Blood Brotherhoods (105 page)

Five weeks later, some twenty-two months after the opening of proceedings, came the verdict. Life imprisonment for nineteen men, including Shorty Riina, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, and three bosses who, unknown to the rest of the world, had already been dealt a swifter form of justice by Cosa Nostra itself. Pippo Calò was sentenced to twenty-three years. The tax farmer Ignazio Salvo was given six years for being a fully fledged member of Cosa Nostra—an ‘enemy of society’, to use his own words.

Just as striking as these heavy sentences were the acquittals: fully 114 of them. Even Shorty Riina’s
corleonese
mentor Luciano Liggio was acquitted, because the court found that there was not sufficient proof that he had been giving orders from behind bars since the mid-1970s. The 2,665 years of
jail handed down to the guilty were 2,002 fewer than the prosecution had asked for in its summing up. Even those who had been sceptical about the maxi-trial now had to admit that it had manifestly
not
delivered summary justice in bulk.

The outcome was a cause for celebration. It was widely viewed as a victory for justice. The penitents had been believed. Buscetta’s account of Cosa Nostra and its structure had been confirmed. The Sicilian mafia existed, in other words.

Or at least it did for now. Falcone and Borsellino had always warned that the maxi-trial was just the beginning. An appeal was bound to follow. And the Supreme Court after that. There was still plenty of time for Cosa Nostra to strike back, and then to vanish once more into the mists of history.

 
66 

O
NE STEP FORWARD
,
THREE STEPS BACK

E
ARLY IN HIS FIRST INTERVIEWS WITH
G
IOVANNI
F
ALCONE IN
1984, T
OMMASO
‘
THE BOSS
of two worlds’ Buscetta put the magistrate on notice.

I warn you, judge. After this interrogation, you will become a celebrity. But they will try and destroy you physically and professionally. They will do the same with me. Do not forget that Cosa Nostra will always have an account to settle with you for as long as you live.

Buscetta’s prophecy began to come true in the months and years following the conclusion of the maxi-trial in 1987. What faced Falcone was not just the renewed threat of violence. (As would later become clear, Cosa Nostra’s plans to kill him reached an advanced stage at various moments between 1983 and 1986; Shorty Riina had even ordered bazooka tests.) Nor was the danger just the Sicilian mafia’s well-practised tactics of spying, intrigue and misinformation. For, in addition, Falcone ran into resistance at the very heart of the judicial system. The outcome was an ordeal both humiliating and terrifying.

Today, Giovanni Falcone is remembered as a national icon. Any nation would have been lucky to have him. But the bland hero-worship to which he is inevitably now subjected, and the hollow tributes paid to him even by the shadiest politicians, still provoke a gritty resentment among those who supported him during his darkest days. They are determined, quite
rightly, that both Falcone and Borsellino should remain controversial figures in death as they were in life. For as long as Italy’s mafias still exist, and for as long as there is institutional collusion with the mafias, Falcone and Borsellino should retain their divisive charge.

Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino photographed in March 1992, on one of the last occasions when the two heroic magistrates were seen in public together. Photographer Tony Gentile’s image is now an icon of the anti-mafia movement.

In the late 1980s, Falcone in particular was sucked into a series of nerve-shredding institutional squabbles that would have destroyed a weaker man. The anti-mafia pool and the maxi-trial offended some deeply rooted conservative instincts among judges. The pool system challenged a cherished vision of the magistrate as a solitary figure, answerable only to his conscience and to the law. So some of the resistance to Falcone was well intentioned: the very nature of the magistrate’s calling was at stake. But if conservatism had been all Falcone had had to put up with, he would not have been put through such tribulation. Sleazier forces combined to create a quagmire of opposition: professional jealousy; territorial conflicts between factions; a petty obsession with regulations; and the engrained fear of talent within all Italian institutions. All in all, at the very least, Falcone’s enemies were guilty of a complete failure to appreciate the dangers that lay ahead for Falcone and his work once the maxi-trial had concluded. They could not grasp just what a threat Cosa Nostra represented, and how insidious were its efforts to marginalise Falcone and dismantle what had been achieved so far, at such an appalling cost in blood. Nor did Falcone’s enemies see how vulnerable he was to the ‘fatal combination’ that General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa spoke of before his assassination in 1982: the magistrate who posed
the biggest danger to Cosa Nostra would be pitilessly exposed by any hint that he was on his own.

Many of Falcone and Borsellino’s enemies took their cue from Sicily’s most celebrated writer. On 10 January 1987, with the maxi-trial still going on, Leonardo Sciascia published a book review in the establishment daily
Corriere della Sera
. The volume in question was a study of Fascism and the Sicilian mafia by a young British historian, Christopher Duggan, who put forward a highly controversial thesis: the mafia did not exist, but Mussolini had puffed up reports of a secret criminal organisation in order to strike at his political enemies on the island. Far more controversial were the parallels that Sciascia drew with the present day: the anti-mafia had once more become an ‘instrument of power’, he claimed. The novelist cited two examples. One was Mayor Orlando in Palermo, who spent so much time posing as an anti-mafia figurehead that he neglected the most basic duties of running the city, said Sciascia. No one dared oppose him for fear of being branded a
mafioso
. The other example was none other than Paolo Borsellino, who had just been made chief prosecutor in Marsala despite having served much less time in the judiciary than other candidates for the job. As Sciascia concluded, in the snide conclusion to his article, ‘If you want to get ahead in the magistracy in Sicily, there’s no better way to do it than to take part in mafia trials.’

Borsellino, in other words, was a mere careerist. Sciascia’s review predictably detonated an enormous row.

The facts spoke out resoundingly against Sciascia’s contrarian griping. It would have been more accurate to say that there was no better way for a magistrate to end up in a box than to take part in mafia trials. Since 1979, four frontline magistrates had been murdered by Cosa Nostra, and a fifth by the ’ndrangheta. Others had been lucky to survive assassination attempts. Yet more would die soon. What drove Borsellino to move to Marsala, in Sicily’s most westerly province of Trapani, was certainly not ambition. He knew that Trapani province was a key power base for the
corleonesi
. In 1985, the biggest heroin refinery ever discovered in Italy was unearthed there. Borsellino’s promotion was, unusually for Italy, based on merit and not seniority—on his ‘specific and very particular professional expertise in the sector of organised crime’, as the official explanation of his promotion put it. Yet Sciascia had cited this passage in his review as if it were self-evidently a reason for casting doubt on the legitimacy of Borsellino’s transfer.

Sciascia would later come to regret his review, which was a tragically misjudged coda to his career as a voice of intellectual dissent. He deserves to be remembered for the incisive pages he wrote about the mafia back in the 1960s when most other writers refused to tackle the subject. But the
regrets came too late. Sciascia had given voice to old Sicilian suspicions about the state; and the title of his review—‘
Professionisti dell’antimafia
’ or ‘Professional anti-mafia crusaders’—had given Falcone and Borsellino’s enemies their slogan.

The next blow against Falcone and Borsellino’s cause was perhaps the most devastating of all. The Sciascia slogan could be heard being muttered in the Roman corridors of the Consiglio Superiore della Magistratura (High Council of the Magistracy), the body that guarded the judiciary’s independence from the government, ruled on appointments and administered discipline within the judicial system. Late in 1987, Antonino Caponnetto, who was Falcone and Borsellino’s boss and the man who had overseen the birth of the anti-mafia pool, went into retirement. There was still much work to be done. Two more maxi-trials were in preparation. Since the spring of ‘87, Falcone had been taking weekly flights to Marseille where an important new penitent, Antonino Calderone, was confessing all. Falcone was the obvious man to replace Caponnetto, and thereby guarantee continuity in the anti-mafia magistrates’ work.

That was not how the High Council of the Magistracy saw it. On 19 January 1988, by a small majority, it voted
not
to give Caponnetto’s job to Falcone. The post went instead to Antonino Meli, a magistrate twenty years Falcone’s senior who had far less experience of mafia cases and no sympathy for the anti-mafia pool’s methods. Explaining their decision in opaque legalese, the members of the Council made reference to Falcone’s ‘distorted protagonism’ and the ‘personality culture’ surrounding him.

Shortly afterwards, the High Council of the Magistracy slapped Falcone down again when he applied to become High Commissioner for the Fight Against the Mafia. The role, created in a political panic after the murder of General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, was that of a supervisory super-investigator. Falcone knew that the job entailed being a lightning conductor for public criticism of the government’s inactivity on mafia issues. Nonetheless, he thought he could achieve something with the powers available. His application was rejected—despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that he was the most qualified candidate by far.

Back in Palermo, the appointment of Antonino Meli proved more destructive than Falcone and his friends had feared. Once in charge, Meli began to override the anti-mafia pool. Mafia cases were entrusted to magistrates with no experience and no formalised links to other magistrates working on the mob. Falcone and his colleagues were loaded with ordinary criminal investigations. All the crucial advantages that the pool had brought—the accumulation and sharing of expertise, the panoramic view of the Sicilian criminal landscape, the mitigation of risk—were being frittered
away. In the practical workings of the Palermo prosecutors, Cosa Nostra had already ceased to exist as a single organisation.

In the summer of 1988, Borsellino took his career in his hands by complaining publicly from Marsala about Meli’s management of the Palermo investigating magistrates. ‘I get the impression that there is a great manoeuvre under way aimed at dismantling the anti-mafia pool for good.’ The President of the Republic ordered the High Council of the Magistracy to investigate. Meli demanded Borsellino’s head. Falcone confirmed Borsellino’s complaints and asked to be transferred. During a drawn-out and exhausting Supreme Council hearing, there were more Sciascia-type noises about Falcone: ‘No one is irreplaceable . . . there is no such thing as a demi-god.’ In the end, there was a messy compromise: Borsellino received only a slap on the wrist, and Falcone withdrew his transfer request.

On both sides of the Atlantic, Cosa Nostra kept close tabs on the arcane shenanigans within the High Council of the Magistracy. Joe Gambino, one of the Cherry Hill Gambinos, telephoned a friend in Palermo and asked for an update on Falcone:

— Has he resigned?

— Things in Palermo are still trouble. He’s withdrawn his resignation and gone back to where he was before, to do the same things he was doing before.

— Shit.

But the mafia had reasons to be optimistic too: Antonino Meli stayed where he was and continued to dismantle the pool. He simply did not believe that Cosa Nostra was a single, unified organisation, and the way he assigned mafia cases reflected his atomised view of it—a view that was already outdated in the 1870s, never mind the 1980s. Cosa Nostra was taking its own precautions, nonetheless. In September 1988, Antonino Saetta, a judge who looked likely to take charge of the maxi-trial appeal, was shot dead along with his son.

In June 1989, the campaign against Falcone took a far more sinister turn. Anonymous letters falsely accused him of using a mafia penitent to kill some of the
corleonesi
. The mysterious source of the letters, dubbed ‘the Crow’ by the press, was clearly inside the Palermo Palace of Justice because there was just enough circumstantial detail in the accusations to give the slander a vague ring of plausibility. Falcone was again hauled before the High Council of the Magistracy.

Then on 21 June 1989, with the furore about the Crow letters still in the air, a sports bag containing fifty-eight sticks of dynamite was found on
the rocks below Falcone’s holiday home at Addaura just along the coast from Palermo. Riina and other
mafiosi
were later convicted of planting the bomb, but several aspects of the Addaura attack remain mysterious to this day. Two policemen who were at the scene, and who may have been secret agents involved in saving the magistrate’s life, were both murdered within months. Some rumours say that deviant elements within the secret services were to blame. Falcone was not a man given to conspiracy theories. But he was convinced that ‘extremely refined minds’ were behind the attack, and that the Crow letters had been part of the plan. His logic had an impeccable grounding in patterns of mafia behaviour over a century and a half: first they discredit you, and then they kill you. The magistrate’s enemies aired a simpler explanation. They claimed that the attack was a fake and Falcone had orchestrated it himself to further his career.