Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Back in Palermo, the appointment of Antonino Meli proved more destructive than Falcone and his friends had feared. Once in charge, Meli began to override the anti-mafia pool. Mafia cases were entrusted to magistrates with no experience and no formalised links to other magistrates working on the mob. Falcone and his colleagues were loaded with ordinary criminal investigations. All the crucial advantages that the pool had brought—the accumulation and sharing of expertise, the panoramic view of the Sicilian criminal landscape, the mitigation of risk—were being frittered away. In the practical workings of the Palermo prosecutors, Cosa Nostra had already ceased to exist as a single organisation.

  In the summer of 1988, Borsellino took his career in his hands by complaining publicly from Marsala about Meli’s management of the Palermo investigating magistrates. ‘I get the impression that there is a great manoeuvre under way aimed at dismantling the anti-mafia pool for good.’ The President of the Republic ordered the High Council of the Magistracy to investigate. Meli demanded Borsellino’s head. Falcone confirmed Borsellino’s complaints and asked to be transferred. During a drawn-out and exhausting Supreme Council hearing, there were more Sciascia-type noises about Falcone: ‘No one is irreplaceable . . . there is no such thing as a demi-god.’ In the end, there was a messy compromise: Borsellino received only a slap on the wrist, and Falcone withdrew his transfer request.

  On both sides of the Atlantic, Cosa Nostra kept close tabs on the arcane shenanigans within the High Council of the Magistracy. Joe Gambino, one of the Cherry Hill Gambinos, telephoned a friend in Palermo and asked for an update on Falcone:

  — Has he resigned?

  — Things in Palermo are still trouble. He’s withdrawn his resignation and gone back to where he was before, to do the same things he was doing before.

  — Shit.

  But the mafia had reasons to be optimistic too: Antonino Meli stayed where he was and continued to dismantle the pool. He simply did not believe that Cosa Nostra was a single, unified organisation, and the way he assigned mafia cases reflected his atomised view of it—a view that was already outdated in the 1870s, never mind the 1980s. Cosa Nostra was taking its own precautions, nonetheless. In September 1988, Antonino Saetta, a judge who looked likely to take charge of the maxi-trial appeal, was shot dead along with his son.

  In June 1989, the campaign against Falcone took a far more sinister turn. Anonymous letters falsely accused him of using a mafia penitent to kill some of the corleonesi. The mysterious source of the letters, dubbed ‘the Crow’ by the press, was clearly inside the Palermo Palace of Justice because there was just enough circumstantial detail in the accusations to give the slander a vague ring of plausibility. Falcone was again hauled before the High Council of the Magistracy.

  Then on 21 June 1989, with the furore about the Crow letters still in the air, a sports bag containing fifty-eight sticks of dynamite was found on the rocks below Falcone’s holiday home at Addaura just along the coast from Palermo. Riina and other mafiosi were later convicted of planting the bomb, but several aspects of the Addaura attack remain mysterious to this day. Two policemen who were at the scene, and who may have been secret agents involved in saving the magistrate’s life, were both murdered within months. Some rumours say that deviant elements within the secret services were to blame. Falcone was not a man given to conspiracy theories. But he was convinced that ‘extremely refined minds’ were behind the attack, and that the Crow letters had been part of the plan. His logic had an impeccable grounding in patterns of mafia behaviour over a century and a half: first they discredit you, and then they kill you. The magistrate’s enemies aired a simpler explanation. They claimed that the attack was a fake and Falcone had orchestrated it himself to further his career.

  These were the bleakest and most anxious days of Falcone’s life. Over the past eighteen months, he had discovered how many fair-weather friends he had. In May 1986 he married the love of his life—an academically outstanding magistrate called Francesca Morvillo. The couple had already decided not to have children: ‘I don’t want to bring any orphans into the world,’ Falcone said. But after the Addaura attack, he seriously entertained the idea of separating from Francesca so that she would not have to share his inevitable fate. He told his sister, ‘I am a walking corpse.’

  Falcone’s mood improved slightly over the coming months. The prosecutor’s office was restructured as part of a far-reaching reform of the judicial system. Falcone was promoted. But he soon found himself at loggerheads with his new boss. As he confided in an off-the-record briefing to a journalist: ‘Working here is impossible. One step forward, three steps back: that’s how the fight against the mafia goes.’

  Falcone continued to be buffeted in the media too. In May 1990, the anti-mafia Mayor Leoluca Orlando used a politics chat show as a platform to accuse Falcone of protecting mafia-backed politicians from prosecution—of keeping sensitive cases ‘hidden in his desk drawer’. Here was yet another insidious slur. There was a widespread conviction that the law only ever caught the underworld’s lower ranks; that the ‘big fish’, or the ‘real mafia’, or the so-called ‘third level’ were never touched. Such a conviction is impossible to disprove, and plays to a disgust with politics that is dyed into the fabric of Italian public opinion.

  Falcone angrily demanded that Orlando prove his allegations, and stated that if he had not charged anyone with having links to the mafia it was for the elementary legal reason that he did not have enough evidence. As Falcone appreciated, Orlando was cynically trying to make himself seem more anti-mafia than the champion of the anti-mafia cause. The episode was also personally hurtful because Falcone had considered Orlando a friend: the mayor had conducted the magistrate’s wedding ceremony in 1986. Nevertheless, Orlando would persist in his accusations for months, accusing Falcone of cosying up to the corrupt establishment in Rome.

  More serious than all of these personal attacks was the gradual erosion of Falcone and Borsellino’s work in the maxi-trial. By early 1989, only 60 of the 342 men who had been convicted at the maxi were still in jail. Many were released because the Italian legal system did not consider anyone guilty until their case had been through all possible stages of the trial process, right up to the Supreme Court. Even those who were still behind bars had managed to find a way to make themselves comfortable. Pippo Calò, the train bomber who confronted Buscetta in the bunker courtroom, had arranged an asthma diagnosis and was now living comfortably in a Palermo hospital.

  Worse was to come. In December 1990, the Appeal Court ruled on the maxi-trial verdicts. Seven of nineteen life sentences were overturned, as were Falcone and Borsellino’s explanations of a number of high-profile murders, including that of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. Doubt was cast on the whole ‘Buscetta theorem’ and the value of penitents’ evidence. The case would soon be passed on to the Supreme Court, which had already demonstrated its deep suspicion of the Palermo magistrates’ methods and the theory that the Sicilian mafia was a single organisation. Having been revealed in all its ferocious complexity by the maxi-trial, the mafia was rapidly becoming as legally diaphanous as it had been for the previous century and more.

  67

  FALCONE GOES TO ROME

  DEEP DOWN, BELOW THE SURFACE HEAT OF ITS TERRORIST VIOLENCE, ITS CONSTANT crises and unstable coalition governments, post-war Italy was a country immobilised by the Cold War. In eternal opposition, the Italian Communist Party received funding from Moscow; in eternal government, the Christian Democrats banked money from the CIA. Rot spread in the stagnant political air: in every corner of the state, factions and secret cabals fought over the spoils of power. In a very Italian paradox, ties between the palaces of power and the country ‘out there’ became both utterly remote and stiflingly intimate. Remote, because the obsession with promoting allies and friends, with occupying ‘centres of power’, made reform close to impossible. The real rights and needs of the Italian people—among them the rule of law—went unserved. Yet also intimate, becaus
e as the state gradually occupied more and more of society, citizens had to make political allies and friends to get a job, or get anything done. Here was a people that loathed politicians, and yet was more addicted to politics than any other nation in Europe. Here was a state that the mafias were perfectly adapted to infect, and a governing party that had few antibodies to the mafia infection. Here was a society where anyone doing their job properly, anyone taking the initiative, risked being looked on with suspicion, if not outright hostility. The tale of Giovanni Falcone’s woes in the late 1980s was a metaphor for the experience of countless other honest citizens.

  The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the end of forty-two years of Cold War, would profoundly destabilise the system. Its most immediate effect was to provoke the Italian Communist Party into changing its name, and tip it into an identity crisis that rendered it virtually inoperative. The great bugbear of Italian politics was no more. At first, the Christian Democrats and their allies seemed unscathed, victorious. But their system had now lost its chief raison d’être: keeping the Reds out. The DC was living on borrowed time.

  The man who embodied the most cynical and slippery aspects of Christian Democrat rule, Giulio Andreotti, was Prime Minister between 1989 and the spring of 1992. Even Andreotti and the other grandees of the old system could see that the government now had to take the initiative. The hunger for reform, and the pent-up public disgust at the Italian political class, was seeking outlets. In the Christian Democrat strongholds of the north-east, the Northern League, heaping racist abuse on southerners and spraying vulgar invective against ‘robber Rome’, began to rake in votes. Fighting crime was a handy way for the politicians who had governed Italy for so long to win fresh legitimacy.

  In February 1991, Giovanni Falcone accepted the offer of a senior post in the Ministry of Justice: his brief was to overhaul Italy’s entire approach to organised crime. On the government’s part, this was a jaw-slackening volte-face. As everyone knew even then, Andreotti had garnered political support from Salvo Lima and the island’s ‘most crooked “political family”’ since the late 1960s. As everyone knows now, Andreotti was on intimate terms with Cosa Nostra until 1980. Yet here he was handing power over key aspects of the justice system to Cosa Nostra’s greatest foe. Falcone’s appointment was both extraordinarily welcome and cynically expedient.

  Many in Palermo, from mafiosi to some of Falcone’s supporters, were convinced that the anti-mafia’s champion had traded in his cause for a fat armchair in a grand Roman office. By sheer attrition, the scandals and disappointments of the years since the maxi-trial had neutralised him. Andreotti had ensnared yet another victim.

  On the eve of his departure for Rome, Falcone responded to these accusations in a revealing interview in a restaurant in Catania. He used a humble metaphor for his past achievements and future plans in the fight against the mafia. In Palermo he had built a room, he said. Now the time had come to construct a whole building. And to do that he had to go to Rome.

  As the interview progressed, Falcone could not conceal the hurt he felt at being forced to leave Palermo. Most hurtful of all was the insinuation that the Addaura bomb attack had broken his nerve and that, by going to Rome, he was running away. Falcone’s response was an uncharacteristic display of anger. ‘I am not afraid to die. I am Sicilian,’ he said. Grabbing the button of his jacket so hard that he almost ripped it off, he continued: ‘Yes, I am Sicilian. And for me, life is worth less than this button.’

  Once in Rome, Falcone set to work with his habitual dynamism. The result was an astonishing rebuttal to anyone who thought he had been rendered harmless. He designed a whole series of laws to gear up the fight against all the mafias, nationwide. There were measures to check money laundering and keep the defendants in mafia trials behind bars during the long unfolding of their cases. The government was given the power to dissolve local councils that had become infiltrated by organised crime. A new fund was set up to support the victims of extortion rackets. Politicians and bureaucrats convicted of mafia-related crimes were banned from public office. And, at long last, a law was passed to regulate the incentives that could be offered to penitents in return for reliable information.

  Far more important even than any of these laws were Falcone’s plans for entirely new structures to investigate and prosecute Cosa Nostra, the camorra, the ’ndrangheta and Italy’s other mafia organisations. The Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (Anti-mafia Investigative Directorate), or DIA, was a kind of Italian equivalent of the FBI: it would marshal Italy’s various police forces in their war on gangland. For the judiciary, Falcone also took the model of Palermo’s anti-mafia pool and proposed replicating it. Specialised teams of magistrates devoting their efforts entirely to the fight against the mafias would be set up in all the prosecutors’ offices in the country. These were to be known as the Direzioni Distrettuali Antimafia (District Anti-mafia Directorates), or DDAs. The pool system dismantled in Palermo had now become the template nationwide. The DDAs would be coordinated by a Direzione Nazionale Antimafia (National Anti-mafia Directorate), or DNA, headed by a senior magistrate whom the press soon dubbed the ‘Super-prosecutor’. Huge new databases would keep track of the myriad names, faces and connections in Italy’s mafia networks.

  Falcone had been marginalised in Palermo, and the pioneering efforts of the anti-mafia pool, carried out in the teeth of horrific violence, had gradually been hobbled. Yet with extraordinary lucidity and daring, Falcone had grasped a fleeting moment of political opportunity to apply the lessons of his bitter Palermo experience and utterly transform the fight against the mafias nationwide. It was to be his crowning achievement, his legacy to the country that never embraced him as it should.

  For one hundred and thirty years, Italy’s response to the mafias had been half-hearted and sporadic at best. No one in power had seen fit to view the three historic gangster organisations—Cosa Nostra, camorra and ’ndrangheta—as a national issue, as three faces of the same fundamental set of problems. Most disturbingly of all, Italy had been forgetful. Each new generation of police, magistrates, politicians and citizens had had to rediscover the mafias for itself. Falcone’s plans for the DIA, the DNA and the DDAs brought huge improvements, and a new continuity in the anti-mafia drive. From now on, when Italy investigated the crimes of Cosa Nostra, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta, it would do so using Falcone’s method. For the first time in its life as a unified state, Italy had been endowed with an institutional memory when it came to mafia crime. Falcone had finally lifted the curse of amnesia, and enabled his country to begin to learn.

  While they watched developments in Rome in horror, Sicilian mafiosi knew that the Supreme Court verdict on the maxi-trial, due early in 1992, would be crucial to their fortunes. A verdict confirming the Buscetta theorem would set a momentous legal precedent by finally confirming the existence of Cosa Nostra as a single criminal organisation. The bosses of the Palermo Commission also had strong personal reasons to follow the Supreme Court’s deliberations closely: most of them risked irreversible life sentences. The wrong outcome of the maxi-trial, from the Sicilian mafia’s point of view, would also be a catastrophic judgement on Shorty Riina’s dictatorial rule of the Honoured Society. Ten years of unprecedented slaughter had exposed Cosa Nostra to the risk of its worst-ever legal defeat. Counter-measures were in order.

  On 9 August 1991, the Calabrian magistrate Nino Scopelliti was on his way home from the beach when he was ambushed on a road overlooking the Straits of Messina. Scopelliti was due to present the prosecution’s case in the maxi-trial to the Supreme Court. To this day, his murder remains unsolved, although the most likely scenario is that Cosa Nostra asked the ’ndrangheta to kill him as a favour. It is thought that the peace that finally put an end to the Second ’Ndrangheta War at around this time was brokered by Cosa Nostra as part of the deal. Today, a monument marks the spot where Scopelliti’s BMW crashed to a halt: it shows a winged angel on her knees, holding the scales of justice. />
  Shorty Riina made his men promises. He told them that Cosa Nostra’s tame politicians, notably ‘Young Turk’ Salvo Lima, would pull strings to ensure that the final stage of the maxi-trial would go their way. He claimed that the case would be entrusted to a section of the Supreme Court presided over by Judge Corrado Carnevale, whose tendency to overturn mafia convictions on hair-splitting legal technicalities had earned him newspaper notoriety as the ‘Verdict Killer’. Judge Carnevale made no secret of his disdain for the Buscetta theorem.

  Despite these promises, by the end of 1991 Cosa Nostra knew that the battle over the maxi-trial was likely to be lost. In October Falcone managed to arrange for the maxi-trial hearing to be rotated away from the Verdict Killer’s section of the Supreme Court. Shorty called his men from across Sicily to a meeting near Enna, in the centre of the island, to prepare the organisation’s response to the Supreme Court ruling. The time had come to take up their weapons, he said. The plan was to ‘wage war on the state first, so as to mould the peace afterwards’. The mafia’s dormant death sentences against Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were reactivated. As it had always done, Cosa Nostra was going to negotiate with the state with a gun in its hand. But this time, the stakes would be higher than ever.

  On 30 January 1992, the Supreme Court issued its ruling and re-established the maxi-trial’s original verdict. The Buscetta theorem had become fact. Cosa Nostra existed in the eyes of the Italian law. When the news broke, Giovanni Falcone was in a meeting in the Ministry of Justice with a magistrate who had come all the way from Japan to seek his advice. Falcone smiled and told him what the maxi-trial’s final outcome meant: ‘My country has not yet grasped what has happened. This is something historic: this result has shattered the myth that the mafia cannot be punished.’