Ten years ago this May, Giovanni Falcone, the celebrated anti-mafia judge, was blown up with his wife and three members of his escort between Punta Raisi airport and Palermo. Two months later, a car bomb killed Falcone's close colleague, Paolo Borsellino and five members of his escort. In its 130-year history, the Sicilian mafia had never mounted such a spectacular challenge to the Italian state.
On 16th April this year, the second most powerful man in the Sicilian mafia, Antonino "Manuzza" Giuffr?, was finally arrested. This should have been a cause for rejoicing. He had been on the run since 1994, wanted for, amongst other things, ordering Falcone's elimination. Yet, in Palermo's Palazzo di Giustizia the magistrates greeted the news of Giuffr?'s arrest without fanfare. While the Carabinieri were being photographed with their new captive, the magistrates were grimly reiterating concerns about the current state of the fight against the mafia. Their pessimism seemed perverse. Two days later in Rome came public acknowledgment of what the magistrates in Palermo already knew-the mafia's leadership in prison wants to "surrender." Crime bosses are ready to admit for the first time what Falcone and Borsellino were killed for proving in court-that the Sicilian mafia (Cosa Nostra or "our thing") is a hierarchically structured criminal society, its members bound by rituals of absolute loyalty. Its imprisoned leadership is now signalling its willingness to break its ties with the organisation. Soon we may even see Silvio Berlusconi proclaim his government's victory over Cosa Nostra.
But the truth is that the mafia's "surrender" will be a fake. And any such announcement by Berlusconi would stir the argument that the "mafia odour" surrounding certain Berlusconi associates betrays his own links to the paramilitary businessmen of Sicily. In the eyes of many magistrates, the arrest of Giuffr? perpetuates an illusion that the state is winning the battle to control Sicily. Since 1997, they say, Cosa Nostra has wanted to create the impression that it is fading. The number of mafia killings in Sicily's cities and even of street crimes has plummeted. Yet magistrates say this "pax mafiosa" is actually a sign that its grip over Sicily is tightening. The organisation, they think, is restructuring and the new "boss of bosses"-Bernardo Provenzano-is reconsolidating links with politicians.
Mafia violence tends to be cyclical. Before Falcone's murder things were also quiet. Then Christian Democrat politician and mafia intermediary Salvo Lima was gunned down in February 1992 for failing Cosa Nostra. His death heralded a season of attacks of unprecedented ferocity. Today, it is Cosa Nostra's political manoeuvring that is causing the magistrates to worry. After the battles won in the wake of the Falcone and Borsellino assassinations, they believe that a historic opportunity to defeat the mafia has been thrown away. But if the "surrender" is refused, there could be a return to the bloody confrontations of the early 1990s. The magistrates could easily find themselves back in immediate physical danger.
One man who would be in the front-line is Antonio Ingroia. Like the other members of Palermo's team of anti-mafia magistrates, he has lived under armed guard for the past decade. On the wall behind his desk, under a picture of Falcone and Borsellino sharing a joke, there is the slogan, "May those smiles never die." His son is named after Borsellino, with whom he worked closely. Between cigarettes, Ingroia explains why he refuses to take a safer post elsewhere: "After living through the tragedy of Paolo Borsellino's death, that pushed me, within my limitations, to try and carry on his work. Sicilians are stubborn."
HOW THE MAFIA WORKS
Until the late 1980s, the notion of a single, highly organised criminal society in Sicily was often dismissed as folklore. That was before the successful conclusion of Falcone and Borsellino's investigations. In February 1992, the verdicts of the famous 1987 "maxi-trial" were confirmed in the Court of Cassation. For the first time, over 300 mafiosi faced the certainty of long prison sentences. The mafia's war on the state began immediately.
But more than endorsing hefty prison terms, the final ruling on the maxi-trial provided the sternest judicial proof that Cosa Nostra is not just a mentality, a nepotistic network, or a loose coalition of drug dealers and enforcers like Italy's other mafia-like organisations. The Neapolitan Camorra is an older organisation than Cosa Nostra, but it is much more chaotic-an archipelago of competing gangs that come and go. The Sicilian mafia is organised like an illegal state. Although double-dealing, betrayal and vicious civil war have been constants in its history, it has a stable territorial structure and a sophisticated business logic to its operations. In Palermo, it is divided into some 90 families or cosche, each of which controls a carefully demarcated fiefdom. A cosca exercises day-to-day government by extortion over any economic activity in its zone, usually at a rate of around 40-50 per cent of profits. This grip on its home territory gives the mafia an excellent basis for involvement in global crime. Sicilian men of honour have a reputation for efficiency and ruthlessness that makes them respected business partners for other criminal gangs.
It is at the local level-market gardens, shops, building sites-that mafiosi enter the economic bloodstream. This has been the basis of the mafia's strength since it emerged in Palermo's economically dynamic suburbs in the 1860s and 1870s. Lemons, then a profitable cash crop, were the first staple of mafia incomes. Now it is government contracts. Cosa Nostra's political connections and its control on the ground allow it to win state funds for its client companies. Construction is ideally suited to the way Cosa Nostra likes to operate, moving back up the chain of supply for materials and labour, using threats at each stage to ensure a monopoly position for the contractors it controls. The results are visible to any tourist in Sicily: the landscape is scarred with purposeless roads, bridges, jerry-built apartment blocks and hotels.
But the whole edifice of mafia power rests on its ability to kill people and get away with it. That is what gives Cosa Nostra's threats substance. Some "mafiologists" think of Cosa Nostra as a criminal company, and "mafia" as its brand of intimidation. Maintaining the credibility of the brand makes a heavy drain on mafia resources in terms of money, contacts and man-hours. Witnesses, police and judges have to be bought off. Killers, whether in hiding or in prison, have to be supported, as do their families. Mafia cosche plough a large part of their core protection-extortion business back into this key murder capability.
The maxi-trial produced a picture of Cosa Nostra's pyramidal structure. The territories of three adjoining mafia families go to make up a mandamento. The head of each mandamento is, in theory, entitled to a place in the governing "commission." The commission deals with any business, such as the murder of state representatives, which may have implications for the whole organisation. A central plank of the prosecution case in the maxi-trial was that the members of the commission-such as Antonino Giuffr?-can be held responsible for important murders committed by those further down the chain of command.
Final confirmation of the maxi-trial verdicts in 1992 was a colossal blow to the prestige of Cosa Nostra's leadership and the then boss of bosses Tot?2 Riina. Riina and his lieutenants had promised the mafia grassroots that client politicians and judges would undermine the trial and acquit the accused on technicalities. Failure put their own survival at risk. As one senior magistrate, Guido Lo Forte, remarks: "In the mafia you can't hand in your resignation. You simply get eliminated. Riina and his men had to reaffirm their power in the eyes of the membership." It would have been easier to kill Falcone in Rome, where he went around without an escort. The huge bomb that killed him after he had landed back in Sicily was a message to a domestic Sicilian audience. After the death of Borsellino, further demonstrations of Cosa Nostra's power followed, this time aimed at terrorising the state into relaxing its grip. In 1993, bombs were placed in the centres of Florence and Milan that left ten dead. When Riina was captured, there was an attempt on the life of a chat show host who had publicly rejoiced at the news.
But Cosa Nostra's terrorist turn failed. After Riina, many other bosses were caught. Public outrage made it possible for the judicial response to the mafia to be ratcheted up. Between 1993 and 1999, ?330m was confiscated from convicted mafiosi in Palermo alone. The tensions that the terror strategy had caused in the mafia, and the toughened prison regimes that mobsters now faced, caused hundreds of them to turn state's evidence.
RECOVERING FROM THE MAXI-TRIAL
The mafia began to deal with its crisis in 1997 when the 64-year-old Bernardo Provenzano emerged as the new boss of bosses. Proven-zano understands business and has created particularly strong niches in the health service and waste treatment sectors, so-called "ecomafia" activities. He is now referred to as "Uncle Bernie," his managerial style being much more conciliatory than Riina's. But the fact that "Uncle Bernie" has been a fugitive from justice since 9th May 1963 and that he has very probably never left Sicily in all that time, gives a clear idea of what mafia territorial control means in practice.
Provenzano responded to the maxi-trial emergency by adopting the current strategy of "submersion." The terrorist outrages ceased, as did the savage reprisals against turncoats. Cosa Nostra has adopted a lighter, more cellular internal structure and a more consensual approach to decision-making at the top. Extortion rates have been cut, but applied more systematically. The aim is to repair the mob's links with the worlds of business and politics. From a historical point of view, Provenzano's low-key policy looks familiar. The many "eminent cadavers" of the 1980s and 1990s, and the bombs of 1992 and 1993, do not fit with the classic patterns of mafia power. Eliminating local union leaders or shopkeepers who refuse to pay the monthly pizzo is more the mafia's style. Indeed, in the century before the murder of investigating magistrate Pietro Scaglione in 1971, the mafia had only killed one real bigwig: Emanuele Notarbartolo, a banker and politician who was stabbed in a train near Palermo in 1893. There followed three trials, resulting in the acquittal of the MP who ordered the killing, after a key witness was found hanged in a hotel room. The case was Italy's first mafia media circus and it brought the mob publicity it would have preferred to do without.
Roberto Scarpinato, a magistrate specialising in relationships between organised crime, business and politics, argues that Provenzano has grasped a fundamental rule of postmodern society: "what does not exist in the media does not exist in reality." The Italian public, appalled by the atrocities of the early 1990s, has now become complacent. Sicily can seem a long way away. Yet under the surface restructuring activity is intense.
Mafiologist Alessandra Dino points to the evidence of recent phone taps to show how Cosa Nostra is regenerating its support network for imprisoned members. Here the captured boss of three adjacent Palermo territories is speaking to one of his lieutenants: "There are 20 of our people who are ruined because of the trials... The task is to come up with three or four apartments each so they can have a secure economic future-them and their families... The guys in prison are always asking me why the monthly payment has been cut since I got arrested... I mean two million (?600) a month is hardly anything... I used to pay five million (?1,500)... I'm urging you to do at least as much as I did... When I was on the run we banked a basic of two hundred million (?66,000) a year plus between a billion and a billion and a half extra (?330,000-?500,000)... If anyone delays they've got to be made to pay. Anyone who takes advantage of the guys behind bars is dishonoured scum."
During the crisis of the mid-1990s, mafiosi fathers were reluctant to allow their sons to be initiated when it looked as if the future belonged to the state. Now recruitment has resumed, albeit more selectively than before. Young men from families with long-established mafia histories behind them are being preferred. As Scarpinato says, "family ties are an antibody to collaboration with the state."
Provenzano's strategy has been helped by other recent trial verdicts. In October 1999, seven-times prime minister, Giulio Andreotti, was acquitted of links with the mafia. Andreotti's supporters treated the decision as a vindication, although the judges' summing up also took it for granted that Andreotti's political allies on the island in the 1970s and 1980s were working with Cosa Nostra.
Verdicts like this have thrown up doubts about the evidence of mafia informers. Many voices from within the current government argue that the pentiti (literally "repentant ones") are inherently unreliable, given to making things up to get back at old enemies. Supporters of the prosecution suspect that it is precisely because these cases reached beyond Cosa Nostra and into the world of politics that opposition to the anti-mafia movement has stiffened. In 2000, the courts convicted 116 mafia members using evidence from pentiti, but the prosecution failed to make charges stick in a single case against politicians suspected of collusion with Cosa Nostra.
The legal infrastructure behind the big mafia trials of the 1980s and 1990s has been weakened. Much of the anti-mafia legislation was created piecemeal, in the "something must be done" mood following a major outrage. Even the anti-mafia magistrates agree it needs refining. The witness protection programme, partly because of its success, has proved very expensive. It has also been controversial. A key witness in the Andreotti trial killed another mobster while in police protection. Under Berlusconi's centre-left predecessors, the benefits magistrates were able to offer pentiti in return for information were cut. And any evidence that pentiti provide more than six months after their capture is now considered invalid. The strict prison regime for mafiosi has been relaxed. The results have been dramatic. The flood of mafiosi turning state's evidence in the mid-1990s has dried up. "Submersion" was already working before Berlusconi came to power last year.
BERLUSCONI AND THE MAFIA
Now that Antonino Giuffr? is behind bars, Matteo Messina Denaro is favourite to succeed Provenzano as boss of bosses. There is a big cultural difference between Provenzano- reported to be ailing-and the young Turk from Trapani. Provenzano is from peasant stock. His wife still runs a dry-cleaners in his home town of Corleone. Messina Denaro is a scion of the local criminal aristocracy. At 40, his friends call him Diabolik after Italy's cult cartoon anti-hero. He is flash (Porsche, Rolex Daytona, Versace), he is a skirt-chaser and he is conceited. He was prominent under Riina's leadership and has been on the run since being given a life sentence in absentia for his role in the 1993 bomb attacks on the mainland. Mafia defectors also say that since the 1994 election, Cosa Nostra's young star has been sending out a clear message to his fief on Sicily's western tip-vote Forza Italia.
Sicily is pivotal to Berlusconi's success nationally. His "Home of Freedoms" electoral alliance won every single one of Sicily's 61 constituencies in Forza Italia's victory in the May 2001 general election. And in November last year, the electorates of Palermo, Trapani and Agrigento all decisively backed "Home of Freedoms" mayoral candidates.
Yet what, exactly, is the connection between a man like Matteo Messina Denaro and Silvio Berlusconi, between Cosa Nostra and Forza Italia? One should not rush to conclusions. The magistrates are scrupulous about maintaining a silence on politics and on cases that are still before a judge. Nor would anyone in Italy seriously claim that Berlusconi is a mafioso. His electoral victories are not a direct reflection of mafia power. Even at its apogee in the 1970s and 1980s, the mafia did not control nearly enough votes to achieve such a landslide for its favoured party. Berlusconi's triumph in Sicily owes more to dissatisfaction with his predecessors and to his promises of massive infrastructural investment, symbolised by the planned bridge over the Straits of Messina. In any case, mafiosi very rarely approach politicians directly. They use friendly entrepreneurs as an interface. In Sicily, according to magistrate Gaetano Paci, it is "very, very difficult" to be an honest businessman. And, as in much of the Italian south where the economy is heavily dependent on the public sector, entrepreneurs have constant and close contact with politicians. What matters for Cosa Nostra are these individual contacts, irrespective of political colouring.
Nevertheless, Berlusconi's dominance of Italian politics is good for organised crime. And there is one mafia case that has been grinding its way through the Italian courts for an eternity that potentially links Silvio Berlusconi directly to Cosa Nostra.
In 1974, Berlusconi was looking for a groom for the stables on his Arcore estate. He turned for advice to Marcello Dell'Utri, a business factotum who lived with him. Dell'Utri later became head of Publitalia, the advertising arm of Berlusconi's business empire. It was Dell'Utri who came up with the idea of Forza Italia. He is still an MP. Dell'Utri's recommendation for the post was a fellow Palermitan, Vittorio Mangano, who did the job for two years. Mangano died of cancer recently-a few days after being sentenced to life for two murders. This "groom," it transpires, was a leading figure in the Porta Nuova family of Cosa Nostra. Dell'Utri and Berlusconi say they were ignorant of this when he was appointed. The prosecution's theory is that Berlusconi, fearing that his children would be kidnapped, got Dell'Utri to approach Mangano for protection. If proved, this hypothesis has far-reaching implications. Nobody seeks services from the mafia without already being embroiled in some kind of business relationship with them.
There are other charges running against Dell'Utri. It is alleged that, in the early 1990s, he tried to extort 50 per cent of a sponsorship contract between a beer brand and the owner of Trapani basketball club. Dell'Utri is also accused of trying to persuade two mafia defectors to discredit magistrates and pentiti. The aim was to "expose" a fictitious plot by judges to frame Berlusconi and Dell'Utri.
Berlusconi's lawyers are fighting to avoid his having to testify in the Dell'Utri case. No mafia-related charges have been made against the leader of Forza Italia himself. Although, as The Economist set out during last year's election campaign, there are persistent doubts about the origins of some of the money used by Berlusconi to build his empire. And just after his election victory, El Pais ran a story about an alleged meeting in the 1970s between some leading mafiosi, Dell'Utri and Berlusconi. Evidence of obscure movements of money between Berlusconi's companies and bank accounts has been produced in court.
Yet even assuming that there is no substance to such allegations, Berlusconi's victory is good for the mafia because of his strong support for what is misleadingly called the garantista (pro-civil liberties) position on questions of criminal law. Berlusconi's troubles with the courts over bribing tax officials, false accounting and fraud have been much in the news. He is now on trial for paying large bribes to judges in order to obtain a favourable decision in a privatisation dispute. Berlusconi claims that "red" magistrates are conducting a concerted campaign to discredit him.
Last year Berlusconi's government embarked on a process of judicial reform. Italy's legal system certainly needs radical reform. But Berlusconi's enemies believe that "efficiency" is a pretext. The programme announced by justice minister Roberto Castelli argues that "elements of the magistrature have tried to occupy terrain that belongs to politics." The minister's plan is to "bring responsibility for judicial policy, especially in the area of criminal law, back within the orbit of democratic sovereignty." Berlusconians argue that magistrates have in some cases abused their position as both investigators and prosecutors to intimidate suspects. His opponents fear that the plan will put justice under government control and protect corrupt politicians. Magistrates have scheduled an unprecedented strike in protest.
In his struggle with the magistrates, Berlusconi's focus is on Milan rather than Palermo. Nevertheless, these policies will have important effects at the southern end of the peninsula. A number of measures seem likely to obstruct the hunt for Cosa Nostra's financial operations, notably a law effectively decriminalising false accounting and another making it much more difficult to get evidence from foreign bank accounts for use in domestic trials. Last December, under protest, Berlusconi signed up to the EU extradition pact covering 32 crimes ranging from murder and paedophilia to terrorism and drug-dealing. But he hinted that tricky constitutional changes may be required to allow Italy to put the agreement into effect. Failure to implement the pact would suit Cosa Nostra.
A DEAL WITH THE STATE
The plan for the mafia in prison to "surrender" is the keystone of Provenzano's vision for Cosa Nostra's development. Its aim is to solve the potential conflict of interest between the large number of captured crime bosses and those still at large. Prison has always been an occupational hazard for the mafia. Its affairs have often been managed from jails which also became the think-tanks from which the mafia model spread across Sicily. But now it has become very difficult to run one's interests from behind bars. And potential for friction derives from the overheads loaded onto Cosa Nostra's operations outside by the need to support a large population of detainees.
Details of the deal the mafia wants to strike in order to solve this problem are still sketchy. But Palermo magistrate Guido Lo Forte explains that its centrepiece is "dissociation." Imprisoned bosses would receive better treatment and keep their wealth. In return, without grassing on their companions, they would "dissociate themselves" from Cosa Nostra, declare it finished for ever, and ask the men on the outside to do the same.
Which, of course, they would not do. They would carry on with their "submerged" operations, confident that the public considered Cosa Nostra a thing of the past. Mafiosi have their eyes on the future. Over the next six years, around ?535m will be invested in Sicily by the EU; 2010 will see the birth of the Euro-Mediterranean free trade area, encompassing 600m people. The dissociation the mafia prisoners are proposing to make is symbolic rather than substantial (although symbols are important to the Cosa Nostra). If a law on dissociation were passed, it would cement a pact of mutual tolerance between the underworld and the political domain for years ahead.
Will the Italian government accept the offer? Acceptance would be risky. Falcone's successors still have considerable support across Italy. They may be able to make the political price for a deal with Cosa Nostra too high. One magistrate has called the mob's proposals "a trap for the state." But Berlusconi may be tempted. He could trumpet the death of Cosa Nostra and hope to prolong indefinitely a pax mafiosa that has seen Forza Italia flourish in Sicily. Sounds implausible? But then so too is decriminalising false accounting. If the dissociation deal were accepted, a modern European state would have effectively granted a franchise to control part of its territory to a murderous illegal organisation.
