A Boy and His Toys

by Carl Russo

Gaspare Spatuzza let spill yesterday that the Mafia experimented with remote-controlled drones for use against enemies. The reformed hit man (and killer of the now canonized priest Pino Puglisi) said of his drone field tests: "We needed to learn how to pilot it and steer it towards targets, loading it with a modest amount of explosives."

Gaspare SpatuzzaMafia authority John Dickie tweeted about the news report: "Worthy but bit desperate stab at new angle on mafia." He's right: the idea of Spatuzza testing flying bombs is, like, wow, but it's not substantial news. The Mafia, thanks in part to him, accomplished much more mayhem and murder with terra-bound dynamite.

Besides, every time this "pentito" opens his mouth his words end up on newsprint. Like when he told a court that Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and his longtime sidekick, Senator Marcello Dell'Utri, had "practically placed the country in our hands."

But Spatuzza is worth listening to: Dell'Utri began serving a seven-year prison sentence for Mafia association in March, and Beslursconi faces jail time for everything from tax evasion to sex with a minor—not that he'll ever set his solid-gold culo on a cell bunk.

Still, it's disturbing to know that the US killer drone program has a precedent in the Mafia.

Click to read more ...

Deal Me In

by Carl Russo

Italy’s trial of the century will probably last for another century. But, unlike past Mafia trials that prosecuted hundreds of mobsters at the same time, this one is down to only ten defendants. And they're not only mafiosi but also high-placed public officials who are being charged.

Nicola MancinoThe crime? Brokering a secret deal in the early 1990s: in exchange for lighter punishments for its members, the Mafia would stop killing so many of those high-placed public officials. You can read the details of the historic trial—the so-called Trattativa (Negotiation)—here.

This video was shot outside the Palermo courtroom hosting the trial. Nicola Mancino, Italy's Interior Minister during the years of the alleged Trattatvia, is jeered by protestors shouting, "Shame! Shame!"

Mancino is accused of hiding evidence of the covert talks from prosecutors. Earlier, on the stand, he bristled at appearing "in the same trial as the Mafia," i.e., in the company of reviled godfathers like Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano. Mancino wants to star in his own trial, maybe?

Those red books being waved by the demonstrators represent Judge Paolo Borsellino's missing journal, swiped from the wreckage of his assassination site twenty years ago.

Click to read more ...

Love is Cold

by Carl Russo

Of the two Sicilians killed by gunmen on motor scooters this week, only one was a member of the Mafia. It happened in the notorious Brancaccio quarter of Palermo, site of the 1993 assassination of anti-Mafia priest Pino Puglisi. In fact, the victim, a 50-year-old man named Francesco Nangano, was considered close to hitman Gaspare Spatuzza, one of the cleric's murderers.

Gaspare SpatuzzaNangano was driving along Brancaccio's waterfront yesterday when two men on a scooter caught up with him. One fired six bullets, stopping him cold in front of the neighborhood gelateria.

Though only a mid-level mafioso, Nangano has had his fair share of media attention. After serving a few sentences for Mafia association before going on the lam, he was caught, tried and sentenced to life for a murder he didn't commit. Released after nearly five years behind bars, the Italian state cut him a €270,000 check to make up for his "unjust detention."

But there's a soap-opera element to Nangano's story. As a fugitive, in 2001, he carried on a love affair with a social worker who served on the jury of a number of Mafia trials. She defended her man, believing him innocent of every charge they threw his way. Naturally, the woman was relieved of her juridical duties.

Click to read more ...

Boondock Saint

by Carl Russo

A famed anti-Mafia priest gets the Scooby-Doo treatment in the animated kiddie show, “La Missione di 3P.” (After all, “anime” is Latin for “soul.” ) 3P is Padre Pino Puglisi, whose impolitic sermons against the gangsters of his outpost parish in Brancaccio earned him a fatal “rosary of gunshots,” as they say in Italy, in 1993.

As seen in the trailer below, the RAI-TV series adds hair to the ecclesiastic and casts him, appropriately, as a crime fighter. The jazzy show-tune theme has a catchy chorus anyone can translate:

Pino Puglisi“Io parlo con Dio, Dio parla con me.

Pio, amico mio, Pio parla con te.”

But the production is cheap—farmed out to a Korean animation house?—and the didactic tone won’t earn too many young converts. (For junior do-gooders with A.D.D., I'd recommend the new book, Invasion of the Cockroaches: The Mafia Explained to Kids.)

Puglisi is in the spotlight on terra firma as well. His remains will be transfered to Palermo’s grand cathedral and Pope Benedict plans to beatify him in May 2013. I’m all in favor of canonizing a cleric who demonstrated bravery instead of magic tricks, but if kids actually tune in to “La Missione di 3P," we’ll have the miracle, too.

Click to see the photosI’d also like to see sainthood bestowed on another 3P, Pastor Pietro Panascia, even if he wasn’t a Roman Catholic. Panascia organized a protest in 1963 after a car bomb in Ciaculli blew up seven officers of the carabiniere. His demonstration, which he titled “An Initiative for the Respect of Human Life,” was shrugged off by Palermo Archbishop Ernesto Ruffini as “a ridiculous attempt by a speculative Protestant.”

That was the same Ruffini who considered the Mafia to be nothing more than simple Sicilian delinquency and/or a communist plot.

Click to read more ...

The Second Coming of Junior

by Bluto Ray

Those cultured hooligans at the UK zine Sabotage Times have reprinted another piece from this blog—I’ve always wanted to work with Brando!

Which brings me to the biggest news for Mafia watchers this month: the release of convicted hood Giuseppe Salvatore Riina from prison. “Salvuccio” (“Bad Sal”), a.k.a. “Riina Junior,” is the son of a true-to-life godfather from Corleone, Totò Riina, who will stay in prison forever.

Giuseppe Salvatore "Salvuccio" RiinaIt was the second time the paparazzi had staked out the prison gate waiting for Salvuccio's liberation. In January 2008 he was let out early, six years into an eight-year sentence, while the court deliberated over his case. The image of the junior boss emerging from the maximum security fortress in a snow-white puffer vest and pink shirtsleeves had a creepily incongruous Milan Fashion Week vibe. At the end of the catwalk he stepped into an idling black Mercedes to reunite with the notorious first lady of the Cosa Nostra, Ninetta Bagarella, a.k.a. “Mamma.”

The European press ate it up, but the citizens of Corleone—the convict’s old neighbors—were appalled to have him back. (“He’s socially dangerous!” said the mayor.) Within a year, Salvuccio was ordered to finish his sentence for Mafia-related crimes; back to jail he went.

Click to read more ...

Patricide

by Bluto Ray

“Don Puglisi would not be proud of the Sicily of today, a Sicily that doesn't show more indignation,” declared a conservative politician last week at a gathering to commemorate a much loved priest. “The truth is that the Sicily of today isn’t worthy of the martyrs who fought the Mafia.” He berated the island’s young people as “dormant” and “embarrassing.”

Don Giuseppe PuglisiBut the politico’s words rang hollow later that evening as hundreds of teens took to the streets—along with parents, grandparents and teachers—in a torchlight procession to the spot where the cleric was murdered for his opposition to the Mafia.

The name of Father Giuseppe “Pino” Puglisi will be forever associated with Brancaccio, a beat-up fringe of Palermo whose impoverished denizens are doubly cursed by urban decay and Cosa Nostra crossfire. Wedged between cliff and sea, railroad and freeway, smoggy Brancaccio sits in a historic battle zone of mafiosi.

Fearsome hoods like Michele “The Pope” Greco, Pietro “Little Mister” Aglieri and Stefano “The Falcon” Bontade trafficked and killed from Ciaculli to the south to Santa Maria del Gesù to the west. The atmosphere of violence and crime led the Sicilian-born Puglisi to take over the godforsaken parish in 1990, turning down plum assignments in richer neighborhoods despite his illustrious thirty-year career.

Click to read more ...