Mafia’s global activities revealed to FBI

The last known photograph of mafia boss Bernardo Provenzano taken in 1959.

The most senior Sicilian mafioso ever to turn his coat has told FBI agents in Palermo that the Sicilian mob was closely involved in providing Pablo Escobar's Medellin drug cartel in Colombia with advice on military strategy.

Antonino Giuffre, former right-hand man of Bernardo Provenzano, the still reigning capo di capi of Cosa Nostra who has been wanted by the police for more than 40 years, claimed in testimony leaked to the Italian press this week that the Sicilian Mafia also had close and continuous relations with their cousins in America.

Heroin flowed from Sicily to the five crime families of New York, while consignments of dollars and weapons flowed the other way, Giuffre told the Americans, who are in Palermo building a case against the five New York crime families. At one time relations were frequent and personal, he maintained.

"In the old days, the bosses [from the two countries] used to meet during baptisms, weddings and sadly also at funerals," he said. "But since the arrival of spy cameras and other electronic gadgets, these meetings have died out. Many years ago, American bosses used to come to Sicily when a particular man of honour was married, to demonstrate how highly he was valued. And these occasions also functioned as Mafia meetings. They don't do that any more for fear of police investigations." Instead, discreet "messengers" cross the oceans in both directions, bearing polite greetings from their respective chiefs.

But relations have remained close enough for distasteful favours to be performed when necessary, he said. Giuffre recalled the case of a Palermo man 20 years back "who by misfortune had told things to an FBI mole, revealing secrets about the drug trade with America." As a result of the man's blabbing a large number of gangsters were arrested, many of them on the other side of the Atlantic. On the arrival of "a polite request" by the Americans "to punish the traitor", he was murdered.

Giuffre sketched a previously unsuspected role for the Sicilian gangsters back in the 1980s. He claimed that during the rule of capo di capi Toto Riina, the hyper-violent Mafia boss responsible for ordering the murders of the investigators Falcone and Borsellino in 1992, the Mafia also had "a very important role in the strategy of the Colombian guerrilla war" conducted by Escobar's Medellin gang, acting as "military advisers" to the Colombians. He claimed that the Sicilian Mafia's interests in the drug trade in Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, Canada and the Far East were managed by a gangster called Vito Roberto Palazzolo, currently on trial on mafia charges in Palermo.

The Sicilian rule of Toto Riina came to an end when the shocking assassinations of anti-Mafia investigators Falcone and Borsellino in 1992 brought down the wrath of the Italian state and the Mafia came closer to extinction than at any time since the days of Mussolini. Giuffre's next boss was Bernardo Provenzano, credited with having ordered the Mafia to stop killing people and thereby ensured its survival. Mafia watchers in Sicily believe Provenzano has maintained his iron grip, and enabled the mob to recover much of its wealth and influence despite its renunciation of homicide. And according to Giuffre Provenzano also succeeded in keeping cordial relations with the New York families and other Mafia cousins in the US, through a relative called Johnny Stanfa, a Sicily-born immigrant to America who became head of the mob in Philadelphia.

- INDEPENDENT