Blood Brotherhoods (77 page)

The national government’s response to the Reggio revolt was to increase the supply of favours through a massive programme of investment: the ‘Colombo package’, named after the Prime Minister of the day. The centrepiece of the Colombo package was a gargantuan new steelworks to be situated on the Tyrrhenian coast at Gioia Tauro.

In the end, as the economic crisis of the 1970s unfolded, the Colombo package would be cut down in size. The steel plant would never actually be completed—a crash in steel prices saw to that. Subsequent plans for a coal-fired power station also failed to materialise. Eventually, the site was transformed into a vast container port—the biggest in the Mediterranean—which opened in 1994. The Piromalli family estate sits on a ridge overlooking both the container port and the cemetery situated next to it: the symbolism is lost on no one.

’ndranghetisti
like the Piromallis could not have dreamed of a better outcome to the crisis of 1970: a seemingly permanent building site, right in the middle of one of the most mafia-dominated areas in the whole of Calabria. When the Colombo package was announced, the chief cudgels of the plain of Gioia Tauro scrambled to gather up diggers, cement mixers and
dumper trucks faster than toddlers let loose in a toyshop. The frenzied grab at the contracts and subcontracts generated by the Colombo package would be one of the major causes of what has become known as Calabria’s First ’Ndrangheta War.

The First ’Ndrangheta War had other causes too. One of them was the growth of the third big sector of the mafias’ economic miracle: after construction and cigarette trafficking came kidnapping.

 
49 

T
HE KIDNAPPING INDUSTRY

U
P AND DOWN
I
TALY
,
AROUND
650
CITIZENS WERE KIDNAPPED BY CRIMINALS IN THE
1970s and 1980s. Some of the most famous names in the country became victims, like the singer-songwriter Fabrizio De André, and no less than three members of the Bulgari jewellery dynasty. Of the untold billions of lire paid in ransoms, only the tiny proportion of eight billion (very roughly $37 million in 2011 values) were ever recovered, despite precautions like marking or microfilming banknotes. No wonder that the phrase ‘the kidnapping industry’ became a journalistic cliché.

From the early 1970s, the kidnapping industry brought organised crime even more riches. Yet it also made the tensions in the whole Italian underworld much more volatile. The lines of cause and effect between the newly profitable business of kidnapping and the risks of mob warfare were not the same in Calabria and Sicily. The ’ndrangheta and Cosa Nostra had very different attitudes to the art of taking hostages. As Antonino Calderone, a Sicilian
mafioso
, explained in 1992:

The [Sicilian] mafia doesn’t run prostitution, because it’s a dirty business. Can you imagine a Man of Honour living as a pimp, an exploiter of women? Maybe in America
mafiosi
have got involved in this business . . . But in Sicily the mafia just does not do it, full stop.

Now kidnapping is another matter. Cosa Nostra has no internal rule against abductions. Deep down inside, a Man of Honour accepts kidnapping. He does not view it as something dirty like prostitution.

Sicilian
mafiosi
have a century and a half of collective kidnapping experience; they have snatched away men, women and children since their Honoured Society began. So they know that taking hostages can have many meanings and many motives. A big ransom is always appreciated, but sometimes it is only part of the story. A more important consideration may be the desire to make friends.

To make friends through kidnapping means deploying a role-playing game. The first role is the bad guy: the screaming blackmailer who peremptorily threatens to make your children disappear unless you hand over a fortune. The second role is the mediator who promises to reason with the kidnappers, the quietly spoken friend who can negotiate a reduction in the ransom, get your loved ones home safe and, of course, make sure you are protected from any future dangers.

Both of these roles are played by
mafiosi
. Whether through kidnapping or through extortion (which often works by the same role-playing rules), the mafia has a genius for making itself into
both
your greatest dread
and
the best friend you could hope for in the circumstances. As Machiavelli wrote, ‘Men who are well treated by one whom they expected to treat them ill, feel the more beholden to their benefactor.’ By simple means like these, the Honoured Society of Sicily has infiltrated the island’s ruling class since the mid-nineteenth century. The term ‘Stockholm syndrome’—used to describe cases in which kidnap victims form a strong bond with their kidnappers—was only invented in 1973. But for more than a century before that date it could quite easily have applied to large sections of the Sicilian elite.

However, kidnapping tends to be a messy crime. A large team of accomplices is often needed. Hostages have to be restrained, hidden and fed, perhaps for long stretches of time. Those victims are by definition wealthy and, like as not, powerful too—the sort of people whose disappearance embarrasses politicians, leading to loud anti-crime rhetoric and the deployment of large numbers of police. Any mafia boss who pulls off a big kidnapping and does not compensate other bosses for the inconvenience is likely to make himself very unpopular. Any ordinary criminal with an atom of sense knows that carrying out an abduction without the mafia’s permission is suicide. In the 1970s, a
mafioso
in prison heard tell that another inmate without mafia connections was thinking about kidnapping someone; his response was simply to mutter
chistu ‘avi a moriri
: ‘this bloke must die’. The would-be kidnapper was shot dead a week after he was released.

For all these reasons, kidnapping has had its seasons in Sicily: short phases when it has been frequent, and longer periods when it has been rare. For example,
mafiosi
—or bandits who were working for them willy-nilly—took many Sicilian dignitaries hostage in the decade and a half following
Italian unification in 1860. In 1876, the kidnapping of an English sulphur merchant helped trigger a major crackdown on organised crime on the island. Many bandits were betrayed by their mafia protectors and shot down. Kidnapping largely fell out of favour thereafter: a sure indicator that the mafia had reached an accommodation with its friends in the island’s ruling class.

So kidnappings, whether they are on the increase or in decline, may also tell us that historically significant change is under way in the Sicilian underworld. That is particularly true of the early 1970s. Most of the bosses released from prison following the trials of the late 1960s—the trials relating to the events of the First Mafia War—were very hard up. As Antonino Calderone, a Man of Honour who knew them all, later recalled:

Mark my words. When I say that there was no money around at that time, that the mafia didn’t have any money, I’m not just saying it by way of exaggeration. After the arrests of 1962–63, after all the men who’d been sent into forced resettlement or who’d spent time in prison, and after the Catanzaro trial in 1968, the money was gone. It had all been spent on lawyers, prison and stuff like that . . . So when they started being released, around 1968, Cosa Nostra’s bosses were all skint. Maybe Luciano Liggio had the odd house or property, but he wasn’t going to sell. I can tell you that ‘Shorty’ Riina cried when he told me that his mother couldn’t come and see him in prison, in 1966 or 1967, because she couldn’t afford the train ticket. So in 1971 or thereabouts a series of kidnappings was organised.

The authors of the new wave of kidnappings were from Corleone, a town in the hinterland some fifty-five kilometres by road from Palermo. We have already had intermittent glimpses of the Corleone Family in mafia history. Kidnapping would turn them into its protagonists. Luciano Liggio began as a petty criminal whose skill with a gun endeared him to the town’s boss, Dr Michele Navarra. In 1958 Liggio machine-gunned Navarra to death, triggering a violent fissure in the Family that would make Corleone notorious: ‘Tombstone’, the press dubbed the town. Eventually Liggio emerged triumphant, thanks in good measure to his fierce young lieutenants, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina and Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano. The
corleonesi
had a close working relationship with Vito Ciancimino, the Christian Democrat Young Turk who was instrumental in the sack of Palermo in the early 1960s. Liggio’s power base was such that, when Cosa Nostra was reconstituted in 1969, he was one of the triumvirs entrusted with rebuilding the organisation’s structure. Since Liggio was often away from Sicily, his place at the
triumvirate’s meetings, and later on the Commission, was often taken by ‘Shorty’ Riina, a man who would develop into the most powerful and violent Sicilian mafia boss of all time.

The
corleonesi
first attempted to remedy their shortage of cash on 8 June 1971, when a twenty-eight-year-old man, who had just pulled up outside his home after buying a chilled cake, was grabbed by five assailants and bundled into a car; passers-by were threatened with pistols. Suddenly, bourgeois Palermitans began going out less and wondering who would be taken next. The reason for their fears was that the victim was Pino Vassallo, the son of the notorious ‘Concrete King’ don Ciccio Vassallo—the very man who had built many of the apartment blocks where much of the Palermitan bourgeoisie now lived. Vassallo had strolled unscathed through all the battles of the 1960s. Now, it seemed, his protection had failed him.

A mafia-backed businessman like the ‘Concrete King’ (or his son, for that matter) was the perfect hostage. Yet at the same time, abducting him was also a potentially catastrophic move. On the one hand, the crimes that lay behind the Vassallo fortune guaranteed that the whole affair would be handled with discretion. Don Ciccio was never likely to try and involve the police. A ransom estimated at between 150 million and 400 million lire ($1.6 million–$4.3 million in 2011 values) was duly paid, and Pino Vassallo was released. But on the other hand, kidnapping someone protected by another boss was flagrantly offensive. To snatch away someone else’s meal ticket was tantamount to a declaration of war. If fighting did not break out after the Vassallo abduction, it may have been because his protection was in abeyance—in that the
mafiosi
closest to him had been the La Barbera brothers, who were the losers in the First Mafia War.

When they received the ransom from the Vassallo kidnapping, Liggio and his boys demonstrated impeccable mafia manners in the way they distributed it equally between the neediest Families in the province of Palermo. So the Vassallo operation served two peaceful purposes: it redistributed wealth, and it cemented the new balance of power that had emerged after the turmoil of the 1960s. But soon the issue of kidnapping would become much more divisive.

After organising the Vassallo kidnapping, the
corleonesi
went on to mount unauthorised operations—such as the August 1972 abduction of Luciano Cassina, the son of the entrepreneur whose contracts to maintain the city’s drains and roads made him Palermo’s biggest taxpayer. Curiously, the man who posed as a ‘friend’ to help the Cassina family negotiate with the kidnappers was a priest, Agostino Coppola, who was a nephew of Frank ‘Three Fingers’ Coppola and close to Luciano Liggio’s allies in the Partinico Family
of Cosa Nostra. This time, the
corleonesi
kept the profits from these escapades for themselves.

Salvatore ‘Shorty’ Riina in 1970. The man destined to exercise a dictatorial power over Cosa Nostra would be on the run from the law for the next twenty-three years.

In mafia terms, there could be little justification for how the
corleonesi
were behaving. Although they were deceitful and evasive when talking to other
mafiosi
about what was going on, it was nonetheless clear that they were mounting a challenge to their rivals’ authority that was both calculated and flagrant. In 1972 the other two members of the triumvirate, Tano Badalamenti and Stefano Bontate, were both temporarily behind bars, and therefore less able to react to the provocation. Just as importantly, even if they had wanted to take measures against the
corleonesi
, they would have had trouble finding them. Luciano Liggio had gone on the run again in the summer of 1969. His two lieutenants, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina and Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano, had been in hiding since 1969 and 1963 respectively.

The years 1974–5 were politically important for Cosa Nostra. In 1974, after Stefano Bontate’s release from prison, the triumvirate that had presided over the organisation in the province of Palermo since 1969 was superseded by a full Commission, largely comprising Bontate allies; Tano Badalamenti sat at the head of the table as provincial representative. Then, in February 1975, a villa set in the central Sicilian countryside near the lofty city of Enna hosted the first meeting of an entirely new body, the Regional Commission, or Region. The Region comprised six bosses representing the six most mafia-infested provinces of Sicily: Palermo, Trapani, Agrigento, Caltanissetta, Enna and Catania. In effect, the mafia Commissions in these six provinces were each sending a delegate
to sit on an island-wide coordinating committee for mafia crime. The Region’s authority over island-wide mafia affairs was relatively limited, as was symbolised by the fact that the boss chosen to preside over its meetings took the title of ‘secretary’ rather than
capo
.