The Society on Trial: Has Mafia’s Time Past?

This has been a busy year for the Sicilian Mafia. Once, that sentence would have been taken to mean 1986 was a year of crime and prosperity for the centuries old “honored society.” But last February in Palermo, the “maxi-processo” began -- the trial of 474 alleged Mafia members, including two bosses nicknamed “the Pope” and “the Cashier.” And this month in Messina, on the other side of Sicily, where once the Mafia had no roots, an additional 253 Mafia suspects were put on trial. Both trials are expected to last several years.

Some of these Mafiosi will eventually be set free. In Italy a person can be imprisoned and tried on suspicion alone, without habeas corpus, without an eyewitness. If there were eyewitnesses to a Mafia crime carried out at noon in a town’s main square, customarily they would never admit having seen it.

On Oct. 7, an 11-year-old Palermo schoolboy, Claudio Domino, was playing with friends near his house when two men in a car called to him. As he approached the car they shot him dead. The Mafia thought he had seen them abduct the owner of a nearby coffee bar earlier in the month, following a quarrel about a drug payment. Claudio had to be silenced. His funeral was one of the biggest Palermo had seen: 20,000 people who never before had heard of Claudio Domino followed his coffin. Palermo was beginning to answer back.

Four years ago there was a similar public display of repugnance for the Mafia. Gen. Carlo Alberto Della Chiesa had been sent to Palermo with a special mandate to wipe out, or at least contain, the local Mafia. He had allegedly found, to no one’s surprise, proof of close links between the Mafia and the Christian Democrats, Italy’s largest political party. He and his young bride were gunned down in an ambush and his filing cabinets rifled--documents and the general’s Palermo diary were stolen. While his funeral drew large crowds for an official occasion, the response to the boy’s slaying was a spontaneous reaction of grief and rage by ordinary people.

With more than 700 Mafiosi removed from circulation by the Palermo and Messina trials (those defendants not under arrest are in hiding), Mafia-watchers think that drug links between Palermo and the U.S. Cosa Nostra have become seriously unraveled, at least for now. As an indication, they cite a Mafia return to armed robbery for ready cash: Two weeks ago there occurred a neat and painless holdup at the Palermo railroad post office; Mafia henchmen walked away with $6.2 million.

The experts also recall that Italian dictator Benito Mussolini in 1927 staged another Mafia trial, also with hundreds of defendants. He promised that he had eradicated the Mafia forever from Sicilian soil. But the only people eradicated with certainty were Sicilians opposed to the Fascist dictator. The Mafia, as always, supported the most powerful political party, at the polls and elsewhere.

“The toughest problem police all over the world face is having to deal with Sicilians. They are different from other people. They won’t have anything to do with the person unless they have at least known his father or his brother, or an uncle or a brother-in-law. They won’t collaborate with a stranger,” said another Mafia expert--Tommaso Buscetta, who took the Mafia blood-rite initiation pledge when he was 17. He is now 58, with a long history of Mafia leadership behind him, and with an unspecified number of murders to his credit.

Buscetta has now apparently told almost all he knows to crime investigators in Palermo and New York. It was his testimony alone that led to the majority of arrests for the Palermo trial--arrests made, appropriately enough, on St. Valentine’s Day in both the United States and Italy. Because many of the Mafia in the United States were using pizza parlors as covers for drug dealing, Buscetta’s revelations soon became known as “the pizza connection.”

Since his arrest in Brazil in July, 1984, and his extradition to Italy, Buscetta has been shuttled between Palermo and New York for police interrogations. That fact in itself is quite unusual for a prisoner long-coveted by both countries. Both have agreed that Buscetta will not be prosecuted in either country--in the Palermo trial he has already appeared as a witness for the prosecution, to jeers and savage insults from defendants who once were his Mafia lieutenants.

Buscetta now lives in New Jersey, surrounded by federal bodyguards. His federal contract guarantees him, his third wife and their children protection and a living allowance until they have “changed identities,” meaning new legal names and proper documents.

Known in the Mafia as Don Masino (“the honorable Tom”), Buscetta has betrayed the Mafia code. Probably most of the defendants in the current Palermo trial would be candidates for the honor of killing him, or his family, and so would the younger members of their families. There may be a couple of thousand people in Sicily and the United States without police records who today feel obliged to kill the once-honorable Tom.

Buscetta explains his reasons for confessing to the Italian journalist, Enzo Biagi, in a recent book, “The Boss Is Alone,” as being brought on by his disgust with the lack of “honor” among today’s Mafiosi, clearly implying a nostalgia for the good old days. He also blames the Mafia for going into drugs (meaning heroin), and claims he never dealt with the stuff himself. He even thinks the Mafia itself may be going out of style among Sicilian youth:

“Everything has its evolution, its rising curve, its decline. The Mafia is decaying due to bad management. They can still recruit pimps and petty thieves, but the right people, those with a sense of honor, will no longer join. No people can support such ferocity. The citizen no longer needs the Mafia--perhaps once it was necessary, as a kind of protection, but not now.”

Is he telling his interlocutors--and us--only what we want to hear, or does the Honorable Tom really mean it? The scope of the trials in Sicily may indeed be an indication that the Mafia is on the wane.

DR, MIRKO ILIC / for The Times