Cosa Nostra (54 page)

The moral pressure on Italy’s politicians to prove that they were not complicit in the murder of Giovanni Falcone at Capaci was irresistible. In the days following the funeral, some of the people who had endured the dense waves of rain to crowd the streets outside the church of San Domenico, who had looked into the weeping eyes of unknown fellow citizens and seen the same desperate resolve reflected back, began doing their bit to try to turn grief into change. Across the centre of the city, slogans sprayed on bedsheets were hung out of windows: ‘Falcone lives.’ ‘Palermo wants justice.’ ‘Get the mafia out of government.’ ‘Stop killing this city.’ A ‘Sheets Committee’ became one of many new grass-roots antimafia organizations. Rosaria Schifani’s words—‘Mafiosi: on your knees’—were printed on T-shirts worn during a human chain that ran through the city a month after the attack. A tree outside Falcone’s house—by a sad irony he lived in a street named after Emanuele Notarbartolo—was turned into a shrine adorned in flowers, photographs, and messages.

Inconceivably, on 19 July 1992, Cosa Nostra showed that the state could not even protect the man who had stepped into Falcone’s shoes, Paolo Borsellino. The explosion that killed him and five members of his escort could be heard halfway across the city. Three days after Borsellino died, Rita Atria, a teenage girl from a mafia family who had started to give evidence to the magistrate after her father and brother were murdered, jumped to her death from the balcony of her safe house in Rome. Her suicide note said simply that there was no one left to protect her. It was a summer in which, as one campaigner wrote, Palermo seemed like a bloody, badly written tragedy: ‘We want to get out of the theatre, but we’re locked in.’

Despite their stunned dismay, many Palermitani still found the will to protest. Among the countless unforgettable images created by the many sit-ins and processions at the time was of a little boy who took part in a demonstration that marched from the centre of the city to the site of Borsellino’s death; he wore a tiny sandwich board with ‘I want to be worthy of Falcone’ written on the front, and ‘I want to be worthy of Borsellino’ on the back. For a few extraordinary months, the virtuous minority made Palermo its own and convinced a large part of the population of the urgency of the antimafia cause.

The situation in Sicily was a national emergency. Seven thousand troops were sent to the island to relieve the police of more mundane duties so that they could participate in a gigantic manhunt for Riina and his teams of killers. The law enforcement officials who had not managed to protect the two magistrates were removed. The head of the Palermo prosecutors’ office, a man who had repeated run-ins with Falcone, asked to be transferred. In yet another act of exceptional personal courage, a magistrate from the northern city of Turin, Gian Carlo Caselli, volunteered to take up the vacant Palermo job and inject new drive into the fight against Cosa Nostra. Dozens of arrests followed. A law to protect
pentiti
was passed, and they were subsequently given the chance to change their identities. The DIA and the DNA, the new national antimafia institutions designed by Falcone, were brought on stream. The police were given the power to infiltrate the mafia, using simulated drug deals or money laundering operations. Most importantly of all, new, tougher prison conditions were stipulated for mafiosi so that they could not continue to run their empires from behind bars as had been the pattern in the past.

But, as so often in the history of Cosa Nostra, these were paradoxical successes. The political system that seemed finally to have found the resolve to address the mafia problem in 1992–3 was actually liquefying in the heat of a raging corruption scandal. It began in February 1992 when a Socialist politician in Milan was caught as he tried to flush 30 million lire in bribe money down the toilet. ‘Operation Clean Hands’, as it was called, rapidly spread to other parties and other cities as investigators revealed an ingrained system of spoils-taking that linked business, administration, and politics. The ‘party-ocracy’ was being overthrown. By the end of 1993, one third of all members of the Italian parliament were under investigation for corruption, and both of the major governing parties—the DC and the Socialists—had ceased to exist. Disbelieving and often amused, the Italian people watched a revolution unfold on their television sets.

The climate inside parts of Cosa Nostra, if nothing like revolutionary, was also undergoing a profound change. Sensing what lay ahead after the Court of Cassation’s final verdict on the maxi-trial, men of honour had begun handing themselves in to the police even before the Capaci outrage. Nothing like this had ever happened before. When Riina showed no signs of a switch in tactics after the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, many more mafiosi began to turn state’s evidence. Gaspare Mutolo had been initiated by Riina himself in 1973 and became a major heroin dealer. It was he who, in October 1992, explained to magistrates that Cosa Nostra had completely underestimated the damage that Falcone could do to them from his position inside the Ministry of Justice, and that it was the Court of Cassation’s verdict in January that had triggered the murders of Falcone and Borsellino. Magistrates now had a very clear picture of what was driving Riina’s thinking.

It was information from a mafioso on the run from Riina’s vengeance that led directly to the capture of the boss of bosses himself in January 1993. Identifying Riina was the primary problem: the last photo that anyone had of him dated from 1969. But captured man of honour Balduccio Di Maggio picked out Riina’s gardener, his son, and his wife in a video of a villa that the
carabinieri
had under observation because it was frequented by a member of the Commission. Early the following morning a snatch squad was ready when Riina was driven from the villa in an inconspicuous family saloon. Four men pounced on him and his driver at a traffic light at Piazza Einstein; he offered no resistance, and showed clear signs of fear that only dissipated when he was told that he was a prisoner of the
carabinieri
and not of his mafia enemies.

At last Italy could put a face to the dread name of Totò Riina. One magazine put his blunt, baggy-eyed features on its front cover under the headline ‘The Devil’. ‘Shorty’ himself feigned disbelief at this satanic public image. When brought face to face with Tommaso Buscetta in court, Riina refused to speak to his accuser because of his marital infidelities: ‘In my town, Corleone, we live in a morally correct way.’ (Four days earlier his moral mentor and godfather, Luciano Leggio, had died of a heart attack in a Sardinian prison.)

But more disconcerting even than the Riina freak show were the questions that his capture left unanswered. He had been a fugitive from justice since the late 1960s. In that time he had married, had children, obtained medical care for his diabetes, sent his kids to school, and exercised iron control over a vast criminal organization. The villa where Riina spent the last five years of his life in hiding was even in Uditore—the same
mafiosissima borgata
that had been the base for Antonino Giammona’s
cosca
back in the 1870s. How was it possible for Riina to have avoided capture for so long? A worrying shadow was cast over the operation that finally netted him by the fact that his Palermo villa was then left unguarded long enough for a team of mafiosi to clean it out—removing cash, documents, accounts, his wife’s fur coats. The magistrates who finally arrived to inspect the property found that it had even been redecorated. An inquiry is currently trying to establish how this was allowed to happen.

After Riina’s arrest, the leadership of Cosa Nostra passed into the hands of his brother-in-law and long-term associate, Leoluca Bagarella. After nearly twenty years of domination by ‘Shorty’ Riina, Cosa Nostra did not respond well to Bagarella’s control. Even Corleonese diehards like Giovanni ‘lo scannacristiani’ Brusca, by now a
capomandamento
in his own right, found the change unsettling:

After Riina’s arrest, there wasn’t the same calm as before … All the various bosses started to manage their own
mandamenti
as they saw fit, for their own sake. There wasn’t the same homogeneity as before when there had been, well, you could call him the father of the family, everybody’s
capo.

What did not change was the core Corleonese group’s thoroughgoing support for what has been termed the massacre strategy. ‘Tractor’ Provenzano was heard to say at one meeting, ‘Everything that Uncle Totò [Riina] did goes ahead; we’re not stopping.’ A month after Riina’s arrest, invoking the rule in Cosa Nostra that stipulates that mafiosi have the freedom to organize any off-island activities they like, irrespective of the will of the rest of the organization, Bagarella, Brusca, and other senior bosses from Palermo and Trapani met to air various proposals for how to continue the war on the state. According to Brusca’s account, it was rapidly agreed to mount an attack on Maurizio Costanzo, a prominent chat-show host who had expressed a wish that a mafioso in hospital with a fake illness would subsequently contract a real tumour. They discussed placing a bomb under the Leaning Tower of Pisa, poisoning children’s snacks in supermarkets, and littering the beaches at Rimini with HIV-infected syringes. In each case there was to be a warning given in time for deaths to be avoided. The point was to create public alarm and bring the state to the negotiating table.

In the end it was decided not to bother with the niceties of these ‘dummy’ attacks. On 14 May 1993 in Rome, a bomb went off as TV presenter Maurizio Costanzo’s car was approaching; by extraordinary good fortune, he was unhurt. On 27 May, a car bomb exploded in via dei Georgofili in the heart of Florence; five passers-by were killed and forty wounded. There were five more bomb victims in via Palestro in Milan on 27 July. On 31 October, a bomb was planted in via dei Gladiatori near the Olympic Stadium in Rome; it was timed to go off at the end of the Lazio versus Udinese football match, with the purpose of killing as many
carabinieri
as possible. It failed to detonate.

It was during that same year of 1993 that it became clear that Cosa Nostra, in directly confronting the state, had also made an enemy of the Church. In November 1982, in the middle of the
mattanza,
John Paul II had visited Sicily and not once mentioned the word ‘mafia’. In May 1993, he made his first visit to the island since the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino. On the eve of his three-day tour, the Vatican paper—the
Osservatore Romano
—invited Borsellino’s widow Agnese to write a letter. She recalled her husband’s ‘simple and profound’ Christianity, and appealed for prayers so that the Church ‘would not compromise the genuine teachings of Christ with any kind of collusion’. A group of Catholic intellectuals followed up with a letter to the
Giornale di Sicilia
that was even less equivocal, denouncing ‘the scandalous links between representatives of the Catholic Church and exponents of mafia power’.

Two days later the pontiff chose the dramatic setting of Agrigento’s Valley of the Temples, where priceless ancient Greek monuments are set in a landscape ruined by mafia-backed illegal building, to throw away his prepared sermon and launch into a thundering extemporized condemnation of ‘mafia culture … a culture of death, profoundly inhuman, anti-evangelical’. Visibly moved, he called on mafiosi to convert: ‘One day the judgement of God will come!’ Cosa Nostra’s response came on 27 July when bombs exploded at the churches of San Giovanni in Laterano and San Giorgio in Rome; there were no casualties. On 15 September, in the eastern Palermo suburb of Brancaccio, Father Pino Puglisi, the finest representative of the embattled tradition of local antimafia priests, was murdered at his front door. One of his killers would later confess that Father Puglisi had smiled at them just before being shot: ‘I was expecting this,’ he said.

In its wild reaction to the Court of Cassation’s verdict of January 1992, Cosa Nostra was clearly no longer concerned to perpetuate any doubts over whether it existed or not. Yet it was also cutting away at its own life-support system, at its political ties, at the pseudo-religion that many of its members professed, at the very notion that it could not be separated from Sicilian culture. As a direct consequence, the organization haemorrhaged defectors in hundreds; in 1996 the number of
pentiti
peaked at 424. Caught between the abominable regime of the Corleonesi within Cosa Nostra and a life in isolation under the new, tougher prison conditions, even senior men of honour, members of the core group of Corleonesi, began to collaborate with justice.

One example must serve for many: Salvatore Cancemi was a
capomandamento
who was on the Commission when it approved the decision to murder Falcone and Borsellino. He had been a lookout for the team that placed and detonated the Capaci bomb. Something finally began to change in him the day he heard Riina explaining his plans to deal with the snowballing number of defectors: ‘The problem is these
pentiti,
because if it wasn’t for them not even the whole world united could touch us. That’s why we’ve got to kill them, and their relatives to the twentieth remove, starting with children of six and over.’ But it was not until the following summer, in the middle of the bombing campaign of 1993, that Cancemi walked up to the gate of a
carabinieri
barracks and turned himself in. He subsequently also surrendered his fortune, which he estimates at around £33 million. When he was reunited with Tommaso Buscetta at a trial (the two were in the same Family and had become friends while in prison in the 1970s), he confessed that he had personally carried out Riina’s order to strangle two of Buscetta’s sons. The history-making mafia defector embraced Cancemi and said, ‘You could not refuse the order. I forgive you because I know what it means to be in Cosa Nostra.’

Armed with the evidence of these new
pentiti,
investigators rapidly ascertained who had carried out the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations, the bomb attacks on the mainland, the murder of Father Puglisi, and many other crimes. The Corleonesi were still sowing terror within Cosa Nostra to discourage any opposition to their massacre strategy. But one by one they fell to the ultimate weapon in a mafioso’s armoury: betrayal to the state. Leoluca Bagarella was captured in June 1995 in an apartment in the centre of Palermo, the second boss of bosses to be arrested in less than three years. And then, in May the following year, four months after little Giuseppe Di Matteo was strangled and dissolved in acid on his orders, the
carabinieri
burst into the house near Agrigento where Giovanni ‘lo scannacristiani’ Brusca was hiding with his family. By the time of Brusca’s arrest, the massacre strategy had been abandoned and the Sicilian mafia was in the throes of the worst crisis in its history. Cosa Nostra was at last on the verge of defeat.