Labyrinth- the Art of Decision-Making

by Pawel Motyl

  In Michele Navarra’s times there were a great deal of scores to settle, and in the short period between 1944 and 1948, the modestly sized Corleone was the site of 150 murders. The good doctor was not a man who attracted suspicion. He surrounded himself with a small group of trusted people who carried out the operations he planned. One of his closest and most trusted collaborators was Luciano Leggio, a modest, albeit highly impulsive man from a poor farming family. Over the years, it was Leggio who eliminated witnesses and rivals on his boss’s orders, all the while implementing his own ever-more intricate and refined plan. Leggio’s ambition was to build his own clan, but he had to do this without threatening, or seeming to threaten, Navarra’s interests.

  At a certain point, though, their areas of interest began to collide dangerously. A particularly significant clash occurred over the matter of a contract to build a dam, which Leggio was heavily involved in. The families allied with Navarra had a vested interest in the dam’s not being built, as they were shareholders in the existing water supply system, which enabled them to dictate pretty much whatever prices they liked to the local residents and businesses. The building of the dam would put an end to this bounty. Navarra let his position on the matter be known in a relatively direct manner—his people ambushed Luciano Leggio and shot him in the shoulder.

  The doctor assumed that the lesson would suffice for his loyal henchman to remember who was head of the Corleone clan. Don Michele Navarra believed totally in the sanctity of his position and reputation—and that he was utterly unassailable. He often traveled alone, without bodyguards, and one of his solo driving trips proved to be his undoing. On August 2, 1958, his car was blocked by two other vehicles, and then machine gun fire broke out; struck by ninety-two bullets, Navarra didn’t have a chance. He died where he fell. The killer turned out to be none other than Luciano Leggio, who, as you can see, drew an entirely different lesson from that which Dottore Navarra intended.

  Leggio took over from where Navarra left off, which meant that the careers of two of his closest allies, Salvatore “Totò” Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, blossomed. The whole trio would play a key role in the Cosa Nostra in the future.

  Over the next few years, Luciano Leggio solidified his position with a perfect balance of carefully chosen alliances and ruthlessness toward opponents. He was renowned for the scale on which he planned and carried out his operations—for example, in June 1973, he collaborated with ’ndràngheta, the powerful Calabrian Mafia, to kidnap John Paul Getty III, the grandson of one of the richest people in the world at the time, from Palazzo Farnense in Rome. After long negotiations, the seventeen-year-old’s family, who had been sent, among other things, the boy’s chopped-off ear, paid close to $3 million for his release. The teenager was released in southern Italy shortly after the ransom was paid, over half a year after his kidnapping. As it turned out, kidnapping the grandchild of such a wealthy person had its consequences, because capturing Leggio became a priority for the local police and Carabinieri. The authorities achieved their goal at dawn on May 14, 1974, when they arrested the unsuspecting gangster at his lover’s house. He was given a custodial sentence but, like his predecessors, he tried to maintain control over the operations of the Corleonesi from behind bars. It turned out, though, that history likes to repeat itself, and standing in his way was his closest collaborator, Salvatore Riina, who, in turn, gradually took over where his boss had left off. Information about this reached Leggio, who ordered his people to start taking orders from Provenzano, and not Riina. In response, Riina torpedoed the plan to release his boss from prison—as a police informer said many years later, all it took was a word from Riina and Leggio “could escape a hundred and fifty times”; instead, though, a shadowy game of intrigue and power plays dragged on.

  In 1975, it became necessary for the Cupola to meet in order to address a number of matters, including the question of the families’ approach to kidnappings (which, as Leggio had learned the hard way, caused more harm than good in the long run) and the choice of a new capo di tutti capi. Giving Riina one more chance, Leggio decided that Provenzano and Riina should represent him at the meeting.

  The families from Palermo were resolute in their desire to stop the kidnappings, pointing to the unnecessary risks they entailed. The only dissenting voice was that of Riina. The meeting ended in a bitter conflict that soon after escalated into open warfare. Riina decided to show who was really in charge of the Cosa Nostra, and despite the prohibition imposed by the Cupola, organized the abduction of Luigi Corleo, who was not only one of the richest Sicilians, but also a relative of two influential bosses from Palermo and so considered himself untouchable. His outraged family refused to pay the exorbitant ransom demanded—reputedly over $25 million—counting on settling the affair through their regular contacts.

  It ended tragically for the kidnapped man, who was murdered, as Riina made a bid to take control of the Cosa Nostra by force. The Palermo families had a chance to stop him, as the united cosche of Gaetano Badalamenti and Stefano Bontade had significantly more firepower at their disposal; however, falling prey to turkey syndrome, they remained doggedly faithful to the methods that had served them well over many decades, ignoring Salvatore Riina and the Corleonesi, whom they dismissively labeled i viddani (peasants), forgetting that the big bosses of the 1940s, like Genco Russo and Calogero Vizzini, had also come from the countryside. Badalamenti and Bontade did not consider Riina a threat, as no one had ever undermined the authority of the families from Palermo. They soon realized just how big a mistake that was.

  The basic goal of the Corleonesi was to control the narcotics market, on which the older bosses looked with distaste, just as they did prostitution. The values nurtured over the centuries were not highly rated by Riina, they limited his opportunities to entrench his power and domination, so it’s hardly surprising that he pretty rapidly departed from the majority of them. He demanded total subservience from the local population, and any kind of criticism was severely punished. For example, the Corleonesi murdered Mario Francese, a journalist from the popular paper Giornale di Sicilia, which over the years had reported on the activities of the family headed by Riina. Francese’s only error was to publish a short interview with Ninette, the boss’s fiancée at the time, whose comments, Riina believed, showed him in a poor light. The journalist was shot dead a few years later, in line with the Corleonesi’s principle that il miglior perdono è la vendetta (the best forgiveness is revenge). At the beginning of the 1980s, another taboo was broken when the clan turned against the authorities and police in a clear breach of the rules of the Cosa Nostra. Anyone whose activities could in any way damage the Corleonesi family would be killed: they murdered, for example, Boris Giuliano, deputy chief of police in Palermo and Emanuele Basile, captain of the Carabinieri, as well as Cesare Terranova, head of the court of appeal, Piersanti Mattarella, president of the Christian Democrat party on the island, and Michele Reina, secretary of the Christian Democrat party. None of these killings were sanctioned by the Cupola, whose members were outraged. Immediate action against the Corleonesi was ordered by Stefano Bontade, one of the most influential members of the Cupola, the capo of the powerful Santa Maria di Gesù family from Palermo.

  Riina responded in his characteristic style, breaking the rules of the game again. On his forty-second birthday, in April 1981, Stefano Bontade died in his Alfa Romeo when he met a Kalashnikov-wielding Giuseppe Greco, the Corleonesi’s leading hitman. Riina didn’t stop at removing Bontade. With his perfect understanding of the rules and logic of Sicilian vendettas, he decided to eliminate anyone and everyone who could possibly threaten him in the future. He had Bontade’s right-hand man, Salvatore Inzerillo, shot along with his sixteen-year-old son, who, following tradition, had announced that he would avenge his father when he grew up; meanwhile, in New York, Salvatore Inzerillo’s brother Pietro died. This series of killings could not go unchecked, which led to a mattanza—a bloody Mafia war—in which more than a thousand people rep
ortedly died over the next few years.

  The state couldn’t ignore what was happening, and so Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a legend in his own lifetime, was sent to the island. Dalla Chiesa was a Carabinieri general who commanded the region of the Aosta Valley in Piedmont, and from 1974 had led an antiterrorist unit in Turin, battling against the radical left-wing Brigate Rosse (Red Brigades), who were responsible for the kidnap and murder in 1978 of former Italian Christian Democrat prime minister Aldo Moro, among other things. Thanks to Dalla Chiesa, the local founder of the Brigate Rosse, Renato Curcio, was arrested along with his close colleague, Alberto Franceschini, which led to the collapse of the organization at the beginning of the 1980s.

  Dalla Chiesa was therefore an ideal candidate to fight organized crime on Sicily and was nominated prefect of Palermo, with a clear order from the authorities: get rid of the Cosa Nostra, and in particular the Corleonesi. The general arrived on April 30, 1982, the same day that the Communist MP Pio La Torre was assassinated.

  Dalla Chiesa threw down the gauntlet to Riina and his people, and soon after his arrival organized a meeting of the mayors of the most important Sicilian towns... in Corleone. During the meeting, he demanded total loyalty from the mayors, and insisted that they pass on any information that might concern the Cosa Nostra. He also contacted the American consul in Palermo, Ralph Jones, from whom he expected support. These steps, together with the general’s well-earned reputation, unsettled the Corleonesi, who solved their new problem in the old-school way: precisely one hundred days after arriving on the island, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa and his wife, Emanuela Setti Carraro, died in a hail of bullets fired by eight hitmen, at the head of whom stood Giuseppe Greco.

  All of the above events were watched closely by one of the Palermo bosses, Tommaso Buscetta, nicknamed, on account of his contacts in the United States, boss dei due mondi (the “Godfather of Two Worlds”). Buscetta understood that the code that had underpinned the power of the Cosa Nostra no longer existed, and that the activities of the Corleonesi had destroyed the old rules of the game. On top of that, Riina’s people had also attacked his family, murdering two of his sons and a brother, and he would be their next target. So, in July 1984, Buscetta decided to take the unprecedented step of breaking omertà by cooperating with Judge Giovanni Falcone. As he said in his testimony, it wasn’t he who had betrayed the Cosa Nostra, but the Cosa Nostra that had betrayed him.

  Judge Giovanni Falcone was an extraordinary figure. Born in 1939 in the port district of Palermo, he was faced with a relatively natural career path within the structure of one of the Mafia clans, much like his friend from the same district, Tommaso Spadaro. Falcone, however, made a different choice and decided to study law at the University of Palermo, after which he became a judge. In the 1980s, he and Paolo Borsellino, a childhood friend, became the cornerstones of the struggle against the Cosa Nostra.

  Buscetta’s testimony was a double blow: not only did it reveal the operation methods of the Cosa Nostra and enable the arrests in later years of many of its members, but it also encouraged other gangsters—270 in total—to collaborate with the authorities. They formed a group named the pentiti (or “penitents” 16), and the information provided by them led to the first Maxiprocesso (Maxi Trial), the biggest body blow dealt to the Sicilian Mafia in its history. The main architect of the trial was the judge, Giovanni Falcone, and a total of 474 people were tried.

  Ultimately, the court sentenced nineteen members of the Cosa Nostra to the maximum punishment allowed under Italian law: life imprisonment. Among those sentenced was Salvatore “Totò” Riina, found guilty in absentia. A further 338 people received sentences totaling 2,665 years in prison.

  The police and Carabinieri began hunting down the missing gangsters.

  Riina did not intend to go down without a fight, and his enemy number one became, of course, Judge Falcone. After several failed attempts, the Corleonesi got their man: on May 23, 1992, a several hundred pound explosive, placed in a pipe under the Palermo–Trapani freeway, killed Giovanni Falcone, his wife, and three bodyguards. Less than two months later, the Mafia dealt another blow to justice—in Palermo, Paolo Borsellino was killed after he took over the investigation of the Cosa Nostra following the death of his friend.

  The assassinations, though, had an effect that the Mafia did not foresee. The local population, which had lived for decades in a better or worse symbiosis with the Cosa Nostra, turned their backs on the gangsters. The killings aroused enormous social outrage and put powerful pressure on the authorities to deal once and for all with the problem of violence on the island. Members of the Sicilian Mafia, many of whom were deeply religious and wore their religion like a badge, were condemned in May 1993 by Pope John Paul II during the culminating event of a three-day visit to Sicily. In a mass delivered before 100,000 faithful, in the vicinity of Agrigento, an evidently angry pope abandoned his earlier prepared sermon and, in a highly emotional manner, demanded that Mafia members repent. These words were burned into the memories of those present. The authorities set about dealing with the Cosa Nostra, now decimated by arrests, with renewed vigor, and the locals more and more openly supported these operations. One of those who decided to turn against the Mafia was Baldassare Di Maggio, who for a time had been a close collaborator of Riina and knew where the boss was hiding. His testimony provided the breakthrough the authorities needed, and on January 14, 1993, at 8:52 am, a division of the Carabinieri surrounded the building he was in and Captain Sergio De Caprio personally arrested the gangster. During his arrest, the surprised capo di tutti capi did not put up any resistance.

  The weakened Corleonesi collected their strength one last time, and in the next few months carried out another series of killings, now aimed clearly at the Italian state itself. Bombs exploded in various towns and cities, including Rome and Florence, where a part of the famous Uffizi Gallery and some of its priceless collection was destroyed. However, two crimes in particular shocked the nation to its core, crimes in which the Cosa Nostra crossed two more boundaries. Revenge for the words of John Paul II came in the form of a bomb explosion in the Archbasilica of St. John Lateran on July 27, 1993, and the murder of a priest named Pino Puglisi, who openly condemned the Mafia, less than two months later. With these actions, the Corleonesi turned against the Church, which was something the deeply religious Sicilians could not forgive. The citizens’ outrage reached a peak, though, when the Corleonesi kidnapped eleven-year-old Giuseppe Di Matteo, the son of a pentito. After being held in captivity for two years, the boy was strangled and his body dissolved in acid. This act of violence led even some of the gangsters to say “enough,” and the number of Mafiosi who broke the code of silence grew to almost 500. The police and Carabinieri caught more of them, destroying the Cupola. Among those arrested was the mastermind behind the assassination of Giovanni Falcone and the kidnapping of Giuseppe di Matteo, Giovanni Brusca; in 1995, Leoluca Bagarella, a relative of Riina’s who had tried to take control over the entire Cosa Nostra and become the new capo di tutti capi, was also captured.

  After years of pretending that the Mafia problem didn’t exist, the Italian state carried out its first effective, large-scale operation since the time of Mussolini, which ultimately led to the breaking up of the Cosa Nostra. Their success was possible only because of a fundamental mistake made by the leader Salvatore Riina, who abandoned the sacred organizational values that formed the basis for omertà. If not for the family war in 1981, the direct attacks on the Italian state and Church, and the unprecedented brutality toward the local populace, there would have been no pentiti, and the anti-Mafia activities would still be nothing more than a demonstration of the impotence of the authorities. In the second half of the 1990s, the Italian police declared victory in their war on the Cosa Nostra and turned their attention to the increasingly powerful Camorra—the Neapolitan Mafia.

  But what was Provenzano up to while this was all going on? Well, it turns out he employed the wisest tactic of them all, as he
managed to avoid arrest in the 1990s. One of the biggest problems facing the investigators, who had been on his trail since 1963, was that the only photo they had of the gangster was from 1959. Unlike the other bosses, Provenzano was an unusually modest man who always tried to remain in the background. There’s an old Russian saying that translates into English as “ride quietly and you’ll ride farther,” and this perfectly sums up the story of Provenzano, who, after the arrest of Leoluca Bagarella, took over the reins of the entire Cosa Nostra in the absence of any competition. His first decision was to introduce a strategy he called “submersion,” which effectively meant totally disappearing off the radar and silencing media reports. This was intended to help restore the organization’s strength and regain the support of the local populace. The facts testify to Provenzano’s influence on the Corleonesi and other Mafia families: after 1995, the number of killings committed on Sicily fell dramatically, as did petty crime. The capo di tutti capi knew that this was the only way to rebuild the Cosa Nostra and openly backed the return to the old values of the organization (e.g., he set up financial support for the families of arrested gangsters, something Salvatore Riina had abolished, and prohibited reprisals against the families of the pentiti). The other Mafia families grew increasingly appreciative of his conciliatory style, thanks to which more and more decisions were of a win-win nature and mutually beneficial to all those involved; Provenzano himself repeatedly used the phrase “mangia e fai mangiare” (eat and let eat). This approach earned him the respect of others and cemented his position as the leader of the entire organization, which in turn gave him even greater influence over the behavior of others, and, consequently, the organizational culture of the Cosa Nostra. Provenzano also displayed an ability to think strategically and, at the end of the 1990s, chose a new direction for the Mafia. Seeing the annually increasing support for the Italian economy from various European Union structural funds, he decided to increase the presence of the Cosa Nostra in the public service sector and construction, which were the main beneficiaries of this aid. Companies controlled by the Sicilian Mafia won contract after contract, and frequently expressed their appreciation with shows of generosity toward the decision-makers. In line with Provenzano’s logic, the Mafia ate and allowed others to eat. Everyone was happy, and the Cosa Nostra once again re-entered the game, this time as a stealthy spider controlling a strategically located and managed web, entangling thousands of businesses in Italy and abroad.