The Sicilian Connection

By Peter Stoler. Reported by Walter Galling and Roberto Suro/Rome and Barry Kalb/New York, with other bureaus

A mobster's "song" brings a wave of arrests and new details of the drug trade

It was a moonless night in the Sicilian city of Palermo, a night filled with the sirocco, a torrid, noisy wind that blows in across the Mediterranean from the Sahara, moaning through the city's narrow streets and driving its inhabitants indoors. Few if any residents noticed as squads of armored cars raced through the streets and gun-toting officers cordoned off the city into three sections. Nor, except for the street cleaners, who were just beginning their rounds, did anyone see the law men begin rousing out of their beds and hustling off to jail the men whose names appeared on a single, shock ingly long arrest warrant.

It was not until late morning that anyone except those actually in volved in the operation began to realize the import of what had happened. Before dawn on Sept. 29, the day of the feast of St. Michael, patron of the police, Italian authorities had conducted one of the biggest crack downs on the Mafia since Dictator Benito Mussolini's relentless suppression of that fabled criminal organization in the 1920s. Armed with copies of the warrant for the arrest of 366 Mafia members, 140 of whom were already in jail, police rounded up 53. By the time the sun rose, the jails that had been set aside for the operation were overflowing. Before the morning was well advanced, a chartered Alitalia DC-9 had left Palermo, carrying the stunned Mafiosi to prisons in northern Italy, not to protect them but to keep them from warning their confederates that Italy had finally declared full-scale war on the "honored association."

The impact of the raid was enormous, sending a chill of apprehension through the ranks of the Mafiosi whose names have yet to appear on warrants and placing politicians who have long winked at the Mafia on notice that they too might be called to account.

The raid, directed by Palermo Investigating Magistrate Giovanni Falcone, had repercussions in the U.S. as well. Two days after the Palermo crackdown, U.S. authorities ordered the arrests of 28 Americans and Italians in New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan and Wisconsin and began the procedure necessary to extradite them to Italy.

The reason for the roundup was unique. Low-level "soldiers" have occasionally broken with the Mafia and decided to work with the authorities. But for the first time in years, a high-level Mafioso had decided to cooperate. Tommaso Buscetta, 56, known as "the boss of two worlds" for his extensive operations in Italy and Brazil, has spent the past two months singing to Italian and U.S. authorities. His song, like a good ballad, had told quite a tale. Buscetta, who is being kept under close guard in a secluded villa on the outskirts of Rome, had not only reportedly fingered the gunmen responsible for more than 100 murders, including that of Italy's leading Mafia fighter, but documented the existence of a "Sicilian connection" that operated outside established American Mafia organizations to supply much of the heroin that entered the U.S.

In the process, Buscetta painted a picture of a 1980s-style Mafia that differs considerably from the all-in-the-family cliches of Mario Puzo's The Godfather. Today's mobster, in both Italy and the U.S., is greedier, meaner and less likely to respect the Mafia's internal code of honor than were the Mafiosi in the generation of his father's father (see box). Officials on both sides of the Atlantic consider Buscetta's break with the Mob a significant gain for law enforcement, which has thus far had only limited success in getting those who really know about Mafia operations to talk about them.

According to Judge Giusto Schiacchitano, one of the Italian state prosecutors involved, Buscetta's revelations "opened doors that before had always remained closed." U.S.

Attorney Rudolph Giuliani, whose territory covers the southern district of New York, said that as a result of Buscetta's disclosures, "we have a whole new area of intelligence that wasn't available to us before." U.S. and Italian authorities hope to use that information to round up even more Mafiosi and crack the Sicilian connection that has smuggled billions of dollars' worth of heroin into the U.S. in the past few years.

Many Mafia leaders are clearly worried. Late last week Leonardo Rimi, a mid-level Sicilian mobster and ally of Buscetta's, was gunned down as he hid in a farmhouse 30 miles from Palermo. Some Italian law enforcement officials interpreted the murder as a warning to Buscetta and to anyone else who might be tempted to talk. There was anxious speculation that the upheaval caused by Buscetta's revelations could produce a new round of all-out bloodletting.

Only hours earlier, Pope John Paul II had issued one of his strongest condemnations ever of organized crime. Visiting the southern Italian village of Paola, he called upon listeners to break "the tragic chain of vendettas" and abandon the Mafia's code of silence, "which binds so many people in a type of squalid complicity dictated by fear."

The probe that culminated in last week's roundup originated nearly a decade ago when the Federal Bureau of Investigation began looking into the activities of the New York Mafia "family" of Joseph Bonanno. The inquiry shed light on a faction headed by Salvatore Catalano, a Queens, N.Y., baker and entrepreneur who seemed to be doing more than selling pizza at his Al Dente pizza parlor. It gathered momentum when investigators obtained evidence that couriers for Catalano's group were transferring enormous amounts of cash through investment houses and banks in New York, Italy and Switzerland.

Court-approved wiretaps turned up other names, including that of Pietro Alfano, the Sicilian-born owner of an Oregon, Ill., pizzeria whose uncle, Gaetano Badalamenti, was suspected of smuggling heroin into the U.S. from Brazil.

The case broke in April, when Spanish authorities, who had been tipped off by the Americans, arrested Alfano, Badalamenti and his son in Madrid. A day later, federal authorities in New York released an indictment charging the three and 28 others with conspiracy to violate drug laws. Within a month, the number under U.S. indictment had grown to 38. According to federal officials, the members of what was quickly dubbed the "pizza connection" had smuggled some 1,650 Ibs. of heroin, with an estimated street value of $1.65 billion, into the U.S during the past five years. The arrests, particularly those in the Midwest, shocked neighbors. Mary Moss, who owns the grain elevator across the street from Giuseppe Vitale's pizzeria in Paris, Ill., spoke well of his product. "He makes a marvelous pizza," she said. "He uses real bacon, not bacon bits."

Even before the discovery of the pizza connection, Italian authorities had been seeking Buscetta, a native of Palermo and an ally of the Badalamenti organization, who had fled Italy in 1970 and gone to New York, where he acquired a second wife, a new daughter and new pizzerias. He also owned property in Brazil, where he was arrested in 1972 when police found 60 kilos (132 Ibs.) of heroin on his farm. Extradited to Italy, Buscetta spent eight years in various jails, living well and even giving away his daughter in a marriage held within the prison's walls. He did not, however, serve out his sentence. Transferred to Turin in 1976, Buscetta behaved so well that an apparently sympathetic judge allowed him to go out by day to work at his old family trade of cutting glass. One night in 1980 he failed to return from his glass-cutting activities. Instead, he went back to Brazil and to a wife, his third, who was so beautiful, according to one Italian judge, that he underwent plastic surgery so that he would remain attractive to her.

In 1982, say Italian authorities, Buscetta slipped back into Palermo with a false passport. The reason for his return: to help his gang and its allies regain the control that had been wrested from it by Luciano Liggio, a tough crime boss from Corleone, one of the traditional Mafia strongholds in western Sicily.

Not even Buscetta's family was immune from the bloodletting. One day, gunmen burst into Buscetta's Palermo pizzeria and shot and killed his son-in-law. A day later, armed men cut down three of his lieutenants. Before long, Buscetta's brother and nephew were dead and Buscetta's two sons had disappeared. They are presumed dead.

Understandably shaken, Buscetta fled back to Brazil, though not to the obscurity he sought. In October 1983, Brazilian authorities picked him up on an Italian warrant and made plans to extradite him to Italy. Fearing what awaited him, the hunted boss of two worlds unsuccessfully attempted to commit suicide by taking strychnine. Facing a probable prison sentence and Mafia vengeance, he decided to talk.

Italian officials were delighted by Buscetta's offer. But they were also skeptical, knowing that no high-level Mafioso was likely to violate omerta, the code of silence, and disclose secrets about the criminal organization. Palermo Deputy District Attorney Vincenzo Geraci was understandably surprised when he met Buscetta in Brazil last June and found him willing to tell what he knew. In their initial interview, Geraci recalled, Buscetta told the prosecutor, "I am not your adversary." A month later, after Buscetta had been extradited to Italy and assured that his family would be protected, he began to talk, said Geraci, "with composure, clarity, self-control and great seriousness." But not, Geraci observed, without sadness. Buscetta had several reasons for opening up to the authorities. One was a sense of disillusionment over what had happened to the Mafia in recent years. "Buscetta is a Mafioso of the old school, a man without scruples but a man of honor," said Geraci. "The Mafia has changed and is no longer an honored society but a band of assassins. His ideology has been crushed."

Some U.S. Mafiosi believe that Buscetta may also be trying to get back at those who kept him out of the Mob's higher councils because he had abandoned his first wife, thereby showing disrespect for the institution of marriage Others see a simpler motive. "He's settling scores," says a former New York detective who has spent most of his ife studying the Mafia. "He's trying to get even with the people who killed his family."

Whatever his purpose, Buscetta has apparently been forthcoming. In a series of conversations lasting through the summer and covering 3,000 pages, he offered a history of the Sicilian Mafia's operations going back, in some cases, to 1950. He volunteered details that authorities had long suspected but never been able to prove. Not since Joseph Valachi, a soldier in New York's Lucky Luciano family, spilled what he knew to a U.S. Senate committee in 1963 has anyone provided such a comprehensive picture of the Mafia and its operations. Said Judge Schiacchitano: "Buscetta has offered confirmation for many, many things that we had learned elsewhere but could not prove conclusively."

He has certainly enlightened the authorities about the Mafia-related killings that have frequently turned Palermo into a war zone.

During the past several years, three judges, five police officers, a journalist specializing in Mafia investigations, and uncounted mobsters have been murdered as rival families have attempted to ward off investigations and settle territorial disputes. In 1982 General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the prefect of Palermo and the man credited with striking the first serious blows at the Red Brigades, which had terrorized Italy for a decade, was gunned down with his young wife as he drove along one of the city's main streets. The assassination angered even those who had grudgingly tolerated the Mafia. It outraged the outspoken Archbishop of Palermo, Salvatore Cardinal Pappalardo, who was known to have sympathized with the general's efforts to eradicate the Mafia. The churchman blamed the general's death on the government's failure to act. "While our city is racked, Rome is idle," said the primate at Dalla Chiesa's funeral. "Poor Palermo!"

Poor assassins too. Buscetta is reported to have named those involved in Dalla Chiesa's murder and in other killings. He has also drawn a detailed picture of the entire structure of the Sicilian Mafia and explained how its elements relate to each other. The picture surprised some authorities, because it shows an organization that is more collegial than they had imagined.

According to Buscetta, the Mafia structure resembles a pyramid, whose base is composed of cosche, families or clans whose territorial and operational boundaries are strictly defined but whose chiefs bear little resemblance to the almost feudal Mafiosi depicted in The Godfather. In a startling statement, Buscetta disclosed that the capifamiglia, or family bosses, are elected and sometimes even fired by a vote of family members. He asserted that few such men were oldtime "men of honor," the occasionally benevolent criminals who were fully initiated into the codes and rituals of the Mafia. Only 8% to 10%, he said, met these qualifications.

As Buscetta explained it, the second tier of the pyramid is made up of provincial commissions throughout Sicily. These, he said, play a mediating and coordinating role among the families. The Palermo commission used to be the most important, Buscetta went on, but in recent years, the Corleone commission has displaced it.

At the top of the pyramid is the so-called cupola, or commission of ten. Headed by the chief of the Palermo provincial council, the cupola is the body that settles jurisdictional conflicts and attempts to coordinate all activities outside Sicily. Dominated by the more powerful of the clans, the commission should sanction the murder of an important judge or politician, or approve the assassination of an uncooperative Mafioso in New York. Sometimes this system works. But on numerous occasions, says Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist on the staff of the Italian legislature's anti-Mafia commission, it does not. In fact, Arlacchi warns against giving too much importance to the structure Buscetta has described. "Certainly there are divisions of territory, and Mafia chieftains do meet periodically to coordinate activities," says Arlacchi. "But more than 500 murders in two years of the Mafia's internal wars offer ample evidence that there is no structure that can always impose peaceful settlements of internal dispute."

Such murders, Buscetta told authorities, were not only the product of territorial rivalries but also the result of battles for top positions between new bosses, who had not previously been accepted by the majority of Mafia members, and old bosses, who often found themselves abandoned by their families. Much of the combat was between the Sicilian Mafia's two major factions, the Palermo gangs and the Corleone families. This ended a year ago, when the Corleone groups established a degree of hegemony and took four places on the ten-member commission.

Buscetta's revelations offered authorities in both the U.S. and Italy a deeper understanding of the ties between the New York and Sicilian Mobs. They challenge the widely held view of the Mafia as a centrally organized entity with branches in the U.S. and Sicily. Instead, they depict it as a looser network of groups in Sicily, the U.S. and elsewhere, linked by a combination of business, personal and family connections. Buscetta's disclosures, in fact, confirmed what investigators had first suspected several years ago, that there are really two Mafia groups working in the U.S.: one composed of the old families that began operating in the U.S. during Prohibition and later branched out into gambling, prostitution, labor rackeleering and, more recently, toxic-waste disposal, and the other a "branch office" established by one of the factions of the Sicilian Mafia. The Sicilian branch cooperated with the U.S. Mafia but did not take orders from it.

Buscetta showed, though, that these two Mafias need each other. The traditional U.S. families began with the immigrant "mustache Petes." They were succeeded by the gangsters of the 1920s and '30s, who were quick to settle their differences with violence. These founding godfathers eventually gave way to more sophisticated criminals, who discovered that buying politicians and law-enforcement officials was just as easy as, and more effective than, shooting them. But the modern U.S. Mafia has fallen on hard times, say federal authorities. With their sons and heirs becoming assimilated and choosing the boardroom over the back room, and with their ranks depleted by the Government's limited but expanding success at prosecution, U.S. capi since the early '60s have found themselves increasingly short of manpower. The Sicilian families have provided the new blood, sending over a generation of immigrants who are very tough and far more willing than their U.S. counterparts to submit to the discipline required of anyone who joins the Mafia's underground army.

The American dons liked the newcomers, who offered them the respect that they got all too rarely from their own offspring. But as one East Coast capo told TIME Correspondent Jonathan Beaty, the hot-blooded Sicilians have also escalated the level of violence in a world that already had too much of it. "This new generation," he sighed. "All they know is shoot, shoot, shoot."

The Sicilian Mafia began to provide heroin. In the old days, say federal authorities, opium was grown in Turkey, shipped to Marseilles, France, where it was processed by Corsicans, and then imported into the U.S. by American Mafia families headed by the Genovese family and others. The cracking of the so-called French connection in the early 1970s and the virtual elimination, under U.S. pressure, of opium growing in Turkey all but closed that international trade route.

The consequence was that by the mid-1970s there was a vacuum that the Sicilian Mafia was all too eager to fill. As law-enforcement authorities have suspected-and Buscetta has now confirmed--Palermo has replaced Marseilles as the center of Europe's heroin business. Authorities estimate that some two tons of pure heroin (worth billions of dollars at street prices) are produced in Palermo each year from opium smuggled into Italy from the Golden Crescent of Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Heroin can often be bought in New York City's Times Square 48 hours after it leaves Sicily.

The Sicilian connection, say authorities, made heroin smuggling easier because its participants knew each other.

"When the Mafia bought from the French connection, they paid up front because they didn't trust each other," says Giuliani. "But these people don't do business that way. They do it with a handshake, because they have been doing business with each other for such a long time."

In a typical deal, explains Giuliani, Alfano and his people would agree on a quantity of heroin to be delivered and set a price with Giuseppi Ganci, Catalano's chief lieutenant. The money would be wired from brokerage accounts at major firms to secret accounts in Switzerland, where it might remain for three or four months before a member of the Badalamenti family collected it. Meanwhile, as a sign of trust between the two groups, the heroin would be delivered. The actual smuggling is done in innumerable ways. One example: a year ago, FBI agents examined a load of ceramic tiles being shipped from a company located near Milan to an address in Buffalo. When they looked inside the hollowed-out beams of the wooden pallets that held the tiles, they found 40 Ibs. of heroin. Replacing the heroin with a look-alike substance, the FBI allowed the shipment to proceed and followed it to its destination with arrest warrants for eight people. When they raided the address to which the heroin was sent, they found an additional 20 Ibs., plus handguns, jewelry and $150,000 in cash.

Authorities in Italy and the U.S. had long suspected the existence of the Sicilian connection, and in the late 1970s rapidly expanded joint efforts to expose and eliminate it. The cooperation has become extensive. U.S. authorities have traveled to Italy to share information with their Italian counterparts; Assistant U.S. Attorney Charles Rose flew to Brazil last year after Buscetta's arrest. Only hours after those named in the Italian arrest warrants had been taken into custody in the U.S., top law-enforcement officials from both countries met at the Justice Department in Washington to make plans for combined police actions and prosecutions in the U.S. and Italy. The 14-member Italian-American working group has encouraged local law-enforcement officials. "It's about time law enforcement got as organized as organized crime," says Giuliani.

Aiding the joint effort is a new extradition treaty (see box). Italy has requested the extradition of at least 16 men rounded up last week in the U.S. Giuliani indicated that he expects Buscetta to be brought to the U.S. to provide general information on the Mafia. And possibly for his own safety. Some law-enforcement authorities speculate that Buscetta can be better protected in the U.S. than in Italy, where Mafia dons have long found it even easier than their American counterparts to run their affairs from prison cells. Some Mafiosi, however, feel that Buscetta's days are numbered wherever he is. Asked how long he thought Buscetta would survive, one New York family man merely shrugged and offered his questioner a cup of coffee.

Many officials in both countries believe they are on the verge of a major breakthrough in their long, only partly effective war against the Mafia. Flushed with the success of their campaign to combat the political terrorism of the Red Brigades, Italian authorities have been moving against the Mafia with increasing vigor in recent months. Meanwhile, the U.S. has also been doing better as it has stepped up its attack on organized crime. According to FBI Director William Webster, narcotics investigations alone produced 700 convictions in the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30, 1983. Justice Department investigations have produced such minor victories as the 1980 conviction of Joseph Bonanno for trying to thwart a grand jury investigation, the 1980 conviction of Crime Family Boss Frank Tieri for racketeering, and the 1981 conviction of New Orleans Crime Chief Carlos Marcello for conspiracy in a bribery and kickback scheme.

These convictions have not crippled the Mafia, which, as both the 1981 fatal bombing of Philadelphia Mobster Philip Testa and the recent indictments of New York mobsters for conspiracy in connection with Suffolk County garbage collections attest, is amply active. The President's Commission on Organized Crime, established last summer, estimates that the Mafia takes in up to $168 billion a year in the U.S., or more than the gross domestic products of Greece and Austria combined. Says FBI Director Webster: "There are few businesses or industries in our communities that are not affected by organized-criminal enterprises. This brand of crime is costing the American people billions of dollars every year."

Nor is the Mafia any less active in Italy, where organized crime has a hold on every major city. In Sicily, the old Mafia has infested every aspect of the island's life. Once known for its poverty, Sicily may now be addicted to a rich diet of drug money. Some Sicilians, in fact, wonder how anything will ever get done without the Mafia to navigate a hopelessly tangled bureaucracy. As a Palermo businessman said last week, "Our city administration is so bad that without the 'friends of friends,' how are we ever going to get anything accomplished? At least with the Mafia, you knew how to fiddle it."

Prosecutors in the U.S. and Italy acknowledge the Mafia's continuing influence but are convinced they can reduce it. Italian authorities insist that last week's roundup, which was organized secretly and carried out with military precision, will be followed by more arrests as they question those in custody and pursue the leads laid out by Buscetta in his statement. U.S. officials are equally encouraged. "This is truly a historic occasion," said U.S. Attorney General William French Smith, "because this is the first tune that there has been an arrangement of this kind developed between two countries that has been made up of policy-level officials who have the authority to make decisions."

The optimism is understandable. Buscetta's decision to break with the Mafia has given the police voluminous information and may encourage others to sing as well. It has also provided other would-be Mafia renegades with a model and given law enforcement a major psychological boost. Says Giuliani: "This is the type of work where you don't get many victories. It's enormously important as an example that someone at a very high level has broken his silence."

Dramatic as they may be, Buscetta's revelations have painted only a small part of the big picture of Mafia organization and activity. U.S. and Italian officials point out that Buscetta has revealed far more about the activities of the Corleone families than he has about his own Palermo organization. They suspect that despite his talk about honor, the Sicilian singer may lose his voice once he has finished implicating his rivals. They also note that the loose-tongued Buscetta is a rarity and that most Mafiosi still respect their organization, and value their lives, sufficiently to keep silent.

Yet Buscetta's disclosures, and the very fact that he was willing to make them, indicate that the seemingly solid facade of the Mafia has its cracks. By continuing the cooperation that has brought them this far, U.S. and Italian authorities can widen the gaps. With patience and persistence they may even widen them to the point that the Mafia's facade crumbles. Doing so will be neither quick nor easy. But as last week's events show, the goal is worth pursuing.

-- By Peter Staler.

Reported by Walter Galling and Roberto Suro/Rome and Barry Kalb/New York, with other bureaus

With reporting by Walter Galling and Roberto Suro/Rome and Barry Kalb/New York