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To cite this Article Galeotti, Mark, Slade, Gavin, Lambert, Robert, Monzini, Paola, Power, Ben, Schneider, Jane and Allum, Percy(2008)'Book Reviews',Global Crime,9:4,368 — 385
To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/17440570802543664
URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17440570802543664
Pentiti: I collaboratori di giustizia, le istituzioni, l’opinione pubblica, by A cura di
Alessandra Dino, Roma, Donzelli Editore, 2006, 282 pages including index of names and
bibliography, hb 25 euros, ISBN 88-6036-095-1
In the concluding chapter to this important collection of essays on Italy’s pentiti di mafia,
Alessandra Dino, the editor, presents the results of an opinion survey administered in 2005 to
350 men and women of varied occupation, educational attainment and political persuasion in
Sicily’s provincial capitals. Although, interviewees differed in their responses to manyquestions – given that the mafia1 was historically a predominantly west Sicilian phenomenon, the most interesting variations correspond to geographical location – substantial majorities expressed negative views of the nearly 400 men and handful of women who have turned state’s witness against Sicilian organized crime. Antimafia prosecutors and judges have referred to such persons as ‘justice collaborators’ but a determined press and public appear to prefer the designation pentiti, first used in the late 1970s to describe alleged political terrorists who had agreed to collaborate with the police. In its current use, the term pentito expresses a certain irony about the likelihood that former mafiosi genuinely repent – an irony often made explicit by putting quotation marks around the word or preceding it with the locution ‘so-called,’ as in cosi-detti pentiti.
While crediting the pentiti di mafia with invaluable assistance in the arrest of fugitives and
sequester of arms and explosives, interviewees did not see them as candidates for reinsertion in
society and the eventual pursuit of a ‘normal’ life – a stated goal of the criminal justice sector.
Rather, they depicted them simply, and incuriously, as ‘mafiosi who talk.’ And while they
acknowledged that the talk does challenge the mafia’s practice of omerta`, secrecy before
outsiders, they nevertheless devalued pentito testimony as opportunistic, linked to the pursuit of
personal advantage or worse, the pursuit of revenge in on-going cycles of vendetta. To reward
such speech with reduced or abrogated sentences, let alone the support services of witness
protection, was anathema.
Some respondents justified this harsh pronouncement by evoking a concern for public safety;
others cited respect for the victims of the mafia and their surviving kin. Dino, however, goes deeper,
proposing that, whether consciously or not, the tenants of Catholic morality have influenced public
opinion, beginning with the quasi-religious tendency to contrast repentance – understood as a
transformation of the interior person, leading to expiation and redemption but only through serving
one’s full incarceration – with collaboration – understood as a negotiated exchange: mitigated
sentences for accusations against colleagues, in other words for the moral treachery of betrayal.
Judging the pentiti as unrepentant, most respondents considered them almost sub-human – a
judgment that they extended to the collaborators’ wives, although less so to their children.
Not surprisingly, interviewees expressed strong reservations about the other party to the
collaborations, the magistrates, whom they blamed for the notoriously slow course of Italian
justice, and for ‘instrumentalizing’ the pentiti on behalf of their own careerist or political ends.
Stunningly, however, respondents seemed ignorant of the actual laws and institutional
arrangements now governing the collaborative process, and underestimated by far the moral and
political complexity of containing organized crime. Sadly, Dino concludes, the many years of
the antimafia struggle, including all the energy and resources poured into educating the citizenry
for legality, only scratched the surface, leaving a broad swath of the public cynical and detached
– an outcome mirrored in the retreat from an antimafia commitment on the part of important
institutions like the Parliament and the Church. In preparing this book, Dino and her colleagues
clearly intended to sound an alarm.
Between the introduction and conclusion, the text consists of two parts – first, the legal and
political framework, with chapters by Simona Riolo, Gioacchino Natoli, Francesco La Licata
and, as co-authors, Clara Cardella and Marilena Macaluso; and second, the dynamics of exiting a
‘life of crime’ in which Salvatore Lupo considers the American as well as the Sicilian mafia,
while Rocco Sciarrone, the co-authors Monica Massari and Cataldo Motta and Felia Allum analyse cases from ‘ndranghetta, Sacra Corona Unita, and the camorra, respectively. Cutting
across these divisions are three contributions of note: an historical narrative of pentitismo – the
process of collaboration – as waxing and waning through time; insights generated by comparing
collaborator experience in different regions of Italy and the United States; and bringing
collaborators to life as (fully human) protagonists of an epic drama.
First, the historical narrative. As Lupo’s essay insists, not only has the mafia given rise to
antimafia heros and movements since its inception; the police have always found informants
who offered up critical bits of information or sent them anonymous letters, even as these
informants used the police for their own ends. In 1973, however, a new kind of figure appeared in
the person of Leonardo Vitale, who was prepared to testify about the leadership structure, ritual
practices and internecine ‘wars’ of the mafia sodality to which he had belonged since young
adulthood. But Vitale was quickly declared criminally insane and sent to prison, only to be
silenced by an assassin’s bullet on his release in 1984.
By the early 1980s, the state’s suppression of ultra-left political terrorism was yielding
results, assisted by justice collaborators whose contributions to the effort were believed to be
decisive. As expanded drug trafficking, and criminal involvement in real estate and construction,
nourished an escalation of factional strife within organized crime groups in southern Italy and
Sicily, magnifying their threat to public order, legislation governing such collaboration was
extended to the pentiti di mafia (specifically through a law of May 1982). Another
groundbreaking antimafia law followed the September 1982 assassination of antimafia prefect,
Carlo Alberto dalla Chiesa; for the first time, membership in the mafia was itself defined as a
crime. From 1984, the famed pentiti Tomasso Buscetta and Salvatore Contorno confirmed and
expanded on Vitale’s deposition. Important players in the losing faction of a ‘war’ for turf and
influence in the Palermo region, they produced leads, analyses, and testimony that enabled the
indictment and successful prosecution of hundreds of organized crime figures in the ‘maxi trials’
of the mid-1980s. This was the zenith of publicly accepted pentitismo.
In the late-1980s, a backlash developed in which public doubts over possible violations of
civil liberties and miscarriages of justice dovetailed with criticisms of the power of the
magistracy, and with intensified mafia reprisals directed at collaborators and their families. As
the pentiti began to name persons in political, professional and financial institutions who had
colluded with mafiosi while remaining ‘above suspicion,’ powerful elites joined the chorus of
voices delegitimating their testimony. Subsequently, however, the Sicilian prosecutor Giovanni
Falcone, Buscetta’s interlocutor, was transferred to Rome where he energetically pushed for a
new, 1991 law on pentiti that instituted an apparatus for witness protection, rehabilitation and
eventual re-entry in society. This generous package of incentives to collaborate was soon
complemented by a law on tougher sentencing, enacted in the wake of the tragic massacres of
Falcone and his colleague, Paolo Borsellino, in 1992. The further escalation of mafia terror and
fall of the First Republic, whose politicians had long been reliable ‘points of reference’ for
mafiosi, were additional elements in a new conjuncture characterized by ‘mass collaboration.’
The number of pentiti and their relatives seeking witness protection multiplied exponentially
across Italy until the late 1990s.
Inevitably the mere demographic pressure of so many collaborators swamped available
resources and led to scandals (collaborators whose testimony was ‘piloted’ by mafiosi to
contaminate a trial; collaborators who retracted their statements in exchange for amnesty from
the mafia; collaborators whose claims could not be corroborated by converging evidence;
collaborators who returned to lives of crime while living off the state). From the mid 1990s to the
present this situation has stoked the rhetoric of persons, exemplified by former prime minister
Silvio Berlusconi, who distrust the magistracy and are opposed to spending public resources on
‘so-called pentiti.’ Revisiting the generous 1991 law in 2001, legislators tightened the criteria for entering witness protection, reduced the benefits, shortened the time for prosecutors to develop
productive relationships with witnesses, and stiffened the penalties in case of a broken contract.
As several authors in this collection warn, the new obstacles threaten the end of pentitismo,
already in marked decline.
This narrative of the vicissitudes of the collaborative process, applied especially to Sicily,
informs all the chapters of the book, including Dino’s pessimistic assessment of present-day
public opinion, giving it a coherence that is unusual in edited collections. Some of the chapters
offer new, specialized analyses of the historical developments involved. Criminologist Riolo, for
example, explores the implications of a legal framework shifting in response to emergencies of
public order. New measures, passed in the heat of emotional outcries for action, may not fit well
with the rest of penal law. Journalist La Licata focuses on the role of the press and media in
shaping the discourse on pentitismo, assembling contemptuous quotations from influential
sources about the motives of the collaborators; the magistrates who would manipulate them; and
any testimony, however, tenuous, regarding political leaders (First Republic first minister Giulio
Andreotti, in particular). Both historian Lupo and Gioacchino Natoli, a magistrate and former
member of the antimafia pool, reflect on the significance for Italy of United States experience
with prosecuting organized crime – including the Pizza Connection, a transatlantic network of
Sicilian and American mafiosi trafficking in heroin.
Clearly, the US charted a useful path. The first American pentito, Joseph Valachi, was
already revealing important secrets, not least about drugs, in the early 1960s, long before
Buscetta opened up; the RICO act that defined participation in a criminal conspiracy as criminal,
independently of committing any illegal act, dates to 1970, and inspired the drafters of Italy’s
antimafia approach of 1982; and a well-run federal program for witness protection, developed
over the 1970s, gave safe haven to Buscetta and Contorno, there being as yet no comparable
program in Italy. However, as both Lupo and Natoli appreciate, the much greater size and
diversity of the US area and population, and the particularities of its institutional arrangements,
make the relocation of collaborators, and their transformations of identity and occupation, much
less traumatic than in the Italian case, and also less controversial. Fittingly, notes Dino, neither
the American public nor its legislators have insisted on personal repentance as a prerequisite for
collaborators’ hopes for a ‘normal’ life. As Lupo observes, Americans do not refer to
collaborators as pentiti.
The chapters that focus on the organized crime formations of Southern Italy – ‘ndranghetta,
Sacra Corona Unita, and the camorra – raise other points of comparison. For
‘ndranghetta, Sciarrone highlights the relatively low incidence of exit, even during the period
of ‘mass collaboration’ in the mid- to late 1990s, attributing the anomaly to the well known
peculiarities of this organization – its emphasis on kinship in recruitment, role of kin relations in
the maintenance of a stable (Freemason-inspired) ranking system and importance of women in
mediating strategic marriages and cementing loyalty. Seemingly ‘archaic’ in these regards,
‘ndranghetta nevertheless participated in the narco-traffic and urban expansion of 1980s
organized crime. Yet, rather than descend into bitter wars over these expanding opportunity
fields, its leaders multiplied the number of high ranks and ceremoniously promoted more and
more followers, dampening the temptation to collaborate. The essay on Sacra Corona Unita by
Massari and Motta makes an opposite point, in a way. This outfit has a shallow history, coming
together precisely in the context of crime expansion. Lacking historical memory and what we
might call cultural density, its members’ commitment to silence was superficial, their loyalty
shaky at the best. A disproportionately large number of young recruits were eager to cut their
losses and find new lives.
With regard to the camorra, Felia Allum contrasts the pentiti of the 1980s and 1990s. Those
of the 1980s, she shows, were by and large driven into collaborating as a consequence of the stressful ‘war’ between Raffaele Cutulo’s ‘NCO’ (nuova camorra organizata) – small-town
based and aggressively dedicated to building an army out of down-and-out, if not always
criminally competent or reliable, youths in the prisons – and nuova famiglia (NF) the Naplesbased
camorra ‘establishment.’ As in Sicily, the rhythm and dynamics of conflict were deeply
implicated in generating the first wave of collaborators, although here they came from the lowest
ranks – the ‘lumpenproletariat’ – of the aggressor faction, as opposed to the leadership stratum
of the ‘losing group’, as exemplified by Buscetta. After 1992, the motivation to collaborate
shifted, having more to do with state-level transformations than with the dynamics of internal
conflict. Key elements were the new witness protection program, the harsher prison terms for
those refusing to ‘turn,’ and the (at least temporary) loss of reliable political referenti with the
fall of the First Republic. Here too, the parallel with Sicily is marked.
Consistent with their emphasis on the extraordinary complexities and ambiguities
surrounding pentitismo, the authors in this volume refuse to stereotype the pentiti as merely
dangerous criminals trying for a better deal. One chapter, by Cardella and Macaluso, is entirely
devoted to ‘lives under protection.’ It draws our attention to the hazards of protected witnesses
separating themselves not only from a way of life and source of income, but also from a
community, and to the inadequacy of the state’s psychological and social services for picking up
the pieces. Because it is not unusual for collaborators to be denounced by close kin, including
wives, who feel threatened by their change of status, separations from family also occur and with
them the persistent worry that unprotected loved ones will be subject to reprisals. Collaborators
with children face the certain risk of living apart from them, or observing close hand their painful
adjustments to a new home (often diminished, without familiar furnishings and personal effects;
sometimes, indeed, a hotel room), a new school (or schools), a new regional culture, new
nightmares and, in a way, new parents, whose names and identities have been changed.
Supportive women can ease these transitions, but not all women are supportive, nor is it easy for
the collaborator to stabilize his family’s finances, adding to the stress.
Cardella and Macaluso introduce two figures – a collaborator and a collaborator’s daughter
– whose own words, culled from letters they wrote to their attorneys, richly document the
descent of their respective families into disfunctionality and despair (divorces, emergency room
visits, lack of work seem the least of it). They are angry with the state for having squeezed them
hard, then abandoned them as they grew economically and psychologically more needy; they
have problems of physical as well as mental health; they seek moral as well as legal support;
they suffer a persistent anxiety that, having been defined as infame for collaborating, they
and theirs will never escape the terror of anticipated retribution.
Other chapters bring additional pentiti to life through the words they recorded in their
depositions and the testimony they provided in court. From this material, we discover the varied
circumstances leading to collaboration. Self-serving opportunism and a desire for revenge are
not absent, but coexist with more complicated motives – most notably being trapped between
the police and mafia enemies in the context of a mafia ‘war’, seeking liberation from coercive
and greedy leaders; responding to abandonment by one’s criminal ‘family’ upon being put in
jail; feeling exhausted by things that are ‘monstrous’, or things that threaten one’s biological
family. In some cases, intense disillusionment propels pentitismo. Allum describes this dynamic
for the young recruits to Cutulo’s nuova camorra organizata who turned state’s witness in the
early 1980s. Having joined this ‘mafia’ in pursuit of better lives, they found themselves serving
as foot soldiers in a bloody ‘war’.
One might argue that cynical public opinion is unlikely to be moved by stories of the
collaborators’ psychological and economic woes; the premise is that as criminals, they do not
deserve, and can hardly expect, anything better. But the theme of disillusionment puts the
process of collaboration on the somewhat different plane of meaningful history. Along these lines, Lupo criticizes the frequently cited categorical distinction between pentiti of terrorism and
pentiti of mafia, as if only the former subscribed any values or held ideological positions.
We may not like the values of the mafia, but those inducted into it systematically produced a
subculture that laid claim to ideals of a sort – respect and honor, loyalty and secrecy, the
provisioning of protection and order. The violent conflicts of the narco-trafficking era,
unleashing a new level of brutality and treachery, provoked at least some insiders to collaborate out
of disgust.
Contra the stereotypes, such persons do not see themselves as traitors or spies. Perhaps
readers will conclude that the Italian state that for most of its history – including its democratic
history – allowed organized crime groups to fester and spread, owes the pentiti at least the hope
of reintegration as citizens. Absent a viable process of justice collaboration, how else will it cope
with the mafias that still persist?
Jane Schneider
City University of New York
q 2008 Jane Schneider