Blood Brotherhoods (106 page)

These were the bleakest and most anxious days of Falcone’s life. Over the past eighteen months, he had discovered how many fair-weather friends he had. In May 1986 he married the love of his life—an academically outstanding magistrate called Francesca Morvillo. The couple had already decided not to have children: ‘I don’t want to bring any orphans into the world,’ Falcone said. But after the Addaura attack, he seriously entertained the idea of separating from Francesca so that she would not have to share his inevitable fate. He told his sister, ‘I am a walking corpse.’

Falcone’s mood improved slightly over the coming months. The prosecutor’s office was restructured as part of a far-reaching reform of the judicial system. Falcone was promoted. But he soon found himself at loggerheads with his new boss. As he confided in an off-the-record briefing to a journalist: ‘Working here is impossible. One step forward, three steps back: that’s how the fight against the mafia goes.’

Falcone continued to be buffeted in the media too. In May 1990, the anti-mafia Mayor Leoluca Orlando used a politics chat show as a platform to accuse Falcone of protecting mafia-backed politicians from prosecution—of keeping sensitive cases ‘hidden in his desk drawer’. Here was yet another insidious slur. There was a widespread conviction that the law only ever caught the underworld’s lower ranks; that the ‘big fish’, or the ‘real mafia’, or the so-called ‘third level’ were never touched. Such a conviction is impossible to disprove, and plays to a disgust with politics that is dyed into the fabric of Italian public opinion.

Falcone angrily demanded that Orlando prove his allegations, and stated that if he had not charged anyone with having links to the mafia it was for the elementary legal reason that he did not have enough evidence. As Falcone appreciated, Orlando was cynically trying to make himself seem more anti-mafia than the champion of the anti-mafia cause. The episode
was also personally hurtful because Falcone had considered Orlando a friend: the mayor had conducted the magistrate’s wedding ceremony in 1986. Nevertheless, Orlando would persist in his accusations for months, accusing Falcone of cosying up to the corrupt establishment in Rome.

More serious than all of these personal attacks was the gradual erosion of Falcone and Borsellino’s work in the maxi-trial. By early 1989, only 60 of the 342 men who had been convicted at the maxi were still in jail. Many were released because the Italian legal system did not consider anyone guilty until their case had been through all possible stages of the trial process, right up to the Supreme Court. Even those who were still behind bars had managed to find a way to make themselves comfortable. Pippo Calò, the train bomber who confronted Buscetta in the bunker courtroom, had arranged an asthma diagnosis and was now living comfortably in a Palermo hospital.

Worse was to come. In December 1990, the Appeal Court ruled on the maxi-trial verdicts. Seven of nineteen life sentences were overturned, as were Falcone and Borsellino’s explanations of a number of high-profile murders, including that of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa. Doubt was cast on the whole ‘Buscetta theorem’ and the value of penitents’ evidence. The case would soon be passed on to the Supreme Court, which had already demonstrated its deep suspicion of the Palermo magistrates’ methods and the theory that the Sicilian mafia was a single organisation. Having been revealed in all its ferocious complexity by the maxi-trial, the mafia was rapidly becoming as legally diaphanous as it had been for the previous century and more.

 
67 

F
ALCONE GOES TO
R
OME

D
EEP DOWN
,
BELOW THE SURFACE HEAT OF ITS TERRORIST VIOLENCE
,
ITS CONSTANT
crises and unstable coalition governments, post-war Italy was a country immobilised by the Cold War. In eternal opposition, the Italian Communist Party received funding from Moscow; in eternal government, the Christian Democrats banked money from the CIA. Rot spread in the stagnant political air: in every corner of the state, factions and secret cabals fought over the spoils of power. In a very Italian paradox, ties between the palaces of power and the country ‘out there’ became both utterly remote and stiflingly intimate.
Remote
, because the obsession with promoting allies and friends, with occupying ‘centres of power’, made reform close to impossible. The real rights and needs of the Italian people—among them the rule of law—went unserved. Yet also
intimate
, because as the state gradually occupied more and more of society, citizens had to make political allies and friends to get a job, or get anything done. Here was a people that loathed politicians, and yet was more addicted to politics than any other nation in Europe. Here was a state that the mafias were perfectly adapted to infect, and a governing party that had few antibodies to the mafia infection. Here was a society where anyone doing their job properly, anyone taking the initiative, risked being looked on with suspicion, if not outright hostility. The tale of Giovanni Falcone’s woes in the late 1980s was a metaphor for the experience of countless other honest citizens.

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, and the end of forty-two years of Cold War, would profoundly destabilise the system. Its most immediate effect was to provoke the Italian Communist Party into changing its
name, and tip it into an identity crisis that rendered it virtually inoperative. The great bugbear of Italian politics was no more. At first, the Christian Democrats and their allies seemed unscathed, victorious. But their system had now lost its chief
raison d’être
: keeping the Reds out. The DC was living on borrowed time.

The man who embodied the most cynical and slippery aspects of Christian Democrat rule, Giulio Andreotti, was Prime Minister between 1989 and the spring of 1992. Even Andreotti and the other grandees of the old system could see that the government now had to take the initiative. The hunger for reform, and the pent-up public disgust at the Italian political class, was seeking outlets. In the Christian Democrat strongholds of the north-east, the Northern League, heaping racist abuse on southerners and spraying vulgar invective against ‘robber Rome’, began to rake in votes. Fighting crime was a handy way for the politicians who had governed Italy for so long to win fresh legitimacy.

In February 1991, Giovanni Falcone accepted the offer of a senior post in the Ministry of Justice: his brief was to overhaul Italy’s entire approach to organised crime. On the government’s part, this was a jaw-slackening volte-face. As everyone knew even then, Andreotti had garnered political support from Salvo Lima and the island’s ‘most crooked “political family”’ since the late 1960s. As everyone knows now, Andreotti was on intimate terms with Cosa Nostra until 1980. Yet here he was handing power over key aspects of the justice system to Cosa Nostra’s greatest foe. Falcone’s appointment was both extraordinarily welcome and cynically expedient.

Many in Palermo, from
mafiosi
to some of Falcone’s supporters, were convinced that the anti-mafia’s champion had traded in his cause for a fat armchair in a grand Roman office. By sheer attrition, the scandals and disappointments of the years since the maxi-trial had neutralised him. Andreotti had ensnared yet another victim.

On the eve of his departure for Rome, Falcone responded to these accusations in a revealing interview in a restaurant in Catania. He used a humble metaphor for his past achievements and future plans in the fight against the mafia. In Palermo he had built a room, he said. Now the time had come to construct a whole building. And to do that he had to go to Rome.

As the interview progressed, Falcone could not conceal the hurt he felt at being forced to leave Palermo. Most hurtful of all was the insinuation that the Addaura bomb attack had broken his nerve and that, by going to Rome, he was running away. Falcone’s response was an uncharacteristic display of anger. ‘I am not afraid to die. I am Sicilian,’ he said. Grabbing the button of his jacket so hard that he almost ripped it off, he continued: ‘Yes, I am Sicilian. And for me, life is worth less than this button.’

Once in Rome, Falcone set to work with his habitual dynamism. The result was an astonishing rebuttal to anyone who thought he had been rendered harmless. He designed a whole series of laws to gear up the fight against all the mafias, nationwide. There were measures to check money laundering and keep the defendants in mafia trials behind bars during the long unfolding of their cases. The government was given the power to dissolve local councils that had become infiltrated by organised crime. A new fund was set up to support the victims of extortion rackets. Politicians and bureaucrats convicted of mafia-related crimes were banned from public office. And, at long last, a law was passed to regulate the incentives that could be offered to penitents in return for reliable information.

Far more important even than any of these laws were Falcone’s plans for entirely new structures to investigate and prosecute Cosa Nostra, the camorra, the ’ndrangheta and Italy’s other mafia organisations. The Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (Anti-mafia Investigative Directorate), or DIA, was a kind of Italian equivalent of the FBI: it would marshal Italy’s various police forces in their war on gangland. For the judiciary, Falcone also took the model of Palermo’s anti-mafia pool and proposed replicating it. Specialised teams of magistrates devoting their efforts entirely to the fight against the mafias would be set up in all the prosecutors’ offices in the country. These were to be known as the Direzioni Distrettuali Antimafia (District Anti-mafia Directorates), or DDAs. The pool system dismantled in Palermo had now become the template nationwide. The DDAs would be coordinated by a Direzione Nazionale Antimafia (National Anti-mafia Directorate), or DNA, headed by a senior magistrate whom the press soon dubbed the ‘Super-prosecutor’. Huge new databases would keep track of the myriad names, faces and connections in Italy’s mafia networks.

Falcone had been marginalised in Palermo, and the pioneering efforts of the anti-mafia pool, carried out in the teeth of horrific violence, had gradually been hobbled. Yet with extraordinary lucidity and daring, Falcone had grasped a fleeting moment of political opportunity to apply the lessons of his bitter Palermo experience and utterly transform the fight against the mafias nationwide. It was to be his crowning achievement, his legacy to the country that never embraced him as it should.

For one hundred and thirty years, Italy’s response to the mafias had been half-hearted and sporadic at best. No one in power had seen fit to view the three historic gangster organisations—Cosa Nostra, camorra and ’ndrangheta—as a
national
issue, as three faces of the same fundamental
set of problems. Most disturbingly of all, Italy had been forgetful. Each new generation of police, magistrates, politicians and citizens had had to rediscover the mafias for itself. Falcone’s plans for the DIA, the DNA and the DDAs brought huge improvements, and a new continuity in the anti-mafia drive. From now on, when Italy investigated the crimes of Cosa Nostra, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta, it would do so using Falcone’s method. For the first time in its life as a unified state, Italy had been endowed with an institutional memory when it came to mafia crime. Falcone had finally lifted the curse of amnesia, and enabled his country to begin to learn.

While they watched developments in Rome in horror, Sicilian
mafiosi
knew that the Supreme Court verdict on the maxi-trial, due early in 1992, would be crucial to their fortunes. A verdict confirming the Buscetta theorem would set a momentous legal precedent by finally confirming the existence of Cosa Nostra as a single criminal organisation. The bosses of the Palermo Commission also had strong personal reasons to follow the Supreme Court’s deliberations closely: most of them risked irreversible life sentences. The wrong outcome of the maxi-trial, from the Sicilian mafia’s point of view, would also be a catastrophic judgement on Shorty Riina’s dictatorial rule of the Honoured Society. Ten years of unprecedented slaughter had exposed Cosa Nostra to the risk of its worst-ever legal defeat. Counter-measures were in order.