused to speak to his accuser because of his marital infidelities: ‘In my town, Corleone, we live in a morally correct way.’ (Four days earlier his moral mentor and godfather, Luciano Leggio, had died of a heart attack in a Sardinian prison.)
But more disconcerting even than the Riina freak show were the questions that his capture left unanswered. He had been a fugitive from justice since the late 1960s. In that time he had married, had children, obtained medical care for his diabetes, sent his kids to school, and exercised iron control over a vast criminal organization. The villa where Riina spent the last five years of his life in hiding was even in Uditore—the same mafiosissima borgata that had been the base for Antonino Giammona’s cosca back in the 1870s. How was it possible for Riina to have avoided capture for so long? A worrying shadow was cast over the operation that finally netted him by the fact that his Palermo villa was then left unguarded long enough for a team of mafiosi to clean it out—removing cash, documents, accounts, his wife’s fur coats. The magistrates who finally arrived to inspect the property found that it had even been redecorated. An inquiry is currently trying to establish how this was allowed to happen.
After Riina’s arrest, the leadership of Cosa Nostra passed into the hands of his brother-in-law and long-term associate, Leoluca Bagarella. After nearly twenty years of domination by ‘Shorty’ Riina, Cosa Nostra did not respond well to Bagarella’s control. Even Corleonese diehards like Giovanni ‘lo scannacristiani’ Brusca, by now a capomandamento in his own right, found the change unsettling:
After Riina’s arrest, there wasn’t the same calm as before … All the various bosses started to manage their own mandamenti as they saw fit, for their own sake. There wasn’t the same homogeneity as before when there had been, well, you could call him the father of the family, everybody’s capo.
What did not change was the core Corleonese group’s thoroughgoing support for what has been termed the massacre strategy. ‘Tractor’ Provenzano was heard to say at one meeting, ‘Everything that Uncle Totò [Riina] did goes ahead; we’re not stopping.’ A month after Riina’s arrest, invoking the rule in Cosa Nostra that stipulates that mafiosi have the freedom to organize any off-island activities they like, irrespective of the will of the rest of the organization, Bagarella, Brusca, and other senior bosses from Palermo and Trapani met to air various proposals for how to continue the war on the state. According to Brusca’s account, it was rapidly agreed to mount an attack on Maurizio Costanzo, a prominent chat-show host who had expressed a wish that a mafioso in hospital with a fake illness would subsequently contract a real tumour. They discussed placing a bomb under the Leaning Tower of Pisa, poisoning children’s snacks in supermarkets, and littering the beaches at Rimini with HIV-infected syringes. In each case there was to be a warning given in time for deaths to be avoided. The point was to create public alarm and bring the state to the negotiating table.
In the end it was decided not to bother with the niceties of these ‘dummy’ attacks. On 14 May 1993 in Rome, a bomb went off as TV presenter Maurizio Costanzo’s car was approaching; by extraordinary good fortune, he was unhurt. On 27 May, a car bomb exploded in via dei Georgofili in the heart of Florence; five passers-by were killed and forty wounded. There were five more bomb victims in via Palestro in Milan on 27 July. On 31 October, a bomb was planted in via dei Gladiatori near the Olympic Stadium in Rome; it was timed to go off at the end of the Lazio versus Udinese football match, with the purpose of killing as many carabinieri as possible. It failed to detonate.
It was during that same year of 1993 that it became clear that Cosa Nostra, in directly confronting the state, had also made an enemy of the Church. In November 1982, in the middle of the mattanza, John Paul II had visited Sicily and not once mentioned the word ‘mafia’. In May 1993, he made his first visit to the island since the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino. On the eve of his three-day tour, the Vatican paper—the Osservatore Romano—invited Borsellino’s widow Agnese to write a letter. She recalled her husband’s ‘simple and profound’ Christianity, and appealed for prayers so that the Church ‘would not compromise the genuine teachings of Christ with any kind of collusion’. A group of Catholic intellectuals followed up with a letter to the Giornale di Sicilia that was even less equivocal, denouncing ‘the scandalous links between representatives of the Catholic Church and exponents of mafia power’.
Two days later the pontiff chose the dramatic setting of Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples, where priceless ancient Greek monuments are set in a landscape ruined by mafia-backed illegal building, to throw away his prepared sermon and launch into a thundering extemporized condemnation of ‘mafia culture … a culture of death, profoundly inhuman, anti-evangelical’. Visibly moved, he called on mafiosi to convert: ‘One day the judgement of God will come!’ Cosa Nostra’s response came on 27 July when bombs exploded at the churches of San Giovanni in Laterano and San Giorgio in Rome; there were no casualties. On 15 September, in the eastern Palermo suburb of Brancaccio, Father Pino Puglisi, the finest representative of the embattled tradition of local antimafia priests, was murdered at his front door. One of his killers would later confess that Father Puglisi had smiled at them just before being shot: ‘I was expecting this,’ he said.
In its wild reaction to the Court of Cassation’s verdict of January 1992, Cosa Nostra was clearly no longer concerned to perpetuate any doubts over whether it existed or not. Yet it was also cutting away at its own life-support system, at its political ties, at the pseudo-religion that many of its members professed, at the very notion that it could not be separated from Sicilian culture. As a direct consequence, the organization haemorrhaged defectors in hundreds; in 1996 the number of pentiti peaked at 424. Caught between the abominable regime of the Corleonesi within Cosa Nostra and a life in isolation under the new, tougher prison conditions, even senior men of honour, members of the core group of Corleonesi, began to collaborate with justice.
One example must serve for many: Salvatore Cancemi was a capomandamento who was on the Commission when it approved the decision to murder Falcone and Borsellino. He had been a lookout for the team that placed and detonated the Capaci bomb. Something finally began to change in him the day he heard Riina explaining his plans to deal with the snowballing number of defectors: ‘The problem is these pentiti, because if it wasn’t for them not even the whole world united could touch us. That’s why we’ve got to kill them, and their relatives to the twentieth remove, starting with children of six and over.’ But it was not until the following summer, in the middle of the bombing campaign of 1993, that Cancemi walked up to the gate of a carabinieri barracks and turned himself in. He subsequently also surrendered his fortune, which he estimates at around £33 million. When he was reunited with Tommaso Buscetta at a trial (the two were in the same Family and had become friends while in prison in the 1970s), he confessed that he had personally carried out Riina’s order to strangle two of Buscetta’s sons. The history-making mafia defector embraced Cancemi and said, ‘You could not refuse the order. I forgive you because I know what it means to be in Cosa Nostra.’
Armed with the evidence of these new pentiti, investigators rapidly ascertained who had carried out the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations, the bomb attacks on the mainland, the murder of Father Puglisi, and many other crimes. The Corleonesi were still sowing terror within Cosa Nostra to discourage any opposition to their massacre strategy. But one by one they fell to the ultimate weapon in a mafioso’s armoury: betrayal to the state. Leoluca Bagarella was captured in June 1995 in an apartment in the centre of Palermo, the second boss of bosses to be arrested in less than three years. And then, in May the following year, four months after little Giuseppe Di Matteo was strangled and dissolved in acid on his orders, the carabinieri burst into the house near Agrigento where Giovanni ‘lo scannacristiani’ Brusca was hiding with his family. By the time of Brusca’s arrest, the massacre strategy had been abandoned and the Sicilian mafia was in the throes of the worst crisis in its history. Cosa Nostra was at last on the verge of defeat.
Through its savage response to the Court of Cassation’s final verdict on the maxi-trial, Cosa Nostra endangered its very future. But for several years in the late 1990s, the Italian public was more absorbed by the mafia’s past. For the dramas of 1992–3 threatened to expose the sinister legacy of collusion between politicians and mafiosi. It looked to some as if the dark truth about Italian history was finally to emerge under the strip lights of the Palermo bunker courthouse. There, in September 1995, the man who had been the country’s most powerful politician for a quarter of a century went on trial for working for the mafia: DC magus Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy. The press habitually referred to it as the trial of the century.
Andreotti’s drama began on 12 March 1992 with the murder of Salvo Lima. It is highly significant that the very first person to fall in Riina’s war on the Italian state, weeks before Falcone and Borsellino were killed, was not a magistrate or a member of the police force but a Christian Democrat politician. Lima—the former DC young Turk who had presided over the sack of Palermo and who used to get Tommaso Buscetta his opera tickets—was the victim of an execution of terrifying efficiency. He was being driven into Palermo from his home in Mondello, Palermo’s seaside satellite town, when the windscreen and one of the tyres of his car were shot out by the pillion passenger on a passing motorbike. Lima’s last words were, ‘They’re coming back! Madonna santa! They’re coming back!’ He ran from the car but only covered thirty metres before the killer, now on foot, caught up with him, shot him in the back, and then administered a coup de grâce to the nape of his neck.
A pentito later explained why he thought the Sicilian DC’s éminence grise had been murdered.
Lima gave a guarantee that everything would be sorted out in Rome … The reasons for the murder of Salvo Lima were because he did not keep the promises made in Palermo, or someone did not allow him to keep them. For a while Salvo Lima, at least according to what I heard, was actually urging people not to worry.
The ‘everything’ that Lima assured would be sorted out in Rome was the maxi-trial verdict. Quite whether he had explicitly made such rash promises is not known for certain. The important thing is that Riina had led his people to believe that guarantees had been given. Many of the pentiti who emerged during the terror campaign of 1992–3 would confirm the extent of Lima’s involvement with the mafia. Since the days of the La Barbera brothers in the late 1950s, he had been the intermediary between the Sicilian underworld and local and national government. Thus, in the minds of the men of honour, Lima’s funeral was also the funeral of the pact between Cosa Nostra and the DC that was formed back in the days of Don Calò Vizzini and the bandit Salvatore Giuliano.
On the day after Lima was buried, there was a cartoon on the front page of Italy’s biggest-selling daily, La Repubblica, that implied that the sensational murder had a clear political meaning. It showed a dark-suited man spreadeagled, face down, with a rasp file protruding from the pronounced hump on his back. Any doubt about the man’s identity was removed by the unmistakable, low-slung, bat-like ear drawn in just above his left shoulder: it was Giulio Andreotti, who was just coming to the end of what was to be his last term as Prime Minister. The pun in the cartoon was scarcely more difficult to decode than the figure of Andreotti. The Italian word for a file is ‘una lima’. The suggestion was that the real target of the attack on Salvo Lima was Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. In other words, the cartoon was saying, Cosa Nostra had stabbed a friend in the back.
When he died, Lima was on his way to the Hotel Palace where he was due to finalize the details of a grand reception in honour of Andreotti. Since 1968, when Lima became a member of parliament and fell out with ‘Viceroy’ Giovanni Gioia, his huge Sicilian following had marched under the banner of Andreotti’s DC faction. Before 1968, Andreotti had occupied government posts continually from the late 1940s onwards, but winning Lima’s support in Sicily was the decisive moment in his political fortunes. Without Lima behind him, Andreotti would probably never have become Prime Minister at all. After getting Lima’s support, Andreotti became the most influential politician in the country. No government could be formed without his approval.
Large numbers of DC notables stayed away from Palermo on the day of the Lima funeral, as did the other party leaders, the incumbent President of the Republic, and the Speakers of both houses of parliament. Some newspapers interpreted this as a sign that the public institutions were making a point of not claiming the controversial Lima as one of their own. In fact the murder could not have come at a politically more delicate moment. A general election was due to be held on 5 April, a vote that everyone knew was likely to be decisive in shaping post-Cold War Italy. Andreotti was widely touted to become the next head of state, the President of the Republic. So it is understandable that Andreotti was the focus of media attention when he turned up to see his Sicilian friend buried. Normally unflappable and ironic, he was pale and visibly shaken. Before the television cameras, he resoundingly defended Sicily’s reputation: ‘The island is not the mafia.’ In interviews he offered a tangled explanation for the Lima assassination, a mixture of ‘behindology’ and a strain of the Cavalleria rusticana myth. Like Sicily, Lima was the victim of a smear campaign, he argued. ‘Slanderers are worse than murderers. Or at least they are just as bad. My friend Salvo Lima was slandered for decades.’ The attacks on Lima’s reputation were the prelude to a politically motivated murder, he claimed; its aim may have been to prepare the ground for a totalitarian takeover. Asked whether he thought the murder could have been a warning aimed at him, Andreotti said he did not know: ‘Often the things that happen in Sicily are all but incomprehensible.’
Just how ‘incomprehensible’ Andreotti actually found what went on in Sicily would soon become the subject of a sensational trial in the Palermo bunker courthouse. Within a year of Lima’s death, and with the country in ferment following the murders of Falcone and Borsellino and the explosion of the ‘Clean Hands’ corruption scandal, the Palermo prosecutors’ office asked the Italian Senate for authorization to begin criminal proceedings against Giulio Andreotti ‘for having contributed in a non-occasional manner to protecting the interests and reaching the aims of the criminal association known as Cosa Nostra’. Moved by the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, Tommaso Buscetta joined more recent pentiti in starting to talk about the mafia’s political links. Two names kept recurring in their testimonies: Salvo Lima and Giulio Andreotti.
The accusations against Andreotti were grave. It was alleged that Italy’s most powerful politician of the 1970s and 1980s had had face-to-face business meetings with mafiosi of the calibre of Stefano Bontate, Tano ‘Sitting Bully’ Badalamenti, and Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco; Stefano Bontate, it was alleged, had given him a painting as a present. Most media attention centred on the charge that Andreotti had actually kissed Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina during one secret encounter. Andreotti was said to have been habitually referred to inside Cosa Nostra as ‘Uncle Giulio’. More importantly, it was claimed that he had sought to arrange for the ‘verdict-slaying’ Judge Carnevale to preside over the final hearing in the maxi-trial. The prosecution concluded its case by arguing that Andreotti, ‘in a dark delirium of power, made a pact with the mafia’, but that his failure to maintain promises made to the men of violence led them to turn first on his ally, Salvo Lima, and then on him; some pentiti said that Riina was planning to kill Andreotti or one of his children.
In October 1999, Andreotti was found innocent. The mafia defectors’ statements were found to be too vague and contradictory to support a secure conviction. But the explanation that the original trial judges issued for their decision hardly constitutes a clarion vindication of Andreotti’s morals. More than that, it raises troubling questions about Italy’s past.
The seven-times Prime Minister’s defence was, in essence, that he did not take any direct interest in Sicilian affairs, that he let his ‘slandered’ lieutenant Lima get on with the business of local politics while he moved on the national and international stage, innocent of the dangerous criminal environment in which Lima and his ilk were moving. In other words, one of Italy’s cleverest and most powerful statesmen found Sicily ‘incomprehensible’.
The judges ruled this defence implausible and even, in some limited respects, mendacious. Lima had clocked up dozens of mentions in the papers of the Antimafia commission of inquiry. The judges’ ruling determined that, both before and after he entered Andreotti’s faction in 1968, Lima boasted to a close member of Andreotti’s circle about his relationship with none other than Tommaso Buscetta. In 1973, Andreotti bent over backwards to help God’s banker Michele Sindona rescue his banks and escape from the criminal charges hanging over him in Italy and the US. There was further evidence of Andreotti’s lack of scruple when ‘pushy Corleonese embezzler’ Vito Ciancimino joined Andreotti’s faction in 1976. The judges ruled that Andreotti ‘repeatedly showed himself to be indifferent to the ties that notoriously linked [Ciancimino] to the criminal structure’.
The court found further evidence of dishonesty on Andreotti’s part related to the tax-collecting Salvo cousins, Ignazio and Nino—both ‘organically inserted into Cosa Nostra’, as the judges stated. (Nino died of natural causes during the maxi-trial; Ignazio was given a light sentence at the trial but was then shot dead on Riina’s orders in September 1992 for failing to protect Cosa Nostra from Judge Falcone.) Andreotti’s claim that he did not know the Salvo cousins was ‘unequivocally contradicted’ by the evidence; photos of them together turned up during the case, for example. The judges suggested that the most favourable interpretation of Andreotti’s reluctance to own up to his regular dealings with the Salvos was that he was trying to protect his image. But the slipperiness of some aspects of Andreotti’s defence was not taken to be evidence that justified the prosecution’s charge that he was systematically and deliberately working to further the interests of Cosa Nostra.
Following an appeal by the prosecution, the not guilty verdict was confirmed in May 2003. In late July the judges’ explanation of this second acquittal was deposited in the Palermo chancellery. According to extracts published in the national press—the only parts of it available at the time of writing—the judges ruled that Andreotti had ‘made himself available to mafiosi in an authentic, stable and friendly way until the spring of 1980’. Prior to that date he had ‘friendly and direct relations [with men of honour] propitiated by his link with Salvo Lima and the Salvo cousins’. There was a relationship ‘based on exchange and general electoral support for the Andreotti faction [of the DC]’. After 1980, Andreotti demonstrated ‘ever more incisive commitment to the antimafia cause’, to the extent that he even put his own and his family’s lives in danger. (As Andreotti has frequently pointed out, for example, he was Prime Minister when Falcone was working at the Ministry of Justice in 1991 and 1992.)
The turning point in Andreotti’s relationship with Cosa Nostra, in the view of the appeal court judges, came at the outset of the season of ‘eminent corpses’, and specifically with the murder of the DC President of the Sicilian Region, Piersanti Mattarella, in January 1980. Mattarella had once been tied to Stefano Bontate and other mafiosi. (Indeed, his father was also a DC politician who was notoriously close to the mafia: he was the Minister who reportedly gave Joe Bananas his red carpet reception at Rome airport back in 1957.) But as the level of mafia violence increased in the late 1970s, Piersanti Mattarella began to sense the dangers of his party’s relationship with organized crime. Most significantly, he tried to free the system of awarding local government contracts from mafia influence. When Andreotti heard about a plan to kill Mattarella, according to the judges, he met with Bontate and other senior men of honour and urged them not to carry it through. After Mattarella’s death, Andreotti again met Bontate, only to be told in no uncertain terms that Cosa Nostra considered itself to be beyond his influence. According to the judges’ ruling, at no stage did Andreotti report any of this to the authorities, either to try and save Mattarella’s life or to bring his killers to justice. When confronted with these findings by a journalist, Andreotti stressed the need to look at them in the context of the judges’ ruling in its entirety.
What saved Andreotti from being convicted for this pattern of relationships with Cosa Nostra was the fact that Italy has a statute of limitations: it is all a question of timing. Whereas Andreotti’s defence had argued that he never had a relationship with the mafia, and the prosecution had maintained that the relationship lasted until the 1980s and even beyond, the Appeal Court judges ruled that any dealings ‘Uncle Giulio’ had with the bosses ceased in 1980. This cut-off point means that, whatever he did, he did it too long ago to be prosecuted under Italian law. The judges commented only that Andreotti would have to ‘answer to history’. The former Prime Minister responded that, ‘in a trial, I’m only interested in the final outcome. And in this case the outcome was positive. As for the rest, Amen.’ His lawyers will now have to consider whether they will appeal to the Court of Cassation in an effort to rescue his reputation.
Both of these judicial rulings strongly indicate that, far from finding Sicily incomprehensible, Andreotti understood it well enough to stick by his political allies even when he was aware of at least some of the evils that they were committing. It is deeply worrying for Italian democracy that for so long so many electors were willing to place their trust in a man who, even before this trial, was strongly suspected of using the mafia, in the traditional way, as an instrument of local government.
In October 2003 the Court of Cassation brought an end to another protracted and controversial mafia case involving Giulio Andreotti. He had been accused of asking Cosa Nostra to kill a journalist who was blackmailing him—the murder took place in 1979. Three and a half years after first being committed to trial Andreotti was judged to be innocent in September 1999. Then, in November 2002, a guilty verdict and a sentence of 24 years in prison were issued in after an appeal by the prosecution. The Court of Cassation’s definitive ruling was that the prosecution had failed to provide any evidence to back up its hypothesis. Thus, seven and a half years after the trial began, and over two decades after the murder had taken place, Andreotti’s innocence was confirmed. He expressed relief that his nightmare was over, and claimed he was the victim of a political plot. The whole affair has done nothing to improve the reputation of Italy’s political and judicial systems.
* * *
The years of the Andreotti trials have been silent ones for Cosa Nostra. Italy was shocked from its torpor by the atrocities of the early 1990s. It was then placated by the capture of Riina, Bagarella, and Brusca. And it seems now to have been put back to sleep by Andreotti’s acquittal. When there are no prominent murders, Sicily can seem a long way away from Milan or Rome. But in the silence Cosa Nostra has begun to restructure. Since ‘lo scannacristiani’ was caught, Italy has set about letting a historic opportunity to defeat the mafia slip through its fingers.
Bernardo Provenzano holds a record. He has been on the run, wanted for murder, since the day—10 September 1963—when he took part in an attack in Corleone on one of Michele ‘Our Father’ Navarra’s remaining soldiers. An unparalleled forty years, and counting, as a fugitive from justice. And, like Riina before him, Provenzano has almost certainly spent most of that time in western Sicily. He is best known in Italy through a police identikit because the last photo of him shows him as an uneasy, brilliantined twenty-six-year-old—it was taken in September 1959. There is no clearer example of what mafia territorial control means in practice than Provenzano’s continuing ability to evade capture.
For much of the last four decades Provenzano’s role within Cosa Nostra was seriously underestimated; at one time it was even thought that he was dead. Indeed, one sign of how he has been misjudged is his nickname, ‘the Tractor’. The world learned of it through the testimony of Antonino Calderone, one of the leading pentiti of the 1980s, who, from his distant viewpoint in Catania on the east of the island, thought that Provenzano was little more than a relentless killer, much less cunning than ‘Shorty’ Riina. Better-informed mafia defectors have now overturned that image; ‘the Tractor’ is more frequently known by the Corleonesi as ‘the accountant’ or ‘zu Binnu’—’Uncle Bernie’. They say that Provenzano has a much more astute business and political brain than Riina. Gioacchino Pennino, a doctor, DC politician, socialite, and man of honour who turned state’s evidence in 1994, said that it was principally Provenzano who rode shotgun on ‘pushy embezzler’ Vito Ciancimino’s political career. On one occasion in 1981, Pennino himself had been thinking out loud about switching out of Ciancimino’s group on Palermo city council. He was summoned to meet Uncle Bernie who, without waiting for an explanation, told him in no uncertain terms to shut up and stay put.
For many years Provenzano operated in Riina’s shadow. While Riina was busily engaged in a war on the state, Provenzano was quietly cultivating the networks of business and political friendships that have always provided the Sicilian mafia with its staple income. He began his business career as a debt collector for a loan firm set up by Luciano Leggio to recycle drug money, and has since specialized in health, construction, and—Tony Soprano would be curious to know—waste management. Like most of the Sicilian economy, these are businesses dominated by the public sector, and therefore by companies that have good links to politicians.
But Uncle Bernie is, of course, far from being a pacific character. As a long-term member of the Commission, he has racked up in absentia life sentences for some of the ‘eminent corpse’ murders, including Falcone and Borsellino, and for planning the 1993 bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. In the early 1990s, Provenzano took personal charge of a war between Cosa Nostra and a new federation of gangs based in southern and eastern Sicily that was originally formed by expelled men of honour; they called themselves the stidda, meaning both ‘bright star’ and ‘bad luck’. Many of the victims of Provenzano’s campaign—300 in three years in the province of Agrigento alone—were teenage gunfighters bought cheap by the stiddari.
Since becoming boss of bosses after Leoluca Bagarella’s capture in 1995, Provenzano has changed Cosa Nostra’s strategy. The magistrates call his ploy ‘submersion’ because its key goal is to take Cosa Nostra below the radar of public discussion. Accordingly there have been no murders of prominent representatives of the state since Provenzano took charge. Those who are killed—significantly, they are almost all businessmen—die away from the big cities. Even petty crime in Palermo and Catania has dropped dramatically under Provenzano’s leadership. Roberto Scarpinato, a magistrate specializing in relationships between organized crime, business, and politics, argues that Uncle Bernie has grasped a fundamental rule of postmodern society: ‘What does not exist in the media does not exist in reality.’
Former mafiosi who knew Provenzano say he is much more conciliatory in his management style than Riina, much more inclined to profit share. Within the mafia he is associated with the saying ‘mangia e fai mangiare’—’eat and let eat’. Some of the boss of bosses’ business letters that have been intercepted give an idea of his approach: ‘I’ll end by saying that I’m at your complete disposal. I wish you the very best and send my dearest affectionate wishes to you and your father. May the Lord bless and protect you.’ Cosa Nostra is still centralized, but no longer the dictatorship that it became under ‘Shorty’ Riina. Internal peace is Provenzano’s priority.
Uncle Bernie’s Cosa Nostra has also returned to cultivating its core business of protection rackets. The pressure on legal businesses to pay the pizzo has increased notably in the past few years. Protection rackets lend themselves well to the submersion strategy in that they rarely require the ultimate and conspicuous sanction of murder; a fire, a beating, or insistent targeted robberies are usually enough to convince anyone who displays any reluctance to put their hand in their pocket.
Protection is also the mafia’s traditional ground-floor means of access to public works contracts. In July 2002, the national regulatory authority for public works published evidence to show that the system of blind bids, set up to prevent corruption, was being systematically subverted in Sicily. The Palermo chief prosecutor estimated that 96 per cent of government contracts were rigged in advance.
A substantial proportion of public spending in Sicily now comes from the European Union in Brussels rather than the Italian government in Rome. Agenda 2000 is the EU’s plan to promote development in poorer parts of the Continent. The regional plan for Sicily envisages spending 7,586 billion euros over six years—from 2000 to 2006—with a view to ‘significantly and sustainably reducing economic and social disadvantage, increasing long-term competitiveness, and creating the conditions for full and free access to work on the basis of environmental values and equal opportunities’. Naturally the new, submerged Cosa Nostra does not share this vision of balanced, sustainable growth in Sicily, at least if the following bugged conversation from the summer of 2000 is anything to go by: ‘They’re advising everyone not to make a noise and attract attention because we’ve got to get our hands on all of this Agenda 2000.’ It pays to remember that Salvo Lima had been a member of the European parliament for twelve years when he was shot dead.
There are no longer any heroin refineries in Sicily. The most recent trend is for the drugs to be produced where the poppies are grown. But Sicily is still a major point of access to the North American market. After eliminating the major drug-dealers in the mattanza in 1981–2, the Corleonesi immediately gave what they called a ‘licence’ to the remaining dealers to act on their behalf. There is evidence of narcotics business links between the Sicilian mafia and the emerging criminal organizations of Eastern Europe. Italian and Russian secret services heard of a first encounter between senior men of honour and members of the Russian mafia in Prague back in 1992. It seems that there was then a second meeting—again about drugs and the arms trade—in Switzerland at which American mafiosi were present too.
The profits from all of these illegal activities are now far easier to disguise, recycle, move and invest than they were in the days of Stefano Bontate, Totò Riina, and ‘God’s bankers’. The mafia has always been able to call on technical expertise, whether it be in citrus fruit dealing or international finance. And now, more than ever, the sons and daughters of men of honour are educated enough to become lawyers, bankers, and property dealers themselves.
Provenzano’s major achievement has been to stem the tide of defectors from Cosa Nostra. The policy of exterminating pentiti and their families has ceased with a view to encouraging those who have turned state’s evidence to retract and return to the fold. At the same time, Provenzano has also put the care of prisoners back in its traditionally high place on Cosa Nostra’s list of priorities. During the chaos of the mid-1990s, many men of honour in custody were not receiving their salaries. Some idea of how bosses began to respond to the crisis emerges from the following extracts from letters written from prison by the captured boss of Brancaccio to one of his lieutenants:
There are 20 of our people who are ruined because of the trials. And they don’t have the means to face the situation. The task is to come up with 3 or 4 apartments each so they can have a secure economic future—them and their families.
The guys in prison are always asking me why the monthly payment has been cut since I got arrested … I mean two million (£600) a month is hardly anything … I used to pay five million (£1,500) … I’m urging you to do at least as much as I did … When I was on the run we banked a basic of two hundred million (£66,000) a year plus between a billion and a billion and a half extra (£330,000–£500,000) … The builders who are on the move have got to produce those apartments … If anyone delays they’ve got to be made to pay. Anyone who takes advantage of the guys behind bars is dishonoured scum.
Under Provenzano, Cosa Nostra’s common fund for prisoners, which is fed from a tax on incomes across the organization, has been reactivated. Consequently, as leading magistrate Guido Lo Forte says, ‘Between the benefits offered by the state and those guaranteed by the mafia, prisoners are now choosing the latter.’
During the crisis of the mid-1990s, when it looked as if Cosa Nostra was on the verge of defeat, mafiosi fathers were reluctant to allow their sons to be admitted to the organization. Now initiations have resumed, albeit more selectively than before. Young men from families with long-established mafia histories behind them are being preferred in an effort to guard against pentiti. As Scarpinato says, ‘Family ties are an antibody to collaboration with the state.’
Provenzano has gathered about him a generation of bosses older than the young killers who tended to be close to Riina—Giovanni ‘lo scannacristiani’ Brusca being the emblematic case. Investigating magistrates sometimes refer to the Palermo Commission, now ruled over by Provenzano, as ‘the Senate’ because of the age of its members, who are with a few exceptions in their late fifties and sixties. Again, the fear of pentiti is driving this change. Older men of honour tend to have a long-term view: they have children to think of, and patrimonies to pass on to those children.
Communications within mafia Families and mandamenti have also become much more compartmentalized, with only a few chosen men of honour acting as channels of communication. It seems that it is now common practice for men of honour to conceal their status even from other mafiosi.
Provenzano’s response to the crisis provoked by defectors from his organization has worked. There has only been one significant man of honour who has turned state’s evidence since 1997 (about whom more below), and in the meantime legislators have sought to impose tight controls on the use of pentiti. Pentitismo, as it is called, has remained a controversial weapon in the magistrates’ armoury. The verdict of the first Andreotti trial strengthened the arguments of those who consider pentiti inherently unreliable. There was controversy during the case when a key pentito killed another mobster while under police protection. The benefits that magistrates are able to offer mafia defectors in return for information have since been cut. And any evidence that pentiti provide more than six months after their capture is now considered invalid; the problem is that six months is not very long for a man of honour to provide detailed information on a lifetime of day-in, day-out criminal activity.
Provenzano has established a pax mafiosa while his organization rebuilds the support networks damaged during the 1980s and early 1990s. Because Cosa Nostra’s guns have fallen silent for a while, some commentators have even been heard suggesting that the mafia is dying, that the new world of the internet and globalization is too modern for a semi-literate thug like Provenzano to understand. But over the past century and a half the mafia has responded to all of the great challenges of modernity: to capitalism, to the emergence of the nation-state, to democracy, to the rise and fall of the great ideologies of Socialism and Fascism, to global war, to industrialization and deindustrialization. Nothing that the nineteenth or twentieth centuries could throw at the Sicilian mafia managed to stop it. There is little to suggest that, left to its own devices, Cosa Nostra will fail to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century either. Cosa Nostra will not decline of its own accord. Magistrate Scarpinato describes it as a ‘collective brain, able to learn from its mistakes, to adapt and counter the different measures used to fight it’.
The fate of this ‘collective brain’ is still in the balance. Italy’s law enforcement response to Cosa Nostra is now more coordinated and efficient than it has ever been. For example, in July 2002, by using global positioning system micro-beacons placed in suspects’ cars, police arrested what they say was the whole of the Commission of Cosa Nostra for the province of Agrigento—fifteen men including one who is a doctor, nobleman, and member of the provincial council; the bosses had assembled—it is alleged—to elect a new capo. These allegations have not, it should be stated, been the subject of judicial determination.
But, as so often in the past, the Sicilian mafia’s destiny will depend less on law enforcement than on politics, meaning both the organization’s internal balance of power and its relationship with the people’s elected representatives. Bernardo Provenzano faces one crucial political task. He has to find a way to settle a conflict of interests between the bosses who are still at large, and the historic leadership of the Corleonesi: men like Riina and Bagarella who have not turned state’s evidence and are now nearly a decade into irreversible life sentences under a harsh prison regime. The bosses on the outside need peace and ‘submersion’ to implement a long-term rebuilding strategy. The bosses on the inside urgently need changes in legislation: first and foremost the reform of the prison conditions—known as Law 41 bis—that prevent them operating from captivity; but also changes to the laws on confiscation of mafia property, and even a reversal of the precedents established by the maxi-trial—perhaps through retrospective laws that weaken the value of evidence provided by pentiti. In other words, the demands that led to the attack on the state in the 1980s and 1990s have yet to be met.
And now, a decade after the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino and the bombs on the Italian mainland, some observers fear that Cosa Nostra has found someone in government who is prepared to give it what it wants.
Antonino Giuffrè, known as ‘Manuzza’ (‘Little Hand’), acting head of the Caccamo mandamento of Cosa Nostra, was captured on 16 April 2002. Giuffrè’s nickname derives from his deformed right hand, which was mangled in a hunting accident. It is said he has since learned to load and fire a shotgun with just his left. In the abandoned farm building where Giuffrè was hiding (along with a loaded pistol, 6,000 euros in cash, and images of Padre Pio, the Sacred Heart and the Madonna) was a shopping bag full of letters to Bernardo Provenzano. Some entrepreneurs, it seems, were even writing to Uncle Bernie on company notepaper with requests for favours.
In June, feeling that he had been betrayed by his leader, Giuffrè started to talk to investigating magistrates: ‘I was Provenzano’s principal collaborator and my job was to try and restructure Cosa Nostra on a huge scale.’ But his most startling claim was that in 1993 Cosa Nostra had ‘direct contacts’ with representatives of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s famous perma-tanned media magnate with a crooner’s smile.
That same year, 1993, it will be recalled, was the year of Cosa Nostra’s bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. It was also the year when Berlusconi was in the process of forming a new political party to respond to the crisis brought about by the ‘Clean Hands’ corruption investigations. The subject of the alleged meeting between Berlusconi’s people and Cosa Nostra, Giuffrè claims, was an alliance between the mafia and Berlusconi’s planned political party, soon to be baptized Forza Italia (‘Come on, Italy!’).
The following year Berlusconi led an alliance to victory in the general election. But the alliance proved fragile and collapsed before 1994 was out. Then in May 2001, a year before Giuffrè’s capture, Forza Italia met with electoral triumph and Berlusconi became Prime Minister with a solid parliamentary majority behind him. The man who likes to be known as il cavaliere—‘the Knight’—is also the richest man in Italy with an estimated fortune of $10.3 billion at the time of the 2001 election; among many other things he owns the country’s three major private television networks and a publishing empire. No one since Mussolini has had so much power over Italy or, indeed, over Sicily; the alliance led by Forza Italia holds all sixty-one of the island’s parliamentary seats.
There are numerous indications that since 1994 men of honour have been directing their people to vote for Forza Italia candidates. Bearing in mind how the mafia has tended to operate over the past century and a half, there is nothing necessarily surprising or scandalous in this: politicians with power are inevitably the most vulnerable to pressure from organized crime. It is known that, because of its growing disenchantment with the DC in the 1980s, Cosa Nostra was on the lookout for a new political vehicle for its interests. In the late 1980s, overtures were made to the Socialist Party. Then in the early 1990s, ‘Shorty’ Riina began to discuss the possibility of a new Sicilian separatist movement with his business and political contacts in the Masons: ‘Cosa Nostra is reviving the dream of becoming independent, of becoming the boss in a part of Italy, a state of its own, of our own,’ said one defector at the time. Some believe that, in the minds of senior bosses within Cosa Nostra, the emergence of Forza Italia in 1993–4 offered an even better solution: a close relationship with the party that was set to be just as central to the national political scene as the DC had once been.
There are many reasons to be cautious about what ‘Little Hand’ says, and to fight shy of any equivalence between Forza Italia in Sicily and Cosa Nostra. Nobody in Italy would seriously claim either that Berlusconi is a mafioso or that his electoral victories are a direct reflection of mafia influence. The lessons of mafia history in that regard are clear: even at its apogee in the 1970s and 1980s, Cosa Nostra did not control nearly enough votes to achieve such a landslide for its favoured political party. Berlusconi’s triumph owed more to dissatisfaction with his predecessors, effective campaigning, and public spending promises.
‘Manuzza’ Giuffrè’s allegations could turn out to be fanciful, perhaps wishful propaganda fed by Cosa Nostra’s leaders to the membership. Defence lawyers call what this latest pentito says ‘an anthology of hearsay’. But the Palermo investigating magistrates take what Giuffrè says seriously because, they allege, it may reveal the outcome of a remarkable story from nearly three decades ago that potentially links one of Silvio Berlusconi’s closest aides directly to Cosa Nostra.
In 1974, Berlusconi was looking for a groom and major-domo for his Arcore estate near Milan. He turned for advice to Marcello Dell’Utri who, after a prodigiously rapid rise through the Sicilian banking world, had recently moved to Milan to become Berlusconi’s business factotum. (Dell’Utri later became the head of Publitalia, the highly profitable advertising arm of the Berlusconi business empire; it was he who came up with the idea of Forza Italia in 1993.) Dell’Utri’s recommendation for the post of major-domo was a fellow Palermitan, Vittorio Mangano, who filled it for two years. Mangano died of cancer recently, a few days after being sentenced to life for two murders. This ‘major-domo’, it transpires, was a man of honour from the Porta Nuova Family of Cosa Nostra.
The story of the major-domo and the ad man is currently the subject of a case that has been dragging through the Palermo Court of Assizes for so long that most members of the Italian public have forgotten about it. (Berlusconi is not a defendant, it should be emphasized; his involvement is as a witness.) The prosecution alleges that Berlusconi’s fears that his children would be kidnapped led Dell’Utri to approach Mangano for protection. Dell’Utri responds to these accusations by saying that he initially did not know about Mangano’s criminal record, and that he dismissed him as soon as the truth came out. The prosecution asserts instead that this moment in 1974 was the beginning of a long-lasting relationship between Dell’Utri and the Sicilian mafia—an assertion that Dell’Utri vehemently denies. Still according to the prosecution, Dell’Utri has admitted to telling a business associate that he mediated between Berlusconi and Cosa Nostra to prevent his boss becoming the victim of a kidnapping, but he now claims this was merely an empty boast.
There is a long list of other charges running against Dell’Utri based around his supposedly regular dealings with men of honour; it is alleged that Dell’Utri recycled drug money and even that Stefano Bontate was considering initiating him into the mafia in 1980. Dell’Utri is also alleged to have mediated between Cosa Nostra and businesses in Berlusconi’s group: in one direction he supposedly ensured the transmission of protection payments from Berlusconi-owned companies operating in Sicily; in the other direction, it is claimed, went mafia investment in Berlusconi-owned companies in Milan. Following the mattanza of the early 1980s, ‘Shorty’ Riina is alleged to have monopolized the mafia’s links to Dell’Utri in the hope of taking advantage, through Dell’Utri, of Berlusconi’s close relationship with the Socialist Party.
The prosecution also claims that Dell’Utri tried to extort 50 per cent of a sponsorship contract between a beer brand and the owner of Trapani basketball club in the early 1990s. He supposedly threatened the owner when he refused to pay: ‘I advise you to think again. We have the men and the means to convince you to change your mind.’ Dell’Utri, who refutes this allegation, is further accused of trying to persuade two mafia defectors to discredit investigating magistrates and three other pentiti; the alleged aim was to ‘expose’ a fictitious plot by judges to frame Berlusconi and Dell’Utri. This charge, like the others, is strongly disputed by the defence.
The Dell’Utri case is long and complex; it will turn on how the judges assess evidence that stretches back into the early 1970s and is far more extensive than Antonino Giuffrè’s allegations. All the accusations are, of course, still being evaluated in court and may, at the end of that process, turn out to be unsubstantiated. But they have inevitably fuelled speculation about a verdict that, whichever way it goes, will be crucial. If Dell’Utri is judged to be innocent, many people will conclude that, as so often in the past, accusations of complicity with the mafia have been used as a political weapon—the real targets on this occasion being Berlusconi and Forza Italia. Such an outcome would inflict severe damage on the credibility of both the magistrates and the pentiti.
According to the prosecution, ‘there was an attempt to make [Berlusconi’s] Fininvest group into a company friendly to the criminal association. Berlusconi did not know this, but Dell’Utri did.’ Nevertheless, if Dell’Utri is guilty, then his notoriously close business and political relationship with Silvio Berlusconi will inevitably raise questions at the very least about the latter’s judgement. If what Giuffrè says is right, then in 1993, through Marcello Dell’Utri, Cosa Nostra sought to obtain guarantees that Forza Italia when in government would prioritize the mafia’s main demands: the maxi-trial verdicts, the law on confiscation of mafia wealth, and the harsh 41 bis prison regime. On this basis, some antimafia campaigners would conclude, perhaps hastily, that the venerable accord between the Sicilian mafia and the Italian political system has been renewed once more. At the very least, if Dell’Utri is convicted, the issue of how much if anything Berlusconi knew about his ad man’s dealings with the men of honour is likely to come onto the political and probably the judicial agenda.
But even if Giuffrè’s claims about ‘direct contact’ between Forza Italia and Cosa Nostra in 1993 turn out to be baseless, and even if Dell’Utri is acquitted, Cosa Nostra had reason to rejoice when Forza Italia took power in 2001 because of Berlusconi’s avowed hostility to those magistrates he regards as being overweening and politically biased. Berlusconi’s involvement with the courts, over allegations that he bribed tax officials, engaged in false accounting, and committed fraud, has been much in the news. At the time of writing, a law he passed to make the five most senior figures in Italy’s institutions, including the Prime Minister, immune from prosecution while in office has been blocked by the Constitutional Court. The law’s first effect had been to halt a trial in which Berlusconi himself was charged with paying massive bribes to judges in order to obtain a favourable decision in a privatization dispute. Berlusconi’s view is that ‘red’ magistrates are conducting a concerted campaign to discredit him, using the same methods that he says they used to destroy democratically elected parties during the ‘Clean Hands’ investigations.
That is one reason why Forza Italia’s top priority in government is to reform the judicial system. The policy programme announced by the Justice Minister Roberto Castelli argues that ‘elements of the magistrature have tried in recent years to occupy terrain that belongs to politics’, and have attempted to ‘turn justice into a spectacle’. The Minister’s plan is to ‘bring responsibility for judicial policy, especially in the area of criminal law, back within the orbit of democratic sovereignty’. Berlusconi’s opponents fear that the plan is to put justice under the control of the government.
In his struggle with the magistrates, Berlusconi’s focus is on Milan, where his business interests are concentrated, rather than Palermo. Nevertheless, his justice policy may have important effects—even if unintended ones—at the other end of the peninsula. A number of measures are arguably likely to obstruct the hunt for Cosa Nostra’s financial operations, notably a law making it much more difficult to get evidence from foreign bank accounts for use in domestic trials.
In addition to these legal reforms, the mafia finds Berlusconi’s plans for public spending in the South highly appetizing, in particular the scheme to build a bridge linking Sicily and the mainland. Provenzano is apparently often heard to say, ‘Fuck! If they build the bridge there’ll be something for everyone.’ Although Cosa Nostra has always been enthusiastic about public spending no matter who is in government, opponents of Berlusconi claim that some of the things his team have been saying have the effect of offering encouragement to Uncle Bernie. In August 2001, Pietro Lunardi, Minister for the Infrastructure, caused a storm when he remarked that Italy had to ‘learn to live with the mafia; everyone should deal with the crime problem in their own way.’
Some members of Berlusconi’s party have expressed hostility towards mafia pentiti; they accuse them of being tools in the hands of politicized magistrates or of acting out a secret plan to destabilize Italy’s political system. In the name of having a more humane prison system, other politicians from the parties within the governing coalition have floated the idea of offering mafiosi easier prison terms in return for ‘dissociating’ themselves from Cosa Nostra, but without turning state’s evidence. There are reasons to believe that Provenzano’s wing of Cosa Nostra would quite like to implement a deal along these lines. Pietro Aglieri, a boss who is studying theology in prison and who is known to be very close to Provenzano, wrote to antimafia prosecutors in March 2002 to ask for negotiations: his proposal was that men of honour would get less harsh penalties in return for recognizing both the existence of Cosa Nostra and the authority of the Italian state. Magistrates view such a scheme as a trap. They think Provenzano wants to resolve Cosa Nostra’s internal conflict of interests by making merely symbolic concessions to the authorities. Although symbols are important in the world of Cosa Nostra, the likely upshot of ‘dissociation’ would simply be that the mafia would continue with its ‘submerged’ operations, confident in the knowledge that the public had been convinced that it was a thing of the past.
Irrespective of the Berlusconi government’s intentions, Cosa Nostra undoubtedly likes many of the noises that have emanated from Rome since the last general election. But top bosses seem to have convinced the organization’s grass roots, and perhaps even themselves, that they have a right to expect more than noises from a Forza Italia government, that a government programme of legal changes will serve to heal the mafia’s internal divisions.
Accordingly, Berlusconi’s opponents are keeping a keen eye on his government to detect any hint of concessions to Cosa Nostra’s headline demands. It is reassuring to report that there have been none so far. In fact the bosses were always likely to be disappointed in their expectation that they could skew the policy-making process to suit their own ends. Mafiosi have a great interest in finding friendly Italian politicians, but that does not necessarily mean that they understand Italian politics. What some of them may not appreciate is that even a hypothetical Prime Minister whose absolute priority was to do the bidding of the Sicilian mafia—and no one for a second believes that this is the case with Silvio Berlusconi—would have to face almost insurmountable obstacles. The spirits of Falcone and Borsellino stand guard over laws like 41 bis, and would exact a fearsome political price before they surrendered them. Any governing party that tried overtly to dismantle the pillars of Italy’s antimafia legislation would be handing a colossal prize to its opponents and, just as importantly, to its coalition allies. (All government in Italy is coalition government, and the rivalry between coalition partners is nearly always just as fiery as the struggle between the ruling parties and the opposition.)
Whatever it was that encouraged some bosses to hope and expect so much when Forza Italia came to power more than two years ago, Cosa Nostra is now beginning to feel let down by a governing coalition it imagines, rightly or wrongly, to contain elements friendly towards it. For one thing, the ‘dissociation’ idea has not become policy. ‘Dissociation’ is thought to be Bernardo Provenzano’s idea of a compromise, both between Cosa Nostra and the state, and between the mafiosi in prison and those still at large. In July 2002, Leoluca Bagarella, the man who was boss of bosses between 1993 and 1995 and who is thought to be hostile to any such compromise deal, showed that his patience had worn very thin; he used a court appearance to send out a warning that mafia prisoners living under the tough prison regime 41 bis were ‘tired of being used, humiliated, oppressed and treated like merchandise by different political parties’. A man like Bagarella would never indulge in an aimless rant. Mafia-watchers interpreted his words as a threat, calibrated in its imprecision, and addressed perhaps to unknown members of the governing coalition, or perhaps to the government in general. In classic mafia fashion, anyone who was really meant to understand, would understand. In October 2002, the head of the Italian secret service said that there was a ‘concrete risk’ that Cosa Nostra, in its disappointment, would open up a new season of murders.
The end of 2002 saw a crucial decision go against the mafia when the Berlusconi government converted 41 bis from an annually renewed decree into a permanent law. A Forza Italia Senator, who has long argued in favour of inscribing 41 bis in the law books for good, commented that parliament had given the ‘only possible response to Bagarella’s worrying pronouncements’. In the eyes of men like Bagarella, however deluded they may be, Forza Italia has thereby scandalously failed to deliver on its most important commitment. No one had to wait very long for a sign of how Cosa Nostra felt about this setback. Soon after the parliamentary vote on 41 bis, magistrates were alarmed to see a banner appear during a football match at Palermo stadium; it read: ‘We are united against 41 bis. Berlusconi has forgotten Sicily.’ This was widely taken to be a warning directed at politicians in Sicily. The pax mafiosa may well be about to end. The paradox of these tense times in Sicily is that, if Cosa Nostra does start shooting again, then that will almost certainly be a sign that it is on the way to defeat. It is no wonder that the pentito Salvatore Cancemi has recently said, ‘I find this silence more frightening than the bombs.’
* * *
In April 2000, at the age of seventy-two, Tommaso Buscetta died of cancer in his adopted American home. In the forty years spent serving Cosa Nostra, and sixteen spent trying to destroy it, he had taken on an estimated 200 pseudonyms. A few months before the end, in his last in-depth interview, Buscetta reflected on a unique life. The hopes that he and Giovanni Falcone had nurtured back in 1984 were now only a bitter memory:
At the end of my first interview, Giovanni Falcone and I deluded ourselves that this time the mafia would be defeated. That there would be no more mafia in our land. Now … I have to admit that my prediction was wrong.
Cosa Nostra, Buscetta concluded, has won: ‘The mafia is inborn in all Sicilians.’ Thus, in his pessimism, the man who made a unique contribution to exposing the falsehood that the mafia and the Sicilian character were the same thing ended his life reiterating it.
These are certainly worrying days for the mafia’s enemies. But the time has not yet come to join in Tommaso Buscetta’s fatalism. Even in a country as amnesic as Italy, what he revealed is unlikely to share the fate of the Sangiorgi report. The ‘rustic chivalry’ myth is dead. The secret that the Sicilian mafia managed to keep for so long, the secret of its existence, is out, and out for good. But through all that time, forces much more formidable than myth have kept the mafia strong. The next few months and years promise to determine which way Cosa Nostra will turn. No one outside the organization knows how deep the split between the bosses in prison and those outside runs; nor does anyone know the relative strength of the two factions. They may unite in a new offensive against the magistrates and in taking revenge on the politicians they imagine have let them down. Or they may collapse into civil war, bringing the whole organization back to the brink of destruction. Or Bernardo Provenzano may succeed in appeasing or isolating the bosses in prison. If he does, Cosa Nostra will continue quietly to restructure and reforge its pact with elements within the state, ready to enter a new phase of its savage history—a history that could, and should, have been brought to an end long before now.