Blood Brotherhoods (111 page)

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 Palermo 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 

C
OSA
N
OSTRA
: The head of the Medusa

S
INCE THE CAPTURE OF
T
OTÒ
‘S
HORTY
’ R
IINA IN
1993, S
ICILY
’
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. Most 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.