Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Most sensationally of all, Mutolo’s evidence was also used against seven-times Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti. When Tommaso Buscetta first met Falcone in 1984, he had warned that Italy was not ready for him to talk about Cosa Nostra’s links to politics. The tragic events of 1992 convinced Buscetta that the time was now right: he too implicated Andreotti. Another penitent, the heroin refiner Francesco ‘Mozzarella’ Marino Mannoia, told prosecutors that he had seen Andreotti come to a meeting in the early days of 1980 with Stefano Bontate, the Prince of Villagrazia. On the agenda of the meeting was Cosa Nostra’s plan to kill the President of the Sicilian Region, Piersanti Mattarella. Andreotti objected to the plan, according to Marino Mannoia. But Bontate overruled him, went ahead and killed Mattarella. Judges would later declare that this meeting marked the point at which Andreotti would increasingly distance himself from Cosa Nostra. Yet it remains a chilling episode. Andreotti knew in advance that the mafia was planning to kill his party colleague Mattarella, yet he did nothing to save him.

  Cosa Nostra tried to terrorise the penitents into silence. Santino Di Matteo, captured a few weeks after Riina, was one of the first men from within the group that had planned and executed the bomb attack on Giovanni Falcone to confess. As a result, Di Matteo’s eleven-year-old son Giuseppe was kidnapped and kept in a cellar for more than two years before being strangled and dissolved in acid.

  Nonetheless, more penitents followed—including from Shorty’s inner circle. In September 1992 a young drug dealer called Vincenzo Scarantino was arrested and charged with planting the bomb that killed Paolo Borsellino and his bodyguards. He too would confess.

  Sicily was breathing revolutionary air. The Catholic Church has always been the institution most resistant to change in Italy. Moreover, when it came to the subject of organised crime, it had long been unworthy of the faith shown by believers like Paolo Borsellino, not to mention the priests who have paid with their lives for resisting the mafia over the decades. But even the Pope could not fail to be moved by the mood radiating out from Palermo in 1992–93.

  In May 1993, John Paul II came to Sicily for the first time in a decade. In Agrigento soccer stadium, shortly after meeting the family of a young magistrate called Rosario Livatino who was murdered in 1990, the pontiff deviated from his prepared speech to deliver a jeremiad against the mafia and its ‘culture of death’. ‘Convert! Because one day the judgement of God will come!’ The Vatican had abandoned its traditional misgivings about the anti-mafia cause. Cosa Nostra, finally, was anathema.

  The camorra suffered almost as much as Cosa Nostra from the bombs in Sicily and the collapse of what was beginning to be called the First Republic.

  Camorra boss Pasquale Galasso was a prime example of what it can mean to be bourgeois in southern Italy’s organised crime hotspots. He was the son of a ‘man of respect’ from a small town between Naples and Salerno. His father owned land, traded agricultural produce, ran a dealership selling tractors and diggers, and farmed votes for the local Christian Democrat potentates. Pasquale had a Ferrari when he was barely out of his teens, and enrolled at university to study medicine. In 1975, at age twenty, he shot two men dead. With the help of his father’s lawyers, Galasso would eventually be acquitted on the grounds of self-defence. But in the meantime he was sent to Poggioreale prison. There he was taken under the wing of Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo.

  When the war with the Nuova Famiglia broke out at the end of the 1970s, Galasso received a visit at home from the Professor, who asked him to join the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. Galasso refused, and Cutolo had one of his brothers killed in revenge. Instead of the NCO, Galasso teamed up with the Nuova Famiglia, and in particular with someone else he had met in prison: Carmine ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri. The former medical student would be Mr Angry’s right arm through the rest of the war; together, the two of them would rise to the top of the Campanian underworld. When the Galasso family villa was finally raided in October 1991, the Carabinieri found a hoard of stolen art treasures, including the gilded throne that had once belonged to the last Bourbon King of Naples.

  In May 1992 Galasso was captured while chairing a meeting between construction entrepreneurs and members of his clan. Suspecting that he was about to be betrayed by his political friends, he ‘repented’ later that year and confessed to forty murders. His testimony allowed the police to reconstruct the whole history of the Nuova Famiglia, from its first emergence to its break-up in the wake of the victory over the Nuova Camorra Organizzata.

  Galasso’s tip-off also led to the arrest of Mr Angry himself, after nine years on the run. Investigators estimated that his wealth amounted to 1,500 billion lire—the biggest patrimony in Italian criminal history, equal to roughly $1,600 million in 2011. The newspapers made much play of the fact that there were heavily annotated copies of Dante and Goethe on Mr Angry’s bookshelves, and that he liked to listen to Bach while he was accepting bribes and ordering murders. This most serenely powerful of camorristi was sent to the formidable island prison of Pianosa, off the coast of Tuscany. There, after watching the Pope’s denunciation of the Sicilian mafia on television, he too resolved to tell all. As a result, the dominant camorra organisation in Campania fell to pieces.

  Together Carmine Alfieri and his lieutenant Pasquale Galasso would also do their bit to destroy the DC system of which they had formed an integral part: they named a slew of politicians with whom they claimed to have done business. Many of those politicians belonged to the political machine of Antonio Gava, a former Finance and Interior Minister for the DC.

  Like Cosa Nostra, the camorra reacted with ferocity to the threat from the penitents. On the day Mr Angry made his first court appearance, 8 April 1994, killers went looking for his twenty-five-year-old son Antonio. They were told he was staying at a friend’s parents’ house. They burst into the living room, pointing guns and demanding to know where the Alfieri boy was. In frustration, one of the killers sprayed a darkened bedroom with machine-gun fire. When they were at last convinced that the family did not know their target’s whereabouts, they left, but not before kneecapping one of Mr Angry’s distant relatives who was there. Only later was it discovered that there had been an innocent victim of the raid. Maria Grazia Cuomo was asleep in the bedroom that had been sprayed with machine-gun fire. She was fifty-five, unmarried, and rarely went out of the house because she was so ashamed of the purple birthmark that covered much of her face.

  Mr Angry’s son would eventually be killed in September 2002. His brother was shot dead in December 2004.

  The increased pressure from the authorities was also felt by the ’ndrangheta. Here too, there was a new batch of penitents whose testimonies launched important new trials, whose memories cast a light backwards into the history of the ’ndrangheta, and whose life stories illustrated the deathly psychological grip of the Calabrian mafia. Here are two examples.

  Giacomo Lauro was the son of a sculptor, who carved statues and reliefs for graves in Brancaleone. He was initiated into the ’ndrangheta at eighteen years old in 1960, back in the days when the Honoured Society held its meetings at night, by candlelight, and when tarantella-dancing triumvir don ’Ntoni Macrì was the dominant figure on the Ionian coast. After fighting in the First ’Ndrangheta War from 1974 to 1977, Lauro was imprisoned and then sent to internal exile in—of all places—northern Campania. There Lauro hooked up with Nuova Famiglia chiefs Antonio Bardellino and Carmine ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri and became one of the link-men between the ’ndrangheta and the camorra. He was a close adviser of Antonio ‘Ferocious Dwarf’ Imerti during the Second ’Ndrangheta War of 1985–91. He was arrested in Holland, where he had gone to receive payment for a cocaine shipment. In his pocket was found a plane ticket for Colombia. When Falcone and Borsellino were killed, he contacted the Italian embassy and told them he wanted to talk. Lauro’s evidence would be crucial in reconstructing the whole history of the Calabrian mafia since the ‘mushroom-picking’ summit on Montalto in 1969. Lauro’s evidence also shed
light on the ’ndrangheta’s most prominent political murder—that of corrupt Christian Democrat politician Ludovico Ligato in 1989.

  Giovanni Riggio came from the southern outskirts of Reggio Calabria. His father was a humble builder. In 1981, when he was eleven years old, his six-year-old brother was killed in a hit-and-run motor accident. Riggio saw the driver. Everyone else in the quarter knew who it was too. But nobody spoke. Riggio’s grief-stricken father turned to the authorities but received no help. One day he asked the local Carabiniere officer if he could help. The man just shrugged his uniformed shoulders and said, in so many words, that only the local boss could sort things out. Riggio’s father cried in desperation. Henceforth, his surviving son would have a burning resentment against the police, and a powerful fascination for the cocksure criminals who hung around in the local bar.

  As a teenager, Riggio began to hang around in the bar too. After several petty crimes, the poisonous language of ‘respect’ and ‘honour’ entered his bloodstream. In September 1987, he was initiated with the rite of Osso, Mastrosso and Carcagnosso. The following spring, when Riggio bumped into the man who had run over his little brother, he shot him dead on the spur of the moment. ‘Everyone saw me, and I immediately thought: now they’re going to arrest me. But they didn’t. No one said anything. No one talked. On the contrary: the day after, people were smiling at me, letting me know that I had done the right thing.’

  By this time, Riggio’s Local had been drawn into a territorial conflict. By the end of it, he had committed four murders himself and helped out in another ten. He was twenty-one years old.

  Riggio turned state’s evidence in September 1993, after falling in love with a girl from Rovigo who would subsequently become his wife. His evidence put his former boss and most of the Local behind bars. Asked what he thinks about the police now, he said, ‘Today I feel as if I am completely one of them, because when it comes down to it we’re all running the same risks and fighting for the same cause.’

  These penitents, as well as the increased police pressure, undoubtedly had their effects. For it was at this time that the ’ndrangheta finally decided that kidnapping attracted too many police into the wooded folds of the Aspromonte massif. The determination of one woman played a part in their decision too. Angela Casella’s son Cesare was kidnapped by the ’ndrangheta in January 1988. Several times during his 743-day-long captivity, she made the journey down to Calabria from the family’s home in Pavia, near Milan. She earned the press nickname ‘Mother Courage’ by appealing for help from the people on Aspromonte; she even chained herself to railings in several village squares. By the time her son was eventually released in January 1990, his case had become as well known as the Getty kidnapping. In the early 1990s, Calabrian gangsters duly abandoned the traffic in captives in which they had been the leading force among Italian criminal organisations—the business that had helped launch them into narcotics and construction.

  An important phase in the ’ndrangheta’s history was over. But of all the three mafias, the Calabrians were the least damaged by the crackdown in the early 1990s. One measure is the number of penitents. In 1995, 381 members of Cosa Nostra were recorded as state’s witnesses. There were markedly fewer penitents from the camorra in the same year: 192. But then former bosses like Carmine ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri inflicted disproportionate damage. The total of 133 ’ndrangheta defectors was the lowest of all the three historic criminal organisations.

  Relatively unscathed, the ’ndrangheta could now harvest the rewards of the long history of invisibility that distinguished it from the camorra and Cosa Nostra. Its decision to refuse Shorty Riina’s invitation to join Cosa Nostra in his war on the state also paid dividends. After 1992, only the ’ndrangheta among criminal organisations would remain mysterious, its internal structure still only partially understood, its existence as a single criminal organisation—rather than a loose ensemble of local clans—as yet unconfirmed.

  70

  NEGOTIATING BY BOMB: Birth of the Second Republic

  THE SHOCK FROM THE MURDERS OF FALCONE AND BORSELLINO WAS MOST INTENSELY felt among the magistracy: by their colleagues, obviously, but also by young magistrates who could only admire the two heroes from a distance, and try to live up to the spirit of self-sacrifice that they embodied. One such young magistrate summed up the feelings of a generation of his peers: ‘After the second bomb we were genuinely all ready to be killed. But we certainly had not resigned ourselves to mafia rule.’ The bombs of 1992 blasted out a deep trench between the representatives of the rule of law on the one side, and the criminal power system on the other. The era of dialogue, and compromise, and collusion between the state and the mafia that produced magistrates like Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo, the inspiration for the film In the Name of the Law, was over for good.

  Or at least it should have been. In the years since 1992, magistrates in Sicily and elsewhere have been haunted by questions that refuse to go away. Shorty Riina had set out clear aims for his organisation when the Supreme Court’s ruling on the maxi-trial went against him: ‘Wage war on the state first, so as to mould the peace afterwards.’ Cosa Nostra was trying to negotiate by bomb. But with whom was it negotiating? Did anyone try to appease Falcone and Borsellino’s murderers? Was a deal ever struck? Today, twenty years on, investigating magistrates believe they can now glimpse the answers to those questions.

  Cosa Nostra’s war on the state did not stop with the murders of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. Nor did the arrest of Shorty Riina in January 1993 bring a halt to the bombing. Indeed later that year, Riina loyalists within Cosa Nostra—bosses who became known as the organisation’s ‘pro-massacre wing’—launched a series of terrorist attacks aimed at high-profile targets on the Italian mainland.

  On 14 May 1993 a car bomb detonated in via Fauro, Rome. The intended victim was Maurizio Costanzo, a leading chat-show host who had been very vocal in his disgust at Cosa Nostra’s crimes. Luckily, although many people were wounded, Costanzo’s car avoided the explosion and nobody was killed: a massacre had been narrowly averted.

  Thirteen days later there was no such luck when a FIAT minivan stuffed with explosives blew up without warning in the shadow of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Five people died, including a nine-year-old girl. The van’s engine was found embedded in a wall on the other side of the river Arno, and three paintings in the Uffizi were damaged beyond all hope of restoration.

  There were five more fatalities in Milan’s via Palestro on 27 July. At just after 11 p.m., three firefighters, a police officer and a man who happened to be sleeping on a bench nearby were all caught in the blast from another car bomb.

  Barely an hour later, Rome became the next city to be targeted by Cosa Nostra’s car bombs. The Catholic Church was made to pay a price for the Pope’s denunciation of Cosa Nostra earlier in the year. One device damaged the façade of the Pope’s official seat in the city, the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano—the huge piazza before it hosts many political rallies. A second explosion destroyed the portico of the Church of San Giorgio in Velabro. There were no victims in either incident.

  Rome was also scheduled to be the venue for the worst slaughter of the whole campaign. On 31 October 1993, a Lancia Thema filled with dynamite was parked outside the Olympic Stadium where a soccer match between Lazio and Udinese was taking place. Activated by a remote control, the bomb was directed at supporters leaving the ground, and at the Carabinieri supervising the crowds. The device, which could have killed dozens, failed to detonate.

  The annals of Italian organised crime contain no precedent for the outrages of 1992–93. Throughout those two terrible years, the pro-massacre wing’s intentions remained consistent: ‘Wage war on the state first, so as to mould the peace afterwards.’ Riina’s demands were high: he wanted both to blunt the state’s most effective weapons against organised crime (the penitents, the Rognoni–La Torre law), and also to reverse the judicial results that those weapons had obtained (Falcone and Bors
ellino’s maxi-trial).

  As the massacres followed one another, Cosa Nostra’s need to negotiate grew ever more urgent, and the list of demands longer. In response to Falcone’s death, the government imposed a new prison regime, universally known as 41-bis (‘Clause 41a’), which aimed to prevent leading mafiosi communicating with the outside world, and therefore running their empires. (This was yet another of Falcone’s ideas.) In the middle of the night of 19–20 July, just hours after Paolo Borsellino’s murder, Clause 41a came into effect when military aircraft took 55 bosses from the Ucciardone to join 101 other top criminals in the bleak penal colony on the island of Pianosa off the Tuscan coast. The abolition of the new prison regime was quickly added to Cosa Nostra’s war aims.

  The whole narrative of the season of mafia massacres in 1992–93 remains worryingly open-ended in a number of crucial respects. For example, some suspect that negligence was not the only factor in play when Paolo Borsellino was left so shamefully underprotected after Falcone’s murder.

  In the immediate aftermath of Borsellino’s own death, his red diary, containing some of his most secret notes, disappeared from the scene of the massacre. (Borsellino’s younger brother Salvatore has adopted the red diary as a symbol of his quest for the truth.)

  When Shorty Riina was captured in 1993, his villa was left unguarded long enough thereafter for mafiosi to enter it, remove property and compromising documents, and even redecorate. Quite how this was allowed to happen has never been satisfactorily ascertained. The episode has led many to suspect that someone within Cosa Nostra betrayed Shorty to the authorities in exchange for favours.