Arrested in 1994, the Graviano brothers are implicated in the most serious mafia massacres. Since then, they have never cooperated with the justice system.
Two streetlamps light up the asphalt, full of cracks and potholes, that disappears into the darkness. There are no pavements: the road, barely wide enough for a single car, ends where the houses begin. Low-rise blocks, in some cases only a ground floor. Walls mottled with missing plaster, metal doors streaked with rust. Roller shutters, suspended electricity cables, bent aerials on asbestos roofs. Anonymity and silence. It is here, amid patched asphalt and laundry hung from windows, that two young men in their twenties grew up. Whose names had not yet made the newspapers: the brothers Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano.
It is dark, before dawn on 7 January 1982, along vicolo Chiazzese, in the heart of the Brancaccio district, in Palermo. Two wars are under way. The first pits the "new mafia" of the Corleonesi — Totò Riina, Giovanni Brusca, Bernardo Provenzano, Leoluca Bagarella — against the "old mafia" of Gaetano Badalamenti, Stefano Bontate, Giuseppe Di Cristina, Giuseppe Calderone.
Palermo, in the 1980s, is largely beyond state control. The mafia, divided into families (mandamenti), controls the territory: illicit dealings, starting with drug trafficking, and legitimate ones, necessary for laundering money. From construction to commerce, from industry to tourism. The mafia has infiltrated everywhere — the institutions, the law enforcement agencies, the courts. It is a parallel state that, on the ground, provides employment, dispenses favours, helps candidates get elected, distributes wealth (in its own way). And for this reason it is not even universally regarded unfavourably by the population, a not insignificant portion of which — partly out of fear, partly out of self-interest — pretends not to see. And when it does see, it guarantees omertà.
Driving the mafiosi is a lust for power, but also the desire to accumulate money. And while up to a point the division of the spoils had satisfied everyone, around the turn of the 1970s and 1980s the situation changes. The Corleonesi demand total control of the rackets and the territory. And they take it.
The second war under way in Palermo is instead the one pitting the mafia, as a whole, against the state. In January 1979 the journalist Mario Francese is killed. On 9 March, the provincial secretary of the Christian Democracy party, Michele Reina. On 21 July, the head of the Palermo flying squad, the police officer Boris Giuliano. On 25 September, the judge Cesare Terranova is shot dead, together with the marshal Lenin Mancuso, who was escorting him.
On 6 January 1980, Sicilian regional president Piersanti Mattarella — brother of the current President of the Republic Sergio Mattarella — is shot and killed. During the night of 3–4 May, Carabinieri captain Emanuele Basile, commander of the Monreale company, is murdered while walking with his wife Silvana and their seven-year-old daughter Barbara in his arms, on a public holiday. On 6 August they kill the magistrate Gaetano Costa, the one who issued arrest warrants against the men of the Spatola, Inzerillo and Gambino clans — warrants his colleagues had refused to sign. And so on. Until 29 July 1983, when the judge Rocco Chinnici is killed.
Police officers, Carabinieri, judges, representatives of the institutions. Anyone who works against the interests of the mafiosi ends up in the crosshairs. And the trigger is often pulled. "Palermo like Beirut", run the newspaper headlines the following morning, alluding to the Lebanese capital, gripped by civil war.
The Graviano brothers are still young, but they know perfectly well what surrounds them. Including on that 7 January 1982, in the narrow confines of vicolo Chiazzese, when a man comes down the stairs of his home. He is a successful businessman. A mafioso. He runs a property company, Emiro Srl. Well known, prominent, successful, talked about. His name is Michele, and he has four children: Benedetto is the eldest, Nunzia the youngest. In between: Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano. The most aggressive, the most ready to make the big leap.
Michele Graviano does not know that those will be his last steps. He too is a designated victim of the first of the two wars: the one who pulls the trigger is Gaetano Grado, a trusted man of Bontate. He himself confesses to the murder: from 1999 he decided to cooperate with the justice system, spilling everything he knew. Grado, in 1982, is one of the survivors of the "old mafia", together with Totuccio Contorno: those who answered to Stefano Bontate, killed on 23 April 1981. The "old mafia" of the "Palermitans", precisely, against the "new" one led by the Corleonesi. The "old mafia", by now decimated, seeking revenge in the streets of Brancaccio. More out of a thirst for blood and retaliation — Grado's brother had been killed — than out of any attempt to reassert its presence in the neighbourhood, which already appears impossible.
After the killing of Michele Graviano, it is commissioner Ninni Cassarà who is the first to open the file bearing his name. He finds entanglements, connections, money going out and money coming back. He investigates, he digs. The police officer is killed three years later, on 6 August 1985, while returning from the police headquarters to his home at via Croce Rossa 81.
In the months following Michele Graviano's death, the Corleonesi believe that it was actually Contorno who killed him. But they also know that Grado has remained loyal to the old guard. The counter-revenge thus begins. And, in the absence of certainty, both are struck through cross-revenge: Michele Jenna, a business associate of Contorno's hitman (who would later also lose his lifelong friend Giovanni Di Fresco), is killed, as is Francesco Paolo Teresi, the brother of Grado's brother-in-law (who would subsequently lose his cousin Antonino).
The two murders do not, however, appease the anger of Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano. The two young men aim to climb the hierarchy and win favour with the new mafia. Especially Giuseppe, soon nicknamed "Madre Natura". Because he "provided for everything", in a territory where the state, as noted, was conspicuous by its absence. He is the third in age but the first in ambition. From 1990, the two would serve as regents of the Palermo mandamento of Brancaccio-Ciaculli, in place of the boss Giuseppe Lucchese (who had been arrested). A consecration, with the blessing of Totò Riina.
When the latter was arrested, in January 1993, the vertical command structure — though still composed of family heads who were very much present and powerful in their own territories — was decapitated at its apex. There were still many bosses at large, however: there was Bernardo Provenzano, who would receive Riina's legacy of command. There were Cosimo Lo Nigro, Brusca, Bagarella, Antonino Gioè, Giacchino La Barbera. There was the Trapanese Matteo Messina Denaro (the only non-Palermitan admitted). And there was Giuseppe Graviano himself, not yet thirty.
The mafia bosses, with Riina now behind bars, gather in Santa Flavia, a town of a few thousand inhabitants less than 20 kilometres from Palermo, on the seafront. On the other side of the Tyrrhenian Sea, political Italy trembles under the blows of the Mani Pulite investigation. It is the time when nomenclatures collapse and parties crumble. Political leaders file through the trial of manager Sergio Cusani over the maxi-bribe of 150 billion lire paid by the Enimont group to virtually the entire parliamentary spectrum — most of them stuttering in the face of questions from public prosecutor Antonio Di Pietro. Former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi appears before the Chamber of Deputies and invites any colleagues who can swear they have never heard of murky transactions within their parties to stand up and say so. Not one of the 630 deputies has the courage to do it. Italians' distrust of the political class has never been so great. The so-called "First Republic" collapses, and Italy finds itself staring into the unknown.
In Santa Flavia, the participants in the mafia "summit" know that the country is weak, vulnerable. And they decide the unthinkable: it is here that Cosa Nostra's strategy of mass slaughter is born. Filippo and Giuseppe Graviano, before being arrested in 1994, manage to string together an impressive series of crimes, both those carried out directly and those they ordered. Giuseppe, who is serving a life sentence in Terni prison without ever having turned state's evidence (like his mentor Riina), has been accused by a number of informants of having pressed the button on the remote control that on 21 July 1992 blew up a Fiat 126 packed with TNT in via D'Amelio, the moment Judge Paolo Borsellino had stepped out of his car to visit his mother. Dying alongside him were his escort members Emanuela Loi, Agostino Catalano, Vincenzo Li Muli, Walter Eddie Cosina and Claudio Traina.
The mafia's fury then turns against the state's heritage. In 1993, the Corleonesi organise a series of bombing attacks: on 14 May an attempt is made, unsuccessfully, to kill journalist Maurizio Costanzo in via Ruggero Fauro in Rome, guilty in their eyes of having repeatedly hosted Judge Giovanni Falcone on his programme. And, together with his colleague Michele Santoro, of having organised "anti-mafia marathons" broadcast almost simultaneously across all networks.
On 27 May a car bomb packed with almost 280 kilograms of TNT explodes in via dei Georgofili, in Florence. The target: the Galleria degli Uffizi and the Corridoio vasariano. Five people die, among them a newborn baby and a nine-year-old girl. Forty-eight people are injured.
On the evening of 27 July another car is blown up in via Palestro, in Milan, in front of the Galleria di arte moderna. Three firefighters, a police officer and a Moroccan migrant sleeping on a bench are killed. Less than an hour later two more bombs explode in Rome: at three minutes past midnight in Piazza di San Giovanni in Laterano, in front of the Basilica di San Giovanni; five minutes later beside the church of San Giorgio in Velabro. By pure chance there are no fatalities, but twenty-two people are injured.
The Graviano brothers have been considered the masterminds behind all the attacks of that tragic 1993. Including the brutal crime in which Father Pino Puglisi lost his life. A street priest, who cleaned up the streets. He was the parish priest of the church of San Gaetano, in the heart of Brancaccio. He never missed an opportunity to remind his congregation that there was an alternative to the mafia. That such devastation could not be accepted. That it was necessary to rebel.
On 15 September Puglisi was returning home to Piazzale Anita Garibaldi. It was 8:40 pm. It was his birthday: he was turning 56. Don Pino had stepped out of his white Fiat Uno and was almost at the front door when one of the two hitmen called out to him: "Father, this is a robbery." But the priest knew perfectly well that it was not: "I was expecting you," he replied. From behind, a single pistol shot was fired into the back of his head.
Yet numerous other facts and circumstances are striking. The Graviano brothers were different from the Riinas and the Provenzanos. The latter, when he was arrested, was living in an anonymous house, like any ordinary person. Filippo and "Madre natura", by contrast, before ending up in handcuffs, frequented boutiques, luxury hotels and restaurants. They spared no expense on holidays or clothes. And they did so far from Palermo: in Omegna, on Lake Orta, in Piedmont. They felt safe: they went out in public with their faces uncovered, went shopping. They did not live the life of fugitives.
In his essay "I fratelli Graviano", journalist Salvo Palazzolo paints a disturbing picture of evident collusion, which may perhaps have reached into deviant branches of the state. Filippo and Giuseppe perhaps kept, and still keep, secrets that cannot be confessed. Even today, after nearly 30 years in prison. They had built a network that evidently made them feel protected. Until 27 January 1994, when they were arrested while dining in a restaurant in Milan, together with their respective families.
Three years later the Court of Assizes of Caltanissetta sentenced Giuseppe Graviano to life imprisonment for the Capaci massacre, along with numerous other bosses. In 1999 came the conviction for the via D'Amelio massacre. In the same year, the conviction for the murder of Pino Puglisi. Finally, in 2000, the conviction (alongside Provenzano, Bagarella and Riina) for the attacks in Florence, Milan and Rome. Today Giuseppe Graviano is serving a life sentence in Terni penitentiary. His brother Filippo is instead held in Parma. He too must serve life imprisonment.