Cosa Nostra (53 page)
Authors: John Dickie
The tale of Falcone’s troubles at the hands of some of his fellow magistrates in the wake of the maxi-trial is a depressing demonstration of how solipsistic Italy’s public institutions can be. In the eyes of many politicians and their allies in the magistracy, the antimafia pool was not seen as a more or less useful instrument for doing what the judicial system is supposed to do: protect the innocent and punish the guilty out there in the real world. Rather it was seen as just one more ‘power centre’ from which to exercise influence over rivals within the state. In trying to uphold the rule of law, Falcone and Borsellino sometimes gave the impression of three-dimensional beings who were forced to explain their thinking to the inhabitants of a two-dimensional world. The two magistrates could struggle all they might to point to the third dimension of legality, but the very notion that such a dimension existed was all but incomprehensible to men whose only coordinates were petty politics and procedural quibbling.
In June 1989, Falcone’s renewed fears about his vulnerability were confirmed when an Adidas sports bag packed with explosives was found on the rocks beside a beach house that he and his wife had rented just outside Palermo. Uncharacteristically, he said openly that he thought unknown politicians close to Cosa Nostra were involved in planning the attempt on his life. The following months saw affairs in the Poison Palace brought before the CSM once again, after Falcone was the victim of a campaign of anonymous defamatory letters probably written by one of his colleagues. The main accusation was that he had used a mafia defector to fight a dirty war against the Corleonesi. The following January, Leoluca Orlando, the antimafia mayor of Palermo who had gone as far as to ally himself with the Communists in an effort to change the climate of city government, was finally brought down by the DC leadership in Rome, who saw him as a political maverick. The prospects for Falcone, and for the antimafia movement, looked bleak indeed.
* * *
But in February 1991, Falcone—so often the victim of political opportunism—became its beneficiary. It was a moment when the fate of the antimafia movement was dramatically reversed. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the postwar pack-ice of Italian politics began to break up. The PCI dissolved and reconstituted itself as a social-democratic party; now Italians had much less reason to ‘hold their noses and vote DC’. The DC also looked vulnerable in its stronghold in north-eastern Italy; here the raucous Northern League was eating away at the Catholic party’s support by decrying corruption in Rome and the South. Reform was in the air. A crime wave, and the outrage in some sections of public opinion at the aftermath of the maxi-trial, gave an ambitious new Socialist Minister of Justice—previously a critic of the antimafia magistrates—the opportunity he wanted to increase his prestige as a defender of law and order. He invited Falcone to become Director of Penal Affairs in the Ministry with the responsibility for coordinating the fight against organized crime at a national level.
Despite the serious misgivings of some of his peers, Falcone took the job. And, in a little over a year, he used the unexpected change in the political climate to completely turn around the fortunes of the fight against the mafia. His main goal was to set up two national bodies that are still today the pillars of Italy’s response to organized crime: the DIA (Direzione Investigativa Antimafia), uniting the efforts of
carabinieri,
police, and other law enforcement agencies involved in fighting mafia-style organizations—it is a kind of Italian FBI; and the DNA (Direzione Nazionale Antimafia), a national antimafia prosecutors’ office, which coordinates twenty-six district antimafia prosecutors’ offices in various major cities across the country; each is obliged by law to keep a computer database on organized crime. Thus from the centre, in Rome, Falcone managed to do what he had been prevented from doing in Palermo: create a unified vision not just of Cosa Nostra, but of the whole Italian underworld.
Then there was still the fate of the maxi-trial to be decided. Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina took measures to ensure that the trial did not have a bloodless journey through the protracted appeals process. Palermo Appeal Court judge Antonio Saetta and his mentally handicapped son were shot dead in September 1988. Court of Cassation prosecutor Antonio Scopelliti was murdered in August 1991 by the Calabrian mafia (the ‘Ndrangheta) on Cosa Nostra’s behalf. (Three weeks later, mafiosi also shot dead Libero Grassi, a Palermo businessman who led a public campaign against extortion rackets, then estimated to provide an income of $25 billion for criminal organizations across Italy.)
These murders helped put further political weight behind Falcone’s reforms. In a way, they were a sign of failure, a sign that the Corleonesi’s scorn for the Italian state had finally begun to rebound. They may also have helped ensure that Cosa Nostra did not get the final verdict it wanted from the maxi-trial. The judge who presided over the first section of the Court of Cassation, Corrado Carnevale, had the nickname of the ‘verdict slayer’ because of his history of acquitting mafiosi on technicalities. At the time, the antimafia magistrates, sections of the public opinion, and even many men of honour were convinced that Carnevale was working in Cosa Nostra’s interests. A decade later, in October 2002, the Court of Cassation would overturn Judge Carnevale’s conviction for ‘external cooperation in the crime of mafia association’—the charge had been that he was using his influence to turn legal decisions in the mafia’s favour. One must conclude that he was merely, as he maintained all along, applying the law with particular punctiliousness. Nevertheless, in 1991 it was perceptions that counted. In that peculiar political climate, and with Falcone working in the Ministry of Justice, Carnevale did not get to preside over the Court of Cassation’s crucial hearing on the maxi-trial.
Thus it was that, on 31 January 1992, after proceedings lasting two months, the Court of Cassation overturned the Appeal Court verdict on the maxi-trial and confirmed the three central contentions of Falcone’s and Borsellino’s original prosecution case: that Cosa Nostra existed and was a single, unified organization; that the members of the Commission were all jointly responsible for murders carried out in the organization’s name; and that the evidence of mafia defectors was valid. The ‘Buscetta theorem’ was now fact, and the leaders of Cosa Nostra faced definitive life sentences.
After 130 years, the Italian state had finally declared the Sicilian mafia to be an organized and deadly challenge to its own right to rule; it was the worst defeat in the entire history of the world’s most famous criminal association. And with Falcone widely expected to take over the new national prosecutors’ office with the power to drive home the advantage in Sicily, across the country, and even internationally, it looked very much as if further defeats for the mafia would follow. Falcone seemed to have all the powers he needed for the definitive redemption of the
terra infidelium
to begin.
Corleone Agricultural College is a curious building, hardly what one would expect of a state educational institution. Brand new, standing three storeys high on a residential road, it has underground parking, lifts, integral air-conditioning and heating, and a neat paved garden. At the front it is overloaded with showy metalwork, with balconies, decorative railings, an imposing gate, and coach lamps. Inside, the desks, blackboards, and computers sit incongruously among black and red marble floors, heavy hardwood doors, and stuccoed walls. In fact the Corleone Istituto Professionale di Stato per l’Agricoltura did not begin life as a college but as exactly what it seems to be: a luxury villa built by a local self-made man, one Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina.
Nobody has ever asked Riina quite what he intended to do with a home he never got to occupy. But it is likely that this is where he planned to gather his extended family around him when his long career came to an end. This was the retirement home Riina constructed on the assumption that he could arrange to have the verdict of the maxi-trial reversed and return home to enjoy the fruits of his labours. So although it is easy to poke fun at the gaudy taste of the Riina villa, it is difficult not to be impressed by the confidence that it displays, by Riina’s sheer inability to comprehend that the state might actually have any right to object to a fortune made from decades of murder.
Thankfully, Riina’s confidence has turned out to be misplaced. By the end of 1995, around £125 million, mostly in property, had been confiscated from the boss of bosses. This extraordinary figure almost certainly does not represent the full extent of ‘Shorty’ Riina’s fortune. His Corleone villa was confiscated in 1992 and then, in 1997, given to the town following a civil suit against the family mounted by a brave young antimafia mayor. The people of Corleone knew what they were doing when they made the Riina villa into something so ordinary—a public, educational institution. Cosa Nostra treats all public wealth, no matter how essential—water sources, roads, hospitals, schools—as potential plunder. As a result, for generations it has denied to all the Sicilian families who do not fall within its orbit these banal but crucial paths to progress. And when the state makes good, ordinary things from mafia property in this way, it does not just hurt men of honour financially; it strikes at the heart of their justification for what they do. With treachery and death all around them, they can at least hold on to the belief that they are doing it all for their loved ones.
Since Buscetta turned state’s evidence back in 1984, Riina had been promising his men that if intimidation and corruption failed to stop the judicial opposition to Cosa Nostra in Palermo, then his political contacts would stop it in Rome. The problem he faced in making good these promises was that Cosa Nostra’s relationship with the DC was in a slowly accelerating tailspin. The outrages carried out in the 1980s led directly to antimafia legislation that Cosa Nostra badly wanted to reverse. Riina now needed to influence headline government policy and not just win piecemeal favours behind the scenes. But the more ‘eminent corpses’ there were, the more reluctant politicians were to expose themselves in the mafia’s defence.
The problem came to a head when Falcone went to Rome in 1991. Mafiosi interpreted his move to the capital as a sign that he would soon be safely sucked into the quagmire of Italian politics, discredited, and rendered powerless. Falcone’s achievements in the Ministry of Justice were a startling reversal of these expectations. It was a hair-raising spectacle for mafiosi who were used to regarding the governing parties as their passive partners in misrule: here was Cosa Nostra’s mortal enemy shaping the crime policies of a Socialist Minister of Justice under a Christian Democrat Prime Minister. Among many other changes, 1991 saw new laws to prevent money laundering, allow the use of phone taps on mafiosi, and give the government powers to dissolve town councils infiltrated by organized crime.
Worrying though these developments were for Cosa Nostra, the organization’s grass roots were led to believe that ‘verdict slayer’ Judge Carnevale was the ultimate guarantee that things would turn out right in the end. So the Court of Cassation’s verdict in January 1992 was a shocking blow to Riina’s plans for his family’s future and to his prestige within Cosa Nostra. Here was the final proof that the most powerful boss in the mafia’s history had made the organization into a political orphan.
Riina’s very survival was now at stake. As investigating magistrate Guido Lo Forte explains, ‘In the mafia you can’t hand in your resignation. You simply get eliminated. It was a case [for Riina and his men] either of accepting their own elimination or of trying to reaffirm their own power in the eyes of the whole membership.’ Riina chose to reaffirm his power through a stunning escalation of Cosa Nostra’s conflict with the Italian state. The mafia needed to influence the political process more than ever, but had only one means of influence left: violence. The state was to be bombed into backing down over the things that mattered most to Riina and his cohorts: the maxi-trial verdict, and the 1982 law that allowed the authorities to confiscate mafia wealth. ‘We must make war in order to be able to mould the peace,’ Riina was heard to say. The Commission’s death sentences against Falcone and Borsellino—long outstanding—were reactivated within days of the Court of Cassation’s pronouncement.
These years, 1992 and 1993—the aftermath of the Court of Cassation’s historic decision—were the most dramatic in the whole history of the Sicilian mafia. Riina’s confrontation with the state grew into a full-scale terrorist bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. This unprecedented military action was to end in a defeat so serious as to bring the organization’s very survival into doubt for the first time since Mussolini. Both Cosa Nostra and Italy are still living with the consequences of Riina’s failed retirement plans.
‘Vito, my Vito. My angel. They’ve taken you away. I’ll never be able to kiss you again. I’ll never be able to hold you again. I’ll never be able to caress you again. You are mine alone.’
At the state funeral of the victims of the Capaci bomb, it was Vito Schifani’s tiny, pale widow Rosaria who gave a harrowing voice to her own desolation and to a city’s rage. Her husband, with fellow officers Antonio Montinaro and Rocco Di Cillo, was in the car that took the full force of the blast that killed Judge Falcone. Standing at the lectern and looking out into the congregation, before the cameras of several national television stations, she cried out, ‘To the men of the mafia—who are here in this church too—I want to say something. Become Christians again. I ask you, for Palermo, a city you’ve turned into a city of blood.’ Before the Cardinal had even finished saying mass, the families and colleagues of the dead policemen moved to prevent any dignitaries getting near the five coffins—‘They are our dead, not theirs,’ one was heard to say. Rosaria Schifani, still weeping uncontrollably, let a bottle of water she had been given slip through her fingers and smash on the floor; without seeming to notice, she implored the congregation once more: ‘Men of the mafia, I will forgive you, but you will have to get down on your knees.’ Her words were repeated again and again on news bulletins.
