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Home , Antimafia Pool, Bernardo Provenzano, Boris Giuliano, Bruno Contrada, Cesare Terranova, Corleonesi Mafia clan

For centuries, there had been banditry in southern . It is not surprising when we consider that the area south of was ruled for hundreds of years by foreign powers and the land was generally (mis)managed by absentee landlords. In their absence, the bandits stepped in to enforce the payment of dues or meagre profits from the peasants to the landowners, creaming a lot off the top. Stealing from the rich to give to the poor was no part of their raison d’etre. Over time, they became the landowners’ enforcers and then began to take over large tracts but it was the unification of Italy, following Garibaldi’s march through and up through defeating and forcing the capitulation of the Spanish Bourbons, rulers of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies, which gave them their greatest opportunity .

If you have read “The Leopard” by Giuseppe di Lampedusa or seen the film, you will have recognised that the were gaining an important role in the running of Sicilian cities, towns and regions; they were gaining election as mayors and they were marrying into families of the nobility of the island.

The Risorgimento whilst unifying the country also exaggerated the division between the north and the south. often used to dispute (at least publicly) the existence of the Mafia or La Cosa Nostra (Our Thing) as the organisation names itself. They claimed that it was a northern construct. However, there is an excellent book by Gianni Riotta, “Prince of the Clouds”, which describes how the mafia, acting as a private army on behalf of the landowner against her peasants, uses force and to keep the poor of Sicily under control.

The other aspect which protected the Mafia was the relationship they developed with political parties, particularly the ‘Partito Democratico Cristiano’ and later with the Socialists and Radicals. Through these relationships they gained information about the activities of the police (and ) and through the corruption of some of the judiciary they enabled the failures of prosecutions or release at appeal of many of their number, even when eventually they had been arrested.

The other main weapon in their armoury was their willingness to arrange the murder of their opponents, on the side of the law and their criminal rivals. In particular, they would choose targets which enabled them to demonstrate who were the real bosses of the island. During the 1960s crucial areas of governance were controlled by the Mafia: from pulled the strings at city hall, municipal contracts were subcontracted out by Arturo Cassina and taxes were collected by a private monopoly controlled by the Salvo family. No-one was challenging them and a there was a period of relative quiet. When they were challenged they turned violent and the law and judiciary were their prime targets. Reputedly, the most ruthless and violent were the Corleone mafia which was led initially by and after his arrest in 1974 by his lieutenants, and .

Here is a short list of some of the mafia’s victims and the dates of their assassination: Judge (anti-mafia judge & political reformer), 25th Sept 1979 , police officer investigating trafficking, 21st Carabiniere Captain , successor to Giuliano, 5th May 1980 Judge , Terranova’s successor, 29th July 1983 Judge , issuer of 55 warrants for heroin trafficking, 6th August 1980 Carabiniere General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiese, 3rd September 1982 Policemen Antonio Cassarà, head of the squad hunting fugitives.

In 1980 joined the “Office of Instruction”, the investigative branch of the Prosecution Office of Palermo, which as the list of killings above shows, was a particularly sensitive and dangerous time to join the fight and, following the murder of Gaetano Costa, Falcone was given a bodyguard. He introduced a number of new techniques such as seizing bank records to follow “the money trail”. He also cooperated with the police services of other nations, including the United States, which he visited in 1980.

On the night of May 5th, 1980 in 3 mafia killers shot and killed Captain Emanuele Basile. He was murdered in the street whilst carrying his young daughter in his arms. The following day the Palermo police arrested members of three mafia families: the Inzerillo, the Spatola and the di Maggio, accused of running an international heroin ring. Two young assistant Prosecutors refused to validate the arrest warrants and the head of the office, Gaetano Costa signed them himself. One of the assistant prosecutors told one of the defence lawyers that Costa had signed the arrest warrants which became a sentence of death for Costa. The case was transferred to the investigative office and it became Giovanni Falcone’s first big case. Using his previous experience of bankruptcy cases he began to construct a network of economic relationships. He impounded all currency exchange records from all the banks in Sicily and started sorting them, initially without computers, and interviewing those whose names kept reoccurring. He discovered connections to other criminal organisations in Italy (the - and ‘Ndrangheta - ) and overseas (Lebanon and Turkey, for example.)

On 6th August Gaetano Costa was shot in a Palermo street and left to bleed to death.

In investigating what became known as “the Spatola case” Falcone widened his search and following the arrest of three couriers, two Belgians a Swiss, he began to gain first-hand evidence against the local mafiosi. Falcone was an incredibly hard worker - twelve hours a day and 6 or 7 days a week and his remorseless pursuit of the mafiosi gradually made inroads into the institutions of Sicily, including the judiciary and, most effectively, he uncovered the involvement of a secret Freemason’s lodge “P2", many of whose members (including police and carabinieri) had close connections to the Mafia. Despite predictions of failure, Falcone accomplished in the Spatola case what no other Sicilian judge had managed before. He had tied together with solid evidence - bank and travel records, seized heroin shipments, fingerprint and handwriting analyses, wiretapped conversations and firsthand testimony - defendants from four crime families on two continents.

It was the murder of Emanuele Basile which brought his friend and former colleague, , into the mafiosi investigation being conducted by Falcone. Borsellino was handed the investigation of Basile’s murder. The main vehicle for the mafiosi investigations was the “” which was inspired by Judge Rocco Chinnici and was created by Judge Antonino Caponetto and to which Falcone and Borsellino were recruited alongside Judges Giuseppe di Lello and Leonardo Guarnotta. Caponetto said that the decision to recruit Borsellino was “one of the best decisions I made in my years in Palermo”. Like Falcone he had a great capacity for hard work but was quite a different character. “He was more open to human relations, to the pleasures of life, . . He managed to communicate a marvellous sense of inner serenity that only later I realised came from his religious faith . . . which he never spoke about.” Whilst Falcone commanded great personal respect, Borsellino elicited both respect and universal personal affection. Falcone was reserved and diffident, whilst Borsellino was gregarious and out-going.

The group pooled the results of their various investigations which eventually resulted in the so- called “”. However, another aspect of Italian unrest was brought into play - . In the shadow of the ‘’ and other groups the Mafia built big drug business. In 1974 only 8 persons had died from drug overdoses, by 1980 there were 200,000 addicts and many deaths annually. Carabiniere General Dalla Chiese formed and led specially trained police units which in only a few years rounded up thousands of suspected terrorists. Following the ‘Christmas Massacre’ at , near Palermo, when three hitmen fired on a car in the centre of the town killing three local mafiosi and injuring a bystander, people began to ask why the terrorist situation could be dealt with successfully but the mafia problem remained unaddressed.

In March 1982 Dalla Chiese was asked to take up the post of prefect of Palermo. Dalla Chiese pushed for special powers to coordinate the anti-mafia efforts throughout Sicily, but had been persuaded to accept the more limited role as Palermo’s chief law enforcement officer.

His arrival was greeted by the murder of , the leader of Communists, who had tried to introduce legislation to make membership of the mafia a crime. His first act on arrival was to attend the funeral of La Torre. Four months later he too was killed, as were his young wife and his bodyguard. This was another in a series of massacres in which the head of the main governing party in Sicily (Michele Reina, CDU), the head of the main opposition party (Pio La Torre, Communist), the president of the region (Piersanti Matterella), chief prosecutors (Cesare Terranova and Gaetano Costa), two leading police investigators (Boris Giuliano and Emanuel Basile, and finally the prefect of Palermo (Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiese) had been assassinated. The outcry for justice was too much even for the authorities in Rome to ignore.

In investigating Dalla Chiese’s death the Antimafia Pool discovered that their investigation and Dalla Chiese’s overlapped.

In 1972 the Brazilian police arrested . Buscetta was born in a Palermo slum in 1927 and was a racketeer and a hit-man. In 1963, he was convicted in absentia for a double murder; he had been assisted by a local politician to escape to the USA. He spent about 10 years in the USA and Brazil, twice marrying bigamously. In 1979 he was returned to Italy and to prison to serve the sentence from 1963. However, 1980 he was allowed to leave prison on day release ‘to work in the family glass business. He absconded and fled Italy.

In September 1982, two of his sons from his first marriage disappeared from Palermo. There were rumours that Buscetta was back in Italy and when in November a mafia boss, , and most of his closest lieutenants disappeared (presumed murdered), it was reported by some journalists that Riccobono had accepted Buscetta’s invitation to a peacemaking banquet and been eliminated. In fact, the capo of the Corleone clan, Totò Riina had had them killed. In the next few days Buscetta’s brother-in-law, then his brother and nephew were gunned down in the window- making firm they ran. Riina was underlining the Bruscetta involvement in the Riccobono killing by making the Bruscetta death appear like tit-for-tat killings. In fact, Buscetta was in Brazil where he was arrested with 11 others in October 1983 as the principal coordinator of the market between Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Europe and the USA. Whilst in prison, despite alleged torture, Buscetta refused to respond to the interrogation. Meanwhile the USA and Italy applied for his extradition. Italy’s claim was upheld as he had three years of his previous sentence to complete.

Giovanni Falcone arrived in Brazil in June 1984 to interrogate Buscetta. Despite Buscetta’s prevarication Falcone sensed that he was prepared to turn State witness. Having initially trying to commit suicide with strychnine, and failing, Buscetta was returned to Italy where a few days after arrival he asked to speak to Falcone. He begun by warning Falcone that after the interrogation he, Falcone, would become a celebrity but also that his fight against the mafia would result in his death. He agreed to tell all he knew about the mafia, or Cosa Nostra, as he named it. In subsequent interrogations he released his knowledge of the organisation garnered over 30+ years. He supplied a precise organisational map of Cosa Nostra from the lowest foot soldier to the Commission which was at the top of the pyramid of mafia power. The revelation about the Commission was particularly surprising and important as it revealed that all the of senior politicians, judges, magistrates and police officers would have been authorised by the Commission, which was extremely useful ammunition against the known ‘capos’ of the mafia. Buscetta’s witness confirmed information gathered, but not previously believed and acted upon, by Falcone’s predecessors and he named all the top operators of the , explaining who had ordered and carried out the many murders committed by the mafiosi. One of the reasons why Cosa Nostra had turned against Buscetta was his abandonment of his first wife and his subsequent bigamous marriages. It was all right to murder, deal in etc. but immoral to leave your wife, was their view, and rendered him unfit for membership of Cosa Nostra. On the other hand, it was the organisation’s lack of support for his family and his expulsion from Cosa Nostra which persuaded Buscetta to tell all he knew about the organisation

Buscetta’s revelations revolutionised mafia prosecutions on both sides of the Atlantic, partly because he gave the names of so many mafiosi but also because he revealed their methods and their manner of thinking. Effectively, he broke the code for the investigators. Creation of the Rognoni-La Torre Law (membership of the mafia became a crime) gave the prosecutors the legal framework. It also confirmed the results and data that the Antimafia Pool had accumulated, especially how the murders of law officers and other opponents of the mafia fitted into the pattern of the behaviour of Cosa Nostra. The interviews with Buscetta had been conducted in Rome but Falcone had kept Borsellino and the others of the team fully briefed and they had been working at full tilt to verify Buscetta’s accusations. They established a great deal of supporting proof. Some of the relatives of victims of the mafia killings provided confirmatory evidence. Further support came from a Canadian wire-tap of a mafiosi conversation. Sometimes Paolo Borsellino joined Giovanni Falcone for the interrogations. Falcone also used his friend as a sounding board for his methods and his conclusions. The other members of the Pool concentrated on a particular area - Leonardo Guarnotto on the financial aspect, Giuseppe di Lello on the homicides. Borsellino concentrated on the assassinations and on the drug trafficking operations. A sister group of the Procura della Republica double-checked the Antimafia Pool’s results to ensure that the evidence would stand up in court. They were determined to ensure that they kept the results to themselves as they did not want their work to be leaked either to the Press or to potential defence lawyers and, therefore, to the mafia. They also needed to ensure that it did not reach the attention of unreliable members of the judiciary or police services.

A huge arrest operation was planned for 4th October 1984 but Falcone received a tip off on the morning of 29th September that a news magazine ‘Panorama’ planned to print a report of the Buscetta interrogations in its next issue, and the arrests had to be accelerated. At about 3 AM on the morning of the 30th September 366 arrest warrants were signed and handed to police inspector Ninni Cassarà who had massed forces of police from all over Sicily for the early morning raids.

The arrest operation was almost completely successful as most of the 366 warrants were served to their targets. The work of Falcone, Borsellino and their colleagues was also extremely useful to the FBI with whom they shared their information.

It was agreed between the and Americans that Buscetta would enter the American Programme, as Italy did not have one.

The investigation stretched into the connections between the mafia and politics and resulted in the indictment of Vito Ciancimono, the Christian Democrat mayor of Palermo.

A parliamentary commission was created which established, inter alia, that the Italian secret services had a ‘parallel service’ composed entirely of members of the secret “P2" Masonic Lodge. It should be remembered that Freemasonry in Europe has always been an animal of a different stripe from its British counterpart.

Following Buscetta's example, and encouraged by him, another mafioso, , gave evidence which resulted on 25th October in a further 127 arrests. Other witnesses long-forgotten also came out of hiding to offer their evidence, giving further proof of the mafia/politico/commercial connections, especially regarding the “Sack of Palermo” when, after WWII most of the fine baroque and Art Deco buildings of central Palermo were destroyed and replaced by high-rise blocks of concrete. The contracts were mostly handled by three individuals, with no architectural experience, acting as front men for the mafia or businessmen with whom it had links. The mafia had also provided the muscle to enforce compulsory purchase.

The “Maxi Trial” of the mafiosi began on 10th February 1986 in a specially constructed courtroom. Sadly, police Inspector Antonio (Ninni) Cassarà, was assassinated in 1985. Paolo Borsellino was appointed prosecutor for the crime. Cassarà’s was one of many reprisal killings organised by the mafia either to demonstrate its continuing power or for revenge against the clans or families of witnesses. Antonino Caponetto led the “Maxi Trial” prosecution assisted by Giovanni Falcone. There were 475 defendants, mostly present but some in absentia. 338 were found guilty and sentenced to a total of 2,665 years imprisonment. This total does not include the life sentences given to and , and, in absentia, to Salvatore Riina, and Bernardo Provenzano. Riina lived as a fugitive for 23 years and was captured in 1993, which triggered a series of bombings of Art galleries and churches by his . He died in 2017. Provenzano lived as a fugitive from 1963 until his capture in 2006. He died in 2016. Giuseppe Lucchese was arrested in 1990 and sentenced to for the murders of General Dalla Chiese and Pio La Torre and 100 other murders.

Giovanni Falcone was not awarded the position he would have liked as chief prosecutor for Palermo. Instead his new boss tried to provide him only with cases such as ‘wife-beating’ and vehicle theft. He threatened to resign and in 1988 he collaborated with Rudolph Giuliani, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, in operations against the Gambino and Inzerillo mafia families.

In 1989, a sack of dynamite sticks was discovered near a beach house he had rented. He had been threatened in the past but he considered that insiders were involved in this action. At the time he was assisting in uncovering mafia financial holdings in .

In March 1991 he accepted a post in the Ministry of Justice in Rome where he began restructuring the Italian prosecution system, creating district offices to fight the Mafia and a national office to fight organised crime. He was so successful in this work that the mafia and their political links considered him more dangerous in Rome than in Sicily

The Maxi trial sentences were upheld by the Supreme Court, a blow to the mafia's prestige. The council of top capos headed by Riina reacted by ordering the assassination of (on the grounds that he was an ally of ), and Falcone. Lima was shot dead on 12 March 1992. Falcone was working for Andreotti at this time.

Giovanni Brusca was ordered to kill Falcone. Riina wanted the murder carried out in Sicily as a demonstration of Mafia power and he instructed that the attack should be on Highway A29, which Falcone had to use to get from the airport to his home on his weekly visits. 400 kilograms of explosives were placed in a culvert under the highway between Palermo International Airport and the city of Palermo, near the town of . Brusca's men carried out tests, using flashbulbs to simulate detonating the blast on a speeding car, and a concrete structure was specially created and destroyed in an experimental explosion to see if the bomb would be powerful enough.

Brusca detonated the device by remote control from a small outbuilding on a hill to the right of the highway on 23 May 1992. Giovanni Falcone, his wife and police officers Rocco Dicillo, Antonio Montinaro and Vito Schifani were killed in the blast. The explosion was so powerful that it registered on local earthquake monitors. Riina reportedly threw a party, toasting Falcone's death with champagne.

Thousands gathered at the Church of Saint Dominic for the funerals which were broadcast live on national TV. All regular television programmes were suspended. Parliament declared a day of mourning.

In 1986, Borsellino became head of the Public Prosecution Office of , continuing his campaign against the mafia bosses, it is the most populated city of the province of . His links with Falcone, who remained in Palermo, allowed him to cover the entire west of Sicily for investigations. In 1987, after Caponnetto resigned due to illness, Borsellino was the leading voice of protest at the failure to appoint his great colleague as Head of the Antimafia Pool.

In July 2012, former Interior Minister was ordered to stand trial on charges of withholding evidence on 1992 talks between the Italian state and the mafia, and the killings of Falcone and Borsellino. Some prosecutors have theorized that Borsellino was killed because he had found out about the negotiations.

Borsellino failed to get himself appointed to the investigation into Falcone's murder. At a public meeting on 25 June 1992, he said that he had certain information which might explain why Falcone was killed. Borsellino unofficially asked Carabinieri Colonel Mario Mori to resume a previous investigation by Falcone into Mafia control of public works contracts. However, Borsellino did not know that Mori was involved in secret meetings with Vito Ciancimino (former Mayor of Palermo), who was close to Riina's lieutenant Bernardo Provenzano. Mori was later investigated on suspicion of posing a danger to the state after it was alleged he prevented the arrest of Provenzano and had taken a list of Riina's demands that Ciancimino had passed on. He maintained he had spoken to Ciancimino to further the investigation of the mafia and that Ciancimino had disclosed little beyond implicitly admitting he knew mafia members, and that the key meetings were after Borsellino's death. In 2014 Italy’s president, , testified in a trial in which 10 defendants, including the former interior minister, Nicola Mancino, were accused of negotiating with the mafia.

On 17 July 1992 Borsellino went to Rome where he was told by , a mafia member turned informer, of two allegedly corrupt officials: , former head of Palermo Flying Squad, now working for the secret service (SISDE), and anti-mafia prosecutor Domenico Signorino. Borsellino considered Signorino a friend and was deeply troubled by the allegation. He was further disconcerted when the meeting was interrupted by a call from the Minister of the Interior, Nicola Mancino, requesting his immediate presence. Borsellino attended to discover that Contrada was there, and knew about the supposedly secret meeting with the informer.

Paolo Borsellino was killed in another bombing 57 days after Giovanni Falcone, along with five police officers: Agostino Catalano, Walter Cosina, Emanuela Loi, Vincenzo Li Muli, and Claudio Traina.

In the major crackdown against the Mafia following Falcone and Borsellino's deaths, Riina was arrested on 15 January 1993, and was serving a life sentence, until his death in 2017, for sanctioning the murders of both magistrates as well as many other crimes. was also sentenced for the Falcone assassination.

Interestingly, a friend of mine, a former lecturer in Italian Studies at Leeds University happened to be in Corleone on the day that Bernardo Provenzano was arrested. Small world! The street poster attached says "You haven't killed them. Their ideas walk on our legs." Have a good week. Best wishes

Gerald