Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Buscetta’s testimony also followed a script, a narrative about his personal journey that many other defeated mafiosi before him had recited. Once upon a time there was a good mafia, he claimed, a Cosa Nostra that adhered to the organisation’s true, noble ideals. Now Cosa Nostra had changed. Honour was dead, and greed and brutality held sway. Now the mafia killed women and children—and so he, Tommaso Buscetta, as a true Man of Honour, would have nothing more to do with it. A misleading and self-interested tale, of course.

  But if mafiosi have always talked, and Tommaso Buscetta was like the many mafiosi that had talked before him, why was he so important? Why is he always defined as the ‘history-making’ penitent? The main reason is that, whether the mafia reabsorbed them, intimidated them or simply killed them, mafia defectors rarely got to repeat their testimonies where it really counted: before a judge. What the prosecutors knew, they could not prove. When the mafia’s losers spoke, Italy refused to believe them. And a Sicilian elite that had been profoundly implicated with the killers of the mafia since Italy was unified needed no further invitation to bury what the mafia’s defectors said in verbiage: the mafia did not exist, they said; it was all a question of the Sicilian mentality, they said; all those rumours about a secret criminal association were the result of northern prejudices and paranoia; it was all the fault of Arab invaders, centuries ago.

  Between talking to the police and testifying to a court, there was a long and difficult journey. For Falcone and the Palermo anti-mafia pool, the challenge was to help the boss of two worlds make it to the end of his journey. Only then could he really be said to have changed the course of history.

  Falcone and Borsellino received crucial help in that task from the United States. The investigations into drug trafficking that had first drawn Falcone into the fight against the mafia had taught him just how profoundly linked, by both kinship and business ties, were mafiosi on both sides of the Atlantic. Falcone was a pioneer in grasping that anti-mafia investigators had to have the same, international outlook as their foe. Sicilian magistrates and police could make themselves twice as effective by seeking the help of their American counterparts. Buscetta, the boss of two worlds, was almost as important a witness in the United States as he was in Italy. And the United States, unlike Italy, had a proper witness-protection programme to which Buscetta could be entrusted.

  Many dark days passed between the day when Tommaso Buscetta first sat down to speak to Giovanni Falcone and his date with the judge. The darkest days of all came in late July and early August 1985.

  Beppe Montana was one of the members of the Flying Squad that had been working closely with the pool—his specialism was hunting down the many mafiosi who had dodged arrest warrants by going on the run. When interviewed by the press, Montana had summed up the mood of determined fatalism in his unit: ‘In Palermo there are about ten of us who are a real danger for the mafia. And their killers know us all. Unfortunately, we are easy targets. If the mafiosi decide to kill us they can do it easily.’

  On 25 July, two killers surprised Montana as he reached shore after a boating trip with his girlfriend; he died in his swimming trunks, aged just thirty-three. The fatal combination had struck again.

  Paolo Borsellino recalled giving Ninni Cassarà, the deputy commander of the Flying Squad, a lift back from the scene of Montana’s murder. Cassarà too was working closely with the pool, and Montana was much more than a colleague to him. After a silent journey, ashen-faced, Cassarà could only mutter: ‘We’d better resign ourselves to being walking cadavers.’ A couple of days later, Cassarà found the composure to give a lucid interview on the political context of Montana’s death. By this time, the huge trial against the Nuova Camorra Organizzata was generating a fierce argument over Portobello star Enzo Tortora’s conviction:

  We keep a very close eye on the worrying events surrounding both the build-up to the Palermo maxi-trial, and the maxi-trial against the camorra. In Naples we can see exactly what is happening both inside and outside the courtroom. There is a frontal assault on the value of evidence from penitents. We don’t know how our Neapolitan colleagues have behaved. What we do know very well is that here we have proceeded by seeking out meticulous, rigorous and even wearying proof to confirm every detail of the penitents’ accusations.

  What Cassarà did not point out was that, in Naples, it was a criminal organisation in terminal decline that was in the dock. The Palermo maxi-trial set out to prosecute a mafia in its pomp, with most of its leaders still at large. In a more private moment at the end of the interview, Cassarà added a chilling final note. ‘Sooner or later all the investigators who really take their job seriously end up getting killed.’

  Montana’s cruel death pitched the men under Cassarà’s command from determined fatalism into desperate rage. Five days later, a young fisherman and amateur soccer player called Salvatore Marino was brought in for questioning. Witnesses placed Marino at the scene of the crime; at his home the police found a bloodied shirt and 34 million lire (about $53,000 today) in cash, part of it wrapped in a piece of newspaper bearing the story of Montana’s assassination. (Mafia penitents have since claimed that Marino, although not a mafia affiliate, was indeed the lookout for the murderers.)

  None of that excuses what happened to him. While in custody, he was punched, beaten and even bitten. Face up and head leaning back, he was then tied to a desk; a hood was placed over his head, and a hose leading into a bucket of seawater was shoved into his mouth. With a policeman sitting on his stomach, Marino was forced to drink litres and litres. This was a torture known as the cassetta (‘box’), and it was a relic of Fascist police brutality. Like many victims of the cassetta before him, Marino died under torture.

  In a panic, the men responsible for his death faked a drowning. Ninni Cassarà found out what had happened, and decided to support the hamfisted cover-up that his beleaguered men were trying to stage. He went to Falcone’s house in the middle of the night to ask for support. The two men had by now been working together for several years, and had become the closest of friends. They paced the room in anguish for hours. Before morning, the investigating authorities were alerted to what had really happened to Salvatore Marino.

  On 5 August Salvatore Marino’s white coffin, draped in his blue soccer shirt, was taken on a tour of the city to the cry of ‘police murderers’. At his funeral, a Carmelite priest gave an angry homily directed at the police. The same Radical Party leader who had offered TV presenter Enzo Tortora a parliamentary seat and a platform for his fight for justice came down to Palermo to decry Marino’s killers. There were rumours that the young suspect’s death was no accident, and that the Flying Squad had a deliberate policy of ‘taking out’ mafia captives. Newspaper opinion-makers across the country began to draft well-rehearsed reflections on whether the fight against Cosa Nostra was imperilling citizens’ rights. That very evening, before the results of Salvatore Marino’s autopsy had even been issued, the Minister of the Interior had the chief of the Palermo Flying Squad and two other senior law-enforcement officers removed from their jobs. The same ministry that had been umming and ahhing for months over whether to replace the Palermo anti-mafia pool’s outdated computers had been shaken into absurdly precipitant action by the outrage over Marino’s death.

  The following afternoon, Ninni Cassarà left work early to find a platoon of mafia killers waiting in two separate firing positions in the apartment block across the road from his house. Three Kalashnikovs and assorted other weapons unleashed 200 rounds. Cassarà’s wife, waiting at home with their three young children, saw the whole ambush from a window. Alongside Cassarà died Roberto Antiochia, a twenty-three-year-old Roman boy who had come back early from his holidays after the Montana murder to watch his commander’s back.

  Between them, the mafia and the politicians had utterly incapacitated the Flying Squad, cutting off the anti-mafia pool’s right arm. The rage among the surviving members of the Flying Squad was barely contained. Refusing to let Antiochia l
ie in state in police headquarters, they kidnapped his coffin, along with the brass posts and cordon that had been positioned around it, and carried them off to the atrium of Flying Squad HQ fifty metres away. The Interior Minister had to be protected from the dead men’s colleagues when he came to Palermo for their funeral. There was fighting in the street with men from other forces. Once again, the government was panicked into inappropriate action, sending 800 police and Carabinieri to the island to man largely symbolic roadblocks.

  The Flying Squad, like the anti-mafia magistrates of the pool, had good reason to feel not only isolated, but misrepresented. In the national and local media, the mafia’s friends, or just lazy journalists in search of a polemical angle, could easily shape the frightening isolation in which they worked into a very different story: the men and women in the front line of the anti-mafia struggle were egotists, lone obsessives, loose cannons, self-appointed sheriffs. After Cassarà’s death Vittorio Nisticò, a veteran of campaigning anti-mafia journalism in Sicily, berated a number of irresponsible crime correspondents:

  You knew Cassarà. And you understood. The mistake you made was that, when he was alive, you didn’t show him for what he was: a modern hero. It would have been a way to protect him. Now, it’s too late to tell his story.

  While all this was going on, two more modern heroes, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were hard at work preparing the prosecution case for the maxi-trial—a document that, in the end, would amount to 8,607 lucidly argued pages. (As was normal in the Italian legal system at the time, the investigating magistrates would leave to others the task of standing up before the court and arguing this case to a judge.) Two weeks after the Cassarà atrocity, both Falcone and Borsellino were transferred with their families to an offshore prison so that they could conclude their mammoth labour. Ironically, the island chosen to host them was Asinara, off the north coast of Sardinia, the very same maximum security facility where Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo was now being held. For once, the anti-mafia magistrates’ isolation was keeping them safe.

  63

  THE CAPITAL OF THE ANTI-MAFIA

  PALERMO’S UCCIARDONE PRISON IS A MONUMENT TO SHATTERED DREAMS OF REFORM. Rising in what was once open countryside near the port, it is a Victorian brick polygon with fat towers at each corner. But its forbidding appearance gives no clue to the enlightened hopes that inspired its construction. It was designed in the 1830s along the lines suggested by the great British philosopher Jeremy Bentham. No longer would men and women, adults and children, the guilty and those awaiting trial, murderers and mere petty thieves, be thrown together in the verminous promiscuity of great dungeons. In the new jail prisoners would be held in separate cells where their God-given consciences would have a chance at last to work on their souls. Rehabilitation would be born from within.

  Bad planning, poor resources and a lack of political will soon buried these far-fetched dreams, and transformed the Ucciardone into a filthy, overcrowded mockery of the rule of law. For the police, it became an instrument of blackmail into which suspects would disappear, without due process, for months on end. For the underworld, as one parliamentary inquiry heard in the 1860s, the Ucciardone was ‘a kind of government’ whence orders were issued in times of political turbulence.

  A century later, Palermo prison earned the nickname, the ‘Grand Hotel Ucciardone’: mafia bosses came and went from their cells in silk dressing gowns, ate lobster and drank champagne, and gave orders for murders and consignments of narcotics. Much of what Tommaso Buscetta told Giovanni Falcone about the personnel of Cosa Nostra was learned in prison. As he explained during their first interviews in the summer of 1984: ‘The presence of so many Men of Honour in the Ucciardone at the same time further reinforces the links between them, allowing them to help and encourage one another.’ The Ucciardone was what it had been since the nineteenth century: the great meeting place for Men of Honour from different Families, a hub of criminal power.

  During the course of 1985, a vast new annexe to the prison was built—a courthouse with space for up to a thousand lawyers and witnesses, and as many journalists. Trees were cut down. Buildings requisitioned. Well over 30 billion lire ($48 million in 2011 values) were spent on creating what looked like a gargantuan bomb shelter. A three-metre-high steel fence was erected, just in case the reinforced concrete walls were not enough to protect the court’s proceedings from a missile attack or an armed assault. Underground passages connected the Ucciardone’s cells directly to the cages arranged in a semicircle around the edges of the courtroom.

  Unlike so many other shambolic public works projects of the 1980s, it was all completed in months. Contractors were rigorously checked to exclude anyone tied to the mafia. The ‘bunker courtroom’, as it is known, was built for one trial: the maxi-trial, in which 475 men were due to stand accused of being members and leaders of Cosa Nostra, and the Buscetta theorem would be put to the test.

  Like the maxi-trial for which it was built, the bunker courtroom divided the city of Palermo. For some, despite its forbidding aspect, it was a symbol of hopes far more down-to-earth than those that had inspired the construction of the Ucciardone 150 years earlier: hopes for justice.

  The bunker courtroom certainly showed that the national government, or at least parts of it, had found the political will to fight Cosa Nostra. In Rome, ministerial support had swung temporarily behind the anti-mafia pool: funds were provided not only for the bunker courtroom, but also for improved security and information technology for the investigating magistrates.

  In Palermo too, there were many who shared the hopes made concrete in the new wing of the Ucciardone. In 1985 the city elected a new mayor, Leoluca Orlando, whose political mentor was Piersanti Mattarella, the reforming Christian Democrat who was murdered at his own front door in 1980. Orlando made sure that any planning issues related to the construction of the bunker courtroom were addressed in record time. He also announced that the city council would be a civil complainant in the maxi-trial: in effect, he was announcing his administration’s intention to sue the bosses. Where countless mayors had played the usual game of denying the existence of the mafia, or pretending that it was just organised crime of a kind that could be found anywhere, the new first citizen did not mince words. ‘Palermo has always been the mafia’s capital city. But I want to express my pride in its ability to be the capital of the anti-mafia too.’

  This was not an empty boast. Compared to the other heartlands of criminal power on the southern Italian mainland, Sicily did have a much greater depth and variety of experience when it came to resistance against the mafia. We have already encountered the traditions embodied by Communist leader Pio La Torre and General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. The investigating magistrates Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were themselves, in some senses, the inheritors of those divergent traditions of resistance to the mafia: Falcone was a man of the left, and Borsellino had right-wing sympathies.

  The post-war years had seen other, perhaps more sporadic examples of anti-mafia activity. Like the ‘Sicilian Gandhi’, Danilo Dolci, whose campaign against poverty in the 1950s soon brought him up against one of that poverty’s underlying causes. Or the courageous investigative journalists of L’Ora, who were denouncing the mafia in the general silence of the late 1950s. Or the vast public demonstration that accompanied the funerals of the four Carabinieri, two military engineers and a policeman killed by the Ciaculli car bomb in 1963. The new dissident left groups that emerged after 1968 also had a strong anti-mafia tendency. In 1977 a small group of militants founded a study centre in Palermo that was destined to be a constant presence in anti-mafia campaigns. Peppino Impastato, the left-wing journalist son of a mafioso from Cinisi, near Palermo’s airport, for years harangued the local boss Tano Badalamenti—the boss of all bosses in the mid-1970s. Impastato paid with his life for his devotion to the cause: in 1978 he was tied to a railway line and blown up. For a long time, the authorities dismissed his death as a bungled terrorist attack.


  The bloody years of mafia conflict after 1979 saw the flowering of new and much more insistent forms of resistance. An estimated 100,000 people packed themselves into Palermo’s piazza Politeama for Pio La Torre’s funeral in 1982. A mass torch-lit parade followed Rocco Chinnici’s death in 1983. Victims’ families and their supporters formed support groups and campaigning organisations. Students staged rallies in support of the police. The anniversaries of the worst atrocities, notably the death of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, became the occasion for demonstrations and other initiatives. Back in 1972, a Sicilian Communist leader had complained, ‘Why are we [i.e., Communists] the only ones who talk about the mafia?’ By the time the bunker courtroom was built, his lament was no longer justified.

  Mayor Orlando’s own story—he was a lawyer close to the Jesuits—spoke of an increasingly vocal strain of Catholic anti-mafia feeling. Priests were beginning to talk about the mafia in their sermons. Groups of Catholic activists embraced the anti-mafia cause. Moreover, extraordinarily, bloodstained Palermo was witnessing the first hints of a truly epoch-making shift in the attitude of the Church hierarchy.

  The Church had rubbed along pretty well with Sicily’s Honoured Society for more than a century. As ever, the reasons were political. The Papacy was one of the losers in the process that had made Italy one country with its capital in Rome: the Pope lost all of his earthly territory apart from Vatican City. Thereafter, the Pope banned Catholics from voting or standing for elections in Italy. Alienated from the state, and true to their profoundly conservative instincts, bishops and priests sought out alternative sources of authority in the society around them. And mafiosi proved adept at posing as a traditional source of authority. In Sicily, as in Campania and Calabria, local saints’ days and processions gave the men of violence the chance to parade their power, while seeming to soften its brutal edges.