Brief History of Sicilian Mafia
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For centuries, there had been banditry in southern Italy. It is not surprising when we consider that the area south of Rome 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 Sicily and up through southern Italy 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 Mafia 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. Sicilians 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 murder 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 carabinieri) 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: Vito Ciancimino from Corleone pulled the strings at Palermo 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 Luciano Leggio and after his arrest in 1974 by his lieutenants, Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano. Here is a short list of some of the mafia’s victims and the dates of their assassination: Judge Cesare Terranova (anti-mafia judge & political reformer), 25th Sept 1979 Boris Giuliano, police officer investigating heroin trafficking, 21st July 1979 Carabiniere Captain Emanuele Basile, successor to Giuliano, 5th May 1980 Judge Rocco Chinnici, Terranova’s successor, 29th July 1983 Judge Gaetano Costa, 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 Giovanni Falcone 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 Monreale 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 Camorra - Naples and ‘Ndrangheta - Calabria) 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 drug 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, Paolo Borsellino, 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 “Antimafia Pool” 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 “Maxi Trial”. However, another aspect of Italian unrest was brought into play - terrorism. In the shadow of the ‘Red Brigades’ 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 Bagheria, 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 Pio La Torre, the leader of the Sicilian 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 Tommaso Buscetta. 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.