Cosa Nostra (51 page)

Nineteen-eighty-one saw the beginning of the
mattanza,
with its almost daily spectacle of murder; bodies were left near police headquarters or simply burned in the street. One of the most prominent of the mafia’s victims fell at the height of the slaughter. Pio La Torre was a straight-talking peasant activist who had risen to become a Communist MP, the leader of the PCI in Sicily, and one of the most dynamic members of the Antimafia commission of inquiry. In April 1982, he was the victim of a carefuly planned ambush, again in a busy Palermo street.

The Italian state’s response was to send General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to be the new prefect of the Sicilian capital. Dalla Chiesa had a long track record of fighting the mafia, even serving in Corleone when Luciano Leggio began his rise. More importantly, the general had just made himself a national hero by bringing home great successes in the fight against left-wing terrorism. Before setting off, he made it clear to his political masters in Rome that he had no intention of being soft on the mafia’s political wing. A few short months after his arrival in Palermo, a firing party of about a dozen mafiosi blocked the road in front of his car in via Carini and machine-gunned him, his young wife, and their escort to death. The day afterwards, someone scrawled on the wall at the scene, ‘Here died the hope of all honest Sicilians.’ The funeral was televised live across Italy, and the nation saw the angry crowd throwing coins at the government ministers who attended.

The politicians had failed to give Dalla Chiesa the powers he wanted, and a campaign of journalistic sniping created the distinct impression that he was isolated, as his son explained five days after the murder:

During the fight against terrorism my father was used to having his back covered, to having all the constitutional political parties behind him—first among them the DC. This time, as soon as he arrived in Palermo, he understood that a part of the DC was not prepared to cover him. More than that it was actively hostile.

With General Dalla Chiesa given such lukewarm backing, Cosa Nostra felt entitled to treat his appointment as yet another empty gesture, and to calculate that the political price of killing him would be correspondingly low. It would be tempting to label the mafia’s tactics in the early 1980s as terroristic, except that terrorists usually see themselves as representatives of the oppressed, as lone fighters taking on a powerful state with the only weapons available to the weak and desperate. Cosa Nostra, by contrast, with its new heroin wealth and its old record of impunity, simply did not take the Italian state seriously. More than a campaign of terror, it was a campaign of scorn.

Further names were soon added to the roster of eminent corpses. Looking back through that catalogue of atrocity, one begins to sense how increasing numbers of Sicilians felt at the time, their exasperated hope that, finally, one of these murders would become a turning point, marking the moment when the Italian state found the resolve to stand up to the mafia threat. There were times when the government did respond. Following the death of General Dalla Chiesa, a law pioneered by the murdered Communist Pio La Torre was finally passed; for the first time it became a crime to belong to a ‘mafia-type association’, defined as a criminal organization that relied on systematic intimidation,
omertà,
and the infiltration of the economy through extortion rackets carried out on a territorial basis. It was the Italian equivalent of America’s RICO measures (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations), passed in 1970. The law also allowed the state to confiscate a mafioso’s ill-gotten gains. These were hugely important new weapons in the fight to bring Cosa Nostra to justice. But the signals from the politicians remained ambivalent. It was never ‘the Italian state’ as such that took on Cosa Nostra. The turning point never came. The battle against the mafia continued to be fought by a heroic minority of magistrates and police, supported by a minority of politicians, administrators, journalists, and members of the public.

On 29 July 1983, Cosa Nostra deployed a car bomb in central Palermo to kill Falcone’s boss, the chief investigating magistrate, Rocco Chinnici; his two bodyguards and the concierge of the apartment block where he lived also died in the explosion. The first mafia war had seen journalists reach for parallels between Palermo and Prohibition-era Chicago; now Beirut seemed the only possible twin town for the Sicilian capital. One anonymous policeman described the desperate mood among investigators to
L’Ora:

We are at war, but for the state and the authorities in this city, on this island, it is as if nothing is happening … The
mafiosi
are firing with machine guns and TNT. We can only hit back with words. There are thousands of them and only a few hundred of us. We set up spectacular road blocks in the city centre, while they stroll calmly about in Corso dei Mille, Brancaccio and Uditore.

Chinnici’s death did lead to a quiet act of extraordinary heroism, typical of the way in which a heroic minority was fighting the battle against the mafia. The news of Chinnici’s death had a profound effect on Antonino Caponnetto, a pale, timid magistrate whose hobby was keeping canaries. Caponnetto, a Sicilian with a safe and prestigious job in Florence, was nearing retirement. Yet within days of Chinnici’s assassination, he sent in an application to take the murdered magistrate’s place. As he later explained, ‘It was an impulse that partly came from the spirit of service that has always motivated my work. In part, it also came out of my Sicilian identity.’ When he entered his new office in Palermo’s Palace of Justice, he found a telegram of congratulations on his desk. It was supposed to say, ‘I wish you success,’ but it had been doctored to read, ‘I wish you dead.’ Caponnetto spent the next four and a half years living in a tiny room in the
carabinieri
barracks for his own protection.

No sooner had Caponnetto arrived than he brought together a small team of magistrates who would come to inflict colossal blows on the Sicilian mafia. His idea, borrowed from the campaign against left-wing terrorism, was to form a ‘pool’ of specialized antimafia magistrates to share information, and therefore reduce the risk of reprisals. Caponnetto chose his team to create an ‘organic and complete’ picture of the mafia problem; the pool comprised Giovanni Falcone, Paolo Borsellino, Giuseppe Di Lello, and Leonardo Guarnotta. In the atmosphere of quiet determination created under Caponnetto’s leadership, they set about their work.

The public only became aware of just how stunningly successful the pool had been when Caponnetto gave a press conference at the Palace of Justice on 29 September 1984. The veteran magistrate announced the news that Tommaso Buscetta, ‘the boss of two worlds’, was collaborating with justice—366 arrest warrants had been issued as a result. Even ‘pushy embezzler’ Vito Ciancimino had been served with notification that he was under investigation; Buscetta revealed that he was in the hands of the Corleonesi. (Later, Ciancimino and both Salvo cousins, the barons of Italy’s privatized tax collection system, were arrested.) Many of the indicted men were already fugitives from justice, but the Palermo police still ran out of handcuffs when they came to capture all the defendants. With a broad smile on his thin face, Caponnetto spelled out the significance of the evidence that had been accumulated:

What we have here is not just a variety of mafia cases. The mafia
as such
is going on trial. So it would not be rash to say that this is a historic operation. At last we have succeeded in penetrating right into the heart of the mafia’s structure.

The huge trial that Caponnetto was referring to would aim to prove that the mafia was a single, unified structure—the ‘Buscetta theorem’, as the newspapers came to call it. It was to be a Copernican revolution in thinking about the honoured society.

The Corleonesi responded to the news of Buscetta’s defection with attacks on
pentiti
and their relatives: Leonardo Vitale, the
capodecina
who had turned to the police during his spiritual crisis, was shot dead in December, as was Buscetta’s brother-in-law. (Italy still had nothing resembling a proper witness protection programme.) And when the police got close to hunting down the bosses who were still in hiding, Cosa Nostra retaliated immediately. At the end of July 1985, Beppe Montana, the flying squad officer in charge of the hunt for mafia fugitives, was shot and killed at the seaside suburb of Porticello. Despite being off duty, Montana was using his little motor launch to spy on the summer homes of mafiosi. Word had gone round that the police had decided that two leading mafia killers were not to be taken alive. In killing Montana, Cosa Nostra issued its vicious response to this challenge: the assassins used dum-dum bullets. Montana’s girlfriend, only a few metres away when he was shot, was left alive to run from house to house, trying frantically to find a telephone as the streets of the town emptied and shutters closed. There could be no clearer image of the fear and
omertà
that gripped western Sicily.

Montana was the third man from his unit to die. The police union protested that in Sicily the state only made itself visible at the funerals of policemen killed by the mafia. But the problems for the police only increased when they caught a young semi-professional footballer and sea-urchin fisherman believed to be the killers’ lookout; he was tortured and beaten while in custody, and by the time he was taken to hospital it was too late. After attempts at a cover-up ended in a squalid fiasco, the suspect’s death was greeted with fury. The Minister of the Interior reacted with alacrity, and dismantled the group of police and
carabinieri
that had been responsible for most of the successes against Cosa Nostra in the previous few years.

Less than twenty-four hours after the Minister’s decision was announced, another senior flying squad officer, Ninni Cassarà, was ambushed and killed. The violence of his death was shocking even by the terrible standards of Palermo in the 1980s. A platoon of between twelve and fifteen killers occupied the building opposite Cassarà’s home and opened fire as he stepped from his bulletproof car. His wife could only watch from the balcony as more than 200 rounds were sprayed at her husband. Killed with him was twenty-three-year-old policeman Roberto Antiochia who, knowing how vulnerable his superior was, had returned early from his holidays to offer protection. Only a few days previously Cassarà had given an interview in which he said, ‘Anyone who takes their job seriously ends up getting killed sooner or later.’

The sense of isolation felt by the police exploded into rage. Members of the flying squad threatened to apply en masse for a transfer. They protested about the lack of witnesses coming forward, and turned away from police headquarters people seeking to renew their passports; one citizen who telephoned with a routine inquiry was simply told to ‘fuck off’. At Antiochia’s funeral, the presence of the Minister of the Interior and the President of the Republic nearly provoked a police riot outside Palermo’s 800-year-old cathedral. The dead officer’s colleagues spat at the two statesmen, shouting insults: ‘Bastards! Murderers! Clowns!’ Fighting broke out between the flying squad and the
carabinieri.
One officer vented his fury to a journalist:

We are sick of this. We don’t need these state funerals. It’s always the same faces, the same words, the same condolences. After two days public opinion calms down … and everything carries on as before. With us dickheads getting ourselves killed because we’re hit both by the mafia and by our leaders.

There has never been any suggestion that the two statesmen against whom the police chose to vent their rage were guilty of complicity with Cosa Nostra. But the message was nonetheless clear: it was not Italy that was fighting the mafia; it was an embattled minority bound together by fierce team spirit and a sense of duty.

WATCHING THE BULLFIGHT

Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were old friends by the time they prepared the prosecution case in the maxi-trial (their job did not include being advocates in court). They were almost the same age, and had been brought up in the same small quarter of central Palermo by parents from the same kind of middle-class background; Falcone’s father was a chemist and Borsellino’s a pharmacist. The two men shared the same devotion to duty and the same unshakeable faith in justice. But they were very different, with different political leanings. Without ever associating with any political party, Falcone had left-wing sympathies. Borsellino joined a neo-Fascist group as a young man, and he retained a much stronger Catholic faith than his colleague. Both magistrates always meticulously resisted any overtures from political parties who sought to capitalize on their reputations.

Falcone and Borsellino also had different attitudes to the city in which they lived and worked. Falcone, perhaps in keeping with his more diffident personality, was more pessimistic about the degree to which Palermo supported his work. Every day he went to work in a speeding convoy of four bulletproof cars full of agents with machine-guns and bulletproof vests; a helicopter watched over their route. To judge by the contemporary letters pages of the
Giornale di Sicilia,
some Palermo residents thought that the traffic congestion created by these convoys was a far more serious problem than the mafia. Falcone was particularly upset when one of his neighbours wrote to suggest that he should be forced to move to the suburbs. Borsellino, a more outgoing man with a healthy streak of hedonism, was more sanguine: ‘They are cheering us on.’

Both men drew strength from the growing voice of Sicily’s antimafia movement. Students were staging demonstrations against the mafia in the streets of the city. Campaigners had set up a study centre named after Peppino Impastato. In Salvatore Pappalardo, Sicily now had a Cardinal Primate who was not afraid to use the word ‘mafia’ or to denounce the state’s inaction in the face of the slaughter. As a consequence, in 1983, the Cardinal’s Easter mass in the Ucciardone prison was boycotted by inmates. Some grass-roots clergymen were much more forthright in their opposition to the mafia.