by John Dickie
The proposal to bring the exiles home had been in the air since Shorty Riina’s capture, and it was bound to be inflammatory. No less than twenty-one members of the vast Inzerillo clan had been killed by the corleonesi. Others had been forced to buy their own lives by betraying their closest relatives to Riina. An entire borgata, Ciaculli, had been ethnically cleansed by the victors in the war. Only a deal brokered by powerful American bosses had stopped the corleonesi pursuing their surviving enemies after they escaped to the United States. With the corleonesi now weakened, the exiles’ return was bound to bring a settling of old scores. ‘Tractor’ Provenzano lacked the authority to impose a solution. So the issue festered, and Cosa Nostra divided into two armed camps: one in favour of the exiles’ return, and one against. Once the Tractor was hunted down, the last obstacle to civil war was removed.
The most fervent proponent of the exiles’ return was Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who was initiated into the same Partanna-Mondello cosca of Cosa Nostra as Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo, and who had close links with the Gambino Family in the United States.
Lo Piccolo’s plan was opposed by Antonino Rotolo, who was one of the older generation of bosses to whom the Tractor had entrusted leadership roles as part of the submersion strategy. Rotolo viewed the return of the exiles with undisguised dread: as a loyal supporter of Shorty Riina, he had personally taken part in the butchery of the exiles, and knew that his life would be forfeit if they were given permission to return. In 2006 Rotolo was serving a life sentence. Or at least he was in theory: for he had faked a heart condition and thereby won the right to serve out his time in the rather more comfortable surroundings of his own house in Villagrazia. Whenever he wanted to meet his men, he would call them to a humble garage that lay just over his garden wall. The garage, however, was bugged by the police, who listened in as Rotolo set out his plans to kill Lo Piccolo. He was arrested before the plan could be put into effect.
Lo Piccolo was left as the most powerful boss in the province. But not for long: in November 2007, he too was arrested. Investigators found a wealth of evidence in the leather bag he had with him at the time. There was a directory of businesses paying protection money: the monthly sums extorted ranged from $650 for a shop, to $13,000 for a construction firm. There were notes discussing murders and political friendships. There was an up-to-date map of the Families of the Palermo area. There was a sacred image inscribed with the oath that affiliates take when they are admitted to the organisation: ‘I swear to be faithful to Cosa Nostra. If I should ever betray it, may my flesh burn as this image now burns.’
Last but not least, Lo Piccolo had with him a badly typed piece of paper headed ‘Rights and Duties’, which was a kind of ‘ten commandments’ of Cosa Nostra. Rule One, for example, stipulated that, ‘You are not allowed to introduce yourself [as a mafioso] either on your own or to another friend unless there is a third party [i.e., a Man of Honour known to both] there to do it.’ Several other rules proscribe ‘immoral’ behaviour: no mafioso is allowed to look at the wives of ‘our friends’, or to disrespect his own wife; and no one is allowed to be initiated into Cosa Nostra if they have ‘sentimental betrayals’ in their immediate family. As ever, the Sicilian mafia was concerned to make sure that affairs of the heart do not interfere with affairs of the gun. Although we are now pretty certain that similar rules have been in force for as long as the Sicilian mafia has existed, to my knowledge no written version of them had ever been captured before. It seemed yet another symptom of the unprecedented trouble that Cosa Nostra was in.
That trouble became even more profound in February 2008, when a joint operation by the FBI and the Italian police led to the arrest of ninety mafiosi on either side of the Atlantic. Many of them were from the clans exiled in the 1980s, whom Salvatore Lo Piccolo had hoped to bring back to Sicily. The operation, codenamed ‘Old Bridge’, prevented the American Cosa Nostra from crossing the ocean to come to the rescue of its Sicilian sister association as it had done so many times in the past. Even in its name, the operation showed that the lessons of history had been learned: close transatlantic collaboration in the fight against organised crime brings big rewards for justice.
The assault on Cosa Nostra was now remorseless. In the spring of 2008, Carabinieri tailing mafia boss Giuseppe Scaduto saw him go to a mob meeting in a garage in the city centre. With the surveillance skills they had by now honed to perfection, officers placed listening devices and even cameras in the garage. They then proceeded to watch live as, between 6 May and 27 June, Cosa Nostra’s bosses schemed. It emerged that, with Provenzano in prison, the time had come for the bosses still at large to re-organise themselves—to impose the kind of coordinating structure that Cosa Nostra always has when it is working best: ‘a Commission to deal with the serious things, with situations, and that way we all stay friends’, as one capo explained.
If we all do our own thing, like the Neapolitans do . . . if we do things like they do we’ll never get anywhere . . . Instead, everyone takes his precinct and then we sort things out nicely. And in the end we all sit down and try and create a kind of Commission like in the old days.
A kind of Commission: the hesitancy of this formulation is striking. The men embarking on this new constitutional initiative were without doubt the most powerful mafiosi in Palermo. Yet even now, even fifteen years on from Riina’s arrest, they did not feel they had the political authority to reconstitute the official Commission. Shorty he may have been, but Riina still cast a long, long shadow over the internal affairs of Cosa Nostra.
The kind of Commission never met. On 16 December 2008, after nearly nine months of painstaking investigation, some 1,200 Carabinieri made coordinated dawn raids on dozens of addresses in Palermo and across western Sicily. They called it Operation Perseus, after the hero of Greek mythology who beheaded the snake-haired monster Medusa, because the aim was nothing less than to decapitate Cosa Nostra. Among the ninety-nine men arrested were the bosses of nineteen Families, including from mafia territories whose names recur throughout the organisation’s long history, such as Santa Maria di Gesù, Monreale, Corleone, Uditore and San Lorenzo. No less than eleven precinct bosses were detained too—the men who presided over three or four Families and took a seat on the Commission to represent their interests. And of course the capo di tutti i capi elect was also taken: sixty-four-year-old Benedetto Capizzi. The choice of Capizzi showed that, after ‘walking with padded shoes’ under Provenzano, Cosa Nostra was ready to don its hobnailed boots again. Capizzi was a former member of Giovanni ‘the Pig’ Brusca’s death squad. Among many other crimes, Capizzi helped plan the kidnap of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the penitent’s boy who ended up in an acid bath. Capizzi was a man of action, who could be relied on to deal militarily with anyone who dissented from the new order. One minor drawback was that he was still serving several life sentences. However, he was yet another case of a boss granted house arrest for health reasons, thus giving him the liberty he needed to meet his criminal friends.
Rebirth of the Commission. Benedetto Capizzi was at the centre of Cosa Nostra’s efforts to reconstruct its governing body, the Palermo Commission. Would-be boss of all bosses Capizzi was arrested in 2008.
Operation Perseus was a stunning blow, which received far less media attention abroad than it deserved—certainly far less than the arrest of Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano two and a half years earlier. It has left Cosa Nostra a fragmented organisation. The mafiosi who remain at large do not have the experience or charisma to embark on any major restructuring along the lines of what Benedetto Capizzi was attempting. Their main priority is now survival: finding enough criminal income to support the heavy burden of prisoners and their relatives, and to keep the fabric of the Families together.
The damage inflicted on Cosa Nostra over the last decade has helped create the space for grassroots movements against its protection racket regime. Their goal is to attack mafia power at its base, and their potential is truly revolutionary. Like much that is g
ood in contemporary Sicily, the anti-racket movement has its roots in the tragedies of the 1980s and early 1990s.
Libero Grassi was an entrepreneur who ran a factory in Palermo making pyjamas. When he moved to a new site in the shadow of Monte Pellegrino in 1990, demands for money started to arrive—a contribution ‘for the lads shut up in the Ucciardone’. Grassi went to the police, and three of the men who had visited his factory to ask for money were arrested. The demands then became more menacing. Grassi responded with a public letter to the press that began ‘Dear extortionist’:
I wanted to tell our unknown extortionist that he can save himself the threatening phone calls and the money to buy fuses, bombs and bullets, because we are not prepared to contribute and we have put ourselves under the protection of the police. I built this factory with my own hands and I have no intention of shutting up shop.
Grassi’s cause found painfully little support. The entrepreneurs in the neighbourhood let it be known that he should wash his dirty linen in private like everyone else. He received only one letter from another businessman expressing solidarity. However, in April 1991, Grassi’s campaign took him onto national TV screens, where the millions of viewers of a popular politics talk show heard his lucid explanation of how the extortion racket system worked, and the omertà that beset him on all sides. He was becoming a threatening symbol of anti-mafia resistance, and an advertisement for the weakness of the boss on whose territory his factory was sited. On 29 August 1991, Libero Grassi was shot five times in the face as he left his house to go to work.
After this appalling murder, many resolved that no one who stood up against the extortionists should ever be left isolated again. The national shopkeepers’ association, Confesercenti, founded an anti-racket support group in Palermo called ‘SOS Business’ in the same year. In 1997, a ruling by the Supreme Court made it clear that paying protection money is a crime. Everyone is obliged turn to the authorities for help against the extortionists, and no one can offer the excuse that they are forced to pay. In 2004, the inheritance of Libero Grassi and other pioneers of the anti-racket movement was picked up by a group of young Palermitans who founded an organisation they called Addiopizzo (‘Goodbye Extortion’). Their idea was fresh and beautifully simple: entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, restaurateurs and hoteliers would sign a public pledge not to pay protection money; and consumers would sign a public pledge to patronise businesses that did not pay. The aim was to grow a mutually reinforcing alliance between clean enterprises and honest consumers.
Others followed Addiopizzo’s lead. In September 2007, the Sicilian branch of Confindustria (the employers’ organisation) announced that it would expel any members found to have been paying protection money or failing to collaborate with the authorities. The days when Sicilian business leaders would grumble that the fight against the mafia was ruining the island’s economy were finally gone.
Organising to defy extortion is far from being an empty gesture: it actually works. One mafia penitent from the Family of Santa Maria di Gesù has recently explained why mafiosi did not try to extort money from businesses that proclaimed their opposition:
If a shopkeeper is a member of Addiopizzo or an anti-racket association, we just don’t go there, we don’t ask for anything. It’s more because of the trouble it causes than the money. If they report it to the police, you then get investigations, listening devices, and so it’s better just to avoid them.
The rebellion against extortion is potentially life-threatening for Cosa Nostra. In late November 2007, mafiosi showed how concerned they were about Confindustria’s new stance by performing a clamorous act of intimidation: the employers’ organisation’s offices in the central Sicilian city of Caltanissetta were vandalised, and a number of CDs containing the names and addresses of its members were stolen.
Despite the threats, a virtuous circle has begun to turn in Palermo. As more businesses go to the police when they receive extortion demands, more mafiosi are arrested, and the authorities and anti-racket organisations can demonstrate their growing ability to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with people that resist—with the result that more businesses gain the confidence to turn to the police when they receive extortion demands.
Moreover, as so often in our story, Palermo’s example has been followed elsewhere. The anti-racket associations that began in Sicily have spread. For example, in January 2010 Confindustria adopted a national policy of expelling members who do business with gangsters.
The hunt for fugitives from justice has also achieved crucial results in both Campania and Calabria. Some of the most powerful camorra and ’ndrangheta bosses have taken to building underground bunkers in the hope of avoiding the ever more determined and expert mafia hunters. Some of these bunkers are just secret compartments in a house: hidey-holes into which a fugitive can dash when the doorbell rings unexpectedly. Others are extraordinarily ingenious and elaborate—miniature apartments, complete with plumbing, air pumps and security cameras. Most are hidden among ordinary houses and farm buildings or on industrial estates, and involve secret passages and moveable walls. The ’ndrangheta are bunker specialists. The Bellocco clan from Rosarno took to burying entire shipping containers, perfectly furnished inside, and disguised by vegetation above. The ground underneath the town of Platì, in Calabria, is criss-crossed by hundreds and hundreds of metres of tunnels connecting bosses’ houses to a complex of bunkers and escape routes. Here the ’ndrangheta even opened the street up in the process of building its secret bunker network; nobody in town said a word.
Whatever form they take, today’s mafia bunkers are not just refuges: they are command centres. Invariably they are built on a boss’s own territory, where he can count on a close network of family and friends to provide for his daily needs and, crucially, to shuttle in and out with orders and requests. Territorial control remains crucial for bosses of all three major criminal organisations. As one mafia hunter from the Carabinieri explains:
The first rule for a boss is to never abandon his ground. Going off to evade justice somewhere else is a sign of weakness. If the throne is left vacant, a boss’s competitors go into overdrive, manoeuvring and plotting to take his place.
La presenza è potenza, as mafiosi say: presence is power.
The bunkers where some bosses now try to maintain their territorial presence are not unprecedented in the history of the mafias: in Sicily, under Fascism, police chasing down mafiosi discovered a range of ingenious secret compartments and sunken shelters. But the bunkers are nonetheless an important sign of the pressure the mafias are now under. Until the 1980s, the dreaded Piromallis of Gioia Tauro could still be spotted presiding over the town square, making their authority visible. Those days are gone. The state has become more serious than ever about fighting organised crime, and so the underworld has gone underground.
Sicily remains the place where the anti-mafia fight is most advanced. And the drop in the number of homicides is only the most obvious indicator of that fact. There were nineteen mafia-related murders in 2009 on the island, eight in 2010 and only three in 2011. These are historical lows. The staggering body count of the 1980s now seems an aeon away.
72
CAMORRA: A geography of the underworld
IN SEPTEMBER 2011, JOURNALISTS FROM THE NEWS MAGAZINE L’ESPRESSO SECRETLY filmed an exhibition of underworld power in the Barra suburb of Naples. For anyone with a sense of camorra history, the film provides depressing evidence of continuity over time.
The backdrop was the Festival of the Lilies, one of several similar religious festivals in the region. The ‘lilies’ in question are actually eighty-foot-high obelisks made from wood and decorated with papier-mâché sculptures. They are built and then shouldered by proud teams of volunteers, known as ‘crews’, who are sponsored by a local grandee known as a ‘Godfather’. The crews compete to attract crowds to their lily with an MC, music and dancing. The film published on the L’Espresso website showed activities around one particular lily built by the crew that
called itself Insuperabile. First the local camorra boss’s father arrived in an open-top white vintage sports car to the sound of a saxophone playing The Godfather theme. As the crowd cheered, the MC hailed the boss Angelo Cuccaro (recently released from prison), then sang him a song called ‘You’re great’, and finally called for a round of applause ‘For all our dead’. Meanwhile the boss himself, dressed in the Insuperabile crew’s blue T-shirt and white baseball cap, was kissed by enthusiastic supporters.
Investigations by the Carabinieri subsequently discovered that the Festival of the Lilies had been a platform for the Barra clan for a long time: they extorted money from businesses under the pretext of spending it on their obelisk; the Insuperabile crew’s ‘Godfathers’ were chosen from among entrepreneurs close to the bosses; the festival was used to publicly celebrate new camorra pacts. When the neighbouring town of Cercola came under the Barra clan’s control, shopkeepers there were forced to display the Insuperabile crew’s blue and red colours in their windows.
In September 2012 the Insuperabile crew had their obelisk confiscated and destroyed because, according to the judge who authorised the confiscation,
The messages it sends, the hidden meaning of that wood and papier mâché, is worth more than a whole arsenal to the clan. Deploying it on the day of the festival means much more than a victory in battle, than the physical annihilation of a rival: it is a sign of authority.
Using community religious celebrations as a chance to parade criminal might is traditional in the Naples underworld. In the nineteenth century, camorristi used to take control of the springtime pilgrimage to the sanctuary of Montevergine. Each boss, with his woman next to him decked out in silk, gold and pearls, would drive his pony and trap into the mountains at the head of his followers. The pilgrims’ progress would be punctuated by drinking bouts, races, more or less stylised knife fights, and camorra summits with the clans of the hinterland.
