by John Dickie
But don ’Ntoni’s most jaw-dropping coup was yet to come. In 1967, he defrauded the Bank of Naples with the help of the Siderno branch manager. Although the manager was sacked as a result, the Bank of Naples refused to help the police with their investigations. Reviewing the evidence in that case, Judge Marino could only conclude that there was a mafia in the Bank of Naples alongside the mafia run by don ’Ntoni Macrì. The judge was shocked by the number of times, through the 900 pages of don ’Ntoni’s criminal record, that he had been shown leniency after important people had defined him as a reformed character. By the time of the summit at Montalto in 1969, the Siderno boss had become what Judge Marino called a ‘living symbol of organised crime’s omnipotence and invincibility’.
Don Domenico ‘Mico’ Tripodo was the second boss invoked at the Montalto summit whose biography was assembled by Judge Marino. In the judge’s words, Mico Tripodo was a ‘proud and indomitable villain, entirely devoted to the mafia cause’. He derived his income from extortion, fruit-market racketeering, armed robbery, counterfeit money and cheques, and, of course, tobacco smuggling and construction. One of the more remarkable features of Tripodo’s career is that he escaped confinement three times by the same trick of feigning illness and getting himself transferred to clinics, which were less well guarded and much easier to slip away from. Much of the rest of his time was spent in hiding: he changed his name several times, and even contracted a bigamous marriage in Umbria before finally being recaptured in Perugia. The fact that he was behind bars at the time of the Montalto summit did not stop him running his empire and ordering murders on his turf.
Poring over these biographies understandably left Judge Marino angry and disbelieving. The authorities knew an awful lot about the ’ndrangheta: the summit at Polsi had been an open secret for a while, for example. Yet, as Judge Marino observed, they seemed incapable of making any progress towards hampering its operations and resisting the rise of don ’Ntoni, Mico Tripodo and their ilk.
Judge Marino’s diligent and penetrating analysis of the mushroom-pickers of Montalto contrasts strikingly with the trials against Cosa Nostra that took place around the same time. A notable example is the 1968 trial that was intended to bring to justice the participants in the First Mafia War, when Palermo’s delinquent elite had blown one another up with booby-trapped Alfa Romeo Giuliettas. The prosecutor who prepared the case against the participants in the mafia war, Cesare Terranova, was certain that the mafia had a centralised coordinating council of some kind. According to a report prepared by the Carabinieri in 1963, fifteen senior mafiosi, of whom six came from the city of Palermo and nine from the towns and villages of the province, had seats around the table. This council, of course, was what we now know is called the Commission. Yet, as so often in mafia history, this picture of the mafia’s inner workings was based on confidential information leaked from within the mafia rather than on formal testimony given in open court. For that reason, it was all but useless as prosecution evidence.
Accordingly, the judge in this case remained agnostic on the question of whether the Sicilian mafia existed or not. He discounted the far-fetched theory that the mafia had ‘norms’ and ‘criteria’ common to all its members. He also made concessions to the defence’s argument that the mafia was ‘a psychological attitude or the typical expression of an exaggerated individualism’. But he also thought it was something more, something illegal but hard to define with any clarity. So he concluded, fuzzily, that it was a ‘phenomenon of collective criminality’. All but ten of the 114 defendants were acquitted for lack of evidence.
Law enforcement took its cue from this verdict. In 1974, the very year when, as we now know, the Palermo Commission of Cosa Nostra was reconstituted, the chief of police of Palermo argued that the mafia was only a loose set of unstructured local gangs that coalesced for specific criminal enterprises and then quickly dissolved. It was hopeless to try and fight the mafia as such, because it was just a part of Sicilian culture. ‘It is impossible to repress the general phenomenon of the mafia! Repress what? An idea? A mentality?’ Cosa Nostra, as so often in its history, was proving very, very adept at concealing its real nature.
So Judge Marino’s account of the Montalto summit case gave the Italian authorities a picture of a highly structured and ritualised ’ndrangheta. Moreover, the criminal records of don ’Ntoni Macrì and Mico Tripodo bore a striking resemblance to those of many Sicilian mafia bosses of their generation and earlier: the same violence, the same powerful friends, the same curious train of acquittals for lack of evidence, the same ability to insinuate themselves into the richest sectors of the lawful economy. Yet no one seems to have wondered whether a similar picture of a structured and ritualised criminal brotherhood might fit the evidence in Sicily. The raw truth was that nothing that happened in far-off Calabria was ever likely to wake Italy up to the gravity of its organised crime problem.
Alas, when it came down to it, the revelations that followed the Montalto case did not change anything in Calabria either. Even Judge Marino, who had proved so painstaking in his research and so withering in his condemnation of the state’s failings, handed out risible sentences to the ’ndrangheta’s leaders. Italy’s laws against mafia organisations were feeble. Although a crime of ‘mafia association’ existed, and made membership of a mafia group illegal, it carried very light penalties. Most of the ‘mushroom-pickers’ were given two and a half years, and most had two of those two and a half years commuted. The bosses invoked in the chair’s appeal for unity, including don ’Ntoni Macrì, were all acquitted of belonging to a criminal association: lack of evidence, yet again. Don ’Ntoni and the others had been mentioned at the summit, but they were not arrested at the scene, and there was no proof that they had actually been there. Mico Tripodo was acquitted because he was in prison at the time of the meeting. The judge seemed to be speaking to his own conscience when he tried to explain his reasoning:
This is an argument that might seem like a travesty if one takes into account the reality that is felt and seen by everyone in this part of the world. But that reality has not been recognised by the criminal justice system in the few extremely serious cases that it has dealt with.
The judge, in other words, was a prisoner of history. The authorities’ repeated failure to create a legal precedent by describing the ’ndrangheta accurately, and to convict men like don ’Ntoni, meant that they could not be convicted now.
As well as feeble legislation, Italian law enforcement would continue to betray the same weaknesses that Judge Marino had so acutely identified in his account of the ’ndrangheta’s Montalto summit. The mafias would continue to be policed in the haphazard and discontinuous way that had allowed the ’ndrangheta to grow so strong. Much blood would have to be shed before Italy was ready, finally, to create investigating methods and laws that were adequate to the threat it faced.
Years after the summit at Montalto was raided, the memories of a small group of ’ndranghetisti who turned state’s evidence helped magistrates understand just how quickly the threat of organised crime was growing in the late 1960s.
For example, the criminal profiles of don ’Ntoni and Mico Tripodo were even more alarming than Judge Marino could know. For, as well as being chief cudgels of the ’ndrangheta, both were also fully initiated members of Cosa Nostra. Here is how one ’ndrangheta defector later recalled don ’Ntoni:
This man was the overall boss. He embodied what people thought was the Honoured Society—and he wasn’t unworthy of embodying it, in my view. We could say that he was the boss of all bosses, and I’m not the only one who has magnified his qualities . . . He was the one and only representative, a fully qualified member of Cosa Nostra . . . He was a personal friend of Sicilian mafia bosses like Angelo and Salvatore La Barbera, Pietro Torretta, Luciano Liggio, and the Grecos from Ciaculli.
Don ’Ntoni’s relationship with the Sicilian hoodlum elite was close. He smuggled cigarettes with them. He also borrowed killers from them: it is thought
that the shooters in the massacre of piazza Mercato were Sicilians.
Mico Tripodo was a member of Cosa Nostra too. But the Sicilians were not his only friends. Later in his career, Mico Tripodo would spend periods of ‘forced resettlement’ in various regions. He was arrested for the last time in 1975 in Mondragone, on the northern coast of Campania—a town that had been one of the region’s most notorious camorra strongholds for a century. When he was caught, Tripodo was in hiding with two leading camorristi. This was just one indicator of the way in which cigarette smuggling and other businesses were weaving high-level ties between the camorra and the ’ndrangheta that were almost as densely meshed as those between Cosa Nostra and the other two organisations.
Gradually, southern Italy was developing a criminal system that was much more unified than it had ever been in the past. Members of Italy’s three historic mafias have always had contacts with one another, chiefly through the prison system. But from the 1960s, the cases of ‘double affiliation’ and even ‘triple affiliation’ would become more and more common. What was happening was not the development of a single master mafia, an umbrella organisation of the underworld. Rather it was something much more subtle and efficient: the pooling of contacts, resources and expertise. Because of cigarette smuggling, mafiosi, camorristi and ’ndranghetisti were rapidly learning how to work together. The new economic frontiers of mafia power could be exploited more thoroughly when Men of Honour from different criminal organisations worked together.
The evidence of later ’ndrangheta defectors also revealed more about the crucial political changes going on in the Calabrian mob. For about a decade before Montalto, the ’ndrangheta in the province of Reggio Calabria was divided into three territories. Those territories corresponded to the three coastal areas at the bony toe of the Italian boot, and thus to what is almost the natural geographical layout of ’ndrangheta power. In Sicily, about half of Cosa Nostra’s total numerical strength is concentrated around the island’s capital, Palermo. In southern Calabria, power was and is shared roughly equally between the strip of land facing Sicily that includes the provincial capital of Reggio Calabria; the Ionian coast, looking out into the Mediterranean; and the Tyrrhenian coast, or the top of the boot’s toe, which included the plain of Gioia Tauro—the largest and most fertile lowland in the region.
In the 1960s a triumvirate of three bosses, one from each of these three territories, had a great influence over ’ndrangheta affairs. We have already encountered two of the three triumvirs in Judge Marino’s conclusions about the Montalto summit. The first was the venerable tarantella-dancing don ’Ntoni Macrì, from Siderno, the ‘living symbol of organised crime’s omnipotence and invincibility’, the underworld patriarch whose authority extended along the Ionian coast. The second member of the ’ndrangheta triumvirate was Mico Tripodo, the bigamist whose power centred on the city of Reggio Calabria and its environs.
The third member of the triumvirate was neither present nor mentioned at the Montalto summit (a fact which itself betrayed tensions within the organisation). His name was don Girolamo ‘Mommo’ Piromalli. Piromalli was the dominant boss in the plain of Gioia Tauro, where the work for the Salerno–Reggio Calabria stretch of the ‘Motorway of the Sun’ was concentrated. Roughly the same age as Mico Tripodo, he too was a major smuggler of tobacco who had been initiated into Cosa Nostra.
Mommo was the oldest of seven siblings, five of them male. His father Gioacchino, who died in 1956, sat at the root of a vast and spreading genealogy. By the 1960s the Piromallis were busily consolidating their dominant role in the plain of Gioia Tauro by marrying themselves into its major ’ndrangheta bloodlines. Across the province of Reggio Calabria, the spider’s web of kinship bonds grew both wider and thicker as the ’ndrangheta immersed itself deeper into the new economic reality.
Together, the three bosses of the triumvirate guaranteed what one ’ndranghetista called a ‘certain equilibrium’ in the Calabrian underworld—an equilibrium that was becoming increasingly delicate as the Honoured Society grew richer on concrete and tobacco.
Coordination between the different territorially based cells of Italian criminal organisations is not new. Indeed it has been integral to the mafia landscape since the beginning. Even the most traditional of criminal affairs tend to go better when mafiosi from different territories cooperate: rustling cattle, hiding fugitives, borrowing killers from one another, and so on. Nevertheless, the new businesses of the mafias’ economic miracle made the rewards of coordination even greater. The Calabrian stretch of the Motorway of the Sun is an obvious example, cutting as it did through numerous ’ndrangheta fiefs along the Tyrrhenian coast. As one senior Carabiniere observed in 1970: ‘There is always someone who rebels against the monopoly held by some cosche, and who then goes and puts dynamite in a cement mixer, under a digger, or in a truck.’
Conflict like this is costly for everyone concerned. So greater cooperation between the rival criminal clans can bring big rewards. The cry for unity that went up at Montalto was one symptom of that new need. And unity, whatever form it actually took, also required more concentrated forms of power. The authority wielded by the triumvirs was a symptom of a drive for greater centralisation. Mommo Piromalli is a good example. In the 1970s, his mighty clan took 55 per cent of the earth-moving and transport subcontracts spun off from a new wave of construction on the plain of Gioia Tauro; the rest went to keep less powerful groups on adjacent territories fed.
Cosa Nostra was undergoing similar changes, a similar distillation of power. As we have already seen, in 1969 the Sicilian mafia created a triumvirate of its own to rebuild the organisation following the dramas of the 1960s. In 1974, the triumvirate was superseded by a full Commission, which was a much more powerful body than the one dissolved in 1963. It was now a direct manifestation of the power of the sixteen or so mightiest bosses in the province of Palermo. Hence the Sicilian Honoured Society underwent a top-down restructuring. Entire Families that had proved troublesome during the early 1960s were disbanded, and their cadres absorbed into neighbouring cosche. When a representative was arrested or killed, the Commission reserved the right to impose a temporary replacement, a ‘regent’, as he was termed.
Yet there is a lethal paradox at the heart of the drive for greater criminal unity in the 1960s and 1970s. For when power became concentrated in fewer hands, then it also brought the risk of greater violence when unity broke down. Mafia history was now caught in a terrible double bind. Criminal organisations had more reasons to negotiate and pool their resources. But greater unity meant that when mafia infighting did explode—as it inevitably would—then the blood-letting would be on a much bigger scale. Where once there had been local squabbles, now there would be all-out conflict. The Italian underworld’s intensified peace-making activity—its appeals for unity, its summits, its rules, its governing bodies, its Machiavellian politics of the marital bed—actually served to create the conditions for war. And war became all the more likely because Italy itself was descending into the worst civil strife it had seen since the fall of Fascism. As the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, growing political violence in Italian society helped accelerate the approach of a mafia hecatomb.
48
MAFIOSI ON THE BARRICADES
IN THE LATE 1960S, ITALY ENTERED AN AGE OF POLITICAL TURBULENCE. IT ALL BEGAN IN the autumn of 1967 with the birth of an anti-authoritarian, counter-cultural student movement; a series of occupations of university buildings followed. The protests gained pace in 1968 with a wave of working-class action that culminated in the so-called ‘hot autumn’ of 1969. There were wildcat strikes, mass meetings, pickets and street demonstrations. New groups of Marxist revolutionaries sprang up to guide the struggle, convinced that—from Vietnam, to South America, to Europe—the Revolution was just around the corner. Agitation on all fronts continued into the early 1970s.
The most sinister response to the new climate of militancy came on the afternoon of 12 December 1969: a terrorist bomb placed in a ba
nk in piazza Fontana, a stone’s throw from Milan Cathedral, killed sixteen people and wounded eighty-eight more. Crude police attempts to blame anarchists for the massacre unravelled, but not before one anarchist suspect, Giuseppe Pinelli, had inexplicably fallen to his death from a fourth-floor window in police headquarters. (This was the ‘accidental death of an anarchist’ on which Dario Fo’s famous play is based.) Italy’s establishment showed a marked reluctance to dig for the truth about who planted the bomb in piazza Fontana. What remained was the widespread and almost certainly justified suspicion that neo-Fascists linked to the secret services were responsible. This was the ‘strategy of tension’: an attempt to create a climate of fear that would draw Italian society away from democracy and back towards authoritarianism.
A year later, Junio Valerio Borghese, a recalcitrant Fascist with friends in the military and secret services, mounted an attempted coup d’état in Rome. The putsch was a flop in the end, but Italians did not even get to hear about it for months: there were suspicions of a secret-service cover-up.
The strategy of tension produced further outrages later in the decade. In May 1974, in Brescia’s piazza della Loggia, a bomb was detonated during a demonstration against right-wing terrorism: eight people were killed. Eighty-five people were murdered by a massive bomb placed in the second-class waiting room of Bologna station in August 1980. A familiar sequence of smokescreens and artfully laid false trails ensued. Many in Italy were convinced that these were state massacres, and the credibility of Italy’s institutions suffered enduring damage as a result.
In the South, the most shocking result of this dangerous destabilisation of Italian society came in July 1970 when the city of Reggio Calabria rose in revolt. Demonstrations led to police charges, which brought barricades and Molotov cocktails, which in turn provoked gunfire. A few days after the revolt broke out, a train derailed just outside Gioia Tauro station, killing six passengers. There were strong suspicions that a bomb had caused the accident, and troops were sent to guard Calabrian railways. Back in Reggio, there were dynamite attacks on the transport infrastructure and occupations of public buildings. No less than eight months of street fighting were only brought to an end when tanks rumbled along the seafront.