by John Dickie
PART XI
MARTYRS AND PENITENTS
59
MAFIA TERROR
IN THE 1980S, THE MAFIAS ACHIEVED GREATER WEALTH, MORE AWESOME MILITARY power, a wider geographical range, and more profound penetration of the state apparatus than at any other moment in their long existence. The story of the people who stood against them at that time is the most tragic and most stirring page in the history of the Italian Republic. Its key dramas took place in the home of what was still the most dangerous of the mafias, Cosa Nostra. The years between 1979 and 1992 were Sicily’s longest decade. The island had set the pace of organised crime history since long before the Second World War. Now it was to set the pace of the struggle against the mafias.
The tale told in the following pages was first reconstructed by investigators—the very people who were at the centre of the unfolding events. By journalists too: for many of them, the task of trying to make sense of what was happening around them with such fearful speed in the 1980s became a sacred cause more than a job. Since those terrible days, the story has been told and retold. It is there in the monuments to the fallen, in street names and plaques, and in the ceremonies that mark each passing anniversary of a mafia outrage. It is there in the famous video clips and photographs that have become icons of collective memory. Its grip on the public imagination is no mystery: this, after all, is a narrative that pits good against evil. Nor should we be surprised if, like all great stories, this one is sometimes emptied of its real meaning, hollowed into mere ritual by indifference, turned bland by the cynical lip-service of politicians, or by the cheesy conventions of television dramatisation. All the same, the truths of this story are far too important to be uncontroversial even today; its lingering mysteries still make headline news.
The people who died fighting Cosa Nostra during Sicily’s longest decade were martyrs. The word may sound overblown. In those Western countries lucky enough to be able to treat the mafia as if it were little more than a movie genre, such vocabulary now belongs only to the mind-set of religious fanatics. But in the Italian context, it is the only word one can use. The martyrs of the struggle against mafia power died for a cause—one that in luckier European countries might seem banal: the rule of law. They also changed lives by setting an example for others to follow. Inspired by them, many young people found a calling in the police or magistracy—or simply by refusing to rub along with the mafia system that confronted them in their day-to-day lives.
The sacrifices made in the anti-mafia battle changed history too. For what happened in Sicily broke patterns that had remained obstinately in place since Italy first became one country in 1861. The most significant progress was in understanding the mafia. The struggle against Cosa Nostra was also a struggle to find out what it really was. In the 1970s, because more than a century of evidence had been covered up, neglected or forgotten, nobody really knew. Italy did not even know that the Sicilian mafia was called Cosa Nostra by its members. The most widely read academic study of the mafia at the time was written by a German sociologist and translated into Italian in 1973. Filled with penetrating insights into Sicily’s social structure, the book was nonetheless dismissive of the suggestion that the mafia might be a secret society: only ‘sensation-hungry journalists, confused northern Italian jurists, and foreign authors’ made that mistake. There were mafiosi in Sicily, of course—mediators, protectors and thugs. But they were part of the island’s culture. There was no single organisation that could be labelled ‘the mafia’. The results of the most recent trials in the late 1960s seemed to back that view up. By 1992, however, such falsehoods had been decisively overturned: enough proof had been assembled to convince even Italy’s Supreme Court to confirm that the Sicilian mafia was indeed a criminal organisation, a secret society. By the end of the longest decade, the Sicilian mafia’s most astonishing crime—the claim that it did not even exist—had been exposed at long last.
The years of bloodshed and polemic in Palermo that led to that crucial Supreme Court verdict would have profound repercussions for the camorra and ’ndrangheta, and for Italy’s entire criminal power system. In its wake, Italy established institutions whose very founding principle was the need to view the Italian underworld, with its connections to the ‘upper world’ of politics, the institutions and business, as a whole. Finally, after well over a century, the mafias would be viewed as aspects of the same underlying problems.
Such changes are unquestionably profound—profound enough to mark the long 1980s as the bloody passage between two entirely different eras in mafia history. Yet more time must pass before we can tell whether the progress made at such appalling cost is irreversible. That is why the titanic struggle between the mafia and the anti-mafia in those years is a story that must continue to be told. For it will retain its relevance, its urgency, until the day when Italy can say that the mafias have been vanquished for good.
Sicily’s longest decade began with five high-profile murders in the space of nine months: ‘eminent corpses’, as they were called.
In Palermo, on 26 January 1979, Mario Francese was shot in the head outside his house. Francese was the crime correspondent of Sicily’s main daily, the Giornale di Sicilia. With him when he died was his twenty-year-old son Giulio, who was just a few weeks into his own career as a journalist.
Six weeks later, on 9 March, Michele Reina, the leader of the Christian Democrat Party in the province of Palermo, died in a hail of dumdum bullets at the wheel of his car. His wife, who was beside him, saw the killer grinning as he fired. Reina was the first post-war politician to be murdered by the Sicilian mafia; he left three young children.
The third assassination took place at the other end of the country, in the banking centre of Milan, on 11 July. Giorgio Ambrosoli, a lawyer, had been appointed by a court to dig into the affairs of disgraced Sicilian banker, Michele Sindona. A team of three killers was waiting for Ambrosoli when he got home late in the evening; he too left a wife and three small children.
Ten days later, back in Palermo, Boris Giuliano, the commander of the Flying Squad was shot seven times at the counter of his local bar.
Cesare Terranova was a judge. On 25 September, he and his bodyguard, Lenin Mancuso, were gunned to death in their car. One witness said that the killers wore smiles on their faces.
A journalist, a politician, a financial lawyer, a policeman and a judge. Information, democracy, honest finance, law enforcement and justice. One after another, the mafia’s smiling killers had attacked five pillars of Italian society.
None of these murders, taken in isolation, was entirely without precedent for the Sicilian mafia. But coming so close together they made clear an unmistakable and chilling new trend. Sicilian mafiosi had never launched such a systematic assault on representatives of the state. The institutions were infiltrated and corrupted, but they were not attacked head on. Now, suddenly, the mafia had taken a terrorist turn.
Comparisons between the mafia and the threat from subversives of Right and Left were on many commentators’ lips during the season of terrorism known as the Years of Lead. Cosa Nostra itself had given them a cue. Following both the Reina and Terranova murders, the offices of Giornale di Sicilia received anonymous calls claiming to be from terrorist cells. The calls were fake, and intended to mislead investigators. But the parallel between the Sicilian mafia and the Red Brigades was far from spurious. Both killed journalists, politicians, lawyers, police and magistrates. Both arrogantly assumed themselves to be above the law. Both thought the Italian state was so weak, and so discredited, that it could simply be bullied into submission. Violence was used because violence would work—by now, it was part of the language of Italian public life. The Italian people could be relied upon to sit, arms folded, and watch as their country went down.
Yet within some of those murders from 1979 the signs of resistance against the mafia threat were also visible. Cosa Nostra was killing people it feared.
The journalist Mario Francese was a relentless in
vestigator, one of the few journalists who sensed the growing menace of Shorty Riina and his corleonesi; he had even dared interview Riina’s wife.
Giorgio Ambrosoli had discovered that Michele Sindona had been laundering the profits of the US heroin trade.
Boris Giuliano was a born policeman who had tracked down some of Cosa Nostra’s heroin refineries. He also knew how to follow the mafia’s money, and the money trail had led him into collaboration with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and to a clear conclusion: ‘Palermo’s mafia organisations have now become pivotal in heroin trafficking, the clearing house for the United States.’
Judge Terranova had led a large-scale prosecution of the mafia following the Ciaculli bomb outrage back in the 1960s. In 1974, he consigned Luciano Liggio, the boss of Corleone, to a life behind bars. Having spent several years in parliament as an independent MP under the wing of the Communist Party, he had just returned to Palermo, and to the judicial trenches of the anti-mafia struggle, when Cosa Nostra decided to kill him.
The death of Michele Reina, the DC politician, was much more difficult to interpret at the time. Only those closest to the mafia would have been able to decode the meaning in the murder. Everyone else had to be content with the rumours and theories that filled the newspapers. We now have a good idea which of those theories was closest to the truth. Reina was an ambitious man who had had brushes with the law. He had been educated politically in the heart of Palermo’s DC machine. He was a ‘Young Turk’ who belonged to the faction of the party headed by Salvo Lima—one of Cosa Nostra’s most reliable politicians. But now that he was local party chief, Reina’s ambition had led him to begin thinking independently. He formed a coalition with the Communist Party: heresy for some. He declared that he wanted to be the leader of a DC that would ‘no longer live for the construction industry and off the construction industry’. Dangerous talk: Reina had already received threats. Perhaps Reina does not deserve to be called a martyr, but his assassination was a chilling challenge to the state all the same. In the new era of mafia terror, the penalty for independent thinking in the Sicilian DC was death.
The five murders of 1979 amounted to a declaration of war: Cosa Nostra, for the first time in its history, was directly confronting the state—or at least those few people working within Italy’s ramshackle government apparatus who embodied what the state ought to be.
And here lay the crucial difference between Cosa Nostra and the Red Brigades, a difference that made the former far, far more dangerous than the latter. The Red Brigades certainly had their spies and their sympathisers. All the same, they were outside a state that they wanted to overthrow. Active brigatisti operated from clandestine hideouts deep in the most anonymous quarters of Italian cities. Cosa Nostra, by contrast, was an integral part of the state—a state it now wanted to neuter and bend entirely to its own bloodthirsty, rapacious will. Active mafiosi operated from the very institutions where people like Mario Francese, Michele Reina, Giorgio Ambrosoli, Boris Giuliano and Cesare Terranova worked. For that reason, standing up to Cosa Nostra required a particular kind of heroism.
The following year, 1980, the assault continued: more eminent corpses fell. And new heroes emerged—heroes who would change the course of Italian history.
On 6 January, Piersanti Mattarella, the Christian Democrat leader of the Sicilian regional government—the most important politician on the island, in other words—was executed just as he got into his car to go to Mass with his wife and son. Mattarella had initiated a campaign to clean up the way government contracts were awarded. His wife saw the killer approach the car, and had time to plead with him not to shoot.
Emanuele Basile was a young captain who commanded the Carabinieri in Monreale, a hilltop town overlooking the Conca d’Oro. The night he was killed, 4 May, the streets were crowded, brightly lit and filled with the smell of nougat emanating from street stalls: it was the local festival of the Holy Crucifix. Basile, who was holding his four-year-old daughter Barbara in his arms at the time, was making his way home through the crowds when two assassins appeared behind him. His little daughter’s hand was burned by a muzzle flash; miraculously, she was not otherwise hurt. Basile only had time to breathe ‘help me’ to his wife before he lost consciousness. He died a few hours later on the operating table.
Basile was investigating both the corleonesi and the narcotics trade with the United States. The magistrate who was working closely with him on those investigations—a gregarious, chain-smoking Palermitan with slicked-back hair and a trim, sloping moustache—was called Paolo Borsellino. Borsellino was devastated when they called him to break the news about his friend Basile. At forty years old, it was the first time his wife had ever seen him cry. The murder was not just a tragedy, it was also a message—a warning directed at Borsellino himself. But, faced with grief and fear, and the Sicilian mafia’s declaration of war, Borsellino responded with resolve. As his wife would later recall, ‘The Basile murder made me sure: I had married a man carved out of rock.’ Her husband threw himself into his work. In the next few days, he became one of the first Palermo magistrates in the era of eminent corpses to be allocated an armed escort. Paolo Borsellino would go on to become one of the two great champions of the fight against Cosa Nostra.
Three months after the Basile murder, on 6 August 1980, Gaetano Costa, the quietly spoken Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, was shot several times in the face by a single killer who pulled a pistol from inside a rolled-up newspaper. Costa bled to death by a bookstand just across the street from the Teatro Massimo, the giant theatre that is one of Palermo’s most famous landmarks. A veteran of the Resistance against the Nazis, he had recently put his name to arrest warrants related to an investigation into Cosa Nostra’s biggest heroin traffickers.
As fate would have it, the investigating magistrate working on that very case was a childhood friend of Paolo Borsellino’s who was also just getting used to living with the constant company of armed policemen in bulletproof vests. His name was Giovanni Falcone. Falcone’s large, friendly face disguised the fact that he was much less outgoing than Borsellino. But he too was a man of granite courage and a voracious appetite for hard work. His meticulous and brilliant research into the finances of heroin trafficking had already unearthed the Sicilian mafia’s business dealings with Neapolitan camorristi for the first time. Falcone had also encountered the insidious resistance that some of his colleagues put up against anyone who was too diligent. His direct superior had been warned in no uncertain terms by another judge that Falcone was ‘ruining the Palermo economy’, and that he should be loaded with ordinary casework to prevent him from digging too deep. When Falcone rushed to the scene of Costa’s murder, a colleague muttered confidentially to him as he gazed down at the disfigured body: ‘Well I never. I was absolutely sure it was your turn.’ Giovanni Falcone was on the way to becoming Cosa Nostra’s greatest enemy. With Paolo Borsellino, he would become a symbol of the struggle against the mafia. The story of the fight against Cosa Nostra in the 1980s and early 1990s is, in large measure, their story.
But to begin the work of challenging Cosa Nostra in earnest, and to do so within the framework of the law, Falcone and Borsellino would need new tools. Directly and indirectly, those tools would emerge from the campaign against terrorism. The Italian state’s struggle with the death-bringing idealists of the Red Brigades during the Years of Lead had crucial consequences for the history of organised crime.
In 1980 the state acquired its decisive weapon in the fight against the Red Brigades. Subsequently, the same weapon was deployed with devastating effect against the mafias.
Law number 15 of 6 February 1980 awarded sentence reductions to members of subversive organisations who provided evidence against fellow terrorists. The first member of the Red Brigades to take advantage of the new law, a carpenter’s son called Patrizio Peci, began talking in April of the same year. Peci was the commander of the Red Brigade column in Turin, and his testimony almost completely dismantled the Red
Brigades in the north-west.
Peci’s story introduced a new and highly controversial figure to the drama of Italian public life: the pentito, or ‘penitent’, as the newspapers insisted on calling any terrorist who informed on his associates. In Italy, lawmakers and magistrates bristle at the very mention of the term ‘penitent’, and for good reason. ‘Penitence’ is one of the most powerful identity narratives in Christian civilisation: it tells of past sins acknowledged and transcended, of a joyful new life born from remorse. But the Christian psychology of penitence fits badly with the varying motives of pentiti. Trading secrets for freedom is often a self-interested business—even when it does bring valuable truths to light. Cold-blooded murderers can barter their time behind bars down to just a few years. Penitents also bring an obvious risk for the legal process: a pentito who can convincingly fabricate more evidence than he really knows may be rewarded with greater benefits. ‘Penitent’, then, is a controversial term for a controversial thing. (Which perhaps helps explain why none of the unwieldy alternatives—like ‘collaborator with justice’, and ‘caller into complicity’—has ever really caught on.)
Yet, for many pentiti, the decision to betray former colleagues is an agonising one. (Which is another reason why the term ‘penitent’ is inadequate, although inevitable.) Patrizio Peci’s decision to collaborate with the state was born of a profound disillusionment with the cause he had killed for. But he contemplated suicide when, after his tip-off, Carabinieri got into a firefight with four brigatisti in Genoa, killing them all, including two of his closest friends. Peci also paid a terrible price for his repentance when the Red Brigades kidnapped his brother Roberto, subjected him to a ‘proletarian trial’, and murdered him. Horrifyingly, they even filmed the execution as a deterrent to others. Such inhuman cruelty was powered by the loathing that penitents inspired in those they betrayed. Penitents were more than stool pigeons: they were infami—vile, unholy, scum. When mafiosi began to turn pentiti as terrorists had done, the moral ambiguities, psychological tensions and vindictive violence surrounding judicial repentance were all magnified.