Cosa Nostra (45 page)

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.