by John Dickie
It is to be hoped that those scenes will soon be repeated in celebration of Matteo Messina Denaro’s capture. For when the Castelvetrano boss is finally caught, it will indeed mark yet another historic victory over an old evil.
Historic, but certainly not definitive. Sicilians will have every right to rejoice at the end of Messina Denaro’s career. Yet despite all the good news since the tragedies of 1992, few on the island will have any illusions that the Sicilian mafia is gone for good. The reasons why that is so—like the whole history of organised crime in Sicily—are partly to do with the Sicilian mafia’s strength, and partly to do with Italy’s weakness.
Every six months, the Anti-mafia Investigative Directorate (the FBI-equivalent set up by Giovanni Falcone) issues a report on the state of the fight against organised crime that is thick with data. Among the least conspicuous but most significant figures it records is the number of acts of ‘vandalism followed by arson’—a tell-tale sign that racketeers are at work, a proclamation of Cosa Nostra’s ability to make good its threats without resorting to murder. In 2011, there were 2,246 cases of vandalism followed by arson in Sicily: the highest in any Italian region, and an increase on the preceding years.
Of course, this figure is far from reflecting the full extent of Cosa Nostra’s protection regime. For one thing, extortion operations lie hidden among the figures for many other kinds of crime: a burglary in a warehouse, for example, is often just an invitation to the owner to find the right person to pay. But it does give an idea of just how difficult Sicily finds it to loosen the racketeers’ grip.
The anti-racket movement, Addiopizzo, as its coordinators are only too well aware, remains largely restricted to the better-off quarters of Palermo. Its impact in the suburbs and outlying settlements where the Sicilian mafia originated and is still strongest has been much more limited. The number of businesses that have signed Addiopizzo’s pledge has been growing steadily since 2004. But at the time of writing, it stands at 723. There is still a long, long way to go.
Why has the current weakness of Cosa Nostra not triggered a full-scale revolt against extortion? Fear is part of the explanation. Sicilians are only too well aware that any lapse in concentration by the authorities will allow Cosa Nostra to regroup, as it did after two separate waves of Fascist repression, for example, or again in the late 1960s. When one of the last remaining bosses from the pro-massacre wing was arrested in 1998, Guido Lo Forte, a magistrate involved in the hunt, issued a note of caution that is still valid today:
The experience of the last twenty years has helped us understand that there is never a time for triumphalism. Cosa Nostra is an organisation whose structure was created to dominate territory irrespective of the role of individuals, and it has an enormous power to regenerate and transform itself.
If a mafia boss is captured, his replacement is almost always ready to step up. If thirty bosses are captured, as in Operation Perseus, new leaders emerge from the rank-and-file. Cosa Nostra’s soldiers are all generals of crime, as Giovanni Falcone once said. Even when a whole generation of bosses and soldiers ends up behind bars for a while, their sons and nephews—boys brought up by the values of violence and honour—are eager to rise to the challenge. And when old bosses are released from their sentences, they too can step back into leadership roles. No criminal organisation venerates experience more than Cosa Nostra. Among the men identified in Operation Perseus who were due to sit on the re-formed kind of Commission was the legendary Gerlando Alberti, aged eighty-one. Alberti has been a constant presence in the crime pages since the 1960s. He was the boss who uttered the cocksure witticism: ‘The mafia? What’s that? A brand of cheese?’
One of Cosa Nostra’s often invisible sources of strength is its control over ordinary criminals. The mafia governs and taxes crime. Mafiosi live by extorting money from burglars and drug peddlers as well as from shopkeepers and construction companies. Control of the underworld begins in prison, and extends out into the streets: the local boss takes a cut of everything, on pain of death. There is a convention in Sicily that anyone who robs a heavy goods vehicle has to wait for twenty-four hours while mafiosi run checks on the booty; if it belongs to a firm with the right connections, then it has to be returned. Ordinary crime is no more likely to die out in Sicily than it is in any other part of the world, and Cosa Nostra’s authority over street criminals will take a long time to eradicate.
Fear has never been the only resource that Sicily’s Honoured Society can call on. Nor has the mafia ever been just a club for cut-throats. In 1876, a pioneering sociologist called mafiosi ‘middle-class felons’—meaning people who are upwardly mobile, judicious in their use of violence. These middle-class felons were experts at corrupt networking who had their hands on some of the most advanced sectors of the Sicilian economy, and who were able to draw on both passive and active support in the society around them. Cosa Nostra owes its ability to regenerate itself in large part to the fact that its members and allies have always included men who can blend in with the economic, professional and political elite, men who can mould a kind of consensus for their authority. The latest journalistic buzzword for such people is the ‘grey zone’: it is an area of society where complicity with the bosses is hard to detect, and where the partnership between the bosses and the businessmen, or between the gun and the laptop, is by no means always tilted in favour of the former. The grey zone is both invisible and pervasive: it cannot be seen on YouTube.
Michele Aiello, a construction entrepreneur who became the leading supplier of hospital facilities in Sicily, came straight out of the grey zone. He was a front for Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano. When he was convicted in 2011, his colossal $1 billion fortune was confiscated. (Alarmingly, just a few months into his fifteen-year sentence, he was granted house arrest on the grounds that he was allergic to beans.)
Another middle-class criminal is Aiello’s friend Giuseppe Guttadauro, a leading surgeon and boss of the Brancaccio precinct of Cosa Nostra. There is a very long line of mafia doctors—men who have not seen any incompatibility between the Hippocratic oath and the vows that Men of Honour make when they are initiated into Cosa Nostra. Infiltrating Italy’s semi-privatised health system has been one of Sicilian organised crime’s major sources of income over the last two decades.
The most recent man from the grey zone was unmasked in 2010. When Salvatore Lo Piccolo was taken in 2007, his soldiers chose one Giuseppe Liga to succeed him as boss of the San Lorenzo precinct of Cosa Nostra. Liga’s nickname in mafia circles is ‘the Architect’—for the prosaic reason that he is an architect. He has recently begun a twenty-year sentence.
Politics has been part of the Sicilian mafia’s grey zone since 1860. It would be naïve to think that the Andreotti faction of the Christian Democrat Party—the ‘Young Turks’ like Lima and Ciancimino—were the only ones in cahoots with Cosa Nostra. The overwhelming likelihood is that many of the gangsters’ political allies from the ‘bad old days’ of the 1980s got away scot-free. The mafia’s politicians have also been inserting their friends and hangers-on into the state machinery for decades.
In recent years, there have been some successful prosecutions of Sicilian politicians with mob ties. The most prominent case is that of Salvatore Cuffaro, another doctor, and the leader of Sicily’s regional government between 2001 and 2008. Cuffaro is now serving a seven-year term for ‘aggravated aiding and abetting of Cosa Nostra’, and he faces other charges too. Among the crimes that earned him his conviction is that of choosing electoral candidates on the say-so of the surgeon-cum-capo Giuseppe Guttadauro. Cuffaro was also deemed guilty of leaking information about criminal investigations into Guttadauro’s affairs that he derived from a ring of corrupt Carabinieri working in the Palermo prosecutors’ office. Despite successful investigations like this, colluding with the mafia remains a difficult crime to prove. Quite how many more Cuffaros there are out there is anyone’s guess.
Cosa Nostra is also difficult to destroy because of its a
bility to win supporters in the lawful economy. Over generations, mafia money and influence have dyed much of the island’s economic fabric varying shades of grey. No one knows how many companies in business now were set up with mob cash. Or have mafiosi as sleeping partners. Or earn from sweetheart contracts and cartel arrangements negotiated under Cosa Nostra’s tutelage. Or whose employees owe their jobs to a boss’s friendly word.
All of this political and commercial traction gives mafiosi enormous power to buy support. It pays to remember the words that the ‘devout’ boss, Pietro Aglieri, said to the magistrate who masterminded his capture:
When you come to our schools to talk about justice and the rule of law, our kids listen to you and follow you. But when those same kids grow up, and start looking for a job, a home, a bit of help with health or finance, who do they go looking for? You or us?
At its edges, the grey zone becomes lighter, spreading out into the sections of the economy, politics and society that are not directly under mob control. There are thousands of enterprises that operate on the borders of the law, paying under the table, cheating on taxes, falsifying accounts, and dodging regulations. Recourse to offshore banking and tax havens is routine among some sections of the bourgeoisie. A large proportion of Sicily’s enduringly sluggish economy depends on the state sector, where favouritism, pork-barrel politics and corruption are deeply entrenched vices. Bosses love to offer their own brand of law to such an arthritic and lawless wealth-accumulation system. The ‘off the books economy’, like the politics of patronage, is inherently susceptible to mafia influence.
Even when it is not in league with Cosa Nostra, a great deal of Sicily’s business, like much of its political system and state apparatus, is constitutionally averse to transparency. Whatever shade of grey they are, nobody wants the law looking too closely at what they are up to. Ivan Lo Bello is the head of Sicily’s Confindustria (the employers’ organisation) who introduced the policy of expelling members who paid protection money. He now lives under escort and has sent his children to be educated abroad. Reflecting on his experience late in 2011, he said the following:
I’m less worried by the response from the criminal organisations than by the response from politicians. In Sicily, we’ve been met by silent hostility. We have the feeling that we aren’t loved by town councillors, aldermen, party leaders and state functionaries who have an interest in maintaining the status quo.
There is a broad section of Sicilian society—from the lowliest shopkeeper to the smartest banker—for whom the fight against organised crime is, at best, extremely inconvenient.
Like Cosa Nostra, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta have a long history that testifies to their ability to adapt to new circumstances and recover from adversity. Like Cosa Nostra, but in subtly distinctive ways, they draw on organisational traditions and family know-how to find their way to the future. Moreover, everything I have said about the grey zone in Sicily applies in Campania and Calabria too. The toxic-waste and rubbish scandals demonstrate how bad business and bad politics open the door to the camorra. The ’ndrangheta would not be the ’ndrangheta without its own ‘middle-class felons’ and its own grey zone. Indeed, in Calabria, where the anti-racket movement is weak, and shady Masonic organisations are notoriously ramified, the grey zone extends even further into society than it does in Sicily. When Confindustria, the employers’ organisation, began applying measures against businesses with mafia contacts, other organisations followed its example. One example was the Palermo branch of ANCE, the association of building companies. When the Reggio Calabria branch of the same organisation staged a conference on the rule of law in June 2010, delegates spent their energies protesting against a whole range of legislation aimed at prohibiting relationships between mafiosi and businessmen.
Historically speaking, the ’ndrangheta, of all the mafias, has also perhaps been the most completely indifferent to ideology. It has always understood that the grey zone has no political colour. The ’ndrangheta’s longstanding bases in the North also demonstrate that the grey zone recognises no boundaries between regions. Corrupt politicians and businessmen do deals with ’ndranghetisti up and down the country.
Even in some areas of the national economy not directly touched by the tentacles of organised crime, sharp practice and corruption are rife—and are found far beyond the South and Sicily. In 2011, the chief of Italy’s national anti-mafia prosecutors’ office, Pietro Grasso, was talking about the whole of Italy when he said the following:
The mafia method, which involves promoting illicit privileges and cancelling out competition, has been cloned in some border areas of politics and the economy where predatory cliques of wheeler-dealers have sprung up.
The Italian state is also doing a great deal to alienate those citizens who do still manage to live according to the rules. Italy’s criminal justice system is in a lamentable state. The average length of a case is four years and nine months. There are many examples in the story I have told here of mafia-related trials that have dragged on for years, with verdicts being reversed at each successive tier of the system right up to the Supreme Court. These delays are monstrous for the accused, and bring continual discredit down upon the law. The delays can also be made to work in favour of the crooked. Citizens could be forgiven for thinking that the courts offer near-impunity to any white-collar criminal who can afford the lawyers needed to spin out proceedings until the statute of limitations takes effect.
The mafias latch onto the state at its weakest points. Prisons have always been one of the most shambolic parts of the Italian state and for that reason they have always been theatres of mafia activity. Indeed the camorra and the ’ndrangheta were both born behind bars. Since the nineteenth century, detainees in unsafe and overfull conditions have turned to the mafia organisations in the hope of protection, and mafiosi have imposed their own arbitrary and brutal rule on their fellow inmates. Italy’s penitentiaries are now more overcrowded than those of any European country other than Serbia. The suicide rate is nearly twenty times higher than it is in Italian society as a whole. No wonder that today, as in the nineteenth century, serving a first stretch is a rite of passage for aspiring gangsters, and most camorra recruits are formally enlisted in jail.
The state can even help push honest citizens into the grey zone. For example, it is utterly failing to impose fairness and transparency on the national economy. A vital case in point is the civil courts, dealing with disputes between citizens and companies, which are in an even worse state than the criminal courts. In 2011, the World Bank ranked Italy 158th out of 183 countries for the efficiency of its justice system in enforcing contracts, just below Pakistan, Madagascar and Kosovo, and three places above Afghanistan. At the end of June 2011, there was a backlog of 5.5 million cases in the civil courts. The average length of a case is seven years and three months. In Germany, when a supplier takes a customer to court for an unpaid delivery, it takes him or her an awfully long time to obtain a ruling from a judge—an average of 394 days. In Italy, the figure is 1,210 days. Which is an age in the life of a business: one could go bust six times over. No wonder some entrepreneurs are tempted to find less peaceful ways of recuperating credit. Mafiosi welcome such entrepreneurs with open arms and a crocodile smile.
Too much of Italy is dysfunctional. The state apparatus is mired in ineptitude, patronage and corruption. A large slice of the economy is cash-in-hand, and therefore invisible to the law; whole areas of the visible economy are hobbled by inefficiency and sleaze. Italian society seems incurably addicted to the same vices. Nor is there much prospect that Italians will elect a government honest, determined and authoritative enough to implement the reforms their country needs. For as long as Italy remains in this condition, then enduring victory over Cosa Nostra, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta will remain out of reach.
The Cold War gave the mafias a political shield. Behind it, they plundered, prospered, and pushed Italy to the brink of the abyss. But the mafias were around before
the Cold War, and they have survived its end. The headline-grabbing violence of the long 1980s may have abated, but organised crime is still a national emergency and a national shame.
However, Italy has more reasons for optimism today than at any point in the past. The anti-mafia magistrates and police forces of Italy are underpaid, underresourced, and understaffed. They operate in very hostile circumstances. Magistrates in mafia-run areas still have constant armed escorts, and live a monastic life for fear that they could be unwittingly photographed in the wrong company. Yet because of the dedication, courage and professionalism that so many of them display, Italy’s gangster fraternities are finding life harder than it has ever been. Mafiosi have their meetings bugged. They are tracked down when they flee from justice. Even in the wilds of Aspromonte, the ’ndrangheta is no longer having things entirely its own way. A mountain operations unit of the Carabinieri, the Cacciatori (‘hunters’) was founded in the early 1990s and equipped with helicopters to combat kidnapping. Since the ’ndrangheta got out of the kidnapping industry, the Cacciatori have had notable success in denying Calabrian mobsters full use of their traditional mountain redoubts.
Although the Italian justice system remains extraordinarily lenient and hyper-protective of the rights of the accused, the long history of mafia impunity seems to be over. Gangsters can now expect to be fairly convicted when they go to court. Despite the agonisingly slow workings of the justice system, mafiosi, camorristi and ’ndranghetisti are now serving thousands of years of prison. Just as importantly, billions of Euros of their stolen wealth have been confiscated. Inroads are even being made into the grey zone.