Blood Brotherhoods (113 page)

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catch: dissociation would only happen if prison conditions were relaxed and some of Italy’s new anti-mafia legislation repealed.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 all 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.

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.