Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  This rhetorical question was both disingenuous and alarming. In raw numerical terms, Andreotti was right: at that moment, organised crime was causing more fatalities outside Sicily. But no one could fail to see the vast qualitative difference in the targets of mafia violence in Sicily. Granted, there were a few ‘eminent corpses’ in Campania and Calabria. In 1980, the ’ndrangheta killed two local Communist politicians. In the same year, the camorra murdered a Catholic mayor and a Communist town councillor who were trying to block the gangsters’ access to the earthquake reconstruction goldmine. Lamentable as these crimes were, they did not bear comparison with the long roll of senior policemen, judges and politicians who had been cut down in Sicily. Andreotti knew this. And he knew that everyone else knew this. So he can only have been dropping a hint. The kind of hint that could bring a shiver of fear to even a brave man like Dalla Chiesa.

  In the eyes of external observers of post-war Italy, the country’s political life could seem confusing to the point of being comic: the same grey suits squabbling and making up, endlessly recombining to form governments that came and went like the rounds of a parlour game. Fear is one of the factors missing from this outside impression. The great string-pullers of Italian politics inspired real fear. For they had the power to take jobs and marginalise, to blackmail, to smear in the media, to initiate Kafkaesque legal proceedings or tax investigations. In Sicily in the 1970s and 1980s, violent death was added to the weaponry of influence.

  When Andreotti eventually went on trial accused of working for Cosa Nostra, the Supreme Court ruled that Andreotti’s relationship with the bosses rapidly became more tenuous after 1980, when his party colleague Piersanti Mattarella was murdered. Andreotti, the court ruled, knew that Cosa Nostra was intending to kill Mattarella, but did nothing about it. However, he was cleared of any criminal responsibility in the Dalla Chiesa affair. All the same, he must bear a huge moral responsibility for helping to increase the General’s exposure to danger, for increasing the impression in the public’s mind—and in the mafia’s—that the new Prefect of Palermo lacked support.

  Dalla Chiesa’s job description remained unclear long after he took up residence in the elegant neo-Gothic villa that served as Palermo’s prefecture. On 9 August 1982—an unusually cool day by the fierce standards of the Sicilian summer—he voiced his worries to one of Italy’s leading journalists. The interview became one of the most famous in the history of Italian journalism. The headline was: ‘One man alone against the mafia’.

  Dalla Chiesa was as forthright as he had been at every stage of his Palermo journey. Citing events over the past few days, he told how the mafia was flaunting its scorn for the authorities:

  They murder people in broad daylight. They move the bodies around, mutilate them, and leave them for us to find between Police Headquarters and the seat of the regional government. They set light to them in Palermo city centre at three o’clock in the afternoon.

  The General laid out his strategic response. First, intensified police patrols to make the state visible to the citizenry. Then the mafia’s money must be targeted. The mafia was no longer a problem limited to western Sicily: it invested right across the country, and those investments had to be exposed.

  Dalla Chiesa was asked if it had been easier fighting terrorism. ‘Yes, in a sense. Back then I had public opinion behind me. Terrorism was a priority for the people in Italy who really count.’ There was a bleak truth to Dalla Chiesa’s words. There may have been eminent corpses in Sicily—journalists, magistrates, politicians—but they counted for less than victims of equivalent stature in Milan or Rome.

  The General also explained the subtle tactics the mafia used to undermine his credibility. The honest police who had fought the mafia since the 1870s, in the teeth of resistance from the island’s VIPs, would have read his words with a bitter, knowing smile.

  I get certain invitations. A friend, someone I have worked with, will casually say: ‘Why don’t we go and have coffee at so-and-so’s house?’ So-and-so has an illustrious name. If I don’t know that so-and-so’s house has rivers of heroin flowing through it, and I go for coffee, I end up acting as cover. But if I go for coffee in full knowledge, that’s the sign that I am endorsing what is going on by just being there.

  Anyone who refused to play along would quickly acquire a reputation for being ‘awkward’, ‘unfriendly’ and ‘self-important’ in Palermo’s influential circles. Acquiring such a reputation was often a prelude to being shot dead.

  Why had Pio La Torre been killed? ‘Because of his whole life. But the final, decisive reason was his proposed anti-mafia law.’

  Why was the mafia now murdering so many important representatives of the state? ‘I think I’ve grasped the new rules of the game. Someone in a powerful position can be killed when there is a fatal combination of two things: he becomes too dangerous, and he is isolated.’

  From his exchanges with Andreotti, General Dalla Chiesa knew only too well that this ‘fatal combination’ applied to him. He was a threat, he was isolated, and his life was in very serious peril. Why, then, did he persist, when throughout its history the mafia had defeated everyone sent to fight it?

  I am pretty optimistic—as long as the specific mandate they sent me to Sicily with is confirmed as soon as possible. I trust in my own professionalism . . . And I’ve come to understand one thing. Something very simple, something that is perhaps decisive. Most of the things the mafia ‘protects’, most of the privileges that it makes citizens pay a steep price for, are nothing other than elementary rights.

  At around ten past nine on the evening of 3 September 1982, Nando Dalla Chiesa, the university lecturer son of General Carlo Alberto, was listening to music on the radio. The telephone rang. ‘A normal ring,’ he later recalled. It was his cousin, who told him he needed to be strong, very strong. ‘What we were afraid of has happened.’

  In Palermo’s via Carini, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, his new wife, and his bodyguard lay disfigured by the Sicilian mafia’s Kalashnikov fire. Someone stuck up an improvised poster beside them: ‘Here died the hope of all honest Sicilians’.

  Back in Dalla Chiesa’s apartment in the Prefect’s residence, the General’s safe was opened and emptied of its contents.

  Even in Italy, even in the 1980s, shame could carry political weight. Days after the Dalla Chiesa murder, Italy’s two houses of parliament gave an express passage to the anti-mafia legislation that Pio La Torre had been campaigning for: the Rognoni–La Torre law, as it became known.

  A hundred and twenty-two years had passed since Italian unification, years when the violence of organised crime had been a constant feature of the country’s history. The mafias’ methods—infiltrating the state and the economy through intimidation and omertà—had been familiar to the police throughout. Yet only now had Italy passed legislation tailored to those methods. The delay had been exorbitant. The price in blood had been terrible. Nevertheless, Italy finally had its RICO acts.

  La Torre and his bodyguard were murdered in April 1982. His legacy was the law that underpins the anti-mafia struggle to this day.

  ‘Here died the hope of all honest Sicilians’. Dalla Chiesa, his wife and bodyguard were machine-gunned to death in September 1982.

  The Rognoni–La Torre law had its limits. It explicitly applied ‘to the camorra and the other associations, whatever their local names might be, that pursue aims corresponding to those of mafia-type associations’. The ’ndrangheta, typically, was not deemed worthy of name-dropping. More substantially, there were no measures to regulate the use of mafia penitents passed in the aftermath of the via Carini massacre. Dalla Chiesa had fought Red Brigade terror using penitents who had been incentivised by reductions in their sentences. He wanted the same incentives to apply to mafiosi. But, for good reasons and bad, Italy’s political class remained profoundly wary of what mafia penitents might say. If the ongoing bacchanalia of blood-letting within the world of organised crime ever generated any penitents, an
d if the police and magistrates wanted to use their testimony to test the Rognoni–La Torre law, then improvisation would be the only recourse.

  Right on cue, barely a month after the Rognoni–La Torre law entered the statute book, the first penitent arrived. Not from Palermo, however, but from Naples.

  Pasquale ‘the Animal’ Barra was the first initiate to the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, its second in command, and the lord high executioner of the Italian prison system. He was a childhood friend of NCO chief Raffaele Cutolo, and the Professor had dedicated a poem to his knife-fighting skills. In August 1981, on the Professor’s orders, ‘the Animal’ murdered yet another inmate, a Milanese gangster. The victim was stabbed sixty times.

  Prison assassin. Pasquale ‘the Animal’ Barra was the Nuova Camorra Organizzata’s principal enforcer within the prison system.

  The problem was that the gangster in question also happened to be the illegitimate son of Sicilian-American Man of Honour Frank Coppola. The Professor was called to account by Cosa Nostra for the killing. Fearing an out-and-out confrontation with Palermo, he cut his childhood friend loose: he said that the Animal had murdered Frank Coppola’s son on his own initiative.

  The Animal was now an outcast in the prison underworld, persecuted by the affiliates of every mafia, including his own. He shunned all contact with others, always made his own food and drinks, and took to carrying a clasp-knife hidden in his anus at all times. Eventually, the pressure and his sense of betrayal overcame his blood bond to the Cutolo organisation: the Animal begged the authorities for help. He told investigators the whole story of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, right from its foundation in Poggioreale prison.

  With the NCO disintegrating after the Professor was sent to the prison island of Asinara, more defectors soon joined the Animal. On 17 June 1983, magistrates issued warrants for the arrest of no fewer than 856 individuals across Italy, ranging from prisoners and known criminals, to judicial officials, professionals and priests. They were all charged under the Rognoni–La Torre law. Italy’s newest and most important piece of anti-mafia legislation, and the crucial evidence of the penitents, were about to be tried out on the Nuova Camorra Organizzata.

  61

  DOILIES AND DRUGS

  AN EXERCISE BIKE FOR ASTRONAUTS. AN ALARM CLOCK CONTRAPTION THAT TIPPED persistent sleepers out of bed. A drastic cure for the Po valley fog.

  A father flown home from Iran to his young family for Christmas. An aged but picky Neapolitan spinster matched with the Spanish flamenco dancer of her dreams.

  Talented kids. Fancy dress. Comedy turns. Cheery jazz. Good causes. A set made up to look like a giant patchwork quilt. And a scruffy green parrot that resolutely refused, despite the tricks and blandishments of dozens of studio guests, to squawk its own name: ‘Portobello’.

  On Friday nights, between 1977 and 1983, 25 million Italian TV viewers had their cockles warmed and their tears jerked by a human-interest magazine show called, like the parrot, Portobello. Many thousands of ordinary people took part in the show: their phone calls were answered by a panel of lip-glossed receptionists who sat at one end of the studio floor. The host of Portobello skilfully deployed his patrician manners, common touch and toothy smile to hold it all together with aplomb. His name was Enzo Tortora; he had been born into a well-to-do family in the northern city of Genoa in 1928, and Portobello made him one of the three or four most popular TV personalities in the country. Between the cosy, warmhearted Italy that Portobello constructed around the clean-living Tortora, and the savage and corrupt world of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, the distance was astral.

  Tortora’s show owed its name to London’s Portobello Road market for antiques and secondhand goods. The core idea was to stage a televised exchange service for curios. And the idea very quickly caught on. Although RAI, the state broadcaster, sternly told them not to, viewers sent in every conceivable bit of bric-a-brac for barter or auction. The contents of the nation’s attics soon filled up the studio’s huge storage facilities and spilled into the corridors.

  Somewhere, lost among those piles of humble treasure, was a package dispatched from Porto Azzurro prison, on the Tuscan island of Elba; it contained eighteen silk doilies, hand-crocheted by a long-term inmate called Domenico Barbaro. Five years later, Barbaro’s doilies triggered one of Italy’s most notorious miscarriages of justice. Because of them, Portobello went off the air, and Enzo Tortora was accused of being a cocaine dealer to the stars, and a fully initiated member of Raffaele Cutolo’s Nuova Camorra Organizzata. The world of Portobello and the world of organised crime collided. The resulting explosion inflicted grave damage on the Italian judicial system at the very moment when the power of Italy’s mafias was reaching its peak. Just when the Italian state finally had the weapons it needed to combat organised crime, it suffered yet another blow to its legitimacy.

  Tortora was arrested before dawn on 17 June 1983, in the luxury Roman hotel that had become a second home. As is so often the case in Italy, fragments of the evidence against him were leaked to the media while he was still being interrogated, creating a widespread assumption that he was guilty. On 21 August—long before any trial—the key testimony against Tortora was published in the current-affairs magazine L’Espresso. His principal accuser was another prisoner and camorrista, Giovanni Pandico.

  Pandico was that rare thing, a con who could read and write; he even had a smattering of legal knowledge, which was enough to make him a Clarence Darrow in the eyes of his fellow jailbirds. His appearance also proclaimed his intellectual gravitas: bland, waxy features hidden behind the boxy black frames of his spectacles. But Pandico was also unstable and very violent. Even as a young man, psychiatrists had defined him as paranoid, and as having an ‘aggressive personality strongly influenced by delusions of grandeur’. In 1970, Pandico was released from a short sentence for theft. Someone had to be responsible for his troubles with the law, and that someone had to be important—like the local mayor. As his paranoid reasoning dictated, Pandico rampaged through the Town Hall, Beretta 9mm in hand, killing two people and wounding two others. The mayor only saved himself by tipping over his desk and sheltering behind it.

  Pandico began a long stretch behind bars. There his literary and legal expertise were spotted by Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo, who initiated him into the NCO and used him as a secretary, a position that gave him access to a great deal of inside information. In a typically self-aggrandising fashion, Pandico would later claim that he had been nothing less than Cutolo’s consigliere, and thus the acting boss of the NCO after the Professor was transferred to the prison island of Asinara.

  Pandico was the second member of the NCO to turn penitent after the Animal. He told magistrates that Portobello presenter Enzo Tortora was a cocaine dealer and money launderer for the NCO. Indeed the TV star had been such a successful criminal that he had been initiated into the brotherhood in 1980. But some time after that, according to Pandico’s narrative, Tortora’s relationship with the NCO had broken down when he failed to pay for a large consignment of cocaine. Pandico claimed to have been entrusted by Cutolo himself with the task of getting the money back. He also said that Tortora received his drugs wholesale through Domenico Barbaro—the same Domenico Barbaro who had sent the doilies to Portobello back in December 1977.

  Tortora was confronted with these accusations in Rome’s historic Regina Coeli prison. He admitted that, yes, he had had indirect contact with Barbaro. Through 1978 and into 1979, Tortora had received a long, indignant and verbose correspondence demanding to know what had become of the doilies. He showed investigators the letters, pointing out their absurd contents: they accused Tortora of stealing the doilies and made far-fetched threats of legal action. One of the letters Tortora received contained the following passage:

  My current status as a detainee who is still bound to the healthy principles of Honour, would oblige me not to inflict damage on you, if I were to see that you forthwith intended, giving tangible proof thereof, to see to
the return of the package. As a result, in agreement with my legal advisors, I have decided to suspend the planned penal action as long as you demonstrate your goodwill.

  As their pseudo-legalese, rambling logic, paranoia and scarcely suppressed violence betray, the semi-literate Barbaro was not the author of these words. They were the work of Giovanni Pandico, who was an inmate at the same Elba prison as Barbaro at the time of the doilies affair. Pandico had evidently taken charge of pressing the case for the return of the doilies with his usual obsessive persistence.

  As a popular TV presenter, Tortora was meticulously protective of his public image, even when the public in question was languishing in jail. So, as he explained to his interrogators, he personally wrote a polite reply to Barbaro/Pandico’s complaints, and even arranged for the RAI legal office to compensate the prisoner to the very generous tune of 800,000 lire—some $480 at the time.

  Dear Mr Domenico Barbaro,

  I am very sorry to tell you that I know nothing about the package you sent and have never seen a trace of it. What concerns me is that you are drawing conclusions from this fact that do not shed a very honourable light either on me, or on the respect that I have always shown to whoever it might be.

  Tortora’s perfectly reasonable assumption was that these documents would bolster his defence. As it turned out, passages from them would become a central part of the prosecution case. On Pandico’s prompting, magistrates decided that these were coded messages: for ‘package’ read ‘consignment of drugs’; for ‘doilies’ read ‘cocaine’. And when ‘honour’ and ‘respect’ were mentioned, it was a signal that both parties in the deal adhered to the ethical code of the criminal underworld.