Blood Brotherhoods (87 page)

As it turned out, Giacalone had not ordered Sorino’s death; in fact he was only a patsy in a much bigger plot. Once he was freed, and had time to investigate, he told Bontate that a top
corleonese
killer called Leoluca Bagarella had carried out the murder. But before Bontate could refer these findings back to the Commission, Giacalone vanished. His place on the Commission was taken by the boss of neighbouring Resuttana, a friend of the
corleonesi
.

The Sorino murder was a dual-purpose homicide. It eliminated a threat to one of Riina’s friends. More importantly, it loudly proclaimed Bontate and Badalamenti’s political weakness.

In 1977, the
corleonesi
carried out another dual-purpose homicide. They killed a zealous colonel of the
Carabinieri
on their own territory, thus eliminating a threat to their own interests. But they also failed to ask permission from the Commission before acting: another political snub to their enemies.

Having used kidnappings and murders to discredit the Bontate-Badalamenti-controlled Commission, the
corleonesi
looked to take it over themselves. By now they already had a prestigious ally: the boss of Ciaculli, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, who proved adept at befogging Bontate with seemingly reasonable explanations for what the
corleonesi
were doing. Behind the smokescreen created by Michele Greco, more and more bosses were coming over to Riina’s side.

In 1978 the extent of
corleonese
influence within the Commission became obvious to all when—sensationally—Tano Badalamenti, the boss of all bosses, was expelled from Cosa Nostra. Badalamenti was almost certainly punished because he had failed to give everyone a share of the heroin bonanza. Being expelled—the word
mafiosi
use is
posato
or ‘laid down’—is a relatively rare sanction, and often a temporary one. Among men for whom one murder more or less is no cause for handwringing, this was a demonstratively mild penalty. Riina was making a show of playing by Cosa Nostra’s traditional rules; he was showing just how
reasonable
he was. Accordingly it was a man of reason, Michele ‘the Pope’ Greco, who took Badalamenti’s place as provincial representative. Greco was little more than a front for
corleonese
power.

Later the same year, the
corleonesi
once more played tricks with the rules of territorial sovereignty. A team of
corleonese
hit men shot dead Giuseppe Di Cristina, a boss who was particularly close to Stefano Bontate. Crucially, the murder took place on territory belonging to another Bontate
ally, the zip Salvatore Inzerillo. The killers even abandoned the car used in the assassination in Inzerillo’s domain. The message in the murder humiliated a key Bontate ally, and a central figure in the Transatlantic Syndicate. Di Cristina’s death also showed that the
corleonesi
’s ambitions were not restricted to the province of Palermo. The son and grandson of mafia bosses, Di Cristina was from the inland town of Riesi in the province of Caltanissetta.

After central Sicily came the turn of the eastern city of Catania. In September 1978, Pippo Calderone—the local boss of Cosa Nostra and the man who had instigated the kidnapping ban at the Regional Commission in 1975—was shot dead by his deputy, another covert member of the growing
corleonese
alliance. At the banquet held by Calderone’s men to mark their boss’s passing, Shorty Riina had the brass to give a speech. He eulogised the dead
capo
as a peacemaker in the best mafia traditions. Many of the gangsters present were moved to tears.

By 1979 the
corleonesi
had won a clear majority on the Palermo Commission. Just as significantly, they had begun to make inroads into their enemies’ own closest circles. One Man of Honour from Stefano Bontate’s own Santa Maria di Gesù Family serves as a measure of just how far the
corleonesi
now reached. He was a lawyer, and a major drug trafficker, who resented his boss’s overweening manner, and found a sympathetic ear for his complaints among Totò Riina’s friends. His name was Giovanni Bontate, and he was the younger brother of the boss.

Cunning exploitation of the mafia’s rules and conventions, calculated insults, alliance-building and betrayal: all of the ingredients in the measured
corleonese
advance upon the centres of underworld power in Sicily can be found in the archives of mafia history going back to the nineteenth century. In that sense, the events of the late 1970s and early 1980s were nothing new. All the same, there were at least two novelties. The first was the value of the prize that would accrue to the victors. For once Sicily was won, the Americans would have no alternative but to talk business with Salvatore ‘Shorty’ Riina. The heroin pipeline would flow through Corleone. The other novelty in Riina’s rise to the top was the relentless ferocity with which he executed his plans, the sheer brutality of Sicily’s Second Mafia War.

On the evening of 23 April 1981, Stefano Bontate, well dressed as ever, drove his brand-new limited edition Alfa Romeo Giulietta Super through the rain and the habitually frenetic traffic on the Palermo ring road. He had spent the evening quaffing champagne at his own forty-second birthday
party, and was now on the way home. When he turned off into a side road, he was stopped dead by blasts from a sawed-off shotgun and a Kalashnikov.

Two and a half weeks later, another Kalashnikov victim was found lying by the gate of a large housing block in via Brunelleschi. The head was so badly pulped by bullets that it took the police five hours to make an identification on the basis of fingerprints and a blood-caked medallion with initials engraved on it: it belonged to Salvatore Inzerillo, boss of Passo di Rigano, whose name had just begun to appear in the papers in association with a major investigation into heroin smuggling.

National public opinion took a while to wake up to the fact that this was something more than another seasonal bout of gangster-on-gangster violence. In newspapers in the North, Salvatore Inzerillo’s death attracted coverage comparable to a moderately serious motor accident in Milan or Turin. But as the killings continued in Palermo, people sought explanations for what was happening. Heroin obviously had something to do with it. Not much else made sense.

One by one, all the old journalistic templates for mafia violence were applied, and discarded. Was this a tit-for-tat: perhaps the Bontate and Inzerillo clans were at war with one another? But then it was discovered that the same Kalashnikov was used to kill both bosses.

Another theory—a very old one—was that this was an inter-generational conflict, and that a young mafia of ‘forty-somethings’ was making an attack on the power of the ‘old’ mafia. The fact that Bontate was forty-two when he died, and Salvatore Inzerillo thirty-seven, did not square easily with this interpretation.

Some explanations were so wildly off target as to be comical, or exasperating, depending on your point of view. Interviewed by the
New York Times
, the novelist Alberto Moravia argued that ‘The Sicilian as such—including the honest Sicilian—is by inclination a Mafioso, in the sense that he shares with the mafia man the yearning for, and obsession with, the “prestige of power.”’ Nowadays it seems mystifying that anyone should consider a Roman novelist to be an authority worth consulting on the complexities of the mafia. But Moravia’s ignorance should serve as a reminder of the appalling state of public knowledge in this key phase of the organisation’s century-old history.

The police themselves were more astute than Moravia, but hardly revealing. The chief of the Flying Squad said only that, ‘What we have here is a blood orgy: when the war ends, we will manage to understand the new balance of power.’ This was the police’s traditional approach to the cyclical blood-letting among Palermo’s criminal elite: wait for the shooting to stop, and then count the bodies and hope for a tip-off.

The shooting did not stop. The newspapers became a daily catalogue of horrors. Bodies abandoned in slicks of blood in the street, or found crumpled behind shop counters, or left amid burning rubbish on empty lots. Antonino Ciaramitaro was discovered in the boot of a car in two plastic bags—one for his trunk and one for his head. Giovanni Prestigiacomo was shot-gunned to death as he parked his FIAT 1100. His wife heard the detonations and ran outside; she would continue to hold him, screaming ‘Don’t die. Don’t die’, long after the life had ebbed from his riddled cadaver.

Desperate for certainties, the newspapers tried to keep a tally. Seventy bodies in the six months between April and October 1981; 148 by the end of the year. But the ‘white shotguns’ (meaning cases in which a victim simply vanishes and their body is never found) made the counting difficult. Perhaps 112 disappearances in the first nine months of 1982, plus 108 murders. But the numbers were only a veil for confusion.

We now know that what was really going on was not actually a mafia war at all: it was a programme of annihilation. Riina was systematically eliminating his enemies and anyone close to them. The day after Inzerillo’s murder, the boss who had stepped into Stefano Bontate’s shoes in Santa Maria di Gesù called the dead
capo
’s six most loyal soldiers into a meeting to discuss what was happening. Four of them obeyed and were never seen again: the new boss was Riina’s appointment.

The drug broker Gaspare ‘Mr Champagne’ Mutolo was a witness to what happened next. Emanuele D’Agostino, one of the two men who had wisely decided not to answer the call to visit the new boss of Santa Maria di Gesù, went into hiding. He sought refuge with Rosario Riccobono, Mutolo’s
capo
. Riccobono had always tried to maintain a neutral position in the mafia power struggle of the late 1970s. But the initial success of the
corleonese
assault persuaded him it was time to come off the fence: he killed D’Agostino as a token of his new-found loyalty to Shorty Riina. Just in case Riina needed more convincing, Riccobono then set a trap for D’Agostino’s son by telling him to bring some clean clothes to his father’s hideout. The son followed the father into a shallow grave.

A couple of weeks later, the only survivor from among the six Bontate soldiers, a
mafioso
by the name of Totuccio Contorno, was driving through Brancaccio with a little friend of his eleven-year-old son in the passenger seat. Suddenly, a powerful motorbike pulled out from a side street, and the pillion passenger raked the car with a Kalashnikov as it sped past. Contorno pushed the boy out of the car (miraculously, he had not been hit) and returned fire with a pistol before escaping. Totuccio Contorno would, in time, become one of the most important witnesses who enabled investigators to reconstruct the dynamics of the slaughter.

Hardly had the
corleonesi
finished with the active members of the opposing faction than they moved on to their relatives. Santo Inzerillo, brother of murdered zip Salvatore, was strangled when he tried to make a peace offering to Riina. Another brother, who was only sixteen, had his arm cut off before he was put out of his agony.

News of the slaughter in Sicily caused consternation in New York. John Gambino, the Transatlantic Syndicate boss from Cherry Hills, bravely came back to Palermo to express the American Cosa Nostra’s concerns. Shorty Riina’s response was an order: the Americans must kill anyone from the Bontate or Inzerillo clans who had managed to escape across the Atlantic. Thus it was that Salvatore Inzerillo’s uncle and cousin disappeared; then Pietro Inzerillo, a brother, was taken from a restaurant in Trenton, New Jersey, beheaded by gunfire, and his body dumped in the boot of a Cadillac. One particular detail of Pietro Inzerillo’s grisly end caught the public’s imagination: dollars were placed in his mouth and on his genitals to show that he had been too greedy. The message here was that his American killers (among whom numbered yet another Inzerillo cousin) were dutifully parroting the
corleonese
justification for the war: the greed of the
mafiosi
who controlled access to the American heroin market.

Having turned the Inzerillo clan against itself, Shorty Riina next purged anyone whose loyalty to him was even remotely in doubt. Just before Christmas in 1982, Saro Riccobono, the Partanna-Mondello representative who had been so keen to cosy up to Riina by betraying and killing Emanuele D’Agostino and his son, was invited to a great barbecue amid the mandarin orange trees of Michele Greco’s Ciaculli estate. After a hearty meal and a nap, he was woken by men placing a rope around his neck: ‘Saru, your story ends here’, they told him. At the same moment, Riccobono’s soldiers were being strangled one by one by the other guests at the barbecue. When the stragglers had been hunted down, only three members of Mr Champagne’s entire Family remained alive.

The cull extended to other provinces of Sicily. In September 1981, the international heroin traffickers of the Cuntrera-Caruana clan suffered their first victim when Leonardo Caruana was murdered. The
corleonesi
also sponsored particularly vicious fighting in the province of Trapani, where they slowly encircled and conquered the town of Alcamo—the capital of the Bontate-Badalamenti-Inzerillo faction in that province.