Cosa Nostra (4 page)

In Cosa Nostra there is an obligation to tell the truth, but there is also great reserve. And this reserve, the things that are not said, rule like an irrevocable curse over all men of honour. It makes all relationships profoundly false, absurd.

For the same reason that they are so reluctant to speak openly, when men of honour do tell each other things, what they say is never idle chat. For example, if mafioso A tells mafioso B that he has murdered entrepreneur X or that politician Y is on Cosa Nostra’s paybook, what he says is probably true; if it is not, then it is a tactical lie that, in its own way, is every bit as significant as the truth. Thus, since Buscetta, mafiosi have no longer been viewed as inherently unreliable witnesses. Interpreting the testimonies of mafiosi, whether they have ‘repented’ or not, is now seen to be about making out a pattern among the truths and the tactical lies, and finding other evidence to corroborate that pattern. This has important consequences for the history of the mafia. It is a history built from all the usual sources—from police files, government inquiries, newspaper reports, memoirs, confessions, and so on. But running like a blood-tinged watermark through many of those documents, whether they directly reproduce the words of men of honour or only contain their faded traces, are the signs of the deadly truth game that is life within the mafia.

Because an element of uncertainty is bound to remain in any history, let alone a history that ventures into the devious world of the Sicilian mafia, this book cannot give the final word on the guilt or innocence of the characters whose stories appear here; the history of the mafia is not a retrospective trial. But it is not mere guesswork either. Although it would be both wrong and futile to try to lock long-dead historical figures in an imaginary prison, what we can do is sample the pungent ‘smell of mafia’—as the Italian phrase would have it—that they still give off.

The history of the mafia thus has many characters and many layers. Accordingly, the different chapters of this book tell different kinds of story. They move between the soldiers and the bosses, but they also step into the mafia’s penumbra to tell of its victims, enemies, and friends—from the poorest in society to the most powerful. In one or two of these chapters, because of a lack of historical evidence, the mafia must remain what it often seemed to be at the time: a malevolent, spectral presence.

Before telling of the mafia’s genesis, this history gives an account of what life is like inside Cosa Nostra today, with the code of honour obeyed by the men who are members of it. Recent defectors have provided an insight into how mafiosi think and feel now, which is simply not possible for earlier periods. And of course it would be simplistic to use what we know about things like the code of honour today to fill in the inevitable blind spots in the mafia’s history. All the same, as the mafia’s story unfolds, what becomes clear is that Sicily’s famous criminal association has changed surprisingly little since it began around 140 years ago. There never was a good mafia that at some point became corrupt and violent. There never was a traditional mafia that then became modern, organized, and business-minded. The world has changed but the Sicilian mafia has merely adapted; it is today what it has been since it was born: a sworn secret society that pursues power and money by cultivating the art of killing people and getting away with it.

Men of Honour

Countless films and novels have helped lend a sinister glamour to the mafia. These mafia stories are so compelling because they dramatize the everyday by adding the hair-trigger thrill that comes when danger is mixed with unscrupulous cunning. The world of the cinematic mafia is one where the conflicts that everyone feels—between the competing claims of ambition, responsibility, and family—become matters of life and death.

It would be both pious and untrue to say that the mafia presented in fiction is simply false—it is stylized. And mafiosi are like everyone else in that they like to watch television and go to the cinema to see a stylized version of their own daily dramas represented on-screen. Tommaso Buscetta was a fan of
The Godfather,
although he thought the scene at the end where the other mafiosi kiss Michael Corleone’s hand was unrealistic. The conflicting demands that lie behind the motivation of a fictional character like Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone—ambition, responsibility, family—are indeed the same ones that are central to the lives of real mafiosi.

One obvious thing that
is
different is that none of the glamour of the cinema can survive an encounter with the horrific reality of Cosa Nostra. A less obvious, but in the end more important, difference is that whereas Michael Corleone’s story is about the moral dangers of unchecked power, real Sicilian mafiosi are obsessed with the rules of honour that limit their actions. A man of honour may dodge, manipulate, and rewrite those rules, but he is nonetheless always aware that they shape how he is perceived by his peers. That is not to say that the values of mafia honour have much that is conventionally ‘honourable’ about them. Honour has a specific meaning within Cosa Nostra that informs even its members’ most execrable actions, as the unsettling case of Giovanni Brusca, the man who pressed the detonator on the Capaci bomb, goes to show.

Brusca was known in Cosa Nostra circles as ‘lo scannacristiani’, ‘the man who cuts Christians’ throats’. In Sicily, ‘a Christian’ means ‘a human being’; in the mafia, it means ‘a man of honour’. Brusca was part of a death squad reporting directly to the boss of bosses, the leader of the Corleonesi, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina. After the Capaci bombing Giovanni Brusca was not idle. He killed the boss of the Alcamo Family who had begun to resent Riina’s authority. A few days after that, members of Brusca’s team strangled the same man’s pregnant partner. Brusca then killed a spectacularly wealthy businessman and man of honour who had failed to use his political contacts to protect the mafia from the maxi-trial.

Worse followed. ‘Lo scannacristiani’ was the friend of another man of honour, Santino Di Matteo, whose little son Giuseppe would play with Brusca in the family garden. That was all before Santino Di Matteo decided to betray Cosa Nostra’s secrets to the state; he was the first mafioso to tell the authorities how the killing of Falcone had been carried out. Brusca’s response was to kidnap little Giuseppe Di Matteo at a gymkhana and hold him captive in a cellar for twenty-six months. Finally, in January 1996, when Giuseppe was fourteen, Brusca ordered him to be strangled and his body dissolved in acid.

‘Lo scannacristiani’ was captured on 20 May 1996 in the countryside near Agrigento. Four hundred police surrounded the box-like two-storey house where he was hiding. At about 9
P.M
., a team of thirty broke in through the doors and windows. They found Brusca and his family at table watching a television programme about Giovanni Falcone—the fourth anniversary of his murder was only two days away. In the bedroom police discovered a wardrobe full of Versace and Armani clothes, and a big red bag containing some $15,000 in Italian and US currency, two GSM cellphones, and jewellery including Cartier watches. On the dining-room table they found a short-barrelled pistol; it was made of plastic and belonged to Brusca’s young son Davide.

Brusca is now collaborating with justice. By his own disturbingly imprecise confession, he has killed ‘many more than one hundred but less than two hundred people’. Here is what he says about the murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo:

If I’d had a moment longer to reflect, a bit more calm to think, as I did with other crimes, then maybe there would be a hope in a thousand, a million, that the child would be alive today. But today it would be useless to try and justify it. I just didn’t think it through at the time.

The terrifying thing about the Sicilian mafia is that men like ‘lo scannacristiani’ are not deranged. Nor are their actions at all incompatible with the code of honour or, indeed, with being a husband and father in Cosa Nostra’s view. Until the day he decided to turn state’s evidence and tell his story, nothing that Brusca did, including murdering a child not much older than his own, was considered by mafiosi to be inherently dishonourable.

In the wake of the Capaci bomb, more mafiosi turned state’s evidence, and some of these ‘penitents’ justified their decision by saying that killers like ‘lo scannacristiani’ had betrayed traditional values, the code of honour. Tommaso Buscetta had used the same argument, along the lines of ‘I did not leave Cosa Nostra, Cosa Nostra left me’. But this is a flimsy claim, historically speaking, because within the mafia betrayal and brutality have been compatible with honour since the beginning. Giovanni Brusca is more typical than some mafia defectors would have the world believe.

This new post-Capaci wave of
pentiti
has allowed researchers to flesh out the evidence about the mafia’s internal culture that had been provided by the earlier generation of defectors, including Buscetta. What is now clear is that the code of honour is much more than a list of rules. Becoming a man of honour means taking on a whole new identity, entering a different moral universe. A mafioso’s honour is the mark of that new identity, that new moral sensibility.

Tommaso Buscetta first outlined Cosa Nostra’s code of honour to Falcone back in 1984. He told of its initiation rite in which the candidate for membership holds a burning picture—usually of the Madonna of the Annunciation—while swearing allegiance and silence until death. Rumours of this quaint ritual had previously been dismissed as folklore, and it is still a part of Buscetta’s evidence that seems to run counter to common sense. Yet it has become abundantly clear from the testimonies of Buscetta, ‘lo scannacristiani’, and others that mafiosi take such things in deadly earnest, as matters of honour.

The initiation ritual shows that honour is a status that has to be earned. Until he becomes a man of honour, an aspiring mafioso is carefully watched, supervised, put to the test; committing murder is almost always a prerequisite for admission. During this period of preparation, he is constantly reminded that until he goes through the ritual of affiliation he is a nonentity, ‘nothing mixed with nil’. And when initiation arrives, it is often the most important moment in a mafioso’s life. The burning of the sacred image symbolizes his death as an ordinary man and his rebirth as a man of honour.

At initiation, the new mafioso swears obedience—the first pillar of the code of honour. A ‘made’ man is always obedient to his capo; he never asks, ‘Why?’ One way to understand the implications of this obligation involves what is also a crucial test case for the code of honour as a whole: the murder of women and children. This has always been something of a delicate issue for the Sicilian mafia; indeed, mafiosi have frequently made the claim that they never touch women and children. It has to be said that many men of honour hold to that principle for as long as they can. Cosa Nostra certainly does not murder babies willy-nilly, not least because to do so would damage its image and alienate some of its closest supporters.

Yet Giuseppe Di Matteo was far from being the first child whose life had been very deliberately ended by men of honour. For eliminating women and children is only deemed dishonourable if it is unnecessary; it can become necessary when a mafioso’s survival is at stake; and simply by being a member of Cosa Nostra, a mafioso often puts his life in danger.

Like nearly all mafia killings, the murder of Giuseppe Di Matteo was committed after it was collectively decided that it was necessary. The boy’s death was part of a strategy adopted by some of Cosa Nostra’s leaders vis-à-vis the families of mafia defectors who were putting the whole organization at risk. Once such a decision became policy, it would have been considered dishonourable not to put it into effect.

Which is where obedience comes in. The mafioso who actually implemented that policy and strangled Giuseppe Di Matteo on Brusca’s orders later explained his thinking to a court:

If someone wants to have a good career [in Cosa Nostra] he must always be available … I wanted a career, and I’d accepted this from the outset because I was walking on air. At that time I was a soldier in Cosa Nostra, I obeyed orders, and I knew that by strangling a little boy I would make a career for myself. I was walking on air.

Honour accumulates through obedience: in return for what they call ‘availability’, individual mafiosi can increase their stock of honour and in doing so gain access to more money, information, and power. Belonging to Cosa Nostra offers the same advantages as does belonging to other organizations, including the achievement of aspirations, an exhilarating sense of status and comradeship, and the chance to pass responsibility, moral or otherwise, upwards in the direction of their bosses. All of these things are ingredients of mafia honour.

Honour also involves the obligation to tell the truth to other men of honour and, therefore, the notoriously elliptical way in which mafiosi talk. Giovanni Brusca relates that, when he visited American mafiosi in New Jersey, he was appalled by how talkative his hosts were by comparison. A dinner was held to welcome him, yet on entering the restaurant Brusca was astonished to see that the mafiosi had all brought their mistresses, and that they chatted openly about which Families various mobsters belonged to. ‘In Sicily, none of us would dream of talking that way in public. Or even in private. Everyone knows what needs to be known.’ Brusca claims he was so embarrassed that he made his excuses and left. ‘It’s a different mentality,’ he concluded about his American experience. ‘They live out in the light of day. They only commit murders in exceptional circumstances. They never carry out massacres like we have in Sicily.’

The mafioso’s duty to tell the truth is partly a way of promoting the kind of mutual trust that is in short supply among outlaws. This need for trust also explains the components of mafia honour that relate to sex and marriage. Newly ‘made’ mobsters swear not to take income from prostitution, and if they sleep with another mafioso’s wife they face a death sentence. Moreover, if a mafioso gambles, womanizes, and parades his wealth, he is likely to be considered unreliable and therefore expendable. Keeping to these rules is an important way of showing your fellow men of honour that you can be trusted. For the same reason, the mafia’s top management makes a virtue of getting its hands dirty, and old-school patriarchal machismo is crucial to the company culture. For example, there are work social events that usually revolve around manly pursuits like hunting parties and banquets.