by John Dickie
The advent of the name Cosa Nostra is only the latest example of the way the mafias have learned their own language from the world outside. Something similar happened a century earlier with the word ‘mafia’ itself. It only became the most commonly used of the many names for Sicily’s elite criminal brotherhood as the result of being used in a successful play about prison gangsters in the 1860s.
Why are the mafias so bad at giving themselves a name? The main reason, as one defector from Cosa Nostra would later explain, is that secret criminal brotherhoods are the ‘realm of incomplete speech’.
Fragmenting information is one of the most important rules. Cosa Nostra is not just secretive towards the exterior, in the sense that it hides its existence and the identity of its members from outsiders. It is also secretive on the inside: it discourages anyone from knowing the full facts, and creates obstacles to the circulation of information.
Mafiosi habitually conduct their affairs in nods and silences, in language marked by an expertly crafted vagueness that can be understood only by those who are meant to understand. Communications within the mafia are like whispers in a labyrinth. So when the outside world says something about the mafia’s affairs, it resounds through the labyrinth like a clarion call.
Years of muddled debate about the mafia in the United States still lay ahead. A whole genre of academic studies would decry the notion of an organisation called Cosa Nostra: it was a product of anti-Italian prejudice and a misrepresentation of the immigrant culture of close family ties—or so the sociologists and anthropologists argued. Ironically, in 1972, one of the most successful movies of all time, Francis Ford Coppola’s generational saga The Godfather, would be based on a systematic confusion between the mafia and the Sicilian-American family, thereby lending a Hollywood gloss to the sceptical views of the academics. But, despite the controversy, the oversimplifications and the perverse side effects, America’s open discussion about the mafia in these years was a healthy sign. What it indicates is that the period of relative impunity and invisibility that Italian-American mobsters had long enjoyed was now over for good. The mafia in the United States was no longer untouchable. The question now was how long it would take for Italy to follow Uncle Sam’s example.
45
MAFIA DIASPORA
IN OCTOBER 1957, ONLY WEEKS BEFORE THE APALACHIN SUMMIT IN UPSTATE NEW York, Men of Honour from the United States held several days of meetings with Sicilian bosses at the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in the heart of Palermo. The head of the American deputation was Joe ‘Bananas’ Bonanno—capo of the New York Family that bore his name. Narcotics were almost certainly at the top of the agenda. Unlike what had happened at Apalachin, however, the heavy-lidded eyes of the Palermo police merely registered the meeting. Nothing was done about it.
Business was not the only thing discussed while Joe Bananas was in Palermo. According to the later confessions of a young drug trafficker called Tommaso Buscetta (a man destined to play an epoch-making role in Sicilian mafia history over a quarter of a century later), the 1957 Italo-American summit was the occasion for an important organisational innovation within the Sicilian mafia. It seems that, over dinner one evening, Joe Bananas suggested that Sicily should have a Mafia Commission—a kind of governing body—like the one that had overseen inter-Family relations in New York since Lucky Luciano brought it into being in 1931. The Commission has existed in Sicily, on and off, ever since. Not for the first time, Sicilian mafiosi had shown that they were better at learning lessons from America than were Italy’s police or politicians.
However, the Commission, as Sicilian historians have now ascertained, was not the novelty that Tommaso Buscetta thought it was. Evidence that Cosa Nostra has had governing bodies of one kind or another is there in some of the earliest documentation we have about it. For example, there were forms of coordination between the different cosche of western Sicily—joint tribunals to settle disputes, summit meetings, marriage pacts and the like. In America, there seem to have been consultative meetings of senior East Coast Men of Honour before the First World War. Our best guess, using recent history as a guide to the mysterious moments in the past, is that the mafia has always had a lively constitutional life. Sicilian mafia bosses have constantly invented new rules and procedures to buttress their own authority and keep the peace with their neighbours. But equally, they have constantly broken their own rules and procedures, or found ways to use them as a political weapon against their enemies.
In the late 1950s, however, these nuances of mafia analysis had not even begun to dawn on Italy’s rulers. The issue of Sicilian organised crime remained stuck in the political permafrost of the Cold War. Communist politicians took every opportunity they could to raise the mafia issue—and make it count against the DC. But without the power to govern, they remained isolated voices. One of the most astute and caustic of those voices belonged to Pio La Torre, the young leader of the PCI in Sicily:
The truth is that there is no sector of the economy in Palermo and in vast areas of Western Sicily that is not controlled by the mafia. This has happened in the course of a long process—the same process that has seen the DC regime prosper in Palermo and the rest of the island.
La Torre knew what he was talking about: he was born in Altarello di Baida, a village set amid the lemon groves surrounding Palermo—the mafia’s nursery, in other words.
In response to charges like these, the DC all too often fell back on a contradictory rag-bag of myths: the mafia was dying out; it was merely a harmless Sicilian tradition; it was invented by the Left as a way of besmirching Sicily and the DC; it didn’t exist; mafiosi only kill one another anyway; gangsterismo was an American problem.
The Left opposition had not forgotten the Kefauver hearings, and lobbied hard for something similar to happen in Italy: a parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia. The Christian Democrats were split into shifting and bitterly antagonistic factions. In the heat of the factional struggle, many DC chiefs were very reluctant to look too closely at the ethical standards of their Sicilian lieutenants. So the DC dragged its feet for years, and only gave ground when the Left’s lobbying was given extra oomph by mafia dynamite.
Late in 1962, a conflict that later became known as the First Mafia War began in and around Palermo. The conflict’s signature weapon was a tactical novelty for underworld wars in Italy: the car bomb. Invariably, it was an Alfa Romeo Giulietta that was stuffed with explosives. The Giulietta was one of the symbols of Italy’s economic miracle. In 1962 it became a symbol of how the Sicilian mafia was keeping up with the pace of growth in the lawful economy.
Although a drug deal gone wrong is known to have been the trigger for the First Mafia War’s outbreak, the underlying reasons for it baffled outside observers at the time, and are still uncertain today. Even many of the combatants did not know where the battle lines were drawn. In essence, it seems that the newly revived Commission had been unable to control conflicts over drugs, concrete and territory. Indeed some Palermo mafiosi regarded the Commission itself with justifiable suspicion: for them it was not an arbiter in disputes, but an instrument manipulated by some powerful bosses. The Sicilian mafia’s constitutional wrangles had taken a bloody turn. Indeed, not for the last time, events in Palermo were pointing the way to the future for organised crime in Italy. Perhaps one hundred people were killed in the First Mafia War—more than in any other underworld conflict since the 1940s. Cosa Nostra had become more volatile in its internal politics, and more flagrant in its violence. Soon the other mafias would follow the same trend.
Against the background of the car bombings and other violence in Palermo, a parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia was grudgingly approved. Yet it still looked as if it would never get going. Then, on 30 June 1963, another Giulietta detonated in Ciaculli: it blew four Carabinieri, two military engineers and a policeman to pieces. The bomb’s intended targets were probably the local mafia clan, the Grecos, one of Palermo’s oldest and most powerful dynasties.
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br /> Remarkably, even on the day of the bomb, the DC remained very touchy about the word ‘mafia’. The Christian Democrat notables who occupied the country’s most senior institutional posts all issued messages of condolence to the victims’ families, and of indignation to the general public. Not one of them mentioned the mafia.
Nevertheless, the public outrage that followed the Ciaculli massacre had rapid effects, both within Cosa Nostra and outside. The First Mafia War came to an immediate halt in the face of a massive police crackdown, with close to two thousand arrests. Cosa Nostra faced one of the worst crises in its history. As a mafioso who turned state’s evidence later explained: ‘After 1963 Cosa Nostra in the Palermo area didn’t exist anymore. It had been knocked out. The mafia was about to dissolve itself, and seemed to be in a shambles . . . The Families were all wrecked. There were hardly any murders any more. In Palermo, people did not even pay protection money.’
Mafiosi who were able to flee Palermo did so—men like the boss of the Commission, Totò Greco (known as ‘Little Bird’), who emigrated to Venezuela. Others fled to Switzerland, the States, Canada . . . The mafia vanished from its birthplace, the province of Palermo.
Silent grief. Palermo turns out en masse in 1963 for the funeral of four Carabinieri, two military engineers and a policeman murdered by a Sicilian mafia bomb.
The Ciaculli bomb also swept away the last resistance to the idea of a parliamentary inquiry into the mafia—an Italian Kefauver, at last. But anyone who expected the inquiry to achieve the kind of spectacular results seen on the other side of the Atlantic was in for both a very long wait and a dull disappointment. The political wrangling only seemed to intensify during the inquiry’s hearings. Astonishingly, in 1966, Donato Pafundi, the Senator who chaired those hearings—a Christian Democrat by political affiliation and a prosecutor by profession—denied the existence of the mafia as a criminal organisation, and even blamed Muslims for the problem:
The mafia in Sicily is a mental state that pervades everything and everyone, at all levels of society. There are historical, geographical and social reasons behind this mentality. Above all there is a millennium of Muslim domination. It is hard to shake off the inheritance of centuries. The mafia has ended up in Sicilians’ blood, in the most intimate folds of Sicilian society.
Considering views like this, it is hardly surprising that the parliamentary inquiry took no fewer than thirteen years to finish its work.
Nor did Italian politicians have any of the flair for the media that Estes Kefauver and Robert Kennedy had shown. The parliamentary inquiry’s final report provided as good a definition of the problem as one could get without using insider sources. It certainly had none of the simplistic sensationalism of Kefauver’s vision of a vast, centralised international conspiracy, and none of Donato Pafundi’s ignorance. But its abstruse wording was indicative of the problems the inquiry had had in bringing public opinion along with it:
The mafia has continually reproposed itself as the exercise of autonomous extra-legal power and the search for a close link with all forms of power and in particular state power, so as to collaborate with it, make use of it for its own ends, or infiltrate its structure.
Anyone who was still awake after trying to read a couple of paragraphs of prose like this deserved a medal for endurance.
Predictably, the parliamentary Left also disagreed with the report and issued its own version, placing much more emphasis on the mafia’s ties to the highest spheres of Sicilian society: ‘The mafia is a ruling class phenomenon.’ This, in its own way, was also an oversimplification. The point about the Sicilian mafia, like the nineteenth-century Freemasonry on which it was based, is that it includes members of all classes: both cut-throats and counts can become Men of Honour.
Perhaps the most damning criticism to be made of the 1960s parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia is that its terms of reference did not include the camorra and the ’ndrangheta. Underestimating the organised crime issue outside Sicily would have dire consequences. And those dire consequences were set in motion scarcely two years after the parliamentary inquiry started work, when the first piece of legislation to issue from the post-Ciaculli climate was passed. Law 575 of 1965 was a parcel of anti-mafia measures that included the policy of ‘forced resettlement’: suspected mafiosi could be compelled to leave their homes and take up residence somewhere else in Italy. Forced resettlement was based on the highly questionable theory that the fundamental cause of the mafia was the backward social environment of western Sicily. If mafiosi could be transplanted from that environment into healthier surroundings, so the theory went, then their criminal inclinations would shrivel.
Rather than shrivelling, the mafia spread. As one Man of Honour would later explain: ‘Forced resettlement was a good thing for us, because it gave us a way to contact other people, to get to know different places, other cities, zones that weren’t already contaminated by organised crime.’
It was not just ‘uncontaminated’ zones of Italy that hosted resettled mafiosi. Incredibly, some of them were even sent to the hinterland of Naples. Despite the fearsome traditions of criminal enterprise that had become visible during the Pupetta Maresca affair, Campania was now deemed socially healthy enough to reform the Sicilian gangster elite. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, some of Sicily’s most powerful criminals were forcibly resettled around Naples: mafiosi of the calibre of Francesco Paolo Bontate, the boss of Santa Maria di Gesù, and later his son Stefano, a future keystone of Cosa Nostra’s Palermo Commission. They were joined there by other mafiosi who were on the run from the law. One of these was Gerlando Alberti, who later became famous for a bon mot: asked about the mafia by a journalist, he replied, ‘What’s that? A brand of cheese?’
Through the repression following the Ciaculli bomb, and then by the policy of forced resettlement, Italy had involuntarily created a new diaspora of criminal talent. Naples during the contraband tobacco boom would be one of that diaspora’s favourite ports. The stage was set for a crucial new convergence of interests between Sicilian and Campanian organised crime.
46
THE MAFIA-ISATION OF THE CAMORRA
MICHELE ZAZA, KNOWN AS ‘O PAZZO (‘MAD MIKE’), WAS THE SON OF A FISHERMAN from Portici who became the dominant Neapolitan cigarette smuggler of the 1970s. He had a vast villa in Posillipo, with one of the most splendid views over the bay of Naples—La Glorietta, he called it. Interviewed there by a local TV station, he once famously quipped that tobacco smuggling was ‘the FIAT of southern Italy’. What he meant was that it created as many jobs as did the Turin-based car giant. Naples could no more survive without smuggling than Turin could without the automotive industry. This was a wisecrack pitched at a ready audience, both in the alleys of central Naples, and in the communities far beyond Naples that had once enjoyed Sophia Loren’s sassy performance in Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow. As had been the case during Prohibition in the United States, gangsters who operated in a clandestine market, trading a commodity that had a great many non-criminal customers, could easily pose as the good guys.
Mad Mike was no Robin Hood, however. On 5 April 1973, he was part of an assassination squad that tried to kill Chief of Police Angelo Mangano, a Sicilian lawman who had distinguished himself in the fight against the mafia in Corleone. (Mangano survived, despite being shot four times, including in the head.) Why would a Neapolitan camorrista try to kill an enemy of the Sicilian mafia? Because that camorrista had recently become an initiated affiliate of Cosa Nostra.
By the early 1970s, the Sicilian mafiosi who had ended up in Campania had become intimate friends with a number of camorristi. The police and Carabinieri reported a regular series of meetings between Neapolitan and Sicilian hoods in Naples. The Sicilians even acquired a taste for the sentimental pop melodies that their Neapolitan hosts adored.
The links between the mafia and the camorra were soon formalised. In the Sicilian mafia’s traditional fashion, mafiosi established kinship alliances with the camorris
ti, based on marriage and comparatico (‘co-parenthood’). Big Neapolitan smugglers were also formally initiated into Cosa Nostra. At least two Cosa Nostra Families in Campania were created and authorised by Palermo. One had its seat in the city itself, and was grouped around an extended family, the Zaza-Mazzarellas, including ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza. The other was based in Marano, a small town on the northern outreaches of Naples. Marano was home to the man who had shot dead the ‘President of Potato Prices’ in 1955. The murderer’s relatives, the Nuvoletta brothers, were now in charge in the town, and were duly initiated into Cosa Nostra.
Thus Cosa Nostra’s new Campanian Families inherited the two main criminal traditions in the region. ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza represented the urban camorra revived by the black market during the Second World War. The Nuvoletta brothers were just the type of camorristi who had long been involved in controlling supply routes from the countryside to the city markets. So in one sense, the novelty of Cosa Nostra’s branches in Campania was also a highly significant return to the past. For the first time since the days of the old Honoured Society of Naples, a single organisational framework embraced both the urban and rural camorras.
The scaling-up of the trade in bootleg cigarettes, and the close links between the Sicilian and Neapolitan underworlds, was ‘mafia-ising’ the camorra. Indeed, not for the first time in history, the very meaning of the word ‘camorra’ was undergoing a transformation. Once, if it was used at all, it referred to small local gangs, or networks of smugglers, or even to isolated guappi. Now camorristi were increasingly functionaries of much bigger groups, with a bigger range of criminal activities and greater financial sophistication.