Cosa Nostra (57 page)

The fate of this ‘collective brain’ is still in the balance. Italy’s law enforcement response to Cosa Nostra is now more coordinated and efficient than it has ever been. For example, in July 2002, by using global positioning system micro-beacons placed in suspects’ cars, police arrested what they say was the whole of the Commission of Cosa Nostra for the province of Agrigento—fifteen men including one who is a doctor, nobleman, and member of the provincial council; the bosses had assembled—it is alleged—to elect a new
capo.
These allegations have not, it should be stated, been the subject of judicial determination.

But, as so often in the past, the Sicilian mafia’s destiny will depend less on law enforcement than on politics, meaning both the organization’s internal balance of power and its relationship with the people’s elected representatives. Bernardo Provenzano faces one crucial political task. He has to find a way to settle a conflict of interests between the bosses who are still at large, and the historic leadership of the Corleonesi: men like Riina and Bagarella who have not turned state’s evidence and are now nearly a decade into irreversible life sentences under a harsh prison regime. The bosses on the outside need peace and ‘submersion’ to implement a long-term rebuilding strategy. The bosses on the inside urgently need changes in legislation: first and foremost the reform of the prison conditions—known as Law 41 bis—that prevent them operating from captivity; but also changes to the laws on confiscation of mafia property, and even a reversal of the precedents established by the maxi-trial—perhaps through retrospective laws that weaken the value of evidence provided by
pentiti.
In other words, the demands that led to the attack on the state in the 1980s and 1990s have yet to be met.

And now, a decade after the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino and the bombs on the Italian mainland, some observers fear that Cosa Nostra has found someone in government who is prepared to give it what it wants.

THE MAJOR-DOMO AND THE AD MAN

Antonino Giuffrè, known as ‘Manuzza’ (‘Little Hand’), acting head of the Caccamo
mandamento
of Cosa Nostra, was captured on 16 April 2002. Giuffrè’s nickname derives from his deformed right hand, which was mangled in a hunting accident. It is said he has since learned to load and fire a shotgun with just his left. In the abandoned farm building where Giuffrè was hiding (along with a loaded pistol, 6,000 euros in cash, and images of Padre Pio, the Sacred Heart and the Madonna) was a shopping bag full of letters to Bernardo Provenzano. Some entrepreneurs, it seems, were even writing to Uncle Bernie on company notepaper with requests for favours.

In June, feeling that he had been betrayed by his leader, Giuffrè started to talk to investigating magistrates: ‘I was Provenzano’s principal collaborator and my job was to try and restructure Cosa Nostra on a huge scale.’ But his most startling claim was that in 1993 Cosa Nostra had ‘direct contacts’ with representatives of Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s famous perma-tanned media magnate with a crooner’s smile.

That same year, 1993, it will be recalled, was the year of Cosa Nostra’s bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. It was also the year when Berlusconi was in the process of forming a new political party to respond to the crisis brought about by the ‘Clean Hands’ corruption investigations. The subject of the alleged meeting between Berlusconi’s people and Cosa Nostra, Giuffrè claims, was an alliance between the mafia and Berlusconi’s planned political party, soon to be baptized Forza Italia (‘Come on, Italy!’).

The following year Berlusconi led an alliance to victory in the general election. But the alliance proved fragile and collapsed before 1994 was out. Then in May 2001, a year before Giuffrè’s capture, Forza Italia met with electoral triumph and Berlusconi became Prime Minister with a solid parliamentary majority behind him. The man who likes to be known as
il cavaliere
—‘the Knight’—is also the richest man in Italy with an estimated fortune of $10.3 billion at the time of the 2001 election; among many other things he owns the country’s three major private television networks and a publishing empire. No one since Mussolini has had so much power over Italy or, indeed, over Sicily; the alliance led by Forza Italia holds all sixty-one of the island’s parliamentary seats.

There are numerous indications that since 1994 men of honour have been directing their people to vote for Forza Italia candidates. Bearing in mind how the mafia has tended to operate over the past century and a half, there is nothing necessarily surprising or scandalous in this: politicians with power are inevitably the most vulnerable to pressure from organized crime. It is known that, because of its growing disenchantment with the DC in the 1980s, Cosa Nostra was on the lookout for a new political vehicle for its interests. In the late 1980s, overtures were made to the Socialist Party. Then in the early 1990s, ‘Shorty’ Riina began to discuss the possibility of a new Sicilian separatist movement with his business and political contacts in the Masons: ‘Cosa Nostra is reviving the dream of becoming independent, of becoming the boss in a part of Italy, a state of its own, of our own,’ said one defector at the time. Some believe that, in the minds of senior bosses within Cosa Nostra, the emergence of Forza Italia in 1993–4 offered an even better solution: a close relationship with the party that was set to be just as central to the national political scene as the DC had once been.

There are many reasons to be cautious about what ‘Little Hand’ says, and to fight shy of any equivalence between Forza Italia in Sicily and Cosa Nostra. Nobody in Italy would seriously claim either that Berlusconi is a mafioso or that his electoral victories are a direct reflection of mafia influence. The lessons of mafia history in that regard are clear: even at its apogee in the 1970s and 1980s, Cosa Nostra did not control nearly enough votes to achieve such a landslide for its favoured political party. Berlusconi’s triumph owed more to dissatisfaction with his predecessors, effective campaigning, and public spending promises.

‘Manuzza’ Giuffrè’s allegations could turn out to be fanciful, perhaps wishful propaganda fed by Cosa Nostra’s leaders to the membership. Defence lawyers call what this latest
pentito
says ‘an anthology of hearsay’. But the Palermo investigating magistrates take what Giuffrè says seriously because, they allege, it may reveal the outcome of a remarkable story from nearly three decades ago that potentially links one of Silvio Berlusconi’s closest aides directly to Cosa Nostra.

In 1974, Berlusconi was looking for a groom and major-domo for his Arcore estate near Milan. He turned for advice to Marcello Dell’Utri who, after a prodigiously rapid rise through the Sicilian banking world, had recently moved to Milan to become Berlusconi’s business factotum. (Dell’Utri later became the head of Publitalia, the highly profitable advertising arm of the Berlusconi business empire; it was he who came up with the idea of Forza Italia in 1993.) Dell’Utri’s recommendation for the post of major-domo was a fellow Palermitan, Vittorio Mangano, who filled it for two years. Mangano died of cancer recently, a few days after being sentenced to life for two murders. This ‘major-domo’, it transpires, was a man of honour from the Porta Nuova Family of Cosa Nostra.

The story of the major-domo and the ad man is currently the subject of a case that has been dragging through the Palermo Court of Assizes for so long that most members of the Italian public have forgotten about it. (Berlusconi is not a defendant, it should be emphasized; his involvement is as a witness.) The prosecution alleges that Berlusconi’s fears that his children would be kidnapped led Dell’Utri to approach Mangano for protection. Dell’Utri responds to these accusations by saying that he initially did not know about Mangano’s criminal record, and that he dismissed him as soon as the truth came out. The prosecution asserts instead that this moment in 1974 was the beginning of a long-lasting relationship between Dell’Utri and the Sicilian mafia—an assertion that Dell’Utri vehemently denies. Still according to the prosecution, Dell’Utri has admitted to telling a business associate that he mediated between Berlusconi and Cosa Nostra to prevent his boss becoming the victim of a kidnapping, but he now claims this was merely an empty boast.

There is a long list of other charges running against Dell’Utri based around his supposedly regular dealings with men of honour; it is alleged that Dell’Utri recycled drug money and even that Stefano Bontate was considering initiating him into the mafia in 1980. Dell’Utri is also alleged to have mediated between Cosa Nostra and businesses in Berlusconi’s group: in one direction he supposedly ensured the transmission of protection payments from Berlusconi-owned companies operating in Sicily; in the other direction, it is claimed, went mafia investment in Berlusconi-owned companies in Milan. Following the
mattanza
of the early 1980s, ‘Shorty’ Riina is alleged to have monopolized the mafia’s links to Dell’Utri in the hope of taking advantage, through Dell’Utri, of Berlusconi’s close relationship with the Socialist Party.

The prosecution also claims that Dell’Utri tried to extort 50 per cent of a sponsorship contract between a beer brand and the owner of Trapani basketball club in the early 1990s. He supposedly threatened the owner when he refused to pay: ‘I advise you to think again. We have the men and the means to convince you to change your mind.’ Dell’Utri, who refutes this allegation, is further accused of trying to persuade two mafia defectors to discredit investigating magistrates and three other
pentiti;
the alleged aim was to ‘expose’ a fictitious plot by judges to frame Berlusconi and Dell’Utri. This charge, like the others, is strongly disputed by the defence.

The Dell’Utri case is long and complex; it will turn on how the judges assess evidence that stretches back into the early 1970s and is far more extensive than Antonino Giuffrè’s allegations. All the accusations are, of course, still being evaluated in court and may, at the end of that process, turn out to be unsubstantiated. But they have inevitably fuelled speculation about a verdict that, whichever way it goes, will be crucial. If Dell’Utri is judged to be innocent, many people will conclude that, as so often in the past, accusations of complicity with the mafia have been used as a political weapon—the real targets on this occasion being Berlusconi and Forza Italia. Such an outcome would inflict severe damage on the credibility of both the magistrates and the
pentiti.

According to the prosecution, ‘there was an attempt to make [Berlusconi’s] Fininvest group into a company friendly to the criminal association. Berlusconi did not know this, but Dell’Utri did.’ Nevertheless, if Dell’Utri is guilty, then his notoriously close business and political relationship with Silvio Berlusconi will inevitably raise questions at the very least about the latter’s judgement. If what Giuffrè says is right, then in 1993, through Marcello Dell’Utri, Cosa Nostra sought to obtain guarantees that Forza Italia when in government would prioritize the mafia’s main demands: the maxi-trial verdicts, the law on confiscation of mafia wealth, and the harsh 41 bis prison regime. On this basis, some antimafia campaigners would conclude, perhaps hastily, that the venerable accord between the Sicilian mafia and the Italian political system has been renewed once more. At the very least, if Dell’Utri is convicted, the issue of how much if anything Berlusconi knew about his ad man’s dealings with the men of honour is likely to come onto the political and probably the judicial agenda.

But even if Giuffrè’s claims about ‘direct contact’ between Forza Italia and Cosa Nostra in 1993 turn out to be baseless, and even if Dell’Utri is acquitted, Cosa Nostra had reason to rejoice when Forza Italia took power in 2001 because of Berlusconi’s avowed hostility to those magistrates he regards as being overweening and politically biased. Berlusconi’s involvement with the courts, over allegations that he bribed tax officials, engaged in false accounting, and committed fraud, has been much in the news. At the time of writing, a law he passed to make the five most senior figures in Italy’s institutions, including the Prime Minister, immune from prosecution while in office has been blocked by the Constitutional Court. The law’s first effect had been to halt a trial in which Berlusconi himself was charged with paying massive bribes to judges in order to obtain a favourable decision in a privatization dispute. Berlusconi’s view is that ‘red’ magistrates are conducting a concerted campaign to discredit him, using the same methods that he says they used to destroy democratically elected parties during the ‘Clean Hands’ investigations.

That is one reason why Forza Italia’s top priority in government is to reform the judicial system. The policy programme announced by the Justice Minister Roberto Castelli argues that ‘elements of the magistrature have tried in recent years to occupy terrain that belongs to politics’, and have attempted to ‘turn justice into a spectacle’. The Minister’s plan is to ‘bring responsibility for judicial policy, especially in the area of criminal law, back within the orbit of democratic sovereignty’. Berlusconi’s opponents fear that the plan is to put justice under the control of the government.

In his struggle with the magistrates, Berlusconi’s focus is on Milan, where his business interests are concentrated, rather than Palermo. Nevertheless, his justice policy may have important effects—even if unintended ones—at the other end of the peninsula. A number of measures are arguably likely to obstruct the hunt for Cosa Nostra’s financial operations, notably a law making it much more difficult to get evidence from foreign bank accounts for use in domestic trials.

In addition to these legal reforms, the mafia finds Berlusconi’s plans for public spending in the South highly appetizing, in particular the scheme to build a bridge linking Sicily and the mainland. Provenzano is apparently often heard to say, ‘Fuck! If they build the bridge there’ll be something for everyone.’ Although Cosa Nostra has always been enthusiastic about public spending no matter who is in government, opponents of Berlusconi claim that some of the things his team have been saying have the effect of offering encouragement to Uncle Bernie. In August 2001, Pietro Lunardi, Minister for the Infrastructure, caused a storm when he remarked that Italy had to ‘learn to live with the mafia; everyone should deal with the crime problem in their own way.’