by John Dickie
By 1979 the corleonesi had won a clear majority on the Palermo Commission. Just as significantly, they had begun to make inroads into their enemies’ own closest circles. One Man of Honour from Stefano Bontate’s own Santa Maria di Gesù Family serves as a measure of just how far the corleonesi now reached. He was a lawyer, and a major drug trafficker, who resented his boss’s overweening manner, and found a sympathetic ear for his complaints among Totò Riina’s friends. His name was Giovanni Bontate, and he was the younger brother of the boss.
Cunning exploitation of the mafia’s rules and conventions, calculated insults, alliance-building and betrayal: all of the ingredients in the measured corleonese advance upon the centres of underworld power in Sicily can be found in the archives of mafia history going back to the nineteenth century. In that sense, the events of the late 1970s and early 1980s were nothing new. All the same, there were at least two novelties. The first was the value of the prize that would accrue to the victors. For once Sicily was won, the Americans would have no alternative but to talk business with Salvatore ‘Shorty’ Riina. The heroin pipeline would flow through Corleone. The other novelty in Riina’s rise to the top was the relentless ferocity with which he executed his plans, the sheer brutality of Sicily’s Second Mafia War.
On the evening of 23 April 1981, Stefano Bontate, well dressed as ever, drove his brand-new limited edition Alfa Romeo Giulietta Super through the rain and the habitually frenetic traffic on the Palermo ring road. He had spent the evening quaffing champagne at his own forty-second birthday party, and was now on the way home. When he turned off into a side road, he was stopped dead by blasts from a sawed-off shotgun and a Kalashnikov.
Two and a half weeks later, another Kalashnikov victim was found lying by the gate of a large housing block in via Brunelleschi. The head was so badly pulped by bullets that it took the police five hours to make an identification on the basis of fingerprints and a blood-caked medallion with initials engraved on it: it belonged to Salvatore Inzerillo, boss of Passo di Rigano, whose name had just begun to appear in the papers in association with a major investigation into heroin smuggling.
National public opinion took a while to wake up to the fact that this was something more than another seasonal bout of gangster-on-gangster violence. In newspapers in the North, Salvatore Inzerillo’s death attracted coverage comparable to a moderately serious motor accident in Milan or Turin. But as the killings continued in Palermo, people sought explanations for what was happening. Heroin obviously had something to do with it. Not much else made sense.
One by one, all the old journalistic templates for mafia violence were applied, and discarded. Was this a tit-for-tat: perhaps the Bontate and Inzerillo clans were at war with one another? But then it was discovered that the same Kalashnikov was used to kill both bosses.
Another theory—a very old one—was that this was an inter-generational conflict, and that a young mafia of ‘forty-somethings’ was making an attack on the power of the ‘old’ mafia. The fact that Bontate was forty-two when he died, and Salvatore Inzerillo thirty-seven, did not square easily with this interpretation.
Some explanations were so wildly off target as to be comical, or exasperating, depending on your point of view. Interviewed by the New York Times, the novelist Alberto Moravia argued that ‘The Sicilian as such—including the honest Sicilian—is by inclination a Mafioso, in the sense that he shares with the mafia man the yearning for, and obsession with, the “prestige of power.”’ Nowadays it seems mystifying that anyone should consider a Roman novelist to be an authority worth consulting on the complexities of the mafia. But Moravia’s ignorance should serve as a reminder of the appalling state of public knowledge in this key phase of the organisation’s century-old history.
The police themselves were more astute than Moravia, but hardly revealing. The chief of the Flying Squad said only that, ‘What we have here is a blood orgy: when the war ends, we will manage to understand the new balance of power.’ This was the police’s traditional approach to the cyclical blood-letting among Palermo’s criminal elite: wait for the shooting to stop, and then count the bodies and hope for a tip-off.
The shooting did not stop. The newspapers became a daily catalogue of horrors. Bodies abandoned in slicks of blood in the street, or found crumpled behind shop counters, or left amid burning rubbish on empty lots. Antonino Ciaramitaro was discovered in the boot of a car in two plastic bags—one for his trunk and one for his head. Giovanni Prestigiacomo was shot-gunned to death as he parked his FIAT 1100. His wife heard the detonations and ran outside; she would continue to hold him, screaming ‘Don’t die. Don’t die’, long after the life had ebbed from his riddled cadaver.
Desperate for certainties, the newspapers tried to keep a tally. Seventy bodies in the six months between April and October 1981; 148 by the end of the year. But the ‘white shotguns’ (meaning cases in which a victim simply vanishes and their body is never found) made the counting difficult. Perhaps 112 disappearances in the first nine months of 1982, plus 108 murders. But the numbers were only a veil for confusion.
We now know that what was really going on was not actually a mafia war at all: it was a programme of annihilation. Riina was systematically eliminating his enemies and anyone close to them. The day after Inzerillo’s murder, the boss who had stepped into Stefano Bontate’s shoes in Santa Maria di Gesù called the dead capo’s six most loyal soldiers into a meeting to discuss what was happening. Four of them obeyed and were never seen again: the new boss was Riina’s appointment.
The drug broker Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo was a witness to what happened next. Emanuele D’Agostino, one of the two men who had wisely decided not to answer the call to visit the new boss of Santa Maria di Gesù, went into hiding. He sought refuge with Rosario Riccobono, Mutolo’s capo. Riccobono had always tried to maintain a neutral position in the mafia power struggle of the late 1970s. But the initial success of the corleonese assault persuaded him it was time to come off the fence: he killed D’Agostino as a token of his new-found loyalty to Shorty Riina. Just in case Riina needed more convincing, Riccobono then set a trap for D’Agostino’s son by telling him to bring some clean clothes to his father’s hideout. The son followed the father into a shallow grave.
A couple of weeks later, the only survivor from among the six Bontate soldiers, a mafioso by the name of Totuccio Contorno, was driving through Brancaccio with a little friend of his eleven-year-old son in the passenger seat. Suddenly, a powerful motorbike pulled out from a side street, and the pillion passenger raked the car with a Kalashnikov as it sped past. Contorno pushed the boy out of the car (miraculously, he had not been hit) and returned fire with a pistol before escaping. Totuccio Contorno would, in time, become one of the most important witnesses who enabled investigators to reconstruct the dynamics of the slaughter.
Hardly had the corleonesi finished with the active members of the opposing faction than they moved on to their relatives. Santo Inzerillo, brother of murdered zip Salvatore, was strangled when he tried to make a peace offering to Riina. Another brother, who was only sixteen, had his arm cut off before he was put out of his agony.
News of the slaughter in Sicily caused consternation in New York. John Gambino, the Transatlantic Syndicate boss from Cherry Hills, bravely came back to Palermo to express the American Cosa Nostra’s concerns. Shorty Riina’s response was an order: the Americans must kill anyone from the Bontate or Inzerillo clans who had managed to escape across the Atlantic. Thus it was that Salvatore Inzerillo’s uncle and cousin disappeared; then Pietro Inzerillo, a brother, was taken from a restaurant in Trenton, New Jersey, beheaded by gunfire, and his body dumped in the boot of a Cadillac. One particular detail of Pietro Inzerillo’s grisly end caught the public’s imagination: dollars were placed in his mouth and on his genitals to show that he had been too greedy. The message here was that his American killers (among whom numbered yet another Inzerillo cousin) were dutifully parroting the corleonese justification for the war:
the greed of the mafiosi who controlled access to the American heroin market.
Having turned the Inzerillo clan against itself, Shorty Riina next purged anyone whose loyalty to him was even remotely in doubt. Just before Christmas in 1982, Saro Riccobono, the Partanna-Mondello representative who had been so keen to cosy up to Riina by betraying and killing Emanuele D’Agostino and his son, was invited to a great barbecue amid the mandarin orange trees of Michele Greco’s Ciaculli estate. After a hearty meal and a nap, he was woken by men placing a rope around his neck: ‘Saru, your story ends here’, they told him. At the same moment, Riccobono’s soldiers were being strangled one by one by the other guests at the barbecue. When the stragglers had been hunted down, only three members of Mr Champagne’s entire Family remained alive.
The cull extended to other provinces of Sicily. In September 1981, the international heroin traffickers of the Cuntrera-Caruana clan suffered their first victim when Leonardo Caruana was murdered. The corleonesi also sponsored particularly vicious fighting in the province of Trapani, where they slowly encircled and conquered the town of Alcamo—the capital of the Bontate-Badalamenti-Inzerillo faction in that province.
Although the Sicilian blood-letting peaked in the years 1981–3, it did not abate entirely, but transformed itself into an endless state of terror. As Riina’s power grew, so did his fear. He began to see the young killers who had taken a leading role in the first waves of killings as a potential threat. The prime case in point was Pino Greco, known as ‘Little Shoe’. Little Shoe was the man whose Kalashnikov had put paid to both Stefano Bontate and Salvatore Inzerillo. He was also the Kalashnikov-wielding pillion passenger who led the attempt to eliminate Totuccio Contorno. Little Shoe it was who cut off the sixteen-year-old Inzerillo brother’s arm. He is thought to have killed some eighty people. But he was more than just a sadistic butcher. He was also a power in his own right. While he was formally the underboss of Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco’s Ciaculli Family, Pino Greco was in reality the power behind the Pope’s throne, making sure that Corleone’s will was done. At some point, late in 1985, Little Shoe’s own men decided to eliminate him before his ambitions put them in the way of Shorty Riina’s wrath.
Such was the dread inspired by the Corleone boss. Shorty had established a kind of military dictatorship. Cosa Nostra would never be the same again. By the time of Little Shoe’s death, the new tide of underworld war in Italy had long since engulfed Campania too, and the Sicilian mafia had been drawn into a proxy war against the Professor and his Nuova Camorra Organizzata.
56
THE NEW FAMILY: A group portrait
WHEN RAFFAELE CUTOLO ‘NOISILY WANDERED AWAY’ FROM THE MENTAL HOSPITAL IN Aversa in February 1978, the growth of his Nuova Camorra Organizzata (NCO) accelerated. The Professor recruited hundreds more young followers, reorganised his command structure, vastly increased the pressure of his extortion rackets, and even made a trip to the United States to seek closer business ties with his contacts in the American Cosa Nostra. All of these initiatives prepared the ground for the audacious demand he then issued to every other camorra organisation: he wanted tribute, in the form of 20,000 lire (equal to some $87 in 2011) for every case of contraband cigarettes that was unloaded in the region. There was no mistaking the scale of the ambition implicit in Cutolo’s ultimatum: he was making a bid to become the absolute ruler of the whole Campanian underworld.
Cosa Nostra was the biggest force standing in Cutolo’s way. In the early 1970s, the clans affiliated to the Sicilian mafia held the criminal balance of power in Campania, a region traversed by many different gang territories. Canny propagandist that he was, the Professor sold his campaign to his followers as underworld patriotism: the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, heir to the traditions of the Neapolitan Honoured Society of old, was to lead a crusade to free the region of Sicilian influence: ‘One day the people of Campania will understand that a crust of bread eaten in freedom is worth more than a steak eaten as a slave. And that day Campania will truly have victory.’ Cutolo branded camorristi who were loyal to any outside criminal force as traitors: ‘In my eyes they were “half mafiosi,” because they took orders from Sicilian bosses and in that way sold out their own land.’ The Professor’s rhetoric was backed by the firepower of his legions of young gunmen. Fighting began to break out across Campania.
The first clans to bond together to resist Cutolo were those from central Naples. The anti-Cutolo front then grew to embrace Cosa Nostra’s Campanian Families and other clans in the Neapolitan hinterland too. As it did so, it adopted the name Nuova Famiglia—the New Family—or NF. By early in 1980, the whole of the region was divided between two armed camps, the NF and the NCO. The scale of the armies was absolutely unprecedented in the whole long history of Campanian organised crime. So too was the scale of the bloodshed: an estimated 1,000 dead in the course of five years.
The battle in Campania in the early 1980s was a much messier affair than Shorty Riina’s coup d’état in Sicily. Most of the confusion derived from the fact that Nuova Famiglia was a loose alliance rather than a single underworld organisation. It did use improvised initiation rituals. But that fact tells that its leaders were desperate to use any means they could to manufacture loyalty among the recruits they needed to stand up to the greatly superior numbers of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. The Nuova Famiglia was held together (when it did hold together) only by its opposition to the Professor. Some of the underworld barons within it soft-pedalled on the war-making when it suited their own selfish purposes. Some switched sides halfway through. Cosa Nostra tried to manage the conflict from the outside, while going through a savage conflict of its own back in Palermo.
In 1980, Cosa Nostra first tried to drum up the kind of united resistance to Cutolo’s ambitions that would have brought a quick end to the struggle. But the Commission found that even some of the Sicilian mafia’s own affiliates in Campania were loath to throw men and money into a war. The leading tobacco smuggler Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza had been one of the founding members of the anti-Cutolo alliance. But by now he preferred to strike a deal with the Professor based on dividing out territory: the Nuova Camorra Organizzata could have the province to itself, as long as it left the city alone. Lorenzo Nuvoletta, leader of the other Campanian Family of Cosa Nostra, probably had different motives. For narcotics were more important to him than the declining revenue from tobacco smuggling that the Professor wanted to tax.
Frustrated by this lack of warrior zeal, the Palermo Commission sent a killer to dispatch the Professor. But someone must have leaked news of the assassin’s arrival, because the assassin himself was shot dead by two men on a motorbike not long after arriving in Naples.
In the summer of 1980 Cosa Nostra tried a different approach. Having failed to nudge Zaza and Nuvoletta into the attack, it urged them to broker an accommodation. But the resultant peace-making seems to have been almost as half-hearted as the war-making, for the cycle of punitive expeditions was not interrupted for long. In the end, Cosa Nostra would sponsor at least three peace conferences attended by large numbers of representatives from both the NCO and NF. Two of those conferences were attended personally by Shorty Riina and his lieutenants, despite the massacre that they were orchestrating in Sicily. But it was all in vain. Once started, the fighting in Campania proved too bitter to stop.
The camorra would go on to murder 364 people in 1982—very nearly one a day. And lest the many innocent victims get lost in the tales of gangland retribution, it is worth citing the case of someone else who died in January 1982: Annamaria Esposito, aged thirty-three, a mother of two who was executed for the sole reason that she witnessed a camorrista being murdered in her bar.
A group portrait of the Nuova Famiglia bosses who were fighting against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata for control of this territory tells us a great deal about the past, the present and the future of Campanian organised crime. The story of the camorra stretching forwards into the twenty-first century has its roots in the NF.
The camorra war of the early 1980s brought Pupetta Maresca back to the national headlines again. In 1955, she had first made herself notorious by killing the man who killed her husband, the President of Potato Prices. Pupetta’s fame carried weight in the Campanian underworld. In 1970, she started a long-term relationship with a major narcotics trafficker, Umberto Ammaturo. With her new beau, Pupetta was able to turn her fame into a luxurious prominence as a femmena ’e conseguenza (a woman with stature), a First Lady of the underworld. The police believed that ‘many of the crimes carried out by Umberto Ammaturo were, in reality, dreamed up in her head’.
Pupetta’s consort, Umberto Ammaturo, was one of the most aggressive members of the NF. Near Christmas in 1981, he planted a bomb outside Cutolo’s Ottaviano palace as a provocation. He would later confess to being the man behind the murder of criminal psychiatrist Aldo Semerari, whose beheaded corpse was also found near Cutolo’s palace on April Fool’s Day 1982. Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo demanded Ammaturo’s own head as the price for any peace deal with the NF.
In February 1982, in the middle of this confrontation between Ammaturo and Cutolo, Pupetta Maresca’s brother Ciro was arrested and sent to the very maw of the NCO monster: Poggioreale prison. Although he was kept in isolation, his life was in obvious and immediate danger. Pupetta’s response showed that she had lost none of her gift for publicity. On 13 February 1982 she called a media conference, no less, in the Naples press association headquarters. Arriving alone, she made a statement entrance: nearly an hour late, her jewels sparkling as the camera flashbulbs ignited, she was dressed in a black leather skirt and black fur coat, with a leopard-skin choker at her throat and a white blouse that exposed her cleavage. No sooner had she come into the room than she started picking fights with the journalists, responding angrily to queries about her jewellery (‘I’d like to see anyone with the courage to mug me’) and then demanding order: ‘Gentlemen, a bit of silence please! If Cutolo was here instead of me, you wouldn’t be making such a racket. Of course, it’s because you’re afraid. He has shut your mouths with lead.’