Cosa Nostra (43 page)

In 1962, faced with the electric chair, imprisoned Gambino soldier Joseph Valachi started to talk. He did not make a particularly compelling witness when he appeared before the Rackets Committee, and many people were very sceptical about what he said. But Valachi did at least succeed in getting J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI to take the syndicate crime issue seriously for the first time. In 1959, the New York office of the FBI had 400 agents investigating American Communism, and only four working on organized crime. Valachi led to a change in priorities: by 1963, the New York office had 140 people in its rackets team. In 1964, FBI hidden microphones recorded Teamsters union boss Jimmy Hoffa in a series of business exchanges with the Detriot mafia.

Inevitably, the Kennedy anti-racketeering campaign lessened the influence of the American mafia in Sicily. As a result, the Sicilian bosses whose interests were centred on the territorial dimension of Cosa Nostra’s operations probably calculated that it was a good time to settle accounts with the drug traffickers on the Commission now that their American protection had weakened.

It is probably also highly significant that the first mafia war followed only a few months after Lucky Luciano died of a heart attack while waiting to meet his biographer’s plane at Naples airport. Lucky was known to be close to the La Barberas, and it is strongly suspected that the relationship was based on narcotics. When Lucky Luciano died, it left Angelo La Barbera having to prove to both the Families and the Commission that his power within Cosa Nostra was based on more than his American friends. Despite all the Giuliettas filled with TNT, he failed.

Angelo La Barbera was sentenced to twenty-two years for his part in the first mafia war in 1968. In 1975, the representative of the ‘new’ mafia died the most traditional of ‘old’ mafia deaths when he was stabbed in a prison yard.

*   *   *

Whatever the truth behind the intrigues of the first mafia war, the results of the Ciaculli bomb that brought it to a close were dramatic. There were close to 2,000 arrests. ‘The police seemed to have gone mad,’ was Buscetta’s comment. Faced with this backlash, the mafia adopted the simplest self-defence method of all: it went into hiding. In the summer of 1963, the Commission met and decided to dissolve itself. The Families disbanded; according to one
pentito
not even protection money was collected in Palermo. Mafia crimes dropped to almost zero over the next few years. A number of leading bosses fled abroad. ‘Little Bird’ Greco went first to Switzerland and then to Venezuela. Tommaso Buscetta’s wanderings took him to Switzerland, Mexico, Canada, and then the United States.

As Lucky Luciano had done when he was expelled from the United States in 1946, many Sicilian men of honour simply changed the direction of their careers within the organization: from becoming power syndicate criminals—statesmen of the mafia’s shadow government—they evolved into enterprise syndicate leaders, international paramilitary businessmen. As they did, the Italian political system once again became the chief player in the mafia’s history.

THE ANTIMAFIA

The years before the Ciaculli bomb were a depressing time for anyone prepared to speak out against the mafia. With both the Church and the DC intent on denying not only the seriousness of the problem but even its very existence, only marginal voices broke the silence. The most important of those voices was a collective one; the fight to expose the truth about the mafia during the 1950s was led by the independent left-wing newspaper
L’Ora.
The title had begun life as the organ of Florio interests in Sicily at the turn of the century. In the 1950s, 1960s, and early 1970s, it created an astute blend of incandescent sports coverage and girls in bikinis with sophisticated writing on literature, music, and art. But for all these attractions, it was
L’Ora
’s courageous investigative reports on organized crime and corruption that were often its main selling point. When it published the names, interests, and political contacts of leading mafia bosses in 1958, there was a devastating dynamite attack on its offices.
L’Ora
refused to bend and carried on its campaign. (In the early 1970s, two
L’Ora
journalists, Mauro De Mauro and Giovanni Spampinato, would pay with their lives for their work.)

Inspired by the example provided by the Kefauver hearings on organized crime in the United States, in the 1950s the Italian Communist Party began to call for a parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia. Impetus to those calls was added by the bombing of
L’Ora
’s offices, but the impetus would never be sufficient as long as the mafia issue remained solely the political property of the Left. As late as 1959, a DC junior Minister of the Interior dismissed the need for a parliamentary inquiry, and blamed mafia crimes on the islanders’ tendency to ‘take justice into their own hands out of a misplaced sense of honour’.

Yet by then the political map of Italy was already changing; the DC was divided, and some of its factions were beginning to look to the Socialist Party as a potential coalition partner. The Socialists were the mafia’s historical enemies; they had not forgotten the slaughter of trade unionists and other militants in the post-war years. This new political environment was one in which the calls for a parliamentary inquiry into the mafia could find a sympathetic hearing even within the ranks of the DC. In September 1961, the Sicilian Regional Assembly got its first ‘Centre-Left’ government which included both the DC and the Socialists, and was given issue-by-issue support by the Communists. Early the following year, the Assembly voted unanimously to ask the Italian parliament to set up a commission of inquiry into the mafia. Even the mafia’s own politicians voted in favour because they now considered an inquiry so inevitable that opposition at this stage would be both useless and conspicuous.

As the country’s centre of political gravity shifted gently to the left, the voices that had spoken out about the mafia became louder. One of them belonged to Leonardo Sciascia, a schoolteacher from the unremarkable little town of Racalmuto in the sulphur region near Agrigento. Leonardo Sciascia’s
The Day of the Owl,
an elegant, bleak novella about a detective’s failed investigation into a mafia killing, was published in 1961.
The Day of the Owl
—a work of fiction, it should be stressed—was the first book to put a face on the mafia and words in its mouth, in the unforgettable figure of Don Mariano Arena.

It is now known that, in the same year that Sciascia’s novel came out, there was a meeting of the Cosa Nostra Commission in the province of Palermo to discuss the organization’s response to the Italian state’s awakening interest in the mafia issue. It was decided to keep killings to an absolute minimum until the politicians lost interest. But the truce held only for a year before the latent tensions over business and territory led to the outbreak of the first mafia war in December 1962. The renewed killing spree cranked further political momentum into the plans for a parliamentary inquiry.

Less than a week after the Ciaculli car bomb, the parliamentary commission of inquiry finally began its work. It was the first official inquiry into the mafia since 1875, but the political conditions were now much more favourable to a serious investigation than they had been in the year of Tajani’s revelations in parliament about police collusion with criminals in Palermo. The Socialist Party was moving into government with the DC, pulling it in the direction of reform and transparency, as the cross-party support for the parliamentary inquiry seemed to show. Expectations in society were high: public opinion seemed ready to hold the politicians to account for the way they responded to the crisis. Thus the Antimafia—as the new inquiry became known—began at a brisk pace. Within a month it had made strong recommendations including, for the first time in Italian history, criminal legislation specifically targeted at the mafia. Italian democracy seemed finally ready to confront organised crime in Sicily.

It is, alas, all too easy to tell the story of the Antimafia as one giant anticlimax. The indignation that followed the Ciaculli bomb of 1963 faded rapidly. With the mafia all but silenced, there were few outrages to fuel the Antimafia’s work. The commission of inquiry’s opening sprint rapidly slowed to a gentle amble that would continue for no less than thirteen years. The Antimafia dragged on until it became the longest parliamentary inquiry in Italian history. It came to seem less like a response to an emergency than a permanent and dreary part of Italian political life.

Interest in the Antimafia’s work revived periodically following some particularly sensational revelation, but sensation repeatedly failed to translate into effective political measures or judicial action. Even the criminal law passed in 1965 as a result of the Antimafia’s recommendations proved to be partially counter-productive. The law stipulated that mafia suspects could be forced to live far from their homes. It was an effort to break contacts between mafiosi and the society around them—as if the mafia was caused by an unhealthy exhalation of the soil in western Sicily. Dozens of men of honour were posted all over the peninsula under these ‘obligatory residence’ measures, with the unintended result that the mafia gained new bases for its operations right across Italy.

Each leak or scandal emerging from the Antimafia about a politician with connections seemed to be blunted by denials and libel suits. It is also, quite simply, extremely difficult for evidence of discreet, face-to-face collusion between politicians and the mafia to reach the standards of proof required by criminal law. Vito Ciancimino—the DC young Turk in the hands of the Corleone mafia—was forced to resign following revelations made by the Antimafia in 1964. He surfaced again in 1970 when, incredibly, he became mayor of Palermo. The national scandal that followed ended in his resignation. In 1975, he submitted a lengthy self-defence to the Antimafia. Its breathless, page-long opening sentence complained about the ‘denigratory publicity’, ‘corrupting sophisms’, ‘personal rancour’, ‘servile demagoguery’, and ‘affront to Latin legal traditions’ to which he, as a man who had ‘sacrificed himself for society’, had been subjected. He remained a power behind the scenes of Palermo politics until he was finally arrested in 1984.

Part of the problem with the Antimafia was a turnover in personnel. When a new president of the Antimafia was appointed in 1972, he confessed that everything he knew about the mafia came from reading Mario Puzo’s
The Godfather.
But this lack of continuity in the Antimafia’s membership was only a symptom of its main handicap: the deep-seated factionalism of Italian political life. Apart from the legacy of Fascism and the fact that Italy was on the front line of the Cold War, there were also other fissures, notably between Catholic and lay world-views and between different regions of the country. Rather than being a ‘ship of state’, Italy often seems more like a flotilla of boats, each piloted according to a different chart, each competing for access to the most favourable winds, yet each afraid of being isolated from the other craft. Like all government institutions, the parliamentary commission of inquiry became the subject of factional tussles, with each group trying to put its own members into the chairs around the Antimafia table. The reason for this was that the word ‘mafia’ remained the same political weapon that it had always been ever since it entered the Italian language back in 1865. It was a weapon that no party or faction, least of all the DC, was prepared to leave in other hands.

Among the members of the Antimafia commission were some outstanding figures like Franco Cattanei of the DC and Girolamo Li Causi of the Communist Party (he was the Resistance veteran who survived a grenade attack by Don Calò Vizzini in Villalba town square back in 1944). It was politicians like these who tried to make the Antimafia into an impartial expression of the national interest. Their task was not an easy one. In 1972, a new government was formed in which two Palermo ‘young Turks’, with links to the mafia that had been revealed by the Antimafia, were given ministerial office: Salvo Lima was undersecretary at the Ministry of Finance, and Giovanni ‘the Viceroy’ Gioia was Minister for the Mail and Telecommunications. One of Gioia’s supporters was even placed on the Antimafia commission; the man in question was not only on record as stating that the mafia did not exist but had himself been investigated by the commission at an earlier stage. The result was a five-month bout of political squabbling during which the Antimafia’s work came to a complete stop. It is only one example of the way in which the vitriolic factionalism of the Italian system undermined the unity and authority of the country’s response to the mafia.

When the Antimafia finally concluded its work in 1976, its most substantial legacy was a mountain of paper. Between the ‘tomes’ and ‘parts’ of the documentation it gathered, the interim reports, concluding report, and minority reports (for there was no political consensus on the lessons to be learned), the Antimafia bequeathed nearly forty fat volumes to the few libraries that had enough shelf-space to stock them. Anyone with the patience to read, for example, the turgid prose of the interim report of 1972—all 1,262 pages of it—will get a pretty good picture of the mafia. The report talks of the association’s systematic use of an ‘unparalleled, bloodthirsty violence’, its parasitical relationship to business, its links to local and national government; it explains that the
cosche
ruling different areas have a ‘tacit accord’ that is not broken even when there is pitiless fighting between them. The papers of the Antimafia are a vast and rich source of material for historians. So vast and rich, in fact, that the thousands of pages smothered the ‘powder keg’ of revelations about political collusion that one early president of the inquiry promised would emerge. It was during the long years of the Antimafia that post-war Italy became acquainted for the first time with mafia fatigue.

The Antimafia’s results were undoubtedly a huge disappointment when compared with the expectations of 1963. But the commission did at least bring a substantial increase in Italy’s awareness of the issue. Some of the stories that surfaced from the investigations lodged themselves in the public memory, like the town of Caccamo where, next to the mayor’s seat in the council chamber, a special chair for the mafia boss was permanently set. In the wake of the commission of inquiry, through well-informed authors like Michele Pantaleone (the left-wing activist who had tangled with Don Calò in his native Villalba), studies of the mafia came to command a small but solid readership in Italy, as they still do to this day. Partly as a result fewer politicians had the brass neck—or the ‘bronze face’ as the Italian idiom has it—to deny completely that the mafia existed. The mafia was now no longer an issue that was restricted to the Left. All told, the Antimafia slightly increased the price (in terms of a loss of credibility and national influence) that politicians who colluded with the mafia risked paying. It was not much to show for thirteen years of work. But it was something, and that something had been achieved democratically.