Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  On 17 July 1975, only a few months after that first meeting of the Region, a little old man was driving an Alfa Romeo 2000 through the crackling heat of a Sicilian summer afternoon. His destination was Salemi, a town clustered round a Norman fortress on a hill in the province of Trapani. But he never reached it: by a petrol pump just outside town, he found the road in front of him blocked by ten men armed with machine guns. As he was being forced out and bundled into another car, the bus from Trapani arrived. Two of the snatch team flagged down the terrified driver and climbed aboard the bus. Silently they then showed their weapons to the passengers. Words were superfluous: nothing had happened, and nobody had seen it happen.

  The corleonesi had struck again, showing their contempt for the manoeuvres against them in the Region. Moreover, they had struck at a more illustrious victim than ever before. The old man in the Alfa Romeo was Luigi Corleo, a tax farmer. In Sicily, tax collection was privatised and contracted out. Since the 1950s, Corleo’s son-in-law, Nino Salvo, had turned the family tax-collecting business into a vast machine for ripping off Sicilian taxpayers. Together with his cousin, Ignazio, Nino Salvo ran a company that now had a near monopoly on revenue gathering, and took a scandalous 10 per cent commission. In effect, one lire in every ten that Sicilians paid in tax went straight into the pockets of the Salvo cousins. Not only that, but the Salvos managed to engineer a two- or three-month time-lag between harvesting the taxes and handing them over to the state—two or three months in which these huge sums attracted very favourable interest. The pharaonic profits of the Salvos’ legalised swindle were invested in art (Van Gogh and Matisse, apparently), hotels, land, and in the political support network needed to ensure that the Sicilian Regional Assembly continued to rubber-stamp the tax-collecting franchise. Both Salvo cousins were also Men of Honour, and both were very close to two members of the triumvirate: Tano Badalamenti and Stefano Bontate, the ‘Prince of Villagrazia’. In other words, by kidnapping Luigi Corleo, the corleonesi had taken aim at the very heart of economic, political and criminal power in Sicily. Antonino Calderone would later explain that the Corleo kidnapping was ‘an extremely serious matter that created a huge shock in Cosa Nostra’. The ransom demand was shocking too: 20 billion lire (not far off $135 million in 2011 values).

  The Corleo kidnapping was initially a grave embarrassment for Badalamenti and Bontate, and quickly become an utter humiliation. Despite sowing the countryside around Salemi with corpses, Badalamenti and Bontate failed to either free the hostage, or find any evidence in support of their suspicion that the corleonesi were responsible. To cap it all, old man Corleo died while he was still in captivity, probably from a heart attack. Yet Badalamenti and Bontate proved unable even to recover the body.

  The corleonesi may not have bagged the ransom they had hoped for, but they did gain something that in the long-term would prove far more valuable: a high-profile demonstration that Badalamenti and Bontate had not mastered the basics of territorial control. Plainly, the corleonesi could ignore Cosa Nostra’s lawmakers with impunity. Across Sicily, other mafia bosses heard the rumours and started to draw conclusions.

  The brief sequence of high-profile kidnappings in Sicily coincided with one more important development: a new generation of leader took control in Corleone. Luciano Liggio was gradually side-lined by his deputy, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina, who was ably assisted by Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano. Riina it was who directed operations for the Cassina and Corleo kidnappings.

  Meanwhile Liggio was still very busy, but in places where Cosa Nostra’s rules against kidnapping did not apply. In July 1971 he moved to Milan, where he could orchestrate the hijacking of as many hostages as he liked. Furthermore, in Milan, there were many more rich people available to abduct. Kidnapping in Sicily was more politically significant than it was lucrative or frequent. Between 1960 and 1978, there were only nineteen abductions in Sicily, a very small proportion of the terrifying 329 in Italy as a whole. The word inside Cosa Nostra was that Liggio grew fantastically rich on the off-island trade in captives, and that he was working with the organisation that was rapidly becoming the Italian underworld’s kidnapping specialist: the ’ndrangheta.

  Cosa Nostra and the camorra were involved in kidnapping to a comparatively limited extent. Cosa Nostra, as we have seen, had severe constitutional reservations about harbouring captives on its own manor. Camorristi in the early 1970s performed a number of abductions, but kidnapping did not become a typical camorra crime, probably because they did not have the colonies in the North that would enable them to create a national network for hostage-taking.

  To anyone who bothered to read the crime pages of the Calabrian dailies, a pattern of kidnappings had already established itself in the region in the late 1960s. But the victims were all local figures, the ransom demands relatively small, and the periods of captivity short. Things began to change in December 1972 with the abduction of Pietro Torielli, the son of a banker from Vigevano in the northern region of Lombardy. Luciano Liggio and the ’ndrangheta are thought to have been involved. From now on, kidnapping would be a nationwide business for Calabrian organised crime.

  Corleonese kidnap king. Sicilian mafia boss Luciano Liggio ran kidnapping operations in northern Italy with his friends in the ’ndrangheta.

  There were several reasons why kidnapping became a favourite business for the ’ndrangheta. It had the great advantage of being cheap to organise, for one thing. The ransoms it rendered often served as seed capital for more investment-intensive initiatives, like construction or wholesale narcotics dealing. No mafia had a network of colonies in the North to match the ’ndrangheta’s. Nor did any other mafia have Aspromonte. The mountain massif at the very tip of the Italian peninsula had long been a reliable refuge for fugitives. Its crags, its grottoes and its wooded gorges became internationally notorious as hiding places for kidnap victims. Captives would report hearing the same distant church bells from their prisons. A bronze statue of Christ on the cross, situated among the beeches and firs of the Zervò plain above Platì, became a kind of post-box where ransoms would often be deposited. For years the statue had a single large bullet hole in its chest. On Aspromonte the ’ndrangheta’s reign of fear and complicity was so complete that the organisation could be confident of keeping hostages almost indefinitely. More than one escaped victim turned to the first passer-by they encountered for help, only to be led back to his kidnappers. The poor ’ndrangheta-controlled mountain villages began to live off the trickle-down profits of kidnapping. Down on the Ionian coast, Bovalino had an entire new quarter known locally as ‘Paul Getty’—after the famous hostage whose abduction first propelled the ’ndrangheta to the forefront of the kidnapping industry.

  In central Rome, in the early hours of 10 July 1973, John Paul Getty III—the sixteen-year-old, ginger-haired, hippy grandson of American oil billionaire Jean Paul Getty—was bundled into a car, chloroformed and driven away. After an agonising wait, the kidnappers finally communicated their demands in a collage of letters cut out from magazines: ten billion lire, or around $17 million at the time. The eighty-one-year-old Jean Paul Getty, a notoriously reclusive and avaricious man, refused to negotiate: ‘I have fourteen grandchildren, and if I pay a penny of ransom, I’ll have fourteen kidnapped grandchildren.’

  The stalemate dragged on until 20 October when the boy’s captors sliced off his right ear, dropped it in a Band Aid packet full of embalming fluid, and mailed it to the offices of the Roman daily newspaper, Il Messaggero. The gruesome package included a note promising that the rest of him would ‘arrive in tiny pieces’ if the ransom were not paid. To increase the Getty family’s agony further, the ear was held up by a postal strike and did not arrive for nearly three weeks. The savage mutilation had the desired effect: a month later a ransom amounting to two billion lire ($3,200,000)—a fifth of the sum originally demanded—was deposited with a man wearing a balaclava helmet standing in a pull-off area on the highway.

  Kidnap victim. John Paul Getty
III was taken in July 1973. His ’ndrangheta captors cut off his ear before releasing him.

  John Paul Getty was released. But the psychological impact of his ordeal was profound. He was fragile and very young: he had spent his seventeenth birthday in captivity. The trauma seems to have tipped him into drug and alcohol addiction. In 1983 his liver failed, precipitating a stroke that caused blindness and near total paralysis.

  It was never proved beyond all doubt that Luciano Liggio masterminded the Getty kidnapping. Nor, for that matter, was anybody ever convicted apart from a handful of small-time crooks—the hired hands rather than the orchestrators. But one thing is certain nonetheless: Getty was held in the mountains of Calabria, and his captors were Luciano Liggio’s friends in the ’ndrangheta. And once Luciano Liggio was removed from the scene (he was recaptured in 1974 and never freed again), the ’ndrangheta showed that it was more than capable of running highly lucrative kidnapping schemes on its own.

  Kidnapping proved less divisive in the ’ndrangheta than it did in Cosa Nostra. But the new criminal industry did attract media and police attention to Calabria, and therefore controversy within the local underworld. It seems that the tarantella dancer and triumvirate member, don ’Ntoni Macrì, made his misgivings about having hostages on his territory known to the other bosses not long after the Getty kidnapping. These misgivings further increased the rivalries between the ’ndrangheta factions that were trying to get their hands on the Colombo package.

  Gangsters from the South and Sicily were by no means the only people to profit from the wave of abductions across the country in the 1970s and 1980s. For example, bandits from the island of Sardinia, some of the most active of them operating off-base in Tuscany, had their own tradition of hostage-taking and were particularly active in the 1970s. Many ordinary delinquents latched on to the idea that taking a hostage or two was a short cut to riches. Kidnapping became a criminal craze that was profoundly damaging to Italy’s weakened social fabric.

  Luigi Ballinari, a drunken, small-time cigarette smuggler of Swiss nationality, recalled the buzz in prison in 1974: ‘Our conversations always came back to the crime of the moment, which was now a fashion in Italy: extorting money by kidnapping. It was everyone’s dream! We fantasised, we organised, we analysed the mistakes that other kidnappers had made.’

  Soon after being released, Ballinari became involved in one of the most atrocious kidnappings of the era. Cristina Mazzotti, nineteen-year-old daughter of an entrepreneur from near Como, on the Swiss border, was taken on 26 June 1975. Her captors stripped, blindfolded and manacled her, blocked her ears, and lowered her into a tiny space below a garage floor. There she was made to consume sleeping pills dissolved in fruit juice for more than two weeks during negotiations with her parents. The plan—one common to many improvised kidnapping groups in the North and centre of Italy—was to sell the hostage on to the real experts: the ’ndrangheta. But in this case, before Cristina could be bartered and sent to a new prison on Aspromonte, her body slowly shut down under the cumulative effect of the drugs; she was loaded into a car boot and buried in a rubbish dump. Her parents, unaware that she was already dead, paid a ransom of 1.05 billion lire ($6.9 million in 2011 values).

  Ballinari was later caught trying to launder some of the profits from Cristina’s abduction. By the time he buckled under interrogation, and told the whole story, Cristina’s body was so decomposed that it proved hard to tell whether she had actually been dead when she was interred.

  The horrors of the kidnapping industry were legion. The captives on Aspromonte were particularly badly treated. Shackled and fed on scraps, they were not allowed to wash and their clothes were never changed. In intercepted phone conversations, their ’ndrangheta captors were heard referring in code to the prisoners as ‘pigs’. The longest kidnapping was that of teenage student Carlo Celadon from near Vicenza, who was snatched in his own home in 1988. Carlo was kept for a mind-boggling 828 days in a rat-infested grotto scattered with his own excrement. With three chains round his neck, he was subject to constant threats—and to beatings if he dared cry or pray. When he was released, his father commented that he looked like the inmate of a Nazi concentration camp. Carlo’s comment on his ordeal was harrowing: ‘I asked, I begged my jailers to cut my ear off. I was totally destroyed, I had lost all hope.’

  In Italy as a whole, between 1969 and 1988, seventy-one people vanished and were never seen alive again; it is thought that in roughly half those cases, a ransom was paid. In 1981 Giovanni Palombini, an eighty-year-old coffee entrepreneur, was kidnapped by a Roman gang who probably intended to pass him on to the ’ndrangheta. He managed to escape, but was so disorientated that when he knocked on the door of a villa to ask for help, it turned out to be his kidnappers’ hideout. He was given a glass of champagne, and then executed. His body was thrown in a freezer so that it could be pulled out for the photographs his family wanted to see to be certain that he was still alive.

  Children were not spared: there were twenty-two abductions of children, some no more than babes in arms. Marco Fiora was only seven years old when ’ndranghetisti grabbed him in Turin in March 1987. His ordeal lasted a year and a half, during which time he was kept chained up like a dog in an Aspromonte hideaway. His captors did their best to brainwash him, telling him that his parents did not want to pay the ransom because they did not love him. It seems that the long delay was due to the fact that the ’ndrangheta’s spies had greatly overestimated how rich Marco’s father was, and refused to believe his claims that he could not afford the ransom. Marco was skeletal when he was released near Ciminà, and his legs were so atrophied that he could barely walk. He knocked on a few doors, but the inhabitants refused to open. So he just sat down by the roadside until a patrol of Carabinieri happened upon him. His first words to his mother were, ‘You aren’t my mummy. Go away. I don’t want to see you.’

  Some children fared even worse. A little girl of eleven from the shores of Lake Garda, Marzia Savio, was taken in January 1982. Her captor turned out not to be a gangster, but just the local sausage butcher who thought he had found a neat way to make some quick money. He strangled Marzia, probably while he was trying to restrain her, and then cut her into pieces that he scattered from a flyover.

  Kidnapping became so common that it acquired its own rituals in the news bulletins and crime pages. The victims’ families giving anguished press conferences. Or, conversely, desperately attempting to shun the limelight and avoid provoking whoever was holding their father, their son, their daughter. There was the long, anguished wait for the kidnappers to make known the ransom demands. There were hoax calls from ghoulish pranksters.

  Kidnapping is a crime that creates and spreads mistrust. Many families rightly suspected that friends and employees had leaked information to the criminals. Finding reliable lines of communication and intermediaries was often agonising. The family of Carlo Celadon, the young man who was held for a record 828 days, alleged that the lawyer they delegated to transport the ransom had pocketed a proportion of it. (He was convicted of the crime but later benefited from an amnesty before his appeal.) The ’ndrangheta sometimes seemed to know more about how much their hostages earned than did the tax man. For that reason, the media tended to cast suspicion over the finances of even the most honest victims. Hostages’ families were often warned against going to the police. And the police were often frustrated by families’ silence: some had the indignity of being arrested for withholding information after seeing their loved ones freed.

  The poison of mistrust leaked into the public domain. Each high-profile abduction triggered a vitriolic and, for a long time, entirely inconclusive debate between journalists, politicians and law-enforcement officials. There were those who favoured the hard line on kidnapping: refusing to pay ransoms, freezing victims’ assets, and the like. Ranged against them were those who thought the ‘soft line’ (i.e., negotiation) was the only humane and practical option. Some of the more pugnacious entrepreneurs of the North under
went weapons training. The situation became so bad that, in 1978, one magistrate discovered that some wealthy families were taking out special insurance policies so that they would have enough money for a ransom when the masked bandits paid their seemingly inevitable visit. Wealthy citizens—the class of person who, in other Western democracies, would almost automatically be loyal to the powers that be—were angry, alienated and afraid.

  There is a photo that makes for an intriguing memento of that terrible era of fear and mistrust. It shows a self-confident young Milanese construction entrepreneur leaning back in a chair. His serious expression shows no hint of the permanent matinée idol smile that would later become his worldwide trademark. He has just removed a pair of aviator sunglasses, and the flared trousers of his suit reveal the trendy ankle boots on his feet. But it is not his dress and accessories that really make the photo symptomatic of the 1970s. Rather it is the holstered pistol that sits on his desk. The entrepreneur’s name is Silvio Berlusconi, and around the time the photo was taken, he had the well-grounded dread of kidnapping that was common to many wealthy Italians. However Berlusconi’s business factotum, a Sicilian banker called Marcello Dell’Utri, found a more effective way to calm these fears than a pistol in a desk drawer. From 1974 to 1976, Vittorio Mangano, a mafioso from Palermo, took a not terribly clearly defined job (groom? major domo? factor?) at Berlusconi’s newly acquired villa at Arcore. The Italian courts have recently ascertained that, in reality, Mangano was a guarantee of Cosa Nostra’s protection against kidnapping. Moreover, he was also there with the intention of making friends. Or, in the language of a judge’s ruling, Mangano was part of a ‘complex strategy destined to make an approach to the entrepreneur Berlusconi and link him more closely to the criminal organisation’.