Blood Brotherhoods (96 page)

A short time before taking up his post as Prefect of Palermo, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa wrote to his sons about what lay ahead. His hopes were high: ‘In a couple of years, La Torre and I should be able to get the most important things done.’ Faced with unprecedented slaughter in Sicily, the two great but divergent traditions of resistance to mafia power were set to unite their forces after more than a century of suspicion and misunderstanding. Honest Sicilians of all political persuasions would see their champions working together.

Dalla Chiesa’s first official duty as Prefect of Palermo was to attend Pio La Torre’s funeral. On 30 April 1982, La Torre was trapped in his car in a machine-gun ambush. The driver, Rosario Di Salvo, managed to get off four futile shots against the attackers before dying alongside his great friend. Di Salvo was not a police bodyguard, but a Communist Party volunteer.

Pio La Torre’s murder prompted what was now a horrendously familiar public ritual in Palermo. First, on the front pages of the dailies and in TV news bulletins, there would be the macabre images of the victims slumped in ungainly postures in a pool of blood or a bullet-pocked car. Then there came the formulaic condemnations by politicians momentarily distracted from the business of jostling for position and influence. Then finally the funeral, with senior statesmen—representatives of a state that was patently not doing its job—forced to risk the wrath of the mourners and public. (One leading Sicilian politician who tried to speak at La Torre’s funeral was heckled with cries of ‘Get lost,
mafioso
!’)

To anyone with eyes to see, it was clear that Sicilian
mafiosi
were systematically decapitating that part of the state that stood in the way of their lust for power. If a shocking chain of ‘eminent corpses’ had been seen anywhere else in the Western world, then the most elementary laws of politics would have guaranteed that a national hero like General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa would be given a unanimous and clear mandate to lead the state’s response. And when the first reports of his mission appeared, back in March 1982, the elementary laws of politics seemed to be in force: both the government and Communist opposition were agreed that Dalla Chiesa would be granted wide-ranging powers, not limited to Palermo or even to Sicily. ‘There should be no political difficulties,’ one national paper declared.

Yet, as he mourned Pio La Torre, political difficulties soon became a bigger worry to Dalla Chiesa than the mafia. Through press releases and interviews, the dealmakers of Rome began to send their coded public messages about Dalla Chiesa’s appointment. Lukewarm expressions of support were mixed with polite perplexity. Fighting the Sicilian mafia was crucial, but it should not hinder the workings of the market economy, they said. Of course Dalla Chiesa’s appointment was a good thing. But Italian democrats needed to be watchful, they said. The General should not be the herald of an authoritarian turn: Sicily didn’t need another ‘Iron Prefect’. (The reference was, of course, to Prefect Cesare Mori, who had led Fascism’s clampdown on organised crime in the 1920s.)

On 2 April, Dalla Chiesa wrote to the Prime Minister to demand an explicit and formal anti-mafia mandate for his new job. ‘It is certain that I am destined to be the target of local resistance, both subtle and brutal.’ He pointed out that the ‘most crooked “political family”’ in Sicily was already making sinister noises about him.

There was little mystery about who that political family was: the Andreotti faction of the Christian Democrat Party, headed by the ‘Young Turk’ Salvo Lima. Dalla Chiesa knew Andreotti well. For the DC magus was Prime
Minister when former premier Aldo Moro was kidnapped and murdered by the Red Brigades. Andreotti it was who conferred special powers on Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to get to grips with the terrorist threat.

Dalla Chiesa was a man who believed profoundly in the values of the state—he had the
Carabinieri
insignia sewn onto his skin, as he often said. Yet he was no ingénue. He was ambitious, and he knew how liquid power was in Italy, how it often coursed through personal channels, and collected in the hands of cliques. He knew the art of modulating relations with his political masters by means of a quiet word, a letter, a leak to a journalist, or a formal newspaper interview. When the list of members of the covert Masonic lodge P2 was discovered in 1981, Dalla Chiesa’s name was rumoured to be on it. He explained that he had applied to join, partly out of a desire to monitor the lodge’s activities, but that his application was not accepted. The P2 affair cast a shadow over Dalla Chiesa’s reputation. Nonetheless, his sense of duty made him an outsider in the Italy of factions and shady schemes. When he reached Palermo, his dealings with Andreotti—the man at the centre of many a shady scheme—showed just how vulnerable that outsider status made him.

On 6 April 1982 Dalla Chiesa was called in to see Giulio Andreotti himself. This meeting was yet another example of just how individualised influence can be in Italy: it resides not in institutions, but in men and their networks of friends. For the spring of 1982 was one of the very rare moments in post-war history when Andreotti did not hold a government post. So he had no official claim to meddle in Dalla Chiesa’s Sicilian mission, or request a meeting. Dalla Chiesa answered the summons all the same. As usual, the General did not mince his words: he declared he would show no special favours to Andreotti’s supporters on the island. He later told his children, ‘I’ve been to see Andreotti; and when I told him everything I know about his people in Sicily, he blanched.’

Andreotti’s typically coded and devious public reply to Dalla Chiesa’s statement of intent came in a newspaper column. Sending Dalla Chiesa to Sicily was a welcome initiative, he wrote. But surely the problem was more serious in Naples and Calabria than in Sicily?

This rhetorical question was both disingenuous and alarming. In raw numerical terms, Andreotti was right: at that moment, organised crime was causing more fatalities outside Sicily. But no one could fail to see the vast qualitative difference in the targets of mafia violence in Sicily. Granted, there were a few ‘eminent corpses’ in Campania and Calabria. In 1980, the ’ndrangheta killed two local Communist politicians. In the same year, the camorra murdered a Catholic mayor and a Communist town councillor who
were trying to block the gangsters’ access to the earthquake reconstruction goldmine. Lamentable as these crimes were, they did not bear comparison with the long roll of senior policemen, judges and politicians who had been cut down in Sicily. Andreotti knew this. And he knew that everyone else knew this. So he can only have been dropping a hint. The kind of hint that could bring a shiver of fear to even a brave man like Dalla Chiesa.

In the eyes of external observers of post-war Italy, the country’s political life could seem confusing to the point of being comic: the same grey suits squabbling and making up, endlessly recombining to form governments that came and went like the rounds of a parlour game. Fear is one of the factors missing from this outside impression. The great string-pullers of Italian politics inspired real fear. For they had the power to take jobs and marginalise, to blackmail, to smear in the media, to initiate Kafkaesque legal proceedings or tax investigations. In Sicily in the 1970s and 1980s, violent death was added to the weaponry of influence.

When Andreotti eventually went on trial accused of working for Cosa Nostra, the Supreme Court ruled that Andreotti’s relationship with the bosses rapidly became more tenuous after 1980, when his party colleague Piersanti Mattarella was murdered. Andreotti, the court ruled, knew that Cosa Nostra was intending to kill Mattarella, but did nothing about it. However, he was cleared of any criminal responsibility in the Dalla Chiesa affair. All the same, he must bear a huge moral responsibility for helping to increase the General’s exposure to danger, for increasing the impression in the public’s mind—and in the mafia’s—that the new Prefect of Palermo lacked support.

Dalla Chiesa’s job description remained unclear long after he took up residence in the elegant neo-Gothic villa that served as Palermo’s prefecture. On 9 August 1982—an unusually cool day by the fierce standards of the Sicilian summer—he voiced his worries to one of Italy’s leading journalists. The interview became one of the most famous in the history of Italian journalism. The headline was: ‘One man alone against the mafia’.

Dalla Chiesa was as forthright as he had been at every stage of his Palermo journey. Citing events over the past few days, he told how the mafia was flaunting its scorn for the authorities:

They murder people in broad daylight. They move the bodies around, mutilate them, and leave them for us to find between Police Headquarters and the seat of the regional government. They set light to them in Palermo city centre at three o’clock in the afternoon.

The General laid out his strategic response. First, intensified police patrols to make the state visible to the citizenry. Then the mafia’s money must be
targeted. The mafia was no longer a problem limited to western Sicily: it invested right across the country, and those investments had to be exposed.

Dalla Chiesa was asked if it had been easier fighting terrorism. ‘Yes, in a sense. Back then I had public opinion behind me. Terrorism was a priority for the people in Italy who really count.’ There was a bleak truth to Dalla Chiesa’s words. There may have been eminent corpses in Sicily—journalists, magistrates, politicians—but they counted for less than victims of equivalent stature in Milan or Rome.

The General also explained the subtle tactics the mafia used to undermine his credibility. The honest police who had fought the mafia since the 1870s, in the teeth of resistance from the island’s VIPs, would have read his words with a bitter, knowing smile.

I get certain invitations. A friend, someone I have worked with, will casually say: ‘Why don’t we go and have coffee at so-and-so’s house?’ So-and-so has an illustrious name. If I don’t know that so-and-so’s house has rivers of heroin flowing through it, and I go for coffee, I end up acting as cover. But if I go for coffee in full knowledge, that’s the sign that I am endorsing what is going on by just being there.

Anyone who refused to play along would quickly acquire a reputation for being ‘awkward’, ‘unfriendly’ and ‘self-important’ in Palermo’s influential circles. Acquiring such a reputation was often a prelude to being shot dead.

Why had Pio La Torre been killed? ‘Because of his whole life. But the final, decisive reason was his proposed anti-mafia law.’

Why was the mafia now murdering so many important representatives of the state? ‘I think I’ve grasped the new rules of the game. Someone in a powerful position can be killed when there is a fatal combination of two things: he becomes too dangerous, and he is isolated.’

From his exchanges with Andreotti, General Dalla Chiesa knew only too well that this ‘fatal combination’ applied to him. He was a threat, he was isolated, and his life was in very serious peril. Why, then, did he persist, when throughout its history the mafia had defeated everyone sent to fight it?

I am pretty optimistic—as long as the specific mandate they sent me to Sicily with is confirmed as soon as possible. I trust in my own professionalism . . . And I’ve come to understand one thing. Something very simple, something that is perhaps decisive. Most of the things the mafia ‘protects’, most of the privileges that it makes citizens pay a steep price for, are nothing other than elementary rights.

At around ten past nine on the evening of 3 September 1982, Nando Dalla Chiesa, the university lecturer son of General Carlo Alberto, was listening to music on the radio. The telephone rang. ‘A normal ring,’ he later recalled. It was his cousin, who told him he needed to be strong, very strong. ‘What we were afraid of has happened.’

In Palermo’s via Carini, General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, his new wife, and his bodyguard lay disfigured by the Sicilian mafia’s Kalashnikov fire. Someone stuck up an improvised poster beside them: ‘Here died the hope of all honest Sicilians’.