War… and Peace?

Abstract

The January 1992 verdict of the Supreme Court came as no surprise to Cosa Nostra, but was seen as the last in a series of failures by those who had done a deal with the organization on the basis of reciprocal advantages to keep their side of the bargain. There had been several indications during the previous 12 months of a greater commitment to combat organized crime, against which Cosa Nostra’s former protectors had shown themselves unwilling or unable to act. Judicial impunity — on which the equilibrium of cohabitation between State and Mafia had rested throughout the entire Cold War period — had definitively collapsed, and with it a consolidated system of alliances and clientilistic exchanges that had outlived its usefulness. Cosa Nostra’s response was a tactical one, calculated to sweep away the past and open up new channels of political-institutional mediation with interlocutors unconnected to the old regime. The principal points of contact in the Mafia-institutional interface, Salvo Lima and Ignazio Salvo, were murdered in March and September 1992 respectively; Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, the ‘historic memory’ of the antimafia fight and Cosa Nostra’s most determined opponents, were eliminated in May and July. Their death sentences had been pronounced some ten years previously but suspended until such time as circumstances made them necessary.