The Origins of the Second Mafia War
RISE OF THE CORLEONESI: 1—LUCIANO LEGGIO (1943–1970)
As most American mafia films do, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather received a poor critical reception when it was released in Italy in 1972. One critic branded it a ‘distillation of all the commonplaces about Italian-American gangsters’. It is an opinion which may owe something to a certain Italian resentment at the way that, through Hollywood, the US has claimed the mafia as its own. The same critic also thought the Sicilian episode of The Godfather ‘offensively stupid’, and on this count he was right: the Sicilian sequences of the god-daddy of all American mafia films are undeniably crass. In one scene Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone wanders through the streets of the town whose name he bears. Struck by the black-clad widows and the funeral announcements pasted to the walls, he wonders aloud where all the men have gone. ‘They are all dead,’ one of his local bodyguards replies, ‘from vendetta.’ He speaks the word as if it meant some unholy force of nature, a variant of the Black Death that mows down only Sicilian men.
At the time when Michael Corleone paid his fictional visit to his father’s home town, typhus was a bigger danger to the population than mafia crime; some forty people succumbed to it in the summer of 1947. Corleone, with its roads and drainage system damaged by the passage of American tanks, was still an extremely poor place. But if the murder rate in those years did not reach the apocalyptic levels suggested by The Godfather, it was nonetheless strikingly high. There were eleven murders in 1944, sixteen in 1945, seventeen in 1946, eight in 1947, and five in 1948. As elsewhere in western Sicily, these were the years of the mafia’s resurgence and of its brutal response to renewed peasant militancy. But in Corleone, in retrospect, the murder statistics have acquired a particularly baleful significance because among them are the first crimes committed by Luciano Leggio, a mafioso who would come to exert a dominant influence within Cosa Nostra. Following Leggio’s example, his favourite pupil and fellow Corleonese, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina, would orchestrate an unparalleled slaughter of men of honour—a slaughter known as the second mafia war of 1981–3. Under Riina, the Corleonesi would establish a dictatorship over the organization and, in so doing, almost bring its history to an end. Even today, Riina’s successor as boss of bosses is a man born in Corleone and tutored by Luciano Leggio. Thus, by nothing more than luck, when Godfather author Mario Puzo chose a birthplace for Don Vito Corleone (né Andolini), he picked on the town that gave the world the most feared and powerful men of honour of them all.
The best-known photographs of Luciano Leggio date from a court appearance in Palermo in 1974. It is difficult to avoid concluding from them that he decided for the occasion to adopt a look based on Brando’s Don Corleone. And with his cigar, his long, heavy jaw, and his arrogant bearing, he actually managed to pull it off; there is a more than passing resemblance between the two. In fact Leggio’s face was already infamous before The Godfather was released. The Antimafia commission’s analysis of Leggio, published in the same year that the movie came out, is not a document that tends to dwell on anything as frivolous as appearances. Yet it was transfixed by Leggio’s ‘big, round, cold face’, his ‘ironic and scornful’ glower. If the cinematic Don Vito was the face of the mafia as it likes to think of itself—judicious and family-centred—then Luciano Leggio’s features, by contrast, were an emblem of capricious terror. Whereas Brando’s heavy lids gave his character an almost noble reserve, Leggio’s staring eyeballs suggested that he was as volatile as he was malevolent. One pentito said that Leggio ‘had a look that struck fear even in us mafiosi. It only took the slightest thing to get him worked up, and then there would be a strange light in his eyes that silenced everyone around … You could sense death hovering in the air.’ This was a man who, on one occasion, according to the same pentito, killed a mafioso and his lover, and then raped and killed her fifteen-year-old daughter.
But like so many real mafia biographies, Luciano Leggio’s story only withers into gangster cliché if it is told in a psychological vein. Although Leggio inspired acute dread, the reason he and his followers became so powerful in Cosa Nostra was not because they were made of more fearsome stuff than the rest. Rather it was because they reinvented mafia tactics by creating a new combination of old methods. The Corleonesi developed a system for dominating the Sicilian mafia that suited the new climate emerging in the years of the Antimafia, when the state and public opinion became more alert to the problem, and the drug business put new strains on the traditional structure of the Families. In a sense, the Corleonesi became within the body of Cosa Nostra what Cosa Nostra was within the body of Sicily: a secret and deadly parasite. To understand how these tactics evolved, it pays to trace the rise of the Corleonesi from Leggio’s first murders in the 1940s.
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Luciano Leggio was born into poverty in 1925. When the honoured society resurfaced after the Allied invasion of 1943, the petty thief Leggio was drafted by Michele Navarra, a round-headed physician, who was also the Corleone capo. (There is a long tradition of mafia medics like Navarra, who was a general practitioner in Corleone; in 1946, he became the director of the hospital after his predecessor was murdered by hands unknown.) Through Navarra’s sponsorship, at the age of only twenty, Leggio obtained a job as a guard on an estate near Corleone. Since before the time of murdered Fasci leader Bernardino Verro, positions like this had been dominated by the Corleone mafia and used to smuggle, steal, intimidate labourers, and extort protection money from landowners.
In 1948, probably on Navarra’s orders, Leggio performed one of the most notorious political murders of the post-war years; Corleone’s peasants were given another socialist martyr to mourn. On the evening of 10 March—not by coincidence, the Italian Republic’s first parliamentary elections were imminent—Leggio marched trade unionist and Resistance veteran Placido Rizzotto out of town at gunpoint; he then forced him to kneel down before shooting him in the head three times at point-blank range. Rizzotto’s remains, along with two other human skeletons, were found in a sixty-metre-deep cave eighteen months later. Only a few fragments of clothes and a pair of rubber-soled American shoes allowed his mother to identify him. Leggio was never convicted for the crime, despite the fact that two men who had helped him perform the kidnapping gave evidence and told the authorities where to find the victim’s body. Placido Rizzotto has never had a tomb, but a bust of him, inaugurated only in 1996, now stands outside Corleone town hall.
Leggio absconded soon after the Rizzotto murder. He was only recaptured in 1964, but disappeared again in 1970 before being locked up for the final time in 1974. He remained a fugitive from justice for so long that he acquired the nickname of the ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ of Corleone. But he was far from the dashing figure that this literary parallel would suggest; he suffered from chronic prostate problems and spondylosis, an inflammation of the spine that forced him to wear a leather brace. His poor health meant that much of his time ‘on the run’ was actually spent in expensive clinics and spas. It should be said that there was nothing unusual about a mafioso going underground for a while in this way. Even a fat old don like Calò Vizzini had done it. But Leggio’s almost permanent life of concealment was to set a pattern. The Corleonesi have all been ‘Scarlet Pimpernels’, invisible not just to the forces of law and order, but also to rival mafiosi. This invisibility was to be part of a new model of mafia power; no longer would the boss hold court at a café table in the local piazza. The only manifest trace of the power of the Corleonesi would be their savagery.
In 1956, Leggio, still officially in hiding, started up a livestock-breeding business as a cover for his cattle-rustling operation. It was to be the base for his challenge to the authority of his own boss, Michele Navarra. First Leggio bullied one of Navarra’s men into renouncing his share of the livestock company. Then, when one of Navarra’s senior lieutenants bought some adjoining land, Leggio made him the target for a campaign of vandalism. Predictably, in June 1958, Leggio was ambushed in his own farm buildings by Navarra killers. But it seems that they were so wary of his reputation as a flawless shot that they opened fire from too far away, allowing Leggio to fight them off at the cost only of a graze to his hand.
It was the doctor’s last chance. Two months later, Navarra was returning by car to Corleone from Lercara Friddi with another doctor—an entirely innocent man. As they rounded a bend, they were confronted by Leggio’s Alfa Romeo 1900 blocking the road. When police and reporters reached the scene some time later, they found that the victims’ car had been rolled down the verge; the dozens of bullet holes in it made for a telling ‘Chicago’ photograph. It was the first mafia killing in Corleone to grab the headlines since the disappearance of Placido Rizzotto a decade before. Leggio’s notoriety now stretched well beyond Corleone.
The move against Navarra was an act of extraordinary daring. The evil doctor of Corleone represented a kind of stability and political protection that Cosa Nostra values. In addition to his medical responsibilities, he was the president of the Corleone peasants’ federation, a trustee of the farmers’ union, and an inspector for the region’s health insurance scheme; he placed his friends on a host of influential quangos; and one of his brothers ran the Sicilian regional bus company that Navarra himself had started up with abandoned military vehicles in 1943. The Corleone doctor controlled a significant packet of votes for the DC, he had support from the other mafia bosses of the region, and he could count among his clan men of honour with considerable experience as well as contacts in the United States. He had even been awarded the Italian equivalent of a knighthood just before he was shot dead, this despite a period of internal exile for his suspected involvement in the Rizzotto murder. No wonder the peasants of the town called him ‘U patri nostru’—‘Our Father’. Mafiosi rarely have an interest in allowing a rank-and-file killer like Leggio to disturb such patiently accumulated and profitable prestige.
After murdering Navarra, Leggio’s band had no alternative but to keep up the momentum of their offensive; by now, survival and victory were one and the same thing. A month after Navarra’s death, three of the doctor’s most feared soldiers were shot dead in a battle involving tens of gunmen in the very centre of Corleone; several bystanders, including children, were wounded. Corleone acquired the nickname ‘Tombstone’. In October of the same year, 1958, L’Ora ran a full-page exposé of Leggio’s activities under the single-word headline ‘Dangerous’. Three days later the newspaper’s offices were bombed.
Leggio’s spectacular coup against the established Corleone bosses was unusual, but far from unprecedented. In one sense it represented a confirmation of what has probably been true all through the mafia’s history. Although political influence is important, ultimate power in the honoured society lies with its military rather than its political wing. A readiness to pay the short-term political price for using overwhelming violence, shown by Leggio in 1958, was to be a characteristic of the tactics adopted by the Corleonesi thereafter.
The shooting and kidnapping in Corleone continued for five years. Leggio’s upstarts were on the verge of total victory over the Navarra establishment when, on 30 June 1963, the Ciaculli car bomb led to mass arrests and brought almost all mafia activity to a temporary halt across western Sicily. The ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ himself was finally arrested in Corleone in 1964 in a house belonging to a middle-aged spinster who had been completely above suspicion for the reason that she was the former fiancée of murdered trade unionist Placido Rizzotto.
When sixty-four of the participants in the war between the Leggiani and the Navarriani finally came to trial in 1969, they were all acquitted. Astonishingly, despite nearly a quarter of a century as a mafia killer, Leggio still only had one conviction on his criminal record: for stealing a few sheaves of corn. The final report of the Antimafia parliamentary commission of inquiry later criticized the verdicts, blaming them on the way Leggio and his men intimidated witnesses, and on the judge’s ‘unconscious’ tendency to be unusually rigorous when he evaluated prosecution evidence. It seems that Leggio also found a way to destroy material proof at some time between the investigations and the trial. Fragments of a car’s rear light had been found at the scene of the Navarra murder; they had been identified at the time as coming from an Alfa Romeo of a kind owned by Leggio. When the evidence bag was opened for reinspection many months later, it was discovered that the fragments had been replaced by others from a different make of car. The prosecution appealed against the acquittals, but by the time Leggio was given a life sentence at a second trial he had gone underground once more.
Mafia activity started up again in earnest following the 1969 acquittal of Leggio and his men. And when it did, a new map of mafia power became visible. Among the firing party disguised as policemen who executed Michele ‘the Cobra’ Cavataio in viale Lazio were two of Leggio’s top killers: Calogero Bagarella (the man who died in the assault and was thrown into the boot of the getaway car), and Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano (the man who at the time of writing is the reigning boss of bosses). The status that Leggio now had within Cosa Nostra was confirmed when the Commission was reconstituted shortly afterwards. As a provisional measure there were initially only three members. The first was Gaetano ‘Tano’ Badalamenti, a major drug-dealer with solid links across the Atlantic and one of the three men on the ‘constitutional working party’ that had drafted the rules for the Commission. The second was Stefano Bontate, known as the ‘Prince of Villagrazia’, capo of the largest Family in Palermo, and scion of a prestigious mafia dynasty—his father had been one of the pallbearers at Don Calò Vizzini’s funeral. The third was Luciano Leggio himself, although he was often represented in meetings by his trusted deputy Totò Riina, known as ‘u curtu’—‘Shorty’.
The composition of this triumvirate was a sign that the new Commission was to be a different kind of body from the one first established following Joe Bananas’ visit to Sicily in 1957. The rule that prevented heads of Families from having a seat on the Commission had gone. The three members of the triumvirate were now, without doubt, the most powerful men of honour in the province of Palermo, and therefore in the whole of the Sicilian mafia. The Commission now no longer acted merely as a counterweight to the authority that local Family bosses had over individual men of honour, as Buscetta had hoped it might back in 1957. Indeed, it now actually reactivated and reorganized the Families from the top down. When the full Commission became operative in 1974, Cosa Nostra assumed the more hierarchical command structure that Tommaso Buscetta would describe to Giovanni Falcone, and that it still has today.
The question is how Luciano Leggio, hailing from backward Corleone as he did, came to take a place among the Palermo elite. The truth is that, despite the notoriety that both Leggio and Marlon Brando have conferred on it, Corleone is not the ‘capital’ of the mafia. Long before he was first arrested in 1964, Leggio was more than the boss of the Corleone Family; he had extended his influence where it really counted—into Palermo.
Palermo was where Leggio spent most of his time in hiding; the city’s wholesale meat market was where his own small trucking firm took his illegally butchered cattle; it was in Palermo that ‘pushy Corleonese embezzler’ Vito Ciancimino was elbowing his way to power on the town council; Palermo was where Leggio had a company that rented out lucky dip machines full of contraband cigarettes; Leggio had close relationships with mafiosi who became the leading combatants in the first mafia war—La Barbera, Buscetta, Greco, Cavataio, Torretta. Palermo was where the mafia had its roots; it was where power in the honoured society was still concentrated. Palermo was to be the prize in the second mafia war.
LEONARDO VITALE’S SPIRITUAL CRISIS
The history of the Sicilian mafia is not composed only of high politics, big business, and war. The 1970s were also the setting for two tragedies—related in this chapter and the next—that speak of the acute anxieties of daily life as they affected the men, women, and children living deep within the mafia system.
At around eleven o’clock in the evening on 29 March 1973, Leonardo Vitale walked into the local headquarters of the Palermo flying squad, to declare that he was undergoing a religious crisis and intended to begin a new life. He was thirty-two and a man of honour from the Altarello di Baida Family of Cosa Nostra in which he held the rank of capodecina (head of ten). In the presence of dumbfounded officers, Vitale admitted to two murders, an attempted murder, a kidnapping, and a host of lesser crimes. He named the culprits in other homicides. He explained how a mafia Family is organized, who the members of his own Family were, and revealed the existence of the mafia Commission. Although he was at too low a level in the organization to know who exactly was on the Commission, he did explain that on one occasion the Corleonese triumvirate member Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina had come to give a ruling on a dispute between his Family and its neighbour. When news reached the press, he was dubbed ‘the Valachi of the Palermo suburbs’. Once again, long before Tommaso Buscetta, a pentito had exposed mafia secrets to anyone prepared to listen.
Three weeks after Vitale had first given himself up, an investigating magistrate invited a team of forensic psychiatrists to the Ucciardone prison and instructed them to ascertain whether the pentito was sane enough to be a credible trial witness. Some signs that his state of mind was fragile were already evident. Earlier that year, while being held for a week on the island of Asinara on suspicion of taking part in a kidnapping, he had covered himself in his own excrement. To the psychiatrists, he explained why:
Doing something like that helped me to understand in some way—to understand that something like that is not bad, but other things are bad. Something like that cannot hurt people, but other things are bad—the things I did before.
Vitale’s gesture of smearing himself with faeces was far more eloquent than his words—he was a poorly educated man. Yet for all his verbal stumbling, the story he went on to tell the forensic psychiatrists constitutes one of the most revealing insights into the emotional cost of belonging to an association that operates in a realm of silence and death.
The most influential man in Vitale’s life, the man from whom he sought the affection he missed after his father’s death, was his uncle who also became his capo. ‘He was everything to me,’ Vitale said. The most influential anxiety in his life revolved around his uncertain masculinity: ‘I believed I was a pederast, and I’ve always carried this thought with me.’ At the age of fourteen he stopped going to mass because he blamed God for the ‘ugly thoughts’ that went through his mind. He became a mafioso, he said, ‘as a protest against my own nature, because God had given me these complexes. A protest against God, for the complex of not being a man.’
But it was not because of any ‘complex’ that Leonardo Vitale’s destiny was already fixed when he was a boy. The mafia value system had been transmitted down the generations of the Vitale family; he was probably a descendant of a killer cleared of working for Don Raffaele Palizzolo back in the 1890s. Following the family tradition, when Leonardo’s uncle sensed young Leonardo’s admiration for him, he began to put his mettle to the test, asking him on one occasion, ‘Do you see my hands? They are stained with blood, and your father’s hands were even more stained than mine.’ His uncle asked him to demonstrate his ‘valour’, first by killing a horse, and then, at the age of nineteen, by killing a man; he was driven past the victim in a tiny Fiat 500 and stood up on the back seat to fire at him with a shotgun. Leonardo’s reward was to be taken skylark hunting by his uncle and then to be initiated into the Altarello di Baida Family. In what we now know was a historically resonant variant on the usual initiation ritual, his finger was pricked with the thorn from a Seville orange tree; its bitter fruit has been valued for its essence since Arab times.
Poisoning guard dogs, burning cars, vandalizing citrus fruit trees, killing a lemon thief, sending threatening letters with skulls drawn on them, placing bombs in offices, damaging machinery on building sites, and a great deal of hanging around: for the next thirteen years, Leonardo Vitale was engaged in the day-to-day business of extortion, of ‘taxing’ his Family’s territory on his uncle’s orders. In 1969, Vitale acquired more honour when he killed another mafioso. As a consequence, his uncle began to reveal more of the organization’s secrets to him, telling him of the existence of the Commission that had ordered this most recent killing, and also the murder of L’Ora journalist Mauro De Mauro who disappeared in 1970. Vitale was promoted and became a capodecina, which did not mean a great deal to him other than a higher share of the loot.
To the psychiatrists Vitale explained that he had left behind his earlier self and its anxieties by revealing the mafia’s secrets. It was, he said, as if someone else had committed his crimes. He had refound God, his inner peace, and with it the final reassurance that he was not, in fact, a pederast. But as he filled in more details of his story to the psychiatrists, it was noted that his mood became more depressed and unpredictable. He appeared one day with self-inflicted cuts on his arms; he then went around with no shoes and a long beard, declaring, ‘Madman, I was a madman.’ Magistrates began to wonder whether he was still going through the spiritual crisis that had led him to defect from the mafia, or whether he had been pressurized into playing up his insanity in order to undermine his testimony. When the psychiatric examination was concluded, Vitale was pronounced ‘mentally semi-infirm’; but the experts also decided that his condition did not impair his memory and thus the credibility of his testimony. Vitale’s own written reaction to how the psychiatrists classified him is harrowing in its strained lucidity:
Mental semi-infirmity = psychic sickness. Mafia = social sickness. Political mafia = social sickness. Corrupt authorities = social sickness. Prostitution = social sickness, syphilis, condyloma, etc. = physical sickness that influences the ailing psyche right from childhood. Religious crises = psychic sickness that derives from these other sicknesses. These are the evils to which I, Leonardo Vitale, resurrected in the faith of the true God, have fallen victim.
The case came to trial in 1977. Of the twenty-eight defendants, only Vitale and his uncle were convicted. His ‘mental semi-infirmity’ and his erratic behaviour had been enough for the prosecution argument to be fatally weakened. If these acquittals were understandable, the same cannot be said for the way Vitale’s profoundly important insights into the nature of the mafia were subsequently completely ignored by the authorities. Vitale was sentenced to twenty-five years. He spent most of his term in mental institutions before being released in June 1984. Soon afterwards much of what he had said back in 1973 was confirmed when Tommaso Buscetta turned state’s evidence. On Sunday, 2 December 1984, Vitale was coming back from mass with his mother and sister when an unidentified man shot him twice in the head. Late the following year Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino presented their evidence in support of the ‘Buscetta theorem’ in preparation for the maxi-trial. They began the document by telling the story of Leonardo Vitale, a story they brought to a conclusion as follows: ‘It is to be hoped that at least after his death Vitale will get the credence he deserved.’
DEATH OF A ‘LEFTIST FANATIC’: PEPPINO IMPASTATO
In the 1970s—known as the ‘years of lead’—Italian democracy faced its darkest days since the fall of Fascism. Once again, understanding and fighting the mafia was not high on the nation’s list of priorities. On 12 December 1969, two days after the attack on Michele ‘the Cobra’ Cavataio, which signalled a renewal of Cosa Nostra activity after the quiet years of the mid-1960s, a bomb exploded in a bank in Piazza Fontana in the centre of Milan; sixteen people were killed and dozens more wounded. Three days later an innocent anarchist pulled in for questioning about the Piazza Fontana bombing fell to his death from a fourth-floor window at Milan police headquarters. Soon afterwards evidence began to emerge linking neo-Fascist groups with the Piazza Fontana massacre, and also connecting elements in the Italian secret services with those same neo-Fascists. Militant left-wing groups adopted the slogan: ‘It was a state massacre.’ They were far from the only ones who believed that a plot to undermine democracy was afoot. There is little doubt that there was such plotting; the only question—still an open one—is how far into the institutions it extended. This was the ‘strategy of tension’: a programme of terrorist outrages intended to prepare the ground for a right-wing coup d’état.
The strategy of tension was a direct response to a perceived threat from the Left. The years 1967–8 saw a wave of student protest that was only radicalized by an often heavy-handed police response. More serious still was the season of strikes and demonstrations that began in the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969; for a while it looked as if the workers’ movement was about to outflank the Italian Communist Party to the left.
The Piazza Fontana bomb outrage heralded a new season of political instability and violence. Further right-wing terrorist acts were to follow throughout the decade and beyond. The worst atrocity was the murder of eighty-five people by a bomb placed in the second-class waiting room of Bologna station in August 1980. But political violence was by no means confined to the extreme Right. In the mid-1970s, as a world economic crisis helped tame labour militancy, the cluster of highly motivated but intensely quarrelsome parties to the left of the Communist Party began to realize that the revolution was not just around the corner, as they had hoped in the late 1960s. For a small minority of such militants of the Left, armed action, aimed at exacerbating social conflict and preparing the ground for a working-class insurrection, was the appropriate response to the decrease in strike action and the ‘state massacres’. The Red Brigades proclaimed ‘an attack on the heart of the state’, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s staged prominent murders of policemen, magistrates, entrepreneurs, journalists, and even Communist Party members suspected of collaborating with the ‘state of the multinationals’.
The mafia’s involvement in the strategy of tension and in right-wing plotting since 1969 is one of the favourite subjects of ‘behindologists’. There are one or two unequivocal links. In December 1970, a neo-Fascist prince occupied the Ministry of the Interior in an attempt to trigger a coup d’état; he withdrew peaceably a few hours later and the public were not made aware of the incident for several months. Subsequently Tommaso Buscetta and other pentiti would reveal that the mafia’s leadership had been asked to participate in the coup in return for the revision of certain important trial verdicts. Buscetta and ‘Little Bird’ Greco even crossed the Atlantic to discuss the matter with Leggio and the others in a series of meetings in Catania, Rome, Milan, and Zurich during the summer of 1970. It seems that many of the senior bosses were diffident about the proposal. One pentito drily observed that the football World Cup was on at the time and, as Italy progressed through the tournament to meet Brazil in the final, many men of honour were more interested in watching the matches on television than in meeting to discuss a Fascist revolution. The mafia agreed to participate in the revolt, but it seems that this was out of a desire to keep a close eye on developments rather than because of any commitment to the cause. The repression of the mafia by ‘iron prefect’ Cesare Mori had left a legacy of mistrust between the extreme right and Cosa Nostra.
Apart from the abortive coup d’état of 1970, it is also known that the mafia helped right-wing terrorists plant a bomb on a train running between Milan and Naples on 23 December 1984—it killed sixteen. Such episodes have helped fuel speculation that Cosa Nostra itself was merely a tool of shadowy figures in the corridors of Roman ministries, that above the highest echelons of Cosa Nostra was the guiding hand of a mysterious puppet-master. This is almost certainly fanciful. Cosa Nostra’s history suggests that when it did collaborate with violent right-wing subversives, it probably did so only on its own terms, in the hope of exacting precise concessions. The revision of trial verdicts is probably an archetype of what the mafia wanted to gain out of any such deal.
Behind the bloodshed and plotting of the late 1960s and early 1970s, much less conspicuous changes were taking place within the judicial system that would have a profound influence on the future history of the mafia. In Sicily, as in many other parts of Italy, the old guard of magistrates and judges were instinctively conservative and some of them were closely tied to the political class through Masonic societies and family ties. Even if there had not been any individuals who deliberately colluded with Cosa Nostra, such a body of men—and they were all men—was never likely to have the animus required to tackle organized crime at its highest levels.
Then in the 1960s, recruitment was widened by the spread of higher education; at the same time the magistrature finally acquired its own governing body and with it a degree of independence from government that compared favourably with other European countries. Towards the end of the decade an organization called Magistratura Democratica spearheaded a drive by younger magistrates to reform the sclerotic legal system. Some of the new generation of magistrates sought to bring more white-collar criminals—polluters, building speculators, corrupt politicians—to book.
As the magistrates grew more powerful, they also became highly politicized and organized into politically aligned factions. Partly as a result, the suspicion that investigations were launched, and even verdicts reached, for partisan political motives became a growing complaint. Nevertheless the great successes in the battle against the mafia in future years would have been unthinkable without this slow transformation in Italy’s legal system. But these were changes that would take years to have their effects on the struggle against Cosa Nostra.
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There were times in the 1970s when it seemed that Italian democracy might not survive the twin assaults from the strategy of tension and left-wing terrorism. The most worrying moment of all came on 16 March 1978 when the Red Brigades kidnapped the most influential figure in the Christian Democrat party, former Prime Minister Aldo Moro; his entire escort and his driver were murdered in the assault. For fifty-five days Italy held its breath as politicians of all parties debated whether to stand firm against the kidnappers’ demands, or negotiate to try to save Moro’s life. On 9 May, Moro was killed and his body left curled up in the boot of a red Renault in a Rome side street just a few dozen metres from the headquarters of both the DC and the PCI.
Understandably these terrorist emergencies helped to drown out concerns about the mafia’s re-emergence, and about its day-to-day regime of terror in western Sicily. There is no clearer illustration of this than a story that appeared on the same day that Moro’s body was found in Rome. The conservative Milanese newspaper Corriere della Sera briefly reported an incident in Cinisi, a small town on the western coast of Sicily, far from ‘the heart of the state’. The headline was: ‘Leftist fanatic blown apart by own bomb on railway track.’
The ‘leftist fanatic’ was Giuseppe ‘Peppino’ Impastato. But his death, at the age of thirty, was not the result of either a terrorist attack that went wrong, or even suicide, as was later claimed. Peppino Impastato was murdered by the Cinisi mafia, although it would take nearly a quarter of a century and a dogged campaign by friends and relatives for justice to be done in his case. To begin to get a sense of why his story is historically significant, it is enough to look at the photograph of a group of ‘men of respect’ from Cinisi in the picture section of this book; the photo was taken in the early 1950s. Peppino is the smaller of the two little boys in short trousers, the one with his left hand tucked under his father’s right arm.
The little boy in the picture did indeed grow up to be a left-wing militant; he was an intelligent and occasionally tortured rebel who devoted half his life to the cause of fighting capitalism and oppression. Like many young Italians at the time, he participated passionately in what now seem arcane sectarian disputes conducted in an arid Marxist jargon; he argued through his ideological stance on everything from the Vietnam war to nudism; he moved from one tiny revolutionary party or initiative to another, oscillating all the time between euphoria and despair (he found personal and romantic relationships difficult). But if Peppino’s politics are an essential ingredient of his story, then even more important to it is the fact that Peppino’s rebellion was lived out within one of the most mafia-saturated family environments it is possible to imagine. Peppino’s father was a mafioso, a low-ranking member of the Cinisi Family. There were several other men of honour in the extended family, as there had been for decades. Peppino’s rebellion against this background was unprecedented.
The surviving members of the Impastato family would later look back on one moment in 1963 as the first sign of Peppino’s revolt against the mafia culture that had surrounded him all his young life. When Peppino was fifteen, Cesare Manzella, the then boss of Cinisi who was also his uncle by marriage, was killed by a TNT-laden Alfa Romeo Giulietta during the first mafia war. The teenage Peppino was horrified. As the whole town knew, pieces of his uncle were found stuck to lemon trees hundreds of metres from the crater where the car had been. He asked another uncle, ‘What must he have felt?’ The reply—‘It was all over in an instant’—did little to quell the young man’s anxiety.
By the time he was seventeen, Peppino was already an activist, addressing rallies and co-editing a news-sheet, The Socialist Idea. His confrontation with the mafia was immediate, direct, and astonishingly brave in a town where the murderous suppression of the left-wing peasant movement in the post-war years was still a recent memory. In 1966, he wrote an article entitled ‘Mafia: a mountain of shit’. After reading it, one of his many mafioso relatives warned his father, ‘If he were my son, I’d dig a ditch and bury him.’ Peppino was banned from the parental home.
Peppino Impastato’s home town of Cinisi was no minor outpost of Cosa Nostra’s empire. By the 1960s it was one of the most important centres of mafia activity in western Sicily. Palermo’s new airport—obviously a prime target for racketeering and contraband operations—was built there in the late 1950s. Of Cinisi’s population of 8,000, 80 per cent had relatives in the United States. It is no coincidence that the town was one of the major entrepôts of the transatlantic heroin business. Cinisi boss Don Tano Badalamenti had strong family ties to the Detroit mob, bases for his drug-dealing operations in Rome and Milan, and a whole string of construction companies under his control. He was massively influential within Cosa Nostra too. He had helped Tommaso Buscetta draw up the rules of the first Commission in 1957, and he was a member of the triumvirate established in 1970. Upon assuming his place in the triumvirate, according to one pentito, his first act was to have a small-time Neapolitan criminal shot. This was the man who, years earlier, had slapped Lucky Luciano at Naples racecourse. Thus, eight years after Luciano’s death, Badalamenti was able to inform his contacts in the American Cosa Nostra that the insult had been avenged. When the full Commission was reconstituted in 1974, it was Badalamenti who sat at the head of the table.
* * *
Peppino’s revolt tore at fissures that already existed in the Impastato household. His mother, Felicia Bartolotta Impastato, took to giving him food surreptitiously. She had married into the mafia, but did not have blood relatives who were men of honour. Peppino’s father was an inarticulate, domineering man who would only allow his wife out to meet other mafia wives. He vented on her the ‘dishonour’ and anxiety that his inability to control his son brought down on him. ‘It was a dictatorship. Desperation … fear. When I heard him come home I used to piss myself,’ she would later recount. Although Felicia was too afraid to attend Peppino’s rallies, she tried to persuade her son to moderate the tone of his campaigning. ‘Giuseppe, look, I’m against the mafia as well. But can’t you see what your father is like? Be careful, my son.’
Despite the mafia’s threats and his mother’s fears, Peppino pressed on. In his mother’s words he fought for ‘just and precise things’, things that almost always clashed with mafia interests. He was heavily involved in a campaign in support of the peasants whose land was to be expropriated so that a third runway for the airport could be built. He also struggled alongside building workers who were exploited by mafia-protected employers. Much of his time in the mid-1970s was taken up with the fight against what the Italian Communist Party (the PCI) called its ‘historic compromise’—its decision to support Christian Democrat governments where it felt they were moving in a progressive direction. Leftists cried out at this betrayal, although there is some justification in the claim that the ‘historic compromise’ saved Italy from the fate of Chile, where Pinochet’s bloody military coup overthrew a democratic government in 1973. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the PCI’s moderate strategy in the rest of Italy, in western Sicily compromise with the DC meant collaboration with the mafia in the eyes of Peppino and his network of comrades.
Peppino was also harsh in his ideological critique of the hippies who had set up Italy’s first commune in an abandoned Florio villa near by; he thought it demoralizing that they had forsaken politics in favour of nudism and cannabis. In 1977, he founded a tiny local radio station, Radio Aut. Its highlight was an evening show of music and satire directed at ‘Mafiopolis’ and its ‘Mafia-cipality’—in other words Cinisi and its DC-dominated town council. The show’s sketches lampooned the local Family and its shady affairs by setting them in grotesque versions of Dante’s Divine Comedy or the Wild West; ruling boss Tano Badalamenti was transparently mocked as ‘Tano Seduto’ (‘Sitting Bully’). In a newspaper article, Peppino also referred to Badalamenti as ‘a paleface adept in drug trafficking and the use of the sawn-off shotgun’. In the spring of 1978, Peppino helped set up a photographic exhibition in the town on ‘The mafia and the landscape’, demonstrating the damage done by cowboy road building; at the same time he was selected as a candidate in the local elections. There is a chilling photo of several men of respect closely examining one of the panels of the ‘mafia and the landscape’ exhibition; it was taken on the day before Peppino was murdered.
Peppino Impastato knew the risks he was taking. His mother warned him that the mafia were ‘animals’, for whom ‘snuffing out a candle was nothing’. He probably calculated that he would be protected to some extent by the fact that his father was a man of honour. His father is now known to have taken considerable risks to protect his son from Badalamenti’s vengeance. Then, in September 1977, he was knocked down and killed by a passing car. For many years the family thought his death was an accident, although they have now come to believe he was murdered. Whatever the truth, Peppino was left unprotected by his father’s death. At the funeral, Peppino refused to shake hands with the mafiosi who came to pay their respects—a resounding insult; nor did his campaigning decline in intensity in the following months. He almost certainly knew he was going to be killed.
On the night of 8–9 May 1978, Peppino was kidnapped on his way back from Radio Aut and taken in his own car to a tumbledown stone shack a few yards from the Palermo–Trapani railway line near the boundary fence of the airport. There he was beaten and tortured before being dumped on the track with several sticks of dynamite strapped to his torso.
Early the following morning railway workers reported that a fifty-centimetre section of track had been damaged. When the carabinieri arrived at the scene, they found Peppino’s car, his white Scholl clogs and his glasses near the hole blown by the explosion. Fragments of his body and clothes were scattered over a 300-metre radius around it; only his legs, parts of his face, and a few fingers were recognizable. Peppino’s death was a horrific echo of the way his uncle the mafioso had died back in 1963—the very murder that had provoked him to ask, ‘What must he have felt?’ and begin his rebellion against the mafia.
* * *
On 6 December 2000, twenty-two years later, a parliamentary commission of inquiry published a report into the way the authorities dealt with Peppino Impastato’s death. It concluded that the investigation had been handled in an insensitive and slapdash way that in effect supported the killers’ own efforts to make Peppino’s death look like a suicidal terrorist attack. Peppino’s friends and family had proclaimed all along that there was a cover-up.
Incredibly, despite Peppino’s well-known campaign against the mafia, despite the fact that Cinisi was a notorious mafia stronghold, despite the threats that activists had received, and despite the fact that even the carabinieri themselves had earlier reported that Peppino and his comrades were ‘incapable’ of committing terrorist acts, investigators in the immediate aftermath of Peppino’s death did not even entertain the possibility that he could have been murdered, let alone by men of honour. Witnesses who participated in the initial inspection of the scene, including the mortician brought in to collect what could be found of the victim’s body, are certain that there were clear traces of blood inside the shack where Peppino was tortured. Because the shack had no openings facing the railway track, those traces of blood could not have got there as a result of the explosion. Yet the initial report into the case by the carabinieri fails even to mention the stone shack, although Peppino’s car was found right next to it.
The morning after Peppino’s death, the carabinieri raided Radio Aut and the houses of his friends and relatives. His mother’s house was searched before she was even told of her son’s death. At his aunt’s house they found a letter in Peppino’s hand dating from several months previously; in it he alluded to his ‘failure as a man and as a revolutionary’ and hinted that he might take his own life. This was to be the slender basis for the ‘terrorist suicide’ conclusion reached by the initial report into the incident. The same story was immediately leaked to the press. In the following few days, as evidence of the bloodstains in the shack emerged, there were further misleading leaks to the newspapers. An anonymous article in the Giornale di Sicilia reported that the blood was menstrual and that it came from sanitary towels found near by. No such towels had, in fact, been discovered. Peppino’s friends visited the site and spent a day of inconceivable anguish filling several plastic bags with bits of Peppino’s body that the authorities had neglected to recover. In the shack, they also found a stone covered in more blood; when they showed it to an independent forensic scientist, the blood turned out to be from the same rare group as Peppino’s.
In the days following, Peppino’s friends’ houses were subject to mysterious break-ins. There were rumours in Cinisi that Peppino had a dossier on the local mafia and its political and business links—Peppino himself had hinted as much—but no such dossier was ever located. Tensions ran high; at Peppino’s funeral procession, 1,000 activists and friends carried banners: ‘Peppino was murdered by the mafia’, ‘With Peppino’s ideas and courage we will carry on’. Some later gathered in front of Don Tano Badalamenti’s house shouting, ‘Butcher.’
The parliamentary inquiry of 2000 is a sorry catalogue of omissions and suspicions. Peppino’s brother testified to the parliamentary commissioners that relations between the local mafia and the carabinieri appeared to be good before the murder. ‘I often saw them [the carabinieri] walking arm-in-arm with Tano Badalamenti and his deputies. You can’t have faith in the institutions when you see mafiosi arm-in-arm with carabinieri.’ The commission of inquiry concluded that this was a symptom of the way that the authorities had traditionally sought to live side by side with the informal power of the mafia in places like Cinisi.
Whatever the reasons for the way the investigation was handled in its early stages, the trail had gone cold by the time more competent investigating magistrates took over the case. They could only conclude, in 1984, that Peppino had indeed been murdered by the mafia but that it was not possible to identify the individual culprits.
The case was reopened eight years later as the result of campaigning by those close to Peppino, notably his mother, his brother, and the historian Umberto Santino. But even in 1992, investigators had to conclude that there was not enough evidence for a prosecution. New testimonies from pentiti finally resulted in Don Tano Badalamenti’s being committed for trial in 1999; by then he was already serving a long sentence in a New Jersey penitentiary for drug trafficking. While the trial was still continuing, and while the parliamentary inquiry was looking into the case, a powerful film of Peppino Impastato’s story won the prize for the best screenplay at the Venice Film Festival; it was called I cento passi—‘One Hundred Steps’—because that was the precise distance between Peppino’s home and Tano Badalamenti’s.
At last, in April 2002, Don Tano was given a life sentence for ordering the murder. Felicia Bartolotta Impastato’s reaction to the verdict was profoundly dignified:
I have never had any feelings of vendetta. All I have done is call for justice for my son’s death. I have to confess that, after so many years of waiting, I had lost faith—I never thought we would reach this point. Now I feel a great deal of contentment, of satisfaction. I always knew what happened. Badalamenti used to call my husband Luigi to complain about Peppino, and my husband begged him not to kill the boy.
These words demonstrate the astral distance that there now is between Peppino’s mother and the deathly domestic environment of honour and omertà in which she had been confined for so long. Her experience has provided crucial insights into the role of women in Cosa Nostra. For it is through the women of families close to Cosa Nostra that the mafia’s values—the code of honour, the contempt for the law, the tolerance of violence—are taught to the very young and handed down through the generations. Interviewed in 2001, Peppino’s mother made it clear how important women were to the mafia, how proud some Cinisi women were to call themselves mafiose; as she heard one such woman say, ‘My brothers were born mafiosi. Some are born stupid, and some are born mafiosi; my brothers were born mafiosi!’
Antimafia campaigners are now no longer as isolated and as alienated from the authorities as Peppino Impastato. Sicily has a varied constellation of antimafia associations. Felicia Bartolotta Impastato, like her son, has become one of the symbols of this broad-based movement. All the same, it is a sign of Sicily’s misfortunes that it still needs symbols like them. And it is difficult to conclude that the justice they have finally won after a quarter of a century is really justice at all.
The bosses who began to be released from jail following the trial verdicts of 1968–9 had lost a great deal of money. Legal fees and the expense of supporting prisoners had emptied their coffers. Catania man of honour Antonino Calderone, who later turned state’s evidence and talked to Judge Falcone in 1987, had a particularly vivid memory of those hard times. He recalled that Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina had wept because he was unable to pay for his mother to come and visit him while he was awaiting trial. Calderone also remembered how rapidly the situation changed once the mafia became active again. ‘They all became millionaires. Suddenly, in a couple of years. Because of drugs.’ The history of Cosa Nostra in the 1970s rides on a flood tide of heroin profits. And it was that flood that ultimately led to the bloodiest conflict in the mafia’s history.
Not that all Palermo mafiosi were poor in 1970. The Grecos, Cosa Nostra’s royal family, were still more than comfortable. In Cinisi, Don Tano Badalamenti’s transatlantic business had not been hampered by the aftermath of the first mafia war. But many of the other capos needed money quickly, the Corleonesi more than any of them. Thus it was that they turned to kidnapping as a way of meeting their basic needs and accumulating capital. The principal targets were the offspring of leading Palermo businessmen; the profits earned were then turned into seed capital for illegal business. The 1970s saw a boom in tobacco smuggling, centred on Naples. Whereas Tommaso Buscetta had been trafficking in hundreds of cases of cigarettes between Sicily and the mainland back in the 1950s, Neapolitan smugglers and their Sicilian partners were now dealing in shiploads. Camorra chief Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza later admitted dealing in 50,000 cases of cigarettes per month. More and more mafiosi were drawn towards Naples to partake of the bonanza.
Even the immense profits of tobacco were soon to be outstripped in importance by heroin. US President Richard Nixon announced a ‘war on drugs’ soon after his inauguration in 1969. Like most such wars, it ultimately proved counter-productive. By causing the closure of Corsican-run refineries in Marseilles, the Nixon administration created the opportunity for Sicily to become the new base for this crucial phase of heroin’s long journey from the poppy fields of the Near and Far East to the streets of American cities. In 1975, a Turkish drugs and arms dealer who had been the main supplier of morphine base to the Marseilles refineries approached Cosa Nostra directly. Soon afterwards heroin laboratories began to appear across western Sicily, staffed initially by chemists who were refugees from Marseilles. The figures for heroin addiction across Western Europe and North America registered a huge leap in 1977 as the Sicilian refineries came on stream. The amount of heroin seized across the world increased by nearly six and a half times between 1974 and 1982, the years when the Sicilian mafia established its dominance of the market.
But mafiosi from Sicily were not content to be refiners and importers of heroin; with the collaboration of their US peers they also aimed to control their own distribution network. Tommaso Buscetta started up his first pizzeria as long ago as 1966 with a loan from New York’s Gambino family. By the late 1970s, nine out of every ten Sicilian illegal aliens deported from the US were found working in pizzerias. The importation and production of Italian foodstuffs had been important to the American mafia since the beginning of the century. So it is no surprise that the supply of ingredients to the network of restaurants springing up across the USA was monopolized by mafia-protected firms. The Pizza Connection case in the USA in 1986 would prove that many of these outlets were dealing in much more than the odd margherita or quattro formaggi. Hidden among America’s countless pizza parlours were some that constituted the mafia’s transnational heroin distribution network.
By 1982, Sicilian mafiosi were estimated to control the refining, shipping, and much of the distribution of 80 per cent of the heroin consumed in the north-eastern United States. The profits that funnelled back to Sicily, of which no definitive calculation will ever be reached for obvious reasons, were certainly of the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. In the late 1970s, Cosa Nostra became wealthier and more powerful than it had ever been before.
The Pizza Connection also involved a new balance of power between the two arms of Cosa Nostra. The Sicilians—the ‘zips’ as lower-ranking US men of honour enviously called them—were no longer just cheap labour for the American bosses. Senior American mobsters could no longer afford to adopt the patronizing attitudes towards the Sicilians that Joe ‘Bananas’ Bonanno had done on his holiday back in 1957. With their numbers, their organization, and their access to seemingly limitless supplies of heroin, the Sicilians now had considerable autonomy in the United States.
Knickerbocker Avenue, in the Bonanno Family’s Brooklyn territory, became at that time a Sicilian colony and heroin terminal. One DEA agent who infiltrated the Philadelphia Family of Cosa Nostra learned that
Brooklyn meant the Sicilian mafia, as distinguished from the Italian-American La Cosa Nostra in the United States. There was a distinct difference … Brooklyn controlled all the heroin in the United States … The Sicilians used the Italo-Americans to distribute the heroin.
But the zips had not only established an enterprise syndicate in the United States; they were also making serious inroads into the American Cosa Nostra power syndicate. Special Agent Joseph D. Pistone (a.k.a. Donnie Brasco) infiltrated the Bonanno Family in New York on behalf of the FBI from 1975 until 1981. He recorded the following anxious conversation between two American men of honour who had heard that some of the Sicilians were going to be made into captains:
—those guys [the zips] are looking to take over everything. There’s no way we can make them captains. We’d lose all our strength.
—… them fucking zips ain’t going to back up to nobody. You give them the fucking power, if you don’t get hurt now, you get hurt three years from now. They’ll bury you. You cannot give them the power. They don’t give a fuck. They don’t care who’s boss. They got no respect.
In 1979, a Sicilian man of honour actually took over the whole Bonanno Family of the New York mafia for two years. He is said to have stepped down only because he found it difficult doing business in English.
But Sicilian and American mafiosi were by no means always rivals in the heroin industry. In fact many of them were relatives. A mafioso looking for trustworthy partners and workers for his drug business will turn first to his blood family, preferably family members who provide the extra guarantee of being mafia initiates. When heroin commerce moved into overdrive in the 1970s, many men of honour were in the fortunate position of already having transatlantic family businesses that could adapt easily to trading in whatever illicit commodity they needed to. This is particularly true of those coastal towns that tended to have the closest links with the United States. An obvious case in point is Cinisi, home of Don Tano Badalamenti. Another is the nearby Castellammare del Golfo, place of origin of Sicilian-American criminal bloodlines like the Magaddinos and the Bonannos. Palermo too had such links; Salvatore Inzerillo, the capo of the venerable Passo di Rigano Family and a major heroin dealer, was the cousin of Carlo Gambino who headed the most powerful of the five New York Families until his death in 1976. Members of clans like the Inzerillos, the Badalamentis, and the Magaddinos kept on travelling back and forth across the Atlantic; cousins from the US and Sicily kept on marrying each other down through the generations. The Inzerillos’ transoceanic family tree caused Judge Falcone to scratch his head at the ‘incredible kinship tangle’.
Drug trafficking is all about contacts, about bringing together a gallery of specialists: from investors, to the suppliers of morphine base, to technicians able to refine the drug, to transporters, to small-time dealers who put it on the streets, to financiers with the expertise required to launder the profits and keep them out of the grasp of the Guardia di Finanza (the Italian tax police). These networks are international and they spread from the top to the bottom of society. And they are not the same thing as the mafia.
Mafiosi have dealt in drugs for as long as drugs have been dealt. But the mafia as such has never been a heroin conglomerate. As Buscetta said, ‘In narcotics trafficking everyone was autonomous. The people who had the most economic opportunities did the most work.’ ‘Having economic opportunities’ means weaving webs of contacts with specialists outside the organization.
Of course there are limits to the principle of autonomy, and everything that a man of honour does can have political implications within Cosa Nostra. A Family has the right to tax any economic activity carried out on its turf, or to exact tribute from any of its men of honour who are involved in enterprises not directly under its control. The easiest way for a mafia boss to profit from drugs is to ‘protect’ the dealers. This method has the added advantage of keeping the narcotics trade at one remove from the Family; because the specialists that the trade requires are not bound by omertà, they bring higher risks because they are likely to tell the police too much when they are arrested.
But when the profits are so large that they generate rivalries between Families, then the Commission is likely to become involved. And when the Commission is involved, it absorbs the business in question into Cosa Nostra’s structure; it is the criminal equivalent of taking a company into public ownership. Getting a panel of senior bosses to manage a business is a way of making sure that they all know what is going on, and that they all get a share of the profits.
A typical instance is the tobacco smuggling through Naples in the mid-1970s. The Commission began to act as a consortium or joint stock company to buy tobacco shipments through Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza—in exactly the way that it had done for heroin deals before the first mafia war. In 1974, Zaza and several other prominent Camorristi were even initiated into Cosa Nostra as a way of flattering them and keeping them under control. All the same, the Commission did not and could not monopolize either the mafia’s cigarette smuggling or its heroin trade. For one thing, it represented the province of Palermo rather than the whole island. Much of the heroin business remained off the Commission’s radar and outside its control. The result was the same volatile admixture of business, politics, and suspicion that had led to the first mafia war.
BANKERS, MASONS, TAX COLLECTORS, MAFIOSI
The drug revenue flowing back from the United States put gold taps in tiny peasant houses, built apartment blocks and seaside villas, emptied the shelves of Palermo’s burgeoning luxury boutiques, and was reinvested in legal and illegal ventures across Italy and Europe. The heroin dollars also leaked into the grass roots of the financial sector (in the 1970s, an archipelago of local private and cooperative banks doubled its share of the Sicilian investment market) and were sucked towards the commanding heights of the Italian banking system where they mingled with the profits of political corruption. Following the money, mafiosi reached further than ever into the topmost echelons of society.
Giovanni Falcone arrived in the Palace of Justice in Palermo in 1978. Within two years the ‘Falcone method’ produced a breakthrough in a case that went to the heart of Cosa Nostra’s transatlantic drug business: it linked Passo di Rigano boss Salvatore Inzerillo; the so-called ‘Cherry Hill Gambinos’ in Brooklyn; the building magnate and largest taxpayer in Sicily, Rosario Spatola; and former triumvirate member Stefano Bontate—each of them part of a sprawling web of marriage alliances. Falcone was also working with magistrates in Milan on a fraud and murder case that threatened to expose the very worst of Italian society in the form of corruption, mafia influence, and anti-democratic conspiracy at the highest levels of the political and financial institutions.
The case centred on banker Michele Sindona. In the early 1970s, Sindona was the most influential financial figure in Italy. He was in charge of one of the biggest banks in the USA, had control over the Vatican’s foreign investments, and was a major funder of Christian Democrat politicians. In addition, he was strongly suspected of laundering money for Cosa Nostra. But in 1974 his financial empire collapsed amid fraud charges and he fled to the United States. From there, in 1979, he commissioned a mafioso to shoot dead the lawyer in charge of liquidating his Italian affairs. As the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic closed in on him, Sindona then enlisted the help of the same mafiosi who were involved in the Inzerillo–Gambino–Spatola–Bontate heroin smuggling ring to stage his own hoax kidnapping by the ‘Subversive Proletarian Committee for a Better Life’ (a non-existent left-wing terrorist group). He spent nearly three months in Sicily in the hands of the ‘terrorists’, and even arranged to be anaesthetized and shot in the left thigh as evidence of their deadly intent. The real goal of the kidnapping was to issue thinly disguised blackmail notes to Sindona’s former political allies in the hope that they could still engineer the salvation of his banks—and therefore of Cosa Nostra’s money. The plot failed; Sindona was ‘released’ by his captors and gave himself up to the FBI; he died in prison in 1986 after drinking coffee laced with cyanide.
In the summer of 1982, another disgraced Italian banker, Roberto Calvi, was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London. Calvi’s career reads like an echo of Sindona’s: a rapid rise, close ties to the Vatican, funds channelled to governing political parties, and a financial collapse followed by desperate attempts to save himself by blackmailing politicians. It took until April 2002 for it to be confirmed—in the minds of the Italian authorities, at least—that Calvi had not taken his own life as was first believed, but was in fact ‘suicided’; the Italian language twists ‘suicide’ into a transitive verb to describe such cases. At the time of writing, a mafia boss close to the Corleonesi seems likely to go on trial for allegedly ordering his death. The prosecution’s thesis, based on the evidence of a mafia pentito, is that Calvi was recycling drug money for the Corleonesi in the same way that Sindona did for the Inzerillo–Gambino–Spatola–Bontate group, and that he was murdered because he too had proved unreliable. It is anticipated that the man of honour in question will deny the charges.
Both of ‘God’s bankers’ were members of a Masonic lodge known as Propaganda 2 or P2. In March 1981, magistrates from Milan investigating Sindona’s fake kidnapping discovered a list of 962 members of P2 at the office of its Grand Master, Licio Gelli. Among the men who had taken its oath were the entire leadership of the secret services, forty-four members of parliament, and a slew of senior businessmen, military figures, policemen, civil servants, and journalists. The parliamentary inquiry into P2 concluded that its aim had been to pollute public life and undermine democracy, although not all of the Lodge’s members were aware of its underlying aims; its Grand Master had almost certainly been keeping secret papers on members for blackmail purposes. The exact extent of P2’s influence is still unclear.
The relationship between the mafia and other Masonic groups is easier to define. Starting in the 1970s, some senior men of honour joined lodges as a way of making contact with businessmen, bureaucrats, and politicians. As one pentito explained, ‘Through the Freemasons you can make comprehensive contact with businessmen, with the institutions, with the men who wield a different kind of power to the punitive power that Cosa Nostra has.’
One example demonstrates how insidious an influence these networks can be: the parliamentary inquiry into the Sindona affair found that the plastic surgeon who anaesthetized and wounded Michele Sindona during his fake kidnapping was, by his own definition, ‘a sentimental international Mason’ with close links both to mafiosi and to the Grand Master of P2. For nineteen years he was also the resident doctor at Palermo police headquarters and may have had friends in the US government.
It would be a mistake to assume that the ‘white-collar’ Masons were the dominant partners in this venal tango with the thugs of Cosa Nostra. For one thing, there was no question of a conflict of loyalties for anyone who was a member of both secret societies. Cosa Nostra’s interests always come first, as one pentito explained: ‘The [Masonic] oath is a fiction because we’ve only got one oath that we respect—the one we take in Cosa Nostra.’
It is now known that the two richest men in Sicily in the 1960s and 1970s took both oaths, Masonic and mafioso. They were the Salvo cousins, Nino and Ignazio. Nino Salvo was an abrasive, outgoing man of honour from the Salemi Family in the province of Trapani. In 1955, he married a woman whose father ran one of the small companies that held tax-collecting contracts. In Sicily both direct and indirect taxes were paid through private firms in a system that the leading historian of Palermo has called ‘an infernal money-eating machine’. Together with his father-in-law and his more urbane cousin Ignazio, Nino would go on to form a cartel that in 1959 secured the right to collect 40 per cent of Sicily’s taxes. In 1962, with the help of ‘young Turk’ Salvo Lima, the Salvo cousins’ company won the contract to collect taxes in Palermo—a business that alone generated over $2 million (1960s values) per year in profit. Their control over the tax-collection system grew still further in the mid-1960s, and would last until the early 1980s. Where similar businesses elsewhere in Italy generally took around 3 per cent of what they gathered as profit, the Salvos raked off a constant 10 per cent. The cousins supplemented their income by cornering huge European Union and Italian government subsidies for the agribusiness concerns that they set up with their tax-collecting booty.
Naturally this level of robbery could not have been maintained without solid and extensive political support, particularly in the Sicilian Regional Assembly. In fact a corrupt short circuit between the Salvos, the mafia, and sections of the DC deformed the whole Sicilian political system. It was bad enough that Salvo funds were kicked back to politicians in return for support when it came to renewing tax-collecting contracts or fending off the periodic attempts to bring this valuable service under public control. But there was more to it than that. In the Regional Assembly, as in town councils across the island, many politicians were actually recruited and chosen by the mafia in consultation with senior DC bosses.
In 1982 Judge Falcone subjected the Salvo cousins’ affairs to an audit—an unheard-of gesture of lèse-majesté. His head-on confrontation with Cosa Nostra was only just getting under way. But by then the narcotics boom had begun to immerse the Sicilian mafia deeper in blood than it had ever been.
RISE OF THE CORLEONESI: 2—TOWARDS THE MATTANZA (1970–1983)
The second mafia war of 1981–3 is known in Italian as la mattanza, a term that comes from the fishing industry. Short of travelling to watch a mattanza at the old Florio fishery on Favignana, the best way to get a sense of the power of this metaphor is to see how Roberto Rossellini registered the impact of a real mattanza on the face of his lover and leading actress, Ingrid Bergman, in the most famous sequence from his 1950 film Stromboli. Bergman plays a Lithuanian refugee who marries a poor Sicilian fisherman to escape an internment camp. The harsh reality of his life is played out before her eyes when the tuna fishermen tow their catch into a calm bay, circle their boats and wail a rhythmic dirge as they haul nets full of huge, thrashing fish to the surface. Then Bergman looks on in shock as the tuna are battered and hauled aboard with fearsome hooked harpoons, turning the water to gore and spume.
The savage mafia cull of 1981–3 did not come unannounced. A full three years before the slaughter began, the carabinieri were given an accurate map of the battle lines and a briefing on the tactics of the winners—the Corleonesi. In April 1978, Giuseppe Di Cristina, a man of honour, secretly arranged to talk to a captain of the carabinieri in an isolated cottage. Di Cristina was a far higher-ranking informer than poor Leonardo Vitale. For one thing, he was the boss of Riesi in central-southern Sicily. For another, he was probably one of the men of honour who dressed up as a policeman to take part in the viale Lazio massacre of 1969; his presence at that symbolically important collective execution was meant to demonstrate that it was willed by the whole of Cosa Nostra, not just Palermo. Di Cristina, in short, was at the heart of the mafia system. Yet the carabinieri present at the meeting said he looked like a hunted animal.
The man who inspired Di Cristina’s fear was Luciano Leggio. As Di Cristina explained, Leggio was now a multi-millionaire. The former ‘Scarlet Pimpernel’ of Corleone had been in jail for four years, but was still running his affairs from behind bars through his avatars ‘Shorty’ Riina and ‘Tractor’ Provenzano; Di Cristina estimated that these two, known as ‘the beasts’, were each guilty of at least forty murders. Leggio’s sources of income included kidnappings carried out on the Italian mainland. In 1973, Eugene Paul Getty III, seventeen-year-old grandson of one of the richest men in the world, was abducted in Rome. He was only freed five months later when a ransom in the region of $2.5 million was handed over; the boy’s ear and a lock of his hair had earlier been sent to a newspaper as proof of the kidnappers’ strength of mind. It was all Leggio’s work, according to Di Cristina.
But more significant even than Di Cristina’s revelations about Luciano Leggio was the picture he drew of the political divisions within Cosa Nostra. The organization was splitting between two factions. The undisputed leader of the first was Leggio. Set against him was a faction led by Don Tano Badalamenti, the ‘Sitting Bully’ of Cinisi (and, incidentally, Leggio’s compare).
What Di Cristina had realized is that the Corleonesi were engaged in a long-term strategy aimed at encircling the opposing faction. They were enlisting supporters one by one from the Families that presided over the small towns in the province of Palermo and the rest of Sicily. As a loyal follower of former triumvirate member Stefano Bontate—a key component of the Badalamenti faction—Di Cristina was one of the last provincial obstacles the Corleonesi had to remove before they could complete their plan of attack with an assault on Palermo itself. (Because he was so close to Bontate, Di Cristina was much less forthcoming about Badalamenti’s faction and did not mention that it also included two of the most important heroin dealers in Cosa Nostra: Passo di Rigano boss Salvatore ‘Totuccio’ Inzerillo and, still lurking in prison, Tommaso Buscetta.)
Like almost all mafiosi who have talked to the police at different times through the association’s history, Di Cristina had few options left. Leggio commanded an elite death squad of fourteen men with bases not only in Sicily, but also in Naples, Rome, and other Italian cities. The Corleonesi had infiltrated the Families of their enemies. (It later emerged that they were also building a secret army by initiating men of honour without informing the other leaders.) Di Cristina’s only hope was that the carabinieri could act against the Corleonesi first, perhaps by capturing Provenzano who had been a fugitive from justice for fifteen years. Di Cristina told the carabinieri that ‘the Tractor’ had been seen very recently near Bagheria, in a white Mercedes driven by the young Giovanni ‘lo scannacristiani’ Brusca. The Bruscas of San Giuseppe Jato were among Leggio’s oldest allies—they constituted the keystone of the Corleonese faction in the province of Palermo. It is not by chance that Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina was godfather to ‘the man who cuts Christians’ throats’ when he was initiated in 1976.
Di Cristina concluded his chat with the carabinieri in a reflective mood: ‘By the end of next week I’ll be taking delivery of a bullet-proof car … You know, I’ve got a few venial sins on my conscience. And some mortal ones too.’ A few weeks later his sins caught up with him when he was shot dead in Passo di Rigano on the outskirts of Palermo. Had they known how to interpret it, the carabinieri would have derived further confirmation of how the coming war would evolve from the manner of Di Cristina’s death, because Passo di Rigano was the fief of Salvatore ‘Totuccio’ Inzerillo, a leading member of the anti-Corleonese faction. There could hardly be a more blatant sfregio than this: the killing of a boss carried out on someone else’s territory without permission.
Thousands of people attended Di Cristina’s funeral—virtually the whole town of Riesi. At around the same time the carabinieri produced a lucid report on just how important was his testimony:
The information provided by Di Cristina reveals a hidden and truly paradoxical truth; it reveals the chilling reality that, parallel to the authority of the state, there is a more incisive and efficient power that acts, moves, makes money, kills, and even makes judgements—all behind the back of the authorities.
No judicial action followed.
* * *
Since Di Cristina, and since the mattanza, more mafia defectors have helped the political build-up to the second mafia war to be reconstructed. The Corleonesi began manoeuvring to establish their domination over Cosa Nostra very soon after the organization started operating again under the Bontate–Badalamenti–Leggio triumvirate in 1970. Militarily strong but financially weak at this stage, Leggio and his ‘beasts’ turned kidnapping into a gesture aimed at redistributing wealth and demonstrating their power. One victim was the son of Don Ciccio Vassallo who was a leading construction magnate during the sack of Palermo. Both Badalamenti and Bontate were close to Vassallo, but neither could do anything to free the hostage. When after five months the negotiations bore fruit and the ransom was paid, ‘Shorty’ Riina distributed it to the neediest Families in the Palermo area; the Corleonesi were already thinking for the long term, investing in their allies within Cosa Nostra’s state structure rather than in new business ventures.
In 1975, Riina inflicted an even more smarting humiliation on Stefano Bontate by kidnapping and killing the father-in-law of Nino Salvo—one of the cousins who ran Sicily’s private tax collection empire. For all their political connections, wealth, and pedigree as men of honour, neither Bontate nor Salvo could even recover the old man’s body. Riina simply denied having anything to do with the abduction, but as Buscetta later said, ‘Shorty’ was sending a signal ‘as big as a house’. Other mafiosi, observing not only his power and arrogance, but also Badalamenti’s and Bontate’s impotence and blindness to the signals, drew the appropriate conclusions about which way to jump if fighting broke out.
In 1977, the Corleonesi expelled Don Tano Badalamenti from Cosa Nostra. The charge was that he had been getting rich on drug money behind the backs of the other bosses—or at least that was the explanation that radiated out from the Commission. It was an extraordinary demonstration of the control that the Corleonesi now had within the Commission, over which Cinisi’s ‘Sitting Bully’ had presided after it was re-established in 1974. Despite being expelled, Badalamenti still retained a formidable power base in Cinisi and its environs, even though he now lived thousands of miles away in the US, but the humiliation that the Corleonesi inflicted showed that his power within Cosa Nostra’s institutions was at an end. Badalamenti’s replacement as titular head of the Commission was Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, the son of Piddu ‘the lieutenant’. It was the sign of a firm alliance between the most powerful mafia dynasty of the Palermo outskirts, the Grecos, and the upstarts from the provincial town of Corleone—with the upstarts easily the more powerful partner. This was the alliance that would go to war in 1981.
Giuseppe Di Cristina’s murder saw the Corleonesi establish their authority over the central Sicilian province of Caltanissetta. A few months later they killed Pippo Calderone who in 1975 had set up the Region, the mafia’s governing body for the whole of Sicily. Calderone’s Catania Family was placed in the hands of a Corleonese ally and one of their major suppliers of drugs and arms—Nitto ‘the Hunter’ Santapaola. With ‘the Hunter’ in place, most of Cosa Nostra’s structure outside of Palermo was now in the grip of the Corleonesi.
At some point around this time, the leadership of Leggio’s faction passed into the hands of his disciple ‘Shorty’ Riina, closely assisted by ‘Tractor’ Provenzano. One later mafia defector who knew Riina well described how his docile and humble manner contrasted with that of the volatile Leggio: ‘I’ve never seen him angry.’ It was a practice of deceit that he tried to pass on to his followers: ‘They always had a smile on their lips. Riina chose people like that and taught them that they had to smile—even if there was an earthquake.’
From one perspective, Bontate, Inzerillo, and Badalamenti still held a great deal more power than the smiling Corleonesi. They were all the capos of Families, well connected in the United States and spectacularly wealthy drug traffickers, able to call on political protection at the highest levels; Bontate was also the most important conduit between the mafia and the world of secret Masonic societies. But much of their power now lay outside Cosa Nostra. The Corleonesi, by contrast, were cut out of the major flows of the transatlantic narcotics trade. Yet as their strategy evolved over the years, they patiently cultivated power within Cosa Nostra. Secretly they invested money and honour in winning control of the Families and the Commission, in dominating the power syndicate rather than making huge short-term profits through enterprise syndicate activities. In taking over the Commission, the Corleonesi had also taken over Cosa Nostra’s collective decision-making apparatus, its judicial system, its office of propaganda and, most importantly, its military machine. If Cosa Nostra is a kind of state, then the Corleonesi were now ready to mount a military coup d’état.
Tommaso Buscetta was released from jail in 1980. Before joining his young wife in South America, he spent several months in Palermo, touring a world of pharaonic luxury and power that was about to sink in gore. He stayed for a while in a hotel complex belonging to the Salvo cousins; Nino asked him to act as a counterweight to Riina, but Buscetta sensed what was just over the horizon and stuck to his plans to go abroad. He also lived with both Bontate and Inzerillo, finding them impervious to the impending carnage and completely absorbed in the heroin industry, which was now at its very peak. Every day between fifty and a hundred cars were parked outside Inzerillo’s villa as the worker ants of the drug trade—mafia soldiers, heroin refiners and carriers—came and went. ‘[Bontate and Inzerillo] talked about villas by the sea and in the mountains, about billions of lire, yachts and banks—all as if they were talking about a morning’s food shopping.’ Buscetta resisted their appeals to stay and join the bonanza; they were even able to give him $500,000 as a goodbye present—so he claims. In January 1981, the ‘boss of two worlds’ took a plane to Brazil, intending never to return.
* * *
The mattanza that Giuseppe Di Cristina had predicted, and for which the Corleonesi had so long prepared, finally started on 23 April 1981. The first victim was Stefano Bontate, the ‘Prince of Villagrazia’. He was driving his brand-new, limited-edition red Alfa Romeo back from his own birthday party when he was rendered unrecognizable by machine-gun fire at a traffic light. Two and a half weeks later the same fate befell Salvatore Inzerillo. He had also recently taken delivery of an Alfa Romeo, an armoured version. But his killers shot him as he left his lover’s house and before he reached the car.
With Tommaso Buscetta and Tano Badalamenti now in Brazil and the United States respectively, the Corleonesi had simply decapitated the opposing faction by killing Bontate and Inzerillo. The daring of the attack seemed breathtaking. Most mafia-watchers expected a ferocious reaction from the Bontate–Inzerillo group. But what ensued was simply a mass execution of their followers. The losing side was totally disorientated. What Judge Falcone called a ‘ghost army’ of Corleonese assassins, recruited in the small towns of the province of Palermo, would appear in the city, kill, and vanish again. A month after Inzerillo’s death, Tommaso Buscetta telephoned Palermo from Brazil to speak to a construction entrepreneur close to both Bontate and Inzerillo. The man begged Buscetta to come back and organize the resistance to the Corleonesi. But ‘the boss of two worlds’ knew better than to give his life in a hopeless cause. Just as they had done in Corleone back in 1958 with the murder of Dr Michele Navarra, the Corleonesi were pitting overwhelming military force against wealth and political influence. It was no contest.
In the weeks and months that followed, 200 men belonging to the Bontate–Inzerillo faction were killed in the province of Palermo—to count only the bodies that were actually found. More disappeared, the victims of ‘white shotgun’ murders. On 30 November 1982 alone, twelve men of honour were shot dead at different times and in different parts of the city. Most of the enemies of the Corleonesi were killed before they even knew they were in danger, betrayed by men within their own Family who had secretly joined the Corleonesi; some were even eliminated by their own men and presented as sacrificial offerings to the victors. The Families and mandamenti of murdered leaders were immediately handed over to Corleonese loyalists.
The mattanza even extended to the United States. John Gambino was reportedly sent over from New York to Palermo to find out what was happening. He returned with a clear instruction: all possible efforts were to be made to find and eliminate Tommaso Buscetta; all Sicilian mafiosi from the losing faction who attempted to escape death by fleeing across the Atlantic were to be killed. Shortly afterwards Inzerillo’s brother was found dead in Mont Laurel, New Jersey, with five one-dollar bills stuffed in his mouth and another in his genitals.
The Corleonesi were not just exterminating their enemies, they were killing any man of honour whose absolute loyalty was even remotely in doubt. They also enforced a scorched earth policy of stunning brutality around any member of the Bontate–Inzerillo faction who went into hiding. Any friends, relatives, or business associates who might plausibly offer shelter were cut down.
The emblematic case is that of faithful Bontate soldier Salvatore Contorno, who escaped in dramatic fashion from a carefully coordinated machine-gun ambush in the main street of Brancaccio, a township to the east of Palermo. An incredible thirty-five of his relatives were then murdered. Contorno began to give information to the police off the record. When he heard that Buscetta had turned state’s evidence in the summer of 1984, he would not believe it until he was brought face to face with ‘the boss of two worlds’. At their meeting Contorno knelt down before Buscetta and received his blessing before taking the decision to give evidence to Judge Falcone. His testimony would be almost as important to the maxi-trial as Buscetta’s.
The mattanza dragged on and on; in fact there never was a clear ending because when ‘Shorty’ Riina had done with his enemies and with the fence-sitters, he turned on any of his own allies who had begun to show signs of independent thinking. The most prominent victim of this new phase of the killing was Pino ‘the Shoe’ Greco, underboss of the Ciaculli Family, the leading Corleonese assassin in the early stages of the mattanza. ‘The Shoe’ was a member of the firing party that had murdered both Bontate and Inzerillo. He had then murdered Inzerillo’s teenage son after the boy swore to avenge his father’s death. The rumours inside Cosa Nostra were that ‘the Shoe’ had cut off the boy’s arm before killing him so as to demonstrate the futility of rebellion against the power of the Corleonesi. In the autumn of 1985, ‘the Shoe’ was shot dead by his own men on the orders of Riina.
The tactics that the Corleonesi had evolved over more than three decades had come to fruition: they had established a dictatorship over Cosa Nostra based on a rolling programme of executions. In doing so they had not betrayed Cosa Nostra’s value system, as many defectors later claimed; they had instead revealed its very essence.