Cosa Nostra (48 page)

But mafiosi from Sicily were not content to be refiners and importers of heroin; with the collaboration of their US peers they also aimed to control their own distribution network. Tommaso Buscetta started up his first pizzeria as long ago as 1966 with a loan from New York’s Gambino family. By the late 1970s, nine out of every ten Sicilian illegal aliens deported from the US were found working in pizzerias. The importation and production of Italian foodstuffs had been important to the American mafia since the beginning of the century. So it is no surprise that the supply of ingredients to the network of restaurants springing up across the USA was monopolized by mafia-protected firms. The Pizza Connection case in the USA in 1986 would prove that many of these outlets were dealing in much more than the odd
margherita
or
quattro formaggi.
Hidden among America’s countless pizza parlours were some that constituted the mafia’s transnational heroin distribution network.

By 1982, Sicilian mafiosi were estimated to control the refining, shipping, and much of the distribution of 80 per cent of the heroin consumed in the north-eastern United States. The profits that funnelled back to Sicily, of which no definitive calculation will ever be reached for obvious reasons, were certainly of the order of hundreds of millions of dollars per year. In the late 1970s, Cosa Nostra became wealthier and more powerful than it had ever been before.

The Pizza Connection also involved a new balance of power between the two arms of Cosa Nostra. The Sicilians—the ‘zips’ as lower-ranking US men of honour enviously called them—were no longer just cheap labour for the American bosses. Senior American mobsters could no longer afford to adopt the patronizing attitudes towards the Sicilians that Joe ‘Bananas’ Bonanno had done on his holiday back in 1957. With their numbers, their organization, and their access to seemingly limitless supplies of heroin, the Sicilians now had considerable autonomy in the United States.

Knickerbocker Avenue, in the Bonanno Family’s Brooklyn territory, became at that time a Sicilian colony and heroin terminal. One DEA agent who infiltrated the Philadelphia Family of Cosa Nostra learned that

Brooklyn meant the Sicilian mafia, as distinguished from the Italian-American La Cosa Nostra in the United States. There was a distinct difference … Brooklyn controlled all the heroin in the United States … The Sicilians used the Italo-Americans to distribute the heroin.

But the zips had not only established an enterprise syndicate in the United States; they were also making serious inroads into the American Cosa Nostra power syndicate. Special Agent Joseph D. Pistone (a.k.a. Donnie Brasco) infiltrated the Bonanno Family in New York on behalf of the FBI from 1975 until 1981. He recorded the following anxious conversation between two American men of honour who had heard that some of the Sicilians were going to be made into captains:

—those guys [the zips] are looking to take over everything. There’s no way we can make them captains. We’d lose all our strength.

—… them fucking zips ain’t going to back up to nobody. You give them the fucking power, if you don’t get hurt now, you get hurt three years from now. They’ll bury you. You cannot give them the power. They don’t give a fuck. They don’t care who’s boss. They got no respect.

In 1979, a Sicilian man of honour actually took over the whole Bonanno Family of the New York mafia for two years. He is said to have stepped down only because he found it difficult doing business in English.

But Sicilian and American mafiosi were by no means always rivals in the heroin industry. In fact many of them were relatives. A mafioso looking for trustworthy partners and workers for his drug business will turn first to his blood family, preferably family members who provide the extra guarantee of being mafia initiates. When heroin commerce moved into overdrive in the 1970s, many men of honour were in the fortunate position of already having transatlantic family businesses that could adapt easily to trading in whatever illicit commodity they needed to. This is particularly true of those coastal towns that tended to have the closest links with the United States. An obvious case in point is Cinisi, home of Don Tano Badalamenti. Another is the nearby Castellammare del Golfo, place of origin of Sicilian-American criminal bloodlines like the Magaddinos and the Bonannos. Palermo too had such links; Salvatore Inzerillo, the capo of the venerable Passo di Rigano Family and a major heroin dealer, was the cousin of Carlo Gambino who headed the most powerful of the five New York Families until his death in 1976. Members of clans like the Inzerillos, the Badalamentis, and the Magaddinos kept on travelling back and forth across the Atlantic; cousins from the US and Sicily kept on marrying each other down through the generations. The Inzerillos’ transoceanic family tree caused Judge Falcone to scratch his head at the ‘incredible kinship tangle’.

Drug trafficking is all about contacts, about bringing together a gallery of specialists: from investors, to the suppliers of morphine base, to technicians able to refine the drug, to transporters, to small-time dealers who put it on the streets, to financiers with the expertise required to launder the profits and keep them out of the grasp of the Guardia di Finanza (the Italian tax police). These networks are international and they spread from the top to the bottom of society. And they are
not
the same thing as the mafia.

Mafiosi have dealt in drugs for as long as drugs have been dealt. But the mafia
as such
has never been a heroin conglomerate. As Buscetta said, ‘In narcotics trafficking everyone was autonomous. The people who had the most economic opportunities did the most work.’ ‘Having economic opportunities’ means weaving webs of contacts with specialists outside the organization.

Of course there are limits to the principle of autonomy, and everything that a man of honour does can have political implications within Cosa Nostra. A Family has the right to tax any economic activity carried out on its turf, or to exact tribute from any of its men of honour who are involved in enterprises not directly under its control. The easiest way for a mafia boss to profit from drugs is to ‘protect’ the dealers. This method has the added advantage of keeping the narcotics trade at one remove from the Family; because the specialists that the trade requires are not bound by
omertà,
they bring higher risks because they are likely to tell the police too much when they are arrested.

But when the profits are so large that they generate rivalries between Families, then the Commission is likely to become involved. And when the Commission is involved, it absorbs the business in question into Cosa Nostra’s structure; it is the criminal equivalent of taking a company into public ownership. Getting a panel of senior bosses to manage a business is a way of making sure that they all know what is going on, and that they all get a share of the profits.

A typical instance is the tobacco smuggling through Naples in the mid-1970s. The Commission began to act as a consortium or joint stock company to buy tobacco shipments through Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza—in exactly the way that it had done for heroin deals before the first mafia war. In 1974, Zaza and several other prominent Camorristi were even initiated into Cosa Nostra as a way of flattering them and keeping them under control. All the same, the Commission did not and could not monopolize either the mafia’s cigarette smuggling or its heroin trade. For one thing, it represented the province of Palermo rather than the whole island. Much of the heroin business remained off the Commission’s radar and outside its control. The result was the same volatile admixture of business, politics, and suspicion that had led to the first mafia war.

BANKERS, MASONS, TAX COLLECTORS, MAFIOSI

The drug revenue flowing back from the United States put gold taps in tiny peasant houses, built apartment blocks and seaside villas, emptied the shelves of Palermo’s burgeoning luxury boutiques, and was reinvested in legal and illegal ventures across Italy and Europe. The heroin dollars also leaked into the grass roots of the financial sector (in the 1970s, an archipelago of local private and cooperative banks doubled its share of the Sicilian investment market) and were sucked towards the commanding heights of the Italian banking system where they mingled with the profits of political corruption. Following the money, mafiosi reached further than ever into the topmost echelons of society.

Giovanni Falcone arrived in the Palace of Justice in Palermo in 1978. Within two years the ‘Falcone method’ produced a breakthrough in a case that went to the heart of Cosa Nostra’s transatlantic drug business: it linked Passo di Rigano boss Salvatore Inzerillo; the so-called ‘Cherry Hill Gambinos’ in Brooklyn; the building magnate and largest taxpayer in Sicily, Rosario Spatola; and former triumvirate member Stefano Bontate—each of them part of a sprawling web of marriage alliances. Falcone was also working with magistrates in Milan on a fraud and murder case that threatened to expose the very worst of Italian society in the form of corruption, mafia influence, and anti-democratic conspiracy at the highest levels of the political and financial institutions.

The case centred on banker Michele Sindona. In the early 1970s, Sindona was the most influential financial figure in Italy. He was in charge of one of the biggest banks in the USA, had control over the Vatican’s foreign investments, and was a major funder of Christian Democrat politicians. In addition, he was strongly suspected of laundering money for Cosa Nostra. But in 1974 his financial empire collapsed amid fraud charges and he fled to the United States. From there, in 1979, he commissioned a mafioso to shoot dead the lawyer in charge of liquidating his Italian affairs. As the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic closed in on him, Sindona then enlisted the help of the same mafiosi who were involved in the Inzerillo–Gambino–Spatola–Bontate heroin smuggling ring to stage his own hoax kidnapping by the ‘Subversive Proletarian Committee for a Better Life’ (a non-existent left-wing terrorist group). He spent nearly three months in Sicily in the hands of the ‘terrorists’, and even arranged to be anaesthetized and shot in the left thigh as evidence of their deadly intent. The real goal of the kidnapping was to issue thinly disguised blackmail notes to Sindona’s former political allies in the hope that they could still engineer the salvation of his banks—and therefore of Cosa Nostra’s money. The plot failed; Sindona was ‘released’ by his captors and gave himself up to the FBI; he died in prison in 1986 after drinking coffee laced with cyanide.

In the summer of 1982, another disgraced Italian banker, Roberto Calvi, was found hanging under Blackfriars Bridge in London. Calvi’s career reads like an echo of Sindona’s: a rapid rise, close ties to the Vatican, funds channelled to governing political parties, and a financial collapse followed by desperate attempts to save himself by blackmailing politicians. It took until April 2002 for it to be confirmed—in the minds of the Italian authorities, at least—that Calvi had not taken his own life as was first believed, but was in fact ‘suicided’; the Italian language twists ‘suicide’ into a transitive verb to describe such cases. At the time of writing, a mafia boss close to the Corleonesi seems likely to go on trial for allegedly ordering his death. The prosecution’s thesis, based on the evidence of a mafia
pentito,
is that Calvi was recycling drug money for the Corleonesi in the same way that Sindona did for the Inzerillo–Gambino–Spatola–Bontate group, and that he was murdered because he too had proved unreliable. It is anticipated that the man of honour in question will deny the charges.

Both of ‘God’s bankers’ were members of a Masonic lodge known as Propaganda 2 or P2. In March 1981, magistrates from Milan investigating Sindona’s fake kidnapping discovered a list of 962 members of P2 at the office of its Grand Master, Licio Gelli. Among the men who had taken its oath were the entire leadership of the secret services, forty-four members of parliament, and a slew of senior businessmen, military figures, policemen, civil servants, and journalists. The parliamentary inquiry into P2 concluded that its aim had been to pollute public life and undermine democracy, although not all of the Lodge’s members were aware of its underlying aims; its Grand Master had almost certainly been keeping secret papers on members for blackmail purposes. The exact extent of P2’s influence is still unclear.

The relationship between the mafia and other Masonic groups is easier to define. Starting in the 1970s, some senior men of honour joined lodges as a way of making contact with businessmen, bureaucrats, and politicians. As one
pentito
explained, ‘Through the Freemasons you can make comprehensive contact with businessmen, with the institutions, with the men who wield a different kind of power to the punitive power that Cosa Nostra has.’

One example demonstrates how insidious an influence these networks can be: the parliamentary inquiry into the Sindona affair found that the plastic surgeon who anaesthetized and wounded Michele Sindona during his fake kidnapping was, by his own definition, ‘a sentimental international Mason’ with close links both to mafiosi and to the Grand Master of P2. For nineteen years he was also the resident doctor at Palermo police headquarters and may have had friends in the US government.

It would be a mistake to assume that the ‘white-collar’ Masons were the dominant partners in this venal tango with the thugs of Cosa Nostra. For one thing, there was no question of a conflict of loyalties for anyone who was a member of both secret societies. Cosa Nostra’s interests always come first, as one
pentito
explained: ‘The [Masonic] oath is a fiction because we’ve only got one oath that we respect—the one we take in Cosa Nostra.’

It is now known that the two richest men in Sicily in the 1960s and 1970s took both oaths, Masonic and mafioso. They were the Salvo cousins, Nino and Ignazio. Nino Salvo was an abrasive, outgoing man of honour from the Salemi Family in the province of Trapani. In 1955, he married a woman whose father ran one of the small companies that held tax-collecting contracts. In Sicily both direct and indirect taxes were paid through private firms in a system that the leading historian of Palermo has called ‘an infernal money-eating machine’. Together with his father-in-law and his more urbane cousin Ignazio, Nino would go on to form a cartel that in 1959 secured the right to collect 40 per cent of Sicily’s taxes. In 1962, with the help of ‘young Turk’ Salvo Lima, the Salvo cousins’ company won the contract to collect taxes in Palermo—a business that alone generated over $2 million (1960s values) per year in profit. Their control over the tax-collection system grew still further in the mid-1960s, and would last until the early 1980s. Where similar businesses elsewhere in Italy generally took around 3 per cent of what they gathered as profit, the Salvos raked off a constant 10 per cent. The cousins supplemented their income by cornering huge European Union and Italian government subsidies for the agribusiness concerns that they set up with their tax-collecting booty.