Blood Brotherhoods
Page 73
Among the many leading fugitives to be rounded up was Leoluca Bagarella, ‘Shorty’ Riina’s brother-in-law. Bagarella was the first boss to step into the huge leadership vacuum created by the arrest of the dictatorial Riina. Bagarella’s power was primarily military: he inherited command of Cosa Nostra’s specialised death squads. He also inherited Riina’s war on the Italian state, a war which Bagarella continued by orchestrating Cosa Nostra’s terrorist attacks on the Italian mainland in 1993.
Tracking down a fugitive mafioso like Bagarella meant learning everything there was to find out about his territory and his network of contacts, piecing together fragments of information on his personal life and psychology. Once the fugitives were captured, their life stories gave sociologists and psychologists rich insights into the world-within-a-world that is Cosa Nostra. The Sicilian mafia’s interior culture seemed utterly distant from our own experience, rendered alien by a constant fear of betrayal and a casual familiarity with violent death. Yet at the same time, mafia life was eerily ordinary, filled with day-to-day stories of love and loss. As so often, Giovanni Falcone’s insights into the mafia mentality were proving correct. Mafiosi were not monsters, Falcone once pointed out:
Getting to know mafiosi has profoundly influenced my way of relating to other people, and also my convictions. I have learned to recognise the humanity even in those who are apparently the worst of beings. I have learned to have a respect for other people’s opinions that is real and not just a question of form.
Bagarella’s story was a case in point. He married his wife, Vincenzina Marchese, in 1991. Her menfolk were members of the Corso dei Mille Family of Cosa Nostra. So this was a classic union of mafia dynasties, celebrated sumptuously with hundreds of guests. Bagarella had the Godfather theme tune recorded over the wedding videos. Yet at the same time, the marriage was unquestionably a love match, and the two were devoted companions. Penitents have since related that, if Vincenzina called to tell Bagarella that his dinner was nearly ready, he would even break off from strangling someone to join her at table.
However the Bagarellas had a secret anguish. Vincenzina struggled to bear the child that she yearned for. She became convinced that this was a divine punishment for what Cosa Nostra had done to Giuseppe Di Matteo—the penitent’s young son who was held captive for more than two years and who would eventually be strangled and dissolved in acid. She constantly asked her husband what had happened to the boy, and received repeated reassurances (which were truthful at the time) that he was still alive. But Vincenzina could not be convinced. So, on the night of 12 May 1995, she hanged herself in the couple’s hideout. Because he was on the run from the law, Bagarella could not give her a decent burial. He even had to move her from one shallow grave to another. Her body has never been found. During a month of mourning, Bagarella refused to take part in any murders out of respect for his beloved. When he was captured on 24 June 1995, six weeks after his wife’s death, he was just planning a return to action. He had her wedding ring on a chain round his neck.
More fugitive members of Cosa Nostra’s Palermo Commission fell into the dragnet. On 20 May 1996 came the turn of the man who killed Falcone. Giovanni Brusca was known in mafia circles as ‘the Man who Cuts Christians’ Throats’ or, more simply, as ’U Verru—‘the Pig’. He came up with the idea of lying on his stomach on a skateboard to push the barrels of explosive meant for Falcone into a drainage tunnel under the motorway. On 23 May 1992, it was Brusca who pressed the detonator. ‘The Pig’ had committed so many murders that he had lost count: somewhere between a hundred and two hundred was his disturbingly vague estimate. When he eventually turned state’s evidence, magistrates had to bring him a list of all the suspicious deaths and disappearances in western Sicily in the previous twenty years so that he could tick off the ones that were his handiwork.
As the police closed in on Brusca, he was forced to move from one safe house to another. In February 1996, investigators unearthed the bunker that the boss had had built by a construction entrepreneur friend. From the outside, it looked like a peasant’s dilapidated homestead. But inside, in the marble floor of the expensively appointed kitchen, there was a concealed entrance worthy of a James Bond villain. When Brusca pressed a remote control, a section of floor would descend like a lift sixteen feet underground into a two-room apartment. One of the two rooms had a metal door with a spyhole, just like a prison cell. This was where Giuseppe Di Matteo, the penitent’s son, was held captive, and where Brusca eventually had him strangled and dropped into an acid bath. Branching off from the apartment was a further secret tunnel that led to a large metal tank where investigators discovered the biggest arms cache in Italian history. A human chain of Carabinieri spent hours passing out more than four hundred pistols, dozens and dozens of pump-action shotguns and machine guns, explosives of all kinds (including Semtex), several bazookas, boxes and boxes of grenades, and ten RPG-18s—the shoulder-launched antitank missiles that were known as ‘Allah’s hammer’ because the Taliban used them against Russian helicopters in Afghanistan. There were even some collector’s pieces, such as a Tommy gun with a circular magazine, just like the ones in the Al Capone–era gangster films. Brusca’s arsenal was only one of many taken out of commission in these years.
Brusca’s last hideout was far from his territory, in the province of Agrigento in southern Sicily. He was eventually betrayed by his nostalgia for home. He made regular calls to order sausages and meat from the butcher in the town of his birth, San Giuseppe Jato—calls that the Carabinieri tapped. Brusca was watching a television programme about Giovanni Falcone when the flash grenades went off and the police burst in on him.
The capture of bosses like Bagarella and Brusca marked the end of the most dangerous phase in the Sicilian mafia’s history. Like the entire leadership of Cosa Nostra, these men had approved Shorty Riina’s policy of waging war on the state. They had also been part of a smaller group of bosses (the ‘pro-massacre wing’ of Cosa Nostra) that favoured carrying on with that war once Riina was captured in 1993. But as the roundup continued, the pro-massacre wing lost control of the organisation, and Cosa Nostra entered an even deeper leadership crisis. A new strategy of ‘submersion’ was implemented in response to that crisis.
The boss responsible for the submersion strategy was Bernardo Provenzano. Provenzano was scarcely a peacemaker by vocation. For most of his criminal career, he formed a solid partnership with Shorty Riina in any question relating to Cosa Nostra’s internal politics. Both were corleonesi, and both pupils of Luciano Liggio. Provenzano’s relentless pursuit of his enemies had long ago earned him the nickname ‘the Tractor’. He bore just as much responsibility for the horrors of the 1980s, and for the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, as did any other member of the Palermo Commission. Yet Provenzano also had another nickname that spoke of different skills: ‘the Accountant’. To his partnership with Riina he brought greater business acumen, and a more refined aptitude for weaving ties with politicians.
Mafia penitents tell us that when the pro-massacre wing of Cosa Nostra sought to step up their terrorist campaign in 1993 (they even planned to blow up the Leaning Tower of Pisa), Provenzano began to go quiet. Internal divisions that had been kept in check by Riina began to surface once more. The centralisation process that Cosa Nostra had undergone when the corleonesi mounted their coup was thrown into reverse. Precinct bosses acquired more autonomy—and more power to create trouble. Try as he might to appear as if he was above the fray, the Tractor was viewed with suspicion by the pro-massacre wing. In 1995, he fought a proxy war with Riina’s brother-in-law, Leoluca Bagarella, for control of the town of Villabate at the edge of Palermo. Rightly or wrongly, many within Cosa Nostra were also convinced that Provenzano had betrayed Shorty Riina to the authorities in 1993.
Provenzano was the most experienced fugitive from justice in Sicilian mafia history, having been on the run since 1963. For much of that time, he had even been rumoured to be dead. Once he was in charge, he abandoned R
iina’s direct challenge to the Italian state, and tried to repair the damage Cosa Nostra was suffering as a result of the reaction to the massacres of 1992 and 1993. His submersion strategy—‘walking with padded shoes’, as he termed it—aimed to keep Cosa Nostra out of the headlines. Accordingly, the number of murders fell dramatically. The Tractor brought an end to the atrocities committed against penitents and their families. Instead, Cosa Nostra gave renewed support to imprisoned mafiosi and their families in the hope that the penitents would retract their evidence. The flood of penitents from Cosa Nostra, which had peaked at 424 in 1996, was reduced to a trickle. One effect of this was that the Tractor’s support network proved much harder to disrupt than had been the case with bosses like Bagarella and Brusca.
Provenzano placed a renewed emphasis on cultivating the Sicilian mafia’s traditional, covert friendships with corrupt elements in the state and business. Extortion rackets were absolutely central to the submersion strategy. Extortion is the Sicilian mafia’s least visible and yet most important crime. Each entrepreneur or criminal who gives in to the local boss’s demand for a percentage of takings is not only providing the mafia with its staple income; he or she is also recognising the mafia’s sovereignty, its right to intervene. Extortion is how a boss gathers information about his territory, and how he gets his foot in the door of lawful businesses. What the tax system is for a democratic state, extortion rackets are for the mafias—southern Italy’s shadow state.
The submersion strategy certainly managed to buy time. But Provenzano faced perhaps insuperable challenges. For one thing, an old problem for the Sicilian mafia was rearing its head once more: the tendency of politicians to break their promises. The laughably bad Italian that Provenzano used in his typed messages to his network is impossible to render properly in English. But I hope the following extract from a 1997 message gives some idea of the Tractor’s concerns when it came to making friends in politics:
Now you tell me that you’ve got a good level political contact, whod allow you to manage lots of big works, and before going ahead you wanna know what I fink? If I don’t no him I can’t tell you nothing. You’d need to no the names? And no how they are set up? Coz today you can’t trust no one. Could they be swindlers? Could they be cops? Could they be infiltrators? Could they be time wasters? Could they be massive schemers? If you don’t no the road you gotta travel, you can’t set off—so I can’t tell you nothing.
In this case, as in many others, Provenzano failed to make a clear decision. Truth be told, his power to make policy had severe limits. For one thing, his authority still depended to a great extent on Riina’s prestige. The Tractor never sat at the head of the Commission, which had not been convened since Shorty was captured. As Sicilian investigating magistrates have put it:
Provenzano never underwent a formal investiture by the other precinct bosses. So he exercised his supremacy in substance, but not officially, and he did so only by virtue of the fact that he was considered to be ‘the same thing’ as Riina.
In other words, the Tractor was a first among equals, and not a capo di tutti i capi. He had the authority to advise, but not to order. In the end, mere advice would not be enough to save Cosa Nostra’s leadership—either from the persistent divisions within the organisation, or from the mafia hunters.
The first of Provenzano’s inner circle to be caught was his number two, Pietro Aglieri, the boss of Santa Maria di Gesù. Aglieri’s story revealed yet more about the strange world of Cosa Nostra, and in particular about the religious beliefs that historically have helped mafiosi cloak the real nature of their power. In his youth, Aglieri had studied theology in a seminary. Investigators tracked him down by following a Carmelite priest, Father Mario Frittitta. (He was the same Carmelite who had spoken the homily at the funeral of the soccer player and fisherman suspected of being the mafia’s lookout when Flying Squad officer Beppe Montana was killed in 1985.) Father Frittitta, it turned out, was Aglieri’s confessor. In the boss’s farmhouse hideout, as well as the usual gangland paraphernalia like weapons and a radio for listening to police communications, was a chapel complete with an altar, crucifix, incense-burner, pews, and cushions for kneeling on during prayer.
Was Aglieri’s faith genuine? Ultimately, only the Almighty himself can give us the answer to that question. Clearly, what Aglieri believed in was a twisted version of Christianity that he somehow thought was compatible with his vocation as a professional criminal. He may have found in it some kind of justification for the evil he did.
What is certain about Aglieri’s religion is that it was strategically useful to him at that moment in Cosa Nostra’s history. Aglieri, like his mentor Provenzano, was seeking ways to repair the damage to Cosa Nostra’s legitimacy caused by the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino, and by the Pope’s long overdue condemnation of mafia culture. Making religious noises—of humility and piety—could feasibly help the bosses mend the bonds with the organisation’s members and friends that were broken by episodes like the horrific murder of the young penitent’s son, Giuseppe Di Matteo. The typed notes through which Provenzano communicated with other bosses, and with his business friends, are full of religious phrases: ‘Thanks be to God’, ‘God willing, I am at your complete disposal’. Whether it expressed any form of devotion, Provenzano’s language revealed a political style that contrasted markedly with his old friend Riina’s.
In the spring of 2000, the ‘devout’ boss Pietro Aglieri—now in prison—was one of a group from Provenzano’s wing of Cosa Nostra who proposed to dissociate themselves from the organisation. The idea was that they would confess their crimes and repudiate the mafia, but without turning state’s evidence and ratting on former comrades-in-arms. In short, Aglieri and his allies would repent in the eyes of God; but they would not turn penitent in the eyes of the state.
The Sicilian mafia being what it is, there was a catch: dissociation would only happen if prison conditions were relaxed and some of Italy’s new anti-mafia legislation repealed. Not long afterwards, it became clear that members of the ’ndrangheta and camorra also supported such a bargain. Life behind bars had created a common front among some of southern Italy’s most feared mob bosses.
Investigating magistrates immediately realised that accepting ‘dissociation’ would be a very bad deal indeed for the state. Moreover, they suspected it was part of a plan to engineer a negotiated settlement to the war between the state and Cosa Nostra—a settlement that would leave Cosa Nostra intact, and pave the way for a return to the traditional partnership between the authorities and the Sicilian mafia’s shadow state. The dissociation offer fitted perfectly with the Tractor’s submersion strategy, in other words. Worryingly, the proposal received a warm welcome in a newspaper article published in Silvio Berlusconi’s newspaper Il Giornale. More worrying still, in 2001, the magistrate who did most to oppose the dissociation deal was suddenly removed from his job by Berlusconi’s Minister of Justice.
In the end, Aglieri’s dissociation proposal never came to anything, thanks to incisive coverage by investigative journalists and political lobbying by anti-mafia magistrates. Nevertheless, it resurfaced now and again over the coming years, as a reminder of Cosa Nostra’s ability to strike up an insidious dialogue with elements of the Italian state.
The pursuit of the mafia fugitives continued, meanwhile. In April 2002, the police captured Antonino Giuffrè, known as Manuzza (‘Little Hand’) because his right hand was mangled in a hunting accident. Unlike the devout Pietro Aglieri, Little Hand quickly turned penitent, giving investigators important new insights into the way Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano was restructuring Cosa Nostra and rebuilding its links to business. When he was captured, Little Hand was found with a shopping bag full of letters to Provenzano from mafiosi and entrepreneurs in his network.
But it would take another four long years of sleuthing for the Tractor’s logistical system to be dismantled and for Provenzano himself to be unearthed. In April 2006, disbelieving journalists from a
ll over the world swooped on Sicily to film the shack near Corleone where Cosa Nostra’s great strategist, a man who had been a fugitive from justice for no less than forty-three years, was finally captured. Could a man as powerful as Provenzano really have lived in such humble surroundings, living off ricotta cheese and chicory like some peasant of days gone by? The truth was that he was no peasant: he was a professional criminal. And his home town of Corleone was a last redoubt, a place he had been forced to retreat to when every other operational base had been denied him by the authorities.
The mafia hunters did not let up even after the capture of Riina’s heir. Just over two months later, they arrested another forty-five mafiosi in the course of an operation that provided a new understanding of political fissures that had brought Cosa Nostra to the brink of civil war, even while the state closed in on its leaders. The fissures had their roots in the most savage conflict in Cosa Nostra’s history: Shorty’s war of extermination against the leading mafia drug barons in 1981–3. At the time of that war, mafiosi from some of the losing Families, notably the members of the Inzerillo clan (who were closely related by blood to the Gambino Family in the American Cosa Nostra), had fled into exile in the United States. Now there was a move afoot to allow the exiles back to fill out the organisation’s thinning ranks and rebuild the transatlantic narcotics pipeline.
Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano. Riina’s sidekick tried to repair the damage caused to Cosa Nostra by Riina’s war on the state. Provenzano was captured in 2006 after a record forty-three years on the run.