Cosa Nostra (44 page)

‘A PHENOMENON OF COLLECTIVE CRIMINALITY’

One hundred and seventeen of the combatants in the first mafia war were sent to trial in Catanzaro, in Calabria, in 1968. When the verdict was issued in December of that year it proved as big a judicial anticlimax as the Antimafia was a political anticlimax. At Catanzaro a small handful of leading mafiosi received long sentences: Uditore boss Pietro Torretta was given the longest term—twenty-seven years—for the murder of the two men in his home; Angelo La Barbera was sentenced to twenty-two and a half years; ‘Little Bird’ Greco and Tommaso Buscetta, both tried
in absentia,
were sentenced to ten and fourteen years respectively. But most of the rest of the defendants were either acquitted or received short sentences for membership of a criminal association. Given the time they had already spent in captivity while awaiting trial, the vast majority were freed immediately.

The Catanzaro verdict is often viewed as a prime example of how toothless the Italian legal system has been when dealing with mafia crime. It seems in many respects like a dispiriting replay of the 1901 trial based on the Sangiorgi report. But there is a difference: in this case there are no suspicions of collusion between the judiciary and the mafia. In fact Catanzaro is an example of just how objectively difficult it was to construct a legally convincing picture of Cosa Nostra in the days before Tommaso Buscetta decided to collaborate with justice. In Italy judges prepare public documents to explain their decisions. The Catanzaro ruling, 461 pages long, provides a fascinating glimpse into the thinking behind a big mafia court case, and explains just how judicially slippery Cosa Nostra was even when the Italian legal system was working well.

Much of the work that the members of Cosa Nostra carried out to avoid conviction in Catanzaro went on well before the case ever came to court. As happened in Sangiorgi’s day, the police found that witnesses emerged from deep within the mafia environment to give evidence during the early stages of investigations. But their evidence was then retracted at a later stage as fear took its toll.

A striking case is that of Giuseppe Ricciardi who suffered a long sequence of injustices at the hand of the La Barbera brothers. First they murdered his father, a man of honour. Then they intimidated him into selling them his father’s trucking business at a knock-down price. Subsequently they used him—without his knowledge—to bring two of their enemies to Brancaccio station on Greco territory; Ricciardi watched as Tommaso Buscetta led the two away at gunpoint never to be seen again. Not long after recounting these events to magistrates, Ricciardi made a complete retraction, proffering a forlorn stream of explanations for his turnaround: he did not know anyone, he was ill, he had lost his well-paid job just because he was his father’s son, he was afraid of everything and everyone and just wanted to live a quiet life. He protested that the police had beaten his story out of him, but then withdrew even that accusation—which the judge took to be baseless. It is little compensation to investigators to prosecute such sorry individuals for withholding evidence.

Like Sangiorgi more than sixty years before, the prosecutors at Catanzaro were forced to rely on anonymous sources to provide a map of the battle lines in the mafia war; such sources were vital in providing a framework that made sense of what would otherwise seem like a random sequence of crimes. When it came to the trial, there was no disguising the fact that the evidence was thin in proportion to the number of defendants and the seriousness of the charges. So the prosecutors made an explicit plea for the bigger picture to be taken into consideration. The defendants’ criminal records, their fearsome reputations, the signs of a deliberate plan to contaminate evidence and intimidate witnesses: it all pointed to a pattern, and that pattern was the organization known as the mafia.

Defence lawyers can hardly be blamed for arguing that there was not enough concrete evidence to make this pattern into anything more than a legal hypothesis. They claimed that the pattern was actually invented by prosecution lawyers as a way of making up for glaring gaps in the evidence. What if the mafia were not an organization but a widespread Sicilian attitude of hostility towards the law?

Corruption, collusion, and intimidation explain a great many of the acquittals for insufficient evidence that mafiosi listed on their CVs. But the Catanzaro verdict on the first mafia war shows that at the centre of the problems faced by the judicial system was simply the enigma of the mafia itself. Both the pre-trial judge, who made a preliminary evaluation of the prosecution’s evidence, and the trial judge discounted the theory that the mafia was a centralized pyramidal organization. But in doing so they were unable to grasp the fact that Cosa Nostra can be organized without being a rigid bureaucracy of crime. The judges also discounted any suggestion that the mafia had ‘norms’ and ‘criteria’ common to all its members. The trial judge’s final ruling wordily conceded that the mafia could indeed be considered ‘a psychological attitude or the typical expression of an exaggerated individualism’. But it did point out that these social factors were only the background to what was in reality a ‘phenomenon of collective criminality’. The picture he had in mind was not of one criminal association but of many independent ones, whether they be local
cosche
or networks of traffickers, all of which blended at their edges into the generalized lawlessness of Sicilian society. In short, the Italian judicial system was moving towards an acceptance of the fact that the mafia was a thing and not an idea, but it was still too indistinct a thing to be caught in the legal net.

*   *   *

At a quarter to seven on the evening of 10 December 1969, five men in stolen police uniforms burst into a single-storey office building in viale Lazio in Palermo and began to machine-gun the occupants. There followed a furious gunfight during which one of the attackers was killed; his companions dumped him in the boot of one of the getaway cars before making their escape. In their wake they left four of their enemies dead, two more wounded, and over 200 shell cases. As soon as police arrived they realized which of the dead men was the primary target of the attack; he was found with his trademark Colt Cobra by his side. It was Michele Cavataio, the mafioso blamed by Buscetta for starting the first mafia war.

With its machine-guns and its getaway cars, the massacre in viale Lazio was the work of eminently modern gangsters. It took place in a new construction company office in a swanky residential quarter that had mushroomed during the sack of Palermo. Yet the murder of ‘the Cobra’ was a collective execution of exactly the kind performed in the same area by the men of honour cited in Chief of Police Sangiorgi’s report seventy years earlier.
Pentiti
have since revealed that the assassins disguised as policemen were representatives of different mafia Families from Palermo and beyond.

In fact, it is now clear that the attack in viale Lazio at the end of 1969 was the last act of the war of 1962–3, and it added credibility to Buscetta’s version of events. According to
pentiti,
the murder of Cavataio was instigated by ‘Little Bird’ Greco, who had come to subscribe to Buscetta’s theory about how the first mafia war began. His proposal to kill ‘the Cobra’ was accepted by an impromptu panel of leading bosses (the Commission was not reconstituted until soon afterwards). Thus it was that, with the Catanzaro verdict safely behind it, the ‘phenomenon of collective criminality’, which the judges had struggled so hard to define, decided to put the troubles of the mid-1960s behind it and go back to work.

NINE

The Origins of the Second Mafia War

1970–1982

RISE OF THE CORLEONESI: 1—LUCIANO LEGGIO (1943–1970)

As most American mafia films do, Francis Ford Coppola’s
The Godfather
received a poor critical reception when it was released in Italy in 1972. One critic branded it a ‘distillation of all the commonplaces about Italian-American gangsters’. It is an opinion which may owe something to a certain Italian resentment at the way that, through Hollywood, the US has claimed the mafia as its own. The same critic also thought the Sicilian episode of
The Godfather
‘offensively stupid’, and on this count he was right: the Sicilian sequences of the god-daddy of all American mafia films are undeniably crass. In one scene Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone wanders through the streets of the town whose name he bears. Struck by the black-clad widows and the funeral announcements pasted to the walls, he wonders aloud where all the men have gone. ‘They are all dead,’ one of his local bodyguards replies, ‘from
vendetta.
’ He speaks the word as if it meant some unholy force of nature, a variant of the Black Death that mows down only Sicilian men.

At the time when Michael Corleone paid his fictional visit to his father’s home town, typhus was a bigger danger to the population than mafia crime; some forty people succumbed to it in the summer of 1947. Corleone, with its roads and drainage system damaged by the passage of American tanks, was still an extremely poor place. But if the murder rate in those years did not reach the apocalyptic levels suggested by
The Godfather,
it was nonetheless strikingly high. There were eleven murders in 1944, sixteen in 1945, seventeen in 1946, eight in 1947, and five in 1948. As elsewhere in western Sicily, these were the years of the mafia’s resurgence and of its brutal response to renewed peasant militancy. But in Corleone, in retrospect, the murder statistics have acquired a particularly baleful significance because among them are the first crimes committed by Luciano Leggio, a mafioso who would come to exert a dominant influence within Cosa Nostra. Following Leggio’s example, his favourite pupil and fellow Corleonese, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina, would orchestrate an unparalleled slaughter of men of honour—a slaughter known as the second mafia war of 1981–3. Under Riina, the Corleonesi would establish a dictatorship over the organization and, in so doing, almost bring its history to an end. Even today, Riina’s successor as boss of bosses is a man born in Corleone and tutored by Luciano Leggio. Thus, by nothing more than luck, when
Godfather
author Mario Puzo chose a birthplace for Don Vito Corleone (né Andolini), he picked on the town that gave the world the most feared and powerful men of honour of them all.

The best-known photographs of Luciano Leggio date from a court appearance in Palermo in 1974. It is difficult to avoid concluding from them that he decided for the occasion to adopt a look based on Brando’s Don Corleone. And with his cigar, his long, heavy jaw, and his arrogant bearing, he actually managed to pull it off; there is a more than passing resemblance between the two. In fact Leggio’s face was already infamous before
The Godfather
was released. The Antimafia commission’s analysis of Leggio, published in the same year that the movie came out, is not a document that tends to dwell on anything as frivolous as appearances. Yet it was transfixed by Leggio’s ‘big, round, cold face’, his ‘ironic and scornful’ glower. If the cinematic Don Vito was the face of the mafia as it likes to think of itself—judicious and family-centred—then Luciano Leggio’s features, by contrast, were an emblem of capricious terror. Whereas Brando’s heavy lids gave his character an almost noble reserve, Leggio’s staring eyeballs suggested that he was as volatile as he was malevolent. One
pentito
said that Leggio ‘had a look that struck fear even in us
mafiosi.
It only took the slightest thing to get him worked up, and then there would be a strange light in his eyes that silenced everyone around … You could sense death hovering in the air.’ This was a man who, on one occasion, according to the same
pentito,
killed a mafioso and his lover, and then raped and killed her fifteen-year-old daughter.

But like so many real mafia biographies, Luciano Leggio’s story only withers into gangster cliché if it is told in a psychological vein. Although Leggio inspired acute dread, the reason he and his followers became so powerful in Cosa Nostra was not because they were made of more fearsome stuff than the rest. Rather it was because they reinvented mafia tactics by creating a new combination of old methods. The Corleonesi developed a system for dominating the Sicilian mafia that suited the new climate emerging in the years of the Antimafia, when the state and public opinion became more alert to the problem, and the drug business put new strains on the traditional structure of the Families. In a sense, the Corleonesi became within the body of Cosa Nostra what Cosa Nostra was within the body of Sicily: a secret and deadly parasite. To understand how these tactics evolved, it pays to trace the rise of the Corleonesi from Leggio’s first murders in the 1940s.

*   *   *

Luciano Leggio was born into poverty in 1925. When the honoured society resurfaced after the Allied invasion of 1943, the petty thief Leggio was drafted by Michele Navarra, a round-headed physician, who was also the Corleone capo. (There is a long tradition of mafia medics like Navarra, who was a general practitioner in Corleone; in 1946, he became the director of the hospital after his predecessor was murdered by hands unknown.) Through Navarra’s sponsorship, at the age of only twenty, Leggio obtained a job as a guard on an estate near Corleone. Since before the time of murdered Fasci leader Bernardino Verro, positions like this had been dominated by the Corleone mafia and used to smuggle, steal, intimidate labourers, and extort protection money from landowners.

In 1948, probably on Navarra’s orders, Leggio performed one of the most notorious political murders of the post-war years; Corleone’s peasants were given another socialist martyr to mourn. On the evening of 10 March—not by coincidence, the Italian Republic’s first parliamentary elections were imminent—Leggio marched trade unionist and Resistance veteran Placido Rizzotto out of town at gunpoint; he then forced him to kneel down before shooting him in the head three times at point-blank range. Rizzotto’s remains, along with two other human skeletons, were found in a sixty-metre-deep cave eighteen months later. Only a few fragments of clothes and a pair of rubber-soled American shoes allowed his mother to identify him. Leggio was never convicted for the crime, despite the fact that two men who had helped him perform the kidnapping gave evidence and told the authorities where to find the victim’s body. Placido Rizzotto has never had a tomb, but a bust of him, inaugurated only in 1996, now stands outside Corleone town hall.