Most famous, even heroic, among these was Giovanni Falcone. Born in a poor district of Palermo in 1939, Falcone recalled growing up horrified by the violence in his hometown. He became a lawyer and, at just 27, a prosecutor specialising in fraud cases. A senior magistrate, Rocco Chinnici, took him under his wing and had him investigate Sicilian construction companies and local politicians who had demanded kickbacks for granting licences. Falcone was offered bribes and subjected to threats but ignored both and obtained several convictions. One of his successes was the 1984 conviction of the Christian Democrat mayor of Palermo, Vito Ciancimino, the first Italian politician formally to be found guilty of membership of the Mafia. Falcone also helped gather evidence of transatlantic connections by the local Inzerillo and Spatola clans to the Gambino mobsters in America. The exposure of the global scale of Mafia activities was one of his principal achievements. Thanks to this evidence, Sicily’s chief magistrate, Gaetano Costa, signed 80 arrest warrants – but also signed his own instant death sentence. Costa was killed in August 1980, the third local prosecutor to be murdered in a decade.
As the Mafia’s international operations grew, so too did the ruthlessness of its methods. Also assassinated was Palermo police chief Boris Guiliano, who had been on the verge of a major breakthrough in his investigations. It marked the beginning of a new era of violence. Falcone became a member of a select anti-Mafia pool of judges and prosecutors formed by his mentor Rocco Chinnici. In joining the group, he knew he would be a target but said the threat of death was ‘not more important to me than the button of my jacket – I’m a real Sicilian!’ In 1982 Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the Carabinieri general who had smashed apart Italy’s terrorist Red Brigades, was sent to Sicily to coordinate the central government’s anti-Mafia policy. Only 100 days after taking office as prefect of Palermo, he was machine-gunned to death in the street. When Judge Chinnici was also killed – blown up by a car bomb in 1983 – Falcone became effective head of the anti-Mafia pool and the authorities in Rome gave him beefed-up powers to take revenge for the murders.
His new role made Falcone a prisoner in his home town. For most of the next decade, he worked in a bomb-proof bunker underneath Palermo’s law courts, his desk dominated by electronic devices and video screens showing the approaches to his office. His home was similarly protected and whenever he ventured out, he was escorted by a convoy of armoured police cars. But through the Eighties, he managed to recruit a brave and brilliant team of prosecutors – and it was their work which eventually led to the most dramatic victory against the island’s gangsters. Falcone, along with fellow magistrate Paolo Borsellino, drew up 8,000 pages of indictments for some of the most serious professional criminals known to the world, among them leaders of the Corleone clan and Michele Greco, alleged Boss of Bosses, known as ‘the Pope’.
In what was known as the ‘Mafia Maxi-Trial’, held in a fortified courthouse through 1986–87, hundreds of convictions, mostly for murder or drug trafficking, were made possible by informers. The most important of these so-called pentiti was Tommaso Buscetta, a jailed member of the island’s Porta Nuevo family, who was later put under a witness protection programme in America. Buscetta refused to confide in anyone other than Falcone, and when persuaded to spill the beans, he warned Falcone: ‘This will make you famous – and bring your death.’ In his evidence, Buscetta revealed the existence and workings of the Sicilian Mafia Commisssion, enabling Falcone to argue that Cosa Nostra was a unified hierarchical structure whose leaders could be held responsible for crimes committed on their behalf. The trial culminated in the conviction of 342 Mafiosi, sent down for a total of 2,665 years, including 19 life sentences. Sadly for Falcone, a series of appeal court acquittals based on the validity of ‘supergrass’ evidence meant that most of them were later freed. Undaunted, Falcone explained to a journalist: ‘Each investigation reveals a little more of the map of the Mafia. But it is a Hydra, with many more heads to replace the old you manage to cut off. You can never say you have won.’
After his successes in the Maxi Trial, the seriousness of Tommaso Buscetta’s warnings became clear. Despite the care he took with his safety, in 1989 as he relaxed outside his beach house, a security guard noticed an abandoned sports bag at the water’s edge. It contained 58 sticks of plastic explosives, primed to explode if picked up. After the incident, he told a friend: ‘My life is mapped out. It is my destiny to take a bullet by the Mafia some day. The only thing I don’t know is when.’
In 1991 the tireless gangbuster left Sicily to take up a job in Rome’s Ministry of Justice but was under no illusion about the continuing threat to his life. He described the Mafia as ‘a panther with an elephantine memory’. The Mafia had already retaliated violently against others they saw as having harmed them. In 1988 they murdered Palermo appeal judge Alberto Giacomelli and his son, allegedly on the orders of ‘Toto’ Riina. In 1991 another prosecutor, Rosario Livatino, was killed, the same year as a politician and an anti-Mafia businessman were murdered.
Falcone’s own horrific murder in May 1992 was followed by a day of mourning ordered by the government in Rome. Thousands gathered at Palermo’s Basilica of San Domenico for the funeral, which was broadcast live nationally, all regular television programmes having been suspended. Meanwhile, Salvatore Riina reportedly threw a party, toasting Falcone’s death with champagne.
Only two months after Falcone’s death, the Mafia caught up with his closest friend and colleague, Paolo Borsellino, and dealt with him in the same brutal fashion. A similar car bomb was detonated as Borsellino drove to his mother’s home in Palermo, killing not only the valiant law enforcer but five policemen. In his last video interview, given just two days before his friend’s murder, Borsellino had spoken about the possible link between Cosa Nostra and rich Italian businessmen such as future Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. The interview has since received little coverage on Italian television, much of which is owned by Berlusconi, who also controlled the state channel during his mandates as prime minister.
The deaths of Falcone and Borsellino caused widespread revulsion against the Mafia and led to a major crackdown by the authorities, resulting in the swift capture of Riina and many of his Corleone family associates. Riina was sentenced to life imprisonment for sanctioning the murders of Borsellino and Falcone, as well as dozens of other slayings. Riina’s hitman Giovanni Busca, who personally detonated the bomb that killed Falcone, was also jailed and later became an informant. He revealed how easy it had been to live a normal life in Sicily despite being on the Carabinieri’s ‘Most Wanted’ list. Riina, for instance, had enjoyed his 30 years as a ‘fugitive’ living openly at home in Palermo, visiting his local hospital for treatments and registering all four of his children under their real names.
Following the arrests and a further government crackdown against the Sicilian Mafia, a campaign of terrorism erupted on the mainland. This appeared to have been the result of a secret summit of the remaining bosses to formulate a shock campaign aimed at scaring the Italian government into a retreat. It resulted in a series of bomb attacks in 1993 in Rome, Florence and Milan that left ten people dead and 93 injured, as well as damaging centres of cultural heritage such as Florence’s Uffizi Gallery.
Only when control of Cosa Nostra fell to a new Godfather, Bernardo Provenzano, in 1995 did the violence ease, with a softly-softly policy known as ‘pax mafiosi’. Provenzano himself was arrested in 2006. The vacuum after the caging of ‘Toto’ Riina and Provenzano was taken up by Matteo Messina Denaro, a young bespectacled multiple murderer with a reported weakness for sports cars, designer watches and sharp suits. Born in Sicily’s Trapani province in 1962, Denaro, nicknamed ‘Diabolik’ after an Italian cartoon character, was said to be running a resurgent Cosa Nostra empire. Now known as the Don of Dons, he is believed to have personally executed at least 50 people and ordered the deaths of scores more.
Denaro cemented his blood thirsty reputation during the 1993 bombings – he chillingly boasted: ‘I filled a ce
metery all by myself’ – and has been on the run ever since. He is one of the world’s Top Ten most wanted criminals and yet, incredibly, all that the police have to go on is a black and white photograph taken more than 20 years ago. Giacomo Di Girolamo, author of The Invisible, a book on the mobster, says: ‘Denaro is a modern Mafia boss, the opposite of the traditional image of the Godfather. He has numerous lovers and a child out of marriage. He knows which businesses to get involved in, and this is primarily drugs.’ His estimated £2.5 billion worth has been steadily built up through lucrative deals with Colombian drug barons and masterminding the import of heroin and cocaine into Europe. It is believed that if there was an attempt to revive the Cupola, a kind of consultative committee of regional bosses that met from time to time to resolve internal disputes and forge long-term strategy, it would see Messina Denaro as unrivalled chairman of the board.
It was the fear of this precise threat – the revival of the Cupola – that in December 2008 saw sweeping raids by more than 1,200 Carabinieri officers stretching from Sicily to Tuscany. They arrested 94 people, many of them veteran Mafiosi including Salvatore Lombardo, the 87-year-old boss of the town of Montelepre, in Palermo province. Investigators say those seized had been trying to re-establish the authority of the Cupola to solidify the Mafia’s power structure after a leadership void caused by the high-profile arrests of dons like Provenzano. Leading anti-Mob magistrate Pietro Grasso said operations over recent years had Cosa Nostra ‘on its knees’. This latest round up, Grasso said, ‘keeps it from getting up.’ Few observers were that confident.
It is true that most of Italy’s organised crime network has been ordering up fewer hits, the number of which peaked in 1982 when there were more than 700 murders in Palermo and surrounding towns alone. This face of the organisation may appear less violent but it’s no less sinister, according to Giuseppe Cipriani, who became mayor of the fabled Mafia stronghold, Corleone, in the wake of the assassination of the two magistrates. ‘The Mafia changed strategy, that’s all,’ he said. ‘They just sat down and decided it at the table. It doesn’t mean they might not start bringing back the bombs.’
In recent years it has become difficult to judge the power of the original Sicilian Mafia, whose influence was global but many of whose leaders are now in prison or in hiding. But where a crime vacuum opens up, there are always crooks to see a new business opportunity – and many of the cleverest to take advantage of this situation have been from rival Mafia organisations on the mainland. The weakened Cosa Nostra has had to yield most of the illegal drug trade to their rivals the ’Ndrangheta from neighbouring Calabria – now the country’s biggest crime organisation (as reported in the next chapter) and estimated to control the import of 80 per cent of all cocaine sold on the streets of Europe. But business boomed at home too …
The modern mobsters have kept the Italian police busy in very different ways from the old days. They now find themselves investigating fraudulent businesses – including tailoring for top Milan fashion houses, pirating of DVDs and handbags, fishing of endangered bluefin tuna, brewing genetically-modified beer and ‘green initiative’ recycling. Even Italian food icons like olive oil and Parma ham have not remained sacrosanct. Coldiretti, the Italian farmers’ union, reported in 2008 that the Sicilian Mafia was adding flavouring to colza oil, often used to lubricate machinery, before relabelling it as olive oil. Fake Parma hams and other beef products falsely branded as ‘gourmet Chianina breed’ are confiscated in industrial quantities by Italian police. All four of Italy’s biggest gangs – the ’Ndrangheta, the Sacra Corona Unita, the Camorra and the Cosa Nostra – invested huge stakes in this new and lucrative business. Pirated handbags and DVDs accounted for £5 billion of Mafia income and the food industry netted the underworld £5.2 billion, according to Tano Grasso, head of Italy’s anti-racketeering commission. Perhaps unsurprising then that the Mafia is estimated to be the biggest business in Italy, with organised crime netting bosses the equivalent of approximately 7 per cent of the country’s gross domestic product.
Italy’s famous fashion industry is rife with fraudulent Mafia investment. Roberto Saviano, an investigative journalist and anti-Mafia campaigner, disclosed how leading fashion houses regularly outsource orders to sweatshop tailors controlled by the Camorra. Mob tailors will win legitimate contracts and be supplied with the necessary raw materials – while others are allowed to flood the market with counterfeit clothes.
In Naples, the gang bosses line their pockets by illegally fishing for endangered bluefin tuna. But the Camorra, who supposedly ‘managed’ 2,500 illegal bakeries, have not had it all their own way: a group of Neapolitan shopkeepers organised an unprecedented rebellion against the racketeers in 2011, with local bakeries as well as butchers and grocers summoning up the courage to try to loosen the Camorra’s stranglehold on the city. ‘We decided we couldn’t go on,’ explained spokesman Salvatore Russo, a grocer in the city centre. ‘They would demand money and those who didn’t pay were shot in the legs, or beaten up, or stolen from. We’ve marked out our position, we’ve dug a moat, but it’s going to take a lot more to win the war.’
That’s what Roberto Saviano discovered after writing a book about the Camorra. In it, he revealed that the ruthless Casalesi clan made hundreds of millions of euros each year by illegally dumping waste, much of it toxic, in addition to extortion rackets, drug trafficking, smuggling of illegal migrants and arms dealing. The journalist, whose exposé Gomorrah and the successful movie it spawned made him a household name, had to flee his home when he learned that the organisation’s dons had ordered his death. Saviano fought back by hauling them into the dock and in 2012, six years after he was forced into hiding, he appeared in a high-security Naples courtroom to look his enemies in the eye. He confronted Camorra bosses Francesco Bidognetti and Antonio Iovine via video link so that he could sue them and two of their lawyers for threats and defamation. The gang leaders were already behind bars, along with other members of the Camorra’s Casalesi clan, after being rounded up for a string of offences. The last of the fugitives, Michele Zagaria, was found in an underground bunker beneath his home north of Naples in 2011. All were sentenced to life in solitary confinement in prisons hundreds of miles from Naples.
With so many of the old-style Mafia leaders in jail or on the run, a new phenomenon has been observed – the rise of the female gangster. As Time magazine reported: ‘Today’s Mafia is transforming itself, and two new character types are emerging: the college graduate in a tailored suit who wields nothing sharper than his felt-tip pen, and the “Signora Boss” who has stepped from the proverbial kitchen to the front lines of Italy’s organised crime network. More women are moving into positions of real power, often filling in for their husbands and brothers who are in prison or on the run.’ For instance, Ninetta Bagarella, wife of jailed Corleone boss ‘Toto’ Riina, who directed Cosa Nostra for a decade, is thought to be the brains that complemented her husband’s brutality. ‘These women’s roles go well beyond raising a family,’ said Corleone’s Mayor Cipriani. ‘Women in the Mafia not only have acquired authorisation, they are now the ones who do the authorising.’
Across on the mainland, a 30-year feud between rival families of the Camorra crime Syndicate led to an explosion of female violence in 2002. After exchanging slaps and threats at the local beauty parlour in a Naples suburb, several female relatives from the Graziano family cornered a carload of women from the Cava clan and opened fire with automatic weapons. Three of the Cava women were killed and two were seriously wounded. After toasting their success with male relatives, the Graziano women were taken into custody by local police, whose wiretaps had captured details of the feud.
It is to be hoped that such senseless blood-letting is a thing of the past. These days the mobster’s prime focus is on butter, not guns. And to make the profits multiply, top bosses have turned to that prototype man in the tailored suit. He is the true motor for the New Mafia, toting a business or economics degree – but still having
a ‘family’ connection. An Italian governmental financial report of December 2012 described the Mafia as ‘the country’s richest firm’ with a turnover of more than £116 billion a year. Giovanni Colussi, a Rome-based expert on organised crime, best summed up thus: ‘The Mafia adapts, it can even change its core business, but it always remains the Mafia. It can’t become another thing.’
One would not wish to end this chapter – one that has recorded so many murders and misery – on a flippant note. However, a newspaper story that is at first glance inconsequential nevertheless reveals the power that Mafia leaders still hold over the beleaguered citizens of southern Italy. In February 2013 a local don was arrested after trying to force an entire community to vote for his daughter on a TV talent show. Domenico Ferrara – his nickname in Neapolitan dialect is O’ Muccuso (the Snotty One) and Zi’ Mimmi (Uncle Mimmi) – handed out mobile phones so locals could cast multiple votes for 13-year-old Vania. Significantly, he made sure the phones were returned so he could check his orders had been carried out. But the votes of the terrified community of Villarica, Naples, were only enough to propel Vania to second place in the final of the show, I’ll Leave You With A Song. Details of the fix emerged as police arrested Ferrara and eight of his clan on suspicion of drug trafficking. A raid on his house uncovered 320 mobile phones. Police chief Captain Francesco Piroddi said: ‘The Ferrara clan exercised complete control over the district of Villaricca. This number of phones cannot be explained away.’
In 2010 another Italian talent show, Songs and Hopes, had been condemned after a contestant, the daughter of another Camorra boss, dedicated to her father the song ‘You Are the Best Daddy In The World and I Wouldn’t Change You For Anything’. At the end of the live broadcast, the girl was seen embracing her father, Gaetano Marino, who was sitting in the front row. It was a touching moment for the proud papa … who returned to his home in the resort of Terracina to be gunned down in a classic gangland hit.
The World's Most Evil Gangs Page 27