Cosa Nostra (55 page)

‘UNCLE GIULIO’

Through its savage response to the Court of Cassation’s final verdict on the maxi-trial, Cosa Nostra endangered its very future. But for several years in the late 1990s, the Italian public was more absorbed by the mafia’s past. For the dramas of 1992–3 threatened to expose the sinister legacy of collusion between politicians and mafiosi. It looked to some as if the dark truth about Italian history was finally to emerge under the strip lights of the Palermo bunker courthouse. There, in September 1995, the man who had been the country’s most powerful politician for a quarter of a century went on trial for working for the mafia: DC magus Giulio Andreotti, seven times Prime Minister of Italy. The press habitually referred to it as the trial of the century.

Andreotti’s drama began on 12 March 1992 with the murder of Salvo Lima. It is highly significant that the very first person to fall in Riina’s war on the Italian state, weeks before Falcone and Borsellino were killed, was not a magistrate or a member of the police force but a Christian Democrat politician. Lima—the former DC young Turk who had presided over the sack of Palermo and who used to get Tommaso Buscetta his opera tickets—was the victim of an execution of terrifying efficiency. He was being driven into Palermo from his home in Mondello, Palermo’s seaside satellite town, when the windscreen and one of the tyres of his car were shot out by the pillion passenger on a passing motorbike. Lima’s last words were, ‘They’re coming back!
Madonna santa!
They’re coming back!’ He ran from the car but only covered thirty metres before the killer, now on foot, caught up with him, shot him in the back, and then administered a
coup de grâce
to the nape of his neck.

A
pentito
later explained why he thought the Sicilian DC’s
éminence grise
had been murdered.

Lima gave a guarantee that everything would be sorted out in Rome … The reasons for the murder of Salvo Lima were because he did not keep the promises made in Palermo, or someone did not allow him to keep them. For a while Salvo Lima, at least according to what I heard, was actually urging people not to worry.

The ‘everything’ that Lima assured would be sorted out in Rome was the maxi-trial verdict. Quite whether he had explicitly made such rash promises is not known for certain. The important thing is that Riina had led his people to believe that guarantees had been given. Many of the
pentiti
who emerged during the terror campaign of 1992–3 would confirm the extent of Lima’s involvement with the mafia. Since the days of the La Barbera brothers in the late 1950s, he had been the intermediary between the Sicilian underworld and local and national government. Thus, in the minds of the men of honour, Lima’s funeral was also the funeral of the pact between Cosa Nostra and the DC that was formed back in the days of Don Calò Vizzini and the bandit Salvatore Giuliano.

On the day after Lima was buried, there was a cartoon on the front page of Italy’s biggest-selling daily,
La Repubblica,
that implied that the sensational murder had a clear political meaning. It showed a dark-suited man spreadeagled, face down, with a rasp file protruding from the pronounced hump on his back. Any doubt about the man’s identity was removed by the unmistakable, low-slung, bat-like ear drawn in just above his left shoulder: it was Giulio Andreotti, who was just coming to the end of what was to be his last term as Prime Minister. The pun in the cartoon was scarcely more difficult to decode than the figure of Andreotti. The Italian word for a file is ‘una lima’. The suggestion was that the real target of the attack on Salvo Lima was Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. In other words, the cartoon was saying, Cosa Nostra had stabbed a friend in the back.

When he died, Lima was on his way to the Hotel Palace where he was due to finalize the details of a grand reception in honour of Andreotti. Since 1968, when Lima became a member of parliament and fell out with ‘Viceroy’ Giovanni Gioia, his huge Sicilian following had marched under the banner of Andreotti’s DC faction. Before 1968, Andreotti had occupied government posts continually from the late 1940s onwards, but winning Lima’s support in Sicily was the decisive moment in his political fortunes. Without Lima behind him, Andreotti would probably never have become Prime Minister at all. After getting Lima’s support, Andreotti became the most influential politician in the country. No government could be formed without his approval.

Large numbers of DC notables stayed away from Palermo on the day of the Lima funeral, as did the other party leaders, the incumbent President of the Republic, and the Speakers of both houses of parliament. Some newspapers interpreted this as a sign that the public institutions were making a point of not claiming the controversial Lima as one of their own. In fact the murder could not have come at a politically more delicate moment. A general election was due to be held on 5 April, a vote that everyone knew was likely to be decisive in shaping post-Cold War Italy. Andreotti was widely touted to become the next head of state, the President of the Republic. So it is understandable that Andreotti was the focus of media attention when he turned up to see his Sicilian friend buried. Normally unflappable and ironic, he was pale and visibly shaken. Before the television cameras, he resoundingly defended Sicily’s reputation: ‘The island is not the mafia.’ In interviews he offered a tangled explanation for the Lima assassination, a mixture of ‘behindology’ and a strain of the
Cavalleria rusticana
myth. Like Sicily, Lima was the victim of a smear campaign, he argued. ‘Slanderers are worse than murderers. Or at least they are just as bad. My friend Salvo Lima was slandered for decades.’ The attacks on Lima’s reputation were the prelude to a politically motivated murder, he claimed; its aim may have been to prepare the ground for a totalitarian takeover. Asked whether he thought the murder could have been a warning aimed at him, Andreotti said he did not know: ‘Often the things that happen in Sicily are all but incomprehensible.’

Just how ‘incomprehensible’ Andreotti actually found what went on in Sicily would soon become the subject of a sensational trial in the Palermo bunker courthouse. Within a year of Lima’s death, and with the country in ferment following the murders of Falcone and Borsellino and the explosion of the ‘Clean Hands’ corruption scandal, the Palermo prosecutors’ office asked the Italian Senate for authorization to begin criminal proceedings against Giulio Andreotti ‘for having contributed in a non-occasional manner to protecting the interests and reaching the aims of the criminal association known as Cosa Nostra’. Moved by the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, Tommaso Buscetta joined more recent
pentiti
in starting to talk about the mafia’s political links. Two names kept recurring in their testimonies: Salvo Lima and Giulio Andreotti.

The accusations against Andreotti were grave. It was alleged that Italy’s most powerful politician of the 1970s and 1980s had had face-to-face business meetings with mafiosi of the calibre of Stefano Bontate, Tano ‘Sitting Bully’ Badalamenti, and Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco; Stefano Bontate, it was alleged, had given him a painting as a present. Most media attention centred on the charge that Andreotti had actually kissed Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina during one secret encounter. Andreotti was said to have been habitually referred to inside Cosa Nostra as ‘Uncle Giulio’. More importantly, it was claimed that he had sought to arrange for the ‘verdict-slaying’ Judge Carnevale to preside over the final hearing in the maxi-trial. The prosecution concluded its case by arguing that Andreotti, ‘in a dark delirium of power, made a pact with the mafia’, but that his failure to maintain promises made to the men of violence led them to turn first on his ally, Salvo Lima, and then on him; some
pentiti
said that Riina was planning to kill Andreotti or one of his children.

In October 1999, Andreotti was found innocent. The mafia defectors’ statements were found to be too vague and contradictory to support a secure conviction. But the explanation that the original trial judges issued for their decision hardly constitutes a clarion vindication of Andreotti’s morals. More than that, it raises troubling questions about Italy’s past.

The seven-times Prime Minister’s defence was, in essence, that he did not take any direct interest in Sicilian affairs, that he let his ‘slandered’ lieutenant Lima get on with the business of local politics while he moved on the national and international stage, innocent of the dangerous criminal environment in which Lima and his ilk were moving. In other words, one of Italy’s cleverest and most powerful statesmen found Sicily ‘incomprehensible’.

The judges ruled this defence implausible and even, in some limited respects, mendacious. Lima had clocked up dozens of mentions in the papers of the Antimafia commission of inquiry. The judges’ ruling determined that, both before and after he entered Andreotti’s faction in 1968, Lima boasted to a close member of Andreotti’s circle about his relationship with none other than Tommaso Buscetta. In 1973, Andreotti bent over backwards to help God’s banker Michele Sindona rescue his banks and escape from the criminal charges hanging over him in Italy and the US. There was further evidence of Andreotti’s lack of scruple when ‘pushy Corleonese embezzler’ Vito Ciancimino joined Andreotti’s faction in 1976. The judges ruled that Andreotti ‘repeatedly showed himself to be indifferent to the ties that notoriously linked [Ciancimino] to the criminal structure’.

The court found further evidence of dishonesty on Andreotti’s part related to the tax-collecting Salvo cousins, Ignazio and Nino—both ‘organically inserted into Cosa Nostra’, as the judges stated. (Nino died of natural causes during the maxi-trial; Ignazio was given a light sentence at the trial but was then shot dead on Riina’s orders in September 1992 for failing to protect Cosa Nostra from Judge Falcone.) Andreotti’s claim that he did not know the Salvo cousins was ‘unequivocally contradicted’ by the evidence; photos of them together turned up during the case, for example. The judges suggested that the most favourable interpretation of Andreotti’s reluctance to own up to his regular dealings with the Salvos was that he was trying to protect his image. But the slipperiness of some aspects of Andreotti’s defence was not taken to be evidence that justified the prosecution’s charge that he was systematically and deliberately working to further the interests of Cosa Nostra.

Following an appeal by the prosecution, the not guilty verdict was confirmed in May 2003. In late July the judges’ explanation of this second acquittal was deposited in the Palermo chancellery. According to extracts published in the national press—the only parts of it available at the time of writing—the judges ruled that Andreotti had ‘made himself available to mafiosi in an authentic, stable and friendly way until the spring of 1980’. Prior to that date he had ‘friendly and direct relations [with men of honour] propitiated by his link with Salvo Lima and the Salvo cousins’. There was a relationship ‘based on exchange and general electoral support for the Andreotti faction [of the DC]’. After 1980, Andreotti demonstrated ‘ever more incisive commitment to the antimafia cause’, to the extent that he even put his own and his family’s lives in danger. (As Andreotti has frequently pointed out, for example, he was Prime Minister when Falcone was working at the Ministry of Justice in 1991 and 1992.)

The turning point in Andreotti’s relationship with Cosa Nostra, in the view of the appeal court judges, came at the outset of the season of ‘eminent corpses’, and specifically with the murder of the DC President of the Sicilian Region, Piersanti Mattarella, in January 1980. Mattarella had once been tied to Stefano Bontate and other mafiosi. (Indeed, his father was also a DC politician who was notoriously close to the mafia: he was the Minister who reportedly gave Joe Bananas his red carpet reception at Rome airport back in 1957.) But as the level of mafia violence increased in the late 1970s, Piersanti Mattarella began to sense the dangers of his party’s relationship with organized crime. Most significantly, he tried to free the system of awarding local government contracts from mafia influence. When Andreotti heard about a plan to kill Mattarella, according to the judges, he met with Bontate and other senior men of honour and urged them not to carry it through. After Mattarella’s death, Andreotti again met Bontate, only to be told in no uncertain terms that Cosa Nostra considered itself to be beyond his influence. According to the judges’ ruling, at no stage did Andreotti report any of this to the authorities, either to try and save Mattarella’s life or to bring his killers to justice. When confronted with these findings by a journalist, Andreotti stressed the need to look at them in the context of the judges’ ruling in its entirety.

What saved Andreotti from being convicted for this pattern of relationships with Cosa Nostra was the fact that Italy has a statute of limitations: it is all a question of timing. Whereas Andreotti’s defence had argued that he never had a relationship with the mafia, and the prosecution had maintained that the relationship lasted until the 1980s and even beyond, the Appeal Court judges ruled that any dealings ‘Uncle Giulio’ had with the bosses ceased in 1980. This cut-off point means that, whatever he did, he did it too long ago to be prosecuted under Italian law. The judges commented only that Andreotti would have to ‘answer to history’. The former Prime Minister responded that, ‘in a trial, I’m only interested in the final outcome. And in this case the outcome was positive. As for the rest, Amen.’ His lawyers will now have to consider whether they will appeal to the Court of Cassation in an effort to rescue his reputation.

Both of these judicial rulings strongly indicate that, far from finding Sicily incomprehensible, Andreotti understood it well enough to stick by his political allies even when he was aware of at least some of the evils that they were committing. It is deeply worrying for Italian democracy that for so long so many electors were willing to place their trust in a man who, even before this trial, was strongly suspected of using the mafia, in the traditional way, as an instrument of local government.