by John Dickie
By the Second World War’s end, Church and state had been reconciled. During the Cold War, Catholicism ceased to be marginal to Italy’s political system, and became central. A Catholic party, the Christian Democrats, dominated the political scene and formed a shield against the satanic forces of Communism. The mafia sheltered behind that shield, and found succour in the Cold War fervour of leading clerics. One notorious case was Ernesto Ruffini, the Cardinal Archbishop of Palermo for two decades: he repeatedly denounced any talk of the ‘so-called mafia’ as a left-wing plot to undermine Sicily.
As the violence grew in 1980s Palermo, Ruffini’s successor, Cardinal Archbishop Salvatore Pappalardo, started to send out very different signals. In November 1981, the mafia-backed politicians who were assembled in Palermo Cathedral for the feast of Christ the King squirmed in discomfort as they heard him outline their complicity in murder:
Street crime, operating in the open, is almost inextricably tied in a complex web with occult manipulators who perform shady business dealings under the cover of cunning protectors. The manual labourers of murder are tied to the men who instigate their crimes. The bullies on every street corner and in every quarter of the city are tied to mafiosi whose range and dominion is much more vast.
At General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa’s funeral in September 1982, Cardinal Pappalardo’s angry denunciation of the government’s failure to come to Palermo’s aid made headlines even in the Communist daily, L’Unità.
At that point, the mafia found its own way to tell the Cardinal what it thought of his anti-mafia turn. At Easter the following year, Pappalardo respected a long-standing custom by going to the Ucciardone to celebrate Mass with the inmates. But when he reached the prison chapel he found that every single seat was empty. A journalist observed the scene:
For almost an hour the Cardinal waited in vain for the prisoners to leave their cells. In the end, he came to the bitter realisation that they were absent because they wanted to send him a clear, hostile signal. At that point he got into his little Renault and was driven back to the curia by his assistant.
Yet within the Church, as across Palermo, the sight of the bunker courtroom and the impending spectacle of the maxi-trial provoked unease rather than hope in many. Perhaps because he was unnerved by his experiences in the Ucciardone, or perhaps because someone in the Vatican had a quiet word, Cardinal Pappalardo made a shuffling retreat from his explicit pronouncements against the mafia. Interviewed before the maxi-trial, he blamed the media for sensationalising mafia violence and said: ‘The Church is worried that holding such a big trial might attract too much concentrated attention on Sicily. I am anxious about it, and in some ways alarmed. Palermo is no different to other cities.’
The Catholic Church in Italy has always tended to regard the public performance of earthly justice as if it were a distasteful parade of crude state power. As if the courthouse was somehow a sinister rival to the cathedral. Cardinal Pappalardo, like all too many clerics before him, now seemed to have retreated behind the catchall language of evil, suffering and forgiveness: mafiosi were just sinners like the rest of us. Despite all the bloodshed, and despite the heroic sacrifices made so far, the Church was not yet ready to take an explicit stand against Cosa Nostra and in favour of the rule of law.
There were still more insidious voices of doubt in Palermo in the run-up to the maxi-trial. Some said that it was going to ruin the city’s image. One politician hoped that it would all be over and forgotten soon, so that the bunker courtroom could be turned into something useful, like a conference centre. Sicily’s most influential daily, the Giornale di Sicilia, was distinctly lukewarm about the whole judicial enterprise, and its editor explicitly sceptical about the key issue of the relationship between the mafia and the institutions of the state:
Today the mafia is fundamentally unconnected to power. I don’t believe it can be said that there are organic links between power and the mafia; just as it can’t be said that every corrupt man in public life is necessarily a mafioso.
As if to prove this assertion, on the eve of the maxi-trial, the Giornale di Sicilia sacked a crime correspondent who had been particularly diligent in his work on mafia issues.
Silently watching the evolving spectacle was a nervous, amorphous, and far from entirely innocent majority of the city’s population. Some voices blamed the anti-mafia magistrates for creating unemployment. The argument was groundless, of course: mafia influence had caused scandalous waste and inefficiency for generations. But that did not deaden the ring of truth it had for the architects and civil engineers who profited nicely from the corrupt construction system; for the bankers who did not care where their customers’ money came from; for the owners of swanky boutiques and restaurants on via Libertà whose businesses floated high on the trickle-down profits of narcotics; for the idlers who had pulled in favours to get a public-sector job, or for the worker bees of the narcotics and contraband tobacco industries.
Palermo remained hard to decipher in the 1980s. Every pronouncement by a public figure was scrutinised for a coded comment on the work of the anti-mafia pool. Giovanni Falcone gave a resolutely optimistic reading of the public mood in the city of his birth. He talked about the numerous letters of support and admiration that he and his colleagues received. And of how the young people who staged demonstrations in favour of the investigating magistrates were showing great maturity: ‘They have shown that, in the struggle against the mafia, party political labels are irrelevant.’ The journalists interviewing him probed him further about his increasing fame, and the conflicting views of what he was doing.
You certainly don’t have an easy relationship with this city. There are those who say that you tend to overdo things, that you want to ruin Sicily. Then there are people who, albeit in a whisper, say, ‘What we need is a thousand Falcones.’ What is your reply?
Falcone gave a typically unassuming response, one designed to play down the familiar and potentially dangerous idea that the anti-mafia cause was a personal crusade. ‘I would like to say to this city: men come and go. But afterwards their ideas and the things they strive for morally remain, and will continue to walk on the legs of others.’
The maxi-trial began on 10 February 1986. As it did, Cosa Nostra’s guns fell silent while the bosses waited for the curtain to lift on the trial drama.
Meanwhile, as if to remind Italians just how high were the stakes in Palermo’s bunker courtroom, the slaughter continued unabated elsewhere—and with it organised crime’s insidious hold over the state machinery and the democratic process designed to run it. Palermo may have been living through an optimistic interlude in the run-up to the maxi-trial, but across the country the political system was becoming yet more dysfunctional: a ‘rule of non-law’.
64
THE RULE OF NON-LAW
IN CAMPANIA, THE MILITARY AND JUDICIAL DEFEAT OF THE PROFESSOR’S NUOVA Camorra Organizzata meant that the coalition formed to oppose him, the Nuova Famiglia, had the region to itself. Once victory was assured, the NF immediately descended into a bloody internecine struggle to control the post-earthquake economy. The first signs of that war came in Marano, the town just to the north of Naples where the Nuvoletta clan—Cosa Nostra’s viceroys in Campania—had their notorious farmhouse.
On 10 June 1984 four cars screeched through the centre of Marano, firing wildly at one another with machine guns and pistols. A bystander, Salvatore Squillace, aged twenty-eight, was hit in the head: yet another innocent victim of camorra violence. The Carabinieri investigating his death traced the cars’ route back up to a place they knew well, because they had searched it several times: the farmhouse shrouded by trees that was the operational base of the Nuvoletta crime family. There they found the aftermath of a huge gun battle. The front of the house was pockmarked by bullets, and shell cases were strewn all around. Searching further, down an avenue leading away from the house they found the body of a man, his forehead flattened by a pistol shot fired at close range: it was one of th
e younger Nuvoletta brothers, Ciro. Extraordinarily, someone had staged a frontal assault on the most powerful camorristi of all.
The first journalists to report on the incident, well aware of the Nuvolettas’ leading role in the resistance to the Nuova Camorra Organizzata, speculated that the Professor’s men were responsible. Was this the sign of an NCO resurgence? The true significance of the gun battle in Marano only emerged later. The geography of camorra power was shifting. With the NCO on its way to defeat, the victorious alliance, the Nuova Famiglia, had begun to splinter. The Nuvolettas, the oldest camorra dynasty, the pillar around which Cosa Nostra had built its Campanian protectorate, stood to be eclipsed. And as they were, the Sicilian mafia’s influence in Campania came to an end, the camorra came of age, and the face of much of the region was transformed.
The man who staged the spectacular, demonstrative attack on the Nuvoletta farmhouse was Antonio Bardellino. Bardellino was born in San Cipriano d’Aversa, one of three contiguous agricultural towns (the others are Casapesenna and Casal di Principe) to the north of the Nuvolettas’ base. Generations of illegal building turned these towns into a two-storey maze of unmapped alleys. The area, known for its fruit trees and its buffalo-milk mozzarella industry, had been notorious for more than a century: Mussolini’s repressive drive against the rural camorra in the 1920s was concentrated here.
Although he came from a very traditional camorra territory, Bardellino was something of an upstart compared to the Nuvolettas: he began his career holding up trucks. He was formally a part of the Nuvoletta organisation, and had been put through Cosa Nostra’s finger-pricking initiation in the Marano farmhouse. However, the war between the NCO and the NF quickly created tensions between Bardellino and his masters. As we have seen, both Lorenzo Nuvoletta and Michele ‘Mad Mike’ Zaza were reluctant to commit themselves to the campaign against the Professor. Bardellino, by contrast, opted for a much more aggressive stance. He commanded a committed team of young killers who were one of the Nuova Famiglia’s most efficient fighting forces—and more than a match for the numerically superior NCO. One of Bardellino’s allies at the time recalled that ‘we felt like the Israelis facing up to the Arabs’.
As the war dragged on, further differences between the Nuvolettas and Bardellino surfaced. The Nuvoletta brothers were closely linked to Shorty Riina and the corleonesi. Bardellino, on the other hand, was a business partner of some of Shorty’s enemies in the Transatlantic Syndicate, and spent increasing amounts of his time with them, away from Campania, on the narcotics route from South America. Thus the same battle lines that were mapped across Sicily during the Second Mafia War in 1981–3 were now being redrawn across Cosa Nostra’s Campanian territories.
By 1984, the corleonesi knew that Bardellino had been continuing to network with surviving Men of Honour from the losing side in Sicily, thus flouting Shorty Riina’s newly established hegemony over Cosa Nostra. Bardellino and his allies, by contrast, were now certain that the Nuvolettas had adopted a duplicitous waiting strategy during the war against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. On instructions from Corleone, the Nuvolettas had kept their Family out of the conflict, while Bardellino and his killers bore the brunt of the fighting. The Nuvolettas’ intention was to wait until the Professor and Bardellino had fought one another to a standstill, leaving them free to mop up.
When Bardellino realised that war with the Nuvolettas was inevitable, he came home from his drug-trafficking base in Mexico especially to lead his men against the Marano farmhouse. Later confessions would make it clear that Bardellino’s assault could have been absolutely devastating for the Nuvolettas: the capo, Lorenzo Nuvoletta, was due to hold two meetings in his farmhouse at that time, one with his senior commanders and one with the Professor’s sister; a last-minute change of plans saved his life.
Thus the Bardellino-Nuvoletta conflict of 1984 was a restaging of the Sicilian war of 1981–3, only on Neapolitan soil. This time, however, the outcome was different.
After the success of the assault on the Nuvoletta farmhouse, Antonio Bardellino returned to his drug trafficking in South America, leaving the campaign against the Nuvolettas in the hands of his main ally, Carmine Alfieri, known simply as ’o ’Ntufato—‘Mr Angry’. Alfieri came from another historic stronghold of organised crime in Campania, the cattle-market town of Nola, birthplace of the Italian-American gangster Vito Genovese. ‘Mr Angry’ was a meat trader and loan shark who had grown up amid the middle-class ferocity that characterises the towns of the Neapolitan hinterland: his father was murdered when he was young. He met Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo in jail, and was later invited to join the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. When he refused, the Professor killed his brother. ‘Mr Angry’ joined forces with the Nuova Famiglia.
‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri proved to be even more spectacularly ruthless than Bardellino. His first major attack on Nuvoletta allies was one of the worst massacres in Italian gangland history. Late on the morning of 26 August, a battered tourist coach pulled up on the main thoroughfare of Torre Annunziata, just outside a fishermen’s club. The streets were crowded with people strolling, or taking coffee, or leaving church. Nobody took any notice of the bus—after all, Torre Annunziata, which lies between Mount Vesuvius, Pompeii and the Sorrento peninsula, was a frequent watering hole for tourist parties. Fourteen killers, carrying a mixture of machine guns, shotguns and pistols, calmly descended the steps of the bus and started shooting at the men playing cards and chatting in the fishermen’s club. Eight people were killed. The club, it turned out, was a regular meeting place for the Nuvolettas’ local allies, the Gionta clan, whose leader was yet another camorrista initiated into Cosa Nostra at the Marano farmhouse.
For Carmine ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri, the massacre was a military triumph. Intended to damage the Nuvolettas’ prestige as loudly and visibly as possible, it succeeded in its aim. The Nuvoletta clan, who were also reeling from heavy blows inflicted by the police, sued for peace. Cosa Nostra’s authority in Campania crumpled. Many Sicilian construction companies operating in Campania immediately abandoned the region, some without even waiting to finish the projects they were working on.
The war against the Nuvolettas left Carmine ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri as the most powerful camorrista in Campania. But Mr Angry had learned the lessons of Cosa Nostra’s colonialism, and of the Professor’s megalomania, and he did not try to impose central control. Alfieri’s camorra was a confederation, as his lieutenant would later explain. ‘Everyone remained autonomous. We weren’t like the Sicilian mafia . . . Every group had its boss, with men loyal to him who were the sharpest and most enterprising.’
Alfieri’s presiding authority finally guaranteed a measure of equilibrium in Campania’s volatile gangland, albeit that the map of organised crime in the region was much more fragmented than it had been at the height of the Professor’s power. In 1983, at the conclusion of the war between the Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia, there were a dozen camorra organisations in Campania. Five years later, in 1988, there were thirty-two, many of them the splinters of the NCO and the NF.
One distinguished victim of the upheaval in the camorra was Mr Angry’s ally, Antonio Bardellino, who did not live long to enjoy the fruits of victory over the Nuvolettas. In Rio de Janeiro, in 1988, he paid the price for abandoning hands-on management of his territory when one of his underlings battered him to death with a hammer. His successors—the young ‘Israelis’ who had been in the vanguard of the Nuova Famiglia during the war against the Professor—would no longer have their boss’s taste for Cosa Nostra–style rituals. The last trace of Sicilian influence over the Campanian underworld was gone. From now on, the camorra had to stand up for itself.
The fragmentation of some camorra clans in the mid-1980s did not mean that the camorra as a whole was less powerful. Quite the contrary. Cutolo’s cultish Nuova Camorra Organizzata, and the fractious Nuova Famiglia that opposed it, certainly had thousands of soldiers and ruled broad expanses of Campanian territory. But beca
use they were only in at the beginning of the post-earthquake construction bonanza, they never achieved as deep a penetration of the economy and political system as did the more territorially circumscribed clans that came in their wake.
The new camorra groups of the mid- and late 1980s were also the beneficiaries of a whole new phase in the blend of economic growth and political failure in late twentieth-century Italy. The Italian economy returned to growth in the early 1980s. Inflation dropped, and there was a stock-market boom between 1982 and 1987. The big success story of the decade was the north-east and centre of the country where small, often family-run businesses produced specialist manufactures for export: luxury fabrics, high-specification machinery, spectacles, ski boots and so on. By 1987, the Treasury Minister could claim that Italy had overtaken the United Kingdom to become the fifth biggest economy in the world. Italy entered the age of remorseless consumerism, driven by a huge growth in advertising on new private TV stations that offered a bountiful diet of soap operas, game shows, Hollywood movies, sport and stripping housewives.
Beneath the glitzy surface, all was not well with the Italian economy. Tax dodging was widespread. The South retained its chronic problems of administrative inefficiency, poor skills and education, and a lack of inward investment. Submerged, unregulated, untaxed businesses were everywhere. Southerners bought their fair share of Levi’s jeans and Timberland shoes in the consumerist boom. But what they spent tended to come from public funds rather than productive economic activity. Not coincidentally, Italy’s public debt grew inexorably during the 1980s, although the South was by no means the only region responsible for the unrestrained borrowing.