The New Mafia Order
The 'sistema,' which has ruled Sicily since my great-grandparents were children, has grown into a transnational empire of crime, and a trading power of phenomenal reach.
a Mother Jones investigation by Frank Viviano
May/June 1995
PROLOGUE: SICILY, 1972
Spring breaks early and powerfully on the Gulf of Castellammare. The citrus groves west of Palermo are already in fruit by the end of February, and the Sicilian air is so ripe with the odor of lemon and orange that it can make a visitor dizzy. From the sea, hillside villages are splashes of pastel masonry on a brilliant carpet of green
and gold.
In spring 1972, an ambitious young Soviet bureaucrat
named Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife, Raisa, spent 15
days here as guests of the Italian Communist Party. They
were installed in a villa on the Castellammare coast,
overlooking the fishing harbor from which generations of
my ancestors set out for tuna each year. The Gorbachevs
had a future -- that much was obvious to their local hosts,
the leading Castellammare families, who saw to it that the
Russian couple had every convenience.
Two decades later, as he presided over the last days of
the Soviet Union, Gorbachev would tell a biographer that
the sojourn on the gulf had been a turning point in his life,
a vision, a dream. The seeds of glasnost and perestroika
were planted in that Sicilian reverie. A new world took
shape.
But it isn't the world Mikhail Gorbachev dreamed of. It is
its nightmare image, cast in the precise mold of the
Castellammare hills -- the heartland of the Cosa Nostra,
the cradle of the dons. The nightmare has its own logic,
its own bones. Sicilians call it the "sistema del potere."
The system of power.
The sistema, which has ruled Palermo and its countryside
since my great-grandparents were children, now extends
across the face of the globe. Immensely expanded, both
by design and by historical happenstance -- notably the
collapse of the Eastern bloc -- it has grown too large for
its Sicilian architects to rule alone, too far-flung, too
complex.
"A cocktail shaker" of crime syndicates governs the
system now, says Alain Labrousse, founder of the
Observatoire Geopolitique des Drogues, Europe's most
important research center on organized crime. "This is
not something that involves just one mafia, the one we all
know from Sicily, but seven or eight of them, frequently
operating in collusion."
In addition to the Cosa Nostra and its Neapolitan cousin,
the Camorra, the cocktail shaker includes organizations
based in Turkey and post-Soviet Russia; the Colombian
cocaine cartels and their operations in Spain; and ethnic
Chinese triads from East and Southeast Asia, which have
established key overseas bases in Rotterdam and London.
At a lower level, the transport and marketing of
contraband is managed by syndicates of Nigerians,
Moroccans, Pakistanis, Lebanese, Albanians, and a
potpourri of ex-Yugoslavs (who are known to put aside
their fratricidal differences in the interest of business).
Together, they have constructed a state in its own right, a
trading power of phenomenal reach, an Empire of Crime.
Gorbachev's Russia and her lost Asian satrapies are its
vast new hinterland. The wretched of the earth are its
foot soldiers. Sicily is its model -- its dark Platonic ideal.
I. IMPERIAL HINTERLAND:
MOSCOW
When the Gorbachevs vacationed on the Castellammare
coast, Aliya Ibvagimovich was among thousands of
Central Asians crammed into the gritty blocks around
Moscow's Kazan Railroad Station. He ran a thriving
personal enterprise hawking pirated American rock
cassettes and styled himself a hippie. He was probably
the only hippie from Tashkent, Uzbekistan, where he was
born and grew up. "Down there, you couldn't be sure
what the word meant," he told me, filling a water tumbler
to the brim with Jack Daniels. "I knew it had something
to do with long hair and music, and a lot to do with being
different. That was me: I wanted to be different."
In the context of the times -- the long, stagnant reign of
Soviet President Leonid Brezhnev -- Aliya had been a
high achiever. He's still an achiever today, which is what
brought me to his door on a frozen January morning in
1994. I was looking for a new entrepreneur, a story for
the business pages. I'd heard that Aliya had money,
seemed to buy and sell a lot, and owned a large building.
Leads are like that in Moscow nowadays.
Aliya played the game for awhile, spinning patent bullshit
about furniture manufacturing and exports. Then he
started laughing, and reached for the Jack Daniels.
Furniture? Even his dour sidekick, a blond Russian and
former casino bouncer named Sergei, laughed out loud
now. "No divanz, no chairz," Aliya said in a rough pidgin
English, throwing back his head of shaggy post-hippie
hair. "Aliya Ibvagimovich, reketiry, aht your sarveez
Meester Francesco!"
"Racketeer:" He was proud of the very idea, and
delighted to meet an Italian-American -- a Sicilian, no
less. In Moscow, after the Soviet demise, to be a member
of the mafiya is equivalent to being a hippie in the
Brezhnev epoch. It has cachet. It marks you as different,
and powerful, in a city where there are two distinct power
centers but only one that holds much promise. The
political class gathered around Boris Yeltsin runs official
Moscow, which is crumbling into ruin. The reketiry run
the other Moscow, where $75 bottles of Jack Daniels are
consumed like water.
In the first Moscow -- Russia's "legitimate" capital -- a
typical month's pay was the equivalent of $45 when I
knocked on Aliya's door. President Boris Yeltsin's salary
check had just been raised to about $300. Pensioners
drawing $35 per month from the state retirement fund
stood outside public buildings, stamping their feet in the
subzero temperatures, peddling loaves of bread and
family heirlooms to stay alive.
In Aliya's Moscow -- the reketiry Moscow -- scores of
new restaurants, supplied with foie gras from France,
prime beef from Australia, and the wildly popular Jack
Daniels, are booked for weeks ahead; a dinner check for
two begins at $120, and climbs rapidly. Cadillacs are sold
for $100,000 cash at Trinity Motors, just yards away
from Red Square; Audi, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz
showrooms dot the blocks around the Bolshoi Theater.
Their clients drive straight into the attached garages of
solid-oak "executive ranch homes," constructed in the
United States, then dismantled and shipped to Moscow
for reassembly on special high-security sites in the
suburbs.
Nobody in Russia has any doubt about who the
conspicuous consumers are, or how they came by their
money. "Unless you are mafiya, or maybe a diplomat,
you can't even think of such things," Ludmilla
Khachikian, an English teacher, told me. "When we see a
certain kind of car on our streets, a certain kind of
fashionable coat, that's what we all conclude: It must be a
foreigner or one of the reketiry."
Aliya and Sergei took me on a spin one night in Aliya's
fire-engine red Audi, roaring at harrowing speed through
the icy streets. The route was a bewildering zigzag. "You
never know," Sergei muttered opaquely, shrugging his
shoulders.
As we fishtailed into a series of turns, the two men
explained their business. It was quite straightforward; in
mafiya Moscow, there's no particular point to discretion.
Aliya and Sergei are international oil merchants of a sort.
Backed by a network of "friends" -- either palm-greasers
in the government ministries or ministerial officials
themselves -- they fill tank trucks with gasoline bought in
Russia at the state-subsidized price of about 60 cents per
gallon. (If it were any more expensive, Aliya pointed out,
"only reketiry could afford to drive.") The trucks are
driven to the Russo-Polish border near the military
stronghold of Kaliningrad, where another network of
friends in the Polish customs service ushers them across
the frontier. Yet more friends wait at the German border.
The economics are breathtakingly simple. A 60-cent
gallon of Russian regular fetches up to $5.25 in Western
Europe. Sell it on the black market at $4, and everyone is
happy. The difference between four bucks and 60 cents
buys a lot of Jack Daniels and foie gras, fire-engine red
Audis, and ranch homes -- most of which come into
Russia as contraband.
Last year, as Russia's visible economy slid into the
deepest recession Europe has seen since the 1930s and its
gross domestic product fell to just 60 percent of its 1991
level, $60 billion of goods from the West entered the
former Soviet Union -- at least $30 billion of it illegally,
says the Russian Interior Ministry. What paid for it all,
legal and illegal, was the mafiya-induced hemorrhaging of
$45 billion in resources. Russian coal by the thousands of
tons. Azerbaijani oil by the lakeful. Entire forests of
Siberian timber. Miles of railcars stuffed with cotton from
Aliya's native Uzbekistan. Truck after truck of gasoline
from Kazakhstan (and until recently, Chechnya) -- so
many trucks that at one point last summer, the line of
vehicles waiting to cross the Hungarian-Romanian border,
another major contraband gate, stretched dozens of miles
and involved a five-day wait.
The scale of this rape is beyond anything the world has
ever seen. It could only be the work of professionals. Of
a phenomenally efficient system that swallows every
legitimate institution it confronts. Of legions of Aliyas and
Sergeis, backed by armies of friends. Of a conspiracy that
beggars the imagination.
Its most disturbing activity involves neither purloined
timber nor smuggled gasoline. Over the past year,
German police have intercepted several contraband
shipments of enriched plutonium and other nuclear
materials from Russia. Their destinations, almost
certainly, were clandestine atomic bomb laboratories.
The Audi slid to a bumpy stop, next to a fortresslike red
brick building somewhere in the northern sprawl of
Moscow. Sergei was explaining the zigzag ride to me:
"Your public life, you live publicly," he said. "Let the
people see you are a big man. But your private life, if you
are smart, you keep that to yourself. Nobody knows
where our apartments are. We take a different route
every day." Aliya nodded in solemn agreement.
"Insuranz, Francesco," he added.
According to Izvestia, there were nearly 20,000 violent
crimes in Moscow alone in 1993, up 36 percent from the
year before. Nationwide, offenses involving fire-arms
were up 250 percent, to 22,100. In 1993 Russia saw
355,500 crimes officially designated as racketeering, and
nearly 30,000 premeditated murders.
In Moscow, the slaughter included 1,404 suspected
gangland assassinations, and probably thousands more
that went unrecorded. By the end of the first quarter of
1994, the toll was running at 84 murders per day, giving
Russia the dubious distinction of surpassing the United
States' homicide rate -- indeed, more than doubling it.
"The bulk were contract killings, because of conflicts in
the sphere of commercial and financial activity," said
Gen-eral Viktor Yerin, minister of the Interior.
On March 1, Vladislav Listyev, Moscow's most
celebrated broadcast journalist and the newly appointed
director of Russia's main public television station, was
shot dead by assassins at the entrance to his apartment
building. Listyev had announced his intention to suspend
all advertising on the station -- a key source of
racketeering income -- until the industry could be cleaned
up. "The merging of the mafiya with commercial
structures, administrative agencies, interior ministry
bodies, city authorities -- nowhere else in Russia do the
authorities turn a blind eye to these things as they do in
Moscow," admitted President Yeltsin, the day after the
killing.
Pyotr Filippov, director of the government-sponsored
Analytical Center for Social and Economic Policies, who
reports directly to Yeltsin, believes that four out of five
Russian businesses are now paying protection money to
the reketiry, or to their political henchmen. The public
authorities in much of the country are so intimidated by
the mafiya, claims Filippov, that they send requests for
business permits to local god-fathers for approval.
Moscow's chief of police says he is convinced that 95
percent of his own cops are on the take.
An entire generation is coming of age in Russia, says
Filippov, "who will not turn to official authorities, but to
unofficial ones. These people are more likely to hire a
murderer to punish a guilty or even an unpleasant partner
than to go to court."
On February 2, Sergei Skorochkin, 33, a prominent
deputy in the State Duma (parliament), was found dead
in a grove of trees south of Moscow. He was handcuffed
and had a large-caliber bullet hole in his head. Skorochkin
had always been more "businessman" than legislator, and
his business was of a variety that other Duma members
tended to discuss in whispers. In May 1994, he had a
disagreement with a rival businessman and shot him dead
on a busy Moscow avenue, killing a woman passer-by in
the process. Skorochkin was the third Russian deputy
murdered in a year. None of the three killings has resulted
in an indictment.
II. SISTEMA DEL POTERE: SICILY,
1978-1995
The efficiency, brazen reach, and violent machismo of
organized crime in Russia are unmistakably familiar to
anyone who knows Sicily. To someone who also knows
the recent history of the mafia in its Mediterranean
homeland, the emergence of an underworld empire in the
East is an entirely predictable development -- the richest
fruit of a deliberate strategy undertaken in the
Castellammare hills in the late 1970s, not long after
Mikhail and Raisa Gorbachev dozed under the Sicilian
sun and imagined themselves in paradise.
To understand the world of Russia's reketiry, it is
necessary to return to its model. To the sistema del
potere in western Sicily. To a decision, by the very
families who informally hosted the Gorbachevs in 1972,
to expand vastly their horizons.
As in Russia, the activities of these crime lords are blatant
today; and the sistema's hierarchy is open knowledge.
Across the island, people will tell you -- everyone citing
identical figures -- there are 186 ruling families, 67 of
them located in Palermo and the Castellammare
countryside. The district of Cinisi, where the Gorbachevs
vacationed, is "under the authority of Partinico," 10 miles
to the west, one of my cousins explains. "And Partinico is
under the authority of the Provincial Committee in
Palermo, which reports to the Commission for all of
Sicily." When the decision to expand was made, the
Commission had three seats. One belonged to the
Castellammare boss, Gaetano Badalamenti, the unwitting
Gorbachevs' chief local host.
Before the decision was made, organized crime in Sicily
had been primarily local, satisfied with corrupting minor
officials, and comfortably but not extravagantly wealthy.
By the mid-1980s, when the new strategy was fully
operational, the mafia and its allies were bidding for
undisguised control of Italy, and with it, the fifth-largest
industrial economy on earth. By 1990, their ambitions
were trans-European. Today, they are global.
The strategy opened with the declaration of a war pitting
the Castellemmarese and their sometime ally, the
Corleone faction headed by the ruthless Toto Riina,
against two enemies: other mafia clans, who for their own
reasons opposed the new strategy, and the Italian state.
Since the struggle began in earnest, around 1978, as
many as 900 Italians per year have died in its gunfire and
bombings. It is a war without mercy or quarter. Roberto
Mazzarella, Palermo's administrative director of La Rete,
an anti-mafia political party, calls it "la mattanza."
The word refers to a peculiar Sicilian fishing practice, in
which tuna are driven by boatmen into a circle of nets,
then bludgeoned to death while frantically trying to
escape.
I was in Palermo a week after one of the mattanza's
clearest messages was sent to the beleaguered authorities
-- a 176-pound bomb placed in the car of magistrate
Paolo Borsellino in July 1992. Borsellino, who was then
the chief prosecutor assigned to Italy's nationwide mafia
investigations, had just arrived at his mother's home when
the explosives were ignited. The explosion left virtually no
trace of his body, killed five other people, and broke
windows several blocks away.
The Borsellino assassination followed that of his mentor,
Judge Giovanni Falcone, who was blown up two months
earlier with his wife, Judge Francesca Morvillo, when
their car passed over a remote-controlled mine on the
autostrada from Palermo to the Gulf of Castellammare
(photo below). A huge stretch of highway was reduced to
rubble by the blast.
Falcone and Borsellino depended heavily on the
disclosures of the "pentiti," the "penitents," alienated
mafiosi who opposed the Castellammare and Corleone
leaders. The most productive information came from
Tommaso Buscetta (photo opposite), whose testimony
broke the famous "pizza connection" case in the early
1980s -- the first inkling that the Sicilian mob was
involved in big-time international trade. The product was
Sicilian-processed heroin, $750 million's worth per year
exported to New York City alone.
Tommy Buscetta can attest to the gravity of the mafia's
expansive new course, and its awful toll. Since he began
talking to prosecutors, mafia hit men have killed his wife,
his three sons, his parents, his aunts and uncles, his
in-laws and their assorted children. And the toll continues
to rise: On March 6, fully 11 years after Buscetta turned
state's evidence, his nephew Domenico was shot dead. In
all, there are 33 Buscetta corpses.
More significant to the strategy's purpose, the
executioners have assassinated virtually every Italian
political figure who has effectively thwarted their grand
design. The mattanza has eliminated a generation of
honest officials -- in a nation where the breed is
exceedingly rare.
At this writing, more than 6,000 Italian bureaucrats,
corporate executives, and politicians (among them a
staggering 438 deputies and senators) are under
investigation or have been indicted on corruption charges
of one kind or another. One estimate is that the mob has
paid $40 billion in bribes to executives and officials over
the past decade. On March 2, seven-time Prime Minister
Giulio Andreotti was indicted for connections to
organized crime.
As for the honest dead, in addition to Falcone, Morvillo,
and Borsellino, the list includes Michele Reina, provincial
secretary of the Christian Democratic Party in Sicily;
judges Cesare Terranova and Boris Giuliano, the two
officials who presided over the pizza connection
investigation; Gaetano Costa, the chief judge in Palermo's
criminal court; Sicilian Communist Party Regional
Secretary Pio la Torre; Provincial Government President
Piersanti Mattarella; General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa,
Italy's top law enforcement official and the man who
defeated the Red Brigades' terrorist squad; and Judge
Rocco Chinnici, the magistrate who sent Borsellino and
Falcone to Palermo -- and to their graves.
By stunning contrast, in the three decades that preceded
the mattanza, the mafia had targeted just one political
figure.
Roberto Mazzarella, a leading expert on organized crime,
has no doubt about the mattanza's intention. "About a
decade ago, I began to understand that something very
different was happening," he told me. "The mafia was
making an explicit attempt to seize actual power in Italy.
They were corrupting, or decapitating, the legitimate
leadership of the civil state."
Three successive developments accompanied this
strategic leap, and brought its planners rewards beyond
their dreams.
The first was that the mafia began to exploit the
revolutions in transportation and communications that
made a global marketplace possible in the 1970s, before
most of the world's legitimate governments recognized
their im-portance. Starting with narcotics and then
diversifying into other forms of contraband, including
arms and explosives, organized crime became a
pioneering force in international trade. |
