Cosa Nostra (56 page)

In October 2003 the Court of Cassation brought an end to another protracted and controversial mafia case involving Giulio Andreotti. He had been accused of asking Cosa Nostra to kill a journalist who was blackmailing him—the murder took place in 1979. Three and a half years after first being committed to trial Andreotti was judged to be innocent in September 1999. Then, in November 2002, a guilty verdict and a sentence of 24 years in prison were issued in after an appeal by the prosecution. The Court of Cassation’s definitive ruling was that the prosecution had failed to provide any evidence to back up its hypothesis. Thus, seven and a half years after the trial began, and over two decades after the murder had taken place, Andreotti’s innocence was confirmed. He expressed relief that his nightmare was over, and claimed he was the victim of a political plot. The whole affair has done nothing to improve the reputation of Italy’s political and judicial systems.

*   *   *

The years of the Andreotti trials have been silent ones for Cosa Nostra. Italy was shocked from its torpor by the atrocities of the early 1990s. It was then placated by the capture of Riina, Bagarella, and Brusca. And it seems now to have been put back to sleep by Andreotti’s acquittal. When there are no prominent murders, Sicily can seem a long way away from Milan or Rome. But in the silence Cosa Nostra has begun to restructure. Since ‘lo scannacristiani’ was caught, Italy has set about letting a historic opportunity to defeat the mafia slip through its fingers.

ENTER THE TRACTOR

Bernardo Provenzano holds a record. He has been on the run, wanted for murder, since the day—10 September 1963—when he took part in an attack in Corleone on one of Michele ‘Our Father’ Navarra’s remaining soldiers. An unparalleled forty years, and counting, as a fugitive from justice. And, like Riina before him, Provenzano has almost certainly spent most of that time in western Sicily. He is best known in Italy through a police identikit because the last photo of him shows him as an uneasy, brilliantined twenty-six-year-old—it was taken in September 1959. There is no clearer example of what mafia territorial control means in practice than Provenzano’s continuing ability to evade capture.

For much of the last four decades Provenzano’s role within Cosa Nostra was seriously underestimated; at one time it was even thought that he was dead. Indeed, one sign of how he has been misjudged is his nickname, ‘the Tractor’. The world learned of it through the testimony of Antonino Calderone, one of the leading
pentiti
of the 1980s, who, from his distant viewpoint in Catania on the east of the island, thought that Provenzano was little more than a relentless killer, much less cunning than ‘Shorty’ Riina. Better-informed mafia defectors have now overturned that image; ‘the Tractor’ is more frequently known by the Corleonesi as ‘the accountant’ or ‘zu Binnu’—’Uncle Bernie’. They say that Provenzano has a much more astute business and political brain than Riina. Gioacchino Pennino, a doctor, DC politician, socialite, and man of honour who turned state’s evidence in 1994, said that it was principally Provenzano who rode shotgun on ‘pushy embezzler’ Vito Ciancimino’s political career. On one occasion in 1981, Pennino himself had been thinking out loud about switching out of Ciancimino’s group on Palermo city council. He was summoned to meet Uncle Bernie who, without waiting for an explanation, told him in no uncertain terms to shut up and stay put.

For many years Provenzano operated in Riina’s shadow. While Riina was busily engaged in a war on the state, Provenzano was quietly cultivating the networks of business and political friendships that have always provided the Sicilian mafia with its staple income. He began his business career as a debt collector for a loan firm set up by Luciano Leggio to recycle drug money, and has since specialized in health, construction, and—Tony Soprano would be curious to know—waste management. Like most of the Sicilian economy, these are businesses dominated by the public sector, and therefore by companies that have good links to politicians.

But Uncle Bernie is, of course, far from being a pacific character. As a long-term member of the Commission, he has racked up
in absentia
life sentences for some of the ‘eminent corpse’ murders, including Falcone and Borsellino, and for planning the 1993 bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. In the early 1990s, Provenzano took personal charge of a war between Cosa Nostra and a new federation of gangs based in southern and eastern Sicily that was originally formed by expelled men of honour; they called themselves the
stidda,
meaning both ‘bright star’ and ‘bad luck’. Many of the victims of Provenzano’s campaign—300 in three years in the province of Agrigento alone—were teenage gunfighters bought cheap by the
stiddari.

Since becoming boss of bosses after Leoluca Bagarella’s capture in 1995, Provenzano has changed Cosa Nostra’s strategy. The magistrates call his ploy ‘submersion’ because its key goal is to take Cosa Nostra below the radar of public discussion. Accordingly there have been no murders of prominent representatives of the state since Provenzano took charge. Those who are killed—significantly, they are almost all businessmen—die away from the big cities. Even petty crime in Palermo and Catania has dropped dramatically under Provenzano’s leadership. Roberto Scarpinato, a magistrate specializing in relationships between organized crime, business, and politics, argues that Uncle Bernie has grasped a fundamental rule of postmodern society: ‘What does not exist in the media does not exist in reality.’

Former mafiosi who knew Provenzano say he is much more conciliatory in his management style than Riina, much more inclined to profit share. Within the mafia he is associated with the saying ‘mangia e fai mangiare’—’eat and let eat’. Some of the boss of bosses’ business letters that have been intercepted give an idea of his approach: ‘I’ll end by saying that I’m at your complete disposal. I wish you the very best and send my dearest affectionate wishes to you and your father. May the Lord bless and protect you.’ Cosa Nostra is still centralized, but no longer the dictatorship that it became under ‘Shorty’ Riina. Internal peace is Provenzano’s priority.

Uncle Bernie’s Cosa Nostra has also returned to cultivating its core business of protection rackets. The pressure on legal businesses to pay the
pizzo
has increased notably in the past few years. Protection rackets lend themselves well to the submersion strategy in that they rarely require the ultimate and conspicuous sanction of murder; a fire, a beating, or insistent targeted robberies are usually enough to convince anyone who displays any reluctance to put their hand in their pocket.

Protection is also the mafia’s traditional ground-floor means of access to public works contracts. In July 2002, the national regulatory authority for public works published evidence to show that the system of blind bids, set up to prevent corruption, was being systematically subverted in Sicily. The Palermo chief prosecutor estimated that 96 per cent of government contracts were rigged in advance.

A substantial proportion of public spending in Sicily now comes from the European Union in Brussels rather than the Italian government in Rome. Agenda 2000 is the EU’s plan to promote development in poorer parts of the Continent. The regional plan for Sicily envisages spending 7,586 billion euros over six years—from 2000 to 2006—with a view to ‘significantly and sustainably reducing economic and social disadvantage, increasing long-term competitiveness, and creating the conditions for full and free access to work on the basis of environmental values and equal opportunities’. Naturally the new, submerged Cosa Nostra does not share this vision of balanced, sustainable growth in Sicily, at least if the following bugged conversation from the summer of 2000 is anything to go by: ‘They’re advising everyone not to make a noise and attract attention because we’ve got to get our hands on all of this Agenda 2000.’ It pays to remember that Salvo Lima had been a member of the European parliament for twelve years when he was shot dead.

There are no longer any heroin refineries in Sicily. The most recent trend is for the drugs to be produced where the poppies are grown. But Sicily is still a major point of access to the North American market. After eliminating the major drug-dealers in the
mattanza
in 1981–2, the Corleonesi immediately gave what they called a ‘licence’ to the remaining dealers to act on their behalf. There is evidence of narcotics business links between the Sicilian mafia and the emerging criminal organizations of Eastern Europe. Italian and Russian secret services heard of a first encounter between senior men of honour and members of the Russian mafia in Prague back in 1992. It seems that there was then a second meeting—again about drugs and the arms trade—in Switzerland at which American
mafiosi
were present too.

The profits from all of these illegal activities are now far easier to disguise, recycle, move and invest than they were in the days of Stefano Bontate, Totò Riina, and ‘God’s bankers’. The mafia has always been able to call on technical expertise, whether it be in citrus fruit dealing or international finance. And now, more than ever, the sons and daughters of men of honour are educated enough to become lawyers, bankers, and property dealers themselves.

Provenzano’s major achievement has been to stem the tide of defectors from Cosa Nostra. The policy of exterminating
pentiti
and their families has ceased with a view to encouraging those who have turned state’s evidence to retract and return to the fold. At the same time, Provenzano has also put the care of prisoners back in its traditionally high place on Cosa Nostra’s list of priorities. During the chaos of the mid-1990s, many men of honour in custody were not receiving their salaries. Some idea of how bosses began to respond to the crisis emerges from the following extracts from letters written from prison by the captured boss of Brancaccio to one of his lieutenants:

There are 20 of our people who are ruined because of the trials. And they don’t have the means to face the situation. The task is to come up with 3 or 4 apartments each so they can have a secure economic future—them and their families.

The guys in prison are always asking me why the monthly payment has been cut since I got arrested … I mean two million (£600) a month is hardly anything … I used to pay five million (£1,500) … I’m urging you to do at least as much as I did … When I was on the run we banked a basic of two hundred million (£66,000) a year plus between a billion and a billion and a half extra (£330,000–£500,000) … The builders who are on the move have got to produce those apartments … If anyone delays they’ve got to be made to pay. Anyone who takes advantage of the guys behind bars is dishonoured scum.

Under Provenzano, Cosa Nostra’s common fund for prisoners, which is fed from a tax on incomes across the organization, has been reactivated. Consequently, as leading magistrate Guido Lo Forte says, ‘Between the benefits offered by the state and those guaranteed by the mafia, prisoners are now choosing the latter.’

During the crisis of the mid-1990s, when it looked as if Cosa Nostra was on the verge of defeat, mafiosi fathers were reluctant to allow their sons to be admitted to the organization. Now initiations have resumed, albeit more selectively than before. Young men from families with long-established mafia histories behind them are being preferred in an effort to guard against
pentiti.
As Scarpinato says, ‘Family ties are an antibody to collaboration with the state.’

Provenzano has gathered about him a generation of bosses older than the young killers who tended to be close to Riina—Giovanni ‘lo scannacristiani’ Brusca being the emblematic case. Investigating magistrates sometimes refer to the Palermo Commission, now ruled over by Provenzano, as ‘the Senate’ because of the age of its members, who are with a few exceptions in their late fifties and sixties. Again, the fear of
pentiti
is driving this change. Older men of honour tend to have a long-term view: they have children to think of, and patrimonies to pass on to those children.

Communications within mafia Families and
mandamenti
have also become much more compartmentalized, with only a few chosen men of honour acting as channels of communication. It seems that it is now common practice for men of honour to conceal their status even from other mafiosi.

Provenzano’s response to the crisis provoked by defectors from his organization has worked. There has only been one significant man of honour who has turned state’s evidence since 1997 (about whom more below), and in the meantime legislators have sought to impose tight controls on the use of
pentiti. Pentitismo,
as it is called, has remained a controversial weapon in the magistrates’ armoury. The verdict of the first Andreotti trial strengthened the arguments of those who consider
pentiti
inherently unreliable. There was controversy during the case when a key
pentito
killed another mobster while under police protection. The benefits that magistrates are able to offer mafia defectors in return for information have since been cut. And any evidence that
pentiti
provide more than six months after their capture is now considered invalid; the problem is that six months is not very long for a man of honour to provide detailed information on a lifetime of day-in, day-out criminal activity.

Provenzano has established a
pax mafiosa
while his organization rebuilds the support networks damaged during the 1980s and early 1990s. Because Cosa Nostra’s guns have fallen silent for a while, some commentators have even been heard suggesting that the mafia is dying, that the new world of the internet and globalization is too modern for a semi-literate thug like Provenzano to understand. But over the past century and a half the mafia has responded to all of the great challenges of modernity: to capitalism, to the emergence of the nation-state, to democracy, to the rise and fall of the great ideologies of Socialism and Fascism, to global war, to industrialization and deindustrialization. Nothing that the nineteenth or twentieth centuries could throw at the Sicilian mafia managed to stop it. There is little to suggest that, left to its own devices, Cosa Nostra will fail to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century either. Cosa Nostra will not decline of its own accord. Magistrate Scarpinato describes it as a ‘collective brain, able to learn from its mistakes, to adapt and counter the different measures used to fight it’.