(5 of 9)
During the past several years, three judges, five police officers, a journalist specializing in Mafia investigations, and uncounted mobsters have been murdered as rival families have attempted to ward off investigations and settle territorial disputes. In 1982 General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the prefect of Palermo and the man credited with striking the first serious blows at the Red Brigades, which had terrorized Italy for a decade, was gunned down with his young wife as he drove along one of the city's main streets. The assassination angered even those who had grudgingly tolerated the Mafia. It outraged the outspoken Archbishop of Palermo, Salvatore Cardinal Pappalardo, who was known to have sympathized with the general's efforts to eradicate the Mafia. The churchman blamed the general's death on the government's failure to act. "While our city is racked, Rome is idle," said the primate at Dalla Chiesa's funeral. "Poor Palermo!"
Poor assassins too. Buscetta is reported to have named those involved in Dalla Chiesa's murder and in other killings. He has also drawn a detailed picture of the entire structure of the Sicilian Mafia and explained how its elements relate to each other. The picture surprised some authorities, because it shows an organization that is more collegial than they had imagined.
According to Buscetta, the Mafia structure resembles a pyramid, whose base is composed of cosche, families or clans whose territorial and operational boundaries are strictly defined but whose chiefs bear little resemblance to the almost feudal Mafiosi depicted in The Godfather. In a startling statement, Buscetta disclosed that the capifamiglia, or family bosses, are elected and sometimes even fired by a vote of family members. He asserted that few such men were oldtime "men of honor," the occasionally benevolent criminals who were fully initiated into the codes and rituals of the Mafia. Only 8% to 10%, he said, met these qualifications.
As Buscetta explained it, the second tier of the pyramid is made up of provincial commissions throughout Sicily. These, he said, play a mediating and coordinating role among the families. The Palermo commission used to be the most important, Buscetta went on, but in recent years, the Corleone commission has displaced it.
At the top of the pyramid is the so-called cupola, or commission of ten. Headed by the chief of the Palermo provincial council, the cupola is the body that settles jurisdictional conflicts and attempts to coordinate all activities outside Sicily. Dominated by the more powerful of the clans, the commission should sanction the murder of an important judge or politician, or approve the assassination of an uncooperative Mafioso in New York. Sometimes this system works. But on numerous occasions, says Pino Arlacchi, a sociologist on the staff of the Italian legislature's anti-Mafia commission, it does not. In fact, Arlacchi warns against giving too much importance to the structure Buscetta has described. "Certainly there are divisions of territory, and Mafia chieftains do meet periodically to coordinate activities," says Arlacchi. "But more than 500 murders in two years of the Mafia's internal wars offer ample evidence that there is no structure that can always impose peaceful settlements of internal dispute."