by Peter Robb
There were mafiosi in personal crisis in the nineteen eighties because the organization itself was in crisis. Mafia values were in crisis. At the very time Cosa Nostra in Palermo was acquiring quite unprecedented wealth from the international traffic in heroin and cocaine, its old structures and friendships had been shattered by the rise of an unusually brutal and treacherous mafia clan from out of town, the family from Corleone and its chief Salvatore Riina, called Uncle Totò by the men of honour. When the mafiosi in crisis began to collaborate, they enabled Falcone and Borsellino to form for the first time in history a detailed understanding of the hitherto secret organization called Cosa Nostra, whose interested friends in government, the judiciary, the church and the media had insisted for decades didn’t exist. The outcome of that collaboration was a monumental judicial defeat for the organization, a mass trial begun in the mid-eighties, which in all its phases of appeal had run for six years and which had received its final and almost unexpected sanction by the supreme court two months before the death of Salvo Lima.
Falcone and Borsellino had paid a high price for their success against Cosa Nostra. They’d disturbed too many interests. The Palermo maxitrial had convicted hundreds of leading mafiosi. It had ratified their thesis that Cosa Nostra was a single organization. But after the initial convictions in 1987 Falcone had been blocked by professional jealousy and obscure manoeuvres from heading the investigating magistrates’ antimafia pool and continuing its work in the late eighties. The pool itself was dismantled and its efforts dispersed. Falcone had narrowly escaped death in a bomb attack engineered by highly refined minds, as Falcone put it, and highly placed informers. Borsellino transferred to the dire posting of Marsala, in an area of western Sicily that had an even higher density of mafia activity than Palermo itself and was the centre of the transatlantic heroin traffic. Falcone had gone to Rome in April 1991 to head a new office in the justice ministry and Borsellino had ended up back in Palermo at the end of the year, in Falcone’s old job.
Everyone had seen Falcone’s move to Rome as a defeat or a surrender, both his colleagues and, it later turned out, Cosa Nostra. A former mafioso called Gaspare Mutolo explained later The climate relaxed with the end of the antimafia pool … and finally with the transfer of Falcone to Rome. He was now considered less dangerous to the organization … we used to joke that he’d end up as ambassador to some south American country. Soon after that, Cosa Nostra realized it’d made a mistake. New decrees started rattling out of Rome, where Falcone now had the ear of the minister Martelli. In less than a month there was a new law on recycling money and less than a month after that another law on mafia influence on local government. Six months after Falcone’s arrival, the coordinating antimafia investigation police group was set up, and a month after that the national antimafia prosecutor’s office. District antimafia pools were created, an antiracket law was passed, house arrest was ended for mafiosi appealing convictions. Measure by measure, Falcone was putting Italian justice into a condition to systematically pursue organized crime for the first time in history. Gradually we began to understand that Doctor Falcone was becoming even more dangerous in Rome than he’d been in Palermo.
The April elections that followed Lima’s murder in 1992 were a disaster for the ruling parties. The DC got its lowest vote in history and the deal to make Andreotti president fell apart. Andreotti was now wearing Lima like an albatross. Craxi was mired in the corruption scandal. Voting for the president went on interminably. Falcone had been nominated to a new post as superprosecutor of all mafia cases, but this too got stuck in the general paralysis as government in Italy collapsed. On May 19 Falcone said in alarm Cosa Nostra never forgets. The enemy’s always there, waiting to strike … we’ve got to act quickly to build the superprosecutor’s office … and we can’t even agree on electing the president of the Republic.
Four days later, on the Saturday afternoon of May 23, Falcone and his wife, the magistrate Francesca Morvillo, flew back to Palermo on a secret flight in a government plane. Falcone always went home to Palermo for the weekend. The plane landed around six in the evening and the Falcones were met by their three-car escort and seven bodyguards. Three of the guards went in the front car. Three more went in the last. In the middle car, Falcone took the wheel himself with Francesca Morvillo beside him, and got his driver to sit in the back. It was a small breach of procedures, a little indulgence. Before, a helicopter had always gone ahead to oversee the route into the city, but security had been cut back to save money, and the convoy set off fast along the freeway without aerial clearance.
Punta Raisi is one of the world’s more dangerous airports. On the far western edge of Palermo, it takes up the last of the narrow strip between the cobalt sea and the mountainous teeth that encircle the city. The freeway to the city curves parallel to the coast, a little inland, affording glimpses of the sea on one side and olive groves under the rocky outcrops on the other, until both are obscured by houses and small factories closer to the city. It was where the freeway runs through Capaci, an outer suburb under mafia control, like all the suburbs of Palermo, that a skateboard had been used to manoeuvre five hundred kilos of plastic explosive into a drainage tunnel under the freeway a few days earlier. When the Falcone convoy passed on its way to Palermo that Saturday near dusk, a group of men of honour had been watching the freeway traffic for some time. They’d sawn off olive branches to get a better view, and littered the ground with the butts of the Merit cigarettes they’d smoked. As the first car passed over the drainage tunnel, the boss Giovanni Brusca detonated the explosive by remote control. Hell opened up before us, said a driver following the convoy. A terrifying explosion … a scene from the apocalypse … screams of terror … an unreal silence. The explosion killed the three in the first car instantly. The guards in the last car were only slightly injured. In Falcone’s car in the middle of the crater Francesca Morvillo was unconscious, eyes open, looking up at the sky. Falcone’s face was a mask of blood, his head moving, his body trapped. Their driver in the back was injured but alive. Falcone died when they got him to hospital. Francesca Morvillo woke for a moment, asked Where’s Giovanni?, fell unconscious again and died later that evening. My account with Cosa Nostra remains open, Falcone had said the year before. I’ll settle it with my death, natural or otherwise.
Paolo Borsellino got to the emergency room in time to see him die. He came out and embraced his daughter, his face lost, shaken, he’d aged visibly in just a few minutes. He wept and his daughter wept and she was crying too because of what she’d heard him say a thousand times. Giovanni’s my shield against Cosa Nostra. They’ll kill him first, then they’ll kill me. At the funeral Giorgio Bocca, a tough and sceptical journalist not easily moved to admiration, watched Paolo Borsellino place his hand on Giovanni Falcone’s coffin, in his black legal gown with the embroidered white shirt and for the first time he looked to me bellissimo, like an antique knight swearing fidelity before his fallen comrade. Bocca also thought he saw something new, or something old renewed at this public moment.
It was years since I’d seen the faces of honest and brave Italians, not the grotesque and greasy masks of a corrupt and mediocre power, years since I’d seen people’s pain and anger … I saw the young people’s faces, crowds of young people, as if they’d woken from a long sleep …
Paolo Borsellino knew he had little time. Falcone had become a martyr in the Italian manner and now Borsellino found that people seem to think I’m a saint. The neofascists proposed him for president, the ministers for justice and the interior wanted him for the superprosecutor’s job Falcone had been blocked from getting, and all Borsellino wanted was to find Falcone’s murderers in the time he had left. New men of honour, shaken by the killings, wanted to tell him their stories and he listened and he tried to learn what he could. His newest witness told him Cosa Nostra was making so much money from drugs and government contracts it couldn’t launder the money fast enough. It’d rented an apartment that was filled with banknotes, a c
ash warehouse. Borsellino had never worked so hard, harder even than for the maxitrial. His family never saw him. He was gone when they rose in the morning and came home when they were asleep at night. He seemed to have death in his eyes, said a colleague. His assistant prosecutor said he was a man in a tremendous hurry … someone who knew that his hours were numbered … he felt that time was running out on him.
By the middle of July the press was announcing the end of a regime. The corruption being revealed in Milan was vaster than anybody could have imagined, and the governing class was going under. July 19 was a Sunday and before sunrise Borsellino wrote a letter to a school teacher, explaining his love of Sicily, his sense that he had a duty to work on its problems, his confidence in the growing awareness of its young people. He went out of town that summer Sunday with his wife, out in a boat with friends, then to lunch with other friends. Later in the afternoon he went back to Palermo with his escort of six. He wanted to see his mother, who was alone that day. Borsellino’s weekend visits to his mother’s place in via D’Amelio had become almost predictable, but he wouldn’t give them up. There were cars parked around the entrance to the apartment block, despite an earlier request that it be cleared for security. The three cars pulled up, five agents, four men and a woman, surrounding Borsellino with their machine guns ready. When Borsellino pressed the bell at the gate, he was blown to pieces by a car bomb explosion that killed all five around him too, destroyed all the apartments facing the street to the fourth floor, though the building was thirty feet from the road, and shattered its windows as high as the eleventh floor. A few days later Antonino Caponnetto, the elderly founder of that Palermo magistrates’ antimafia pool, to whose great maxitrial the events of 1992 were an epilogue, arrived from Florence to weep in the ruins of via D’Amelio. It’s all over, the old man said. It’s all over. But it wasn’t.
* * *
FOURTEEN YEARS earlier, heading for south America in the late European summer, I’d stopped off for a return visit to the Mezzogiorno and ended up settling in Naples. In the spring of that year the former Italian prime minister Aldo Moro had been ambushed and kidnapped in Rome by terrorists of the Red Brigades. He’d been on his way to parliament for the swearing-in of yet another conservative DC government headed by Giulio Andreotti, a government for which Moro himself had most remarkably won the support of Italy’s huge communist party, the PCI. After the murder of his driver and bodyguards, Moro was held prisoner for a couple of months in a secret place in the middle of Rome and then murdered. The events of Moro’s long imprisonment, the government’s total failure to find him or do anything to save his life, were extremely puzzling. The government had masked its inaction as intransigence, defending the state by not compromising with terrorism. Knowing the state of their state, Italians were sceptical about this. Still, the terrorist emergency wasn’t a normal time. Learning the language, I followed the debate, and the deepening of a crisis that seemed entirely ideological, with interest and detachment.
Then other things started happening. A year after Moro’s murder, a journalist named Pecorelli was found shot in a Rome street. He’d been about to publish a piece on Moro’s successor as prime minister, Giulio Andreotti. A new pope, intending to clear up the Vatican’s tangled finances, had been found dead in bed in the papal apartments a month after his election. The next pope was shot and wounded in St Peter’s square three years later. The Vatican bank was involved at the time in a huge financial collapse, and the government-appointed receiver of the Milan bank that caused it had been shot dead in the street. An Italian airliner flying from Genoa to Palermo with eighty-nine people aboard was shot down in the Mediterranean and the source of the missile attack was never identified. A bomb killed eighty-five people in Bologna station. A secret masonic lodge was discovered that had been plotting a coup d’état. Its members included dozens of leading politicians, magistrates, armed forces chiefs and secret service personnel, journalists and media owners. The general who’d eliminated left-wing terrorism was sent to Palermo and murdered there with his wife less than three months later. Hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people died in a couple of years of shooting wars in Naples and Palermo. There was another and bigger banking crash in Milan, the world’s worst since the war, and the man who caused it was found hanging under Blackfriars bridge in London. His mentor Michele Sindona, the architect of the earlier collapse, was himself found dead of strychnine poisoning in a top security prison. Another bomb killed eighteen people on the Naples–Milan express train. A lawyer’s severed head was found in a parked car in Naples. And so on and so on and so on.
These events had a certain horrid fascination, and their unfolding enthralled, since nothing was ever explained or resolved. They seemed glimpses of the workings of something larger, something big and hideous that was working itself out in the dark. These constellations of mysteries were themselves constellated by other mysteries, not necessarily lesser, just more briefly or imperfectly glimpsed, or involving more obscure players, less spectacular events and therefore less able to compete for attention. A lot of the players in this endless turbid soap had entered the drama not as players at all but as observers, inquirers, searchers after truth. They were magistrates, journalists, police, lawyers, people trying to ascertain the facts who’d been sucked in and become part of the story itself and usually ended up as its stiffs. Others never went under. They appeared in episode after episode. Many of the episodes seemed unrelated, though you sensed hidden continuities. What you needed was an index, a key to all mythologies, a theorem, a Big Picture into which all the details would fit. Of course I never found one. In the nineteen-eighties Falcone and Borsellino had used the information provided by former mafiosi to elaborate a theorem for Cosa Nostra, the analysis that linked and explained the thousands of mysteries of organized crime in Sicily. What was needed now was something even larger, something that would take in the secret life of the Italian republic too, and the other orbiting mysteries of America and the Vatican and the east.
The most frequently recurring name in the linked and nested tales of the thousand and one nights of Italy was Giulio Andreotti’s. He’d been around since the forties, a member of pretty well every government in the Italian republic. He’d been prime minister for a good part of the seventies. He was prime minister that disastrous spring of 1992 when everything fell apart. Until that spring of 1992, he was routinely called the finest political mind in Europe. He was a survivor, a winner. Of course his name would come up again and again. It came up too during that seething unstable interregnum after the collapse. Former men of honour started to speak about their former political friends. Most of all, about life senator Andreotti. Long and intricate stories were told about the secret history of crime and politics in Italy, and the magistrates who heard them found a deal of objective confirmation. As they wove the stories and the evidence into a thesis, all the old names and incidents of the eighties started coming together. The politician Moro and his death. The banker Sindona and his death. The journalist Pecorelli and his death. The general Dalla Chiesa and his death. And all the other mysteries of the living and the dead started falling into place around the tiny aging figure of the longest lived statesman in Europe. After fourteen years, after the massacres of 1992, I’d left Italy for good, yet I was drawn irresistibly back in 1995 because at the end of the summer Andreotti was going on trial. He was going on trial in Palermo for association with the mafia and a few weeks later he was going on trial in Perugia for murder.
I had some time in Palermo before the Andreotti trial started, and some inquiries to make. I went back to the Vucciria next day and up to the Shangai for lunch, and from the verandah I noticed a very thin young man examining a fish. He was inspecting it closely and speaking intensely with the stallholder. After a few minutes he moved on to another stall and looked rapidly over its wares. Then he moved on again. The fishmongers seemed to know him. He was young and thin and rather poorly dressed and haggling and the sellers were treating him with
a certain respect. He was worth convincing, you could see they thought. He was in his early twenties and wearing an embroidered maghrebin cap. His chin had a few days’ growth on it. I lazily observed his movements round the fish stalls of the little square, until someone banged down the sarde alla beccafica. These were fresh sardines splayed open and cooked wrapped around some fishy forcemeat. They must have been called that because they look like the little birds, fig-peckers, long since gone like most birds from Italy, that Byron liked to eat.
When I got down the grubby staircase he was still there. He was so thin that at certain angles he nearly vanished from sight. He had made up his mind to buy, though not from a single seller, buying sarago from one stall, swordfish steaks from another and fresh sardines from a third. He headed off up a dogleg alley and I followed him. After a few yards he turned right into an even narrower lane and slipped into a doorway on the left. He entered a kitchen, and spoke with a cook about his own age, a fair bit more corpulent and wearing glasses and a serious look. Then its door swung shut. The lane, a little further on, opened to the left on a miniscule piazza before a derelict church. A couple of parked cars took up most of its space, but on the other side some heavy earthenware pots had been pulled out around two massive umbrellas of clean white canvas. A couple of tables and some empty chairs stood under them. A big stone step led to a closed glass door. The furnishings looked clean and new in the dirty piazzetta and yet apart from a large and grubby Persian cat sleeping on the step there was no sign of life. It looked like the restaurant whose kitchen was in the lane. Pushing on up a steep little lane, I arrived at piazza San Domenico. I thought I’d return to that piazzetta.
* * *
THE VILLA’S name, the one on the fax that had reached me in Sydney from Palermo, had a faint resonance. It wasn’t till I got there weeks later that the distant memory took form.