Authors: John Dickie
Cosa Nostra (39 page)
Then there is the fear factor. A glimpse into the fear that the ‘pushy Corleonese embezzler’ Ciancimino was able to marshal is provided by the Pecoraro case. In August 1963, Lorenzo Pecoraro, a partner in a construction firm, sent a letter to Palermo’s chief prosecuting magistrate, accusing Ciancimino of corruption. The case derived from an incident nearly two years earlier in which Ciancimino had illegally denied a building licence to Pecoraro’s company. At the same time, a licence to build on an adjacent plot was granted to another company, Sicilcasa S.p.a., despite the fact that this successful proposal broke planning regulations in a number of respects.
Pecoraro’s company responded to the block on their project by approaching Ciancimino through an intermediary, the mafia boss of the area in which it was hoped to build. The approach seemed to bring results; Ciancimino promised to release the licence. But then there was a delay caused by a council workers’ strike. By the time it ended, Pecoraro had, for reasons that remain unknown, lost the mafioso’s support. Ciancimino had also adopted a new tactic: the executives in Pecoraro’s company were told that they could only have their licence if they deposited a large bribe with Sicilcasa.
In his letter to the investigating magistrate, Pecoraro named a witness who had stated that Ciancimino was secretly a partner in Sicilcasa. Pecoraro also said he had a tape recording of Ciancimino boasting that Sicilcasa had given him an apartment for nothing. On another recording in his possession Pecoraro claimed a notary could be heard confessing that he was the channel through which huge backhanders paid for planning licences were passed to Ciancimino’s Office of Public Works. Between the events of the Sicilcasa case and Pecoraro’s report to the prosecutor, the mafia boss and three partners in Sicilcasa were arrested and charged with murder.
Despite all this evidence, the magistrate to whom Pecoraro had addressed his original report found no grounds for a prosecution. It was only the following year that the case came under the scrutiny of a parliamentary commission of inquiry. But when it did, Lorenzo Pecoraro submitted a letter to the inquiry, stating that his earlier accusations against Ciancimino were the ‘result of mistaken information’. Furthermore, he said, the rumours that Ciancimino was corrupt had originated with people who had a personal and political grudge against him. Ciancimino, Pecoraro concluded, had ‘always been exemplary for his decency and honesty’. The matter ended there.
Ciancimino and Lima were the most infamous DC politicians of their day, the fastest travellers on a new and serpentine road to wealth and influence. For decades, a horde of favour-broking politicians turned the Sicilian DC into a maze of clienteles, cliques, factions, counter-factions, covert alliances, and open feuds. Even experienced journalists despaired of ever making any sense of it all. At the end of the 1960s, one such journalist went to report on what he called a leading DC ‘personage’. On entering the politician’s new Palermo apartment, the journalist found
a marble interior, old master paintings, furniture of every style, splendid ancient gold artefacts in perfect condition; displays of jewels, coins, archaeological relics; priceless ivory crucifixes keeping promiscuous company with pot-bellied jade Buddhas. I was stunned, as if I had stumbled across a corsair’s swollen heaps of booty. The personage in question was there, dressed in a long dressing gown, smooching with his election chiefs who had come in from the area. This was the same man I had met at the beginning of his political career when he had been as poor as Job. I could not help wondering what witchcraft had caused that river of gold to spring from the ground around him.
The power that, along with others, Ciancimino and Lima first created for themselves in the 1950s would last for decades. Ciancimino was only arrested in 1984 and was not finally convicted until 1992—the first politician ever to be successfully prosecuted on charges of working for the mafia. On 12 March of that same year, Salvo Lima—at that time a member of the European parliament—fell victim to a less ponderous judicial system: he was shot dead near his home in Palermo’s beach-resort suburb of Mondello. Whether Lima was actually a man of honour, as some mafia ‘penitents’ claim, is not known for certain. Buscetta thought it unlikely, but said that Lima’s father had been a member of the central Palermo Family. What nobody doubts is that it was Lima’s former friends who brought his political career to its sudden end.
* * *
As always, mafia stories raise questions about Italy as a whole; in this case about why Italian public opinion was not so outraged about what was going on in Sicily—and in large parts of southern Italy—that people tried to do something about it. The reasons, it need hardly be said, are related to both power and money.
The most frenetic years of the sack of Palermo coincided with Italy’s economic ‘miracle’. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the country’s economy launched itself into the era of mass industrial production. The vast funds channelled into the hands of the young Turks of the South derived from the surging profits made by the factories of Genoa, Turin, and Milan in the North. Yet big business was not inclined to protest about the waste. Many of the larger construction companies were northern owned. Northern industry also needed the consumer market of southern Italy to be primed by public spending. Much of the cash scattered with such abandon in Palermo and Naples found its way back up the peninsula to buy radios, fridges, scooters, and cars. As a political bonus, the Christian Democrat electorate of the South also helped keep the Communists out. For decades, many Italians preferred to follow a principle made explicit by a leading right-wing journalist in the 1970s: ‘Hold your nose and vote DC.’
And then, of course, through all the changes of the 1950s and 1960s, the DC could always count on the support of the Church. The Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo between 1946 and his death in 1967 was Ernesto Ruffini, a man who brought the Church in Sicily to the nadir of its culpable blindness towards the reality of organized crime and political collusion. Ruffini was from Mantua in northern Italy, but he was more Sicilian than the Sicilians when it came to his obstinate love for the island. Here, Ruffini imagined, faith went deeper than individual belief; it had sturdy roots in peasant customs whence it reached up into political life. Sicily was the closest thing the world had to the ideal of a wholly Christian society. Being Sicilian and being a believer were inseparable. If the Italians had a mission to bring the Church’s message to the globe, then the Sicilian people had a special mission in Italy: when the industrial North looked like succumbing to materialism, the happy island of faith would set an example and be a fortress against Mammon, Marx, and the Masons. In short, Ruffini’s was an entirely fabulous picture of the world.
The Cardinal Archbishop had a righteous terror of Communism and dismissed the mafia as the invention of Communist scare tactics. Back in 1947, after Salvatore Giuliano’s band machine-gunned peasant families at Portella della Ginestra, the Cardinal had written to the Pope to explain that, while he ‘certainly could not approve of violence’ from any side, ‘resistance and rebellion were inevitable in the face of the Communists and their bullying, lies and deceitful scheming, their anti-Italian and anti-Christian theories’. Before the 1953 general election he announced that it was a ‘grave obligation’ for believers to put their cross against the DC symbol on the ballot paper. More than that, to fail to vote against the ‘impending threat posed by the enemies of Jesus Christ’ was nothing less than a mortal sin. Despite this admonition, and despite five years of DC government in Rome, the percentage of the vote won by the DC in Sicily dropped dramatically, from just under 48 per cent to just over 36 per cent. There were clearly a great many mortal sinners on the island.
It was the beginning of a period of rapid social change that could only seem like a long wave of catastrophes to a man with Ruffini’s views. The ‘rampant apostasy’ of Communism spread through some regions of Italy in a dense network of cooperatives and housing associations. Then the economic boom of the late 1950s and early 1960s tore great numbers of southern peasants from the local fabric of their religion, and sent them to work in the building sites and factories of Genoa, Turin, and Milan. Even government and Church censorship could not stop Hollywood from schooling young people in the ways of immorality and consumerism.
Worse still, the Christian Democrat party, the Holy Church’s chosen vanguard in the crusade against the atheist Left, did not seem to be living up to its lofty mission. The DC’s disorganization, its vicious factional infighting, and its casual handling of public money were even becoming the subject of guarded criticism by senior churchmen. What is more, after its setback at the 1953 election, the DC was forced to rely on lay allies to its right or left in order to stay in power. Some of the party’s factions were trying to lure the Socialist Party away from its alliance with the Communists; the Socialists went on to form a government with the DC for the first time in 1963. At the same time, what the Church called free-market ‘liberaloids’ and ‘agnostics’ were gaining strength within the DC as it grappled with the reality of managing a modern capitalist economy.
None of these developments altered Ruffini’s support for the DC, or his lifelong struggle to keep the contemporary world at bay. But he could not dodge the mafia issue for ever. On Palm Sunday 1964, Cardinal Ruffini issued a pastoral epistle, entitled ‘The true face of Sicily’, which was the ecclesiastical hierarchy’s first ever official, explicit public statement about the mafia—ninety-nine years after the word was first used. ‘The true face of Sicily’ denounced a fiendish media conspiracy to slander the island; it was a conspiracy with three prongs. The first two were the most celebrated figures to be associated with Sicily in the 1950s and 1960s: Danilo Dolci, known as the ‘Sicilian Gandhi’, whose non-violent campaigning drew attention to the hardships endured by the fishing and peasant communities of western Sicily; and aristocratic novelist Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, author of
The Leopard
(1958) with its sensuous, disconsolate portrayal of the island’s history. The third prong of the media offensive against Sicily was the mafia, which, Ruffini asserted, was nothing more serious than the same kind of crime that could be found elsewhere in Italy and around the world.
Giuseppe ‘Joe Bananas’ Bonanno had the longest reign of any of the bosses of the five New York mafia Families. Born in the tiny seaside town of Castellammare del Golfo in 1905, he fled Mussolini’s Italy in the 1920s, fought with Salvatore Maranzano, his fellow Castellammarese, against Joe ‘the Boss’ Masseria, and was then installed as capo of his Family following Lucky Luciano’s pacification of the New York mafia in 1931. For over three decades thereafter, Joe Bananas led the Brooklyn-based Bonanno clan. While he was in charge, it remained the most Sicilian of the New York Families. The island’s dialect was the language of choice; Bonanno himself always struggled with his English. Along with the Magaddinos in Buffalo, to whom Joe Bananas was related by blood, the Bonanno Family maintained close links with the mafia back in Castellammare del Golfo.
In 1983, Joe Bananas published
A Man of Honour,
a ghosted narrative of his life; its a book packed with absurdly self-justifying references to ‘my Tradition’—by which he means the mafia. One of the most interesting chapters in
A Man of Honour
tells of how, for several weeks in October 1957, the Brooklyn boss returned in style to where his ‘tradition’ originated. His account of what he calls his holiday in Sicily is replete with the usual old cant about a time-honoured Sicilian culture of family and self-respect. This was Bonanno going back to his roots, to a little world that he had forsaken in his search for freedom and success. On arrival, he expressed admiration for the Italians’ ‘art of living’ and ‘exuberance of warmth’. More perceptively, he called the Italian government machinery ‘appalling’, and his point was exemplified when he first landed at Rome airport, where he was pleasantly surprised to be given a red-carpet welcome by the DC Minister for Mail and Telecommunications—another native of Castellammare. ‘Wouldn’t my friends in the FBI have been astonished at this princely welcome?’ was Bonanno’s comment. Although there is no independent confirmation of the story, no one who knows about the Sicilian DC would be remotely taken aback if it were true. Once in Palermo, the visiting don was taken in hand by a deputation of dignitaries and men of honour who proudly showed him the splendid new motorways and office buildings that were mushrooming around the city. Perhaps not surprisingly, this early view of the sack of Palermo did not count among the highlights of his holiday.
Although one would never guess it from the humbug in Bonanno’s book, his holiday in Sicily was in fact a turning point for Cosa Nostra on both sides of the Atlantic. For it was then that the US mafiosi franchised out heroin-trafficking operations to their Sicilian cousins. Just as importantly, during the same trip the Sicilian mafia created a Commission on the model of the one instituted in New York at the end of the Castellammarese war. These two, intimately related developments set the stage for all the drama of mafia history over the next four decades. Everything that happened up to and beyond the staggering violence of the 1980s and early 1990s can be traced back to the time when Joe Bananas came to visit.
The surviving information about what actually went on during that trip is partial but highly suggestive. Making sense of the evidence, understanding not just the ‘what’ but the ‘why’, is a delicate matter. This is one of those occasions when Italian historians of the mafia have found it imperative to stretch a tissue of informed supposition across the nervure of available fact. What follows here is therefore a mixture of knowledge and supposition, a mixture created with one central aim: to get inside the
politics
of Cosa Nostra. The word ‘politics’ is important and it is not used loosely. For if the gearing-up of Cosa Nostra’s involvement in heroin was a matter of business, then the creation of the Commission was the mafia equivalent of constitutional politics. To non-Italians there is no longer any scandal in referring to mafiosi as businessmen; the mafia boss, seen as the sinister double of the company CEO, is now a cinematic cliché. However, outside Italy, writers are still reluctant to dignify the machinations of murderers and thieves with the word ‘politics’. But as those who strive to understand the Sicilian mafia in its homeland have learned over the decades, to use any other word is gravely to underestimate Cosa Nostra. For the Sicilian mafia has a politics in a very literal sense. As today’s investigating magistrates continually emphasize, Cosa Nostra will never be beaten unless it is understood that it is a shadow state, a political body that sometimes opposes, sometimes subverts, and sometimes dwells within the body of the legal government.