In the late seventies Tomaso Razzo had not yet become the Capo dei Capi, the Second Mafia War had not yet broken out, and I was in my early twenties. From my grandfather I had learned a few things about the Mafia's way of doing things. He had taught me about the protection tax, a tax that, while far less lucrative than the drug trade, provided a kind of social security for mobsters who could use the money either to pay relatives of those Mafiosi in prison or to pay off the attorneys of those arrested.Three men headed the Sicilian families at this time—Silvio Buontempo, Giuseppe Buonafortuna and Tomaso Razzo. Silvio Buontempo was the youngest and most glamorous of the three. In the looks department, he had a clear advantage over Razzo and Buonafortuna. His dark brown hair was thick and wavy, and his eyes were large and brown. He drove a high speed Maserati, and headed the cosmopolitan Palermo families. But his good looks had not made him any less ruthless than the other two bosses. It was said that once, after arriving late to a commission meeting, he had explained, “Sorry I'm late, I had to get gas and strangle Gianfranco Russo.” Buontempo worked solely with Giuseppe Buonafortuna, the boss of Cinisi, whose district had, through the heroin ring, grown in importance because of its proximity to the airport. Buonafortuna had not had much luck in his looks. He had small beady eyes, thin wispy hair, and a long, horse-like face. He had made his reputation by slapping an Italian Member of Parliament across the face for not performing up to his abilities. The third capo, Tomaso Razzo, headed the Corleone families. In looks Razzo had fared the worst. He had even beadier eyes than Buonafortuna. He was fat and stocky, and had large clumsy hands. He had risen through the ranks by becoming a trusted ally of Luciano Leggio during the First Mafia War, even saving his life at one point. The Palermitan families, it was said, humored the provincial Corleones out of need rather than out of any real affection.

By some fluke, my Aunt Claudia had married into the Palermo sect. I genuinely liked Aunt Claudia's first husband, Giuseppe “Rings” Crimi. He called infrequently, but when he was in Rome , he usually took me out to lunch and gave me money. They had two sons, Vito and Antonio (Nino, for short), and a daughter Giulietta. Their son Vito I couldn't stand. An arrogant poseur, he exaggerated the number of women he had slept with and shrank when you asked him simple questions of geography, music or biology. The younger son, Antonio, was quieter. He didn't say much, but he idolized his older brother. Their daughter, Giulietta, was the darling of the family. She had the most dazzling green eyes and raven black hair. When Luca was alive, she had flown up to Rome with her mother at least twice a year, but after his death I didn't see much of her or Aunt Claudia. At eight, she was still a shy girl, but we all hoped she would grow out of this once she realized her magnificent strengths. Aunt Claudia's husband, Giuseppe “Rings” Crimi, never bragged about his ties. His son Vito made up for this (probably to prove what a big man he was, and my insignificance in comparison) because he could not keep quiet about the subject.

The seventies were heady times for these Sicilian businessmen. Heroin trafficking had made many people rich. Little old ladies doused themselves in perfume, lined their girdles with H and spent a week at the Ritz in Manhattan . My Aunt Claudia bought Armani outfits and a new Jaguar XJ6, Vito bought a BMW R80 G/S Motorcycle, and Uncle Giuseppe built a kidney-shaped pool in the backyard. As profits continued to roll in, Aunt Claudia redecorated and expanded the house, finally even plating the master bathroom in gold. All this seemed to happen overnight. One day they were like us, and then suddenly they weren't. At this time the Commission held the ultimate authority to sanction killings of either “excellent corpses”—local politicians or law enforcement officials—or “most excellent corpses”—major personalities, civic leaders, important politicians, or powerful businessmen. The beginnings of the Second Mafia War were in this seemingly small event: Razzo requested the death of a well-known colonel in the carabinieri, found it not forthcoming, and decided to kill him anyway. Other law officials followed: the deputy police chief, a judge, even the president of the Sicilian region. All these killings happened almost at the same time as my Uncle Luca's murder. I was like a crazy person at this time. Hardly one thought would enter my head before another pushed it right out again. Many respected intellectuals formulated theories surrounding my uncle's death, and I, so introverted as a child, took it upon myself to publicly accuse both the state and the Mafia of killing my uncle. Livia, who was in the process of suing Roberto Civetta for child support, forgot herself. She could not see me as her son, a man who needed distance from her, but assumed I would now become her partner/husband/lover, someone who by virtue of my relation to her would never be able to abandon her. My half brothers Lorenzo and Pietro were by now seven, and in some misguided way, I think they thought me their surrogate father, too. The very little money I made at Occham's Razor all went back to Livia. As soon as I came home from the bookstore, Lorenzo and Pietro would run into the living room to show me something they had learned, or to tell me about something they had seen on TV or heard on the radio.

When the media arranged interviews with me, I freely voiced my outrage. A Rai Uno reporter, Nando Piersanti, asked how I could be so convinced. “Because my Uncle Luca predicted his death,” I said, “but before he died, he had the foresight to turn over some very important papers to me, papers which are now in the hands of the justice system and which will soon reveal the truth.” This statement was only partly true: Luca had once, in a very maudlin state, after a few glasses of wine, spoken abstractly about getting in too deep, but said he had covered his ass. “Let all the poisons that lurk in the mud hatch out,” he had said, quoting his favorite line from a Robert Graves' book. “I've made some provisions for you, Paolo, and I want you to know your Uncle Luca tried. Promise me you'll make sure the truth hatches out.”

I do remember promising him, although I have often tried to forget. At that time he had also given me an envelope, but I had never had the courage to open it. Instead, when the authorities came to me asking what I knew, I simply handed this manila folder over to them without looking inside. Livia was furious with me for taking it upon myself to lash out against the state and organized crime. Her view was that as absolutely corrupted as both were, my first duty was to the family. She begged me to play down my accusations against Luca's murderers: “At least until things settle down, dear,” she said, stroking my cheek. My boss, Carlo Levi, expressed the same concern, but for less self-interested motives: “You're young, you're handsome. Let them take care of it. Don't try to take all of this onto your shoulders alone. An army of 10,000 couldn't carry the weight, so why should you carry it alone?” But of all the responses, Aunt Claudia's most visceral reaction startled me most. In late 1979 she left a message on my answering machine, “Paolo, honey, this is your aunt. You've been talking to the press a lot recently. Giuseppe and I saw you on the news last night. Paolo, dear, I just want you to know if you ever mention the M— word again, I'll kill you myself. I mean it, with my own two hands. Now my son Vito goes to school (lie), and my husband runs a business (lie): they can't afford to pick up your dirty laundry, Paolo. Now what happened to Luca was a terrible tragedy, terrible , but our family just has to buck up and move on.” Beeep. Before Aunt Claudia made me aware of using the word Mafia , I had not even realized I had said it, or that they had been watching, but over time I began to learn to hold my tongue. I could list off the brave and indignant who had rallied for change and who were now all dead, and, in short, I was afraid.

Not long after this, men associated with Buonafortuna and Buontempo began to disappear, victims of the Lupara Bianca method I mentioned earlier. The Sicilian refineries grew more and more profitable. Some said Buontempo would have to kill Razzo for disobeying the Commission's orders; others worried Razzo would try to kill one of the Palermo bosses. But when Buontempo was murdered on the way home from his son's fifteenth birthday party, we all knew that a gain the code of not killing a boss had been broken, and again a Mafia war was about to begin. This meant little for me personally, but Aunt Claudia, Vito and Giuseppe clearly had reason to be afraid. With Buontempo dead, the Palermo families were exposed. They spoke of retaliation, but Buonafortuna, the boss of Cinisi, did not think the Palermo families were ready yet. What followed was perhaps the most bloodless, but cruelest Mafia war in history. Razzo worked by subterfuge, pitting brother against brother, and actively recruiting the younger and more capable ‘soldiers' of the Palermo faction. He and his henchmen perfected the ‘Lupara Bianca' method. Whole families were wiped out. Toto Banigno lost twenty-three relatives. I lost my Uncle Giuseppe and my Cousin Vito, both of whom disappeared in May 1982. Claudia sold the house, and she and Giulietta moved into Luca's former apartment in the Laurentina district outside of Rome .

The city by this time had ceased to live and breathe as a city, instead functioning as a chaotic mass of separate units fighting for their small piece. There was no nightlife to speak of because after eight the shops closed, the city died, and the Mafia war continued to rage. In a three block area, as many as five bodies might turn up in a given day. The once beautiful, historical city had become a depressed urban center, a city that boasted the largest consumption of cement in the world, a city where basic services, like water, electricity and heat, were shut off not just once a month, but once a week. Historical landmarks were torn down only to be replaced by block, high rise buildings. Projects commissioned in the seventies were never completed. The city's urban planning, widely known to be run by the Mafia, had commissioned projects in which roads began and then abruptly ended. Palermitans were fed up, and a figure like Superman, an outsider with an illustrious reputation, had offered them hope that the battle against the Mafia could be won, so long as it was waged by a man as capable and honest as this one. When Fernando La Terrazza, a Member of Parliament, was killed in broad daylight, the state realized something had to be done.

They called in General Bernardo Superman from the North—a carabiniere, imposing and lock-jawed, a fearless sort who, people said, ate bullets for breakfast. He had been wanted dead by the Red Brigades for years, but, miraculously, he was still alive. I find it difficult to imagine, but my uncle met with General Superman on a number of occasions, and, according to the family of Superman, the two were almost friends. In their private lives, they could not have been more different. My uncle, strictly speaking, was not always a saint. He loved to gamble, especially on horses, had a drug habit—amphetamines, cocaine, sometimes heroin—and frequented brothels. But he had spent some years in the secret service, and, through this, he had developed an understanding of the police forces, the military, the judicial, and the executive branches of the state. When he left the secret service, his rolodex could already have easily provided him with enough stories for many lifetimes over. Luca never told me exactly why they knew each other. He never even expressed the reverence most Italians did when speaking about the general. All I knew was that it had something to do with the so-called “Extremely secret papers.”

Superman had made his name during his tenure as the head of the Terrorist Emergency Agency in the early eighties. His detractors claimed he had reaped the benefits of being the head at a time when former Red Brigade enthusiasts had turned against armed struggle and informed on their former colleagues. Although he had conducted most of these investigations in and around Milan, twice before he had been stationed in Sicily, and through these two previous occasions, he had become familiar enough with the key players on the island, so that by the time he returned to Palermo, in April 1982, he was known by them also. In that same month, a local communist labor organizer known as Pepe LaForza, who had been drafting a complex and radical anti-Mafia proposal which would have made membership in the mafia a crime and which would have also exempted the state from banking secrecy laws, was ambushed and murdered like many others who had opposed Cosa Nostra. At his funeral local teenagers began shouting at the Christian Democrats called to give speeches in LaForza's honor that they were to blame for his death, they were his killers, and they were also part of the Mafia.

In the months that followed Superman did much to give Sicilians hope simply by virtue of the fact that he was not afraid. He spoke at local high schools and received standing ovations. He married a much younger and beautiful Northerner, Isabella Ferrara, who moved to Palermo to be closer to him despite the obvious dangers. He strolled through the mythic town of Corleone linked arm in arm with the mayor. He met with both businessmen and drug addicts. He refused the armored car offered to him and drove around in an old beat-up Fiat. I read about this from Rome, and thought, “I'll be damned. The man will change things if he keeps this up. It is possible that one man can change things,” and the thought filled me, a non-Palermitan, with hope. Claudia, by then bitter and cynical, had declared Superman “a walking corpse,” and even made a wager with her neighbor that he would not live through the month. To my great dismay, Claudia won this bet: Superman and his young second wife were killed just a hundred days after they had arrived. Two kids on mopeds carrying Kalashnikovs pulled up beside the couple's idling Renault and fired a stream of bullets, then, gunned their mopeds up an adjacent narrow side street. His wife was shot first, and he, lunging to protect her, second. The city, and then the nation, erupted in grief. Angry civilians pelted politicians trying to attend his funeral with 100 lire coins: “Thieves, criminals! Will 100 lire do it? No, probably 50 would be enough!” The Italian parliament unanimously passed La Forza's previous proposal, making membership in Cosa Nostra a crime and giving the magistrates and carabinieri the right to investigate the banking records of suspicious persons thought to be affiliated. Without LaForza's bill, the Maxi Trial would not have taken place, and Amabili would never have gone to trial either.

Superman was once loved, but now dead, and the monumental importance of the bill was lost on me. I had lost Luca three years earlier, and since that time I had seen no progress at all. Razzo's illustrious corpses flooded the streets, and my grandfather Giorgio would not drive into the city after dark for fear of being mugged or beaten. The criminal investigation into Luca's murder had been stalled yet again, and no one within my family was prepared to fight to have his case tried. It was Superman's death which convinced me this was no country for the young, but let me set the record straight: I did not marry Sandy for a green card or to escape from Italy . I married Sandy for the simple reason that I was in love with her, and, therefore, afraid of losing her. I am sure I would have left Italy even if I had never met her.

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