Blood Brotherhoods (104 page)

Now Calò loped across the green floor of the bunker courtroom in a yellow shirt and fawn flared slacks, his grey hair combed back over his ears and collar from a bald pate. His insolent smirk betrayed a supreme confidence that one hundred and fifty years of Sicilian mafia impunity was not about to end. Buscetta was ‘ten times a liar’, Calò declared; he had cribbed his evidence from
The Godfather
, and he could not be trusted because of his immoral private life. (The history-making penitent had been married three times.)

Buscetta’s retaliation was withering. On the subject of family values, Calò had taken part in the Commission meetings that had sentenced Buscetta’s own brother and nephew to death: their only ‘crime’ was being related to the boss of two worlds. Buscetta went on to accuse Calò of strangling another member of the Porta Nuova Family with his own hands.

In response, Calò wavered visibly. Having denied ever meeting the strangling victim, he was forced to admit that he had known him in prison. After this encounter, no other defendant dared challenge Buscetta directly.

More and more evidence of Cosa Nostra’s barbarity emerged. Particularly shocking was the testimony of a petty criminal from the slums of Palermo called Vincenzo Sinagra, who gave evidence in an almost impenetrable dialect. Sinagra’s relationship with the mafia had begun when he made the terrible mistake of robbing someone with mafia connections—a capital offence in Cosa Nostra’s value system. But because he had a cousin who was a Man of Honour, Sinagra was offered the chance to work for the mob during its murder campaign of 1981–3. Arrested after he botched an assassination, Sinagra made an unconvincing attempt to feign insanity. Largely thanks to Paolo Borsellino’s extraordinary powers of empathy, this pitiful figure was then persuaded to put his trust in the state, and to confess his every murder. He explained that he had been paid the equivalent of two or three hundred dollars a month to help one of Riina’s most ruthless killers torture and strangle his victims, and then dissolve their bodies in acid—a process he described to the court with unassuming clarity and in horrific detail.

Played against the background of evidence like Sinagra’s, the words of the bosses seemed grotesquely mannered, separated by an almost ludicrous distance from the realities of their calling. The
capo
whose performance would remain longest in the memory was Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, nominally the head of the Commission at the time of the Second Mafia War,
but in reality one of Shorty Riina’s mere patsies. Greco’s Favarella estate in Ciaculli had been the theatre of much of the action in the early 1980s. It had hosted a heroin refinery, and its large cellars were a reliable refuge for killers on the run. Many of the Commission’s meetings were held there. Late in 1982, the Pope had hosted the banquet after which Saro Riccobono, the boss of Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo’s Family, was garrotted in his chair while his men were hunted down amid the fruit trees.

Sitting in a midnight-blue suit before a microphone in the vast space of the bunker courtroom, Greco insisted on prefacing his cross-examination with a lapidary declaration: ‘Violence is not part of my dignity. Let me repeat that for you: violence is not part of my dignity.’ Greco uttered these words, carefully framed by pregnant pauses, as if he had just enunciated one of the fundamental laws of physics for the first time in history. He gave every indication of thinking that a mere reassurance about his own good character would be sufficient in itself to guarantee an acquittal. He went on to blame the cinema for putting ideas into the penitents’ heads. ‘It’s certain films that are the ruin of human kind. Violent films. Pornographic films. They are the ruin of human kind. Because if [Totuccio] Contorno, instead of watching
The Godfather
, had seen
Moses
, for example, then he would not have uttered such slanders.’

The least spectacular cross-examination in the maxi-trial was among the most revealing and intriguing. On 20 June 1986, Ignazio Salvo entered the bunker courtroom in an elegant light blue suit, carrying a briefcase. For thirty years, before he was brought blinking into the light of publicity and justice by the anti-mafia pool, Ignazio had controlled tax-collecting franchises across much of Sicily with his cousin Nino. The inflated profits of their licensed robbery were reinvested in agribusiness, tourism, property, and in buying the political leverage within the DC that was essential to the whole operation. Nino Salvo, who had died of a tumour just before coming to trial, was a more abrasive man than his cousin. When he was called to the Palace of Justice, his growling voice had uttered an admission (and a veiled threat) that had echoed through the building’s marble and glass atrium: ‘The Salvos paid all the political parties. Money to all of them: no exceptions.’

Unlike most of the other defendants at the maxi-trial, Ignazio Salvo had not been held in the Ucciardone, but under house arrest. Now, with his reading glasses halfway down his long nose, he addressed the presiding judge with relaxed precision. He began by giving a point-by-point response to Buscetta’s allegations, and then embarked on a long and monotonous explanation of the reams of documentary evidence he had in his briefcase. ‘You seem bored,’ he said at one point to the judge, through a thin smile of contempt. It was as if, by sheer grinding force of tedium, the richest and
most powerful man in Sicily hoped to vanish slowly into the background once more.

The Salvos were particularly close to Stefano Bontate, the ‘Prince of Villagrazia’, and other members of Cosa Nostra’s drug-trafficking elite. That friendship had cost the cousins dearly, when in 1975 Nino Salvo’s father-in-law was kidnapped by the
corleonesi
and never returned. The Salvos were understandably terrified in 1981, when Shorty Riina began slaughtering Bontate and his allies. For safety’s sake, Nino went for a long cruise on his yacht. Meanwhile Ignazio stayed in Palermo frantically trying to contact Tommaso Buscetta to find out what was going on and organise resistance to Shorty Riina’s coup. It was to be the beginning of the end of the Salvos’ power.

Ignazio Salvo’s response to the prosecution’s narrative, apart from trying to bore the court to a standstill, was an argument of devilish subtlety:

For many a long year the state was practically absent from the struggle against the mafia. Connivance and complicity were so widespread that citizens were left defenceless before the power of mafia organisations. The only thing for us to do was to try and survive by avoiding threats, especially to family members, and especially when our activity as businessmen necessarily put us in touch with those organisations. I have never been a
mafioso
. But I am one of the many entrepreneurs who, in order just to survive, has had to strike a deal with these
enemies of society
.

‘What could we do?’ Ignazio Salvo was saying. We thought we made just enough concessions to the men of violence to be left alone. Alas, we were wrong, and we ended up on the receiving end of a kidnapping. We are not culprits, but victims.

This defence was part admission and part excuse—and all completely disingenuous. Generations of Sicilian landowners and entrepreneurs had produced
exactly
the same argument when their links to
mafiosi
were discovered.

Buscetta and other penitents knew that Ignazio Salvo was a Man of Honour from the Salemi Family of Cosa Nostra—the underboss, indeed. As early as 1971, the then colonel of the
Carabinieri
Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa had filed a report stating that Ignazio was a
mafioso
and that his father Luigi had been the town’s boss. Falcone and Borsellino’s work on bank records showed that the Salvos had been illegally exporting capital—the mafia’s profits, likely as not. But the cousins’ real sphere of influence lay
outside
the criminal brotherhood. On that score, Buscetta’s analysis of the Salvos was a lesson in the subtle relationships between the mafia and Sicily’s economic and political system.

The Salvos’ role in Cosa Nostra is modest. Yet their political importance is huge, because I know about their direct relationships with extremely well-known Members of Parliament, some of whom are from Palermo, and whose names I will not give.

‘Whose names I will not give’—Buscetta was saying that the Salvos were the link between Cosa Nostra and politics. But he would not say
which
politicians. He had warned Falcone at the very beginning of their discussions that he did not think Italy was yet ready for such revelations, which would have been more controversial, harder to prove, and more dangerous. Ignazio Salvo was as close as the maxi-trial was going to get to the explosive subject of the mafia’s ‘untouchable’ friends inside the institutions of government. Yet the message in Ignazio Salvo’s presence at the maxi was clear all the same: there were more revelations of political scandal to come.

When the major bosses had finished giving evidence, the maxi still had over a year left to run. Vast quantities of bank data and other evidence needed to be aired. The relatives of mafia victims were given the chance to speak too. It was difficult to tell which of them made the more harrowing sight: those who pleaded tearfully for news of where their loved ones were buried; or those who, evidently petrified, recited the familiar refrain of ‘I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything.’

Caged defendants look out at proceedings in the history-making maxi-trial against Cosa Nostra, Palermo, 1986–87.

In April 1987, the prosecution summed up: a process that took more than two weeks. When one of the two prosecuting advocates finally sat down after eight long days of oratory, he found himself unable to get to his feet again and had to wait for the closure of the day’s proceedings so he could be carried bodily out of the courtroom by the
Carabinieri
.

One by one, the squadron of nearly two hundred defence lawyers then took the floor to give their final remarks, a process that took months.

Finally, on 11 November 1987, the judges and jury retired to consider their verdict. But just before they did, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco made it known that he wanted to address them. His short speech would become the most famous of the whole maxi.

I wish you peace, Your Honour. I wish you all peace. Because peace, and tranquillity, and serenity of mind and conscience . . . It’s for the task that awaits you. Serenity is the fundamental basis for standing in judgement. These are not my words: they are the words of Our Lord, his advice to Moses. May there be the utmost serenity when it comes to passing judgement. It’s the fundamental basis. What is more, Your Honour, may this peace accompany you for the rest of your life.

A threat, of course. But one draped in the cloying language that had characterised the Pope’s defence throughout: he was a family man, a citrus-fruit farmer, a devout Christian who knew nothing of the mafia and narcotics.

True to his imperturbable self, Judge Giordano replied only, ‘That’s what we wish for too.’