Blood Brotherhoods (72 page)

The intermarriages are significant in that often times you wonder whether these people want to marry each other. Yet the marriages take place. Let’s say two people of a prominent status within the Mafia if they have children, you will find that their sons and daughters get married. . . . a leader within the organization would not have his child marry someone who is a nobody within the organization.

Bobby Kennedy’s best-selling account of the investigation he led,
The Enemy Within
(1960), contained vivid cameo portraits of a series of Italian-American gangsters. One such was ‘labor relations consultant’ Carmine Lombardozzi, who had been ordered to wait in the garage during the Apalachin summit while the other
mafiosi
decided whether to kill him or merely fine him for covertly pocketing money from a juke-box racket. (They opted for the fine.)

In 1961, when his brother became President, Bobby Kennedy became Attorney General. The investigation and repression of organised crime was a key part of his programme. Where there had been nineteen organised crime indictments in 1960, the total rose to 687 in 1964.

Alongside these law enforcement and political developments, the mafia became a hot topic in American culture. In 1959, ABC began transmitting a drama series, based on Eliot Ness’s
The Untouchables
, about Al Capone’s Prohibition-era Chicago. The show became a hit, largely because it was studded with thinly disguised references to recent gangland news.

As always, there was a good deal of controversy and sensationalism in public discussion. The Order Sons of Italy in America, an ethnic lobby group that was desperate to play down the mafia issue, managed to get all Italian-American characters removed from
The Untouchables
in 1961. Deprived of this key element of authenticity, the show declined in popularity and was taken off air in 1963.

At the other extreme, some wrote about the mafia as if it were a centralised, bureaucratic, calculating monster—an IBM of crime. Ever since then, in both Italy and the States, it has made for good journalistic copy to see the mafia as a dark mirror of cutting-edge capitalism, and to see
mafiosi
as executives with guns. This is an oversimplification with undoubted imaginative power, to both the law-abiding and the outlaw.
The Godfather
—novel and movie—would later draw part of its insidious glamour from the same idea: ‘Tell Mike it was only business.’ Nothing could be better calculated to make middle-aged, middle-American middle-managers feel dangerous and clever than the suggestion that they and
mafiosi
are pretty much alike—give or take a few garrottings. Conversely, nothing could be better calculated to flatter a hoodlum’s ego, and impress his young sidekicks, than the suggestion that he is the incarnation of some sleek, lawless ideal-type of the businessman. But if
mafiosi
are entrepreneurs, then they are entrepreneurs who specialise not in competition, but in breaking and distorting the rules of the market.

The season of intense political and media interest in the mafia in the early 1960s also had a curious side effect: it changed the mafia’s name. In 1962 Joe Valachi, a soldier in the Genovese Family, mistakenly suspecting that he was about to be killed on the orders of his boss, bludgeoned an innocent man to death in prison. He then began to talk to the FBI about the mafia, its initiation rituals and structure as he saw them from his lowly and relatively marginal position in the organisation. A non-Italian speaker, Valachi had heard other members of the brotherhood refer to
cosa nostra
—‘our thing’. Valachi took this vague description to be the mafia’s official name: Cosa Nostra, or la Cosa Nostra. So too did the FBI. And then, once Valachi’s testimony had been made public in 1963, so too did American
mafiosi
themselves. Only in 1984 would the world learn that this label had been adopted by the Sicilian mafia too.

The advent of the name Cosa Nostra is only the latest example of the way the mafias have learned their own language from the world outside. Something similar happened a century earlier with the word ‘mafia’ itself. It only became the most commonly used of the many names for Sicily’s elite criminal brotherhood as the result of being used in a successful play about prison gangsters in the 1860s.

Why are the mafias so bad at giving themselves a name? The main reason, as one defector from Cosa Nostra would later explain, is that secret criminal brotherhoods are the ‘realm of incomplete speech’.

Fragmenting information is one of the most important rules. Cosa Nostra is not just secretive towards the exterior, in the sense that it hides its existence and the identity of its members from outsiders. It is also secretive on the inside: it discourages anyone from knowing the full facts, and creates obstacles to the circulation of information.

Mafiosi
habitually conduct their affairs in nods and silences, in language marked by an expertly crafted vagueness that can be understood only by those who are meant to understand. Communications within the mafia are like whispers in a labyrinth. So when the outside world says something about the mafia’s affairs, it resounds through the labyrinth like a clarion call.

Years of muddled debate about the mafia in the United States still lay ahead. A whole genre of academic studies would decry the notion of an organisation called Cosa Nostra: it was a product of anti-Italian prejudice and a misrepresentation of the immigrant culture of close family ties—or so the sociologists and anthropologists argued. Ironically, in 1972, one of the most successful movies of all time, Francis Ford Coppola’s generational saga
The Godfather
, would be based on a systematic confusion between the mafia
and the Sicilian-American family, thereby lending a Hollywood gloss to the sceptical views of the academics. But, despite the controversy, the oversimplifications and the perverse side effects, America’s open discussion about the mafia in these years was a healthy sign. What it indicates is that the period of relative impunity and invisibility that Italian-American mobsters had long enjoyed was now over for good. The mafia in the United States was no longer untouchable. The question now was how long it would take for Italy to follow Uncle Sam’s example.

 
45 

M
AFIA DIASPORA

I
N
O
CTOBER
1957,
ONLY WEEKS BEFORE THE
A
PALACHIN SUMMIT IN UPSTATE
N
EW
York, Men of Honour from the United States held several days of meetings with Sicilian bosses at the Grand Hotel et Des Palmes in the heart of Palermo. The head of the American deputation was Joe ‘Bananas’ Bonanno—
capo
of the New York Family that bore his name. Narcotics were almost certainly at the top of the agenda. Unlike what had happened at Apalachin, however, the heavy-lidded eyes of the Palermo police merely registered the meeting. Nothing was done about it.

Business was not the only thing discussed while Joe Bananas was in Palermo. According to the later confessions of a young drug trafficker called Tommaso Buscetta (a man destined to play an epoch-making role in Sicilian mafia history over a quarter of a century later), the 1957 Italo-American summit was the occasion for an important organisational innovation within the Sicilian mafia. It seems that, over dinner one evening, Joe Bananas suggested that Sicily should have a Mafia Commission—a kind of governing body—like the one that had overseen inter-Family relations in New York since Lucky Luciano brought it into being in 1931. The Commission has existed in Sicily, on and off, ever since. Not for the first time, Sicilian
mafiosi
had shown that they were better at learning lessons from America than were Italy’s police or politicians.

However, the Commission, as Sicilian historians have now ascertained, was not the novelty that Tommaso Buscetta thought it was. Evidence that Cosa Nostra has had governing bodies of one kind or another is there in some of the earliest documentation we have about it. For example, there
were forms of coordination between the different
cosche
of western Sicily—joint tribunals to settle disputes, summit meetings, marriage pacts and the like. In America, there seem to have been consultative meetings of senior East Coast Men of Honour before the First World War. Our best guess, using recent history as a guide to the mysterious moments in the past, is that the mafia has always had a lively constitutional life. Sicilian mafia bosses have constantly invented new rules and procedures to buttress their own authority and keep the peace with their neighbours. But equally, they have constantly broken their own rules and procedures, or found ways to use them as a political weapon against their enemies.

In the late 1950s, however, these nuances of mafia analysis had not even begun to dawn on Italy’s rulers. The issue of Sicilian organised crime remained stuck in the political permafrost of the Cold War. Communist politicians took every opportunity they could to raise the mafia issue—and make it count against the DC. But without the power to govern, they remained isolated voices. One of the most astute and caustic of those voices belonged to Pio La Torre, the young leader of the PCI in Sicily:

The truth is that there is no sector of the economy in Palermo and in vast areas of Western Sicily that is not controlled by the mafia. This has happened in the course of a long process—the same process that has seen the DC regime prosper in Palermo and the rest of the island.

La Torre knew what he was talking about: he was born in Altarello di Baida, a village set amid the lemon groves surrounding Palermo—the mafia’s nursery, in other words.

In response to charges like these, the DC all too often fell back on a contradictory rag-bag of myths: the mafia was dying out; it was merely a harmless Sicilian tradition; it was invented by the Left as a way of besmirching Sicily and the DC; it didn’t exist;
mafiosi
only kill one another anyway;
gangsterismo
was an American problem.

The Left opposition had not forgotten the Kefauver hearings, and lobbied hard for something similar to happen in Italy: a parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia. The Christian Democrats were split into shifting and bitterly antagonistic factions. In the heat of the factional struggle, many DC chiefs were very reluctant to look too closely at the ethical standards of their Sicilian lieutenants. So the DC dragged its feet for years, and only gave ground when the Left’s lobbying was given extra oomph by mafia dynamite.

Late in 1962, a conflict that later became known as the First Mafia War began in and around Palermo. The conflict’s signature weapon was a tactical novelty for underworld wars in Italy: the car bomb. Invariably, it was an Alfa
Romeo Giulietta that was stuffed with explosives. The Giulietta was one of the symbols of Italy’s economic miracle. In 1962 it became a symbol of how the Sicilian mafia was keeping up with the pace of growth in the lawful economy.

Although a drug deal gone wrong is known to have been the trigger for the First Mafia War’s outbreak, the underlying reasons for it baffled outside observers at the time, and are still uncertain today. Even many of the combatants did not know where the battle lines were drawn. In essence, it seems that the newly revived Commission had been unable to control conflicts over drugs, concrete and territory. Indeed some Palermo
mafiosi
regarded the Commission itself with justifiable suspicion: for them it was not an arbiter in disputes, but an instrument manipulated by some powerful bosses. The Sicilian mafia’s constitutional wrangles had taken a bloody turn. Indeed, not for the last time, events in Palermo were pointing the way to the future for organised crime in Italy. Perhaps one hundred people were killed in the First Mafia War—more than in any other underworld conflict since the 1940s. Cosa Nostra had become more volatile in its internal politics, and more flagrant in its violence. Soon the other mafias would follow the same trend.

Against the background of the car bombings and other violence in Palermo, a parliamentary inquiry into the Sicilian mafia was grudgingly approved. Yet it still looked as if it would never get going. Then, on 30 June 1963, another Giulietta detonated in Ciaculli: it blew four
Carabinieri
, two military engineers and a policeman to pieces. The bomb’s intended targets were probably the local mafia clan, the Grecos, one of Palermo’s oldest and most powerful dynasties.

Remarkably, even on the day of the bomb, the DC remained very touchy about the word ‘mafia’. The Christian Democrat notables who occupied the country’s most senior institutional posts all issued messages of condolence to the victims’ families, and of indignation to the general public. Not one of them mentioned the mafia.

Nevertheless, the public outrage that followed the Ciaculli massacre had rapid effects, both within Cosa Nostra and outside. The First Mafia War came to an immediate halt in the face of a massive police crackdown, with close to two thousand arrests. Cosa Nostra faced one of the worst crises in its history. As a
mafioso
who turned state’s evidence later explained: ‘After 1963 Cosa Nostra in the Palermo area didn’t exist anymore. It had been knocked out. The mafia was about to dissolve itself, and seemed to be in a shambles . . . The Families were all wrecked. There were hardly any murders any more. In Palermo, people did not even pay protection money.’

Mafiosi
who were able to flee Palermo did so—men like the boss of the Commission, Totò Greco (known as ‘Little Bird’), who emigrated to Venezuela.
Others fled to Switzerland, the States, Canada . . . The mafia vanished from its birthplace, the province of Palermo.