A mobster's "song" brings a wave of arrests and new details of the drug trade
It was a moonless night in the Sicilian city of Palermo, a night filled with the sirocco, a torrid, noisy wind that blows in across the Mediterranean from the Sahara, moaning through the city's narrow streets and driving its inhabitants indoors. Few if any residents noticed as squads of armored cars raced through the streets and gun-toting officers cordoned off the city into three sections. Nor, except for the street cleaners, who were just beginning their rounds, did anyone see the law men begin rousing out of their beds and hustling off to jail the men whose names appeared on a single, shock ingly long arrest warrant.
It was not until late morning that anyone except those actually in volved in the operation began to realize the import of what had happened. Before dawn on Sept. 29, the day of the feast of St. Michael, patron of the police, Italian authorities had conducted one of the biggest crack downs on the Mafia since Dictator Benito Mussolini's relentless suppression of that fabled criminal organization in the 1920s. Armed with copies of the warrant for the arrest of 366 Mafia members, 140 of whom were already in jail, police rounded up 53. By the time the sun rose, the jails that had been set aside for the operation were overflowing. Before the morning was well advanced, a chartered Alitalia DC-9 had left Palermo, carrying the stunned Mafiosi to prisons in northern Italy, not to protect them but to keep them from warning their confederates that Italy had finally declared full-scale war on the "honored association."
The impact of the raid was enormous, sending a chill of apprehension through the ranks of the Mafiosi whose names have yet to appear on warrants and placing politicians who have long winked at the Mafia on notice that they too might be called to account.
The raid, directed by Palermo Investigating Magistrate Giovanni Falcone, had repercussions in the U.S. as well. Two days after the Palermo crackdown, U.S. authorities ordered the arrests of 28 Americans and Italians in New York, Illinois, New Jersey, Michigan and Wisconsin and began the procedure necessary to extradite them to Italy.
The reason for the roundup was unique. Low-level "soldiers" have occasionally broken with the Mafia and decided to work with the authorities. But for the first time in years, a high-level Mafioso had decided to cooperate. Tommaso Buscetta, 56, known as "the boss of two worlds" for his extensive operations in Italy and Brazil, has spent the past two months singing to Italian and U.S. authorities. His song, like a good ballad, had told quite a tale. Buscetta, who is being kept under close guard in a secluded villa on the outskirts of Rome, had not only reportedly fingered the gunmen responsible for more than 100 murders, including that of Italy's leading Mafia fighter, but documented the existence of a "Sicilian connection" that operated outside established American Mafia organizations to supply much of the heroin that entered the U.S.