Cosa Nostra (41 page)

So the Palermo Commission was not a board of directors of the international heroin trade. It was actually a very carefully constructed representative mechanism—a creature of politics rather than of business. As such, there is nothing inherently new about it. It is now known from the Sangiorgi report that already in the late nineteenth century the
cosche
of the Palermo area had formal rounds of consultation and a unified system of trials. So—despite what both Buscetta and Bonanno themselves believed—the Commission was not a complete novelty in mafia history; it was a new solution to a problem as old as the mafia itself: how to combine territorial control with illegal commerce. That said, the creation of the Commission undoubtedly had epoch-making political implications; in effect, the power of life and death over other mafiosi was being taken out of the hands of the Family bosses.

The question is: ‘Why now?’ Why exactly did the gearing-up of Sicilian involvement in the narcotics business lead to the creation of such an elaborate constitutional apparatus? The answer that Italian historians have come up with leads to the heart of the relationship between business and politics within Cosa Nostra. And the best way to explain it is, once again, through the eyes of Tommaso Buscetta. For on this issue, as on so many others, Buscetta is a crucial but not entirely objective witness—crucial, in fact, for the very reason that he is not objective.

Buscetta sunnily describes the Commission as ‘an instrument of moderation and internal peace’, ‘a good way of reducing the fear and risks that all
mafiosi
run’. This description is very much in tune with how he likes to visualize life in the mafia as a whole. Buscetta thinks of Cosa Nostra as a noble brotherhood rather than as a hierarchy; in his mind, men of honour are all peers, and the bond holding them together is mutual respect rather than obedience to a capo. ‘We all felt we were part of a very special elite,’ he says. It is a nostalgic vision that fits with the image Buscetta is trying to portray of himself—as a kind of roving emissary of the underworld. As such it is as captivating, and as implausible, as a party political broadcast. In reality Buscetta had very hard-headed strategic reasons for wanting the Commission to take the shape that it did, reasons that are best explained by looking at his career path.

There are essentially two types of career in Cosa Nostra; politics and business. A man of honour can climb the shadow state’s internal ladder of promotion, becoming a
capodecina,
a
consigliere,
a capo, and so on upwards. Or he can develop his own commercial interests outside of his particular Family’s territory, travelling the world to exploit the mafia’s unrivalled criminal networking opportunities. Buscetta, despite the huge respect he commanded within Cosa Nostra, never rose above the rank of soldier, and he travelled very widely throughout his life of crime; thus he was a prime example of a mafioso who followed the second career path. As, for that matter, was Cola Gentile, the Sicilian-American man of honour of the early twentieth century.

Lucky Luciano is an interesting case in that he followed both routes at different stages in his life. Before he was imprisoned on pimping charges in 1936, his authority was territorial; he was at the head of what is sometimes called a power syndicate, a criminal gang that exacts an extortion tax from legal and illegal businesses in a given area. After being expelled from the US in 1946, Luciano did not settle in Palermo as might seem the natural thing to do for a Sicilian-born mafioso. He went instead to Naples on the Italian mainland whence he organized all sorts of illegal trafficking, including in narcotics. For the rest of his life he was therefore what is called an enterprise syndicate criminal, one who engages in illegal trade but does not have the power to control territory. A low-level Neapolitan crook once demonstrated this point in dramatic style by publicly slapping Luciano, who could do nothing to avenge this
sfregio.

The point is that, as a man of honour who was more of an enterprise syndicate type than a power syndicate type, more of a narcotics businessman than an extortion-racket statesman, Buscetta had every interest in weakening the power of the heads of Families, in gaining more commercial autonomy for individual men of honour. With the surge in heroin trafficking between Europe and America, the high-flying young drug-dealers like Buscetta, Badalamenti, and ‘Little Bird’ Greco did not want their commercial wings clipped by the power syndicate bosses. The Commission was created—with Joe Bananas’ support—as a new mechanism of mafia government. But the aim of its founding fathers was not to centralize control over the mafia; it was to apply overall rules that gave more freedom to individual mafiosi. The Commission was supposed to make the mafia more like the association of autonomous men of honour that Buscetta thought it should be.

As it happened, in the early 1980s the Commission metamorphosed into exactly the reverse of what Buscetta hoped. It would ultimately become, in the hands of the Corleonesi, the instrument of a dictatorship. And yet before that historical irony could unfold, another would be visited on Joe Bananas’ plans to use the Sicilian mafia as tame manpower for the US Cosa Nostra’s heroin operation. Even Buscetta, a man with great sympathies for the American mafia, felt that US mafiosi in the 1950s and 1960s often patronized their Old World colleagues, treating them like ‘poor cousins’, calling them ‘zips’ because they spoke Sicilian so fast. But once the zips were allowed into the traffic in heroin in North America, they did not prove as obedient as had been hoped. By the 1970s, the zips would be running the once-mighty Bonanno Family’s drug operation.

When the Commission was founded in 1957 all of this still lay far in the future. When Joe Bananas got on the plane to return to New York, the constant struggle to reconcile business and politics within the Sicilian Cosa Nostra entered a new and turbulent phase. Only six years after being set up, the Commission was temporarily dissolved in dramatic circumstances.

EIGHT

The ‘First’ Mafia War and its Consequences

1962–1969

THE CIACULLI BOMB

Set alongside a road that climbs through the tangerine groves of Ciaculli, there is a monument commemorating one of the worst of the many horrors perpetrated by Cosa Nostra. Perhaps fittingly, the monument is not particularly attractive: a tall wedge of pink marble crowned with seven metal stars that perch in wisps of wire. On it are chiselled the names of four
carabinieri,
two military engineers, and a policeman. A glance at the list reveals that the mason made a small mistake as he began his work. Beneath the first name—Lieutenant Mario Malausa of the
carabinieri
—one can see signs that the name of another man with a lower rank has been chipped gently away. Absurdly, but somehow touchingly, someone must have pointed out that the hierarchies of military life must be preserved even in death.

The monument is set in a tiny garden from which the view is both stunning and disquieting. Here in Ciaculli, perhaps more than anywhere in western Sicily, the power of the mafia is made visible in the landscape. With one’s back to the sea, one can see lines of tangerine trees rising towards the curved ridge of Monte Grifone. Turning to look at the ground below the monument’s base, one discovers small square wells feeding into narrow channels—the arteries of the citrus groves, the pressure points that the mafia once squeezed to exert its territorial control. From this point, rows of trees run down through Ciaculli and Croceverde Giardini, the fiefdoms of the two branches of the Greco dynasty that fought out their war in 1946–7. Villabate, where a
cosca
has been rooted for as long as the mafia has existed, lies at the foot of the hill. To Villabate’s west is the notorious new industrial quarter of Brancaccio; the
carabinieri
station here is a villa confiscated from the local mafia. So heavily fortified was it that the military police scarcely needed to do more than put a new sign over the door when they took over. Beyond Brancaccio and Villabate the sea stretches across the middle distance, an expanse wider than can be taken in with a single glance. Palermo lies further along the coastline to the west; its concrete arms stretch out eastwards to embrace what were once independent towns and villages of the hinterland. In the late 1980s, when a journalist asked a mafia defector from Brancaccio how he would tackle Cosa Nostra, his answer was simple: send troops along the two roads that lead up to Ciaculli and start shooting. ‘They are all there,’ he said.

As well as offering a panorama of a landscape that the mafia has helped shape, the monument at Ciaculli also marks a turning point in the mafia’s history. It bears the date 30 June 1963. Mid-morning on that day, a man phoned Palermo police headquarters to say that a car had been left on his land where the monument now stands. The car, an Alfa Romeo Giulietta, had a flat tyre and its doors were still open. It was immediately clear what this might mean: in the early hours of the same morning, a car bomb—another Giulietta—had exploded in Villabate, killing a baker and a motor mechanic. Responding rapidly to the call, the police and
carabinieri
coaxed their vehicles up what was then a potholed track to find the abandoned car. On the back seat, clearly visible, was a tank of butane with the burned end of a fuse attached to the top. On seeing it, they secured the surrounding area and called in the army engineers. Two hours later, two bomb disposal experts arrived, cut the fuse, and pronounced the vehicle safe to approach. But when Lieutenant Mario Malausa made to inspect the contents of the boot, he detonated the huge quantity of TNT it contained. He and six other men were blown to pieces by an explosion that scorched and stripped the tangerine trees for hundreds of metres around.

There had been bloodshed on the streets of Palermo before 30 June 1963, of course. In 1955–6, two mafia Families fought out a brutal conflict when the city’s wholesale market was moved from one territory to another. But most onlookers were relatively unconcerned. As one Rome conservative newspaper commented at the time: ‘When it comes down to it, reciprocal elimination is a method that brings benefits for public order in Palermo … These last remnants of Sicilian crime are destroying themselves on their own initiative.’

After the Ciaculli bomb, no one could shrug their shoulders and argue that ‘they only kill each other’ or that the mafia was in its death throes. The papers rightly called it the worst crime since the days of the ‘last bandit’, Salvatore Giuliano. The police response was immediate: Villabate and Ciaculli were surrounded on the night of 2 July, their streets illuminated by rocket flares; forty people were arrested and a large quantity of arms confiscated. It was only the beginning of what would become the biggest round-up of suspects since the days of the ‘iron prefect’. Three days after the tragedy at Ciaculli, under an enervatingly hot sun, an estimated 100,000 people, including the Minister of the Interior, followed the virtually empty coffins of the seven victims to Palermo Cathedral. The political pressure to take the mafia problem seriously became irresistible.

The Ciaculli car bomb marked a historical point of no return. Until then, every generation of Italians seemed doomed to ‘discover’ the mafia as if no one had ever heard of it before. Tajani’s speech to parliament in 1875, the Notarbartolo murder in 1893, the iron prefect’s Fascist ‘surgery’: with each outrageous killing or political crisis, an understanding of the problem had to be reconstructed from the ground up. Every time, as apathy, cynical politicking, and criminal complicity reasserted themselves, that knowledge crumbled once again into incoherent ruins. After the Ciaculli bomb, Italy began to remember and—slowly, painfully, confusedly—to learn.

The outrage of 30 June 1963 was a turning point for Cosa Nostra itself. It brought to an end what has become known as the ‘first mafia war’—the title itself betrays how short is Italy’s historical memory. The crackdown that followed scattered men of honour across not only Italy but the globe. Yet to this day, no one knows for certain who it was who left the Giulietta that morning in 1963. To this day, no one has ever been brought to justice for the murder of the seven servants of the state whose names are carved in pink marble above Ciaculli. However, one man is still strongly suspected of the crime: Tommaso Buscetta.

LIKE CHICAGO IN THE TWENTIES? THE FIRST MAFIA WAR

In late 1962 and early 1963, explosions, car chases, and shoot-outs suddenly became regular events in Palermo. The papers said—with unconscious irony—that the Sicilian capital had become like Chicago in the 1920s. At first glance, the war of 1962–3 does indeed seem like a Chicago-style cliché; it could come from one of the tiresome gangster yarns that fill the true-crime sections of British and American bookstores. The first mafia war looks, in other words, like the usual cycle of tit-for-tat killings. But internal conflict in the mafia is never that predictable. For within Cosa Nostra, deceit and politics are as important as guns and bombs. The first mafia war may in fact have been the most cunningly fought of them all.

One ‘Chicago’ cliché can be dispatched straightaway. It was often thought that because of who the leading combatants were, the first mafia war was a struggle between the ‘old’ mafia and the ‘new’ mafia, between venerable landed bosses and audacious young hoods grown precociously rich on drugs and concrete. On one side, it was pointed out, was Salvatore ‘Little Bird’ Greco, the son of the Ciaculli boss murdered by Piddu the lieutenant Greco in 1946. In other words, ‘Little Bird’ was a scion of Cosa Nostra’s most revered dynasty. Pitted against this mafia blue blood was Angelo La Barbera, the capo of Palermo-Centre. Angelo and his brother Salvatore came from nowhere; their father sold firewood for a living. From being street criminals they rose within the organization and took a major role in the sack of Palermo. Angelo La Barbera’s territory took in much of the area around via Libertà where the sack was initially concentrated; he also had a good working relationship with DC young Turk, Salvo Lima.