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Where does the power lie in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra?
28-March-2007
As the first anniversary of the capture of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano, approaches on 11 April, the Italian police continue to build their picture of how the ageing fugitive, who had been on the run for 43 years, managed the organisation’s criminal operations.
One thing Provenzano’s arrest did not do was to precipitate a violent war of succession. The pax mafiosa instituted by Provenzano, who rejected the strategy of violent confrontation with the state, pursued by his predecessor, Salvatore (Toto) 'the Beast' Riina, continues to this day. Rather than fighting over his legacy, his successors appear to have overseen an orderly and relatively bloodless transfer of power. The organisation may now be under the stable control of a triumvirate, investigators say, a return to the state of affairs that prevailed more than 30 years ago.
"There is no doubt that with the capture of Provenzano, the mafia has lost the leader who provided it with its strategic guidelines," says Piero Grasso, the national anti-mafia prosecutor. Grasso identified the candidates for the succession, and possible members of the new triumvirate, as Matteo Messina Denaro, a playboy boss from the western port of Trapani, Salvatore Lo Piccolo, who controls part of the Sicilian capital Palermo, and Domenico Raccuglia, an up-and-coming boss from Piana degli Albanesi, inland from the capital.
"Apart from these three, all the others who might have had a say in the succession are in prison," Grasso says. "The mafia has been governed by a triumvirate in the past. It could happen again." The mafia was governed by three bosses Stefano Bontade, Gaetano Badalamenti and Luciano Liggio in the early 1970s, a state of affairs that was terminated by the arrests of Badalamenti and Liggio and the murder of Bontade. Grasso, the top anti-mafia official in Italy, acknowledged that the police armed with Provenzano’s pizzini may also influence the election of the godfather’s replacement by arresting some or all of the potential candidates. "Unfortunately that is true, even though it is not deliberate," he laughed. "After Riina, Provenzano was favoured by a series of arrests."
The key question for the new mafia bosses, Grasso explains, was whether to continue Provenzano’s strategy of lying low, cutting down on murders, not overtly challenging the state and concentrating on infiltrating civil society and the economy. "The organisation has a vertical structure as far as strategy is concerned, but every family runs its own territory as it sees fit," he says.