Authors: John Dickie
Forces for change were even gathering within the Democrazia Cristiana. Leoluca Orlando, Palermo’s DC mayor elected in July 1985, was a vocal opponent of the mafia who ensured that the city council was represented as a ‘civil complainant’ in the maxi-trial. He presided over what became known as the ‘Palermo spring’—an exhilarating contrast to the grim winter of collusion that had held much of Palermo city council in its grip since the Second World War. Yet the attitude of most Palermitani to the magistrates’ battle remained one of nervous neutrality; as Falcone said, ‘It seems to me as if the city is watching from the window, waiting to see how the bullfight ends.’
The maxi-trial opened on 10 February 1986; it would last for the best part of two years. As proceedings began, a tense calm descended on Palermo. Cosa Nostra’s killers were under orders to lie low while the drama switched from the streets to a massive floodlit concrete bunker abutting the Ucciardone prison where the specially built courtroom was housed. The bunker showed that the public revulsion at all the eminent corpses had at last forced the Italian state into giving a tangible demonstration of its commitment to tackling Cosa Nostra. But it was a far from reassuring sight: one journalist said it looked as if a giant judicial spaceship had landed in Palermo. The main hall was green and octagonal, with thirty cages placed around the outside for the 208 most dangerous defendants. Of the total of 474 men who faced charges, 119 were still on the run, the most important being Luciano Leggio’s ‘beasts’, ‘Shorty’ Riina and ‘Tractor’ Provenzano. Leggio himself, dressed in a blue tracksuit and white tennis shoes, was the first to speak from Cage 23; he announced that he would be conducting his own defence against the charge that he had been running the Corleonese faction from prison.
As the trial opened, journalists sounded out the public mood. Many people in the streets of Palermo were reluctant to talk. Some were openly against the trial, saying that there was more unemployment now that the mafia was on the defensive. Most were sceptical: ‘It’s a farce. It will only get the ones who have stuck their necks out too far. The big politicians will decide how the trial ends.’ Buscetta had made it clear that he did not think Italy was ready to hear all his secrets yet; he was keeping to himself what he knew about the mafia’s links to top statesmen. Many people thought that the mafiosi who had fought out the
mattanza
were merely thugs, and that the real mafia were the string-pullers much higher up.
But doubts about the maxi-trial were not confined to vox pop interviews. Some of the most thoughtful opinion-leaders in Sicily simply could not grasp the trial’s real significance. For one thing, the sheer dimensions of the case were unnerving—Cardinal Pappalardo called it ‘an oppressive show’. In a much-discussed interview given just before the maxi-trial began, the Cardinal seemed to row back from his earlier firm stance on the mafia. He said that abortion killed more people than the mafia, and worried about the effect that all the media attention on the trial would have on Palermo’s image. Asked whether he would define himself as an antimafia prelate, he equivocated significantly: ‘You can’t build anything with a purely negative attitude. It is not enough just to be anti-something.’
Many people shared a fear that the maxi-trial was an attempt to deliver justice in bulk, and that it would be impossible carefully to measure each individual defendant’s guilt or innocence. Some suspected that the scale of the trial reflected only the scale of the magistrates’ egos.
The evidence of
pentiti
also raised doubts. Many onlookers had grave concerns about how reliable their testimonies would prove. In 1985, a prominent television personality had been the victim of a grave miscarriage of justice after false evidence supplied by a
pentito
from the Neapolitan Camorra. To many observers, using the testimony of Tommaso Buscetta presented the same risks on an even bigger scale.
There was precious little room for neutrality during the months of the maxi-trial. The Buscetta theorem flew in the face of profoundly rooted assumptions about the mafia, and about what it meant to be Sicilian. To grasp its implications would take a giant leap in understanding. It was a leap that even some of the mafia’s most outspoken enemies simply could not make. One famous and surprising name came to symbolize how hard it was for many Sicilians to accept what Falcone and Borsellino were doing, to see them as the solution rather than as part of the problem: Leonardo Sciascia.
Sciascia was the novelist who had done so much to bring the mafia to the public’s attention back in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Even today it is to novels like
The Day of the Owl
that most non-Italians turn when they want to find out about the mafia. Everything about Sciascia’s background, his writing, his sense of his own Sicilian identity, had pitted him against the mafia for over three decades. Tragically, in January 1987, the same forces also brought him down on the wrong side of a city divided and perplexed by the maxi-trial.
Eleven months into proceedings, Sciascia wrote an article in the
Corriere della Sera
that would fatally undermine his reputation as an opponent of the mafia. The article took its cue from two recent events: the publication of a book about the iron prefect’s crusade against organized crime during the Fascist years; and Paolo Borsellino’s promotion. (Borsellino had just been put in charge of the office of investigation in Marsala on Sicily’s westernmost tip where the Corleonesi had close allies.) Sciascia argued passionately that the maxi-trial threatened to trample on civil liberties in the same way that Fascism had done. He fulminated against a climate—we would now call it ‘politically correct’—in which any criticism of the antimafia magistrates was treated as if it were a sign of complicity with the bosses. He concluded his polemic by accusing Borsellino of careerism: ‘There is nothing better for getting ahead in the magistracy than taking part in mafia trials.’
Sciascia’s outburst caused profound shock in Italy where the public tends to look to writers and intellectuals for the kind of moral leadership that politicians too often fail to provide. It was a role that Sciascia took very seriously; in his own way he viewed himself as a voice of reason in
terra infidelium,
as solitary and rational as the detectives in his novels who tried and failed to breach the wall of
omertà.
All the more reason for Borsellino to be deeply hurt by the
Corriere della Sera
article; he said that Sciascia had been an intellectual father figure for him. Some of the mafia’s politicians subsequently took a sneering delight in quoting the novelist against the magistrates he had inspired.
By the time he penned his attack on the antimafia magistrates, the author of
The Day of the Owl
was terminally ill. For many solitary years he had devoted all the subtleties of his art to understanding the mafia’s thought-patterns, and he resented the antimafia sloganeering that now abounded. But Sciascia’s polemic was more than the outburst of a balky, moribund old man. It was the voice of the distrust that generations of Sicilians seemed to feel towards both the mafia and the Italian state.
Sciascia was the self-taught son of a man who worked in the sulphur mines of Agrigento province. He had witnessed as a boy the hypocritical brutalities of the Fascist regime, and he had seen the mafia kill union leaders in the sulphur mines after the war. For him the mafia was an informal branch of the Italian police; both the state and the mafia had the same repressive reflexes. The lesson of both his life and Sicily’s history was that the island could expect nothing but trouble from the authorities. Sciascia’s pessimism about the Italian state was matched by his fatalism about Sicily. He had long believed that the mafia at its root was not a self-conscious organization but a mental condition that made a prison house for even the most rational of Sicilian minds:
When I speak out against the mafia it also makes me suffer because within me, as within every Sicilian, the residue of
mafioso
feeling is still alive. So when I struggle against the mafia I’m also struggling against myself; it is like a split, a laceration.
Thankfully for the island, Caponnetto, Borsellino, Falcone, and many like them were untroubled by Sciascia’s ‘laceration’ and had a very different idea of what it means to be Sicilian.
The verdict of the maxi-trial was announced on 16 December 1987. Of the 474 accused, 114 were acquitted; 2,665 years of jail were shared out between the guilty. The message in the numbers was clear: the court had upheld the ‘Buscetta theorem’, but it had demonstrably not dished out the kind of justice in bulk that many civil libertarians had feared. Even Luciano Leggio was acquitted for lack of evidence; it had not been possible to prove that he had still been giving orders from behind bars.
In the days following the verdict, the newspapers that supported the magistrates proclaimed an end to the myth that the mafia was an invincible and inseparable part of Sicilian culture. It was a premature reaction, uttered more in hope than conviction. The maxi-trial verdict would be subject to a long appeals process before it became an established truth, and confirmation of the verdict was far from a foregone conclusion. Leonardo Sciascia, for one, stuck to his sceptical guns, still unable to accept the ‘Buscetta theorem’: ‘My opinion has always been that the mafia is actually a confederation of mafias.’ Two years later Sciascia would go to his grave, to the end refusing to admit the hope that either he or Sicily could ever leave the mafia behind.
Falcone took the verdict as proof that ‘by respecting the rules of democracy we can achieve important results against organized crime’. He knew that notable progress was already being made against the mafia. Before the maxi-trial had even finished, investigations into Cosa Nostra had produced two further large-scale cases; all three maxi-trials were handled together by Caponnetto’s pool. An important new
pentito,
Antonino Calderone, was giving evidence that was due to lead to a fourth maxi-trial; 160 arrests were made in March 1988. Magistrates from other Sicilian cities were building a series of related prosecutions. But Falcone was at pains to emphasize that the maxi-trial was no more than a good starting point in the battle against Cosa Nostra.
He would have perhaps been even more downbeat had he known what
pentiti
later revealed. ‘We were sure that the maxi-trial would turn out to be a bluff. The final verdicts would not accept the “Buscetta theorem”.’ The word inside Cosa Nostra was that the maxi-trial was a political showpiece created as a response to the bloody years since the
mattanza.
There would have to be convictions in the first trial, but they would gradually and quietly be reversed on appeal; normality would be re-established in the end.
For a while it looked as if that was exactly what was going to happen. Because Italy’s legal system took so long to produce definitive verdicts, legislation was passed to prevent prisoners spending too long in custody awaiting the final outcome of their cases. And because of their complexity, mafia cases were particularly slow. Thus it was that mafia defendants were among the main beneficiaries of the legislation: by the beginning of 1989, only 60 of the 342 men convicted in December 1987 were still behind bars.
Then, in 1990, the Palermo Court of Appeal reversed some of the maxi-trial convictions and—crucially—failed to uphold the central plank of the Buscetta theorem: that the members of the Commission, by virtue of their position, were guilty of ordering the important murders that Cosa Nostra carried out. The case was then referred to the first section of the Court of Cassation where many observers expected that the verdicts at the original maxi-trial would be undermined still further.
There was insidious opposition to Falcone from within the judicial system. After the maxi-trial verdict, the founder of the antimafia pool, Antonino Caponnetto, decided to return to Florence. Falcone, who wept at Caponnetto’s leaving party, was the obvious candidate to take his place at the head of the investigative office. But at the end of a sordid story of politicking, corridor intrigue, and professional jealousy, thinly veiled by attacks on a ‘cult of personality’ that was supposedly building up around Falcone, the post went to Antonino Meli, a man two years from retirement who was inexperienced in investigating mafia cases. Falcone was not just humiliated and devastated, he was afraid. ‘I am a dead man,’ he said to friends. He was all too aware that Cosa Nostra would read any sign that the state was not backing him as an indication that he was vulnerable.
Unknown to the public, Meli then proceeded to share out mafia investigations among magistrates seemingly at random, to load the pool members with non-mafia cases, to add new members to the pool without consulting anyone as to their suitability, and to divide up mafia cases and distribute the pieces among investigators from different Sicilian cities. No doubts have ever been raised about Meli’s integrity or intentions, it was just that his was a method that went against the fundamental principle of Falcone’s work: that Cosa Nostra was a single organization that required a coordinated judicial response.
Viewing these developments with alarm from his new post in Marsala, Borsellino eventually felt the need to make his worries public. ‘I have the nasty feeling that somebody wants to turn the clock back,’ he said. There was an immediate political flare-up, and the national governing body of the magistracy, known as the CSM, met in special session and decided to investigate Borsellino’s claims. Falcone wrote to explain that under Meli’s leadership, antimafia investigations had ground to a halt. As the supposedly confidential CSM hearings into the affair were leaked by both pro-Falcone and anti-Falcone camps, and as the usual accusations of political bias and ‘cult of personality’ flew, all sense of the real issues was lost. Falcone offered and then withdrew his resignation. At the end of a time-consuming and demoralizing row, the CSM lamely ordered both sides to patch up their differences, leaving Falcone’s position even weaker. Palermo’s Palace of Justice became known as the ‘Poison Palace’.