Despite Crackdown, Sicilian Mafia Casts Sinister Shadow

PALERMO, Italy —  The Sicilian Mafia, far from beaten by mass arrests, is diversifying its drug operations and reverting to lucrative extortion and kidnaping, Italian officials say.

Pressure on the Mafia has cut its share of the American heroin market from one-third down to barely 10%, U.S. officials say, but sales have been channeled instead to Western Europe.

Mafia wholesalers are pushing cocaine into new European markets. They exchange heroin directly for Colombian cocaine, eliminating the cash transfers that make them vulnerable.

A defector has implicated two recent Cabinet ministers, echoing others’ statements that senior political figures protect the Mafia, but police say they have no proof to move against politicians.

“Trials alone are not enough,” said Giusto Sciacchitano, a senior prosecutor, interviewed in the concrete bunker where a team of magistrates piece together evidence for continuing “maxi-trials.”

Under new laws, Italian authorities have seized $200 million in suspect earnings since 1982. Last December, 338 Mafiosi were given 2,665 years of sentences after the first maxi-trial.

In April, a joint U.S.-Italian operation disrupted the Pizza Connection, which markets Mafia heroin in America. Police arrested Emanuele Adamita, a fugitive Sicilian drug lord, and 101 others.

But public fear, official corruption, lack of evidence, foreign refuges and Italy’s legal system were all obstacles, Sciacchitano said. “The Mafia is very hard to beat. Very hard.”

After the maxi-trial verdicts were delivered, hit men on a motor scooter murdered Giuseppe Insalaco, a former Palermo mayor who fought corruption, as he sat at the wheel of his car in rush-hour traffic.

In Italy, prosecutors cannot plea bargain, nor can police infiltrate. The law requires that all crimes be punished, even when committed by undercover officers or state’s witnesses as part of an investigation.

Italy is ill-equipped to protect informers and their families from Mafia vengeance. Tommaso Buscetta, the Mafia boss-informer behind the first maxi-trials, took refuge in the United States.

Buscetta helped convict Vito Ciancimino, ex-mayor of Palermo, but Sciacchitano says politicians are difficult to put on trial. A parliamentary committee linked Ciancimino to the Mafia in 1976.

“The Mafia has always been at the edges of power,” said Attilio Bolzoni, a journalist who was arrested recently after reporting on an informer’s confession that named two ministers. He was held six days, then released.

U.S. authorities say privately that although Italy has scored important victories, little will change if public officials close to the Mafia are not rooted out.

Apart from outright graft, diplomats say, some politicians court the vital Sicilian vote by going easy on the issue.

Italian authorities are divided on how far the Mafia reaches into the state. Giuseppe Grassi, director of the Anti-Crime Department of Italy’s national police force, said:

“We have no evidence. Of course, there is some official corruption. That is normal. But politicians belonging to the Mafia, I don’t think so.”

Grassi contends that with uncounted billions of dollars in drug revenue and with sanctuaries provided by Latin American governments, the Mafia no longer needs political protection.

Authorities have arrested 4,100 suspected Mafiosi since 1982, he said. “But they can replace them overnight in Sicily, with all its unemployment and poverty,” he added.

For many Sicilians, going after the Mafia is tantamount to trying to suppress the weather.

“Hah,” snorted an entrepreneur named Napoli when asked if the Mafia had been weakened. He drove his questioner by the leafy piazza where Joe Petrosino, a New York detective, was murdered in 1902.

Petrosino, who was investigating the Mafia, was shot with a sawed-off shotgun known as a lupara . Modern versions--submachine guns--more recently killed an average of one person a day in Palermo.

Italian and U.S. authorities agreed that Mafia families had made a strategic retreat to regroup, not only reorganizing their drug operations but also concentrating more on extortion and ransom.

Such venerable dons as Michele Greco and Luciano Liggio, convicted in the maxi-trial, live lavishly in prison, with servants bringing them meals from Palermo’s finest restaurants.

“These guys can run a drug operation from inside prison just as well as they can outside,” a U.S. drug enforcement officer observed.

Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano of the dominant Corleone family are still loose. Besides, police say, the Mafia is known as la piovra --the octopus--because it regenerates severed tentacles.

By “the Mafia,” Italians mean about 30 Sicilian “families,” linked in crime, not blood, whose worldwide income makes up perhaps 1% to 2% of Italy’s gross national product.

Thousands of men sworn to silence by the code of omerta supervise couriers, bag men, informers and enforcers. Grassi estimates as many as 50,000 people may be involved in Mafia operations.

Sicilian patriarchs hold tight sway over family branches in the United States and Latin America, rarely trusting home-grown mobs that often go under the generic label of Mafia.

U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration officers discovered that heroin networks are compartmentalized so that couriers know only their immediate controller. Families make sure that key people do not talk.

“We found that every time we got up to a certain level, we had a homicide on our hands,” one senior agent said.

The drug traffic brought deep changes to the Mafia, which had evolved slowly from its roots in feudal Sicily, where it once defended rural landowners.

The Mafia has specialized in construction but kept a hammerlock on Sicily’s economy. Shopkeepers pay a pizzo --a premium against petty criminals or untoward accidents. Public services must contend with the Mafia for labor and services.

Palermo is the last major European city to dig itself out from World War II; its old port is pocked with crumbling buildings and gaping empty spaces.

Mayor Leoluca Orlando, staunchly anti-Mafia, fears contracts awarded to local companies will enrich criminals. In the past, reconstruction was stalled because so much money was stolen.

In the city of Catania, an American-trained doctor said: “They are in everything. They decide who is hired, and they take a cut of what is purchased.”

One public hospital spent enormous sums for spoiled food from a Mafia-run catering service after its kitchen was destroyed mysteriously, he said.

In the 1970s, after the French Connection was severed in Marseille, the Sicilian Mafia hired Lebanese chemists and took over the business. Vast new revenues made the Mafia a major multinational.

Sleek, ruthlessly ambitious young men began replacing folkloric dons in baggy pants. The title “Honorable Society” lost meaning for Sicilians who once condoned it.

By some estimates, their drug turnover reached $10 billion a year at its peak. In the late 1970s, Mafia killers began striking back at the state.

In 1982, Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, a popular police general who had fought the Red Brigades, was sent to Palermo to quell the Mafia. He and his wife were murdered.

Hours earlier, Dalla Chiesa had complained to a diplomat that Rome had not delivered promised support. At the funeral, his daughter Rita, a television journalist in Rome, returned flowers to officials she suspected were implicated.

“I don’t know if the Mafia is weaker now, but people are no longer afraid to say its name,” she said in a recent interview.

In 1982, the La Torre Law, named after a murdered legislator, made Mafia membership illegal and allowed property seizures. Since then, a growing “anti-Mafia” group is speaking out.

Many young Sicilians say they are tired of seeing their province paralyzed by fear and stagnation.

Rita Costa, widow of a crusading magistrate murdered in 1980, has since become a regional legislator dedicated to the anti-Mafia.

“We can fight them only by mobilizing people, by teaching children about the dangers they face,” she said. “We must say no to the Mafia.”

Even within the Mafia, some of the old guard draw the line at killing wives and using women to smuggle drugs. Buscetta said the breaching of old codes was a reason he turned against the Mafia.

In the anteroom outside Orlando’s office, supplicants wait on dark wood benches for solutions to their problems. City officials know that if they do not respond, the Mafia might.

Judge Giovanni Falcone, the flamboyant head magistrate, lives behind a 24-hour guard of heavy arms, vault locks and television cameras, with varying support from Rome.

He canceled scheduled anti-Mafia courses at a local university when authorities decided it was just too dangerous. In some ways, Falcone is more a prisoner than the men he has locked up.

Luciano Liggio, in a well-appointed cell, took up painting nature scenes. His first show sold out, and he put the earnings toward a kidney clinic for the grateful citizens of Corleone.