Fight Against Mafia In Crucial Phase

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30911, 18 November 1965, Page 23

Fight Against Mafia In Crucial Phase

IN.Z.P.A.-Reuter)

PALERMO (Sicily). Italy’s fight to eliminate the stranglehold of the Mafia in western Sicily has entered a crucial phase.

A big questionmark hangs over the biggest effort since the days of Mussolini to crush the Sicilian secret society.

It concerns the major coup of the Italian police in August In arresting a group of alleged Mafia and Cosa Nostra bosses on charges of conspiring for criminal purposes. Those seized in the swoop Included Frank “Three Fingers” Coppola, aged 75, who was once deported from the United States; Gieseppe Genco Russo, aged 73 and reputed to be uncrowned king of the Sicilian Mafia; and Frank Garofalo, aged 74. Their names have been publicly bandied about as reputed Mafia leaders for many years, but little, or nothing has ever been proved against them. Now the question being asked is whether the courts this time have sufficient evidence to convict them.

The police say that they have built up a fat dossier proving new' and extensive links between the Sicilian Mafia and the Italo-American crime syndicate, Cosa Nostra. SMUGGLING

According to the police, leading underworld figures on both sides of the Atlantic were using Sicily as a springboard for smuggling drugs and tobacco between the Middle East, Europe and the United States.

Some people in Sicily believe that the financial power of the Mafia in the island, which is comparatively poor and underdeveloped, is derived from the rich yields of international narcotics smuggling and links with the American underworld.

The Mafia has a different face in the United States from that in its native Sicily, but in recent years there have been increasing similarities. The United States branch of the Mafia is an enormous crime syndicate described by Mr Robert Kennedy when he was attorney-general as “one of the biggest businesses in America ”

On its home ground in Sicily, The Mafia is a complicated and baffling problem, so extensive in its ramifications that some people even describe it as a way of life, PROTECTION RACKETS In the western part of Sicily, stretching from Palermo across to Agrigento, the Mafia has been dispensing patronage and running protection rackets with apparent impunity for many years, a self-styled “honoured society” protected by the traditional “omerta,” or refusal of local people to talk to the police.

While the Mafia in the United States works as a highly-organised gangster network, in Sicily it is more a mysterious and hidden power, operating in town and country, and preying on peasants and businessmen.

It is what Mr Paolo Traviani, the Minister for the Interior, has called a “gangrene in the body of the State,” which tries to usurp the functions of government. In recent years, the Mafia, in Sicily has moved more into modern protection rackets, in American fashion and has concentrated on trade and industry—building and contracting, electrical household appliances, garages, food markets. The Rome Government has become increasingly aware that its plans to modernise

Sicily and bridge the gap between the industrial north and the under-developed south were being hampered by the Mafia. As bloody gang wars broke out among Mafia members for control of new rackets, the police found themselves with problems of increasing complexity. The climax came in 1963, when nine people, including seven police, were killed in Palermo by Mafia booby traps which exploded in parked cars. Public anger was aroused. Umberto Madia, an energetic Milanese, took over command of the Palermo flying squad, and since then he has rounded up hundreds of Mafia suspects. Mafia killings have dropped from 107 in 1960 to 39 last year. BIG CATCH One of his biggest catches to date is Luciano Liggio, aged 39, the “man without a face,” wanted on many charges ranging from murder to extortion. The other major development 'in 1963 came on the political front. After long delays an Italian parliamentary commission representing all parties opened an inquiry into the Mafia and to ascertain ways of eradicating it. The question is whether the commission will really lift the lid off the Mafia and expose its criminal and political ramifications, even though this may cause embarrassment to some powerful men. The only concrete result of the commission’s work so far has been a new law giving wider powers to magistrates and police in their fight against the secret organisation.