by Peter Robb
Captain Dalla Chiesa described Dr Navarra, the capomafia of Corleone, in his reports as
cunning, cultivated, a fluent but careful speaker … uninterested in personal profit … careless in his dress, corpulent and florid, a keen card player and enthusiastic hunter, he succeeded in creating an air of considerateness that particularly among the poorer people earned him respect and gratitude.
Dr Navarra was better-educated than most, but otherwise the very image of the old mafia boss. Cards, hunting and the DC were far from his only interests outside medicine. His cousin captain De Carlo got him US army authorization to commandeer abandoned military vehicles, and he used these to found the still-flourishing bus company, the AST, whose blue bus had brought me to Corleone. He was also heavily into petrol distribution and hospital management and medical insurance. The Corleonesi called Dr Navarra Our Father, and when they mentioned his name made the sign of the cross.
Liggio and Mr Vincent murdered the unionist at the orders of Dr Navarra and Dr Navarra was acting in the interests of the landowners, as were his peers all round western Sicily. From 1946 to 1948 was the time of the great political massacre. Even one brave demochristian mayor died for trying to stop the mafia joining his local DC. Liggio was a cruel and arrogant and hugely ambitious youth, but Dr Navarra needed him and his band, however dangerous they were, because Mr Vincent still nursed secret hopes of taking over Corleone. When Liggio and Mr Vincent were eventually tried for the unionist’s murder, long after the event, some witnesses retracted their stories and others disappeared and the two were acquitted. Identifying Liggio as the killer, Dalla Chiesa also charged Navarra in his report with murdering the shepherd boy. Navarra was tried in Palermo, sentenced to five years’ exile in Calabria and through the agency of his friends in the DC was welcomed back to Corleone by the town band in the space of a few months.
The young Totò Riina meanwhile at the age of nineteen had killed a friend during a game of bowls in Corleone and been imprisoned. It was the same age at which his son would commit his first murder in 1995, and I wondered whether Giovanni Riina had been impelled by Oedipal haste to match his father. Totò Riina reappeared out of jail in 1955, after only six years, and went to work for Liggio, butchering stolen cattle for sale in Palermo. The stolen animals were hidden in the magical wood at Ficuzza. Liggio was quietly forming the nucleus of his own cosca, spurred on by his uncle, who’d told him he couldn’t go on being a picciotto all his life. Cosca, the more exact Sicilian word for a mafia family, I was told derived from artichoke, as indicating how the members of the family were equal, overlapping, close together around the centre, like the artichoke’s leaves, but I could find no confirmation of this etymology.
The slowly building enmity between Dr Navarra and Liggio was also a conflict between the values of power and money. Liggio’s prime value was money, whereas the doctor was a power man. Even captain De Carlo now found his cousin too old fashioned in this way. The ex-marine had moved to Palermo, made political friendships and seen how the new city mafia was growing with the DC. It was time to get into construction, public works and the huge bureaucracy of autonomous Sicily. The crisis came in 1958 when Liggio and Riina were ambushed and shot at while riding their horses at dawn to their secret abbattoir. Liggio escaped with a flesh wound. By saving Liggio’s life, Riina strengthened his status as second in command. He was in Liggio’s heart. Dalla Chiesa’s carabinieri reported the attack as Navarra’s, but a retired man of honour later claimed it was organized by Liggio’s uncle and the captain, and intended to provoke a war with Navarra.
It did that. A month later Navarra and another doctor were ambushed in their car and pulped by machine gun fire. It was the start of a war in Corleone that lasted five years and cost a hundred and forty ascertained killings and uncounted disappearances. Riina, who went into hiding, was identified as Liggio’s main killer. By 1963 Liggio had won the war of extermination, but that year an intensive police action against the mafia throughout Sicily, after the death of seven carabinieri in a car bomb explosion, sent thousands of leading mafiosi to jail. The Cupola governing Cosa Nostra and all the families were dissolved until the trouble passed. At the end of the year Riina was arrested at a road block and five months later Liggio joined him in the Ucciardone. Liggio now had Pott’s disease, and spent his time in jail reading Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams. Riina played chequers and his opponents made sure he always won.
When Liggio and Riina finally went on trial in Bari with sixty-odd others for the killings in the five year war in Corleone, judges and jury were well softened up with ominous messages and all were acquitted in 1969. But when Riina returned to Corleone he was arrested again and exiled to a small town near Bologna in the north. Instead of going, Riina disappeared. He would be on the run for the next twenty-four years and spend nearly all of that time in Palermo. The Cosa Nostra commission was formed again at the end of 1970 as a temporary triumvirate of two Palermo bosses, Gaetano Badalamenti and Stefano Bontate, and Liggio, representing Corleone and the other families of the interior. Liggio wasn’t a man to share power. Five months later he and Riina assassinated the Palermo chief prosecutor because Liggio felt he was favouring Badalamenti. It was the first assassination of a judge since the war, the first distinguished corpse, a challenge at once to the state and to the Palermo mafia. Three years later Riina married Ninetta Bagarella, the sister of another rising man of honour from Corleone. The priest who married them in secret was a man of honour. The four children were born in rapid succession thereafter.
Hunted for the killing of the judge and convalescent after being operated on by the Italian president’s surgeon in a private clinic in Rome, Liggio now retired to a safe house in the country. Riina’s rival as heir apparent was Bernardo Provenzano, who was admired as a killing machine but little else. He lacked peasant cunning. Shoots like an angel but he’s got the brains of a chicken, decided Liggio, and kept Provenzano as company in the country, sending Riina to Palermo as his stand-in. Liggio was a fussy and querulous invalid. Riina meanwhile, whose fault Liggio saw as biting off more than he could chew, was cultivating a smiling affable manner. People had always found Riina a killer utterly without charisma, but he was working on it. I never saw him angry, said the pentito Mutolo, sometimes a little flushed but never aggressive or rude. Buscetta also found that he looks like a peasant, true, but he’s got a very diplomatic manner and God only knows how much diplomacy matters in Cosa Nostra. He was a great persuader and he knew how to work people up when he needed to. The pentito Calderone remarked that Riina had cunning and ferocity, a rare combination in Cosa Nostra.
At this time, the start of the seventies, the Corleonesi were badly short of money. Several big trials, with huge costs in lawyers’ fees and bribes, had precipitated a crisis. Riina’s mission in Palermo was to make money fast and he did it by kidnapping. This was a great financial success for the Corleonesi, but the wealthy objects of the kidnappings were all people with ties to the demochristian political establishment and the Palermo mafia families, who had such richly nuanced relationships with that establishment. Bontate and Badalamenti were ropable that all the old understandings were threatened, but they were impotent because both happened to be in the Ucciardone at the time. Liggio, Riina and Provenzano pissed themselves laughing at the memory of the two enraged bosses, like a couple of throttled chooks, though formally Liggio promised to rein in Shorty Riina. He’ll be even shorter when we’ve finished with him, said Badalamenti. Liggio resumed his place in the Cosa Nostra triumvirate. The Palermo provincial commission was reconstituted and its first act was to forbid kidnapping in Sicily. Kidnapping put valuable friendships at risk. In 1972 Liggio moved to Milan, and got involved in kidnapping on the continent. One job was the Getty boy, taken by the Calabresi of the ’ndrangheta and held in the Aspromonte. The old tightwad Paul Getty had to be sent a piece of his grandson’s ear before he paid up.
When the regional Cupola of Cosa Nostra wa
s properly reconstituted in 1975 with six members, one representative for each mafia province, it solemnly confirmed the ban on kidnapping. Riina’s response was to kidnap the potentissimo Nino Salvo’s father-in-law, one of the richest men in Sicily, who was seventy and died of a heart attack. The Salvos were very close indeed to Bontate and Badalamenti, and the Palermo bosses, as the pentito Antonio Calderone later put it, were made to look like shit to Nino because they couldn’t even get the body back. This had been the whole point. Riina was telling the Salvos where the power centre now lay. The huge income from the ransoms had given him new clout, and by sharing it around Riina made new allies. The first was the family of San Giuseppe Jato headed by Bernardo Brusca, and it was an alliance that lasted. When Brusca Sr and Riina Sr were long in jail, the sons Giovanni of each were killing together until their own arrests in 1996.
One by one other families entered the Corleone orbit. Palermo, Trapani, San Giuseppe, Partinico, Mazara del Vallo. Riina joined forces with the camorra in Naples. He organized country lunches and barbecues for the boys, and turned out to be a great cook and a specialist in game. Once he made an exquisite casserole of fox, but didn’t tell them what it was until they’d eaten. When Liggio, who’d always terrified people, was seized in 1974 in Milan and jailed for good, Cosa Nostra was collectively relieved to be dealing now with the almost human Riina. Provenzano was astutely sidelined and a couple of plans to rescue Liggio were squelched or sabotaged by Riina. The astutest move of all, however, was to persuade the Cupola that each family, each territory, should put a couple of boys directly at Riina’s own service. Pleading his special needs as a boss on the run, he thus built up a private army of killers loyal only to him. It broke every principle in the history of Cosa Nostra, gave Riina spies and allies in every family, but the bosses bought it and were undone.
All were soon disturbed by Riina’s rise, but even the bosses who’d always loathed and distrusted him continued to underestimate the danger. Through the middle seventies the rest of the commission held secret meetings, and always they split between those for killing Riina and those for managing him. At these discussions Riina had a spy, the boss Michele Greco, jealous of the other Palermo bosses’ power, won over with promises by Riina. Knowing what each thought, Riina used his knowledge to create suspicions and rivalries and pick them off one by one. Badalamenti was accused of permitting the murder of another boss, a killing fomented by Riina, was expelled from the commission and fled to Brazil. Greco took his place. Riina then won permission to punish the boss who’d done the killing. Riina organized the killing of another boss, and when it was done made a moving oration in the Cupola that reduced one man of honour to tears. Stefano Bontate knew what was going on and responded by killing two bosses linked to Riina and then going for Riina himself.
In early 1979 Riina went underground and simultaneously ordered a series of excellent killings without consulting the Cupola. The head of the DC for Palermo province, Michele Reina, was killed for getting in the way of Vito Ciancimino’s construction friends. Boris Giuliano, deputy police chief of Palermo, was killed for getting too close to the drug traffic and discovering a hideout of Riina’s brother-in-law Bagarella. Judge Terranova, arriving to take over the Palermo prosecutor’s office, was killed with a police officer. In the new year of 1980 the president of the Sicilian region, Piersanti Mattarella, was killed. He too had been getting in the way of Vito Ciancimino and Riina. Four months later the carabiniere captain Basile was killed, for looking into the affairs of a cosca allied to Riina. Nothing like this campaign of murder had ever happened before. It was Riina’s way of showing who was in command.
Now even Bontate’s own brother had become a spy for Riina, who always knew of the moves against him and so survived a Bontate assassination attempt. The boss Salvatore Inzerillo then had the Palermo chief prosecutor Gaetano Costa killed while he was browsing at a book stall. This too was done without informing the Cupola, as an answer to Riina’s arrogation of power. As all the old rules broke down, Bontate called in Tommaso Buscetta, a man of honour who enjoyed a singular reputation for intelligence and independence, in a last attempt to mediate the crisis in Cosa Nostra. It was a failure. After celebrating the new year of 1981 at the Salvos’ Hotel Zagarella, Buscetta left for Brazil.
It was a good moment to leave. Riina and the Corleonesi were preparing the final assault. In April, driving home from a champagne celebration of his forty-third birthday, Stefano Bontate stopped at a traffic light in his bright red Alfa Romeo and was cut down by a kalashnikov. Inzerillo knew he was next and planned a preventive killing of Riina, who was forewarned by his men in the Inzerillo cosca. Inzerillo had ordered an armour-plated Alfa Romeo at great cost and was about to step into it the day after its delivery when he too, three weeks after Bontate, was riddled by bullets from the same kalashnikov. Riina and the picciotti ate cannoli, a Sicilian delicacy of pastry, ricotta and candied fruit, and toasted with Moët & Chandon. The authors of The True History of Italy later wrote of these two killings,
These homicides marked a turning point in the history of Cosa Nostra, and affected the entire future of the organization and its strategies, down to the most recent tragic events [of 1992]. They represented the change from a situation of hidden conflict inside a pluralistic organization still formally governed by democratic rules, to a strategy for the conquest of absolute power by Riina’s Corleonesi, who would transform Cosa Nostra into a dictatorship, no longer founded on consensus but on terror alone, both within the organization and toward society and the state.
* * *
MAFIA WAR, it was called at the time. It was really the Riina terror. There was no mafia war in Palermo, said Gaspare Mutolo after he turned collaborator. There was a massacre. In 1981 and 1982 there were two hundred bodies on the streets of Palermo. There were at least three hundred other disappearances. The white shotgun it was called, a touch of rural nostalgia in the age of kalashnikov, when the body wasn’t found. Una mattanza, said Guido Lo Forte, one of the Palermo prosecutors who reconstructed its history. He was using the Sicilian word for the annual tuna killing, when the schools of great fish migrating past the island are corralled into traps of nets and harpooned en masse from open boats and the sea turns red. It was a killing of the losers and the losers’ families and the losers’ friends, a hunting down of real and potential and imaginary enemies. There were meetings, stranglings, goat ropings. Bodies burnt, bodies dissolved in acid, bodies buried in lime, bodies thrown in the sea and down crevasses and set in concrete. Inzerillo’s sixteen-year-old son, who’d sworn to avenge his father, had his right arm cut off so you won’t go shooting Totò Riina before he was killed. The first year ended with the bungled Christmas massacre, when a group of mafia losers were pursued on foot and then killed with passers-by in the crowded streets of Bagheria. After he turned, Buscetta remembered Riina thus:
He lived Cosa Nostra twenty-four hours a day. Always talking and discussing. Got information on everything. Followed every family’s internal affairs. Got news from his spies. Cold and attentive to the smallest detail … [he had] the memory of an elephant. If you’d told him something ten years earlier, you could be sure he wouldn’t forget it ever. He’d remind you of it ten or twenty years later, with the same words. He never tired of making suggestions, giving orders, handing out death sentences.
By then Riina had eliminated all Inzerillo’s and Bontate’s men, filled the Cupola with his own men and halved its members. The immediate threat removed, he was now at that point reached by every megalomaniac who achieves total power, of looking round for potential enemies, and seeing them everywhere. Phase two of the terror now began. Many of his allies now looked insufficiently loyal. Waiting for my body to come floating down the river, said Riina. First there were two more distinguished corpses. Pio La Torre had just returned to head the communists in Sicily. He was an anti-Riina, a son of poor peasants who’d been a labour organizer in Corleone when Riina was starting out as a killer. La Torre had been on the p
arliamentary antimafia commission and had proposed a law to confiscate mafia property, and for this he was killed with his driver in April 1982. The day of La Torre’s funeral in Palermo another nemesis returned. Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, now a general of the carabinieri and national hero of the antiterrorism campaign, arrived for his third posting in Sicily as prefect of Palermo, to lead the fight against the mafia. He’d been in Palermo a hundred days when he and his wife and his driver were ambushed and killed with the same kalshanikov used on Bontate and Inzerillo. Buscetta and Badalamenti were hiding out on Buscetta’s vast property near Belém in Brazil when they saw the news on TV. Some politician’s used the mafia to get rid of him, the former boss told Buscetta enigmatically.
Cosa Nostra’s festive season comes earlier than most people’s. The mafia year ends on November 30, and when the boss Rosario Riccobono was invited to lunch with Riina and Brusca at the Brusca villa in San Giuseppe Jato for that day in 1982, he dressed up in his smartest suit and so did all his picciotti. Riccobono was a powerful boss of a big and rich mafia territory, and he’d sided with the Corleonesi, betraying former friends to their death. The invitation to the annual festivity was natural, as it was that all his picciotti should have been invited to the larger barbecue party for sixty-odd guests that same day on the boss Michele Greco’s gracious country estate not far away, the estate where all the Cupola meetings were now held. Riccobono was in fact powerful enough to be conceived as a danger to Riina, if you were Riina, and his vast territory was badly needed by Riina to pay off closer allies with ambitions of their own. Riccobono didn’t think of this, however, as he dressed up for the annual party and set off in the rain. To be disarmed was de rigueur on these festive occasions of friendship and trust. When Riccobono arrived around eleven that morning from Palermo, he was greeted by the elder Brusca, who kissed him and took his arm and led him in to where Riina was already sitting at the head of the table. The whole Brusca clan was there, and Pino The Shoe Greco, who’d cut the arm off the Inzerillo boy. Riina was particularly jovial that day. Welcome among us, Saru. Today we’ll banish ill thoughts and think only about filling our bellies, he said expansively as he embraced the guest.