Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  It was equally evident to Falcone’s enemies how significant the Supreme Court verdict was. Shorty Riina’s brutality had cut Cosa Nostra off from its political protectors. His leadership would be called into question, and his life was inevitably forfeit. The boss of all bosses declared that Cosa Nostra had been betrayed, and was entitled to take vengeance. His leading killer has since told judges that Cosa Nostra set out to ‘destroy Giulio Andreotti’s political faction led [in Sicily] by Salvo Lima’. Without Lima and Sicily, Andreotti would lose much of his influence within the DC. Thus, less than six weeks after the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Buscetta theorem, Salvo Lima received his reward for forty years of service to Cosa Nostra when he was gunned down in the Palermo beach suburb of Mondello by two men on a motorbike.

  Falcone understood the ground-shaking implications of Lima’s execution. As he said to a magistrate who was with him when the news broke: ‘Don’t you understand? You must realise that an equilibrium has been broken, and the entire building could collapse. From now, we don’t know what will happen, in the sense that anything may happen.’

  With the establishment of the DIA, the DNA and the DDAs, the confirmation of the Buscetta theorem, the political orphaning of Cosa Nostra, and finally the murder of Salvo Lima, Falcone’s brief months in the Ministry of Justice saw the dawn of an entirely new epoch in the long history of Italy’s relationship with the mafias. An epoch we are still living in. An epoch born to the sound of bombs.

  PART XII

  THE FALL OF THE FIRST REPUBLIC

  68

  SACRIFICE

  AT 17.56 AND FORTY-EIGHT SECONDS ON 23 MAY 1992, AT THE GEOLOGICAL observatory at Monte Cammarata near Agrigento in southern Sicily, seismograph needles jumped in unison. Sixteen seconds earlier, and sixty-five kilometres away, a stretch of motorway leading back to Palermo from the city’s airport had been torn asunder by a colossal explosion.

  At the scene of the explosion, three policemen, Angelo Corbo, Gaspare Cervello and Paolo Capuzza, felt a pressure wave and a flash of heat, and were thrown forwards as their car juddered to a halt under a cascade of debris. They were in the third vehicle of a three-car convoy escorting Giovanni Falcone and his wife back home to Palermo for the weekend. Groggy from the impact, they peered in horror at the devastation. Then it dawned on them that there could be a secondary assault, a death squad moving in to finish off the man under their protection. Capuzza tried to grab his M12 submachine gun, but his hands were shaking too much to pick it up. So, like the others, he opted for his service pistol. The three stumbled onto the tarmac. Falcone’s white FIAT Croma lay a few metres away, pitched forwards, on the edge of a four-metre-deep crater. Falcone sat in the driver’s seat behind a bulletproof door that refused to budge. Gaspare Cervello later recounted the scene: ‘The only thing I could do was to call Judge Falcone. “Giovanni, Giovanni.” He turned towards me, but he had a blank, abandoned look in his eyes.’

  Giovanni Falcone and Francesca Morvillo died in hospital that evening. Three of their bodyguards—Vito Schifani, Rocco Dicillo and Antonio Montinaro—were already dead: they were in the lead car of the convoy that took the full force of the detonation.

  The Capaci massacre, 23 May 1992. Falcone, his wife and three of their bodyguards were murdered by a bomb placed under the motorway leading back to Palermo from the airport.

  What makes a hero? Where did Falcone get his courage? After so many setbacks, so much terror? The Italian state was viewed with scorn by many of its citizens; its human and material resources were treated by all too many politicians as mere patronage fodder. Yet it was in the name of that very state that Falcone chose to give his life.

  The definitive answer to those questions lies hidden in psychological depths into which no historian will ever be able to reach. All the same, the question is far from being an idle one. Indeed it is extremely historically important. Because Falcone was not alone. His cause was shared by many others—beginning with his wife and his bodyguards. After Falcone, many others would be inspired by his story, just as he had been inspired by the example of those who died before him.

  When Falcone’s friends and family were asked about what drove him, they spoke of his upbringing, and the patriotism and sense of duty that were instilled in him from a young age. Such factors are undoubtedly important. But the most insightful account of Falcone’s motives came from the man who shared his destiny.

  On the evening of 23 June 1992, exactly a month after Giovanni Falcone passed away in his arms, Paolo Borsellino stood up in his local church, Santa Luisa di Marillac, to remember his great friend. As he made his way to the pulpit, the hundreds who had crowded into the candle-lit nave spontaneously got up to applaud him. Hundreds more could be heard clapping outside. Seven minutes later, his voice unsteady, Borsellino began one of the most moving speeches in Italian history:

  While he carried out his work, Giovanni Falcone was perfectly well aware that one day the power of evil, the mafia, would kill him. As she stood by her man, Francesca Morvillo was perfectly well aware that she would share his lot. As they protected Falcone, his bodyguards were perfectly well aware that they too would meet the same fate. Giovanni Falcone could not be oblivious, and was not oblivious, to the extreme danger he faced—for the reason that too many colleagues and friends of his, who had followed the same path that he was now imposing on himself, had already had their lives cut short. Why did he not run away? Why did he accept this terrifying situation? Why was he not troubled? . . .

  Because of love. His life was an act of love towards this city of his, towards the land where he was born. Love essentially, and above all else, means giving. Thus loving Palermo and its people meant, and still means, giving something to this land, giving everything that our moral, intellectual and professional powers allow us to give, so as to make both the city, and the nation to which it belongs, better.

  Falcone began working in a new way here. By that I don’t just mean his investigative techniques. For he was also aware that the efforts made by magistrates and investigators had to be on the same wavelength as the way everyone felt. Falcone believed that the fight against the mafia was the first problem that has to be solved in our beautiful and wretched land. But that fight could not just be a detached, repressive undertaking: it also had to be a cultural, moral and even religious movement. Everyone had to be involved, and everyone had to get used to how beautiful the fresh smell of freedom is when compared to the stench of moral compromise, of indifference—of living alongside the mafia, and therefore of being complicit with it.

  Nobody has lost the right, or rather the sacrosanct duty, to carry on that fight. Falcone may be dead in the flesh, but he is alive in spirit, just as our faith teaches us. If our consciences have not already woken, then they must awake. Hope has been given new life by his sacrifice, by his woman’s sacrifice, by his bodyguards’ sacrifice . . . They died for all of us, for the unjust. We have a great debt towards them and we must pay that debt joyfully by continuing their work, by doing our duty, by respecting the law—even when the law demands sacrifices of us. We must refuse to glean any benefits that we may be able to glean from the mafia system (including favours, a word in someone’s ear, a job). We must collaborate with justice, bearing witness to the values that we believe in—in which we are obliged to believe—even when we are in court. We must immediately sever any business or monetary links—even those that may seem innocuous—to anyone who is the bearer of mafia interests, whether large or small. We must fully accept this burdensome but beautiful spiritual inheritance. That way, we can show ourselves and the world that Falcone lives.

  As he spoke these words, Borsellino knew he was next. He knew that Falcone was his shield against Cosa Nostra. His family often heard him say, ‘It will be him first, then they will kill me.’ When Falcone went to work at the Ministry of Justice in Rome, Borsellino returned from Marsala to Palermo to pick up where his friend left off. Now Borsellino was widely rumoured to be the leading candidate for the jo
b Falcone had designed: ‘Super-prosecutor’, in charge of the National Anti-mafia Directorate, coordinating organised crime investigations at a national level. Borsellino had prepared the maxi-trial with Falcone. Sicily had chosen him, willing or not, to be Falcone’s heir as the symbol of the struggle against Cosa Nostra. He had been informed that the explosive meant for him was already in Palermo.

  All of which makes his courage all the more astonishing, and the Italian state’s failure to protect him all the more appalling.

  On 19 July 1992, a FIAT 126 stuffed with explosives was detonated outside Paolo Borsellino’s mother’s house in via d’Amelio. The magistrate had just rung the doorbell when he was torn limb from limb.

  With Borsellino died his five bodyguards, volunteers all: Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina, Claudio Traina, and a twenty-four-year-old female officer from Sardinia called Emanuela Loi. Several times during the previous fifty-six days, Borsellino had gone out alone to buy cigarettes in the hope that he would be shot, thus sparing anyone else from sharing his end.

  The via d’Amelio massacre, 19 July 1992. Paolo Borsellino and five police bodyguards were blown apart by a car bomb in Palermo.

  At his wife’s insistence, Borsellino’s funeral was private, held in the very church where he had pronounced his own epitaph on 23 June.

  The state funeral of his five bodyguards took place in Palermo Cathedral. It turned into a near riot. The streets around were closed off, and a police cordon tried to deny access—for reasons that nobody could understand. Among the vast crowd of grief-stricken citizens shut outside were members of the dead officers’ families. There was screaming, spitting, pushing and shoving. Police fought police, to cries of ‘they won’t let us sit with our dead’. As one eyewitness commented:

  The state seemed like a punch-drunk boxer throwing his fists in the wrong direction, at the people. The tens and tens of thousands of Palermitans who had shown up in the piazza to protest against the mafia were being treated as if they were a gigantic public order issue.

  Eventually, the cordon broke, and the crowd flooded into the cathedral. The coffins of Borsellino’s bodyguards were greeted with a chorus of ‘GIUS-TIZ-IA, GIUS-TIZ-IA.’ Justice. Justice.

  69

  THE COLLAPSE OF THE OLD ORDER

  THE SUMMER OF 1992 IN PALERMO WAS A TIME OF RAGE, DESPAIR AND DISBELIEF. It was also a time of enormous cultural and political energy as the healthy part of the city sought to broadcast its feelings. There were demonstrations, torch-lit parades, human chains . . . The tree outside Falcone’s house in via Notarbartolo became a shrine to the heroes’ memory. Balconies across the city were hung with sheets bearing anti-mafia slogans: ‘FALCONE LIVES!’; ‘GET THE MAFIA OUT OF THE STATE’; ‘PALERMO DEMANDS JUSTICE’; ‘ANGER & PAIN—WHEN WILL IT END?’

  The echoes from Palermo reverberated across a national political landscape that was in the throes of an earthquake. A many-layered crisis was in the process of utterly discrediting the system that had been in force since 1946. The end of the Cold War was working its delayed effects.

  Falcone died on 23 May 1992 in the middle of a power vacuum in Rome. Recent general elections had witnessed a slump in the DC vote. ‘Collapse of the DC wall’, ran one newspaper headline. Following the elections, the beginning of a new five-year parliamentary cycle coincided with the beginning of a new seven-year term for the President of the Republic. A governing coalition had yet to be formed, and newly elected Members of Parliament and the Senate were still busy haggling over who would be the next President of the Republic. Giulio Andreotti was playing a canny game as ever, waiting for other candidates to be eliminated before putting himself forward. The keys to the Quirinale, the Head of State’s palace in Rome, were to be the crowning glory of his long career.

  The shame and horror surrounding Falcone’s death made Andreotti’s candidature unthinkable. In the coming months, the most powerful politician in post-war Italy would be increasingly marginalised. Oscar Luigi Scalfaro, a respected Christian Democrat senior statesman with no ‘odour of mafia’ around him, was rapidly elected President.

  However, Italy was not allowed to regain its equilibrium after 23 May. On the evening of Borsellino’s assassination, 28 million people followed the news special on the state broadcaster RAI, and a further 12 million watched the horror unfold on the private channels. ‘The mafia declares war on the state’, ran one national headline the next day. The war, in actual fact, had been declared more than a decade earlier. It now looked as if the state was about to lose that war. Not only that, but the country itself seemed to be falling apart.

  On 16 September 1992, after months of pressure on international currency markets, the lira was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism—the forerunner of the planned single European currency. The debts racked up by the party-ocracy had destroyed Italy’s financial credibility.

  The day after the lira’s exit from the ERM, Cosa Nostra killed another key component of what had once been the DC machine in Sicily: Ignazio Salvo, the tax collector brought down by the maxi-trial, was shot dead at the door of his villa. Like Salvo Lima, Ignazio Salvo paid the price for failing to protect Cosa Nostra from Falcone and Borsellino.

  Meanwhile, a huge corruption scandal had begun, with investigations into the Socialist Party in Milan. The summer and autumn months witnessed more and more politicians and party functionaries targeted by investigations grouped under the name ‘Operation Clean Hands’. The scandal continued to gain momentum until it engulfed the weakened ‘party-ocracy’. By the end of 1993, some two hundred Members of Parliament were under investigation. In January 1994, the Christian Democrat Party was formally dissolved. The First Republic, as it is now known, was dead. Cosa Nostra had helped finish it off.

  Yet precisely because the old regime was toppling, Italy found the will to respond to public dismay and fight back. By murdering Falcone and Borsellino, Shorty Riina and his entourage brought down the state’s retribution not just on themselves, but on the whole Italian underworld. For a brief and extraordinary season, between Borsellino’s death in July 1992 and the spring of 1994, Italy’s institutions finally called the mafias to account for more than a decade of slaughter. Even crude numbers registered the transformation. Between 1992 and 1994, 5,343 people were arrested under the Rognoni–La Torre anti-mafia law. In 1991 there were 679 mafia-related homicides in Italy; by 1994 the figure had fallen to 202.

  Immediately after Borsellino’s murder, 7,000 troops were sent to Sicily to relieve the police of more mundane duties. New anti-mafia legislation was rushed through parliament—legislation that arrived more than a century late, but which was welcome nonetheless. A witness-protection programme was set up. Just as importantly, a tough new prison regime was imposed on underworld bosses. At long last, Italy had the means to stop jails like the Ucciardone becoming command centres for organised crime.

  The fight against the mafia was also stepped up on the international front. In September 1992, the Cuntrera-Caruana clan, key members of the heroin-dealing Transatlantic Syndicate, suffered a serious blow: three Cuntrera brothers, Pasquale, Paolo and Gaspare, were extradited from Venezuela.

  A new Chief Prosecutor from Turin, Gian Carlo Caselli, volunteered to enter the Palermo war zone. Caselli’s bravery and absolute professional integrity were not the only things that made him the perfect man for the job. He had a highly distinguished record investigating the Red Brigades in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He had experience of handling penitents, and of the rigours of life under armed escort. He had also supported Falcone at every stage of his battles with the High Council of the Magistracy. Palermo prosecutors were galvanised as never before.

  After his capture in 1993, Riina is made to pose before a picture of one of his most illustrious victims, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.

  In January 1993, the very day of Caselli’s arrival in Sicily, Shorty Riina was captured as he and his driver circled a roundabout on the Palermo ring road. He had bee
n on the run since 1970. But as with all the many fugitives from justice in Cosa Nostra, ‘on the run’ was an entirely inappropriate metaphor. In all his twenty-three years of evading capture, Riina had not only masterminded his coup d’état within Cosa Nostra, managed his economic empire and murdered countless heroic representatives of the law, he had also married in church, fathered and schooled four children, and obtained the best medical care money could buy.

  Riina’s arrest resulted from inside information from his former driver. Since Borsellino’s death, magistrates had been offered a flood of such tip-offs. The number of penitents grew exponentially too. Some were encouraged by the new measures to protect them; others were afraid of the new prison regime; and some were just shocked to their human core by what happened to Falcone and Borsellino. Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo, the Ferrari-driving heroin broker, turned state’s evidence in May 1992 after months of gentle encouragement by Giovanni Falcone. He was the last man to be interrogated by Borsellino. The via d’Amelio bomb removed the residues of Mutolo’s reticence, and from then on he held nothing back. Having been in prison with bosses close to Riina until the spring of 1992, he was able to supply the first insider account of Cosa Nostra’s strategy following the Supreme Court’s ruling on the maxi-trial. He also provided evidence that led to the arrest, on Christmas Eve 1992, of Bruno Contrada, former chief of police of Palermo and Deputy Head of Italy’s internal intelligence service. Contrada would ultimately be convicted of collusion with Cosa Nostra.