Sicilian Mafia Commission
"Contrary to the wide-spread image presented by the media, these superordinate bodies of coordination cannot be compared with the executive boards of major legal firms.
Their power is intentionally limited [and] it would be entirely wrong to see in the Cosa Nostra a centrally managed, internationally active Mafia holding company," according to criminologist Letizia Paoli.
[5] It was Tommaso Buscetta who definitively revealed the existence and workings of the Commission, when he became a state witness and started to give evidence to judge Giovanni Falcone in 1984.
Other magistrates, in particular Corrado Carnevale – also known as the Sentence Killer – of the Supreme Court (Corte di Cassazione), sustained that Mafia associations are autonomous groups, not connected amongst themselves, and therefore, the collective responsibility for the Commission members did not exist.
Carnevale's view prevailed at the appeal of the Maxi Trial, but at the theorem was confirmed upheld by the final sentence of the Supreme Court in January 1992.
Many Mafia bosses were condemned to life in prison and Cosa Nostra reacted furiously and started a series of revenge killings because of the Supreme Court sentence.
The meeting came at the tail end of a violent Mafia war in Palermo over the fruit and vegetable wholesale market that was moved from the Zisa area to Acquasanta near the port in January 1955, disturbing the delicate power balances within Cosa Nostra.
[8] Originally, to avoid excessive concentration of power in the hands of a few individuals, it was decided that only "men of honour" holding no leadership position within their own family – in other words, simple "soldiers" – could be appointed as members of the Commission.
It had exclusive authority to order murder of police officials, prosecutors and judges, politicians, journalists and lawyers, because these killings could provoke retaliation by law enforcement.
On June 30, 1963, a car bomb exploded near Greco's house in Ciaculli, killing seven police and military officers sent to defuse it after an anonymous phone call.
In this period, the Commission was increasingly dominated by the coalition led by Totò Riina and Bernardo Provenzano that was opposed by Gaetano Badalamenti and Stefano Bontade.
Riina and Provenzano secretly formed an alliance of mafiosi in different families, cutting across clan divisions, in defiance of the rules concerning loyalty in Cosa Nostra.
Beside using violence, the Corleonesi also imposed their supremacy by shrewdly exploiting a competence of the Commission: the power to suspend leaders of a family and to name a reggente, a temporary boss.
Members of the Commission were no longer freely selected by the provinces but were chosen on the basis of their allegiance to Riina's faction, and eventually were only called to legitimize decisions that had already been made elsewhere.
The Corleonesi slaughtered the ruling families of the Palermo Mafia to take control of the organisation while waging a parallel war against Italian authorities and law enforcement to intimidate and prevent effective investigations and prosecutions.
According to Buscetta: "With the power gained by the Corleonesi and their allies the traditional organizational structures had a purely formal value … the decisions were taken before … and the Commission was nothing but the faithful executor of orders."
Since the arrests as a result of the revelations of pentiti such as Tommaso Buscetta, Salvatore Contorno, Francesco Marino Mannoia and Antonino Calderone, and the Maxi Trial in the 1980s many Commission members ended up in jail.
In 1992 the Commission that decided to kill the politician and Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti’s right-hand man on Sicily Salvo Lima and the judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino was composed of:[7][20] Provenzano proposed a new less violent Mafia strategy instead of the terrorist bombing campaign in 1993 against the state to get them to back off in their crackdown against the Mafia after the murders of anti-mafia prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
The incarcerated bosses are currently subjected to harsh controls on their contact with the outside world, limiting their ability to run their operations from behind bars under the article 41-bis prison regime.
Antonino Giuffrè – a close confidant of Provenzano, turned pentito shortly after his capture in April 2002 – alleges that in 1993, Cosa Nostra had direct contact with representatives of former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi while he was planning the birth of Forza Italia.
During a court appearance in July 2002, Leoluca Bagarella suggested unnamed politicians had failed to maintain agreements with the Mafia over prison conditions.
Nevertheless, the Italian Parliament, with the support of Forza Italia, subsequently prolonged the enforcement of 41 bis, which was to expire in 2002, for another four years and extended it to other crimes such as terrorism.
Riina and Bagarella felt betrayed by political allies in Rome, who had promised to help pass laws to ease prison conditions and reduce sentences for its jailed members in exchange for Mafia support at the polls.
The SISDE report says they believed that hits on either of the two embattled members of Berlusconi's Forza Italia party — each under separate criminal indictments — would have been less likely to provoke the kind of public outrage and police crackdown that followed the 1992 murders of the widely admired Sicilian prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino.
Among the rivals were Matteo Messina Denaro (from Castelvetrano and the province of Trapani), Salvatore Lo Piccolo (boss of Tommaso Natale area and the mandamento of San Lorenzo in Palermo), and Domenico Raccuglia from Altofonte.
[30] After the arrests of Benedetto Spera, Vincenzo Virga (both in 2001) and Antonino Giuffrè in 2002 (who decided to cooperate with the authorities), the leadership of Cosa Nostra was in the hands of the fugitives Bernardo Provenzano, Salvatore Lo Piccolo and Matteo Messina Denaro.
The Direzione Investigativa Antimafia (DIA) cautioned that the capture of Provenzano could potentially present mafia leaders an opportunity to return to violence as a means of expressing their power.
Study of the pizzini showed that Provenzano's joint deputies in Palermo were Salvatore Lo Piccolo and Antonio Rotolo, capo-mandamento of Pagliarelli.
Rotolo had passed a death sentence on Lo Piccolo and his son, Sandro, even before Provenzano's arrest – and even procured the barrels of acid that are used to dissolve the bodies of slain rivals.
From tapped phone conversations and surveillance, police had obtained a full list of those present and those who had sent their apologies, as well as details of the issues discussed and the decisions adopted.
