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The Baron's Briefings

Monsters and heroes - the decline of Sicily's Cosa Nostra

Barry Moody, who spent more than 40 years at Reuters, 12 of them in Italy, was the latest speaker in the Reuter Society's series of online Baron's Briefings. He painted a bleakly fascinating picture of the rise and fall of Sicily's Cosa Nostra.

In a meticulously researched talk, Barry described the broad sweep of mafia history, from its origins in the 19th century to ever more brutal campaigns of violence, until a head-on confrontation with the Italian state in the 1990s.

It was a saga of monstrously bloody gang bosses and heroic magistrates, police and politicians, who eventually undermined the criminal society, often at the cost of their lives, despite a century of collusion from senior Italian politicians.

Barry said the Sicilian mafia grew from gangs of toughs who protected the lucrative citrus groves of absentee landlords after Sicily was united with mainland Italy in 1861. The name mafia is thought to have come from a Greek word for ‘swagger’ or ‘boldness’.

To maintain secrecy, the gangs borrowed pseudo-religious ritual from the Masons. They imposed loyalty with ceremonies that have lasted until the present day in which a new recruit would have his finger cut and the blood spread on a religious image which was then burned – signifying what would happen if the initiate broke the code of omertà (silence).

In the inter-war years, the mafia was almost wiped out by the brutal tactics of Cesare Mori, the “Iron Prefect” of Sicily under fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, but it revived when the United States requested the help of Sicilian-American gangsters, like Lucky Luciano, in their invasion of Sicily in 1943 – which led to Mussolini’s overthrow.

The transatlantic heroin trade established strong links between the American and Sicilian mafia in the 1950s although they remained separate outfits. The name Cosa Nostra (Our Thing) was adopted in this period, probably an import from the United States.

Barry’s central theme was that Cosa Nostra was periodically pushed back after notable outrages, but then recovered, helped by powerful political allies and huge profits from the transatlantic drug trade. But in the 1990s its bloodthirsty leadership went too far and challenged the power of the state, leading to the decline of the “Honoured Society”.

He described how rivalry over huge profits from drugs and public building contracts in Palermo – which destroyed many beautiful historic palaces in a sea of concrete -- led to the first mafia war in the early 1960s. Many gangsters were killed in a battle between two rival clans but the war ended abruptly when a car bomb killed five police and two army bomb disposal experts in 1963. The ensuing outrage pushed Cosa Nostra underground for several years.

During the Second Mafia War in the 1980s, the brutal Corleonesi clan wiped out their rivals in a series of spectacular hits, showing that they had no regard for the transatlantic or political links of their enemies.

Corleone, a town in the Palermo hinterland is where Mario Puzo got the name of Don Vito Corleone in The Godfather.

Led by the homicidal Toto “The Beast” Riina, the Corleonesi broke mafia tradition to murder many public figures including magistrates, prosecutors, police, officials and civilians. One of the victims was the brother of Italy’s current president. But Riina’s reprisals against rival clan members and their extended families produced the first of many informers. They began to give star investigating magistrate Giovanni Falcone an unprecedented picture of how the mafia worked and said it was a hierarchical organisation with a governing commission, proving collective responsibility for the first time.

Much of this information came from a senior boss called Tommaso Buscetta, who agreed to talk to Falcone after six members of his family including two brothers and a son, were slaughtered.

Falcone was able to prove the “Buscetta Theorem” at the biggest ever mafia trial of more than 400 alleged gangsters, which ended in December 1987 with the conviction of 338 of them.

The trial led to a series of anti-mafia laws that were deeply damaging to Cosa Nostra.

When the verdicts were confirmed by Italy’s supreme court in 1992, Riina ordered the killings of Falcone, in a spectacular bombing that tore up a long section of the motorway into Palermo from the airport, and his close colleague and friend Paolo Borsellino.

Huge public outrage at these atrocities, combined with the collapse of Italy’s old political order after the fall of the Berlin Wall and a massive corruption investigation, removed the mafia’s protection from the ruling Christian Democrat party and Cosa Nostra’s close political ally, seven-times premier Giulio Andreotti. It created strong civilian resistance in Palermo and elsewhere to mafia activities which lasts to this day. Some 7,000 troops were sent to Sicily under a state of emergency.

After Falcone and Borsellino’s death, the mafia went even further with unprecedented terrorist bomb attacks on the Italian mainland, but these only confirmed that Cosa Nostra’s leadership was desperate. Riina was arrested in 1993 and died in prison, as did two successors as so-called boss of bosses.

Barry said Cosa Nostra has been in decline ever since and has now been superseded as Italy’s dominant mafia by Calabria’s ‘Ndrangheta, which controls around 80 percent of cocaine supplies into Europe and has an estimated annual turnover of $60 billion.

This organisation has learned the lessons of Cosa Nostra’s fall and remains largely in the shadows, avoiding direct confrontation with state officials.

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