Cosa Nostra (42 page)

It is worth taking a closer look at the figure of Angelo La Barbera to see whether he was really as ‘new’ a mafioso as he seems. In fact he is unusual in that, while he was being held on a prison island some years after the events of the early 1960s, he allowed himself to be the subject of a series of fascinating interviews by a British-based Italian journalist, Gaia Servadio.

Servadio was struck immediately by La Barbera’s shrewd features, slick elegance, and ‘lupine teeth’. But the man beneath these physical traits remained elusive. Servadio is as engaging and astute as she is brave, so it is certainly not her fault if her portrait of La Barbera could hardly be tagged ‘intimate’. No gangster on trial for murder, as La Barbera was at the time of the interviews, was ever likely to give a great deal away; that much is understandable. But there is, one suspects, a more profound reason why Angelo La Barbera’s individual identity is not captured by Servadio’s pen: he probably did not have much of an individual identity to capture.

The mafioso was as rigidly stylised in his behaviour as an imperial Chinese courtier. Everything about La Barbera that Servadio observed was mannered: he had a slow, measured gait and openly disdained physical effort; he had a kind of pokerfaced generosity; and he habitually referred to himself in the third person. La Barbera was also what his interviewer called an ‘accomplished hypochondriac’—medical conditions make a good delaying tactic in court hearings. There is no way of knowing with any certainty, but it seems that all of his mannerisms had been learned from a time-honoured repertoire. One can only wonder how closely the way La Barbera carried himself would have aped the bearing of the ‘taciturn, puffed up, and wary’ Antonino Giammona back in the 1870s. ‘New’ mafioso he may have been, but Angelo La Barbera probably made sure he conformed to an old mafia style.

There is definitely nothing novel about the way Cosa Nostra acts as a ladder of social promotion for hard young men from poor backgrounds like Angelo La Barbera. The mafia has always been a meritocracy of violence. In fact there were blue bloods and barrow boys on either side in the first mafia war. An ally of ‘Little Bird’ Greco’s was Luciano Leggio, the child of a humble peasant family who rose through the ranks and took over the Corleone Family in the late 1950s. On the La Barberas’ side in the war was Pietro Torretta, a former member of Salvatore Giuliano’s brigand band, and now boss of Uditore—the same territory ruled by Antonino Giammona a century earlier. A Torretta is even mentioned in Chief of Police Sangiorgi’s report back in 1898. So neither side in the first mafia war had a better mafia pedigree than the other. The story about a ‘new’ mafia challenging an ‘old’ mafia—that staple of the true-crime genre—provides a misleading map of the battle lines.

And so to the war dispatches. The first mafia war was triggered when someone cheated on a drug deal. In February 1962, the La Barbera brothers and the Grecos were all members of a consortium that financed a consignment of heroin from Egypt, delivered to the southern Sicilian coast. A man of honour, Calcedonio Di Pisa, was sent to make sure it was safely forwarded to New York on an ocean liner. But the mafiosi in Brooklyn who collected the drugs found that the packages they received did not contain as much heroin as expected. The waiter on the liner to whom Di Pisa had handed the drugs was tortured but did not reveal anything. Suspicions began to fall on Di Pisa himself. At a meeting of the Commission called to decide on the case, Di Pisa was acquitted of having stolen any of the drug shipment. But the La Barberas made plain their displeasure about the decision.

On 26 December 1962, Di Pisa was shot dead in Piazza Principe di Camporeale on the western edge of Palermo. He had just parked his car and was heading for the tobacconist’s when two men fired at him with a .38 and a sawn-off shotgun. Other members of Di Pisa’s Family were soon attacked. Then, in January 1963, the retaliation began when Salvatore La Barbera became the victim of a ‘white shotgun’ killing: his Alfa Romeo Giulietta was all that was found, burned out. His brother and capo Angelo also vanished, only to pop up in Rome to give a press conference; it was a way simultaneously of telling his friends that he was still alive, and making himself too public a target for his enemies to kill easily.

Angelo La Barbera was determined to continue the war after his brother’s death. On 12 February, a huge car bomb—a Giulietta—destroyed ‘Little Bird’ Greco’s house in Ciaculli. Despite being unharmed, ‘Little Bird’ responded in equally spectacular fashion. At 10.25
A.M
. on 19 April, a cream-coloured Fiat 600 pulled up outside the Impero fishmonger’s in via Empedocle Restivo. Some of the many housewives on the street at the time remembered thinking it odd that, in a drizzle, the car’s soft top was open. Before they had time to reflect further, two men stood up on the seats and showered the fishmonger’s with machine-gun fire. Two men were killed, including the fishmonger himself who was thought to be a La Barbera hit man; two people were wounded, one of whom was a passer-by. Whoever was in the shop at the time—probably Angelo La Barbera—was clearly expecting trouble because the occupants returned fire with a revolver and a shotgun. Later, as police recovered an arsenal of small arms from the shattered shop, Communist activists with megaphones toured the area in cars to demand action.

A Greco ally was the next to fall. The Cinisi boss was killed near the iron gate of his lemon grove by a bomb placed, inevitably, in an Alfa Romeo Giulietta. This dainty four-door family saloon was one of the symbols of Italy’s economic miracle—‘svelte, practical, comfortable, safe and convenient’, as the adverts proclaimed. But as the car bombs detonated in Palermo, the Giulietta was quickly coming to symbolize something rather more dangerous and, apparently, atavistic.

Investigators later surmised that this most recent Giulietta attack in Cinisi was a last desperate attempt by Angelo La Barbera to show that he could still reach his enemies. If it was, it did not work. La Barbera was finally put out of action in the early hours of 25 May 1963. What struck Italian public opinion about his shooting was not its ferocity—two cars pulled up beside him and their occupants fired repeated volleys of shots; nor was it the remarkable fact that La Barbera survived, despite being hit in his left eye, neck, chest, back, leg, and groin; nor was it even that doctors found another bullet lodged in his head from an earlier attack (perhaps he had some basis for his ‘accomplished hypochondria’ after all). What was surprising about the incident was rather where it happened. La Barbera was shot in viale Regina Giovanna, a residential street in Milan—the booming northern city where the Giuliettas were built. The headlines in the
Corriere della Sera
spelled out the city’s surprise, and hinted at its attitude to ‘typically Sicilian’ behaviour: ‘War between mafia
cosche
shifts to Milan. Sicilian, riddled with six bullets, tells police: “I don’t know anything.”’ When the mafia spread beyond Sicily, the issue moved up the whole nation’s political agenda.

If the first mafia war had really been no more than the usual chain of retaliatory killings set in a ‘Chicago’ built from true-crime stereotypes, it would have come to an end when Angelo La Barbera was arrested in a Milanese hospital; all the publicity that the war generated would have died down, and the Ciaculli bomb—which went off only just over a month after the La Barbera shooting in Milan—would never have happened. The war’s brutal coda betrays the fact that it was a subtler affair. Most of the subtleties involve Tommaso Buscetta.

*   *   *

There are two accounts of Buscetta’s role in the first mafia war. The first is the product of police work at the time and probably draws on anonymous mafia informers; the second is Buscetta’s own, written more than two decades after the event. The official version is, broadly speaking, more credible. Buscetta’s account needs to be treated with as much circumspection as the other parts of his testimony that have not been verified in court. He airbrushes drugs out of the picture and underplays his own cunning and aggressive role in the unfolding of hostilities. But as ever, ‘the boss of two worlds’ also adds both insight and intrigue to the story.

The official sources on the first mafia war place Buscetta on the La Barberas’ side at the outbreak of hostilities. Buscetta may well have been in the fishmonger’s that was machine-gunned by Greco men—he was certainly a frequent visitor. But it seems that when the Grecos began to look as if they would prove victorious, both Buscetta and Uditore boss Pietro Torretta decided to change their allegiances; losing mafiosi are rarely too proud to try and get a foot on the victor’s rostrum.

Nevertheless, according to the official version, when Angelo La Barbera was shot and arrested in Milan, the result was a power vacuum in the Family that he had ruled, Palermo-Centre. Both Tommaso Buscetta and Pietro Torretta considered themselves jointly to be Angelo La Barbera’s natural successors; Torretta proposed himself as capo of Palermo-Centre and Buscetta as his deputy. But the Grecos thought Buscetta in particular a dangerous man to promote. The protracted dispute gradually reignited hostilities between Buscetta, Torretta, and the Grecos. Buscetta and Torretta acted first by ambushing two of their enemies in Torretta’s house. A new spate of violence was just getting under way when, on 30 June 1963, the umpteenth Giulietta stuffed with TNT accidentally killed the seven members of the forces of order whose names are inscribed on the Ciaculli monument. The intended targets were once again the Grecos, but a puncture stopped the killers carrying through the attack. Whether those killers were Buscetta and Torretta in person, or merely men of honour acting on their orders, is not known.

By predictable contrast, in his own account of the first mafia war Buscetta presents himself as an impartial mediator and a good friend to both ‘Little Bird’ Greco and Salvatore La Barbera. He is much less kind about Salvatore’s younger brother and capo, Angelo La Barbera, whom he blames for escalating the conflict—he calls him ‘haughty and arrogant’. Buscetta admits to having accepted a contract to kill Angelo La Barbera, but claims that someone else carried out the shooting in Milan before he could. It is still not known for certain whether he was, in fact, involved.

The main thrust of Buscetta’s story is to blame another man altogether for starting the trouble: Michele ‘the Cobra’ Cavataio, the new capo of the Family that had lost out to the Grecos in the war over the wholesale market back in the mid-1950s. It was Cavataio, Buscetta tells us, who carried out the murder that set off the war in the first place—the shooting of drug trafficker Calcedonio Di Pisa outside the tobacconist’s. Buscetta’s theory is that ‘the Cobra’ killed Di Pisa in the knowledge that the La Barberas would be blamed and that a war with the Grecos would be the result. Cavataio it was, according to Buscetta, who was also responsible for the Ciaculli bomb. The first mafia war, in essence, was all the result of a trick designed to play the La Barberas and Grecos off against each other.

Reading through these conflicting accounts, one begins to get a sense of why mafia wars so often failed to end in successful prosecutions. But what also becomes clear is that it is slightly beside the point to try to sort out who murdered whom or, in the language of ‘Chicago’ schlock, to ‘finally reveal the shocking truth’ about the extravagant shootings and bombings of 1962–3. It is more important to realize that even the mafiosi involved did not really know what was going on. Both Buscetta and the official account make it apparent that one of the reasons that mafia bosses reflected for so long before approving a new capo for Palermo-Centre was simply that they were trying to work out what on earth had happened. The first mafia war—like many mafia wars—was a giant game of murder in the dark.

It was also politics in the dark. Buscetta disingenuously claims that the Commission was invented to be a parliament of felons; he presents it as an impartial institution designed to bring light and equity into the gloom and treachery of Cosa Nostra’s affairs. But in its own way the Commission was as much an instrument of struggle within Cosa Nostra as were the Giuliettas loaded with TNT. It was designed to impose rules across Cosa Nostra that would make life easier for the ‘enterprise syndicate’ mafiosi operating in the transatlantic heroin trade. But the Commission soon became a power in its own right. It was, for example, beginning to act like a joint stock company for the heroin traffickers; or at least that is the implication of the fact that both the La Barberas and the Grecos—mafiosi from opposite sides of the city—were jointly funding a heroin shipment in 1962. So the Commission’s growing influence was running into conflict with the long-established power of the individual Families.

Buscetta believed that behind both ‘the Cobra’ Cavataio and La Barbera was an alliance of bosses from the north-west of Palermo who resented the Commission’s growing power, and the influence thereby enjoyed by south-eastern Palermo men of honour like ‘Little Bird’ Greco. Amid the intrigue and confusion, the root cause of the first mafia war was a problem as old as the mafia itself, the same problem it had had to manage when its main interests were lemon groves and cattle rather than construction sites and heroin: that is, the conflict between its role as a shadow government and the business interests of its members—between the territorial structure of the
cosche
and the highly lucrative smuggling networks that cut across the map of Family domains.

Truth, territory, and business are always at stake in mafia wars. And by the 1960s, whatever happened within Cosa Nostra in Sicily also had diplomatic ramifications. At about the time that the first mafia war started, the American Cosa Nostra was coming under unprecedented pressure from the Kennedy administration. Robert Kennedy had built his political profile through his scrupulous work on the Senate Labor Rackets Committee. As attorney general, part of his brief was to tackle the mob. Under Kennedy, convictions of racketeers by the Organized Crime Section and the Tax Division trebled between 1961 and 1963; they nearly doubled again in 1964. Tax law, famously the instrument used to catch Al Capone three decades earlier, was still the main weapon against organized crime.