Facing the Mafia - La Mattanza (chapter II, part 2).

Category:

Mafia

Palermo's freeway after a major bomb attack from the Mafia.

In fact, in the following months more notable Italian figures were murdered in Palermo. The Mafia was, indeed, challenging the Italian State with its vicious war. Again and again, the Mafia kept murdering the servants of the Italian State sent in Sicily to fight the Mafia, and to many Italian citizens it looked as a losing war.

As the months went by I felt really afraid for the Sicilians as the the Mafia had once again killed an other great Sicilian man. This time the man to be murdered was Giovanni Falcone.



Giovanni Falcone (May 18, 1939 – May 23, 1992) was an Italian magistrate who specialized in prosecuting the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. He was killed by the Mafia, together with his wife and three of his bodyguards, by a 350 kg dynamite explosion placed beneath the freeway from Palermo Airport to Palermo near the town of Capaci.

Palermo's highway after the bomb attack to the Sicilian magistrate Giovanni Falcon.

At this news, I cried. I wanted to kill one by one with my bare hands those responsible for this atrocious crime (I couldn't really express my anger by just writing it here). That murder was an other brutish way from the Mafia, to eliminate a resolute man of justice.

Capaci was the small town where I was used to go in summertime for fishing, and that freeway was the same freeway I took the last time to get to the Palermo's Airport, before I embarked into a flight that was bound for New York.


Now, my desolation was complete.

The mattanza keeps going on.

After two only months from the death of Giovanni Falcone, an other tragic assassination reaches me through the American's mass medias. This time, was the turn of Paolo Borsellino to be murdered by what seemed an unstoppable Mafia's arrogance.



Paolo Borsellino (January 19, 1940 - July 19, 1992) was an Italian anti-Mafia magistrate who was killed by a Mafia car bomb in Via D'Amelio, Palermo, less than two months after his friend and fellow anti-Mafia magistrate Giovanni Falcone had been killed by the Mafia. The bomb attack also claimed the lives of five policemen: Agostino Catalano, Walter Cosina, Emanuela Loi, Vincenzo Li Muli, Claudio Traina.

(Palermo)- Via D'Amelio after the bomb attack to the Sicilian magistrate Paolo Borsellino.

This new murder was extremely unpleasant and extremely serious, it added to the sum of more than a thousand of murders, the highest officials of the Italian State being murdered on the Sicilian streets in the space of few years: a mattanza! This freakish word, "mattanza" which I have learned in my youth, keeps coming back like a terrifying nightmare.

The turning point to the mattanza.

Going back in Palermo where the mattanza of highly Sicilian figures keeps going on, but slowly things starts to change even at the magistracy's level.

Thanks to the pentiti (collaborators with justice, or informants) of the Mafia that are testifying against their former associates.

Among the most famous Mafia pentiti (informants) is Tommaso Buscetta, the first important pentito (informant), who was very helpful to judge Giovanni Falcone in describing the Sicilian Mafia Commission or Cupola, the leadership of the Sicilian Mafia in the 1980s, and identifying the main operational channels that the mafia used and uses for its business.

And with Tommaso Buscetta start talking even bosses of the caliber of Francesco Marino Mannoia, Salvatore Contorno e Antonino Calderone.

La mattanza finally reaches its end.

Together with the informants' revelations and the magistrates' investigations, also all the investigative work from a police squad led by De Gennaro with their phone's interceptions, their following of suspects, and all their paperworks, finally, all these hard work starts to pay off, with a series of incriminations toward the men of the Sicilian Mafia.

All the incriminations emanated by the Italian judicial system will bring to the police blitz of San Michele (that's how it was called) with hundred of arrests in a single day. At last, the result of all these arrests will take to the maxi trial.

The Ucciardone's penitentiary.

The maxi trial with its 474 arrests accused of Mafia associations, began in Palermo in the 1986 inside a bunker next to the penitentiary institution of the Ucciardone. Among all the accused there are names such as Luciano Liggio, and Pippo Calò said to be the Mafia's cashier. The trial ended on December 16, 1987, almost two years after it commenced.

Palermo 1986 - Mafia's maxi trial video.

Red's note: Unfortunately, this video is only in Italian. I really sorry that I couldn't find an English translation of it.



The dark years of the Sicilian mattanza are finally over. Until...

Next: Facing the Mafia - Between mafia's myths and realities.

Facing the Mafia - La Mattanza (chapter II, part 1).

Category:

Mafia

The tuna fishes, "Mattanza".

The word, "mattanza" how is related to Mafia and what it meant to me? I have to go back to a couple years after I had immigrated in the U.S. to answer to this question.

First off, the term, "mattanza" is an heritage left after different centuries of Spanish dominations of the Sicilian island, and it originated from word matar, meaning to kill. There are two specific contexts where the word, " mattanza" has been used like expressions in every day Sicilian life.




In first context, the word mattanza is used for the killing of tuna fishes in the Mediterranean Sea. For hundreds of years, fishermen in Sicily and Sardinia have used dense nets to capture the Mediterranean blue fin tuna (thunnus thinnus) in a quasi-spiritual procedure known as the mattanza (if you like to read more about it, here is the link for: Mattanza

In the second context, the word mattanza has been used for a different Sicilian expression. Even though, it still meant to kill something, this time the killing wasn't a tuna fish but a human being. And to be more exact, it meant to kill a lot of people with methods of ferocious assassinations, like the same ferocious methods used to kill a large number of tuna fishes in the Sicilian seas.

Now, going back to a couple years after I had immigrated in the U.S. and I learned a bad news by watching the TV. The bad news was that a man was brutally murdered by a Mafia's reprisal, and this man wasn't just a common man but he was also the embodiment of an ideal, a hope to finally defeat the Mafia. That man was, " Il generale Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa".

I cento giorni a Palermo di Dalla Chiesa.
( The one hundred days of Dalla Chiesa in Palermo.)

The general Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, was the new prefect of Palermo which was sent in Sicily by the Italian government after the premature death of Pio La Torre (of course, a premature death inflicted by the Mafia), to fight the Mafia.

Pio La Torre (Palermo, December 24, 1927 – Palermo, April 30, 1982) was a leader of the Italian Communist Party (Partito Comunista Italiano, PCI). He was killed by the Mafia after he initiated a law that introduced a new crime in the Italian legal system, mafia conspiracy, and the possibility for the courts to seize and to confiscate the assets of the persons belonging to the mafia conspiracy.

Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa was the man that had defeated the Italian terrorism, "the red brigades" and because of this success he was sent in Sicily with full powers granted to him, in the hope to defeat the Mafia. Unfortunately, in the paper was given to him full powers, but in reality was given to him none.

In fact, the Italian government was accused by many Italian citizens to have betrayed Dalla Chiesa's trust in the Italian institutions by leaving him alone to fight the Mafia. Consequently to this betrayal, he was left very vulnerable to the attacks of the Mafia that already had marked him as a dead man.

Before he was brutally slaughtered in his car together with his young wife Emanuela Setti Carraro by a Mafia's ambush on September 1982, had just passed one hundred days of his takeover of the Palermo's prefecture. Also I wanted to remember here, in the same attack died, "Domenico Russo" who was a police agent in escort with his armored car to Dalla Chiesa. On the place of the massacre, an anonymous citizen had left to the wall a paperboard with written on it a few bitter words:

Here died the hope of the honest Sicilians.

I was tremendously shocked and angered by those few words because were accurately telling a truth. The truth that the Mafia had killed the only man capable that could have given back to the Sicilian people, a hope of rebirth from the miseries and the abuses of a Mafia's historical impositions.

Even though I was living in the U.S., I felt at the moment defeated because the Mafia had won once more, first by enforcing me to leave my Sicily and now by making me feel like I had betrayed my land because I fled from it without a real fight.


When the TV's news was parading in front of my eyes those cruel images of the Dalla Chiesa's assassination, I couldn't believe it! Those streets were so familiar to me. Indeed, those streets were the same streets from where I grew up. The same streets, where I used to play soccer in my adolescence. And now, those images were broadcasted around the world. I felt an increasing desperation as the news went on. At some point, I started to hit the wall with a couple fists to calm down my rage.

What I didn't realized that time was, the Mafia's killing spree had just started. In other words, the Mafia's mattanza hadn't finished its job but it was just beginning.

Continue...

Next: Facing the Mafia - La Mattanza (chapter II, part 2).