Blood Brotherhoods

by John Dickie

  Crucial insights into Cosa Nostra’s negotiations with the state came in 2008 when Gaspare Spatuzza began to talk. Spatuzza, known by the nickname of ‘Baldy’, was a Man of Honour from the Brancaccio Family of Cosa Nostra who was already serving life sentences for his role in Cosa Nostra’s bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. Baldy explained that Vincenzo Scarantino, the young drug dealer who had already spent a decade and a half in prison for planting the car bomb that killed Borsellino, could not be guilty—for the simple reason that he, Spatuzza, was responsible. So convincing was the corroboration that Baldy provided to back up his revelation, that Scarantino has since been released and his innocence confirmed. (He had long maintained that he was not guilty, claiming that he was tortured until he confessed.)

  Another new mystery about the massacres of 1992–93 was thereby exposed. Was Scarantino framed by overenthusiastic policemen who were desperate to get any kind of result in the climate of emergency following the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino? Or was the shocking injustice he suffered part of a bigger and much more devious plan?

  Baldy Spatuzza’s evidence has brought new energy to the search for the truth about the negotiations between Cosa Nostra and the state in the early 1990s. Still more worrying fragments of evidence have emerged. Some Carabinieri have confirmed that they tried to make contact with Cosa Nostra in the summer of 1992 to try and stop the massacres, but they deny that there were any negotiations.

  In the summer and autumn of 1993, while Baldy was placing car bombs in Florence, Milan and Rome, no fewer than 480 mafiosi were released from the Clause 41a prison regime by the Minister of Justice Giovanni Conso. Conso has recently offered the explanation that this act of clemency was a purely personal initiative, aimed at sending out an accommodating signal.

  Most troubling of all, it has now been confirmed that Paolo Borsellino found out that overtures were being made to Cosa Nostra in the days following Falcone’s death—overtures that he vigorously opposed. Shorty Riina’s top killer has claimed that Cosa Nostra brought forward its plan to kill Borsellino precisely in order to stop him interfering with the deal-making: ‘The ongoing negotiations were the main reason why the plan to eliminate Borsellino was accelerated.’

  One of the two most important murders in the entire history of Italian organised crime therefore remains substantially unsolved. Testimonies from Spatuzza and others raise the chilling possibility that Paolo Borsellino was deliberately sacrificed. Some witnesses speak of secret-service involvement both in the negotiations between the mafia and the state, and in the murder of Paolo Borsellino.

  As I write, several mafia bosses, including Shorty Riina, stand accused for their part in trying to blackmail the state in 1992–93. Three senior Carabinieri and two politicians face related charges. A former Minister of the Interior has been accused of giving false evidence about the negotiations. Their trial has only just begun, and the presumption of innocence can be no mere formality in such an intricate and controversial case.

  The charges filed by the investigating magistrates paint a picture of a negotiation that developed over several stages, and involved links between Cosa Nostra and a number of functionaries and politicians, by no means all of them among the accused in the new trial. What the magistrates believe is that, in order to achieve its aims in 1992–3, Cosa Nostra needed to find new political partners—just when Italy’s Cold War political parties were breaking up, and the country was negotiating the tumultuous passage between the First Republic and the Second Republic (as we now call them). Among the protagonists of the negotiations on the state’s side were politicians of three kinds, according to the as yet untested charges. First, there were those from the First Republic, previously close to Cosa Nostra, who felt threatened by Riina’s rage. Second, there were statesmen trying to pilot Italy through its economic and political crisis who were not friendly with the Sicilian mafia, but who may have made or approved misguided attempts to appease the pro-massacre wing. And finally there were the new men trying to assert themselves politically in the chaos of the First Republic’s collapse. Men like Marcello Dell’Utri, the Sicilian right-hand man of a media entrepreneur who went on to become the dominant and most controversial figure of the Second Republic, Silvio Berlusconi.

  Berlusconi did well out of the close political friendships he made during the First Republic: the Socialist Party leader and sometime Prime Minister, Bettino Craxi, was the best man at his second wedding. The collapse of the old political order was a serious threat to his business interests. It is thought that as early as June 1992 (between the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, that is), Berlusconi’s people were taking soundings about founding a new political party. The magistrates contend that, as Berlusconi’s political plans took shape, Dell’Utri offered himself to Cosa Nostra as a negotiating partner, promising to grant some of its wishes in return for support. The Second Republic began in March 1994, when Berlusconi led his new party, Forza Italia, to election victory. That was the point in time, according to the magistrates, when ‘the new pact of co-habitation between the state and the mafia was finally sealed’.

  Marcello Dell’Utri is an old acquaintance to readers of these pages. It was he who hired the mafioso Vittorio Mangano in 1974 to protect Berlusconi and his family from kidnappers. Since 1996, Dell’Utri has been the subject of a seemingly endless mafia trial. He currently has an outstanding conviction for helping Cosa Nostra, and a sentence of nine years in prison to serve. But Dell’Utri is still a free man because the verdict remains provisional until the Supreme Court rules. So far, the judges have explicitly rejected the argument that Dell’Utri’s relationship with Cosa Nostra was still operative in the early 1990s when the mafia-state negotiations are thought to have taken place. But that too may change. It should also be stressed that an investigation based on the theory that Berlusconi and Dell’Utri had a role in commissioning Cosa Nostra’s bombing campaign was shelved because of a lack of evidence in 2002. Berlusconi has never been charged with any crime in relation to Cosa Nostra’s bombs. Nor does he appear in the latest trial, except as the victim of an alleged extortion by his friend Marcello Dell’Utri, who is one of the two politicians who face charges that they helped Cosa Nostra with its negotiating strategy.

  No period in Italian mafia history is without its lingering uncertainties. Historians live with the constant risk that their work will be unmade when some new document surfaces from the archives, or a new penitent unlocks his or her memory. The transitional years of 1992–4 are more than usually dogged by doubt. Only time—the glacier-slow time of the Italian judicial system—will reveal what truth, if any, there is in all the accusations about Cosa Nostra’s plan to negotiate by bomb.

  Even if the worst suspicions about the mafia-state negotiations turned out to be true, it would be very rash indeed to conclude either that Silvio Berlusconi’s main aim in government was to do Cosa Nostra’s bidding, or indeed that a pact with Cosa Nostra explained his political success. There is much, much more to the whole Berlusconi phenomenon than his alleged links to Cosa Nostra.

  That said, Berlusconi’s priority while in power was to protect his business interests from what he deemed to be a judicial conspiracy. In the process of defending himself, he damaged the anti-mafia cause. In Berlusconi’s view, popularity and electoral success exempted him from the rule of law. Many of the measures he introduced, or tried to introduce, displayed a categorical failure to perceive the boundary between his own personal concerns on the one hand, and those of the state and the Italian people on the other. He repeatedly tried to make himself immune from prosecution. He introduced amnesties for people seeking to reimport money that had been exported illegally to foreign or offshore bank accounts (usually to avoid the attentions of the law or the tax authorities). He decriminalised false accounting, and made it harder for magistrates to obtain evidence from financial institutions in other countries. He introduced a law specifically targeted at Gian Carlo Caselli, the Chief Prosecutor who had gone to Paler
mo after the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino and achieved such extraordinary results. The law tweaked the age qualifications for the job of National Chief Anti-mafia Prosecutor, and was aimed at stopping Caselli getting the job for which he was the outstanding candidate. Mafiosi, camorristi and ’ndranghetisti were not the intended beneficiaries of these and other changes, but they will have greeted them with a broad smile nonetheless.

  Berlusconi’s rhetoric on the issue of organised crime was frequently irresponsible. To one British journalist, he said that he thought that anti-mafia magistrates were ‘mad’. ‘To do that job you need to be mentally disturbed, you need psychic disturbances,’ he asserted. Berlusconi’s party attracted electoral support from the mafias. In open court in 1994, ’ndrangheta boss Giuseppe Piromalli said, ‘We’ll all vote for Berlusconi.’ In a sense, that fact is not scandalous: the mafias are attracted by power, whoever holds it. But Berlusconi did little to disown or discourage such supporters.

  Whether he was in opposition or in government (which he was in 1994–95, 2001–6, and 2008–11) Silvio Berlusconi was impossible to ignore, inspiring both adulation and loathing. Viewed from abroad, his dominance gave the Italian political scene during the years 1994–2011 an appearance of clarity that was deceptive. If one looks beyond those appearances, one finds a dispiritingly familiar picture of political confusion and paralysis of a kind that has always prevented Italy introducing the reforms it needs, and made the state weak in the face of the threat from organised crime.

  The end of the Cold War inaugurated a new series of opportunities and threats for Italy, as for its neighbours and the other developed countries. There was the expansion and deepening of the European Union, with the creation of the Euro and its subsequent crisis. Globalisation introduced Italy for the first time to mass inward migration and the tide of cheap Chinese manufactures. The rise of the information society forced economies worldwide to recalibrate. The end of the Cold War ideologies left many political systems looking for new ways to engage with distracted electors. Old problems—like the balance between social solidarity and economic individualism—were posed in novel forms.

  Italy, in particular, had a long and urgent to-do list that it had inherited from the First Republic: its poor education system; the lamentable state of its public finances; one of the worst records for youth unemployment and tax avoidance on the continent; the chronic imbalance between North and South; a serious lack of investment in research and development; a pensions time-bomb; and last but not least, the control that criminal organisations exercised over a good quarter of the national territory. The fall of the First Republic gave Italian politics of all colours a chance to make a fresh start in the task of offering collective solutions to challenges new and old, global and local. On most measures, after two decades of the Second Republic, few observers would view the results as being other than lamentable—left, right and centre.

  In the First Republic, parliament and the Senate had been dominated from the centre ground by the vast, formless and irremovable ‘white whale’ of the DC. The extremes of left (Communist Party) and right (the neo-Fascists) were perpetually excluded from power. Now the white whale was gone. Italy’s Catholics, who had once been united in the DC, were scattered across much of the political spectrum. The Communists (mostly) converted to some form of social democracy, and the neo-Fascists (mostly) restyled themselves as a conventional European party of the centre-right. No one was excluded a priori from the game of forming governing coalitions. Even the Northern League—a raucous movement that wanted independence for a fictional country called ‘Padania’, and that was given to racist outbursts unacceptable in any other European polity—was now a sought-after ally.

  What many people hoped for at the birth of the Second Republic was that a new clarity would reign. To give Italy effective government, a consensus formed around so-called ‘bi-polarism’: the idea that two opposing forces of centre-right and centre-left should compete for the voters’ loyalties, and form a government or an opposition according to who came out on top. Italian politicians, in other words, would have to get used to winning and losing elections. Governments would rule with the knowledge that they would be thrown out by the electorate if they did not perform. Nobody would be able to occupy power in the way that the DC had done for the best part of half a century. No longer would the left have a monopoly on trying to make political capital out of accusations of corruption or complicity with organised crime.

  The theory was good. The practice, however, was confusion: partly because of the badly drafted electoral laws designed to promote bipolarism, but mostly because of the familiar Italian spectacle of factional infighting. Minor parties, able to blackmail larger ones by threatening to withdraw their support, continued to proliferate. Catholics and ex-Communists continued to search, in vain, for a political identity. The interests of North and South, lay values and Catholicism, region and nation continued to divide each electoral alliance from within—to say nothing of the more conventional sources of political disagreement over economic and social policy, or indeed of the instability brought by overweening personal ambition. Shamelessly expedient deals were struck between politicians who had previously traded vicious insults. In 1998, Northern League leader Umberto Bossi said there could be ‘no agreement with the mafioso’. He meant Berlusconi, whom he would subsequently go on to support staunchly throughout their time as coalition allies.

  Each election saw a confusing array of new acronyms and symbols, shallow political ‘brands’ for hastily formed parties and coalitions. Each coalition of parties of centre-right or centre-left that presented itself at the polls started to fall apart almost as soon as it was elected, cripplingly divided as it was. Politicians predictably abandoned governing coalitions as soon as the going got tough. Governments continued to hand out appointments to their political friends. Most obviously, the state television networks, lacking any tradition of independence, continued to be distributed on party lines, and continued to produce boring and biased news coverage that seemed designed to put young people off democracy for life.

  The end of the old ideologies killed off some of Italy’s few antibodies to the old political maladies of patronage, clientelism and corruption. The country’s elected representatives seemed more and more to fit to their caricature: they were a self-interested ‘caste’, cut off from the population behind the tinted windows of their blue, state-funded, luxury limousines. Meanwhile, the nation’s problems went unsolved.

  Under the Second Republic, the battle against the mafias has been carried on largely in spite of the political system, rather than because of it. The strange thing is that some quite extraordinary successes have been recorded all the same. And the most extraordinary of these have been in Sicily. If a deal was struck between Cosa Nostra and the state between 1992 and 1994, then almost all of the bosses who negotiated that deal are now buried in maximum-security prisons. Since the arrest of Shorty Riina, Cosa Nostra has sunk steadily into the worst crisis in its entire history.

  PART XIII

  THE SECOND REPUBLIC AND THE MAFIAS

  71

  COSA NOSTRA: The head of the Medusa

  SINCE THE CAPTURE OF TOTÒ ‘SHORTY’ RIINA IN 1993, SICILY’S ANTI-MAFIA MAGISTRATES, police Carabinieri, and Guardia di Finanza (Tax Police) have scored a series of victories over Cosa Nostra that have absolutely no historical precedent. By comparison, the Fascist campaigns against the Sicilian mafia in the 1920s and 1930s were clumsy, superficial and fitful. Cosa Nostra continues to pay a very heavy price for its war on the state between 1979 and 1993.

  Every mafioso accepts a certain amount of prison time as an occupational hazard. Yet he will do everything he can to avoid being convicted: from intimidating witnesses to pulling strings so that judges make ‘anomalous’ rulings. If he is unlucky enough to be on the receiving end of a guilty verdict, a mafioso still has the option of becoming a fugitive. But as we have seen, few Sicilian mafia fugitives from justice actually run away. Mo
st just go to ground in their own fiefdom, take on an assumed identity and carry on running their criminal affairs just as before. There were hundreds of such renegades in Sicily at the start of the 1990s; among them were the bosses responsible for Cosa Nostra’s worst crimes. Their charisma seemed magnified by their invisibility: an aura grew up around them—both among mafiosi and in the general population. They were a living proclamation of the Italian state’s failure to enforce the law, to turn the sentences issued by the courts into years actually served behind bars.

  Even before the maxi-trial, Cosa Nostra knew exactly how grave a challenge to its authority any serious attempt to round up fugitives would be. That is why the bosses killed Flying Squad officer Beppe Montana in 1985. His murder—he was shot dead in his swimming trunks when he was using his own free time to follow up leads on mafia fugitives—encapsulates both the dedication and the vulnerability of the forces ranged against Cosa Nostra in the bloody 1980s.

  Gian Carlo Caselli was the Piedmontese Chief Prosecutor who stepped into the Palermo hot seat after the murder of Paolo Borsellino in 1993. Caselli would continue in his role until 1999. He immediately made the capture of Cosa Nostra’s fugitives from justice a priority. He kept a list of them in his desk drawer, and when one was taken, he would cross the name off in green ink. By the end of Caselli’s Palermo stint, over three hundred names had been cancelled out. Penitents gave information that led to the capture of bosses in hiding, some of whom turned penitent in their turn, supplying more valuable leads.

  The chain of defections was not the only weapon in the authorities’ armoury. In the 1990s, the pursuit of Cosa Nostra’s fugitives became increasingly technologically advanced: bugging and tracking devices came into play, and the police and Carabinieri acquired ever more expertise in their use. Before Giovanni Falcone died, he turned his experience in the Palermo pool of magistrates into a template for Italy’s new national organisations for investigating and prosecuting organised crime. After Falcone’s death, Palermo continued to be the model for the rest of the country: it became an elite school for teams of mafioso hunters.