CRIMINAL CONSPIRACY

By John Elson

According to an old Italian saying, Chi dorme coi cane si sveglia colle pulci (Who sleeps with dogs gets up with fleas). For proof, look no further than the history of Italy's now shattered Christian Democratic (DC) Party. After World War II, with Washington's tacit approval, some DC leaders formed an unofficial partnership with Sicily's Mafia to block the ominous growth of communism on the strategically important island. The Communists and their then allies the Socialists had together captured 30% of Sicily's vote in the 1947 elections, in contrast to 21% for the Christian Democrats.

As Alexander Stille points out in Excellent Cadavers: The Mafia and the Death of the First Italian Republic (Pantheon; 467 pages; $27.50), this unholy alliance had a dramatic payoff. To the embarrassment of police, Mafia gunmen ambushed and killed the notorious, elusive bandit Salvatore Giuliano, who for years had terrorized rural Sicily. By appearing to abet law and order, the Mafia acquired a prestige and cachet that it had never possessed since first surfacing in the early 19th century.

In exchange for guaranteed votes, Sicily's easily corruptible DC bosses, most of them allied with seven-term Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti, looked the other way as the Mafia embarked on an orgy of grand theft and murder. The beautiful historic heart of Palermo was left to rot while Mafia-allied contractors put up ugly, jerry-built apartments on the capital's rim. Millions of dollars were siphoned from projects that were never completed and municipal services never rendered. Honest officials who tried to block or expose the corruption often became what Sicilians quaintly call "excellent cadavers."

Stille's dense narrative focuses on two implacably determined prosecutors, who with the help of informers managed to breach the wall of secrecy and the infamous culture of omerte (silence) that surrounded the Mafia. Childhood friends from Palermo, aloof, workaholic Giovanni Falcone and the gregarious Paolo Borsellino were, in the author's phrase, Sicilian patriots. Together they painstakingly amassed the evidence that led to the first so-called maxi-trial, of 475 Mafia conspirators, which began in Palermo on Feb. 16, 1986, and ended 22 months later with the conviction of 344 defendants. Both prosecutors eventually paid for their integrity and grit. In May 1992 Falcone and his wife, while on their way to visit his mother, were ambushed and mortally wounded by the Mafia's "men of honor" on a road near Palermo. Two months later, Borsellino and five of his bodyguards died in a similar ambush.

Their death outraged the public and galvanized prosecutors. New turncoats supplied evidence specifically linking the Mafia to a dc faction led by the highly respected Andreotti (who was formally indicted in March on charges that he had served as the criminal brotherhood's political protector). With its leadership in disarray, the Christian Democratic Party -- for half a century the church -- blessed bulwark against the threat of Italian communism-ignominiously collapsed.

Stille's first book, Benevolence and Betrayal, was a gently empathetic account of Italian Jewry under Fascist rule, focused on the misfortunes of five families. Excellent Cadavers has a broader, bloodier scope, and at times readers may find themselves lost in a thicket of unfamiliar names. Stille clearly struggled to humanize his two heroes, whom he never met, and the book's last section, which describes the maxi-trial's political aftermath, seems rushed and scrappy. Excellent Cadavers, nonetheless, is a strong tale of a drama in progress: the Mafia may have been badly bruised, but it has not yet died.