by John Dickie
The Red Brigade penitents who braved the loathing of their former comrades encountered a state that was better equipped to make use of their evidence than it had ever been. Italy’s police, particularly the Carabinieri, learned to operate in specialised, specially trained teams against the terrorists, and they emerged from the fight with a greatly enhanced reputation.
During the Years of Lead, the Italian judicial system also came of age. In theory, since the Constitution of the Italian Republic was promulgated in 1948, magistrates and judges had been free from political interference, subject only to their own governing body. In practice, genuine judicial independence took much longer to arrive. During the 1960s, the expanding education system and the selection of magistrates through public examinations made a career in the legal system an option for bright young people from many different backgrounds. As a result, the magistracy was becoming less of a caste and more of an open profession.
Some of the magistrates who went to university in the 1960s were the legal professionals who stood in the front line during the Years of Lead. Like the senior police officers, they ran terrible risks: their movements were constantly trailed by terrorist cells spying out any opportunity to strike. The successes that the state eventually won against left-wing terrorism gave the legal system a store of credibility that it could then draw on when taking the fight to Italy’s bastions of illicit privilege—corrupt politicians and the mafias.
In Sicily, the conflict within Cosa Nostra that had been rumbling since 1978 exploded in the spring of 1981 when Shorty Riina launched his assault on the mafia’s heroin elite. Meanwhile, on the mainland, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia were scattering Campania with cadavers. The first penitents from criminal organisations would emerge from the carnage.
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THE FATAL COMBINATION
ANYWHERE ELSE IN THE WORLD, PIO LA TORRE AND CARLO ALBERTO DALLA CHIESA would have been enemies: the one, a Sicilian Communist militant devoted to radical social change; the other, a rigorous northern military man devoted to defending society from subversives. Cosa Nostra turned them into allies. Then in 1982, Cosa Nostra killed them both.
Few people knew the Sicilian mafia more intimately than Pio La Torre. He was born in 1927 in the village of Altarello di Baida, set among the mafia-controlled lemon groves of Palermo’s Conca d’Oro. Life was hard. His father kept a few animals to top up what he could earn as a farmhand. With a stubbornness that would characterise him for the rest of his life, Pio studied by candlelight, laboured to cover his living costs, and worked his way into university. There, in 1945, he joined the Communist Party, soon rising to be a local leader of the Communist agricultural workers’ union. He gained his first experience of political action—and had his first clash with the mafia—during the post-war peasant struggle for control of the land. The local boss, always on the lookout for talent, sidled up to him during an election campaign: ‘You’re an intelligent lad. You’ll go far. You just have to come with us . . .’ Soon afterwards, the mafia made Pio an offer through his father: he could become a Member of Parliament straight away—all he had to do was change his political colours. ‘We just can’t stomach this party. Over there in Russia maybe . . . But in Italy, we just don’t do that kind of thing.’ When La Torre refused, his father woke one morning to find the cowshed door ablaze. The warnings were clear: Pio had to choose between his home and his politics. He packed his bags.
These were acutely dangerous years to be a left-wing militant in western Sicily. Dozens of trades unionists and political activists were murdered by mafiosi or by Salvatore Giuliano’s bandit gang. In March 1948 Placido Rizzotto, a union leader from the mafia stronghold of Corleone, vanished. La Torre went to take his place. In March 1950, La Torre led several thousand peasants from nearby Bisacquino on a march to occupy part of an under-cultivated estate. Along with 180 others he was arrested and charged with violent conduct based on the false testimony of a Carabiniere. He would spend a terrifying eighteen months in Palermo’s Ucciardone prison—confined with members of Salvatore Giuliano’s gang, among others—before his case even came to trial.
Pio La Torre encapsulated a tradition of Sicilian peasant militancy, and of opposition to the mafia, that went back to the nineteenth century. Again and again, just like La Torre, the peasants had found their hunger for land and a decent living thwarted by a de facto alliance between the landowners, the police and the mafia. In the fight for social justice, the rule of law was a mask for repression, and the state was not an ally but an enemy.
But in those earliest years of his career as a militant, Pio La Torre also encountered another face of the Italian state, and a very different tradition of opposition to the mafia—one rooted not in the radical aspirations of the peasantry, but in the patriotic, conservative instincts of the forces of law and order. In 1949, when La Torre first went to serve the proletarian cause in Corleone, he found that a young Captain of the Carabinieri had been posted there too: Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa.
There is one vignette that captures, better than any description, the value system into which Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was born—and the enormous cultural distance that separated him from Pio La Torre. In 1945, he and his brother Romolo, both of them lieutenants in the Carabinieri, both of them in uniform, were waiting anxiously for their father’s train to pull into Milan station. The reunion was no ordinary one: General Romano Dalla Chiesa was due to arrive home from a concentration camp. Back in September 1943, Italy had capitulated to the Allies, and the Nazis set up a puppet regime. Like many military men, the General faced a choice between enlisting on the German side or being interned: he opted for the latter, and he had not seen his family since.
At last, the train pulled in, and the two Dalla Chiesa boys saw their father’s emaciated figure emerge from the crowd on the platform. Carlo Alberto clicked his heels, stood to attention, and snapped his hand to the peak of his cap. But the emotion of the occasion overcame Romolo, who threw himself into his father’s arms.
The following day General Romano Dalla Chiesa sent Romolo a disciplinary notice. Carabiniere regulations explicitly state that an officer in uniform may not embrace anyone in public.
Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was a man cut from the same military-issue serge as his father. Like his father, he had faced a stark choice in the terrible September of 1943. At the time, he was billeted in a villa on the Adriatic, charged with supervising the coastguard. When he refused to join the hunt for partisans, the SS came to arrest him. Warned just in time, Dalla Chiesa escaped from a first-floor window and out into the open countryside. He organised a partisan band, and then in the winter of 1943 passed through the battle lines to resume his duties in the liberated South.
Dalla Chiesa had a family connection with Sicily, because his father was a veteran of the Fascist campaigns against the mafia in the 1920s. Two decades later, Carlo Alberto volunteered to join the special force set up to combat banditry on the island. When he reached Corleone, he made a promise to the family of the vanished trade unionist Placido Rizzotto that he would find out who had killed their son. Rizzotto, like Dalla Chiesa, was a former fighter in the Resistance against the Nazis. Thanks to Dalla Chiesa’s sleuthing, the wall of omertà began to crumble, parts of Rizzotto’s body were recovered, and a report—naming an up-and-coming young mafioso called Luciano Liggio as the killer—was sent to the prosecuting authorities. Alas, the two key witnesses were intimidated into retracting their statements, and Liggio was released: a dispiriting reprise of countless mafia trials of the past, and a foreshadowing of many more still to come. All the same, Dalla Chiesa’s determination would remain impressed in the memory of Corleone’s peasants.
After Corleone, Pio La Torre and Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa would continue to cross paths. When he was released from prison, La Torre was elected to Palermo city council, where he spent the years of the Sack of Palermo denouncing the corrupt goings-on within the ruling DC. As a trade-union militant, he also campaigned aga
inst mafia influence in Palermo docks, where big companies used bosses to recruit casual labour. In 1962 he was elected to the regional leadership of the Communist Party in Sicily, and the following year he won a seat in the Sicilian Regional Assembly. At the end of the 1960s he took up a national role within his party, and in 1972 he became a Member of Parliament, where he took a particularly energetic role in the last years of the parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia.
Unlikely allies and anti-mafia martyrs: Pio La Torre of the Italian Communist Party and Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa of the Carabinieri.
La Torre addresses a local Communist rally in Palermo, 1968.
The future General Dalla Chiesa during his time in Corleone, c. 1950.
Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa testified before the inquiry, by virtue of being commander of the Carabinieri legion in Palermo between 1966 and 1973. He provided some of the inquiry’s most explosive evidence against mafia-backed politicians, and compiled reports on, among others, the ‘Concrete King’, Ciccio Vassallo.
In 1974 Dalla Chiesa was promoted to General, and appointed to a command in north-western Italy, where he created a specialised anti-terrorist unit to combat the Red Brigades. After the kidnap and murder of former Prime Minister Aldo Moro in 1978, Dalla Chiesa became the prime figure in the fight against left-wing terrorism nationally. Dalla Chiesa it was who convinced Patrizio Peci to become the first brigatista to turn penitent. The General was number two on the Red Brigades’ death list in the motor city of Turin—a list that Peci had helped draw up. (Number one was the FIAT dynast Gianni Agnelli.) He knew that Peci had tried several times to kill him, and yet dealt with his prisoner in a humane and professional fashion. Dalla Chiesa personally guaranteed the penitent’s safety while he was in prison, and came to visit him after the Red Brigades tortured his brother to death. As Peci later recalled: ‘His manner was severe but gentle, authoritative but kind. He never treated you with familiarity, but he didn’t make you feel like a shit either . . . I came to admire him more and more: for his character, confidence, imagination and ability to command.’
Peci’s information led to the dismantling of most of the Red Brigades’ structure, and made Dalla Chiesa, with his salt-and-pepper moustache set over stern jowls, a famous face and a national hero. At the close of 1981 he was appointed deputy commander of the Carabinieri nationally. Then, in April of the following year, with a nation’s plaudits still ringing in his ears, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was sent to Sicily to break the mafia in the same way that he had broken the Red Brigades.
In Palermo, there was a bloodbath: Riina’s savage mafia coup was in full swing, and the eminent corpses were continuing to fall. One of the most vocal supporters of Dalla Chiesa’s appointment as Prefect of Palermo was Pio La Torre, who had also recently returned to his native city, drawn back by the mafia crisis and by the decision to allow the United States to base new cruise missiles at an airbase in the south-east of Sicily.
La Torre was still busy lobbying in support of new anti-mafia legislation that he had proposed the previous year. The planned law was based on the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act that had done such damage to the mafia in the United States since it came into effect there in 1970. The key law enforcement tools that La Torre wanted were two: heavy sentences for anyone proved to be a member of an organisation that used intimidation and omertà to gain control of companies and public resources; and the power to confiscate the mafia’s illegally acquired wealth. The political irony in La Torre’s proposal was clear: once again, it was the Communists who were the keenest to learn lessons from Uncle Sam’s experience in fighting organised crime.
A short time before taking up his post as Prefect of Palermo, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa wrote to his sons about what lay ahead. His hopes were high: ‘In a couple of years, La Torre and I should be able to get the most important things done.’ Faced with unprecedented slaughter in Sicily, the two great but divergent traditions of resistance to mafia power were set to unite their forces after more than a century of suspicion and misunderstanding. Honest Sicilians of all political persuasions would see their champions working together.
Dalla Chiesa’s first official duty as Prefect of Palermo was to attend Pio La Torre’s funeral. On 30 April 1982, La Torre was trapped in his car in a machine-gun ambush. The driver, Rosario Di Salvo, managed to get off four futile shots against the attackers before dying alongside his great friend. Di Salvo was not a police bodyguard, but a Communist Party volunteer.
Pio La Torre’s murder prompted what was now a horrendously familiar public ritual in Palermo. First, on the front pages of the dailies and in TV news bulletins, there would be the macabre images of the victims slumped in ungainly postures in a pool of blood or a bullet-pocked car. Then there came the formulaic condemnations by politicians momentarily distracted from the business of jostling for position and influence. Then finally the funeral, with senior statesmen—representatives of a state that was patently not doing its job—forced to risk the wrath of the mourners and public. (One leading Sicilian politician who tried to speak at La Torre’s funeral was heckled with cries of ‘Get lost, mafioso!’)
To anyone with eyes to see, it was clear that Sicilian mafiosi were systematically decapitating that part of the state that stood in the way of their lust for power. If a shocking chain of ‘eminent corpses’ had been seen anywhere else in the Western world, then the most elementary laws of politics would have guaranteed that a national hero like General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa would be given a unanimous and clear mandate to lead the state’s response. And when the first reports of his mission appeared, back in March 1982, the elementary laws of politics seemed to be in force: both the government and Communist opposition were agreed that Dalla Chiesa would be granted wide-ranging powers, not limited to Palermo or even to Sicily. ‘There should be no political difficulties,’ one national paper declared.
Yet, as he mourned Pio La Torre, political difficulties soon became a bigger worry to Dalla Chiesa than the mafia. Through press releases and interviews, the dealmakers of Rome began to send their coded public messages about Dalla Chiesa’s appointment. Lukewarm expressions of support were mixed with polite perplexity. Fighting the Sicilian mafia was crucial, but it should not hinder the workings of the market economy, they said. Of course Dalla Chiesa’s appointment was a good thing. But Italian democrats needed to be watchful, they said. The General should not be the herald of an authoritarian turn: Sicily didn’t need another ‘Iron Prefect’. (The reference was, of course, to Prefect Cesare Mori, who had led Fascism’s clampdown on organised crime in the 1920s.)
On 2 April, Dalla Chiesa wrote to the Prime Minister to demand an explicit and formal anti-mafia mandate for his new job. ‘It is certain that I am destined to be the target of local resistance, both subtle and brutal.’ He pointed out that the ‘most crooked “political family”’ in Sicily was already making sinister noises about him.
There was little mystery about who that political family was: the Andreotti faction of the Christian Democrat Party, headed by the ‘Young Turk’ Salvo Lima. Dalla Chiesa knew Andreotti well. For the DC magus was Prime Minister when former premier Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades. Andreotti it was who conferred special powers on Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to get to grips with the terrorist threat.
Dalla Chiesa was a man who believed profoundly in the values of the state—he had the Carabinieri insignia sewn onto his skin, as he often said. Yet he was no ingénue. He was ambitious, and he knew how liquid power was in Italy, how it often coursed through personal channels, and collected in the hands of cliques. He knew the art of modulating relations with his political masters by means of a quiet word, a letter, a leak to a journalist, or a formal newspaper interview. When the list of members of the covert Masonic lodge P2 was discovered in 1981, Dalla Chiesa’s name was rumoured to be on it. He explained that he had applied to join, partly out of a desire to monitor the lodge’s activities, but
that his application was not accepted. The P2 affair cast a shadow over Dalla Chiesa’s reputation. Nonetheless, his sense of duty made him an outsider in the Italy of factions and shady schemes. When he reached Palermo, his dealings with Andreotti—the man at the centre of many a shady scheme—showed just how vulnerable that outsider status made him.
On 6 April 1982 Dalla Chiesa was called in to see Giulio Andreotti himself. This meeting was yet another example of just how individualised influence can be in Italy: it resides not in institutions, but in men and their networks of friends. For the spring of 1982 was one of the very rare moments in post-war history when Andreotti did not hold a government post. So he had no official claim to meddle in Dalla Chiesa’s Sicilian mission, or request a meeting. Dalla Chiesa answered the summons all the same. As usual, the General did not mince his words: he declared he would show no special favours to Andreotti’s supporters on the island. He later told his children, ‘I’ve been to see Andreotti; and when I told him everything I know about his people in Sicily, he blanched.’
Andreotti’s typically coded and devious public reply to Dalla Chiesa’s statement of intent came in a newspaper column. Sending Dalla Chiesa to Sicily was a welcome initiative, he wrote. But surely the problem was more serious in Naples and Calabria than in Sicily?
