Authors: John Dickie
Cosa Nostra (50 page)
With Tommaso Buscetta and Tano Badalamenti now in Brazil and the United States respectively, the Corleonesi had simply decapitated the opposing faction by killing Bontate and Inzerillo. The daring of the attack seemed breathtaking. Most mafia-watchers expected a ferocious reaction from the Bontate–Inzerillo group. But what ensued was simply a mass execution of their followers. The losing side was totally disorientated. What Judge Falcone called a ‘ghost army’ of Corleonese assassins, recruited in the small towns of the province of Palermo, would appear in the city, kill, and vanish again. A month after Inzerillo’s death, Tommaso Buscetta telephoned Palermo from Brazil to speak to a construction entrepreneur close to both Bontate and Inzerillo. The man begged Buscetta to come back and organize the resistance to the Corleonesi. But ‘the boss of two worlds’ knew better than to give his life in a hopeless cause. Just as they had done in Corleone back in 1958 with the murder of Dr Michele Navarra, the Corleonesi were pitting overwhelming military force against wealth and political influence. It was no contest.
In the weeks and months that followed, 200 men belonging to the Bontate–Inzerillo faction were killed in the province of Palermo—to count only the bodies that were actually found. More disappeared, the victims of ‘white shotgun’ murders. On 30 November 1982 alone, twelve men of honour were shot dead at different times and in different parts of the city. Most of the enemies of the Corleonesi were killed before they even knew they were in danger, betrayed by men within their own Family who had secretly joined the Corleonesi; some were even eliminated by their own men and presented as sacrificial offerings to the victors. The Families and
mandamenti
of murdered leaders were immediately handed over to Corleonese loyalists.
The
mattanza
even extended to the United States. John Gambino was reportedly sent over from New York to Palermo to find out what was happening. He returned with a clear instruction: all possible efforts were to be made to find and eliminate Tommaso Buscetta; all Sicilian mafiosi from the losing faction who attempted to escape death by fleeing across the Atlantic were to be killed. Shortly afterwards Inzerillo’s brother was found dead in Mont Laurel, New Jersey, with five one-dollar bills stuffed in his mouth and another in his genitals.
The Corleonesi were not just exterminating their enemies, they were killing any man of honour whose absolute loyalty was even remotely in doubt. They also enforced a scorched earth policy of stunning brutality around any member of the Bontate–Inzerillo faction who went into hiding. Any friends, relatives, or business associates who might plausibly offer shelter were cut down.
The emblematic case is that of faithful Bontate soldier Salvatore Contorno, who escaped in dramatic fashion from a carefully coordinated machine-gun ambush in the main street of Brancaccio, a township to the east of Palermo. An incredible thirty-five of his relatives were then murdered. Contorno began to give information to the police off the record. When he heard that Buscetta had turned state’s evidence in the summer of 1984, he would not believe it until he was brought face to face with ‘the boss of two worlds’. At their meeting Contorno knelt down before Buscetta and received his blessing before taking the decision to give evidence to Judge Falcone. His testimony would be almost as important to the maxi-trial as Buscetta’s.
The
mattanza
dragged on and on; in fact there never was a clear ending because when ‘Shorty’ Riina had done with his enemies and with the fence-sitters, he turned on any of his own allies who had begun to show signs of independent thinking. The most prominent victim of this new phase of the killing was Pino ‘the Shoe’ Greco, underboss of the Ciaculli Family, the leading Corleonese assassin in the early stages of the
mattanza.
‘The Shoe’ was a member of the firing party that had murdered both Bontate and Inzerillo. He had then murdered Inzerillo’s teenage son after the boy swore to avenge his father’s death. The rumours inside Cosa Nostra were that ‘the Shoe’ had cut off the boy’s arm before killing him so as to demonstrate the futility of rebellion against the power of the Corleonesi. In the autumn of 1985, ‘the Shoe’ was shot dead by his own men on the orders of Riina.
The tactics that the Corleonesi had evolved over more than three decades had come to fruition: they had established a dictatorship over Cosa Nostra based on a rolling programme of executions. In doing so they had not betrayed Cosa Nostra’s value system, as many defectors later claimed; they had instead revealed its very essence.
A British historian has spoken of the ‘virtuous minorities’ within the Italian state. A few countries are lucky enough to take certain things almost for granted, like the notion that everyone is equal before the law, or that the state should serve the interests of all its citizens rather than the friends and family of whoever happens to wield power, whether it be in a national ministry or in a local hospital. All too often in Italy—and not just in Italy—such values have to be fought for, day to day, by a virtuous minority of people from all walks of life and of all political persuasions. It is not, of course, that the majority of Italians are corrupt, or that Italian public life is entirely rotten. As is doubtless true of most societies around the world, the majority just adapt to survive in the environment in which they find themselves.
Italy’s virtuous minorities have rarely seemed so beleaguered as during the 1980s. The terrorist emergency slowly subsided, the labour movement went into retreat, support for the PCI declined, and a new economic boom began to gather pace. But at the same time sleaze sank deeper than ever into the fabric of society. The Socialist Party, now a permanent partner in governing coalitions, all but abandoned its reforming goals and strove to ‘occupy the state’ in the same way that the DC had done since the 1950s. These were the years of what Italians called the ‘party-ocracy’, when all state employees from the board members of nationalized banks down to school janitors seemed to have been chosen on the basis of party affiliation. For businesses in some towns and cities, winning a government contract of any kind inevitably involved paying kickbacks to party bag carriers.
Amid the constant horse-trading between factions in parliament, and with public opinion increasingly resigned and disillusioned, the Italian political class of the 1980s was hardly likely to slough its century-old habit of treating Sicilian society as if it amounted to no more than a squabbling band of politicians to buy off. Tragically, this same political class was called on to confront Cosa Nostra at a time when it became wealthier and more bloodthirsty than ever before.
The Sicilian mafia has always brought out the worst and the best in the Italian state, both its most duplicitous villains, and the most virtuous of the virtuous minorities. In the year before his death, Giovanni Falcone gave a series of interviews to a French journalist in which he famously explained that he was not some suicidal Robin Hood: ‘I am simply a servant of the state in
terra infidelium
’—in the land of the infidels. In a country that now had a respectable claim to be the fifth largest industrial economy on earth, Sicily was still a frontier zone for the rule of law.
Falcone was in many ways the figurehead of Italy’s virtuous minorities, and it is not hagiographic to say that he demonstrated their virtues in a pure form: courage, of course, but also devotion to his job and a legendary capacity for hard work. Falcone was also rigorously honest and correct in his dealings with people; it was a trait that could at times make him seem stiff and unfriendly. But more than a facet of his character, it was a calculated defence mechanism both for himself and for those around him. Anyone who had regular access to him, even the most upright of his friends, was a potential channel through which Cosa Nostra could make an approach.
Francesco La Licata, one journalist who often interviewed Falcone, experienced just such an approach at first hand. His bizarre encounter with the mafia began one morning over coffee in a bar when someone asked him, ‘Do you remember me?’ It was Gregorio, a man from the quarter of the city where La Licata had grown up; Gregorio lived on the margins of organized crime. ‘Let’s go for a ride, and we can talk about how things were when we were kids,’ he suggested. Warily, La Licata agreed to get in Gregorio’s red VW, but no sooner had he sat down than he noticed the handle of a pistol protruding from the seat pocket. ‘There are some people who want to talk to you, but don’t worry. Everything’s OK,’ Gregorio said with a smile.
During the journey La Licata tried to calculate how likely he was to be murdered. After a change of car, he was taken deep into a lemon grove in what remained of the Conca d’Oro. There he was brought face to face with a
capofamiglia
whom he recognized from a police mugshot. The boss began, ‘Please excuse us for the way we invited you here. But as you know I’m on the run from the law. We have found out about you. We know you are a reliable type and you do your job honestly.’ The mafioso then began to deliver a circuitous, maudlin speech in his own defence. All the while, La Licata struggled to follow what he was hearing while casting nervous glances at the deep water of a cistern near where they stood.
Finally the boss got to the point: ‘We know that you can talk to Judge Falcone. You have to tell him how things stand, that we are just family men who are the victims of a shameful smear. All you need to tell him is what I’ve just finished telling you.’ It was a classic opening gambit. Establishing even a vaguely compromising connection of this kind with a judge could open the way for an exchange of favours, blackmail, or intimidation.
La Licata knew that a blank refusal to act as go-between could easily be fatal. Thinking frantically and speaking with measured politeness, he explained that anyone making contact with Falcone on a mafioso’s behalf was likely to be put under investigation; he suggested that the boss could make his point through a newspaper interview instead. ‘I’m not authorized,’ came the reply. ‘We don’t do that kind of thing.’ La Licata’s second suggestion—a memorandum sent to Falcone and the press through his lawyers—met with a better reception. ‘Well done! Good idea! That way Falcone won’t take offence. He’s a nasty character.’
In the space of a brief exchange, La Licata had successfully staked his life on Falcone’s reputation for rigorous honesty and procedural correctness—what the mafioso called his ‘nasty character’. Feeling as if he had survived an air disaster, the journalist was taken back unharmed to the bar he had left a few hours before. He did not tell Falcone the story of his abduction until several years later. By way of reply, Falcone matter-of-factly confirmed that he would indeed have placed him under investigation. The two men became friends.
Emanuele Notarbartolo, the banker and former mayor of Palermo stabbed to death on a train in 1893; and Joe Petrosino, the New York policeman shot dead in Sicily in 1909: in the first century of its existence, the Sicilian mafia killed only two establishment figures, two men whose status in the world of business, politics, administration, journalism, justice, or law enforcement qualified them as
cadaveri eccellenti.
Since the late 1970s, as the power of the Corleonesi has grown, there have been dozens of these ‘eminent corpses’. A few of them were friends who failed to respect their pact with the bosses, but the vast majority have been Cosa Nostra’s enemies. After 1979, violence became the dominant note in the mafia’s duet with the upper world of the institutions. And the violence reached a crescendo as Falcone and other members of the virtuous minority made unprecedented advances in the struggle to defeat Cosa Nostra.
Looking back, the first sign of the new aggression came in 1970 with the disappearance of
L’Ora
investigative reporter Mauro De Mauro. It is still not clear what he had discovered, perhaps evidence of the heroin trade or of the neo-Fascist putsch that year in which Cosa Nostra was asked to take part. In 1971, the Palermo prosecutor Pietro Scaglione was shot dead after visiting his wife’s tomb. Considerable suspicion surrounded Scaglione at the time—although it is now known that he was the victim of mafia smear tactics which were aimed, as ever, at devaluing the life of an innocent victim. For that reason his death was easily dismissed in some circles as an internal mafia affair. Even the 1977 murder of a colonel in the
carabinieri
near Corleone could still be treated as an anomaly. Only in 1979 did the new pattern of mafia tactics became unmistakable. In that year, as if to demonstrate how comprehensive was its assault on the institutions, Cosa Nostra killed a journalist (the
Giornale di Sicilia
’s crime correspondent), a politician (the leader of the Palermo DC), a policeman (the chief of the Palermo flying squad), and a magistrate (Cesare Terranova, the man who had led investigations into the first mafia war). The mafia’s message was now clear: no matter how prominent, any public figure who stood in the way of Sicily’s state within a state was going to be killed.
The demonstrative recklessness and brutality with which many of these murders were performed by the Corleonesi bore its own message too. Terranova died in the street outside his Palermo home; despite the risk of being seen, the three killers fired more than thirty pistol and rifle shots, and even took the time to walk up to the old magistrate and administer a
coup de grâce.
Again and again, around the eminent cadavers were strewn the corpses of guards, drivers, family members, friends, and passers-by. Cosa Nostra was flourishing its savage might. The following year, 1980, saw three eminent corpses: the captain of the
carabinieri
in Monreale, the president of the Sicilian Region, and the chief prosecutor in Palermo. The latter was gunned down in the very centre of the city, within sight of the Teatro Massimo; it was the Sicilian equivalent of carrying out an execution in Piccadilly Circus or Times Square. (This murder was actually ordered by Bontate and Inzerillo to show that they could leave eminent corpses with the same abandon as the Corleonesi.)