Blood Brotherhoods (110 page)

 
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N
EGOTIATING BY BOMB
: Birth of the Second Republic

T
HE SHOCK FROM THE MURDERS OF
F
ALCONE AND
B
ORSELLINO WAS MOST INTENSELY
felt among the magistracy: by their colleagues, obviously, but also by young magistrates who could only admire the two heroes from a distance, and try to live up to the spirit of self-sacrifice that they embodied. One such young magistrate summed up the feelings of a generation of his peers: ‘After the second bomb we were genuinely all ready to be killed. But we certainly had not resigned ourselves to mafia rule.’ The bombs of 1992 blasted out a deep trench between the representatives of the rule of law on the one side, and the criminal power system on the other. The era of dialogue, and compromise, and collusion between the state and the mafia that produced magistrates like Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo, the inspiration for the film
In the Name of the Law
, was over for good.

Or at least it should have been. In the years since 1992, magistrates in Sicily and elsewhere have been haunted by questions that refuse to go away. Shorty Riina had set out clear aims for his organisation when the Supreme Court’s ruling on the maxi-trial went against him: ‘Wage war on the state first, so as to mould the peace afterwards.’ Cosa Nostra was trying to negotiate by bomb. But with whom was it negotiating? Did anyone try to appease Falcone and Borsellino’s murderers? Was a deal ever struck? Today, twenty years on, investigating magistrates believe they can now glimpse the answers to those questions.

Cosa Nostra’s war on the state did not stop with the murders of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino in 1992. Nor did the arrest of Shorty Riina in January 1993 bring a halt to the bombing. Indeed later that year, Riina loyalists within Cosa Nostra—bosses who became known as the organisation’s ‘pro-massacre wing’—launched a series of terrorist attacks aimed at high-profile targets on the Italian mainland.

On 14 May 1993 a car bomb detonated in via Fauro, Rome. The intended victim was Maurizio Costanzo, a leading chat-show host who had been very vocal in his disgust at Cosa Nostra’s crimes. Luckily, although many people were wounded, Costanzo’s car avoided the explosion and nobody was killed: a massacre had been narrowly averted.

Thirteen days later there was no such luck when a FIAT minivan stuffed with explosives blew up without warning in the shadow of the Uffizi Gallery in Florence. Five people died, including a nine-year-old girl. The van’s engine was found embedded in a wall on the other side of the river Arno, and three paintings in the Uffizi were damaged beyond all hope of restoration.

There were five more fatalities in Milan’s via Palestro on 27 July. At just after 11 p.m., three firefighters, a police officer and a man who happened to be sleeping on a bench nearby were all caught in the blast from another car bomb.

Barely an hour later, Rome became the next city to be targeted by Cosa Nostra’s car bombs. The Catholic Church was made to pay a price for the Pope’s denunciation of Cosa Nostra earlier in the year. One device damaged the façade of the Pope’s official seat in the city, the Basilica of San Giovanni in Laterano—the huge piazza before it hosts many political rallies. A second explosion destroyed the portico of the Church of San Giorgio in Velabro. There were no victims in either incident.

Rome was also scheduled to be the venue for the worst slaughter of the whole campaign. On 31 October 1993, a Lancia Thema filled with dynamite was parked outside the Olympic Stadium where a soccer match between Lazio and Udinese was taking place. Activated by a remote control, the bomb was directed at supporters leaving the ground, and at the
Carabinieri
supervising the crowds. The device, which could have killed dozens, failed to detonate.

The annals of Italian organised crime contain no precedent for the outrages of 1992–93. Throughout those two terrible years, the pro-massacre wing’s intentions remained consistent: ‘Wage war on the state first, so as to mould the peace afterwards.’ Riina’s demands were high: he wanted both to blunt the state’s most effective weapons against organised crime (the penitents, the Rognoni–La Torre law), and also to reverse the judicial results that those weapons had obtained (Falcone and Borsellino’s maxi-trial).

As the massacres followed one another, Cosa Nostra’s need to negotiate grew ever more urgent, and the list of demands longer. In response to Falcone’s death, the government imposed a new prison regime, universally known as 41-bis (‘Clause 41a’), which aimed to prevent leading
mafiosi
communicating with the outside world, and therefore running their empires. (This was yet another of Falcone’s ideas.) In the middle of the night of 19–20 July, just hours after Paolo Borsellino’s murder, Clause 41a came into effect when military aircraft took 55 bosses from the Ucciardone to join 101 other top criminals in the bleak penal colony on the island of Pianosa off the Tuscan coast. The abolition of the new prison regime was quickly added to Cosa Nostra’s war aims.

The whole narrative of the season of mafia massacres in 1992–93 remains worryingly open-ended in a number of crucial respects. For example, some suspect that negligence was not the only factor in play when Paolo Borsellino was left so shamefully underprotected after Falcone’s murder.

In the immediate aftermath of Borsellino’s own death, his red diary, containing some of his most secret notes, disappeared from the scene of the massacre. (Borsellino’s younger brother Salvatore has adopted the red diary as a symbol of his quest for the truth.)

When Shorty Riina was captured in 1993, his villa was left unguarded long enough thereafter for
mafiosi
to enter it, remove property and compromising documents, and even redecorate. Quite how this was allowed to happen has never been satisfactorily ascertained. The episode has led many to suspect that someone within Cosa Nostra betrayed Shorty to the authorities in exchange for favours.

Crucial insights into Cosa Nostra’s negotiations with the state came in 2008 when Gaspare Spatuzza began to talk. Spatuzza, known by the nickname of ‘Baldy’, was a Man of Honour from the Brancaccio Family of Cosa Nostra who was already serving life sentences for his role in Cosa Nostra’s bombing campaign on the Italian mainland. Baldy explained that Vincenzo Scarantino, the young drug dealer who had already spent a decade and a half in prison for planting the car bomb that killed Borsellino, could not be guilty—for the simple reason that he, Spatuzza, was responsible. So convincing was the corroboration that Baldy provided to back up his revelation, that Scarantino has since been released and his innocence confirmed. (He had long maintained that he was not guilty, claiming that he was tortured until he confessed.)

Another new mystery about the massacres of 1992–93 was thereby exposed. Was Scarantino framed by overenthusiastic policemen who were desperate to get any kind of result in the climate of emergency following the deaths of Falcone and Borsellino? Or was the shocking injustice he suffered part of a bigger and much more devious plan?

Baldy Spatuzza’s evidence has brought new energy to the search for the truth about the negotiations between Cosa Nostra and the state in the early 1990s. Still more worrying fragments of evidence have emerged. Some
Carabinieri
have confirmed that they tried to make contact with Cosa Nostra in the summer of 1992 to try and stop the massacres, but they deny that there were any negotiations.

In the summer and autumn of 1993, while Baldy was placing car bombs in Florence, Milan and Rome, no fewer than 480
mafiosi
were released from the Clause 41a prison regime by the Minister of Justice Giovanni Conso. Conso has recently offered the explanation that this act of clemency was a purely personal initiative, aimed at sending out an accommodating signal.

Most troubling of all, it has now been confirmed that Paolo Borsellino found out that overtures were being made to Cosa Nostra in the days following Falcone’s death—overtures that he vigorously opposed. Shorty Riina’s top killer has claimed that Cosa Nostra brought forward its plan to kill Borsellino precisely in order to stop him interfering with the deal-making: ‘The ongoing negotiations were the main reason why the plan to eliminate Borsellino was accelerated.’

One of the two most important murders in the entire history of Italian organised crime therefore remains substantially unsolved. Testimonies from Spatuzza and others raise the chilling possibility that Paolo Borsellino was deliberately sacrificed. Some witnesses speak of secret-service involvement both in the negotiations between the mafia and the state, and in the murder of Paolo Borsellino.

As I write, several mafia bosses, including Shorty Riina, stand accused for their part in trying to blackmail the state in 1992–93. Three senior
Carabinieri
and two politicians face related charges. A former Minister of the Interior has been accused of giving false evidence about the negotiations. Their trial has only just begun, and the presumption of innocence can be no mere formality in such an intricate and controversial case.

The charges filed by the investigating magistrates paint a picture of a negotiation that developed over several stages, and involved links between Cosa Nostra and a number of functionaries and politicians, by no means all of them among the accused in the new trial. What the magistrates believe is that, in order to achieve its aims in 1992–3, Cosa Nostra needed to find new political partners—just when Italy’s Cold War political parties were breaking up, and the country was negotiating the tumultuous passage between the First Republic and the Second Republic (as we now call them). Among the protagonists of the negotiations on the state’s side were politicians of three kinds, according to the as yet untested charges. First, there were those from the First Republic, previously close to Cosa Nostra, who
felt threatened by Riina’s rage. Second, there were statesmen trying to pilot Italy through its economic and political crisis who were not friendly with the Sicilian mafia, but who may have made or approved misguided attempts to appease the pro-massacre wing. And finally there were the new men trying to assert themselves politically in the chaos of the First Republic’s collapse. Men like Marcello Dell’Utri, the Sicilian right-hand man of a media entrepreneur who went on to become the dominant and most controversial figure of the Second Republic, Silvio Berlusconi.

Berlusconi did well out of the close political friendships he made during the First Republic: the Socialist Party leader and sometime Prime Minister, Bettino Craxi, was the best man at his second wedding. The collapse of the old political order was a serious threat to his business interests. It is thought that as early as June 1992 (between the murders of Falcone and Borsellino, that is), Berlusconi’s people were taking soundings about founding a new political party. The magistrates contend that, as Berlusconi’s political plans took shape, Dell’Utri offered himself to Cosa Nostra as a negotiating partner, promising to grant some of its wishes in return for support. The Second Republic began in March 1994, when Berlusconi led his new party, Forza Italia, to election victory. That was the point in time, according to the magistrates, when ‘the new pact of co-habitation between the state and the mafia was finally sealed’.

Marcello Dell’Utri is an old acquaintance to readers of these pages. It was he who hired the
mafioso
Vittorio Mangano in 1974 to protect Berlusconi and his family from kidnappers. Since 1996, Dell’Utri has been the subject of a seemingly endless mafia trial. He currently has an outstanding conviction for helping Cosa Nostra, and a sentence of nine years in prison to serve. But Dell’Utri is still a free man because the verdict remains provisional until the Supreme Court rules. So far, the judges have explicitly rejected the argument that Dell’Utri’s relationship with Cosa Nostra was still operative in the early 1990s when the mafia-state negotiations are thought to have taken place. But that too may change. It should also be stressed that an investigation based on the theory that Berlusconi and Dell’Utri had a role in commissioning Cosa Nostra’s bombing campaign was shelved because of a lack of evidence in 2002. Berlusconi has never been charged with any crime in relation to Cosa Nostra’s bombs. Nor does he appear in the latest trial, except as the victim of an alleged extortion by his friend Marcello Dell’Utri, who is one of the two politicians who face charges that they helped Cosa Nostra with its negotiating strategy.

No period in Italian mafia history is without its lingering uncertainties. Historians live with the constant risk that their work will be unmade when some new document surfaces from the archives, or a new penitent unlocks
his or her memory. The transitional years of 1992–4 are more than usually dogged by doubt. Only time—the glacier-slow time of the Italian judicial system—will reveal what truth, if any, there is in all the accusations about Cosa Nostra’s plan to negotiate by bomb.