Cosa Nostra (46 page)

To the psychiatrists Vitale explained that he had left behind his earlier self and its anxieties by revealing the mafia’s secrets. It was, he said, as if someone else had committed his crimes. He had refound God, his inner peace, and with it the final reassurance that he was not, in fact, a pederast. But as he filled in more details of his story to the psychiatrists, it was noted that his mood became more depressed and unpredictable. He appeared one day with self-inflicted cuts on his arms; he then went around with no shoes and a long beard, declaring, ‘Madman, I was a madman.’ Magistrates began to wonder whether he was still going through the spiritual crisis that had led him to defect from the mafia, or whether he had been pressurized into playing up his insanity in order to undermine his testimony. When the psychiatric examination was concluded, Vitale was pronounced ‘mentally semi-infirm’; but the experts also decided that his condition did not impair his memory and thus the credibility of his testimony. Vitale’s own written reaction to how the psychiatrists classified him is harrowing in its strained lucidity:

Mental semi-infirmity = psychic sickness. Mafia = social sickness. Political mafia = social sickness. Corrupt authorities = social sickness. Prostitution = social sickness, syphilis, condyloma, etc. = physical sickness that influences the ailing psyche right from childhood. Religious crises = psychic sickness that derives from these other sicknesses. These are the evils to which I, Leonardo Vitale, resurrected in the faith of the true God, have fallen victim.

The case came to trial in 1977. Of the twenty-eight defendants, only Vitale and his uncle were convicted. His ‘mental semi-infirmity’ and his erratic behaviour had been enough for the prosecution argument to be fatally weakened. If these acquittals were understandable, the same cannot be said for the way Vitale’s profoundly important insights into the nature of the mafia were subsequently completely ignored by the authorities. Vitale was sentenced to twenty-five years. He spent most of his term in mental institutions before being released in June 1984. Soon afterwards much of what he had said back in 1973 was confirmed when Tommaso Buscetta turned state’s evidence. On Sunday, 2 December 1984, Vitale was coming back from mass with his mother and sister when an unidentified man shot him twice in the head. Late the following year Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino presented their evidence in support of the ‘Buscetta theorem’ in preparation for the maxi-trial. They began the document by telling the story of Leonardo Vitale, a story they brought to a conclusion as follows: ‘It is to be hoped that at least after his death Vitale will get the credence he deserved.’

DEATH OF A ‘LEFTIST FANATIC’: PEPPINO IMPASTATO

In the 1970s—known as the ‘years of lead’—Italian democracy faced its darkest days since the fall of Fascism. Once again, understanding and fighting the mafia was not high on the nation’s list of priorities. On 12 December 1969, two days after the attack on Michele ‘the Cobra’ Cavataio, which signalled a renewal of Cosa Nostra activity after the quiet years of the mid-1960s, a bomb exploded in a bank in Piazza Fontana in the centre of Milan; sixteen people were killed and dozens more wounded. Three days later an innocent anarchist pulled in for questioning about the Piazza Fontana bombing fell to his death from a fourth-floor window at Milan police headquarters. Soon afterwards evidence began to emerge linking neo-Fascist groups with the Piazza Fontana massacre, and also connecting elements in the Italian secret services with those same neo-Fascists. Militant left-wing groups adopted the slogan: ‘It was a state massacre.’ They were far from the only ones who believed that a plot to undermine democracy was afoot. There is little doubt that there was such plotting; the only question—still an open one—is how far into the institutions it extended. This was the ‘strategy of tension’: a programme of terrorist outrages intended to prepare the ground for a right-wing
coup d’état.

The strategy of tension was a direct response to a perceived threat from the Left. The years 1967–8 saw a wave of student protest that was only radicalized by an often heavy-handed police response. More serious still was the season of strikes and demonstrations that began in the ‘hot autumn’ of 1969; for a while it looked as if the workers’ movement was about to outflank the Italian Communist Party to the left.

The Piazza Fontana bomb outrage heralded a new season of political instability and violence. Further right-wing terrorist acts were to follow throughout the decade and beyond. The worst atrocity was the murder of eighty-five people by a bomb placed in the second-class waiting room of Bologna station in August 1980. But political violence was by no means confined to the extreme Right. In the mid-1970s, as a world economic crisis helped tame labour militancy, the cluster of highly motivated but intensely quarrelsome parties to the left of the Communist Party began to realize that the revolution was not just around the corner, as they had hoped in the late 1960s. For a small minority of such militants of the Left, armed action, aimed at exacerbating social conflict and preparing the ground for a working-class insurrection, was the appropriate response to the decrease in strike action and the ‘state massacres’. The Red Brigades proclaimed ‘an attack on the heart of the state’, and in the late 1970s and early 1980s staged prominent murders of policemen, magistrates, entrepreneurs, journalists, and even Communist Party members suspected of collaborating with the ‘state of the multinationals’.

The mafia’s involvement in the strategy of tension and in right-wing plotting since 1969 is one of the favourite subjects of ‘behindologists’. There are one or two unequivocal links. In December 1970, a neo-Fascist prince occupied the Ministry of the Interior in an attempt to trigger a
coup d’état;
he withdrew peaceably a few hours later and the public were not made aware of the incident for several months. Subsequently Tommaso Buscetta and other
pentiti
would reveal that the mafia’s leadership had been asked to participate in the coup in return for the revision of certain important trial verdicts. Buscetta and ‘Little Bird’ Greco even crossed the Atlantic to discuss the matter with Leggio and the others in a series of meetings in Catania, Rome, Milan, and Zurich during the summer of 1970. It seems that many of the senior bosses were diffident about the proposal. One
pentito
drily observed that the football World Cup was on at the time and, as Italy progressed through the tournament to meet Brazil in the final, many men of honour were more interested in watching the matches on television than in meeting to discuss a Fascist revolution. The mafia agreed to participate in the revolt, but it seems that this was out of a desire to keep a close eye on developments rather than because of any commitment to the cause. The repression of the mafia by ‘iron prefect’ Cesare Mori had left a legacy of mistrust between the extreme right and Cosa Nostra.

Apart from the abortive
coup d’état
of 1970, it is also known that the mafia helped right-wing terrorists plant a bomb on a train running between Milan and Naples on 23 December 1984—it killed sixteen. Such episodes have helped fuel speculation that Cosa Nostra itself was merely a tool of shadowy figures in the corridors of Roman ministries, that above the highest echelons of Cosa Nostra was the guiding hand of a mysterious puppet-master. This is almost certainly fanciful. Cosa Nostra’s history suggests that when it did collaborate with violent right-wing subversives, it probably did so only on its own terms, in the hope of exacting precise concessions. The revision of trial verdicts is probably an archetype of what the mafia wanted to gain out of any such deal.

Behind the bloodshed and plotting of the late 1960s and early 1970s, much less conspicuous changes were taking place within the judicial system that would have a profound influence on the future history of the mafia. In Sicily, as in many other parts of Italy, the old guard of magistrates and judges were instinctively conservative and some of them were closely tied to the political class through Masonic societies and family ties. Even if there had not been any individuals who deliberately colluded with Cosa Nostra, such a body of men—and they were all men—was never likely to have the animus required to tackle organized crime at its highest levels.

Then in the 1960s, recruitment was widened by the spread of higher education; at the same time the magistrature finally acquired its own governing body and with it a degree of independence from government that compared favourably with other European countries. Towards the end of the decade an organization called Magistratura Democratica spearheaded a drive by younger magistrates to reform the sclerotic legal system. Some of the new generation of magistrates sought to bring more white-collar criminals—polluters, building speculators, corrupt politicians—to book.

As the magistrates grew more powerful, they also became highly politicized and organized into politically aligned factions. Partly as a result, the suspicion that investigations were launched, and even verdicts reached, for partisan political motives became a growing complaint. Nevertheless the great successes in the battle against the mafia in future years would have been unthinkable without this slow transformation in Italy’s legal system. But these were changes that would take years to have their effects on the struggle against Cosa Nostra.

*   *   *

There were times in the 1970s when it seemed that Italian democracy might not survive the twin assaults from the strategy of tension and left-wing terrorism. The most worrying moment of all came on 16 March 1978 when the Red Brigades kidnapped the most influential figure in the Christian Democrat party, former Prime Minister Aldo Moro; his entire escort and his driver were murdered in the assault. For fifty-five days Italy held its breath as politicians of all parties debated whether to stand firm against the kidnappers’ demands, or negotiate to try to save Moro’s life. On 9 May, Moro was killed and his body left curled up in the boot of a red Renault in a Rome side street just a few dozen metres from the headquarters of both the DC and the PCI.

Understandably these terrorist emergencies helped to drown out concerns about the mafia’s re-emergence, and about its day-to-day regime of terror in western Sicily. There is no clearer illustration of this than a story that appeared on the same day that Moro’s body was found in Rome. The conservative Milanese newspaper
Corriere della Sera
briefly reported an incident in Cinisi, a small town on the western coast of Sicily, far from ‘the heart of the state’. The headline was: ‘Leftist fanatic blown apart by own bomb on railway track.’

The ‘leftist fanatic’ was Giuseppe ‘Peppino’ Impastato. But his death, at the age of thirty, was not the result of either a terrorist attack that went wrong, or even suicide, as was later claimed. Peppino Impastato was murdered by the Cinisi mafia, although it would take nearly a quarter of a century and a dogged campaign by friends and relatives for justice to be done in his case. To begin to get a sense of why his story is historically significant, it is enough to look at the photograph of a group of ‘men of respect’ from Cinisi in the picture section of this book; the photo was taken in the early 1950s. Peppino is the smaller of the two little boys in short trousers, the one with his left hand tucked under his father’s right arm.

The little boy in the picture did indeed grow up to be a left-wing militant; he was an intelligent and occasionally tortured rebel who devoted half his life to the cause of fighting capitalism and oppression. Like many young Italians at the time, he participated passionately in what now seem arcane sectarian disputes conducted in an arid Marxist jargon; he argued through his ideological stance on everything from the Vietnam war to nudism; he moved from one tiny revolutionary party or initiative to another, oscillating all the time between euphoria and despair (he found personal and romantic relationships difficult). But if Peppino’s politics are an essential ingredient of his story, then even more important to it is the fact that Peppino’s rebellion was lived out within one of the most mafia-saturated family environments it is possible to imagine. Peppino’s father was a mafioso, a low-ranking member of the Cinisi Family. There were several other men of honour in the extended family, as there had been for decades. Peppino’s rebellion against this background was unprecedented.

The surviving members of the Impastato family would later look back on one moment in 1963 as the first sign of Peppino’s revolt against the mafia culture that had surrounded him all his young life. When Peppino was fifteen, Cesare Manzella, the then boss of Cinisi who was also his uncle by marriage, was killed by a TNT-laden Alfa Romeo Giulietta during the first mafia war. The teenage Peppino was horrified. As the whole town knew, pieces of his uncle were found stuck to lemon trees hundreds of metres from the crater where the car had been. He asked another uncle, ‘What must he have felt?’ The reply—‘It was all over in an instant’—did little to quell the young man’s anxiety.

By the time he was seventeen, Peppino was already an activist, addressing rallies and co-editing a news-sheet,
The Socialist Idea.
His confrontation with the mafia was immediate, direct, and astonishingly brave in a town where the murderous suppression of the left-wing peasant movement in the post-war years was still a recent memory. In 1966, he wrote an article entitled ‘Mafia: a mountain of shit’. After reading it, one of his many mafioso relatives warned his father, ‘If he were my son, I’d dig a ditch and bury him.’ Peppino was banned from the parental home.

Peppino Impastato’s home town of Cinisi was no minor outpost of Cosa Nostra’s empire. By the 1960s it was one of the most important centres of mafia activity in western Sicily. Palermo’s new airport—obviously a prime target for racketeering and contraband operations—was built there in the late 1950s. Of Cinisi’s population of 8,000, 80 per cent had relatives in the United States. It is no coincidence that the town was one of the major entrepôts of the transatlantic heroin business. Cinisi boss Don Tano Badalamenti had strong family ties to the Detroit mob, bases for his drug-dealing operations in Rome and Milan, and a whole string of construction companies under his control. He was massively influential within Cosa Nostra too. He had helped Tommaso Buscetta draw up the rules of the first Commission in 1957, and he was a member of the triumvirate established in 1970. Upon assuming his place in the triumvirate, according to one
pentito,
his first act was to have a small-time Neapolitan criminal shot. This was the man who, years earlier, had slapped Lucky Luciano at Naples racecourse. Thus, eight years after Luciano’s death, Badalamenti was able to inform his contacts in the American Cosa Nostra that the insult had been avenged. When the full Commission was reconstituted in 1974, it was Badalamenti who sat at the head of the table.