Authors: John Dickie
Cosa Nostra (37 page)
In the summer of 1950, Giuliano’s captured associates were finally arraigned in Viterbo near Rome for the trial that was supposed to answer all the questions. But no sooner had the hearing got under way than the mysteries deepened when Giuliano’s body was found in the courtyard of a house in Castelvetrano—outside his mountain realm.
The film
Salvatore Giuliano
opens with images—meticulously based on reality—of the bandit’s dead body lying face down in the small courtyard in Castelvetrano. He is dressed in socks, sandals, and a blood-soaked vest; there is also a small stream of blood dried into the beaten earth beneath him. His right hand, on which a diamond ring is visible, is stretched out towards a Beretta sub-machine-gun. In fact the sequence is shot through with irony; as Rosi knew very well, the ‘real’ scene of Giuliano’s death was as much a fake as this cinematic version. When the press came to photograph the bandit’s body, the
carabinieri
claimed that they had killed him in a furious gunfight. But a courageous investigative reporter soon exposed the official account as a fiction; the headline read: ‘The only thing certain is that he is dead.’ Once the official version of his death had been discredited, a more likely account emerged: Giuliano was shot in his bed, probably by his cousin and lieutenant Gaspare Pisciotta—an agent of the
carabinieri;
the
carabinieri
themselves moved his body into the courtyard to be photographed as the basis for a cover-up. Quite
what
they were covering up was to remain obscure. But the fact remains that Giuliano was killed when he very probably could have been captured, and there were certainly politicians, policemen,
carabinieri,
and mafiosi for whom he was less dangerous dead.
In the Viterbo courtroom, the members of Giuliano’s band fed the frenzy of public suspicion. The Minister of the Interior, Mario Scelba, was again said to have been involved in the plot to carry out the Portella della Ginestra slaughter. The accusations were often contradictory or vague—passing the responsibility upwards to politicians and policemen evidently served the bandits’ interests—but it was nonetheless an alarming and disconcerting spectacle. In the end the judge concluded that no higher authority had ordered the massacre, and that the Giuliano band had acted autonomously. Their aim had been to punish local leftists for the recent election results.
The verdict left few people satisfied simply because there were too many pieces of the puzzle that did not fit. Although it would be futile now to try to solve the mysteries surrounding Portella della Ginestra and Salvatore Giuliano, it is certainly worth listing some of the evidence. Ever since Giuliano’s death, ‘behindologists’ have been trying to assemble a coherent picture out of these and other facts:
• Several witnesses recalled that Giuliano received a letter just before he carried out the Portella della Ginestra atrocity. When he read it, he destroyed it carefully and told the members of his band, ‘Boys, the hour of our liberation is at hand’; he then announced the plan to attack the peasant celebration. No one has ever discovered who sent the letter.
• After the massacre at Portella della Ginestra, the Chief of Police in Sicily met senior Monreale mafiosi at his house in Rome. There they handed him a written testimony by Giuliano which he in turn seems to have sent to the home address of the chief prosecutor at the Palermo Court of Appeal, a man who may also have had contacts with Giuliano. The testimony has never been found.
• The same Chief of Police had a regular correspondence with Giuliano through the same mafia channels. On at least one occasion he actually met the bandit leader—they shared
panettone
and two different kinds of liqueur.
The one man able and possibly willing to reveal the truth about Portella della Ginestra was Gaspare Pisciotta, Giuliano’s dapper cousin who betrayed and probably killed him on behalf of the
carabinieri.
While he was with the band he had a pass, signed by a colonel in the
carabinieri,
that allowed him to move about the island freely. He had even visited a doctor under the supervision of another officer—he suffered from tuberculosis. During the Viterbo trial, Pisciotta had proclaimed, ‘We are one body: bandits, police and mafia—like the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’
At the conclusion of the Viterbo trial, Pisciotta was given a life sentence for his part in the events at Portella della Ginestra. While he was in prison—he spent his time writing an autobiography and doing silk embroidery—it became clear that the authorities were starting to give more credit to some of his evidence. There was to be a new trial at which he would be charged with Giuliano’s murder. Perjury and other charges were to be made against police and
carabinieri.
Pisciotta contacted an investigating magistrate and said that he was intending to reveal much more than he had done before.
On the morning of 9 February 1954, Pisciotta made himself a cup of coffee. Into it he stirred what he thought was his tuberculosis medicine. He took an hour to die, his body tormented by the violent head-to-toe convulsions that are the characteristic symptom of strychnine poisoning. His autobiography vanished.
Pisciotta was poisoned in the Ucciardone prison in Palermo—the mafia’s university of crime since the middle of the nineteenth century. It is inconceivable that he was killed without at least the honoured society’s approval. Whatever the mafia’s involvement in the intrigues behind Portella della Ginestra and the Giuliano band, it was they who made sure that the whole truth would never come out.
God, Concrete, Heroin, and Cosa Nostra
THE EARLY LIFE OF TOMMASO BUSCETTA
It was in the years following the Second World War that the Sicilian mafia probably began to refer to itself as Cosa Nostra—’our thing’. It may be that the most recent of the mafia’s many names is an American import. The theory has been put forward that the term originated in Sicilian immigrant communities in the United States; it was ‘our thing’ because it was not open to criminals from other ethnic groups. But because the mafia does not leave written minutes of its dense, cryptic internal conversation, there is no way of proving where ‘Cosa Nostra’ came from. In fact there would be little to be gained even if there was, because names are not very important to the Sicilian mafia. Most mafiosi would probably prefer it if ‘their thing’ did not need a name at all, if its existence could be intimated solely by the raising of an eyebrow or a stony glare. As was the case with the other titles that have come and gone over the years—the Brotherhood, the honoured society, and so on—the arrival of ‘Cosa Nostra’ does not signal any real change in the organization’s structure or methods.
Tommaso Buscetta himself believed that Cosa Nostra was an ancient name. There is no evidence that he is right, and this theory probably carries no more authority than his belief that the Sicilian mafia had medieval origins. Buscetta may have been a bad historian, but he was a good witness, and the testimonies and memoirs that he left stretch back over half a century. It is after the Second World War that Buscetta enters the mafia’s story. Between 1945 and 1963—the dramatic year in which he, like many other important mafiosi, fled abroad—he saw first-hand some profound developments in Cosa Nostra. It was between 1950 and 1963 that it established a new governing body—the Commission or Cupola—and remade ties with the American Cosa Nostra that drew it deep into the transatlantic heroin trade. It was in these years that Cosa Nostra found what was both a new source of income and a bond in its relationship with the political system: concrete.
Buscetta’s opinions are not always entirely reliable. For one thing, he remembered the 1950s as the ‘good old days’ of Cosa Nostra, when respect and honour reigned rather than greed and violence. As will become clear, he was far from right about that. For another thing, Buscetta spent a good deal of his career away from Sicily. So the history of the Sicilian mafia is not the same as either the story Buscetta told or the story he lived. But because Buscetta will appear and reappear in these pages from this point onwards, it is important to get a sense of both the man and the mafioso.
* * *
There is a reason why so much is known about Tommaso Buscetta’s sex life. The first man of honour to explain Cosa Nostra’s rules to Judge Giovanni Falcone was also the first on whom Italian journalists could test a cherished theory: that mafiosi were prime examples of the archetypal macho, sensual, Mediterranean male. Buscetta’s famous features—the thick, generous lips, the round, sad eyes—made him look as if he had been cast for the role.
On one occasion in 1986, Italy’s best-known journalist and TV presenter, the genial raconteur Enzo Biagi, went to New York to interview Sicily’s most famous mafia boss and write what is still the most rounded and engaging portrait of his character. To do so he had to brave an elaborate Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) witness protection operation: a rendezvous at the Hotel St Moritz on Central Park with a security chief known only as ‘Hubert’, a long drive upstate, a change of car, and a thorough frisking. Biagi’s reward was to spend several days with Buscetta in an isolated, temporary safe house. After winning the mafioso’s trust by chatting about family and football (Buscetta was a Juventus fan), Biagi blurted out the question he had been burning to ask the legendary ‘boss of two worlds’, self-confessed multiple murderer, and keeper of some of the darkest secrets in Italian history: ‘Do you remember when you made love for the first time?’
Buscetta was happy to play up to what the chirpy Biagi called ‘gallismo meridionale’—’southern cockerel-ism’. After all, not long before, Buscetta had been recalling altogether more stressful memories in the vast, bombproof courthouse at the Ucciardone prison in Palermo. The questions he had had to field then were about international drug-dealing and bloodshed, and the audience were the mafiosi who had killed six members of his family in the space of three months. Talking about his sexual conquests with Biagi was a stroll on the Marina by comparison. It also got him on to one of his favourite subjects, his own magnetism: ‘Mother Nature gave me charisma, I’ve got something extra.’ It was his (less than entirely convincing) explanation for the fact that other men of honour so revered him.
For the record, Tommaso Buscetta lost his virginity at the age of eight. It was the first and only time he ever had sex with a prostitute; the woman in question also ran a roadside stall selling olives, cheese, and anchovies, and requested only a bottle of olive oil in return for her favours. Thereafter romance played a big part in Buscetta’s life. Of his three marriages—punctuated by countless infidelities—the first was contracted when he was sixteen, the second overlapped with the first, and the third was to a prominent Brazilian lawyer’s daughter who was twenty-two years his junior. In all, Buscetta had six children. He was also that very rare thing, a groovy don—at least as far as his dress-sense is concerned. One picture, taken in Brazil in 1971 or 1972 soon after he met his third wife, shows a smiling Buscetta in cream shoes, cream slacks, and a frilly shirt unbuttoned down to the solar plexus to reveal a delicate pendant. He even experimented with plastic surgery on his nose—this long before the US authorities asked surgeons to alter his appearance for his own protection.
Even if Buscetta was happy to present himself as a typical specimen of Mediterranean male, he was certainly not a representative
Homo mafiosus
in this respect. Discreet sleeping around is no crime for men of honour, but mistreating a wife certainly is. Buscetta’s marital record brought him trouble within Cosa Nostra. In the 1950s, he was suspended from the association for six months because of his infidelities. In 1972, he was extradited from Brazil and incarcerated in the Ucciardone prison in Palermo where he learned that the head of his Family had wanted to expel him altogether from Cosa Nostra for disrespecting his first two wives.
Buscetta was born on the eastern outskirts of Palermo in 1928 into a family without mafia connections. Although he was the seventeenth of seventeen children, he was not an urchin drawn to crime by dint of having no other chance in life. His father ran a workshop and employed fifteen people making and selling decorative mirrors. Like many Sicilian families, however, the Buscettas fell on hard times during the war, and the teenage Tommaso became a black marketeer. He also began stealing petrol, jam, butter, bread, and salame from the Germans, building up in the process an extensive network of contacts in the Palermo underworld. Once the Allies had liberated Sicily, Buscetta joined a group of about fifty young tearaways who went to Naples to fight the Nazis—partly out of a sense of adventure, and partly in the hope of booty. After two or three months of sabotage and ambushes on the Italian mainland, he returned to Sicily with his reputation greatly enhanced. It was then that he began to be approached by ‘cautious, mysterious men who expressed themselves in allusions, nuances, and hints’; he felt they were watching him, assessing him. One in particular—a furniture polisher—probed him about his attitudes to the police and magistrates, to family morality, and loyalty to friends.
The furniture polisher, one Giovanni Andronico, eventually proposed him for membership of the Porta Nuova Family of Cosa Nostra in 1945. Once the proposal was made to the capo, a note of Buscetta’s name was circulated to all the Families in the Palermo area so that they could undertake their own investigations into his reliability and check that neither he nor any of his family had any relations with the police. Once the investigations were complete, it was Andronico himself who pricked Buscetta’s finger with a pin during the initiation ceremony.
The Porta Nuova Family that Buscetta joined was comparatively small—there were about twenty-five men of honour in it—but very select. Among its members he discovered that there were four notables: the holder of the Sicilian franchise for a famous beer brand, a monarchist MP, a consultant psychiatrist, and Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile—the ‘friend’ of the mafia who was exercising his fiery rhetorical skills in the cause of Sicilian separatism. (This story, like some of the others that Buscetta relates about this period, has not been corroborated from other sources and must therefore be treated sceptically. They do, nonetheless, give a sense of the man’s style.)