Honoured Society (26 page)

At the end of 1981 the Mafia threat reached an extreme phase, more than one hundred persons having been assassinated in Palermo alone in that year. The Rome Government’s counter attack began with the decision to name General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa as Prefect of Palermo, with the task of carrying the war into Mafia territory. Dalla Chiesa had had some previous experience of the Mafia, having served as a captain of Carabinieri in Sicily in the days of banditry, and returned there with the rank of Colonel in the year 1970. He was then transferred to the North and placed in charge of the struggle against the
Brigate Rosse
and the other terrorists, a task which he brought to its conclusion so successfully as to warrant his promotion to the rank of General.

In 1982, before the General’s arrival in Palermo, the year opened with a sensational crime, the killing of Pio La Torre, a Communist deputy, who had recently been sent to Sicily to direct the regional organisation of his party. La Torre had been one of the most active members of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission and had proposed the passing of a special law permitting magistrates to investigate the bank accounts of persons suspected of laundering Mafia funds. This law was approved and applied only several months after his assassination.

There persists in the heart of the Italian world of politics an obscure area of resistance to the fight against the Mafia, for even the granting of the necessary special powers to General Dalla Chiesa met with opposition
in Rome. As soon as La Torre arrived in Palermo he began his attack on the Mafia, as well as a campaign against the NATO installation of atomic missiles in Sicily. He had been a strong supporter of General Dalla Chiesa, welcoming his appointment, and promising his party’s support.
However
, before Dalla Chiesa could arrive in Palermo, La Torre had already been assassinated and the General arrived barely in time to be present at his funeral. Precisely one hundred days later he and his wife were ambushed and killed while driving their little car on the way home.

After the killing of the Communist Deputy and of the new Prefect, the Mafia challenge continued in 1983 with the murders of Judge Giacomo Ciaccio Montalto, Mario D’Aleo (Captain of the Carabinieri), and of Judge Rocco Chinnici. The latter was well-known for his encouragement of civilian resistance to the Mafia. He took part in public meetings, spoke in schools, wrote to the Press to denounce the immorality of the Mafia traffickers, and to urge Sicilians not to give in to threats and intimidation. Realising that he was in constant danger he went everywhere protected by a strong police escort. Being unable to kill him in ambush, the killer used remote control to explode a car parked outside his house, just as he was passing through the door. Two policemen died with him and also an innocent passer-by.

1984 opened with a disturbing portent: the killing of a journalist, not in Palermo but in Catania, where it had been believed that the Mafia had little following, but where they were now firmly entrenched. The dead man, Giuseppe Fava, was an author and journalist, who, for some years, had directed his own paper, in which he carried an open campaign against the Mafia, particularly against Catania’s drug traffickers.

It cannot be claimed that in the years following the publication of Norman Lewis’s book the Mafia has been defeated, or even held in check. Indeed some economists forecast that in Sicily the Mafia economy will, in the end, expel the normal one, as it extends its empire even further into business, banking, and drugs. The implications of the relative silence which followed the thirteen years investigation of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission are that it has retained protective links in the political parties. Disquieting questions arise from the strong US presence
in Sicilian bases, when from recent history we know that collaboration between the United States military and the Mafia can exist. In Palermo, too, it should be remembered that, according to police estimates, about 30,000 citizens derive benefits, either directly or indirectly, from the narcotics trade, and that many young people working at present for Mafia undertakings, would otherwise be on the streets.

On the other hand the Mafia has ceased to be useful to the right-wing parties as an instrument of political power, employed to capture votes in exchange for a certain tolerance on the part of the police. Moreover, for the Italian state it is intolerable that a savage, uncontrollable and aggressive neo-capitalism should be allowed to develop in the South. Hence the likelihood of more and more drastic repressive action by the government, and more and more ferocious counter-attacks by the forces of the Mafia. This is an impasse from which there is no end in sight. We shall be obliged to await a further epilogue to
The Honoured Society.

S
CANNING THROUGH
Marcello Cimino’s epilogue to this book and its most recent extensions to the interminable catalogue of Sicilian death by violence, my eye was suddenly caught by a familiar name. The first instant reaction was of refusal to accept an intolerable fact.
Strangers
who had no real flesh and blood existence for me might be cut off in the huge abruptness of a Mafia ambush. This could never happen to a friend, upon whom our friendship itself ought to have conferred a kind of invulnerability. But here was the name, fourth on the fatal list. There could be no mistake here, no confusion. There were Giulianos in abundance in Sicily, but certainly only one Sicilian mother of the numerous Giuliano clan could have ever taken it into her head to name her son Boris.

I first met Boris Giuliano on an extraordinary day in June 1968, the morning of which I had spent in the Assize Court of Palermo, where a trial that was supposed to have made history had just faltered to an end. It had been advertised as unique on two counts. The first was the awesome reputation of the prisoners in the dock, supposed until this moment to be wholly beyond the reach of the law. They were described in the newspapers as ‘princes of the underworld’. Joe Bananas (Giuseppe Bonnano), in close association with them, the Al Capone of his day, had been tried
in absentia
in the same court, but John Bonventre, his
lieutenant
, trapped while on a visit from the States, was here in the flesh, shackled in Italian style to the nine other men in the dock, a confident half-smile barely absent from his face.

The presence here of three men holding dual American and Italian nationality provided the second reason for widespread excitement. These, including Bonventre, were reputed to be heads of Cosa Nostra
‘families’ in the United States, and the trial was to provide the
opportunity
for uncovering the tenuous association between the formidable Sicilian parent and its evil American offspring, described in President Johnson’s
Task Force Report on Organised Crime
as the most powerful and successful criminal organisation the world has ever known.

Hopes of astounding revelations to be followed by drastic action were dissipated as the trial degenerated into farce. It turned out that to have legally established the suspected relationship between Sicilian and American gangsterdom would have necessitated the translation from English into Italian of seven volumes of evidence (comprising 1,497 pages) gathered in the United States, and that this would take a year. Furthermore the multifarious and often horrific crimes of which these men were accused became as insubstantial as legends of the Nibelungs when the defence counsels went to work. Witnesses had second thoughts as to what they had claimed to have seen or heard, urgently retracting all or part of their previous evidence. Police files had gone missing, and alibis winged like doves through the stagnant spaces of the seedy courtroom. Many of the accused were presented as men of exemplary conduct, intensely engaged in religious and charitable work. Several were known for their long association with the heads of the Church in Sicily. Two had sons training for the priesthood, and one had founded an orphanage.

On July 25th, in an atmosphere of boredom and derision, the charade came to an end. For the last time impudent press photographers, who had no right to be there, poked their camera lenses into the face of the somnolent judge. For the last time, deferential as ever, the guards unshackled the prisoners – so relaxed, so debonair, and, after so many months spent in prison on remand, so amazingly suntanned – to allow them to embrace their wives and press sweets upon their children.

The long foreseen verdict had to be Not Guilty, through lack of proof, and once more justice bowed its head in defeat.

Later that day I called on Colonel Giuseppe Russo of the Carabinieri who was understandably outraged that his efforts should have come to naught. Although he had been sent down from the North and given all the powers he asked, the ten men that he and Boris Giuliano, of the
Squadra Mobile
, had between them sent on remand to the Ucciardone Prison had been freed with nothing to show but spectacular suntans from the months of their captivity. Russo was a handsome man, very much of a soldier, who used handcuffs of his own design as
paperweights
, and surrounded himself with underlings and spit-and-polish. For the local Pubblica Sicurezza, including Boris Giuliano, its chief, he showed unconcealed contempt. In handling the Mafia he favoured a
no-nonsense
approach and described with relish the way he had dealt with the powerful Frank Copolla, one of the men released that day. ‘I took a couple of carabinieri and went to his house, chained him up, and had them drag him away,’ he said. ‘I made sure that as many people as possible were there to see it. Respect – as they call it – is what they live for, and that’s just what I make it my business to see that they lose.’

Leaving Russo, I called on Boris Giuliano. He was a young man, full of potentially mischievous humour, a Sicilian by birth who had once worked – illegally, as he was delighted to assure me – as a waiter in a Soho restaurant, speaking excellent English, as a result with something of a Cockney accent.

He admitted to being no more impressed by Colonel Russo of the rival police force than Russo had been with him, and was deeply shocked at he way Russo had boasted about the circumstances of Frank Coppola’s arrest. ‘He’s signed his own death warrant,’ he said. ‘He’ll end up on a slab. Apart from that, it does no good.’

‘Let me explain the way I play it,’ Boris said. ‘First of all I take a plain car to the house. If there’s a woman there I bow to her and excuse myself. “
Mi dispiace assai
, Signora,” I say, and should there be a kid in sight, I give it a pat on the head. The man is given time to get his things together, and then we go off. That way the thing is kept on an impersonal level, and I don’t make an enemy. Why should I die before my time? A man like Frank Coppola is too heavy to drag around on a chain.’

We were sitting in the bar of the best hotel in Palermo, which was not only good but extremely reasonable in its prices, and we both knew only too well who owned it. A few minutes before I had asked the barman if he had ever met Lucky Luciano, once a frequenter of the place, to which his
reply was, ‘Many times, and if you ask me my opinion of him it is this. He was on all counts the most exquisite man I have ever met.’

Boris was determined to bore me with all the stale old arguments for the historical reason for the Mafia’s existence. ‘You English have only been invaded once. In Sicily we’ve gone through the mill six times. Every time a new lot of foreigners took over they changed the laws, naturally in their favour. Supposing a Spaniard took your orchard away and then told you all the old title deeds had been cancelled, what would you do? The Mafia had to exist.’

‘I’ve heard it so often, before,’ I told him. ‘Surely you don’t really believe that stuff.’

‘Put it this way, the big money these days is in development and construction. The Mafia controls the City planning department, so no one outside the mob gets planning permission. This way they make thousands of millions. But does it really matter all that much? If they didn’t cash in, the Roman bankers and investment companies would. We’d be no better off. They kill each other, but what of it? The main thing is to see to it they don’t kill us.’

‘Sometimes you sound just like a mafiosi,’ I said.

‘In my trade you have to be a realist. No one will stop this thing. The most you can ever hope to do is to keep it within bounds. This is a game. It’s like chess. I give a piece here and I take a piece there, but I know it’s a game I’m never going to be able to win. I have to do business with them, and they can be helpful in small ways. Among other things they hate to have small-time villains spoil the atmosphere of the place. You can leave your car unlocked in the parking space outside this hotel. Can you think of any hotel on the mainland where you could do that?’

‘They still kill judges. And chiefs of police.’

‘Outsiders who don’t bother to learn the rules of the game. We try to explain to them, but they refuse to listen. It’s a great help to have been born here.’

Boris and I got on tremendously well. He wanted to talk about Soho, and I about the Mafia, and we had a half dozen such meetings at that time. We exchanged letters and a few years later I spent an hour with
him when he stopped off in London on his way to Washington for a conference with the FBI. An earlier visit to the United States had had to do with the assassination of President Kennedy. His opinion as to the possibility of a Sicilian connection in this case suggested the plot of a book based on the assassination I subsequently wrote.

In the early part of 1979 Boris’s letters stopped. I assumed that he was too busy a man to continue a desultory correspondence, but the reason proved later to be different. Ten years earlier the wealth of the Mafia came from the expansion and the rebuilding of cities like Palermo. Since then it had been discovered that no business had ever been known to compare with the trade in narcotics, and the secret laboratories of Sicily stepped up production to meet a quarter of the world demand in heroin. It was no longer possible for a policeman to stand on the sidelines and exercise any measure of control over this explosion of criminality. In July Boris visited Marseilles and Milan, engaged in a crucial investigation into a reallocation between the Italian and American Mafia families of spheres of influence in the narcotics trade.

A few days after his return he went as usual at exactly eight o’clock for his morning cup of coffee in the Bar Lux, a few yards from his home. He was alone as ever. Boris never bothered with bodyguards, as confident as always in his knowledge of the ways of the enemy who opposed him. He shook hands with one or two of the regulars, finished his coffee and turned to go. Only one of the twenty odd men in the bar at the time would admit to having seen what happened next. ‘I noticed a man who was trembling,’ the witness said. ‘He was white in the face. He must be ill, I thought. My first impulse was to offer to help. When the
commissario
went towards the door the man followed him. He drew a pistol and shot him three times in the neck. Signor Giuliano fell face downwards, and the man then shot him four more times in the back.’

Colonel Giuseppe Russo, the man from Milan who did all the wrong things and could therefore expect to take the consequences, died with his bodyguard in an ambush in July 1977. The assassination in the Bar Lux, of the man who had mastered all the intricate moves in the eternal chess game with the Mafia, took place only two years later, almost to the day.