by John Dickie
Played against the background of evidence like Sinagra’s, the words of the bosses seemed grotesquely mannered, separated by an almost ludicrous distance from the realities of their calling. The capo whose performance would remain longest in the memory was Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, nominally the head of the Commission at the time of the Second Mafia War, but in reality one of Shorty Riina’s mere patsies. Greco’s Favarella estate in Ciaculli had been the theatre of much of the action in the early 1980s. It had hosted a heroin refinery, and its large cellars were a reliable refuge for killers on the run. Many of the Commission’s meetings were held there. Late in 1982, the Pope had hosted the banquet after which Saro Riccobono, the boss of Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo’s Family, was garrotted in his chair while his men were hunted down amid the fruit trees.
Sitting in a midnight-blue suit before a microphone in the vast space of the bunker courtroom, Greco insisted on prefacing his cross-examination with a lapidary declaration: ‘Violence is not part of my dignity. Let me repeat that for you: violence is not part of my dignity.’ Greco uttered these words, carefully framed by pregnant pauses, as if he had just enunciated one of the fundamental laws of physics for the first time in history. He gave every indication of thinking that a mere reassurance about his own good character would be sufficient in itself to guarantee an acquittal. He went on to blame the cinema for putting ideas into the penitents’ heads. ‘It’s certain films that are the ruin of human kind. Violent films. Pornographic films. They are the ruin of human kind. Because if [Totuccio] Contorno, instead of watching The Godfather, had seen Moses, for example, then he would not have uttered such slanders.’
The least spectacular cross-examination in the maxi-trial was among the most revealing and intriguing. On 20 June 1986, Ignazio Salvo entered the bunker courtroom in an elegant light blue suit, carrying a briefcase. For thirty years, before he was brought blinking into the light of publicity and justice by the anti-mafia pool, Ignazio had controlled tax-collecting franchises across much of Sicily with his cousin Nino. The inflated profits of their licensed robbery were reinvested in agribusiness, tourism, property, and in buying the political leverage within the DC that was essential to the whole operation. Nino Salvo, who had died of a tumour just before coming to trial, was a more abrasive man than his cousin. When he was called to the Palace of Justice, his growling voice had uttered an admission (and a veiled threat) that had echoed through the building’s marble and glass atrium: ‘The Salvos paid all the political parties. Money to all of them: no exceptions.’
Unlike most of the other defendants at the maxi-trial, Ignazio Salvo had not been held in the Ucciardone, but under house arrest. Now, with his reading glasses halfway down his long nose, he addressed the presiding judge with relaxed precision. He began by giving a point-by-point response to Buscetta’s allegations, and then embarked on a long and monotonous explanation of the reams of documentary evidence he had in his briefcase. ‘You seem bored,’ he said at one point to the judge, through a thin smile of contempt. It was as if, by sheer grinding force of tedium, the richest and most powerful man in Sicily hoped to vanish slowly into the background once more.
The Salvos were particularly close to Stefano Bontate, the ‘Prince of Villagrazia’, and other members of Cosa Nostra’s drug-trafficking elite. That friendship had cost the cousins dearly, when in 1975 Nino Salvo’s father-in-law was kidnapped by the corleonesi and never returned. The Salvos were understandably terrified in 1981, when Shorty Riina began slaughtering Bontate and his allies. For safety’s sake, Nino went for a long cruise on his yacht. Meanwhile Ignazio stayed in Palermo frantically trying to contact Tommaso Buscetta to find out what was going on and organise resistance to Shorty Riina’s coup. It was to be the beginning of the end of the Salvos’ power.
Ignazio Salvo’s response to the prosecution’s narrative, apart from trying to bore the court to a standstill, was an argument of devilish subtlety:
For many a long year the state was practically absent from the struggle against the mafia. Connivance and complicity were so widespread that citizens were left defenceless before the power of mafia organisations. The only thing for us to do was to try and survive by avoiding threats, especially to family members, and especially when our activity as businessmen necessarily put us in touch with those organisations. I have never been a mafioso. But I am one of the many entrepreneurs who, in order just to survive, has had to strike a deal with these enemies of society.
‘What could we do?’ Ignazio Salvo was saying. We thought we made just enough concessions to the men of violence to be left alone. Alas, we were wrong, and we ended up on the receiving end of a kidnapping. We are not culprits, but victims.
This defence was part admission and part excuse—and all completely disingenuous. Generations of Sicilian landowners and entrepreneurs had produced exactly the same argument when their links to mafiosi were discovered.
Buscetta and other penitents knew that Ignazio Salvo was a Man of Honour from the Salemi Family of Cosa Nostra—the underboss, indeed. As early as 1971, the then colonel of the Carabinieri Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa had filed a report stating that Ignazio was a mafioso and that his father Luigi had been the town’s boss. Falcone and Borsellino’s work on bank records showed that the Salvos had been illegally exporting capital—the mafia’s profits, likely as not. But the cousins’ real sphere of influence lay outside the criminal brotherhood. On that score, Buscetta’s analysis of the Salvos was a lesson in the subtle relationships between the mafia and Sicily’s economic and political system.
The Salvos’ role in Cosa Nostra is modest. Yet their political importance is huge, because I know about their direct relationships with extremely well-known Members of Parliament, some of whom are from Palermo, and whose names I will not give.
‘Whose names I will not give’—Buscetta was saying that the Salvos were the link between Cosa Nostra and politics. But he would not say which politicians. He had warned Falcone at the very beginning of their discussions that he did not think Italy was yet ready for such revelations, which would have been more controversial, harder to prove, and more dangerous. Ignazio Salvo was as close as the maxi-trial was going to get to the explosive subject of the mafia’s ‘untouchable’ friends inside the institutions of government. Yet the message in Ignazio Salvo’s presence at the maxi was clear all the same: there were more revelations of political scandal to come.
When the major bosses had finished giving evidence, the maxi still had over a year left to run. Vast quantities of bank data and other evidence needed to be aired. The relatives of mafia victims were given the chance to speak too. It was difficult to tell which of them made the more harrowing sight: those who pleaded tearfully for news of where their loved ones were buried; or those who, evidently petrified, recited the familiar refrain of ‘I didn’t see anything. I don’t know anything.’
Caged defendants look out at proceedings in the history-making maxi-trial against Cosa Nostra, Palermo, 1986–87.
In April 1987, the prosecution summed up: a process that took more than two weeks. When one of the two prosecuting advocates finally sat down after eight long days of oratory, he found himself unable to get to his feet again and had to wait for the closure of the day’s proceedings so he could be carried bodily out of the courtroom by the Carabinieri.
One by one, the squadron of nearly two hundred defence lawyers then took the floor to give their final remarks, a process that took months.
Finally, on 11 November 1987, the judges and jury retired to consider their verdict. But just before they did, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco made it known that he wanted to address them. His short speech would become the most famous of the whole maxi.
I wish you peace, Your Honour. I wish you all peace. Because peace, and tranquillity, and serenity of mind and conscience . . . It’s for the task that awaits you. Serenity is the fundamental basis for standing in judgement. These are not my words: they are the words of Our Lord, his advice to Moses. May
there be the utmost serenity when it comes to passing judgement. It’s the fundamental basis. What is more, Your Honour, may this peace accompany you for the rest of your life.
A threat, of course. But one draped in the cloying language that had characterised the Pope’s defence throughout: he was a family man, a citrus-fruit farmer, a devout Christian who knew nothing of the mafia and narcotics.
True to his imperturbable self, Judge Giordano replied only, ‘That’s what we wish for too.’
Five weeks later, some twenty-two months after the opening of proceedings, came the verdict. Life imprisonment for nineteen men, including Shorty Riina, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, and three bosses who, unknown to the rest of the world, had already been dealt a swifter form of justice by Cosa Nostra itself. Pippo Calò was sentenced to twenty-three years. The tax farmer Ignazio Salvo was given six years for being a fully fledged member of Cosa Nostra—an ‘enemy of society’, to use his own words.
Just as striking as these heavy sentences were the acquittals: fully 114 of them. Even Shorty Riina’s corleonese mentor Luciano Liggio was acquitted, because the court found that there was not sufficient proof that he had been giving orders from behind bars since the mid-1970s. The 2,665 years of jail handed down to the guilty were 2,002 fewer than the prosecution had asked for in its summing up. Even those who had been sceptical about the maxi-trial now had to admit that it had manifestly not delivered summary justice in bulk.
The outcome was a cause for celebration. It was widely viewed as a victory for justice. The penitents had been believed. Buscetta’s account of Cosa Nostra and its structure had been confirmed. The Sicilian mafia existed, in other words.
Or at least it did for now. Falcone and Borsellino had always warned that the maxi-trial was just the beginning. An appeal was bound to follow. And the Supreme Court after that. There was still plenty of time for Cosa Nostra to strike back, and then to vanish once more into the mists of history.
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ONE STEP FORWARD, THREE STEPS BACK
EARLY IN HIS FIRST INTERVIEWS WITH GIOVANNI FALCONE IN 1984, TOMMASO ‘THE BOSS of two worlds’ Buscetta put the magistrate on notice.
I warn you, judge. After this interrogation, you will become a celebrity. But they will try and destroy you physically and professionally. They will do the same with me. Do not forget that Cosa Nostra will always have an account to settle with you for as long as you live.
Buscetta’s prophecy began to come true in the months and years following the conclusion of the maxi-trial in 1987. What faced Falcone was not just the renewed threat of violence. (As would later become clear, Cosa Nostra’s plans to kill him reached an advanced stage at various moments between 1983 and 1986; Shorty Riina had even ordered bazooka tests.) Nor was the danger just the Sicilian mafia’s well-practised tactics of spying, intrigue and misinformation. For, in addition, Falcone ran into resistance at the very heart of the judicial system. The outcome was an ordeal both humiliating and terrifying.
Today, Giovanni Falcone is remembered as a national icon. Any nation would have been lucky to have him. But the bland hero-worship to which he is inevitably now subjected, and the hollow tributes paid to him even by the shadiest politicians, still provoke a gritty resentment among those who supported him during his darkest days. They are determined, quite rightly, that both Falcone and Borsellino should remain controversial figures in death as they were in life. For as long as Italy’s mafias still exist, and for as long as there is institutional collusion with the mafias, Falcone and Borsellino should retain their divisive charge.
Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino photographed in March 1992, on one of the last occasions when the two heroic magistrates were seen in public together. Photographer Tony Gentile’s image is now an icon of the anti-mafia movement.
In the late 1980s, Falcone in particular was sucked into a series of nerve-shredding institutional squabbles that would have destroyed a weaker man. The anti-mafia pool and the maxi-trial offended some deeply rooted conservative instincts among judges. The pool system challenged a cherished vision of the magistrate as a solitary figure, answerable only to his conscience and to the law. So some of the resistance to Falcone was well intentioned: the very nature of the magistrate’s calling was at stake. But if conservatism had been all Falcone had had to put up with, he would not have been put through such tribulation. Sleazier forces combined to create a quagmire of opposition: professional jealousy; territorial conflicts between factions; a petty obsession with regulations; and the engrained fear of talent within all Italian institutions. All in all, at the very least, Falcone’s enemies were guilty of a complete failure to appreciate the dangers that lay ahead for Falcone and his work once the maxi-trial had concluded. They could not grasp just what a threat Cosa Nostra represented, and how insidious were its efforts to marginalise Falcone and dismantle what had been achieved so far, at such an appalling cost in blood. Nor did Falcone’s enemies see how vulnerable he was to the ‘fatal combination’ that General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa spoke of before his assassination in 1982: the magistrate who posed the biggest danger to Cosa Nostra would be pitilessly exposed by any hint that he was on his own.
Many of Falcone and Borsellino’s enemies took their cue from Sicily’s most celebrated writer. On 10 January 1987, with the maxi-trial still going on, Leonardo Sciascia published a book review in the establishment daily Corriere della Sera. The volume in question was a study of Fascism and the Sicilian mafia by a young British historian, Christopher Duggan, who put forward a highly controversial thesis: the mafia did not exist, but Mussolini had puffed up reports of a secret criminal organisation in order to strike at his political enemies on the island. Far more controversial were the parallels that Sciascia drew with the present day: the anti-mafia had once more become an ‘instrument of power’, he claimed. The novelist cited two examples. One was Mayor Orlando in Palermo, who spent so much time posing as an anti-mafia figurehead that he neglected the most basic duties of running the city, said Sciascia. No one dared oppose him for fear of being branded a mafioso. The other example was none other than Paolo Borsellino, who had just been made chief prosecutor in Marsala despite having served much less time in the judiciary than other candidates for the job. As Sciascia concluded, in the snide conclusion to his article, ‘If you want to get ahead in the magistracy in Sicily, there’s no better way to do it than to take part in mafia trials.’
Borsellino, in other words, was a mere careerist. Sciascia’s review predictably detonated an enormous row.
The facts spoke out resoundingly against Sciascia’s contrarian griping. It would have been more accurate to say that there was no better way for a magistrate to end up in a box than to take part in mafia trials. Since 1979, four frontline magistrates had been murdered by Cosa Nostra, and a fifth by the ’ndrangheta. Others had been lucky to survive assassination attempts. Yet more would die soon. What drove Borsellino to move to Marsala, in Sicily’s most westerly province of Trapani, was certainly not ambition. He knew that Trapani province was a key power base for the corleonesi. In 1985, the biggest heroin refinery ever discovered in Italy was unearthed there. Borsellino’s promotion was, unusually for Italy, based on merit and not seniority—on his ‘specific and very particular professional expertise in the sector of organised crime’, as the official explanation of his promotion put it. Yet Sciascia had cited this passage in his review as if it were self-evidently a reason for casting doubt on the legitimacy of Borsellino’s transfer.
Sciascia would later come to regret his review, which was a tragically misjudged coda to his career as a voice of intellectual dissent. He deserves to be remembered for the incisive pages he wrote about the mafia back in the 1960s when most other writers refused to tackle the subject. But the regrets came too late. Sciascia had given voice to old Sicilian suspicions about the state; and the title of his review—‘Professionisti dell’antimafia’ or ‘Professional anti-mafia crusaders’—had given Falcone and Borsellino’s enemies their sloga
n.
The next blow against Falcone and Borsellino’s cause was perhaps the most devastating of all. The Sciascia slogan could be heard being muttered in the Roman corridors of the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura (High Council of the Magistracy), the body that guarded the judiciary’s independence from the government, ruled on appointments and administered discipline within the judicial system. Late in 1987, Antonino Caponnetto, who was Falcone and Borsellino’s boss and the man who had overseen the birth of the anti-mafia pool, went into retirement. There was still much work to be done. Two more maxi-trials were in preparation. Since the spring of ‘87, Falcone had been taking weekly flights to Marseille where an important new penitent, Antonino Calderone, was confessing all. Falcone was the obvious man to replace Caponnetto, and thereby guarantee continuity in the anti-mafia magistrates’ work.
That was not how the High Council of the Magistracy saw it. On 19 January 1988, by a small majority, it voted not to give Caponnetto’s job to Falcone. The post went instead to Antonino Meli, a magistrate twenty years Falcone’s senior who had far less experience of mafia cases and no sympathy for the anti-mafia pool’s methods. Explaining their decision in opaque legalese, the members of the Council made reference to Falcone’s ‘distorted protagonism’ and the ‘personality culture’ surrounding him.
Shortly afterwards, the High Council of the Magistracy slapped Falcone down again when he applied to become High Commissioner for the Fight Against the Mafia. The role, created in a political panic after the murder of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, was that of a supervisory super-investigator. Falcone knew that the job entailed being a lightning conductor for public criticism of the government’s inactivity on mafia issues. Nonetheless, he thought he could achieve something with the powers available. His application was rejected—despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was the most qualified candidate by far.