Blood Brotherhoods (93 page)

The ’ndrangheta is the mafia that has the richest and most complex repertoire of symbols, traditions, ranks and rituals: it has been collecting them since the nineteenth century. The ’ndrangheta is the last survivor of a broad kin group of Honoured Societies from the Italian mainland that included the original Honoured Society of Naples, and even an organisation called the Mala Vita (literally ‘Bad Life’, but more accurately, ‘the Criminal Underworld’), which was a short-lived nineteenth-century forerunner of the Puglian mafia, the Sacra Corona Unita. Some of the most important new mafias of the 1970s and 1980s, including the NCO and the SCU, drew on the ’ndrangheta’s great library of gangland style and structure.

Together with a great many business opportunities in drugs, kidnapping and the like, these cultural offerings were enough to satisfy both the Puglians of the SCU and the
’ndranghetisti
they adopted as sponsors. The ’ndrangheta, in short, preferred a hands-off approach. It did not want an empire, just a select band of reliable business partners. Perhaps ‘franchising’ is the best way to describe the Calabrian approach to the Puglian crime scene.

In the wealthy regions of the North, the ’ndrangheta had long been setting down roots through its involvement in construction and kidnapping. Here the ’ndrangheta spread directly and not by recognising local gangs like the SCU. By the 1980s,
’ndranghetisti
had established branches called Locals in many towns and cities across Lombardy and Piedmont. These northern colonies were closely linked to individual Locals back in Calabria by blood ties, organisation and business: through such channels, a regular to-and-fro of drugs, money, assassins, fugitives and kidnap victims was established. Young men born into ’ndrangheta families in the North would come back home to be initiated into the brotherhood. The northern
’ndranghetisti
also met among themselves to settle disputes and make sure that Calabrian rules were applied. As one ’ndrangheta defector from the North testified:

In 1982 I took part in a meeting of all the Locals in Piedmont. About 700 people were there . . . The reason for the meeting was because in Turin at that time many Calabrians who were affiliated to the ’ndrangheta were pimping—an activity that the ’ndrangheta considers dishonourable . . . It was decided to order the affiliates to stop pimping. And if they did not obey the order, they would either be expelled from the ’ndrangheta or physically eliminated.

The ’ndrangheta’s strategy made it by far the most successful of the three major mafias in other regions. According to one Sicilian
mafioso
who did business in the North: ‘In Piedmont, the Calabrians have taken over the region. The little groups of Sicilians don’t give any trouble to their organisation.’ The
Calabrians were so confident in their power in the North that they accommodated groups of Sicilian
mafiosi
within their structure. The ’ndrangheta, once the poor relation of the mighty Sicilian mafia, had come a long, long way.

While all this was actually going on, the Italian authorities had very little idea of just how far the ’ndrangheta had spread. The Calabrian mafia’s softly-softly brand of colonisation proved to be the right formula for expansion into the regions at the heart of the national economy.

However colonisation was not the only measure of mafia reach. The ’ndrangheta may have planted its piratical flag in towns and cities across the North, but Cosa Nostra’s narcodollars had earned it a place at the highest tables of Italian finance. Aldo Ravelli was a famously ruthless stockbroker who ran into trouble with the law on several occasions in the course of a career on the Milan stock exchange that traversed the decades. In an interview he ordered to be published only after his death, he gave an insider’s take on Italy’s financial bourgeoisie, dividing it into three camps. The first was ‘semi-clean’. The second was ‘unscrupulous’. The third was the Sicilian mafia.

PART XI

MARTYRS AND PENITENTS

 
59 

M
AFIA TERROR

I
N THE
1980
S
,
THE MAFIAS ACHIEVED GREATER WEALTH
,
MORE AWESOME MILITARY
power, a wider geographical range, and more profound penetration of the state apparatus than at any other moment in their long existence. The story of the people who stood against them at that time is the most tragic and most stirring page in the history of the Italian Republic. Its key dramas took place in the home of what was still the most dangerous of the mafias, Cosa Nostra. The years between 1979 and 1992 were Sicily’s longest decade. The island had set the pace of organised crime history since long before the Second World War. Now it was to set the pace of the struggle against the mafias.

The tale told in the following pages was first reconstructed by investigators—the very people who were at the centre of the unfolding events. By journalists too: for many of them, the task of trying to make sense of what was happening around them with such fearful speed in the 1980s became a sacred cause more than a job. Since those terrible days, the story has been told and retold. It is there in the monuments to the fallen, in street names and plaques, and in the ceremonies that mark each passing anniversary of a mafia outrage. It is there in the famous video clips and photographs that have become icons of collective memory. Its grip on the public imagination is no mystery: this, after all, is a narrative that pits good against evil. Nor should we be surprised if, like all great stories, this one is sometimes emptied of its real meaning, hollowed into mere ritual by indifference, turned bland by the cynical lip-service of politicians, or by the cheesy conventions of television dramatisation. All the same, the truths of this story are far
too important to be uncontroversial even today; its lingering mysteries still make headline news.

The people who died fighting Cosa Nostra during Sicily’s longest decade were martyrs. The word may sound overblown. In those Western countries lucky enough to be able to treat the mafia as if it were little more than a movie genre, such vocabulary now belongs only to the mind-set of religious fanatics. But in the Italian context, it is the only word one can use. The martyrs of the struggle against mafia power died for a cause—one that in luckier European countries might seem banal: the rule of law. They also changed lives by setting an example for others to follow. Inspired by them, many young people found a calling in the police or magistracy—or simply by refusing to rub along with the mafia system that confronted them in their day-to-day lives.

The sacrifices made in the anti-mafia battle changed history too. For what happened in Sicily broke patterns that had remained obstinately in place since Italy first became one country in 1861. The most significant progress was in understanding the mafia. The struggle against Cosa Nostra was also a struggle to find out what it really was. In the 1970s, because more than a century of evidence had been covered up, neglected or forgotten, nobody really knew. Italy did not even know that the Sicilian mafia was called Cosa Nostra by its members. The most widely read academic study of the mafia at the time was written by a German sociologist and translated into Italian in 1973. Filled with penetrating insights into Sicily’s social structure, the book was nonetheless dismissive of the suggestion that the mafia might be a secret society: only ‘sensation-hungry journalists, confused northern Italian jurists, and foreign authors’ made that mistake. There were
mafiosi
in Sicily, of course—mediators, protectors and thugs. But they were part of the island’s culture. There was no single organisation that could be labelled ‘the mafia’. The results of the most recent trials in the late 1960s seemed to back that view up. By 1992, however, such falsehoods had been decisively overturned: enough proof had been assembled to convince even Italy’s Supreme Court to confirm that the Sicilian mafia was indeed a criminal organisation, a secret society. By the end of the longest decade, the Sicilian mafia’s most astonishing crime—the claim that it did not even exist—had been exposed at long last.

The years of bloodshed and polemic in Palermo that led to that crucial Supreme Court verdict would have profound repercussions for the camorra and ’ndrangheta, and for Italy’s entire criminal power system. In its wake, Italy established institutions whose very founding principle was the need to view the Italian underworld, with its connections to the ‘upper world’ of politics, the institutions and business,
as a whole
. Finally, after well over a century, the mafias would be viewed as aspects of the same underlying problems.

Such changes are unquestionably profound—profound enough to mark the long 1980s as the bloody passage between two entirely different eras in mafia history. Yet more time must pass before we can tell whether the progress made at such appalling cost is irreversible. That is why the titanic struggle between the mafia and the anti-mafia in those years is a story that must continue to be told. For it will retain its relevance, its urgency, until the day when Italy can say that the mafias have been vanquished for good.

Sicily’s longest decade began with five high-profile murders in the space of nine months: ‘eminent corpses’, as they were called.

In Palermo, on 26 January 1979, Mario Francese was shot in the head outside his house. Francese was the crime correspondent of Sicily’s main daily, the
Giornale di Sicilia
. With him when he died was his twenty-year-old son Giulio, who was just a few weeks into his own career as a journalist.

Six weeks later, on 9 March, Michele Reina, the leader of the Christian Democrat Party in the province of Palermo, died in a hail of dumdum bullets at the wheel of his car. His wife, who was beside him, saw the killer grinning as he fired. Reina was the first post-war politician to be murdered by the Sicilian mafia; he left three young children.

The third assassination took place at the other end of the country, in the banking centre of Milan, on 11 July. Giorgio Ambrosoli, a lawyer, had been appointed by a court to dig into the affairs of disgraced Sicilian banker, Michele Sindona. A team of three killers was waiting for Ambrosoli when he got home late in the evening; he too left a wife and three small children.

Ten days later, back in Palermo, Boris Giuliano, the commander of the Flying Squad was shot seven times at the counter of his local bar.

Cesare Terranova was a judge. On 25 September, he and his bodyguard, Lenin Mancuso, were gunned to death in their car. One witness said that the killers wore smiles on their faces.

A journalist, a politician, a financial lawyer, a policeman and a judge. Information, democracy, honest finance, law enforcement and justice. One after another, the mafia’s smiling killers had attacked five pillars of Italian society.

None of these murders, taken in isolation, was entirely without precedent for the Sicilian mafia. But coming so close together they made clear an unmistakable and chilling new trend. Sicilian
mafiosi
had never launched such a systematic assault on representatives of the state. The institutions were infiltrated and corrupted, but they were not attacked head on. Now, suddenly, the mafia had taken a terrorist turn.

Comparisons between the mafia and the threat from subversives of Right and Left were on many commentators’ lips during the season of terrorism known as the Years of Lead. Cosa Nostra itself had given them a cue. Following both the Reina and Terranova murders, the offices of
Giornale di Sicilia
received anonymous calls claiming to be from terrorist cells. The calls were fake, and intended to mislead investigators. But the parallel between the Sicilian mafia and the Red Brigades was far from spurious. Both killed journalists, politicians, lawyers, police and magistrates. Both arrogantly assumed themselves to be above the law. Both thought the Italian state was so weak, and so discredited, that it could simply be bullied into submission. Violence was used because violence would work—by now, it was part of the language of Italian public life. The Italian people could be relied upon to sit, arms folded, and watch as their country went down.