Blood Brotherhoods (91 page)

Although a parliamentary inquiry could find no direct evidence of a quid
pro quo
between the secret services and the NCO, very big questions remain unanswered. The Cirillo story is made of many profoundly worrying suspicions and relatively few certainties. A great deal of murk remains. Here are two of the reasons why.

At the time of the Cirillo kidnapping, many senior officers in both SISDE and SISMI were members of the P2 Masonic lodge, which makes their motives very difficult to read. No combination of blackmail, right-wing subversion and corruption can be ruled out.

When Cirillo was released, in a semi-derelict building in the Poggioreale quarter of Naples, he flagged down a passing traffic police patrol. The orders
were to take Cirillo straight to police headquarters where he could be cared for and interviewed by the magistrates investigating the kidnapping. But the journey had barely begun when the car was blocked off and surrounded by four more police cars. Citing orders from on high, the officer in charge of the four cars took Cirillo home instead. Once home, Cirillo was examined by a doctor who declared that he was in a state of shock and could not be interviewed by investigating magistrates. These health problems did not, however, prevent senior figures in the DC, including Flaminio Piccoli, the party’s national leader, from going to see Cirillo forty-eight hours before the magistrates were eventually allowed access. The timing may have given Cirillo and his DC friends an opportunity to get their story straight about the whole negotiation saga.

What did the Professor have to gain from getting himself involved in the deal to free Cirillo? One thing he definitely pocketed was the chance to boast to the criminal world that he had the ear of the authorities. Irrespective of the real nature of any bargain behind Cirillo’s release, the Professor could now present himself as a man with a seat at the top table. But did he receive anything else? And did he give the BR more than money? Several witnesses, including
brigatisti
and
camorristi
turned state’s evidence, have cited a whole list of bargaining counters. Such people may of course have been lying. But there is nonetheless evidence to back up what they said.

Some
brigatisti
claimed that Cutolo passed them useful information on potential targets. There are facts that seem to support this allegation. On 15 July 1982, the BR machine-gunned police commander Antonio Ammaturo along with his driver Pasquale Paola. Ammaturo was a common enemy for both the BR and the NCO. He had investigated left-wing terrorism. Moreover, soon after being appointed to the Naples job, he had even had the impudence to raid the Professor’s castle in Ottaviano—the first policeman to do so. Ammaturo was also probing into the Cirillo affair at the time of his death. When asked about the murder in court, the Professor was his usual, slippery self:

I did not give the BR Ammaturo’s name so that he could be killed. I’m not ruling out the fact that bumping him off would have been a pleasure for me. But I would have done it myself, directly, because it was a personal vendetta.

The likely scenario—one that illustrates the twisted logic in force in the shadows where violent subversion and violent crime overlapped—is that a left-wing terrorist group killed two good policemen on behalf of the NCO.

According to one
camorrista
, the Professor also converted his intervention as a mediator in the Cirillo affair into a series of favours that further
extended his influence within the prison system. Hence, perhaps, the fact that on 27 October 1981, the Appeal Court in Naples ruled that Cutolo was ‘semi-insane’, and thus deserving of more lenient treatment.

But the biggest item on the Professor’s shopping list was a slice of the earthquake reconstruction bonanza. It must be stressed that investigations did not reveal smoking-gun proof of such an exchange. Nevertheless, the courts ruled that entrepreneurs close to the NCO, including the Professor’s own son Roberto,
were
awarded contracts worth sixty-seven billion lire ($172 million in 2011 values) to put up prefabricated housing in the Avellino area.

The question of reconstruction contracts leads us into the last, and most controversial, of the mysteries surrounding the Cirillo kidnapping: the question of who authorised the negotiations. Which politicians were involved, and how deeply?

A parliamentary inquiry would conclude that, while there had definitely been negotiations with the BR through Cirillo, there was no absolute proof that favours were exchanged as part of a deal. A number of senior Christian Democrats emerged with their reputations badly damaged by the verdict. For example Flaminio Piccoli, the party’s national leader,
must
have known about the negotiations. Francesco Pazienza, the wheeler-dealer linked to right-wing terrorism who conducted the last phase of the bargaining, was a regular visitor to the DC leader’s house. But the figure at the epicentre of the controversy, and one of the most powerful politicians in Campania, was Antonio Gava. Gava had just won his first national Cabinet post when Cirillo was kidnapped, and he went on to hold a series of senior Cabinet positions, including Interior Minister and Finance Minister, in the 1980s.

Gava was chief of the local DC faction whose main man on the ground was none other than Ciro Cirillo. Gava went on trial for having links with the camorra in 1993. No less than thirteen years passed before he was finally acquitted in 2006. Gava was suing for damages when he died in 2008. One cannot help but sympathise with the plight of a man on the receiving end of such an appallingly protracted judicial ordeal. Alas, such judicial sagas are all too common in Italy, particularly when it comes to the delicate business of ascertaining the relationship between organised crime and politics. However the final ruling that marked Gava’s acquittal, for all its opaque legal phrasing, showed him in a very poor light indeed.

The court maintains that it has proved with certainty that Gava was aware of the arrangement of functional reciprocity between local politicians in his faction of the DC and the camorra organisation . . . There is also proof that [Gava] did nothing incisive and concrete to fight or limit that situation, and that instead he ended up enjoying the electoral benefits it brought his political faction.

Gava’s behaviour, the judges concluded, was morally and politically reprehensible, but he had done nothing to deserve a criminal conviction.

Camorristi
had their hands on the post-earthquake reconstruction before the BR’s ‘Cirillo campaign’ began. On 11 December 1980, a mere two and a half weeks after the quake, the mayor of one damaged town was shot dead because he tried to block companies linked to organised crime from winning rubble-clearing contracts. So the Cirillo kidnapping was ultimately only one symptom of the way the camorra seized hold of the opportunities that came with the disaster of 23 November 1980. In Sicily, the mafia war of the early 1980s was fought for control of the heroin pipeline to the United States. In Campania, the Nuova Camorra Organizzata and the Nuova Famiglia battled for control of the reconstruction riches.

Yet the Cirillo affair would prove to be decisive in another respect: it would bring about the final defeat of Raffaele ‘the Professor’ Cutolo.

On 18 March 1982—eleven months after the Cirillo kidnapping, and with the mysteries surrounding it still unsolved—the Italian Communist Party daily
L’Unità
published what purported to be an Interior Ministry document that gave full details of the negotiations leading up to Cirillo’s release. The letter turned out to be a fake—fake enough to cost the newspaper’s editor his job. But many of the details it contained were true—true enough for a formal investigation into the negotiations leading to Cirillo’s release to be launched. We now know that the Professor was the likely author of the fake. He created it because he did not feel that he had received his just reward for helping out in the Cirillo kidnapping affair. Leaking the letter to the opposition press was a sly way of sending a warning: if the Professor did not get what he wanted, new revelations, documented revelations, would follow.

The letter backfired horribly. The President of the Republic, outraged by the stories of Cutolo’s cushy life behind bars that were then beginning to emerge, arranged for him to be sent to the forbidding prison island of Asinara. From now on, communicating with the rest of the NCO would be impossible. The Nuova Famiglia moved in for the kill. Within days of Cutolo’s being transferred to Asinara, Alfonso Rosanova, the construction entrepreneur who managed the business arm of the NCO, was shot dead in the Salerno hospital where he was recovering from a previous attempt on his life; six or seven killers entered the building, disarmed the policemen on duty at his bedside, and shot him many times where he lay. In January 1983 came the mortal blow, when Enzo ‘Blacky’ Casillo—the Professor’s top military commander and the roving negotiator of the Cirillo affair—was blown
to pieces by a car bomb in Rome. The Nuova Famiglia officer who rigged the booby trap would later turn state’s evidence and explain to a parliamentary inquiry why Casillo was dispatched in such a spectacular fashion. The message in the murder, he explained, was ‘to demonstrate to Cutolo that he was finished, and that he had to stop once and for all with blackmailing the politicians or the people in the state institutions that he had dealt with during the Cirillo kidnapping business’. The same
camorrista
also suspected that the secret services had been the source of the information that allowed him to identify where Blacky Casillo lived.

Death blow. The car bomb that led to the defeat of the Nuova Camorra Organizzata. Enzo Casillo, the Professor’s military chief, was murdered in Rome in January 1983.

The Professor had overplayed the hand he had been dealt in the Cirillo affair. The Nuova Famiglia were now determined to punish him, and thereby win over his political friends. The Nuova Camorra Organizzata began to fall apart. Leaderless, Cutolo’s zealous young followers were slaughtered by the Nuova Famiglia’s well-organised hit squads.

The Professor’s legacy was nonetheless enormous. His reign saw the camorra reach a level of wealth and influence that bore comparison with the mafias of Calabria and Sicily. He also had lasting effects outside his own region of Campania. Indeed, the Professor was one of the main reasons why Italy witnessed the birth of two entirely new mafias.

 
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T
HE
M
AGLIANA
B
AND AND THE
S
ACRED
U
NITED
C
ROWN

T
HE LATE
1970
S AND
1980
S WERE NOT JUST A PERIOD OF RECORD VIOLENCE WITHIN
Italy’s historic mafias. They were also a time when, for the first time in a century, entirely new criminal organisations were created in regions outside the home turf of the Sicilian mafia, the Neapolitan camorra and the Calabrian ’ndrangheta.

Rome was a special case when it came to the spread of mafia power. All three major mafias were present there, kidnapping, dealing in drugs, laundering money, and the rest. Yet none of the three tried to oust the others. Contrary to what one might expect of such ferocious clans, there was no direct military confrontation between
camorristi, mafiosi
and
’ndranghetisti
on Roman soil. In Rome, as elsewhere, the three major mafias preferred to profit from peaceful cohabitation rather than endure the costs and dangers of a ‘foreign’ war. The capital became a kind of free port of criminal influence, its riches open to all for exploitation. In those peculiar circumstances, Rome generated a criminal fraternity of its own in the late 1970s—one entirely independent from the mafia, the camorra and the ’ndrangheta, although deeply indebted to them when it came to methods and contacts.

On 7 November 1977 Duke Massimiliano Grazioli Lante della Rovere, the former owner of Rome’s major newspaper,
Il Messaggero
, was kidnapped just outside the city. One night the following March, after months of negotiations, his son heaved a bag containing two billion lire (more than $9
million in 2011 values) over the parapet of a road bridge. From below came a voice: ‘Go home and wait. Your father will be freed in a few hours.’

The Duke was never freed. In fact, when the ransom was handed over he was already dead, killed by his kidnappers because he had seen one of them without a mask. His body was propped in a chair, his eyes forced open, and a recent newspaper lodged in his hands so that a photograph proving that he was alive could be sent to his relatives.

The macabre abduction of Duke Grazioli was the first major action carried out by a group named the Banda della Magliana (the Magliana Band), after the newly built suburban neighbourhood of Rome whence some of its members came. The Banda della Magliana’s chiefs—variously loan sharks, drug dealers, fences and, particularly, armed robbers—explicitly set themselves the goal of dominating the capital’s underworld. Before long, they achieved their aim.