by Peter Robb
Apart from Pecorelli and Bonino, three others were present at the dinner. They were Claudio Vitalone, Adriano Testi and Donato Lo Prete. The first two were magistrates and the third a general in the Guardia di Finanza, the Italian financial police. All three were closely tied to Andreotti, especially Vitalone. Vitalone worked in the Rome prosecutor’s office and was Andreotti’s legal advisor, a bitter rival of Evangelisti’s in aspiring to be Andreotti’s closest confidant of all. He was elected senator later that year for the DC and later became a deputy minister and finally a minister in 1992, in the last months of the last Andreotti government. Testi was a member of the Italian magistrates’ governing body and was later given charge of an important department of the justice ministry, a position he still holds. Lo Prete was facing corruption charges in an oil scandal, for which he was later convicted, and had been attacked, as Vitalone had, in OP.
For fifteen years little or nothing was known about this dinner. When Bonino, Vitalone and Testi were asked about it the following year, they all denied that anything of importance had been talked about over whatever it was they ate. They all denied it again in 1994 when the magistrates who were looking into some new claims by Tommaso Buscetta asked them again what they’d talked about with Pecorelli. The reason the dinner was ever of interest at all was that a few weeks after it took place Mino Pecorelli was dead. He was shot in the head outside the office of OP in Rome. It happened in the evening of 20 March 1979, the same day Andreotti presented his new government and became prime minister of Italy for the fifth time. Somehow the original investigation into Pecorelli’s murder, conducted by the Rome prosecutor’s office where Vitalone worked while Andreotti was head of the government, never got very far in the face of the distinguished guests’ denials of rumours that money, or OP or Andreotti had been discussed at dinner. Nor indeed did it go far in any other direction. The investigation died and Pecorelli’s death remained a mystery. The magistrates from Perugia who reopened the case in 1994, however, charged the group with perjury when they repeated their story of a normal occasion, and one of the dinner party cracked. Walter Bonino, whose presence had in any case been coincidental, admitted he’d lied about the evening. He said he’d organized the dinner because Vitalone had said he wanted to meet Pecorelli. Bonino had the clear impression it was to do with Andreotti.
On the Tuesday evening of the dinner, things had started with some low-key bickering between Vitalone and Pecorelli over a passport and proceeded to an ugly personal confrontation between Pecorelli and Lo Prete, who showed great animosity. Tension around the table increased when Vitalone discovered to his great surprise and anger that not only did Pecorelli know well Franco Evangelisti, Andreotti’s aide and Vitalone’s rival, but that Evangelisti had made a series of payments to Pecorelli and OP. Then Pecorelli told them about the next issue of OP. It was coming out at the end of that week with the cover story on The President’s Cheques. Since the Italian prime minister was formally known as the president of the council of ministers, the president was Andreotti. It was an exposé of Andreotti’s role in the Italcasse affair.
Everyone froze. The table fell silent. Vitalone spoke first, asking about the content of the article. Then he asked Pecorelli whether he couldn’t suspend publication while Vitalone spoke about it with a highly placed person. Pecorelli told him he had until Saturday. Three days later Pecorelli told Bonino that Evangelisti had telephoned the day after the dinner and Pecorelli had met him in his deputy minister’s office. Evangelisti had made a series of offers of money, help with printing, publicity and distribution of OP, asking after each new offer, Is that OK for you? The article on The President’s Cheques never appeared and it’s never since been found, neither the original typescript nor the proofs. Two days after receiving Evangelisti’s promises of money and help, Pecorelli took the cover, with its menacing headline over a colour photo of Andreotti’s thinly featured face staring blankly out through heavy blackframed glasses, to Evangelisti. Andreotti was meanwhile showing himself extremely solicitous toward Pecorelli, whom he’d never met. More than twenty-five years later, Pecorelli’s sister was to recall their surprise at a telephone call of condolences from the Hon. Andreotti for the death of their mother. And learning that Pecorelli suffered from migraines, Andreotti, who also did, sent round a packet of migraine remedy with a little note to the journalist he’d never met, remarking on their common problem and offering the cure. Bonino remembered that at a later dinner Pecorelli made jokes and even vulgar wisecracks about it, because the medicament was in the form of suppositories, and Pecorelli didn’t fail to be ironical about the Hon. Andreotti’s intentions and allusions. The day after Evangelisti delivered the promised cash in person, Pecorelli was shot dead in the street. The same day in 1979, March the twentieth, Giulio Andreotti was busy forming his new government of Italy. At seven-thirty the following morning, twelve hours after the murder, the delivery man brought a telegram of condolence from prime minister Andreotti to Pecorelli’s house. It was the first message the family received after the murder and they were amazed.
In 1995 Andreotti and Vitalone went on trial together for the murder of Mino Pecorelli. The prosecutors in Perugia charged that Andreotti had communicated his wish to be rid of the troublesome journalist to Vitalone, who’d communicated it to the Salvo cousins in Palermo, who’d told the Cupola of Cosa Nostra, who’d passed it on to the Cupola’s man in Rome, the boss Pippo Calò, who’d arranged the physical execution of the mandate in association with a Rome criminal gang. The murder charge, like the Palermo mafia charge against Andreotti, had as its premise the existence of a chain of communication and command that linked the prime minister to Cosa Nostra through a series of trusted intermediaries in the overlapping worlds of politics and crime. In the murder case, the prosecutors offered to illustrate this with a great deal of circumstantial evidence of meetings between politicians and criminals. Andreotti’s factotum Vitalone looked in it up to his neck.
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TOMMASO BUSCETTA told the Palermo magistrates fourteen years after the event that in 1979, the year Pecorelli died, when Buscetta was still a man of honour in jail in Cuneo, he received another message from outside asking him for a second time to make contact with members of the BR in the prison. This time a personal emissary from Stefano Bontate asked Buscetta to find out whether the BR would agree to claim responsibility for the murder if Cosa Nostra were to get rid of general Dalla Chiesa. The general had been the BR’s prime target for years, but Buscetta had no idea why Cosa Nostra might’ve wanted to eliminate him. In 1979 Dalla Chiesa was entirely taken up with the antiterrorist campaign and was no trouble at all to the mafia. Buscetta duly made contact and passed on the request, only to be told that the BR’s condition was that one of their militants take part in the killing. When this answer was passed outside, the plan was cancelled. Cosa Nostra didn’t do joint venture assassinations.
General Dalla Chiesa became a national hero at the beginning of the eighties. Following the historic pentito Peci, other BR militants had turned against armed struggle and political assassination. Dalla Chiesa swiftly took advantage of their defections to destroy the BR. By 1981 Italy’s terrorist emergency had moved to the mopping up stage. The state was intact, and so was that demochristian regime with which the state was more and more closely identified. In this country, Dalla Chiesa himself was to remark bitterly some time later, party membership counts more than the State. In April 1982, with much fanfare, Dalla Chiesa was posted to Palermo as prefect. It would be his third posting to Sicily. The first had been his time in Corleone as a young captain in the days when Liggio and Riina were starting their rise. From 1966 until 1973 he’d commanded the Palermo carabinieri, a posting that’d given him responsibility for law enforcement over a large part of Sicily. During those recent years as a colonel in Palermo he’d developed considerable understanding of the ways of Sicilian politics and administration, and its penetration by Cosa Nostra. Dalla Chiesa knew the major players in Palermo. He knew Andre
otti’s man in Sicily, Salvo Lima, and the dominant demochristian’s closeness to Cosa Nostra. He knew that other former demochristian mayor, Vito Ciancimino from Corleone, and his closeness to Cosa Nostra.
Before he left for Palermo, Dalla Chiesa told the prime minister and the interior minister about his worries. He was now returning to Palermo for the third time with tremendous prestige but in the heartland of Cosa Nostra he needed more real power. They promised that he would be invested with special powers as high commissioner in the fight against the mafia. He had, he was told, the government’s full support. In a letter to the prime minister, Dalla Chiesa referred to sinister messages sent through the press by the place’s most polluted ‘political family’ and foresaw that he would face operations of subtle or brutal local resistance if not rejection. The polluted family was Andreotti’s faction in the DC. Three days earlier, before the new appointment had been announced and while special powers were being discussed by the government, the mayor of Palermo, an Andreotti man, had given a newspaper interview. The mayor said that talk about the mafia was branding a whole people as criminals, as well as that political power that was the democratic expression of the people. Proof that the state was fighting crime in Sicily, he added, was that among the many slaughtered Palermitans were a number of distinguished corpses and he listed the many names of murdered police chiefs, judges, politicians. Dalla Chiesa knew Sicily and he knew the mafia and he got the message. That, he said, showing the interview to his son, is a warning.
The general kept a private diary. Each evening he wrote up the events of the day in the form of an intimate letter to his late wife Doretta. On April 5, two days after the general’s new appointment was announced, Andreotti, who wasn’t then in the government, asked the general for a meeting and the next evening Dalla Chiesa wrote it up in his diary. Andreotti, he wrote to his dead wife, had wanted to know about his intentions in Palermo. I told him I’d show no consideration for that part of the electorate his great supporters draw on. There was no need to tell Doretta who that part of the electorate was. He told his son that on hearing this Andreotti went white in the face. In the diary he added that Andreotti, speaking about the Sindona affair, had mentioned a mafioso killed in America and sent home in a coffin to Sicily with a ten dollar note in his mouth.
Four years later Andreotti denied all this, saying under oath that he was naturally pale, that he hadn’t sought Dalla Chiesa out and implying that it was all, as the magistrates of The True History put it, a nocturnal fantasy of the general’s. Andreotti ascribed it to the very nature of the diary, which had the form of an imaginary conversation with his dead wife … It wasn’t the only insinuation that general Dalla Chiesa had lost his marbles. Andreotti, discreetly conveying fastidious revulsion to the judges, also strongly denied having brought up the subject of the mafioso sent home from America with a ten dollar note in his mouth. He’d never even heard of the corpse in question, he said. It had in fact belonged to Pietro Inzerillo, the brother of Salvatore, boss of one of the main mafia families of Palermo. Salvatore Inzerillo had been murdered the year before, two weeks after his ally Stefano Bontate had been cut down by the same kalashnikov. Inzerillo’s sixteen-year-old son swore to avenge his father, and for this had his right arm hacked off before he was shot. Inzerillo’s brother went to meet the Corleonesi with a propitiatory suitcase of money and was never seen again. Inzerillo’s uncle walked out of his house in New Jersey and was never seen again. Bontate’s clan was wiped out. Pietro Inzerillo had fled to New York. When he was found, in a Cadillac belonging to the Gambino family, the dollars were stuffed in the mouth of a head that had been severed from his handcuffed body. Dollars were also stuffed in the groin. The American police had put the pieces in a sealed coffin and sent them home. At issue were ten million dollars in drug money Riina claimed the Inzerillos owed. Was it delicacy or ignorance that elided these further circumstances? The statesman Andreotti was later greatly concerned that people shouldn’t get the impression he’d been aware of details like this.
On the last day of April 1982, as Dalla Chiesa was making his farewells in the north, the PCI’s leader in Sicily and his driver were ambushed and murdered in Palermo. Pio La Torre had been a young labour organizer in Corleone after the war, when Dalla Chiesa was a young captain of carabinieri there and Totò Riina a young killer. He’d lately been in parliament at Rome and a member of the antimafia commission, but the year before he’d asked to return to Palermo. He’d led the opposition in Sicily to the American missile base at Comiso, in part because it would intensify the criminal traffic between Sicily and the United States. He’d also studied the new mafia and the new wealth gained from government contracts, building speculation and drugs. He’d drawn up a proposal for a complex and radical new law that would for the first time make membership alone of Cosa Nostra a serious crime. It would deny banking secrecy when suspect assets were investigated. It would let the government seize assets gained by criminal violence. The three elements were premised on the understanding that Cosa Nostra existed as a criminal organization, a fact hitherto unrecognized in Italian law. As a law, the La Torre proposal would make a real onslaught on the mafia possible for the first time. It was still only a proposal when La Torre was killed.
So general Dalla Chiesa arrived in Sicily earlier than planned. When news arrived of the La Torre assassination, he had to rush south from a military parade in the Milanese drizzle, the signing off from his military career, to show the flag in Palermo. He stopped off for a brief and frantic meeting in Rome with the prime minister and plummeted, as he described it to Doretta, into superheated Palermo. He arrived without warning in a civilian suit and dark glasses and caught a taxi from the airport. Nobody was expecting him when he turned up at the prefect’s office. Dalla Chiesa now had the responsibility of national coordinator of the struggle against the mafia. He didn’t have the powers. I suddenly find myself away from home, he wrote that night to Doretta’s shade, in an environment that on the one hand expects miracles from your Carlo and on the other curses my destination and my arrival.
Pio La Torre’s funeral was held on May Day. Enrico Berlinguer, the leader of the PCI, came, and Pippo from the Sant’Andrea restaurant, still just a trade union militant, was part of his bodyguard, as he always was when Berlinguer came to Palermo. President Pertini and prime minister Spadolini came too, and sat ashen and immobile on the dais in the piazza as the young communists ruined the protocol of mourning. You’ll pay dearly! the kids stood in the piazza and shouted at the demochristians on the platform. You’ll pay for everything! A party of Dutch tourists trooping through the centre in sandals and grey woollen socks stopped openmouthed and took out their cameras as the farm labourers and steelworkers raised their fists.
Governo DC
la mafia sta lì,
the kids chanted. The mafia was there, inside the DC government.
Lima! D’Acquisto! Ciancimino!
Chi di voi è l’assassino?
Which of you is the killer? The young people of Palermo turned out in the following weeks to be Dalla Chiesa’s most visible supporters, along with other ordinary people who had little voice and no clout. The obstruction, hostility and undermining he’d foreseen from the political establishment in Palermo was palpable from the start. The promised support from the government never came, as he’d foreseen.
While writing to Doretta, Dalla Chiesa had been courting a striking woman much younger than himself, the beautiful Emanuela Setti Carraro, another northerner. In his isolation and despite his fears for her, the general let her join him in Palermo where, as Claire Sterling describes in Octopus,
They were married in a setting of nightmare violence. The bloodletting was then at its height in Palermo. Killers roamed the streets on big motorbikes at high noon, firing almost casually. Beheaded corpses were left in cars at the railroad station, dead men were burned on downtown streets, bodies were dumped at the door of police headquarters. The atmosphere was pitiless, terrible in its arrogan
ce, wrote the presiding judge in Palermo’s maxitrial.
It was the time of Riina’s terror. In Naples that year the same thing was happening, for reasons that were not unrelated to events in Palermo. In Naples there were even more bodies on the ground. For the Mezzogiorno, 1982 was zero year. I escaped to Brazil that summer, and it was in Rio, on the beach at Copacabana that I opened the Jornal do Brasil one morning in early September and read of the ambush and murder in the streets of central Palermo of general Dalla Chiesa and his wife Emanuela Setti Carraro and their driver.
He’d seen it all coming, in total lucidity and utter helplessness, as the vacuum was created around him. In early August he’d spoken to Giorgio Bocca of the danger, in a long interview that was published in La Repubblica. The general told Bocca