Fighting the Mafia & Renewing Sicilian Culture. Leoluca Orlando
was not just a dark fantasy, but a real sociological phenomenon. He did not do this because of some abstract or perverse interest in the subject (which for some Sicilians is akin to an interest in pornography), but because he was interested in the growth of community and the development of democracy, and he knew that the Mafia stood in the way of both.
Father Pintacuda’s interest in Cosa Nostra intensified at the very time that the organization was becoming virtually invisible. The combination of the First Mafia War and the national Antimafia Commission that followed had forced the Mafia to lie low and regroup during the early 1970s. This was also the time of terrorism in Italy, and dealing with the Red Brigades monopolized the attention of the authorities. (Indeed, the situation became so desperate that civil servants allegedly contacted imprisoned Mafiosi such as Tommaso Buscetta, who later became the first Mafia informant, in an attempt to convince them to infiltrate and give information on the terrorists who were also jailed.) But while Italy’s attention was directed elsewhere, the Mafia was not asleep; it was morphing into a different organization with different objectives. After the heroin link between Marseilles and the United States—the so-called French Connection—was broken in 1974, the Sicilian Mafia moved silently into the vacuum. Before, it had smuggled cigarettes and other contraband. Now it was setting up heroin refineries and using these networks, along with its genetic connection to the American Cosa Nostra, to begin a traffic that would make Sicily the narcotics capital of the world.
The capital of that capital was Palermo. Becoming involved in the politics of the city was a natural consequence of the social action Father Pintacuda advocated. And in Sicily, becoming involved in politics meant becoming involved in the Christian Democratic Party.
I was, to say the least, ambivalent about it. The Christian Democrats had become established in the postwar era as a bulwark against communism, including the Eurocommunism that the West regarded as the first step down a slippery slope. Leaders and governments came and went, but the Christian Democrats were eternal. Yet during the time of its hegemony, the party had become smug, oppressive, inefficient, cliental, morally compromised—everything that made me, a committed Christian who should have been a natural constituent, reject them. This was before the web connecting the CDs to the Mafia had been diagrammed; though even without such revelations, it was clear that the party limited the range of opinion and narrowed the spectrum of the permissible so that it was impossible to incorporate any sort of idealism into the political process it controlled.
But then, because of terrorism and economic concerns, Italians (but not Sicilians) rebuffed the Christian Democrats in the national elections of 1975. The party plummeted to its historical low point since the end of the Second World War. Father Pintacuda and I saw this as a sign of hope. Perhaps the party could be reborn into a politics that was both truly Christian and truly democratic. This hope was strengthened by the presence on the Sicilian political scene of a man named Piersanti Mattarella.
Although twelve years older than I, Mattarella too was a professor at the university and therefore my colleague. He had done an apprenticeship in my father’s law firm, and the first time I had met him was when my family was invited to his wedding. But apart from that occasion and good wishes at Christmas and Easter, we had never socialized.
Piersanti was the son of Bernardo Mattarella, one of the most powerful Christian Democrats in Sicily during the postwar era. Bernardo’s star had fallen rapidly, however, after his name had appeared in a report by the Communist minority of the Parliamentary Antimafia Commission as the man “who had striven to absorb Mafia forces into the Christian Democrats so as to use them as an instrument of power.” Piersanti never spoke of his father. It was clearly an extremely painful subject for him, and indeed, the pain became almost tangible on occasions when somebody, with words or looks, would insinuate: “You are different….” Still, his father’s and his party’s experiences were probably responsible for Piersanti’s uncompromising desire to cleanse the Christian Democrats of any such connections.
When I got to know Piersanti Mattarella, he was commissioner for budget in the Sicilian regional government and author of a proposal for a thoroughgoing reform of the outdated regional bureaucracy. Here was a man proposing the laws that desperately needed to be passed if Sicily was to enter the modern age. I felt that we spoke the same language, the language of a new administrative culture—functional, modern, European.
One morning in early 1976, I visited Mattarella in his office. He was a tall, blue-eyed, elegant man with a profound dignity. As I stuttered out my desire to become involved in his political work, he looked at me and said, “You mustn’t worry.” He might have been referring to the party’s past and present situation, as well as to my obvious unease, but in fact I stopped worrying on the spot. Piersanti was gentle and soft-spoken, inspiring one with a sense of confidence. Even though the Sicilian political scene was degraded, he considered politics itself a noble art. He was so sure of himself that he never acted as if he needed to have your consent, yet he always deeply respected your dissent. He was a true and truly devout Catholic, and instinctively a shy man with a gift of quiet courage.
At the end of our first conversation, I felt it was a duty to do what I could to support his effort to cleanse the Sicilian political system, so I finally took out a party card. In my mind, however, it was very clear that I had not become a member of the Christian Democratic Party so much as the Piersanti Mattarella party.
Piersanti had formed a group called Politica, composed of young professionals like myself who met once a week under his guidance to discuss current problems and their possible solutions. It was a group obsessed with politics, but our discussions were really about ethics, as was indicated by the titles of the conferences and debates we organized: “Faith and Politics,” “A Christian’s Commitment in Politics,” “Ethics and Politics.”
Father Ennio Pintacuda was close to our movement and was frequently invited to speak at our conferences or debates. This in spite of the fact that Piersanti was suspicious of the Jesuits and what he regarded as their hidden agendas; he was much closer to the Franciscans and the Salesians, seeing their humility as a truer reflection of Christ’s message of love.
Mattarella’s first big move came at the Christian Democrats’ 1976 regional congress, held at the Hotel Zagarella, a modern, multistoried building owned by Ignazio and Nino Salvo, cousins connected to Salvo Lima and Vito Ciancimino and the Sack of Palermo. The Salvos were a metaphor for what was wrong with our society. They had acquired incredible wealth after getting themselves named tax collectors for Sicily, a post which entitled them to keep 10 percent of all taxes they brought in! They had invested in real estate, vineyards, hotels—all of it networked in a complex way with Mafia holdings. The Salvos were known as “grand electors” of the Christian Democratic Party and famed for saying of certain political figures, “That lemon has been fully squeezed,” after which the lemon would not be reelected.
At the 1976 congress, Piersanti caused a furor by refusing to include his name in the listone, the “big slate” of candidates for Christian Democratic Party delegates headed by Vito Ciancimino, who, since presiding over the Sack of Palermo, had alternately dominated the city’s politics and disappeared into the background. Defying Ciancimino, Piersanti insisted on running a minority slate of his own candidates, my own name among them. (The rule was that any list must get at least 10 percent of the vote to have representation.) Despite the fact that Ciancimino bought off one of Piersanti’s delegates at the last minute, he was unable to keep us from getting the necessary votes, and so we became a presence in the party.
We worked hard over the next year to expand our influence, telling voters that we would clean up the party and make it accountable. And in 1978, Mattarella was chosen president of the Sicilian Region by a vote of our parliament, and I became his legal advisor. He took office at the same time that one of the most terrible events in recent Italian history was beginning to unfold. On the morning of March 16, the Red Brigades kidnapped President Aldo Moro, leaving behind the bullet-riddled bodies of his five bodyguards. The news immediately interrupted all radio and television programs and swept through the entire country within minutes. As soon as I heard it, I rushed to Piersanti’s office.
“This