Blood Brotherhoods (94 page)

Yet within some of those murders from 1979 the signs of resistance against the mafia threat were also visible. Cosa Nostra was killing people it feared.

The journalist Mario Francese was a relentless investigator, one of the few journalists who sensed the growing menace of Shorty Riina and his
corleonesi
; he had even dared interview Riina’s wife.

Giorgio Ambrosoli had discovered that Michele Sindona had been laundering the profits of the US heroin trade.

Boris Giuliano was a born policeman who had tracked down some of Cosa Nostra’s heroin refineries. He also knew how to follow the mafia’s money, and the money trail had led him into collaboration with the US Drug Enforcement Administration and to a clear conclusion: ‘Palermo’s mafia organisations have now become pivotal in heroin trafficking, the clearing house for the United States.’

Judge Terranova had led a large-scale prosecution of the mafia following the Ciaculli bomb outrage back in the 1960s. In 1974, he consigned Luciano Liggio, the boss of Corleone, to a life behind bars. Having spent several years in parliament as an independent MP under the wing of the Communist Party, he had just returned to Palermo, and to the judicial trenches of the anti-mafia struggle, when Cosa Nostra decided to kill him.

The death of Michele Reina, the DC politician, was much more difficult to interpret at the time. Only those closest to the mafia would have been able to decode the meaning in the murder. Everyone else had to be content with the rumours and theories that filled the newspapers. We now have a good idea which of those theories was closest to the truth. Reina was an ambitious man who had had brushes with the law. He had been educated politically in the heart of Palermo’s DC machine. He was a ‘Young Turk’ who belonged to the faction of the party headed by Salvo Lima—one of Cosa
Nostra’s most reliable politicians. But now that he was local party chief, Reina’s ambition had led him to begin thinking independently. He formed a coalition with the Communist Party: heresy for some. He declared that he wanted to be the leader of a DC that would ‘no longer live for the construction industry and off the construction industry’. Dangerous talk: Reina had already received threats. Perhaps Reina does not deserve to be called a martyr, but his assassination was a chilling challenge to the state all the same. In the new era of mafia terror, the penalty for independent thinking in the Sicilian DC was death.

The five murders of 1979 amounted to a declaration of war: Cosa Nostra, for the first time in its history, was directly confronting the state—or at least those few people working within Italy’s ramshackle government apparatus who embodied what the state ought to be.

And here lay the crucial
difference
between Cosa Nostra and the Red Brigades, a difference that made the former far, far more dangerous than the latter. The Red Brigades certainly had their spies and their sympathisers. All the same, they were
outside
a state that they wanted to overthrow. Active
brigatisti
operated from clandestine hideouts deep in the most anonymous quarters of Italian cities. Cosa Nostra, by contrast, was an integral part of the state—a state it now wanted to neuter and bend entirely to its own bloodthirsty, rapacious will. Active
mafiosi
operated from the very institutions where people like Mario Francese, Michele Reina, Giorgio Ambrosoli, Boris Giuliano and Cesare Terranova worked. For that reason, standing up to Cosa Nostra required a particular kind of heroism.

The following year, 1980, the assault continued: more eminent corpses fell. And new heroes emerged—heroes who would change the course of Italian history.

On 6 January, Piersanti Mattarella, the Christian Democrat leader of the Sicilian regional government—the most important politician on the island, in other words—was executed just as he got into his car to go to Mass with his wife and son. Mattarella had initiated a campaign to clean up the way government contracts were awarded. His wife saw the killer approach the car, and had time to plead with him not to shoot.

Emanuele Basile was a young captain who commanded the
Carabinieri
in Monreale, a hilltop town overlooking the Conca d’Oro. The night he was killed, 4 May, the streets were crowded, brightly lit and filled with the smell of nougat emanating from street stalls: it was the local festival of the Holy Crucifix. Basile, who was holding his four-year-old daughter Barbara in his arms at the time, was making his way home through the crowds when two
assassins appeared behind him. His little daughter’s hand was burned by a muzzle flash; miraculously, she was not otherwise hurt. Basile only had time to breathe ‘help me’ to his wife before he lost consciousness. He died a few hours later on the operating table.

Basile was investigating both the
corleonesi
and the narcotics trade with the United States. The magistrate who was working closely with him on those investigations—a gregarious, chain-smoking Palermitan with slicked-back hair and a trim, sloping moustache—was called Paolo Borsellino. Borsellino was devastated when they called him to break the news about his friend Basile. At forty years old, it was the first time his wife had ever seen him cry. The murder was not just a tragedy, it was also a message—a warning directed at Borsellino himself. But, faced with grief and fear, and the Sicilian mafia’s declaration of war, Borsellino responded with resolve. As his wife would later recall, ‘The Basile murder made me sure: I had married a man carved out of rock.’ Her husband threw himself into his work. In the next few days, he became one of the first Palermo magistrates in the era of eminent corpses to be allocated an armed escort. Paolo Borsellino would go on to become one of the two great champions of the fight against Cosa Nostra.

Three months after the Basile murder, on 6 August 1980, Gaetano Costa, the quietly spoken Chief Prosecutor of Palermo, was shot several times in the face by a single killer who pulled a pistol from inside a rolled-up newspaper. Costa bled to death by a bookstand just across the street from the Teatro Massimo, the giant theatre that is one of Palermo’s most famous landmarks. A veteran of the Resistance against the Nazis, he had recently put his name to arrest warrants related to an investigation into Cosa Nostra’s biggest heroin traffickers.

As fate would have it, the investigating magistrate working on that very case was a childhood friend of Paolo Borsellino’s who was also just getting used to living with the constant company of armed policemen in bulletproof vests. His name was Giovanni Falcone. Falcone’s large, friendly face disguised the fact that he was much less outgoing than Borsellino. But he too was a man of granite courage and a voracious appetite for hard work. His meticulous and brilliant research into the finances of heroin trafficking had already unearthed the Sicilian mafia’s business dealings with Neapolitan
camorristi
for the first time. Falcone had also encountered the insidious resistance that some of his colleagues put up against anyone who was too diligent. His direct superior had been warned in no uncertain terms by another judge that Falcone was ‘ruining the Palermo economy’, and that he should be loaded with ordinary casework to prevent him from digging too deep. When Falcone rushed to the scene of Costa’s murder, a colleague muttered confidentially to him as he gazed down at the disfigured body: ‘Well I never. I was absolutely sure
it was your turn.’ Giovanni Falcone was on the way to becoming Cosa Nostra’s greatest enemy. With Paolo Borsellino, he would become a symbol of the struggle against the mafia. The story of the fight against Cosa Nostra in the 1980s and early 1990s is, in large measure, their story.

But to begin the work of challenging Cosa Nostra in earnest, and to do so within the framework of the law, Falcone and Borsellino would need new tools. Directly and indirectly, those tools would emerge from the campaign against terrorism. The Italian state’s struggle with the death-bringing idealists of the Red Brigades during the Years of Lead had crucial consequences for the history of organised crime.

In 1980 the state acquired its decisive weapon in the fight against the Red Brigades. Subsequently, the same weapon was deployed with devastating effect against the mafias.

Law number 15 of 6 February 1980 awarded sentence reductions to members of subversive organisations who provided evidence against fellow terrorists. The first member of the Red Brigades to take advantage of the new law, a carpenter’s son called Patrizio Peci, began talking in April of the same year. Peci was the commander of the Red Brigade column in Turin, and his testimony almost completely dismantled the Red Brigades in the north-west.

Peci’s story introduced a new and highly controversial figure to the drama of Italian public life: the
pentito
, or ‘penitent’, as the newspapers insisted on calling any terrorist who informed on his associates. In Italy, lawmakers and magistrates bristle at the very mention of the term ‘penitent’, and for good reason. ‘Penitence’ is one of the most powerful identity narratives in Christian civilisation: it tells of past sins acknowledged and transcended, of a joyful new life born from remorse. But the Christian psychology of penitence fits badly with the varying motives of
pentiti
. Trading secrets for freedom is often a self-interested business—even when it does bring valuable truths to light. Cold-blooded murderers can barter their time behind bars down to just a few years. Penitents also bring an obvious risk for the legal process: a
pentito
who can convincingly fabricate more evidence than he really knows may be rewarded with greater benefits. ‘Penitent’, then, is a controversial term for a controversial thing. (Which perhaps helps explain why none of the unwieldy alternatives—like ‘collaborator with justice’, and ‘caller into complicity’—has ever really caught on.)

Yet, for many
pentiti
, the decision to betray former colleagues is an agonising one. (Which is another reason why the term ‘penitent’ is inadequate,
although inevitable.) Patrizio Peci’s decision to collaborate with the state was born of a profound disillusionment with the cause he had killed for. But he contemplated suicide when, after his tip-off,
Carabinieri
got into a firefight with four
brigatisti
in Genoa, killing them all, including two of his closest friends. Peci also paid a terrible price for his repentance when the Red Brigades kidnapped his brother Roberto, subjected him to a ‘proletarian trial’, and murdered him. Horrifyingly, they even filmed the execution as a deterrent to others. Such inhuman cruelty was powered by the loathing that penitents inspired in those they betrayed. Penitents were more than stool pigeons: they were
infami
—vile, unholy, scum. When
mafiosi
began to turn
pentiti
as terrorists had done, the moral ambiguities, psychological tensions and vindictive violence surrounding judicial repentance were all magnified.

The Red Brigade penitents who braved the loathing of their former comrades encountered a state that was better equipped to make use of their evidence than it had ever been. Italy’s police, particularly the
Carabinieri
, learned to operate in specialised, specially trained teams against the terrorists, and they emerged from the fight with a greatly enhanced reputation.

During the Years of Lead, the Italian judicial system also came of age.
In theory
, since the Constitution of the Italian Republic was promulgated in 1948, magistrates and judges had been free from political interference, subject only to their own governing body.
In practice
, genuine judicial independence took much longer to arrive. During the 1960s, the expanding education system and the selection of magistrates through public examinations made a career in the legal system an option for bright young people from many different backgrounds. As a result, the magistracy was becoming less of a caste and more of an open profession.

Some of the magistrates who went to university in the 1960s were the legal professionals who stood in the front line during the Years of Lead. Like the senior police officers, they ran terrible risks: their movements were constantly trailed by terrorist cells spying out any opportunity to strike. The successes that the state eventually won against left-wing terrorism gave the legal system a store of credibility that it could then draw on when taking the fight to Italy’s bastions of illicit privilege—corrupt politicians and the mafias.