The Antimafia Also by Alison Jamieson The Heart Attacked: Terrorism and Conflict in the Italian State Terrorism Terrorism and Drug Trafficking in Europe in the 1990s (editor) The World Drug Report of the United Nations International Drug Control Programme (editor) The Antimafia Italy’s Fight Against Organized Crime Alison Jamieson Foreword by Luciano Violante © Alison Jamieson 1999 Foreword © Luciano Violante 1999 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1P 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 1999 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-0-333-80158-1 ISBN 978-0-333-98342-3 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780333983423 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 Published in the United States of America by ST. MARTIN’S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 For Nigel Contents List of Tables vii List of Plates viii Foreword ix Acknowledgements xiii Introduction xv 1 The Significance of 1992 1 2 The Mafia–Antimafia Seesaw 10 3 The Political Response 40 4 The Law-enforcement Response 75 5 The Grassroots Antimafia 127 6 The International Response 159 7 War ... and Peace? 200 Notes 236 Index 249 List of Tables 2.1 Municipal councils dissolved on grounds of Mafia infiltration, total at 31 December 1997 38 4.1 Persons reported and arrested for serious crimes in Sicily, 1990–95 80 4.2 Persons reported in Sicily for the crime of Mafia association, 1983–97 81 4.3 Murder rates in Italy and in the four southern regions, 1991–97 82 4.4 Persons arrested for the crime of Mafia association, 1988–97 82 4.5 Operations of electronic surveillance/telephone interception authorized in Italy, 1992–96 83 4.6 Survey of prisoners under article 416 bis and article 74 of Law 309/90, 1992–96 101 4.7 Criminal proceedings relating to Mafia-type crimes, 1994–97 101 4.8 Investigative activities of the Palermo DDA (District Prosecution Office), 1993–97 102 4.9 Numbers of state’s witnesses in Italy, 1992–97 104 4.10 Numbers of presumed members of Italian Mafia-type organizations, 1995–97 105 4.11 Numbers of state’s witnesses and their affiliation, 1995–97 105 4.12 Breakdown of costs for Italian Witness Protection Programme 108 4.13 Assets seized and confiscated in Italy, 1990–97 113 4.14 Indirect estimates of criminal assets seized, confiscated and confiscated definitively in Italy, 1983–97, in US$m. 114 4.15 Suspicious disclosures in Italy to 31 December 1996 115 4.16 Prisoners subject to special regime with application of article 41 bis 120 7.1 Incidence of reported cases of Mafia-type association, 1990–95 231 vii List of Plates Plate 1. Judge Giovanni Falcone. (Adnkronos Photos) Plate 2. The conference on 12 May 1992 in Rome at which Giovanni Falcone spoke in public for the last time. On the podium, left to right, are Giovanni Falcone, Daniele Ripeto (chair, adnkronos), Professor Francesco Bruno (criminologist), the author, Henry Marsden (Director, Office of Research, Office of National Drug Control Policy, Executive Office of the President, The White House). (Adnkronos Photos) Plate 3. Giovanni Falcone, immediately after receiving an anonymous letter at the conference in Rome on 12 May 1992. (Adnkronos Photos) Plate 4. The motorway at Capaci, with the bulletproof Fiat Croma in which Giovanni Falcone, his wife Francesca and bodyguard Giuseppe Costanzo were travelling when the bomb exploded. (Polizia Scientifica) Plate 5. Via D’Amelio, Palermo, scene of the car bomb which killed Paolo Borsellino and bodyguards Agostino Catelano, Wlater Cusina, Vincenzo Li Muli, Claudio Traina and Emanuela Loi. (Polizia Scientifica) Plate 6. Judge Paolo Borsellino. (Ansa Photos) Plate 7. Mafia boss Salvatore (Totò) Riina photographed just after his arrest in Palermo on the morning of 15 January 1993. (Ansa Photos) Plate 8. Father Luigi Ciotti with friends at a ceremony to commemorate victims of the Mafia. (Ansa Photos) Plate 9. Document from American Consulate General. (Antimafia Commission 1976) viii Foreword Luciano Violante Speaker of the Chamber of Deputies and Chairman of Antimafia Commission 1992–94 When people describe the Mafia they often use terms such as ‘octopus’ or ‘cancer’. Nothing could be further from the truth. The use of these expressions makes the Mafia seem mysterious, omnipotent, uncatchable – precisely the image that the mafiosi want people to have about their organization. As this book shows, the reality is rather different. The Mafia is composed of men, arms, money and political relationships. We need to arrest those men, destroy their arms, confiscate that money and break up those political relationships. The Italian experience shows that it is possible, but also teaches us that it will take more time, as well as an exceptional degree of international cooperation, before we can claim a final victory. When the Mafia goes through moments of crisis, it hides – si ingrotta, as they say in Palermo – and waits for better times to come. For this reason one should not misinterpret the Mafia’s silence as its defeat. Nor should one have a ‘national’ vision of the Mafia-type organ- izations, since they exist and are active in most of the developed world as well as in developing countries. In the past, countries like Japan, the United States, Italy and Turkey had their own Mafias which operated prevalently within national boundaries. This is no longer the case. The mafia groups have become transnational organizations, and therefore have an operational capacity which transcends national boundaries. This capacity derives from the intensifi- cation of the international movement of goods traditionally traded by organized crime such as drugs and arms. For arms as for drugs, the country of final destination is different from that of production. To reach the country of destination, consignments of drugs and arms must transit many other countries and cross their national boundaries. Trading arrangements involve the need to use the legal sector (banks, finance houses, customs formalities) and to maintain relationships with criminal groups of different countries. These commercial necessities have created solid international relations between all the most dangerous criminal organizations. To the two traditional criminal markets of drugs and arms a third has now been added – that of people. The market is made up of refugees from war zones, of immigrants in search of work that they cannot find at home ix x The Antimafia and of the international trade in prostitutes. Trafficking in people has become the new version of the old slave trade. Like any legal multinational company, transnational crime groups are capable of establishing men, offices and activities in different countries depending on the profits to be made, the degree of impermeability to regulation and the possibilities of expansion. The origin of this phenomenon can be traced back to the change of geo-strategic conditions around the world. Since the collapse of the Soviet system and the consequent expansion of global markets, money, goods and people have circulated with a rapidity and facility which were once unthinkable. Civic values, honest citizens, business entrepreneurs, students, academics and those who work in the world of finance – all move freely. But criminal cultures also move freely, as do the members of the large criminal groups and the professionals – the lawyers, accountants and financiers – who are fully aware that by managing the affairs of the criminal organiza- tions they are breaking all deontological and juridical rules. One effect of transnationalization is the ability to move the centre of criminal activities to countries where conditions are more favourable and, conversely, to move away temporarily from countries where conditions are unfavourable. This analysis leads to three conclusions. The first is that we should not feel particularly reassured when the Mafia goes silent. It is possible that the organization has temporarily moved its business centre to another country. The second is that without major international cooperation the mafia organizations will never be defeated. Whereas serious crime is organized, our countries’ response is still dis- organized. The third conclusion is that a Mafia of such dimensions must have at its disposal large quantities of money; when organized crime has a mass of accumulated capital its principal weapon ceases to be murder and starts to be corruption. For groups with this type of economic means, corruption is a low-cost, low-risk instrument of great utility, both in the present and for the future. Whereas murder eliminates an obstacle, corruption creates an accomplice: the corrupted person inside the state system is a port of entry which is always open for the criminal organi- zation. Those who have been corrupted once will be corruptible a second time, and in any event will always be vulnerable to blackmail. In every country, organized crime tries to create an area of permanent complicity within the public sector by means of organized corruption.