Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  What seemed to give this airy-fairy interpretation the heft of truth was the cascade of NCO defectors, including the Animal, who backed up Pandico’s story. The NCO certainly feared the penitents enough to mount violent attacks on them and their relatives in the build-up to the trial. Pandico’s own mother died in an explosion only a few days after he had been cross-examined in court. Crucially, there were also two witnesses, an artist and his wife—neither of them prisoners or camorristi—who claimed to have seen Tortora actually swapping a small suitcase of cash for a package of white powder in a Milan TV studio.

  On 17 September 1985, the huge trial against Cutolo’s NCO reached its conclusion: Enzo Tortora was found guilty; he was sentenced to ten years in prison and given a fine of 50 million lire ($80,000 in 2011). For similar offences, Tortora’s principal accuser, Giovanni Pandico, received a three-year sentence. The judge’s ruling demolished the Portobello presenter’s character:

  Tortora has demonstrated that he is an extremely dangerous individual who for years has managed to conceal his sinister activities and his true face—the face of a cynical merchant of death. His real identity is all the more pernicious because it has been covered by a mask which exudes nothing but courtesy and savoir-faire.

  The verdict against Tortora seemed to confirm suspicions about the real nature of public life—suspicions that had deep roots in the country’s psyche. Many of the millions of ordinary Italians who spent their Friday nights in front of Portobello also harboured a half-buried belief that they were witnessing a façade. Behind the televisual world of light entertainment, sport, and above all politics, lay a sordid reality of favouritism, corruption, political shenanigans, and—why not?—organised crime and drug dealing. Indeed, the more suave and convincing the façade, the more cunning and devilish was the truth it concealed. According to this pernicious calculus, Enzo Tortora stood condemned by his own affable public image. The sentimental glow that issued from Portobello was reflected back onto its presenter as the incriminating glare of an interrogator’s lamp.

  The truth of Tortora’s off-screen life was anything but lurid. He was exceptionally quiet and bookish by the standards of the media milieu. A non-smoking, non-drinking vegetarian, his favourite author was Stendhal and he liked to spend his spare time reading Livy and Seneca in the original Latin. But before the trial even began, journalists had been hunting for—and finding—evidence of the double life that he surely must have led.

  To British observers like myself, the Italian legal system’s way of doing things can sometimes seem monstrous. That is to say: to anyone raised on an adversarial system that gives judges the power to abandon a trial if the press has said anything likely to prejudice the outcome of the jury’s deliberations, the sheer noise that accompanies a prominent case in Italy can be disturbing. Long before the decisive hearings, much of the evidence to be cited by lawyers on both sides is widely available and widely discussed. Witnesses and defendants give lengthy interviews. Multiple media investigations run in parallel to the official legal process. Opinions divide into opposing factions of colpevolisti and innocentisti (literally ‘guilty-ists’ and ‘innocent-ists’). The actual verdict is frequently not enough to dislodge the most hardened views on the case: it remains only one view among many.

  The most important argument in the Italian system’s defence is that every stage of a trial, including the preparation of evidence, must be open to public scrutiny. In other words, the axiom ‘justice must be seen to be done’ applies long before prosecution and defence square up in front of a judge. And this is a strong argument in a country like Italy, where all kinds of undue influences, ranging from a Fascist dictatorship to the mafia, have tilted the scales of justice over the years.

  Enzo Tortora certainly had the skills and the influence to fight his corner in the media battle leading up to the trial. Seven months after being arrested, he was granted house arrest for the remainder of his time on remand. He stood for election under the Radical Party banner for the European elections of June 1984. (The Radical Party had a strong civil liberties platform.) Tortora’s living room was converted into a TV studio for the campaign, and he was resoundingly elected. In Italy at the time, Members of Parliament, whether in Rome or Strasbourg, had immunity from prosecution. Tortora publicly renounced his immunity.

  After being convicted, he took advantage of a period of bureaucratic formalities to visit Asinara maximum security jail as part of a Radical Party initiative highlighting the desperate conditions for inmates. In a bizarre encounter, Tortora even shook hands with Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo. ‘Very pleased to meet you,’ the NCO boss quipped. ‘I’m your lieutenant, remember?’

  Tortora, who knew that Cutolo had openly called Pandico a liar, accepted the joke in good spirits: ‘No, look, you’re the boss.’

  Between Christmas and New Year 1985, Tortora resigned as a Euro MP. In front of a meeting of thousands of supporters in Milan’s vast piazza Duomo, he gave himself up to the police who took him off to begin his jail sentence.

  In September 1986, almost exactly a year after Tortora was first found guilty, the Appeal Court overturned his conviction and restored his reputation completely.

  The Appeal Court judges’ ruling made the first trial seem like The King of Comedy rescripted by Franz Kafka. Tortora’s main accuser, Giovanni Pandico, was exposed as a vindictive, self-aggrandising fantasist. Flattered by the attention and power that turning penitent brought him, he had taken revenge on the Portobello star for ‘snubbing’ him over the doilies. The other NCO defectors, many of whom were held together in an army barracks for their own protection during the investigation, had simply brought their stories into line with Pandico’s. The artist who claimed to have seen Tortora swapping cash for cocaine in a TV studio, it turned out, was a known slanderer desperate to use the publicity surrounding the case to hawk a few more of his execrable paintings.

  Portobello returned to the airwaves on 20 February 1987. Tortora, visibly worn down by his ordeal, nonetheless opened the show in his usual gentlemanly style: ‘So then, where were we?’ It is still one of the most remembered moments in Italian television history, a moment marked with indelible poignancy because Tortora died of cancer a little over a year later.

  The whole Tortora story did serious damage to the public’s support for the fight against organised crime. The successes of the trial against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata were completely overshadowed. The image of the pentito that would remain fixed in the public mind was of Giovanni Pandico in court decrying Tortora’s evidence as a mere ‘performance’, and melodramatically demanding to undergo a lie-detector test.

  Just before lunchtime on Monday 16 July 1984, with the Tortora saga still a long way from being resolved in Naples, another penitent from the world of organised crime was going through the formalities of his first interrogation in a police cell in Rome.

  I am Tommaso Buscetta, son of the late Benedetto and the late Felicia Bauccio. Born in Palermo on 13 July 1928. I have not done military service. Married with children. Agricultural entrepreneur. With a criminal record.

  Buscetta had once been one of the most charismatic and powerful bosses in Sicily, an international drug lord with contacts on both sides of the Atlantic that earned him the nickname ‘the boss of two worlds’. Now, he was a physical wreck. His dark features, which had the noble impassivity of an Aztec prince’s, were pale and blurred. Having broken parole and fled Italy in 1980, he had taken refuge on his 65,000-acre farm in Brazil. From there he had watched, impotent, as the corleonesi slaughtered his friends and picked off several members of his family.

  When the Brazilian police caught up with him, they tortured him: they pulled his toenails out, electrocuted him, and then took him for a ride in an aeroplane over São Paolo and threatened to throw him out. All he said was, ‘My name is Tommaso Buscetta.’ Just before being extradited to Italy, Buscetta tried to commit suicide by swallowing strychnine. When he landed at Rome airport, he had to be helped fr
om the plane. Soon afterwards, he asked to speak to Giovanni Falcone, who now sat across the desk from him, listening to his every word. When asked if he had anything to declare, Buscetta spoke the following words:

  Before anything else, I want to point out that I am not a stoolie, in the sense that what I say is not dictated by the fact that I intend to win favours from the justice system.

  And I am not a ‘penitent’ either, in the sense that the revelations I will make are not motivated by wretched calculations of what is in it for me.

  I was a mafioso, and I made mistakes for which I am ready to pay my debt to justice completely.

  Rather, in the interests of society, of my children and of young people generally, I intend to reveal everything I know about that cancer that is the mafia, so that the new generations can live in a worthier and more human way.

  The most important informer in Italian underworld history. Cosa Nostra’s Tommaso Buscetta is brought back to Italy in 1984 after surviving a suicide attempt.

  62

  WALKING CADAVERS

  IN HIS LAST INTERVIEW, GENERAL CARLO ALBERTO DALLA CHIESA HAD SPOKEN ABOUT the ‘fatal combination’ of being a danger to the mafia, and of being isolated. The same sense of isolation was articulated very clearly by one young magistrate based in Trapani, on the very western tip of Sicily. In 1982 a TV journalist provocatively asked him whether he was mounting a ‘private war’ against the mafia. The magistrate calmly explained that only certain magistrates would deal with mafia crime, and build up what he called a ‘historical memory’ about it. For that reason, what those few magistrates were doing in the public interest ended up looking like a private crusade. ‘Everything conspires to individualise the struggle against the mafia.’ And that, of course, is precisely how mafiosi themselves viewed the struggle: as a confrontation between Men of Honour and a few ball-breakers in the police and judiciary. For the mafiosi, the lines between private business and the public interest are simply invisible.

  The young Trapani magistrate who made this point was a brusque, bespectacled classical music–lover called Gian Giacomo Ciaccio Montalto. One evening, only a few months after the interview, he and his white VW Golf were hosed with bullets. The street where he lay bleeding to death was a narrow one, and tens of people in the overlooking apartments must have heard the gunfire. Yet no one reported the incident until the following morning. Right up to its tragic conclusion, Ciaccio Montalto’s battle was an individualised one indeed.

  As each ‘eminent corpse’ fell, seeming to confirm the mafia’s barbaric supremacy over Sicily, the tightly knit but isolated group of police and magistrates who were fighting Cosa Nostra somehow found the will to carry on. One of the worst blows came in the summer of 1983 with the death of Falcone and Borsellino’s boss, the chief of the investigating magistrates’ office, Rocco Chinnici. Chinnici was murdered by a huge car bomb outside his house; two bodyguards and the janitor at the apartment block were also killed in the explosion. This was the most spectacular escalation yet of the Cosa Nostra’s terror campaign. Chinnici was one of the first magistrates to understand the importance of winning public support for the anti-mafia cause, of leaving the Palace of Justice to speak in public meetings and schools. His shocking death was intended to intimidate the whole island.

  As one hero was cut down, another stepped in to take his place—a volunteer. Antonino Caponnetto was a quiet man, close to retirement, who gave up a prestigious job in Florence to return to his native Sicily. Before he even moved into the barracks that would be his Palermo home, Caponnetto knew what he wanted to do: adopt another lesson from the battle against terrorism in northern Italy. Faced with the daily threat of the Red Brigades, investigating magistrates had decided to work in small groups, or ‘pools’ (the English word was used), so that the elimination of one magistrate would not cripple a whole investigation. Caponnetto wanted to use the same method against the mafia. The Palermo anti-mafia pool—Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, along with Giuseppe Di Lello and Leonardo Guarnotta—would share the knowledge and the risks, uniting the different cases into a single great inquiry. The pool system was the magistrates’ response to the ‘fatal combination’.

  The Palermo pool made steady progress. For example, Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo’s phone was tapped, and the passages of his heroin trade with the Far East reconstructed. Mutolo’s supplier, Ko Bak Kin, was arrested in Thailand and subsequently agreed to come back to Italy to testify. Ballistic analysis had revealed that the same Kalashnikov machine gun was used in a whole series of mafia murders—from that of Stefano Bontate to General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa’s. The weapon was a common signature that began to make patterns discernible in the gore. Most importantly, the Flying Squad produced a report on 162 mafiosi that included a rough sketch of the battle lines in the war that had led to the extermination of Stefano Bontate, Salvatore Inzerillo and their followers. But as yet, investigators were reliant on secret internal sources from the world of the mafia—men who were far too afraid, and far too mistrustful of the authorities, to give their names, let alone give evidence that could be used in court.

  Then, in the summer of 1984, came Tommaso Buscetta, the boss of two worlds. The new penitent’s evidence marked a huge leap forward. Buscetta began from scratch by revealing the name that mafiosi used for their brotherhood. ‘The word mafia is a literary invention,’ Buscetta told Falcone. ‘This organisation is called “Cosa Nostra,” like in the United States.’

  Buscetta’s interviews with Falcone carried on, almost without interruption, until January 1985. He revealed Cosa Nostra’s entire structure, naming everyone he could remember—from the soldiers at the bottom of the organisational pyramid, to the bosses of the Palermo Commission at the top. Drawing on nearly four decades of experience as a Man of Honour (he was initiated into the Porta Nuova Family in 1945), Buscetta taught Falcone about the exotic inner workings of the mafia world, its rituals, rules and mind-set. He identified culprits responsible for a host of murders. Still more importantly, he explained how those murders fitted into the strategic thinking of the bosses who had commissioned them. At last, the entire story of Shorty Riina’s rise to power in the Sicilian underworld made sense. The Sicilian mafia was not an unruly ensemble of separate gangs. It was Cosa Nostra: a unified, hierarchical organisation that had undergone a ferocious internal conflict.

  Until now, Falcone and his colleagues had been examining the Sicilian mafia from the outside. It was as if they were trying to draw a floor plan of a building by peering in through the keyhole. Buscetta changed everything ‘by opening the door for us from the inside’, as Caponnetto would later recall. Falcone thought that Buscetta ‘was like a language professor who allows you to go to Turkey without having to communicate with your hands’. Following Buscetta’s example, more penitents would begin to talk. The most important of them was Totuccio Contorno, the soldier from Stefano Bontate’s Family who had narrowly survived a Kalashnikov attack in Brancaccio.

  The pool managed to keep Buscetta’s collaboration a secret for months. Finally, on 29 September 1984, the secret could be kept no longer. Arrest warrants for 366 mafiosi were put into effect at dawn: the operation became known as the St Michael’s Day blitz. The police ran out of handcuffs. And when the police’s work was done for the day, the pool held a press conference to proclaim to the world that the Sicilian mafia as such was to be brought before justice. Borrowing a word used to describe the massive prosecution of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata in Naples, the press began to talk about the forthcoming ‘maxi-trial’ in Palermo. In the streets where dialect was spoken, the trial became simply ’u maxi. And the central issue in ‘the maxi’ would be Buscetta’s allegation—the ‘Buscetta theorem’, it was dismissively labelled—that Cosa Nostra was a single, unified, hierarchical organisation.

  The boss of two worlds was perfectly well aware of the historic scale of the trial that was being prepared around his testimony. Indeed a sense of his own historical mission was probably pa
rt of the mix of motives that led him to turn to Giovanni Falcone.

  When the news first broke that Tommaso Buscetta was helping investigators, many commentators assumed that he was the first Sicilian mafioso to break the code of omertà. We now know more than enough about mafia history to be certain that Sicilian mafiosi have always talked. Both the winners and losers in the Sicilian underworld’s constant struggle for supremacy have broken omertà over the decades.

  The winners talked in order to make a partnership with the police: in exchange for passing on information on their criminal competitors, they would be granted immunity from harassment. At a grassroots level, for the police or Carabinieri who demonstratively walked arm-in-arm around the piazza with the local boss, this arrangement guaranteed a quiet life. The Sicilian mafia specialised in a higher level of partnership with authority: when the mafia threatened to make Sicily ungovernable, ‘co-managing crime’ could become a cynical and covert official policy.

  The mafia’s losers have broken omertà for a reason every bit as sordid: revenge. Abandoned by their powerful friends, out-fought and out-thought by their mafia rivals, they turned to the police as the instrument of vendetta, when no other instrument remained.

  Tommaso Buscetta, like generations of mafiosi who broke the code of omertà before him, was a loser. He was part of the Transatlantic Syndicate that brokered narcotics between Sicily and the United States. As such, he felt the wrath of the corleonesi both before and after he decided to speak to Giovanni Falcone: between 1982 and 1984, no fewer than nine members of his family were killed, including two sons and a brother. The boss of two worlds, like many of the mafia’s losers before him, had many reasons to seek vengeance through the law. He was also like many mafia witnesses before him in that he told only a part of what he knew: his drug-trafficking friends were barely touched by his revelations.