Blood Brotherhoods (114 page)

The
kind of
Commission never met. On 16 December 2008, after nearly nine months of painstaking investigation, some 1,200
Carabinieri
made coordinated dawn raids on dozens of addresses in Palermo and across western Sicily. They called it Operation Perseus, after the hero of Greek mythology who beheaded the snake-haired monster Medusa, because the aim was
nothing less than to decapitate Cosa Nostra. Among the ninety-nine men arrested were the bosses of nineteen Families, including from mafia territories whose names recur throughout the organisation’s long history, such as Santa Maria di Gesù, Monreale, Corleone, Uditore and San Lorenzo. No less than eleven precinct bosses were detained too—the men who presided over three or four Families and took a seat on the Commission to represent their interests. And of course the
capo di tutti i capi
elect was also taken: sixty-four-year-old Benedetto Capizzi. The choice of Capizzi showed that, after ‘walking with padded shoes’ under Provenzano, Cosa Nostra was ready to don its hobnailed boots again. Capizzi was a former member of Giovanni ‘the Pig’ Brusca’s death squad. Among many other crimes, Capizzi helped plan the kidnap of Giuseppe Di Matteo, the penitent’s boy who ended up in an acid bath. Capizzi was a man of action, who could be relied on to deal militarily with anyone who dissented from the new order. One minor drawback was that he was still serving several life sentences. However, he was yet another case of a boss granted house arrest for health reasons, thus giving him the liberty he needed to meet his criminal friends.

Rebirth of the Commission. Benedetto Capizzi was at the centre of Cosa Nostra’s efforts to reconstruct its governing body, the Palermo Commission. Would-be boss of all bosses Capizzi was arrested in 2008.

Operation Perseus was a stunning blow, which received far less media attention abroad than it deserved—certainly far less than the arrest of Bernardo ‘the Tractor’ Provenzano two and a half years earlier. It has left Cosa Nostra a fragmented organisation. The
mafiosi
who remain at large do not have the experience or charisma to embark on any major restructuring along the lines of what Benedetto Capizzi was attempting. Their main priority is now survival: finding enough criminal income to support the heavy burden of prisoners and their relatives, and to keep the fabric of the Families together.

The damage inflicted on Cosa Nostra over the last decade has helped create the space for grassroots movements against its protection racket regime. Their goal is to attack mafia power at its base, and their potential is truly revolutionary. Like much that is good in contemporary Sicily, the anti-racket movement has its roots in the tragedies of the 1980s and early 1990s.

Libero Grassi was an entrepreneur who ran a factory in Palermo making pyjamas. When he moved to a new site in the shadow of Monte Pellegrino in 1990, demands for money started to arrive—a contribution ‘for the lads shut up in the Ucciardone’. Grassi went to the police, and three of the men who had visited his factory to ask for money were arrested. The demands then became more menacing. Grassi responded with a public letter to the press that began ‘Dear extortionist’:

I wanted to tell our unknown extortionist that he can save himself the threatening phone calls and the money to buy fuses, bombs and bullets, because we are not prepared to contribute and we have put ourselves under the protection of the police. I built this factory with my own hands and I have no intention of shutting up shop.

Grassi’s cause found painfully little support. The entrepreneurs in the neighbourhood let it be known that he should wash his dirty linen in private like everyone else. He received only one letter from another businessman expressing solidarity. However, in April 1991, Grassi’s campaign took him onto national TV screens, where the millions of viewers of a popular politics talk show heard his lucid explanation of how the extortion racket system worked, and the
omertà
that beset him on all sides. He was becoming a threatening symbol of anti-mafia resistance, and an advertisement for the weakness of the boss on whose territory his factory was sited. On 29 August 1991, Libero Grassi was shot five times in the face as he left his house to go to work.

After this appalling murder, many resolved that no one who stood up against the extortionists should ever be left isolated again. The national shopkeepers’ association, Confesercenti, founded an anti-racket support group in Palermo called ‘SOS Business’ in the same year. In 1997, a ruling by the Supreme Court made it clear that paying protection money is a crime. Everyone is obliged turn to the authorities for help against the extortionists, and no one can offer the excuse that they are forced to pay. In 2004, the inheritance of Libero Grassi and other pioneers of the anti-racket movement was picked up by a group of young Palermitans who founded an organisation they called Addiopizzo (‘Goodbye Extortion’). Their idea was fresh and beautifully simple: entrepreneurs, shopkeepers, restaurateurs and hoteliers would sign a public pledge not to pay protection money; and consumers would sign a public pledge to patronise businesses that did not pay. The aim was to grow a mutually reinforcing alliance between clean enterprises and honest consumers.

Others followed Addiopizzo’s lead. In September 2007, the Sicilian branch of Confindustria (the employers’ organisation) announced that it would expel any members found to have been paying protection money or failing to collaborate with the authorities. The days when Sicilian business leaders would grumble that the fight against the mafia was ruining the island’s economy were finally gone.

Organising to defy extortion is far from being an empty gesture: it actually works. One mafia penitent from the Family of Santa Maria di Gesù has recently explained why
mafiosi
did not try to extort money from businesses that proclaimed their opposition:

If a shopkeeper is a member of Addiopizzo or an anti-racket association, we just don’t go there, we don’t ask for anything. It’s more because of the trouble it causes than the money. If they report it to the police, you then get investigations, listening devices, and so it’s better just to avoid them.

The rebellion against extortion is potentially life-threatening for Cosa Nostra. In late November 2007,
mafiosi
showed how concerned they were about Confindustria’s new stance by performing a clamorous act of intimidation: the employers’ organisation’s offices in the central Sicilian city of Caltanissetta were vandalised, and a number of CDs containing the names and addresses of its members were stolen.

Despite the threats, a virtuous circle has begun to turn in Palermo. As more businesses go to the police when they receive extortion demands, more
mafiosi
are arrested, and the authorities and anti-racket organisations can demonstrate their growing ability to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with
people that resist—with the result that more businesses gain the confidence to turn to the police when they receive extortion demands.

Moreover, as so often in our story, Palermo’s example has been followed elsewhere. The anti-racket associations that began in Sicily have spread. For example, in January 2010 Confindustria adopted a
national
policy of expelling members who do business with gangsters.

The hunt for fugitives from justice has also achieved crucial results in both Campania and Calabria. Some of the most powerful camorra and ’ndrangheta bosses have taken to building underground bunkers in the hope of avoiding the ever more determined and expert mafia hunters. Some of these bunkers are just secret compartments in a house: hidey-holes into which a fugitive can dash when the doorbell rings unexpectedly. Others are extraordinarily ingenious and elaborate—miniature apartments, complete with plumbing, air pumps and security cameras. Most are hidden among ordinary houses and farm buildings or on industrial estates, and involve secret passages and moveable walls. The ’ndrangheta are bunker specialists. The Bellocco clan from Rosarno took to burying entire shipping containers, perfectly furnished inside, and disguised by vegetation above. The ground underneath the town of Platì, in Calabria, is criss-crossed by hundreds and hundreds of metres of tunnels connecting bosses’ houses to a complex of bunkers and escape routes. Here the ’ndrangheta even opened the street up in the process of building its secret bunker network; nobody in town said a word.

Whatever form they take, today’s mafia bunkers are not just refuges: they are command centres. Invariably they are built on a boss’s own territory, where he can count on a close network of family and friends to provide for his daily needs and, crucially, to shuttle in and out with orders and requests. Territorial control remains crucial for bosses of all three major criminal organisations. As one mafia hunter from the
Carabinieri
explains:

The first rule for a boss is to never abandon his ground. Going off to evade justice somewhere else is a sign of weakness. If the throne is left vacant, a boss’s competitors go into overdrive, manoeuvring and plotting to take his place.

La presenza è potenza
, as
mafiosi
say: presence is power.

The bunkers where some bosses now try to maintain their territorial presence are not unprecedented in the history of the mafias: in Sicily, under Fascism, police chasing down
mafiosi
discovered a range of ingenious secret compartments and sunken shelters. But the bunkers are nonetheless an
important sign of the pressure the mafias are now under. Until the 1980s, the dreaded Piromallis of Gioia Tauro could still be spotted presiding over the town square, making their authority visible. Those days are gone. The state has become more serious than ever about fighting organised crime, and so the underworld has gone underground.

Sicily remains the place where the anti-mafia fight is most advanced. And the drop in the number of homicides is only the most obvious indicator of that fact. There were nineteen mafia-related murders in 2009 on the island, eight in 2010 and only three in 2011. These are historical lows. The staggering body count of the 1980s now seems an aeon away.

 
72 

C
AMORRA
: A geography of the underworld

I
N
S
EPTEMBER
2011,
JOURNALISTS FROM THE NEWS MAGAZINE
L’E
SPRESSO
SECRETLY
filmed an exhibition of underworld power in the Barra suburb of Naples. For anyone with a sense of camorra history, the film provides depressing evidence of continuity over time.

The backdrop was the Festival of the Lilies, one of several similar religious festivals in the region. The ‘lilies’ in question are actually eighty-foot-high obelisks made from wood and decorated with papier-mâché sculptures. They are built and then shouldered by proud teams of volunteers, known as ‘crews’, who are sponsored by a local grandee known as a ‘Godfather’. The crews compete to attract crowds to their lily with an MC, music and dancing. The film published on the
L’Espresso
website showed activities around one particular lily built by the crew that called itself
Insuperabile
. First the local camorra boss’s father arrived in an open-top white vintage sports car to the sound of a saxophone playing
The Godfather
theme. As the crowd cheered, the MC hailed the boss Angelo Cuccaro (recently released from prison), then sang him a song called ‘You’re great’, and finally called for a round of applause ‘For all our dead’. Meanwhile the boss himself, dressed in the
Insuperabile
crew’s blue T-shirt and white baseball cap, was kissed by enthusiastic supporters.

Investigations by the
Carabinieri
subsequently discovered that the Festival of the Lilies had been a platform for the Barra clan for a long time: they extorted money from businesses under the pretext of spending it on their
obelisk; the
Insuperabile
crew’s ‘Godfathers’ were chosen from among entrepreneurs close to the bosses; the festival was used to publicly celebrate new camorra pacts. When the neighbouring town of Cercola came under the Barra clan’s control, shopkeepers there were forced to display the
Insuperabile
crew’s blue and red colours in their windows.