Two stories, two days in May, separated by a century of history. Each story—the first a melodramatic fiction, the second a tragic reality—reveals something important about the Sicilian mafia, and about why, at last, the history of the mafia can now be written.
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The first story was introduced to the world at the Teatro Costanzi in Rome on 17 May 1890 at what many people believe was the most successful opera première of all time. Pietro Mascagni’s Cavalleria rusticana (‘rustic chivalry’) put plangent melody at the service of a simple tale of jealousy, honour, and vengeance set among the peasants of Sicily. It was greeted with wild enthusiasm. There were thirty curtain calls; the Queen of Italy was present and apparently applauded all evening. Cavalleria rapidly became an international hit. A few months after that night in Rome, Mascagni wrote to a friend that his one-act opera had made him, at the age of twenty-six, rich for life.
Everyone knows at least some of the music of Cavalleria rusticana, and everyone recognizes its associations with Sicily. Its intermezzo is played over the famous slow-motion title sequence of Raging Bull, Martin Scorsese’s dissection of Italian-American machismo, pride and jealousy. The opera also runs through Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather Part III. In the climactic scene, a mafia killer disguised as a priest stalks his victim through the sumptuous Teatro Massimo in Palermo as Cavalleria is performed on stage. Don Michael Corleone’s son is singing the lead tenor role of Turiddu. At the end of the film, the intermezzo makes a return to accompany the solitary death of the aged don played by Al Pacino.
What is less well known about Cavalleria is that its story is the purest, most anodyne form of a myth about Sicily and the mafia, a myth that was something akin to the official ideology of the Sicilian mafia for nearly a century and a half. The mafia was not an organization, it was believed, but a sense of defiant pride and honour, rooted deep in the identity of every Sicilian. The notion of ‘rustic chivalry’ stood square against the idea that the mafia might even have a history worthy of the name. Today, it is impossible to tell the story of the mafia without reckoning with the power of that same myth.
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The second story takes us to a hill above the road that leads back towards Palermo from the city’s airport. It is nearly 6 P.M. on 23 May 1992 and Giovanni Brusca, a stocky, bearded young man of honour, is watching a short stretch of motorway just before the turn-off to the small town of Capaci. At that point his men have used a skateboard to fill a drainage pipe with thirteen small barrels containing nearly 400 kilos of explosives.
A few metres behind Brusca, another, older mafioso is smoking and talking on his mobile phone. Abruptly, he breaks off and leans forward to look at the road through a telescope propped on a stool. When he sees a convoy of three cars approach the spot, he hisses, ‘Vai!’ (‘Go on!’) Nothing happens. ‘Vai!’ he urges again.
Brusca has noticed that the convoy is travelling more slowly than expected. He waits for brief seconds that seem interminable, even allowing the cars to pass an old fridge that he has placed by the roadside as a marker. Only when he hears a third, almost panicked ‘Vai!’ from behind him does he press the switch.
There is a deep, tripping drum roll of detonations. A colossal explosion tears upwards through the tarmac, hurling the first car into the air. It lands sixty or seventy metres away in a field of olive trees. The second car is a white, bulletproof Fiat Croma; its engine is blown away and the car crashes, shattered, into the deep crater. The third is damaged but intact.
The victims of the explosion were leading antimafia investigating magistrate Giovanni Falcone and his wife (in the white Fiat Croma), and three members of their escort (in the lead car). In murdering Falcone, the Sicilian mafia rid itself of its most dangerous enemy, the symbol of the fight against it.
The Capaci bomb brought Italy to a standstill. Most people remember exactly where they were when they heard the news, and in its aftermath several public figures declared themselves ashamed to be Italian. To some, the tragedy at Capaci was the supreme demonstration of the mafia’s arrogance and power. Yet the attack also marked the demise of the myth crystallized in Cavalleria rusticana; the mafia’s official ideology was now officially bankrupt. It is no coincidence that the first credible history of the mafia ever to be written in Italian was only published after Capaci.
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The little love-triangle narrative that is Cavalleria rusticana reaches its climax in a Sicilian town square when the tough cart driver, Alfio, refuses a drink offered by a young soldier, Turiddu. No explicit accusations are exchanged, but both men know that this little slight will have deadly consequences, for Alfio has been told that Turiddu has dishonest intentions towards his wife. A whole primitive value system is compressed into their brief exchange. Both men recognize that honour has been offended, that vendetta is a right, and that a duel is the only way to settle the debt. As custom dictates, the two embrace and Turiddu grips Alfio’s right ear between his teeth as a sign that the challenge has been accepted. Turiddu tearfully kisses his mother farewell and leaves the stage to meet Alfio in a nearby orchard. Then, from a distance, comes a woman’s shriek, ‘Turiddu has been killed!’ The curtain drops as the peasants wail in dismay.
Mascagni, who was from Tuscany, had never been to Sicily when he set the Cavalleria story to music. In rehearsal the tenor changed the words of his opening song because the librettists, both from Mascagni’s home town, had not been able to make it sound Sicilian enough. But it mattered little. Sicily—or at least a certain image of it—was in fashion in 1890. What the audience at the Teatro Costanzi expected—and got—was the picturesque island as packaged for them by their illustrated magazines: an exotic land of sun and passion inhabited by brooding, dark-skinned peasants.
In 1890, the mafia was already a murderous and sophisticated criminal association with powerful political connections and an international reach. In the Sicilian capital, Palermo, local politicians were engaged in banking and share fraud, and were stealing urban renewal funds allocated to municipal government; among them were mafiosi. Yet the widespread image of the mafia was very different. Mascagni’s audience would have viewed Turiddu, and particularly the cart driver Alfio—for all the countrified pathos of their tale—not just as typical Sicilians, but as typical mafiosi. For ‘mafia’ was widely taken to refer not to an organization, but to a mixture of violent passion and ‘Arabic’ pride that supposedly dictated Sicilian behaviour. ‘Mafia’, as viewed by many, was a primitive notion of honour, a rudimentary code of chivalry obeyed by the backward people of the Sicilian countryside.
Nor was this just a misunderstanding propagated by supercilious northern Italians. Seven years after the staggering success of Mascagni’s opera, a precocious Sicilian sociologist, Alfredo Niceforo, wrote Contemporary Barbarian Italy, a study of southern Italy’s ‘backward races’. Niceforo gave a pejorative colouring to some Cavalleria-style commonplaces about the Sicilian psyche: ‘Sicilian man … eternally has rebellion and the unbounded passion of his own ego in his bloodstream—the mafioso in a nutshell.’ Niceforo, Cavalleria rusticana, and much of Italian culture at that time systematically confuse Sicilians and the mafia. Since then, generations of observers, whether Sicilians, Italians, or foreigners, have made the same mistake, blurring any clear distinction between the mafia and what one English travel writer of the 1960s called the ‘primeval mentality’ of the ‘Sicilian subconscious’.
Sicilian culture was for too long confused with mafiosità (‘mafia-ness’), and that confusion served the interests of organized crime. Needless to say, it was a great help to the illegal organization known as the mafia when people thought it did not exist. ‘There is no secret criminal society,’ the argument went; ‘that is just a conspiracy theory dreamed up by people who do not understand the way Sicilians think.’ Countless writers have rehashed the same misguided argument: that centuries of invasion have made Sicilians suspicious of outsiders, and so they naturally prefer to settle disputes among themselves without involving the police or the courts.
Smudging the line between the mafia and Sicilians could also make legal measures against the mob look futile. If the supposedly primitive Sicilian mentality was to blame, how could the mafia be prosecuted, short of putting the whole island in the dock? ‘Tutti colpevoli, nessuno colpevole,’ as the Italian saying has it: ‘If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.’
The mafia had great success in peddling this family of falsehoods for a century and a half. The most insidious effect was simply to create muddle and doubt. As a result the existence of the mafia remained no more than a suspicion, a theory, a point of view—until surprisingly recently. And the notion of writing a history of the ‘mafia mentality’ often seemed pointless, hardly more worthwhile than writing a history of Gallic flair or the British stiff upper lip.
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We owe it to Falcone and his colleagues if the myth of rustic chivalry has now, at last, been dispelled. The story of the Capaci bomb began in the early 1980s when, in less than two years, as many as 1,000 people were murdered—men of honour, their relatives and friends, police, and innocent bystanders. People were shot down in the street, or taken to secret locations to be strangled; their bodies were dissolved in acid, buried in concrete, dumped in the sea, or cut up and fed to the pigs. This was the bloodiest mafia conflict in history, but it was not a war; it was a campaign of extermination. The perpetrators were an alliance of mafiosi grouped around the leadership of the Corleone mafia. They were using secret death squads to hunt down their enemies and establish a well-nigh dictatorial power over the mafia across Sicily.
Among the victims of the slaughter were two sons, a brother, a nephew, a brother-in-law, and a son-in-law of a well-connected man of honour, Tommaso Buscetta. The papers dubbed him the ‘boss of two worlds’ because of his interests on both sides of the Atlantic. When the Corleonesi mounted their assault, neither of his worlds was safe for him any more. Buscetta was arrested in Brazil. When he was extradited to Italy, he tried to commit suicide by swallowing the strychnine he always kept with him. He survived the attempt—just. On recovering, Buscetta decided to tell what he knew about the secret society into which he had been initiated when he was seventeen. And it was to Giovanni Falcone, and to him alone, that he wanted to speak.
Falcone was the bright son of a middle-class family from the then crumbling la Kalsa area of central Palermo. He once said that he had breathed in the smell of mafia since he was a boy. At the local Catholic youth club he played table tennis with Tommaso Spadaro, later to become a notorious mafioso and heroin trafficker. Falcone’s family insulated him from these influences, bringing him up under a code of duty, church, and patriotism.
Falcone’s early career as an investigating magistrate was in the bankruptcy court, where he developed his skills in hunting down obscure financial records. These skills became the first ingredient in what came to be known as the ‘Falcone method’ of mafia investigation. It was first applied to a big heroin smuggling case in 1980 after Falcone was transferred to the criminal investigative office in Palermo. In 1982, Falcone secured seventy-four convictions in the heroin case: a prodigious success on an island where the terrorizing of witnesses, judges, and juries had caused the failure of innumerable previous prosecutions.
Buscetta provided Falcone for the first time with access to the Sicilian mafia from the inside. ‘For us he was like a language professor who allows you to go to Turkey without having to communicate with your hands,’ said Falcone. In many hours of interviews with Buscetta, Falcone and his team developed their understanding of the organization, and patiently mapped the connections between faces, names, and crimes. They assembled a completely new picture of its command structure, methods, and mindset.
It is hard now to realize how much was not known about the mafia before Tommaso Buscetta sat down with Giovanni Falcone. The first revelation was the name given to the organization by its members: Cosa Nostra—‘our thing’. Until then, even the few investigators and police who had taken this name seriously had assumed that it only applied to the American mob.
Buscetta also told Falcone about Cosa Nostra’s pyramidal command structure. The soldiers at the lowest level are supervised in groups of ten or so by a capodecina (head of ten). Each capodecina reports upwards to the elected boss of a local gang or ‘Family’, who is flanked by a deputy and one or more consiglieri (advisers). Three families with adjoining territories are organized into a mandamento (district). The head of each mandamento is a member of the Commission, Cosa Nostra’s parliament or board of management for the province of Palermo. In theory, above this provincial level there is a regional body made up of mafia bosses from the whole of Sicily. But in practice Palermo dominates the Sicilian mafia: nearly 50 per cent of the approximately 100 Families in Sicily have their territory in Palermo and its province, and the boss of the Palermo Commission has a leadership role within the Sicilian mafia as a whole.
At the time of Buscetta’s revelations, some 5,000 men of honour were members of a single criminal organization. Significant murders—of policemen, politicians, or other mafiosi—had to be approved and planned at the highest level to make sure that they were compatible with the organization’s overall strategy. With the aim of creating stability, the Commission also issued rulings on disputes within the families and mandamenti over which it presided. This level of internal discipline astonished investigators.
‘The boss of two worlds’ also knew the American Cosa Nostra well. He told Falcone that the Sicilian mafia, and the American mafia to which it had given birth, had a similar structure. But they were separate organizations; being a member in Sicily did not mean that you also became a member in the US. The strong links between the two were blood and business ties rather than organizational ones.
Other men of honour followed Buscetta’s example as they turned to the state for protection from the Corleonesi and their death squads. Together with his close colleague Paolo Borsellino, Falcone meticulously checked their testimonies and assembled 8,607 pages of evidence—the prosecution case for the famous ‘maxi-trial’, which was held in a specially built bombproof bunker courthouse in Palermo.
On 16 December 1987, after proceedings lasting twenty-two months, the judge in the maxi-trial handed down guilty verdicts on 342 mafiosi and sentenced them to a total of 2,665 years in prison. Just as importantly, what sceptics had dismissed as the ‘Buscetta theorem’ on the structure of Cosa Nostra had withstood a stiff judicial examination.
Final legal confirmation of the Buscetta theorem had to wait until January 1992 when, contrary to Cosa Nostra’s hopes and expectations, the Court of Cassation—Italy’s Supreme Court—set a seal on the initial verdicts. It was the worst legal defeat the Sicilian mafia had ever suffered. In response, the Corleonesi put their death squads on the trail of the investigating magistrates. Falcone was murdered within a few months of the verdict. Less than two months after Falcone’s death, disbelief and indignation swept across Italy once more when Paolo Borsellino and five members of his escort were killed by a massive car bomb outside his mother’s house.
The tragic deaths of Falcone and Borsellino had profound effects that are still unfolding today. The first of those effects was simply to reinforce the fact that the antimafia magistrates had won a momentous victory; the existence of a centralized criminal organization called Cosa Nostra is no longer just a theory.
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If Cosa Nostra exists, then it has a history; and if it has a history then, as Falcone often said, it had a beginning and it will have an end. Because of the work of Falcone, Borsellino, and their colleagues, as well as the collapse of the cluster of untruths surrounding the notion of ‘rustic chivalry’, historians can now research the history of the mafia with more confidence and insight than has ever been the case.
As the reality about Cosa Nostra emerged through Buscetta’s testimony and the maxi-trial, a few historians, most of them Sicilians, took their cue from the investigating magistrates: they began to look back at neglected records and unearth new evidence. A whole field of study was slowly opening up. Then, in 1992, when the Court of Cassation’s verdict confirmed the Buscetta theorem—and in so doing triggered the murders of Falcone and Borsellino—writing the history of the mafia suddenly became far more than an academic pursuit: it was now part of an urgent imperative to understand a deadly threat to society, and to show the remaining antimafia magistrates that they were not alone in their struggle.
A pioneering history of the Sicilian mafia was published in Italian the following year. It was updated in 1996, and further discoveries have been made since then. The drive to tell the mafia’s story has progressed in tandem with the drive to combat Cosa Nostra in the wake of the atrocities of 1992. In Sicily, history counts.
It may also count for something if the history of the mafia is told to the world beyond Italy. While Falcone’s epic confrontation with Cosa Nostra in the 1980s became the subject of some superb accounts in English, the totally new perspective on the mafia’s history that Falcone opened up remains almost totally unknown. This book is the first history of the Sicilian mafia, from its origins to the present day, to be written in any language other than Italian. It presents the findings of the latest research and tells the story of the mafia as the Italian specialists now tell it. It also contains some completely new findings. What has emerged in the last few years is a much fuller historical description of the Sicilian mafia than was thought possible even a short time ago. A picture that used to be drawn in the fuzzy lines of sociological jargon—’mentalities’, ‘para-state functions’, ‘violent mediators’—now contains real people, places, dates, and crimes. And the clearer the picture becomes, the more disturbing are its implications: a secret society that has murder as its very raison d’être has been an integral part of the way Italy has been run since the middle of the nineteenth century.