After declining to get involved in peddling cocaine, Davide De Marchi took the precaution of not always being at home. His bosses in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra had not taken kindly to his refusal.
”Once, while for reasons of security I was hiding in the flat opposite mine, I saw Salvatore Cimino [not his real name] and three others coming up the stairs,” he told investigators.
”Cimino was carrying a grey Magnum .357 pistol.”
Soon afterwards, last May, De Marchi turned up at Palermo’s high-security courthouse and asked to speak to a prosecutor specialising in organised crime.
The evidence he has since poured out has given detectives their most detailed insight yet into what has been called the ”new mafia” — and, often, the ”invisible mafia”.
In recent years, the world’s best-known mob has vanished from view as comprehensively as at any time in the 150 or more years it has existed.
Pulverised by the damage done to it by informers and the arrest in the early 90s of the ”boss of bosses”, Salvatore ”Toto” Riina, and most of his key lieutenants, it opted for what investigators call a strategy of submersion.
Today the Sicilian mafia is still a powerful force, but, like any business under threat, it has changed strategies and diversified.
Riina’s successor, Bernardo Provenzano, now 80, is an unlikely moderate. Variously nicknamed ”the Animal” and ”the Tractor” (because he mowed people down), he is credited with personally murdering at least 40 people.
As Riina’s lieutenant, he helped run the so-called death chamber in a farm building near his hometown of Corleone, where rival mafia bosses, invited to parley, were killed and their bodies dissolved in acid.
Yet, since taking over as capo di tutti capi, Provenzano has put an end to the simmering hostilities that pitted his own Corleone-based gang against those of Palermo and reduced drastically the number of blood-spattered corpses featuring on Sicily’s, and Italy’s, front pages.
”Nowadays, they don’t murder if they can avoid it,” said Maurizio De Lucia, a prosecutor belonging to Palermo’s elite anti-mafia team.
”If they feel they have no option but to get rid of someone, then they prefer to make him or her just disappear.”
Provenzano is also believed to have shaped an entirely new leadership structure. Traditionally, and notwithstanding its murderous internal feuds, the Cosa Nostra had a clearly defined hierarchy that narrowed as it rose to the mob’s high command, the cupola (dome).
Back in 1993, when it is last known to have met, the cupola had 14 members, each representing a particular faction or district. Four years ago, investigators say, the boss of bosses imposed a more compact governing body, which they have dubbed ”the directory”.
The only two mobsters they are confident form part of this body, apart from Provenzano, are Matteo Messina Denaro from Trapani and Salvatore Lo Piccolo, from the Palermo district of Resuttana.
Under their leadership, the mafia has scrapped its involvement in high-profile international ventures such as the wholesale drug trade and switched its attention to reasserting its hold over its homeland.
It has tightened its grip on the allocation and exploitation of contracts for major works, public and private. And with the money it has creamed off, it has invested in new areas. Ironically, healthcare is thought to be a favourite destination for Cosa Nostra funds.
Frontman
Prosecutors identify one Michele Aiello as the archetypal new-style mafia frontman. He has denied their charges against him, saying he was the mob’s victim, not its accomplice.
Aiello made a fortune building minor roads across Sicily before founding a chain of private clinics with state-of-the-art equipment that, according to former mafiosi who have turned state’s evidence, was put at the disposal of ageing mobsters, including Provenzano himself.
By the time he was arrested last year, Aiello was Sicily’s biggest taxpayer. His declared annual earnings were almost 6-billion lire (£2,1-million).
Cosa Nostra protection rackets envelop Palermo more completely than ever. ”Almost all the shopkeepers, apart from the owners of the big stores in the centre of town, pay il pizzo [protection money],” the prosecutor Maurizio De Lucia said. ”The policy is to take relatively little, but from everyone.”
Davide De Marchi was the mafia’s collector in the maze of cobbled streets round the Vucciria street market where everything from 19th-century military prints to unskinned hares are sold.
”These days, payments normally take place four times a year at three-month intervals … Fruiterers and fishmongers pay the lowest amounts,” he told prosecutors.
”Building sites pay a first instalment when the company erects the scaffolding of 3,5-million old lire [£1 250], negotiable down to 2,5-million. At the end of the work, the company pays a second installment of 5-million.”
De Marchi’s evidence, detailing a ceaseless, silent stream of funds to Cosa Nostra coffers, also raises the question of how long the low-profile policy of recent years will hold.
”For a while now, the mafia ‘family’ to which I was close has been rethinking its exaction strategies,” he told prosecutors. ”Demanding protection money — in other words, making it clear that you are involved in this activity — is becoming very dangerous, since a lot of the collectors have been arrested.”
The mob’s retrenchment is giving the forces of law and order a smaller target on which to focus. Just last week Palermo’s police chief ordered a renewed drive against racketeering.
There are other factors in play, any one of which could spark off a sea change in the mafia’s strategy.
One is Bernardo Provenzano’s age and apparent infirmity. Informers say he suffers from kidney and prostate disorders. His death could spark a power struggle at the top.
Another potential factor, which police and carabinieri detectives have picked up repeatedly in bugged conversations between mafiosi, is evidence of a split within the Cosa Nostra.
Those suffering the tough jail conditions imposed on organised crime prisoners in the early 90s are bitter about what they see as a lack of progress made by the current leadership towards alleviating their situation. The inmates have allies on the outside who could rekindle violence.
Finally, there is the issue of pride — never a factor to be underestimated in assessing a world where a man’s stock is measured entirely by the ”respect” he engenders.
It is clear, as De Lucia says, that ”the mafia is anything but dead”. But is the Sicilian Cosa Nostra any longer public enemy No 1?
It has certainly retreated a long way from the days in the early 90s when it felt powerful enough to take on the Italian state itself, murdering its top judges in Sicily and then taking its ”war” to the mainland, with bombings in Rome and Florence.
Since then, by allowing Calabria’s mob, the ‘Ndrangheta, to secure a monopoly over cocaine imports at a time when the drug was taking over from heroin as the top money-spinner, the Sicilian mafia may have let itself be unseated as Italy’s top crime syndicate.
This month the Italian interior minister, Giuseppe Pisanu, expressed implicit support for that view when he described the ‘Ndrangheta as his country’s ”most ruthless and powerful mafia”.
There will have been many members of the original Sicilian mafia who will have winced to hear those words, and maybe some who decided the time had come to show they were not true. – Guardian Unlimited Â