Cosa Nostra (49 page)

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.