by John Dickie
The chief culprits for the debt were the usual suspects: the state and the political system that was supposed to manage it. The old vices of pork-barrel politics, nepotism and clientele-building grew worse in the 1980s—in part because there were fewer restraints. The Communist Party had reached its highest ever percentage of the vote in the 1976 general election. Thereafter, it went into decline, beached by the final retreat of the tide of labour militancy in the early 1980s. The PCI could now only look on from the margins, its leaders bewildered by change.
The decade was dominated by a five-party coalition, centred on the DC and the Socialist Party, which seemed to spend most of its time squabbling over the spoils of office. Endless bargaining, and endless jockeying for position and influence, robbed the executive branch of its ability to make reforms, plan for the future, or put a brake on public spending. The extension of local democracy (Italy’s regional governments began in 1970) only spread the same methods deeper down into society. The parties, and party factions, moved in to place their men in every possible position of influence: from government ministries, national TV stations and nationalised banks to local health authorities. This ‘party-ocracy’, as it was termed, became entirely self-serving, cutting politics and the state off from the ordinary job of reflecting the people’s will and administering collective services. A new breed of ‘business politician’ emerged: a party functionary or state administrator devoted to systematically taking bribes on public contracts. The business politicians then took home those bribes or, much more often, reinvested them in the sources of personal power: a party or party faction, a clique of friends or fellow Masons. Some money went on conspicuous consumption to advertise political traction and lack of scruple: a big car, a flash suit or a daughter’s lavish wedding. When the occasional corruption investigation hit the headlines, the governing classes united in denouncing the magistrates for political bias.
In the South, but not just in the South, this newly degraded political system was easy prey to the threats and wiles of organised crime. In the ethics-free world of the party-ocracy, criminal organisations became just one more lobby group to buy off. For any given political coterie, as for any given company looking to do business with the public sector, having camorristi, ’ndranghetisti or mafiosi as friends became a competitive advantage in the struggle to corner public resources. Even as they became more violent than ever before, more hooked on the profits of narcotics trafficking, the mafia, camorra and ’ndrangheta became more deeply entwined with the state—a state that had occupied more of society and the economy than ever before.
Organised crime had made itself indispensable. Looking back on the growth of the camorra in the 1980s, a parliamentary inquiry into the camorra put it this way in 1993:
In areas dominated by the camorra, society, companies and public bodies tend to become dependent on the camorra organisation. The camorra becomes the great mediator, the essential junction box linking society to the state, linking the market to the state, and linking society to the market. Services, financial resources, votes, or the buying and selling of goods: all are subject to camorra mediation. The camorra’s activities create a generalised ‘rule of non-law’.
The line between criminal business and lawful business had never been as blurred. In the construction sector, it was difficult to discern any line at all. Camorristi were newcomers to the building game, but by the early 1980s every major clan could boast its own cement works. Paying kickbacks became routine, as did doling out fat subcontracts.
Naples and the towns of Campania were rebuilt in organised crime’s ghastly image. An entire neighbourhood of 60,000 inhabitants, Pianura near the Nuvoletta capital Marano, was built using mob money and without a single building licence. The whole of greater Naples, in the words of the parliamentary inquiry’s report,
has been transformed into a conurbation that can only be compared to some of the metropolises that have grown up rapidly and chaotically in South America or South-East Asia: it is uninhabitable, and impossible to travel across. This level of disorder helps the camorra prosper and grow vigorous.
Illegal building has corrosive long-term effects. People who live in houses put up without planning permission, or businesses based in illegally built real estate, make up a vast and vulnerable constituency for the most unscrupulous power brokers. They are dependent on favours from on high to have their properties linked up to the electricity grid, to the road network or to water supplies. They need to be protected from any politician or administrator who might take it upon himself to enforce the law and begin demolition procedures. And they seek the help of any politician or administrator above to give them planning approval retrospectively. Such people are the camorrista-politician’s perfect constituents.
The camorra (and the same could be said for Cosa Nostra and the ’ndrangheta) exploited Italy’s political and social weaknesses with cool entrepreneurial rationality. Antonio Bardellino’s business manager later explained his clan’s strategic thinking:
In the 1980s we realised that we had to ‘industrialise mafia activities’ in the way that the Nuvolettas had already done. We needed to do this for several reasons: so as to have capital constantly available; so that we could plan the organisation’s future activities; and so that we didn’t end up like Cutolo’s Nuova Camorra Organizzata, which no longer had the money to pay what was due to its affiliates behind bars. That’s the time when [our people] set up CONVIN, an aggregates consortium. In 1982 Antonio Bardellino and I also set up CEDIC, a concrete supply consortium. We entrusted the running of CEDIC to a qualified surveyor, Giovanni Mincione. Before being nominated chairman, Mincione was ritually affiliated to Antonio Bardellino’s organisation by having his finger pricked while an image of the patron saint of our village was burned.
Force of arms, and through it the establishment of territorial control, was of course integral to this business plan. After the Torre Annunziata massacre, Antonio Bardellino’s victorious troops ousted the Nuvolettas from the pits that supplied sand and gravel for the building industry.
Carmine ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri’s territorial control around his home town of Nola was so undisputed that no one would have dreamed of awarding a contract except through his good offices. All the commodities of the modern mob imperium flowed through Alfieri’s hands: bribes and votes, narcotics and concrete, contracts and weapons. In just one operation against one of Alfieri’s lieutenants in the Sarno and Scafati area to the south-east of Mount Vesuvius, the police arrested a former mayor, a chief of a local health authority and three bank managers.
The Torre Annunziata bus massacre that confirmed ‘Mr Angry’ Alfieri’s pre-eminent position in the camorra in 1984, happening as it did in a tourist hotspot, was the cause for renewed chest-beating by politicians and the media. The Italian state seemed to have lost control of the streets, its right to rule usurped by gangsters who were dragging much of the South and Sicily into a slough of gore. Once the question had been, ‘When will it all end?’ Now the press was asking, ‘When will we even reach the bottom?’
The answer was not yet. Across Calabria, ’ndranghetisti fought one another throughout the 1980s in a seemingly interminable sequence of feuds over local turf. Then in 1985, yet another major conflagration broke out in Reggio Calabria over control of narcotics trafficking and construction. The so-called Second ’Ndrangheta War began with a bang: on 11 October 1985, in Villa San Giovanni, an ugly ferry port north of Reggio, a FIAT Cinquecento stuffed with dynamite exploded, killing three people. The intended target, the local boss Antonio ‘Ferocious Dwarf’ Imerti, survived. But the criminal balance of power in place since the end of the previous war in 1976 was blown apart.
The First ’Ndrangheta War had left Paolo De Stefano as the dominant boss in the city of Reggio Calabria and its environs. De Stefano’s authority in the city had the blessing of the ’ndrangheta’s regional institutions. He boasted to one of his lieutenants that, ‘He lived to do justice because he was the armed emissary
of the Madonna of Polsi, which used him to kill and eliminate all the dishonoured scum and schemers in the ’ndrangheta.’
De Stefano it was who had tried to kill Ferocious Dwarf. Two days later he was cruising on his motorbike round Archi, the ramshackle new quarter of Reggio Calabria that was his fortress, when the assassins caught up with him.
After Paolo De Stefano’s death, the underworld in Reggio Calabria again split into two factions, and descended into a seemingly endless slogging match. Bosses from the ’ndrangheta’s Canadian colonies tried to intervene to stop the blood-letting, but to no avail. Six years passed, and six hundred lives were lost before a compromise was reached. When judges came to reconstruct the events of the Second ’Ndrangheta War, their narrative of how it all began was tinged with justified fury: ‘Great fluctuations in power. Marriages to seal pacts. Secret alliances. These were the warning signs of the conflict—a conflict between opposed criminal personalities who were all just as cunning as they were stupidly determined to carry on with a futile massacre.’ By the end, according to the same investigating magistrates, ‘the war’s protagonists, who had by now been decimated, were irrationally hitting victims chosen at random just so that they could demonstrate—perhaps more to themselves than to their adversaries—that they still existed.’
Mafia war had become its own reason. Sicily, Campania and Calabria stood at risk of becoming narco-regions, swollen empires of graft, nightmarish mockeries of the civilised Europe to which they purported to belong.
65
’U MAXI
THE PALERMO MAXI-TRIAL OPENED ON 10 FEBRUARY 1986 AMID BARELY CONCEALED scepticism in the international press. Foreign correspondents were uniformly puzzled by the sheer scale of the undertaking: 3,000 police occupying the area of the bunker courtroom; an entire spare team of judges and jurors, just in case anything should happen to the first lot; 475 defendants, a quarter of whom were being tried in absentia—including, of course, Shorty Riina himself. The New York Times summarised the ‘Buscetta theorem’ in terms that made it sound as if Falcone and Borsellino were tilting at windmills: ‘The prosecution will try to prove how individual acts were part of a vast criminal conspiracy born centuries ago and now able to reach from Bangkok to Brooklyn.’
Across the pond, the Economist referred to the Palermo Commission, Cosa Nostra’s ruling body, as ‘semi-mythical’. The Observer called the maxi a ‘show trial’ whose only precedents dated back to the Fascist era. The Guardian was more disparaging still, saying that the whole affair had ‘overtones of a Barnum and Bailey production’.
There were barely concealed stereotypes at work in these views: the anti-mafia pool’s work, like the Fascist campaign against the mafia that it inevitably called to mind, was a typically Italian mixture of the sinister, the melodramatic and the farcical.
It was not only the foreign media who dealt in stereotypes. In Italy, as abroad, Mussolini’s anti-mafia drive was frequently evoked as a parallel for Falcone and Borsellino’s maxi-trial. But what people meant by ‘Fascism’ was rarely more than a crude metaphor—the image of a demonic alliance between propaganda and state brutality. In other words, the Fascism of popular memory bore little relationship to the contradictory reality of what had actually happened in the 1920s and 1930s. The truth was that the maxi-trial bore comparison with Fascism only in the minds of its enemies.
Nevertheless, the doubters seemed to have their prejudices confirmed by the inordinately slow opening to proceedings. It took three hours for the judge just to read out the charges; and two days for him to check that all the defendants had lawyers to call on. As they were trained to do, mafiosi did their part in trying to discredit the court: some feigned insanity or illness; others brought up endless procedural quibbles, or complained loudly about prison conditions. The presiding judge, Alfonso Giordano, refused to be thrown off course, but also listened to any sensible requests from the defendants and their lawyers. In the coming months, he would show reserves of patience and good sense that would earn him deserved plaudits. The maxi-trial would be many things, but it would not be a farce.
Falcone, Borsellino and Caponnetto responded to the many critics and doubters in a series of interviews. They vehemently denied that their case was founded only on finger-pointing by former crooks. A mountain of evidence had been gathered to back up what Tommaso Buscetta, Totuccio Contorno and the other penitents alleged. Falcone and Borsellino took justifiable pride in claiming that the maxi-trial also included the largest investigation of bank records in Italian history. They also denied that they were trying to deliver herd justice, trampling over the specific circumstances of each individual defendant. As the two magistrates argued, none of the individual crimes made sense outside of the bigger picture of a struggle for power within the whole of Cosa Nostra; these crimes were local battles conducted in the context of a war-fighting strategy. Above all, the magistrates insisted that the maxi was not a gargantuan show. The unitary nature of Cosa Nostra could not be proved without putting a large number of mafiosi on trial at the same time.
Falcone and Borsellino were, of course, absolutely correct to say what they said. They were also politically smart to say what they said. Any concession to the idea that they had written the script for a judicial extravaganza would open them up to their enemies’ charge that they were merely ambitious showboaters. Nevertheless in Sicily, where the Honoured Society’s power had hitherto been as fearsome as it was invisible, the sight of mafiosi undergoing cross-examination helped puncture the mafia’s aura of invincibility. So it was inevitable that the maxi-trial would be a spectacle.
The spectacle really began on 3 April 1986, when the constant backdrop of argument and chatter from the defendants’ cages was finally silenced by Judge Giordano’s declaration that Tommaso Buscetta was ready to give evidence. The boss of two worlds was about to live up to his epoch-making promise not to retract his confessions. The accused were rapt as he spoke—first from behind a hedge of policemen, and subsequently from behind a portable bulletproof shield that had been brought in at the insistence of the United States authorities. Over the course of a week, Buscetta confirmed the structure of Cosa Nostra as he had first explained it to Giovanni Falcone, and told the story of the rise of the corleonesi. Although this was the prosecution’s central contention, it was not news to the watching public: diagrams of the mafia’s pyramidal structure had appeared in every newspaper since the pool went public with the news that Buscetta had ‘repented’.
The ‘Treasurer of Cosa Nostra’. Pippo Calò’s worst crime was the bomb that killed seventeen on a train between Florence and Bologna in 1984. His confrontation with Tommaso Buscetta was one of the highlights of the maxi-trial in 1986.
Remarkably, one of the defendants asked for the chance to question Buscetta face to face. Pippo Calò was no run-of-the-mill mafioso. Initiated into the Porta Nuova Family of Cosa Nostra by none other than Buscetta, Calò had risen to become the Family’s representative, and had allied himself with Shorty Riina. In the early 1970s, Calò had transferred to Rome, where he worked closely with the Banda della Magliana, sharing their contacts with right-wing terrorists. The investments he managed on behalf of the Palermo bosses earned him the press nickname of the ‘Treasurer of Cosa Nostra’. Calò stood accused of no fewer than sixty-four murders. In a separate case, he had also been charged with planting a bomb on a Naples–Milan train. (The charge was, in the end, confirmed.) On 23 December 1984 the bomb detonated in a mountain tunnel between Florence and Bologna; seventeen people were killed, including Federica Taglialatela (aged twelve), and the entire De Simone family, comprising Anna and Giovanni (aged nine and four) and their parents. Calò’s aim in planning this slaughter of innocent people was to turn the government’s attention away from Cosa Nostra and back towards terrorism. Police investigating the ‘Christmas train bomb’ (as it was called) found an arsenal in Calò’s house that included anti-tank mines.
Now Calò loped across the green floor of the bunker courtroom in a yellow
shirt and fawn flared slacks, his grey hair combed back over his ears and collar from a bald pate. His insolent smirk betrayed a supreme confidence that one hundred and fifty years of Sicilian mafia impunity was not about to end. Buscetta was ‘ten times a liar’, Calò declared; he had cribbed his evidence from The Godfather, and he could not be trusted because of his immoral private life. (The history-making penitent had been married three times.)
Buscetta’s retaliation was withering. On the subject of family values, Calò had taken part in the Commission meetings that had sentenced Buscetta’s own brother and nephew to death: their only ‘crime’ was being related to the boss of two worlds. Buscetta went on to accuse Calò of strangling another member of the Porta Nuova Family with his own hands.
In response, Calò wavered visibly. Having denied ever meeting the strangling victim, he was forced to admit that he had known him in prison. After this encounter, no other defendant dared challenge Buscetta directly.
More and more evidence of Cosa Nostra’s barbarity emerged. Particularly shocking was the testimony of a petty criminal from the slums of Palermo called Vincenzo Sinagra, who gave evidence in an almost impenetrable dialect. Sinagra’s relationship with the mafia had begun when he made the terrible mistake of robbing someone with mafia connections—a capital offence in Cosa Nostra’s value system. But because he had a cousin who was a Man of Honour, Sinagra was offered the chance to work for the mob during its murder campaign of 1981–3. Arrested after he botched an assassination, Sinagra made an unconvincing attempt to feign insanity. Largely thanks to Paolo Borsellino’s extraordinary powers of empathy, this pitiful figure was then persuaded to put his trust in the state, and to confess his every murder. He explained that he had been paid the equivalent of two or three hundred dollars a month to help one of Riina’s most ruthless killers torture and strangle his victims, and then dissolve their bodies in acid—a process he described to the court with unassuming clarity and in horrific detail.
