Cosa Nostra (3 page)

As the reality about Cosa Nostra emerged through Buscetta’s testimony and the maxi-trial, a few historians, most of them Sicilians, took their cue from the investigating magistrates: they began to look back at neglected records and unearth new evidence. A whole field of study was slowly opening up. Then, in 1992, when the Court of Cassation’s verdict confirmed the Buscetta theorem—and in so doing triggered the murders of Falcone and Borsellino—writing the history of the mafia suddenly became far more than an academic pursuit: it was now part of an urgent imperative to understand a deadly threat to society, and to show the remaining antimafia magistrates that they were not alone in their struggle.

A pioneering history of the Sicilian mafia was published in Italian the following year. It was updated in 1996, and further discoveries have been made since then. The drive to tell the mafia’s story has progressed in tandem with the drive to combat Cosa Nostra in the wake of the atrocities of 1992. In Sicily, history counts.

It may also count for something if the history of the mafia is told to the world beyond Italy. While Falcone’s epic confrontation with Cosa Nostra in the 1980s became the subject of some superb accounts in English, the totally new perspective on the mafia’s history that Falcone opened up remains almost totally unknown. This book is the first history of the Sicilian mafia, from its origins to the present day, to be written in any language other than Italian. It presents the findings of the latest research and tells the story of the mafia as the Italian specialists now tell it. It also contains some completely new findings. What has emerged in the last few years is a much fuller historical description of the Sicilian mafia than was thought possible even a short time ago. A picture that used to be drawn in the fuzzy lines of sociological jargon—’mentalities’, ‘para-state functions’, ‘violent mediators’—now contains real people, places, dates, and crimes. And the clearer the picture becomes, the more disturbing are its implications: a secret society that has murder as its very
raison d’être
has been an integral part of the way Italy has been run since the middle of the nineteenth century.

Introduction

‘Mafia’ is now one of a long list of words—like ‘pizza’, ‘spaghetti’, ‘opera’, and ‘disaster’—that Italian has given to many other languages across the world. It is commonly applied to criminals far beyond Sicily and the United States, which are the places where the mafia in the strict sense is based. ‘Mafia’ has become an umbrella label for a whole world panoply of gangs—Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Chechen, Albanian, Turkish, and so on—that have little or nothing to do with the Sicilian original.

There are other criminal associations based in other regions of southern Italy, and all of them are sometimes called ‘mafia’: the Sacra Corona Unita, in Puglia (the heel of the Italian boot); the ‘Ndrangheta, in Calabria (the toe); and the Camorra, in the city of Naples and its environs (located on the shin). These other associations all have a fascinating history of their own—one of them, the Camorra, is a little older than the mafia—but they will only be touched on here when relevant to the history of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. The reason is simply that no other Italian illegal society is nearly as powerful, as well organized, or as successful as the mafia. It is not by chance that it is this Sicilian word that has become the most widely used.

This book is selective in that it is a history of the mafia of Sicily. Some of the most famous American mafiosi, men like Lucky Luciano and Al Capone, also people these pages because the history of the Sicilian mafia cannot be told without also telling the story of the American mafia to which it gave birth. The United States has been a thriving environment for organized criminals over the past two centuries, but only a part of organized crime in the US has been mafia crime. Accordingly, the American mafia is here placed in its proper and most illuminating perspective. It is only when viewed from the coast of a small, triangular island in the Mediterranean that the history of the mafia in the USA, at least in its early stages, can begin to make sense.

The mafia of Sicily pursues power and money by cultivating the art of killing people and getting away with it, and by organizing itself in a unique way that combines the attributes of a shadow state, an illegal business, and a sworn secret society like the Freemasons.

Cosa Nostra is like a state because it aims to control territory. With the agreement of the mafia as a whole, each mafia Family (the Italian word used through much of the mafia’s history is
cosca
) exercises a shadow government over the people within its territory. Protection rackets are for a mafia Family what taxes are for a legal government. There is a difference, in that the mafia tries to ‘tax’ all economic activity, whether it is legal or illegal: retailers and robbers alike pay what is known as the
pizzo.
A mafioso may well end up protecting both the owner of a car showroom and the gang of car thieves who prey on him. So the only party absolutely guaranteed to benefit from any given protection deal is the mafia. Like a state, the mafia also arrogates to itself the power of life and death over its subjects. But the mafia is not an alternative government; it exists by infiltrating the legal state and twisting it to its own purposes.

Cosa Nostra is a business because it tries to make a profit—albeit by intimidation. But it rarely clears large margins from its ‘governmental’ activities. Most of the income from protection rackets tends to get ploughed back into maintaining its murder capability: it buys lawyers, judges, policemen, journalists, politicians, and casual labour, and it supports mafiosi unlucky enough to end up in prison. Cosa Nostra pays these overheads in order to build what some ‘mafiologists’ think of as a brand of intimidation. The mafia brand can be deployed in all sorts of markets, like construction fraud or tobacco smuggling. As a general rule, the more treacherous, violent, and profitable a market is—the obvious case is narcotics trafficking and dealing—the more mafiosi who enter that market benefit from having a world-renowned and utterly reliable brand of blood-curdling intimidation behind them.

Cosa Nostra is an exclusive secret society because it needs to select its affiliates very carefully and impose restrictions on their behaviour in return for the benefits of membership. The chief demands that Cosa Nostra makes of its members are that they be discreet, obedient, and ruthlessly violent.

The history of this organization is fascinating in its own right. But the history of the mafia cannot
just
be about the mafia, about the deeds of men of honour. Before Falcone and Borsellino, a great many other people died fighting the mafia. Some of them are characters in the drama recounted here, because an integral part of the story of the mafia is the tale of its struggle with the Sicilians and others who have opposed it from the outset. The mafia’s story also embraces the people who, for an assortment of motives ranging from rational fear, through political cynicism, to downright complicity, have favoured the organization’s cause.

But even a history of the mafia that included all these things would still leave many questions unanswered. Because everyone outside Italy knows what the mafia is, or at least thinks they do, it still seems baffling that it took until 1992 for the true nature of the Sicilian mafia to be confirmed. How could an illegal organization remain so powerful and so difficult to understand for so long? Part of the explanation was a lack of evidence. The mafia survived and prospered because it intimidated witnesses, and confounded or corrupted the police and courts. All too often in the past, the authorities (and so, after them, the historians) were left to count the dead bodies and wonder what strange logic underlay all the bloodshed.

The problem was even more deep-seated; indeed, it went to the heart of the Italian system of government. At the very least, the Italian state has been extremely absentminded about the Sicilian mafia over the past century and more. On the few occasions when an understanding of the mafia penetrated government institutions, it was swiftly forgotten. And even when it was remembered for a while, it was not put to good use. Italy repeatedly missed opportunities to grasp some of the truths that judges Falcone and Borsellino finally paid with their lives to prove. The mafia was a secret hidden in plain view. For that reason, Italy’s recurring failure to understand the mafia makes for a much richer story than would be the case if it were all down to some cloak-and-dagger conspiracy by a few individuals bent on keeping the truth concealed. For that reason too, as well as being a history of the mafia, this book is a history of Italy’s failure to comprehend and combat what was visible all the while.

There are plenty of contemporary examples that suggest that Italy’s deeply rooted mafia problem is still very much alive. At the time of writing, the President of the Sicilian Region is under investigation for links with the mafia—he denies any wrongdoing. Another high-profile mafia case involves the advertising executive who in 1993 founded Forza Italia, the political party of the current Prime Minister, media tycoon Silvio Berlusconi. A recent mafia defector has alleged that there were high-level meetings to seal a pact between Cosa Nostra and Forza Italia. The allegations are strongly denied and one should not rush to draw conclusions about these individual cases, neither of which has reached a definitive verdict. But as well as raising eyebrows, they also raise historical questions about how Italy managed to get itself into such a predicament.

The historians who first attempted to answer those questions in the wake of Buscetta’s evidence quickly made a remarkable find that only deepened the mystery of why Italy had failed properly to understand the mafia before. Buscetta was, in fact, far from the first man of honour to break the mafia’s famous code of silence known as
omertà;
he was not even the first to be believed when he did so. There have been mafia informants for almost as long as there have been mafiosi. In addition, there existed from the outset a furtive and often intimate dialogue between men of honour and the powers that be—police, magistrates, politicians. Historians can now eavesdrop on passages of that dialogue; it makes for fascinating and uneasy listening because it reveals the extent of the Italian state’s complicity with murderers.

Even after the discovery of these earlier mafia defectors, there remained the profound problem of how to interpret what they said; police and magistrates had wrestled with this from the beginning of the mafia’s history, right up to Falcone’s and Borsellino’s maxi-trial. Why should anyone believe professional criminals who have any number of reasons to lie? The evidence of mafia informers was often dismissed as simply not reliable enough to be used in court—or in a history book. The testimonies of men of honour, even of
pentiti,
are always hard to read. In fact the word
pentito
is deceptive: true repentance in a man of honour is comparatively rare. Throughout the association’s history, members of the mafia have generally given their testimonies to the state as a way of getting back at other mafiosi who have betrayed them and defeated them in a war. Confessions turn up when the losers have no other weapons left. Buscetta was a loser and, like other
pentiti,
his testimony is skewed in parts as a consequence.

Yet there is something else about Buscetta’s evidence, something that made it more than just a subjective version of events, and turned it instead into the Rosetta Stone of mafia testimonies. Buscetta explained exactly how men of honour
think
because he set out both the strange rules that they follow and the reasons why they often break them. The ‘boss of two worlds’ himself still felt the power of these rules and always denied that he had become a
pentito
instead of a man of honour. Buscetta’s great lesson to magistrates and historians alike is that the mafia’s rules need to be taken seriously—which is by no means the same thing as assuming that they are always obeyed.

Tommaso Buscetta never ceased to stress the importance of one particular rule within Cosa Nostra. It relates to truth. Thanks to Buscetta we now know that the truth is a peculiarly precious and dangerous commodity for mafiosi. When a man of honour is initiated into the Sicilian mafia, one of the things he swears is never to lie to other ‘made men’, whether or not they are from the same Family. Thereafter, any man of honour who tells a lie can easily find that he has taken a short cut to the acid bath. Yet at the same time, a well-disguised lie can also be a very powerful weapon in the permanent struggle for power within Cosa Nostra. The upshot is simple: acute paranoia. As Buscetta explained, ‘A
mafioso
lives in terror of being judged—not by the laws of men, but by the malicious gossip internal to Cosa Nostra. The fear that someone could be speaking ill of him is constant.’

In the circumstances, it is not surprising to learn that all men of honour are prodigiously good at keeping their mouths shut. Before turning state’s evidence, Buscetta once spent three years in the same prison cell as a man of honour who had recently carried out an order to kill a third mafioso—a close friend of Buscetta’s. Throughout those three years the two enemies did not exchange a single hostile word, and even shared Christmas dinner. Buscetta knew that his cellmate had already been condemned to death by Cosa Nostra; it is not known whether the cellmate was also aware that he had been marked down for execution. He was duly murdered on his release.

Men of honour prefer not to say anything to anyone who does not already know what they are talking about; they communicate in codes, hints, fragments of phrases, stony stares, significant silences. In Cosa Nostra, no one asks or says more than they absolutely have to; nobody ever wonders out loud. Judge Falcone observed that ‘the interpretation of signs, gestures, messages and silences is one of a man of honour’s main activities’. Buscetta was particularly eloquent in explaining what it feels like to live in such a world: