Читать книгу Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture - Leoluca Orlando - Страница 7

CHAPTER 3

Why did I become involved in the fight against the Mafia? Why did I start saying the word and repeating it until it became something like an obsession? There were small things: the murder of our doctor; my father saying he could not run for office because the Mafia had corrupted our politics. But the primary reason, as I later understood, was the awareness of my Sicilian identity. My family and Father Pintacuda set the process of such an awareness in motion. It was Father Pintacuda in particular who not only said the word “Mafia” but began to apply a definition. It was he who led me to realize that the Mafia was not just a dark fantasy, but a real sociological phenomenon. He did not do this because of some abstract or perverse interest in the subject (which for some Sicilians is akin to an interest in pornography), but because he was interested in the growth of community and the development of democracy, and he knew that the Mafia stood in the way of both.

Father Pintacuda’s interest in Cosa Nostra intensified at the very time that the organization was becoming virtually invisible. The combination of the First Mafia War and the national Antimafia Commission that followed had forced the Mafia to lie low and regroup during the early 1970s. This was also the time of terrorism in Italy, and dealing with the Red Brigades monopolized the attention of the authorities. (Indeed, the situation became so desperate that civil servants allegedly contacted imprisoned Mafiosi such as Tommaso Buscetta, who later became the first Mafia informant, in an attempt to convince them to infiltrate and give information on the terrorists who were also jailed.) But while Italy’s attention was directed elsewhere, the Mafia was not asleep; it was morphing into a different organization with different objectives. After the heroin link between Marseilles and the United States—the so-called French Connection—was broken in 1974, the Sicilian Mafia moved silently into the vacuum. Before, it had smuggled cigarettes and other contraband. Now it was setting up heroin refineries and using these networks, along with its genetic connection to the American Cosa Nostra, to begin a traffic that would make Sicily the narcotics capital of the world.

The capital of that capital was Palermo. Becoming involved in the politics of the city was a natural consequence of the social action Father Pintacuda advocated. And in Sicily, becoming involved in politics meant becoming involved in the Christian Democratic Party.

I was, to say the least, ambivalent about it. The Christian Democrats had become established in the postwar era as a bulwark against communism, including the Eurocommunism that the West regarded as the first step down a slippery slope. Leaders and governments came and went, but the Christian Democrats were eternal. Yet during the time of its hegemony, the party had become smug, oppressive, inefficient, cliental, morally compromised—everything that made me, a committed Christian who should have been a natural constituent, reject them. This was before the web connecting the CDs to the Mafia had been diagrammed; though even without such revelations, it was clear that the party limited the range of opinion and narrowed the spectrum of the permissible so that it was impossible to incorporate any sort of idealism into the political process it controlled.

But then, because of terrorism and economic concerns, Italians (but not Sicilians) rebuffed the Christian Democrats in the national elections of 1975. The party plummeted to its historical low point since the end of the Second World War. Father Pintacuda and I saw this as a sign of hope. Perhaps the party could be reborn into a politics that was both truly Christian and truly democratic. This hope was strengthened by the presence on the Sicilian political scene of a man named Piersanti Mattarella.

Although twelve years older than I, Mattarella too was a professor at the university and therefore my colleague. He had done an apprenticeship in my father’s law firm, and the first time I had met him was when my family was invited to his wedding. But apart from that occasion and good wishes at Christmas and Easter, we had never socialized.

Piersanti was the son of Bernardo Mattarella, one of the most powerful Christian Democrats in Sicily during the postwar era. Bernardo’s star had fallen rapidly, however, after his name had appeared in a report by the Communist minority of the Parliamentary Antimafia Commission as the man “who had striven to absorb Mafia forces into the Christian Democrats so as to use them as an instrument of power.” Piersanti never spoke of his father. It was clearly an extremely painful subject for him, and indeed, the pain became almost tangible on occasions when somebody, with words or looks, would insinuate: “You are different….” Still, his father’s and his party’s experiences were probably responsible for Piersanti’s uncompromising desire to cleanse the Christian Democrats of any such connections.

When I got to know Piersanti Mattarella, he was commissioner for budget in the Sicilian regional government and author of a proposal for a thoroughgoing reform of the outdated regional bureaucracy. Here was a man proposing the laws that desperately needed to be passed if Sicily was to enter the modern age. I felt that we spoke the same language, the language of a new administrative culture—functional, modern, European.

One morning in early 1976, I visited Mattarella in his office. He was a tall, blue-eyed, elegant man with a profound dignity. As I stuttered out my desire to become involved in his political work, he looked at me and said, “You mustn’t worry.” He might have been referring to the party’s past and present situation, as well as to my obvious unease, but in fact I stopped worrying on the spot. Piersanti was gentle and soft-spoken, inspiring one with a sense of confidence. Even though the Sicilian political scene was degraded, he considered politics itself a noble art. He was so sure of himself that he never acted as if he needed to have your consent, yet he always deeply respected your dissent. He was a true and truly devout Catholic, and instinctively a shy man with a gift of quiet courage.

At the end of our first conversation, I felt it was a duty to do what I could to support his effort to cleanse the Sicilian political system, so I finally took out a party card. In my mind, however, it was very clear that I had not become a member of the Christian Democratic Party so much as the Piersanti Mattarella party.

Piersanti had formed a group called Politica, composed of young professionals like myself who met once a week under his guidance to discuss current problems and their possible solutions. It was a group obsessed with politics, but our discussions were really about ethics, as was indicated by the titles of the conferences and debates we organized: “Faith and Politics,” “A Christian’s Commitment in Politics,” “Ethics and Politics.”

Father Ennio Pintacuda was close to our movement and was frequently invited to speak at our conferences or debates. This in spite of the fact that Piersanti was suspicious of the Jesuits and what he regarded as their hidden agendas; he was much closer to the Franciscans and the Salesians, seeing their humility as a truer reflection of Christ’s message of love.

Mattarella’s first big move came at the Christian Democrats’ 1976 regional congress, held at the Hotel Zagarella, a modern, multistoried building owned by Ignazio and Nino Salvo, cousins connected to Salvo Lima and Vito Ciancimino and the Sack of Palermo. The Salvos were a metaphor for what was wrong with our society. They had acquired incredible wealth after getting themselves named tax collectors for Sicily, a post which entitled them to keep 10 percent of all taxes they brought in! They had invested in real estate, vineyards, hotels—all of it networked in a complex way with Mafia holdings. The Salvos were known as “grand electors” of the Christian Democratic Party and famed for saying of certain political figures, “That lemon has been fully squeezed,” after which the lemon would not be reelected.

At the 1976 congress, Piersanti caused a furor by refusing to include his name in the listone, the “big slate” of candidates for Christian Democratic Party delegates headed by Vito Ciancimino, who, since presiding over the Sack of Palermo, had alternately dominated the city’s politics and disappeared into the background. Defying Ciancimino, Piersanti insisted on running a minority slate of his own candidates, my own name among them. (The rule was that any list must get at least 10 percent of the vote to have representation.) Despite the fact that Ciancimino bought off one of Piersanti’s delegates at the last minute, he was unable to keep us from getting the necessary votes, and so we became a presence in the party.

We worked hard over the next year to expand our influence, telling voters that we would clean up the party and make it accountable. And in 1978, Mattarella was chosen president of the Sicilian Region by a vote of our parliament, and I became his legal advisor. He took office at the same time that one of the most terrible events in recent Italian history was beginning to unfold. On the morning of March 16, the Red Brigades kidnapped President Aldo Moro, leaving behind the bullet-riddled bodies of his five bodyguards. The news immediately interrupted all radio and television programs and swept through the entire country within minutes. As soon as I heard it, I rushed to Piersanti’s office.

“This is the end for President Moro,” I said.

“This is the end for me as well,” Piersanti answered grimly.

I wasn’t sure what he meant. It was true that he looked to Moro as his point of reference within the national Christian Democratic Party. But what was the relationship between Moro’s kidnapping and Piersanti? He didn’t tell me that on the same morning he had received his first death threats—not from the Red Brigades, but from the Mafia.

The fifty-five days that followed were filled with anguish for the fate of Aldo Moro and discussions at the highest level on whether to negotiate with the terrorists. Then on May 9, Moro’s body was found in a red Renault, deliberately parked equidistant between the Christian Democrat and Communist headquarters in Rome. The country reeled under the shock.

All this was a godsend to the Mafia. Italy was preoccupied with rising Cold War tensions and especially with terrorism. During the 1970s there were some three thousand acts of violence, less than 10 percent of them in Sicily. As the Red Brigades soaked up police attention, other issues receded in importance. It was no accident that the Antimafia Commission, which had been keeping tabs on Cosa Nostra since the First Mafia War of the early 1960s, was now disbanded. This left the false impression that it had taken care of business—despite the chilling conclusion of its final report: “There exists a criminal structure which, in putting up an impenetrable wall to noncompromised authorities, operates for the support and protection of Mafia criminal activities.”

What the commission didn’t say—and didn’t know—was that the Mafia was now supplying close to half of the heroin smuggled into the United States. It had opened a number of refineries in Sicily by the end of the 1970s. Between 1976 and 1980, when the first of these refineries were discovered, several metric tons of pure heroin were exported, worth an estimated $600 million in profits.

My office as legal advisor to the president was on the first floor of Palazzo d’Orleans, once owned by the Duke of Paris, a beautiful building on the square behind the Norman Palace. Mattarella’s rooms were on the second floor, and I spent as much time there as in my own office.

In the two years that I worked as Piersanti’s legal advisor, we designed several laws, the most important of which was a law that transferred the responsibility for a large part of the regional budget from the regional commissioners to the cities of Sicily. It was a revolutionary law in its way. Over the years, the position of regional commissioner had become too powerful, able to move millions of dollars in one direction rather than another on the strength of a single signature. Without checks and balances, the position had become vulnerable to Mafia penetration. The aim of our law was to put this money directly into the hands of the various municipalities that were supposed to be the beneficiaries of the spending, thus making the sum spent with a single stroke of the pen less appetizing. I worked hard on the details of each article of the law, which was finally approved by the regional parliament.

Piersanti was also responsible for passing a law forcing Sicily to comply with building standards that had been in effect in the rest of Italy for over a decade. Such a measure seemed innocuous enough, but it was a step onto dangerous ground. No past president of the Region had dared become involved with building rules and regulations of Sicily, and especially of Palermo, where they were exclusively controlled by the Mafia and its front men in the political world.

Without any oversight, the city of Palermo, for instance, had let six contracts for the construction of six schools in six different districts of the city. For each contract only one construction company submitted a bid. This would be unusual in any city, but it was astounding in a city where there was such a hunger for work and where the construction business—however hideous its product—was flourishing. Piersanti commissioned an investigation into the circumstances of such deals and discovered, without much effort, that the six construction companies that submitted winning bids were connected to the capimafia of the six districts where the schools were to be built. When Piersanti’s advisors discussed this discovery with him, I had to keep myself from smiling. How could those bosses be so stupid as not to permit another company to submit a bid, if for no other reason than to create the appearance of open competition? My amusement showed how ignorant I still was of the Mafia mentality.