Silence Code - And Mafia - Being Broken

ROME - Salvatore Riina faces his accusers with exaggerated politeness and a cloying peasant servility. Arrested this month after 23 years in hiding, Riina says he is a misunderstood old man with diabetes, a heart ailment and nothing to say.

Investigating magistrates know Riina as the boss of bosses of the Mafia, for more than a decade among the most powerful and dangerous criminals on Earth.

"I am not the monster that everyone thinks," Riina told a judge. "That monster does not exist. What really exists is what stands before you, your honor, a poor, sick old man. I have never been part of Cosa Nostra."

Riina, 62, has turned to "omerta," the conspiracy of silence that historically has insulated organized crime in Italy from its pursuers.

Real men don't talk.

But men like Salvatore Riina are a dying breed. It took decades to develop a chink in organized crime's armor of silence. In recent months, the chink has become a gaping hole.

Omerta is dying, the Mafia is bleeding. Italy is riveted by unabashed testimony that ridicules those who remain silent.

It is a historic turning. Better-trained police armed with stiffer anti-Mafia laws are parlaying inside information from resentful and suddenly talkative Mafiosi into Italy's greatest success against organized crime in half a century.

300 MAFIOSI TALKING

"As an institution, the Mafia as we have traditionally understood it is finished," said Col. Domenico Di Petrillo, the Rome commander of a new national anti-Mafia police force called DIA after its acronym in Italian. "It is not dead, but it has a lovely cancer."

Nearly 300 Mafiosi, including about 10 major Cosa Nostra figures, are talking to police with the earnestness of Catholic penitents confessing their sins. Most of the "pentiti," as Italians call them, have slipped quietly in from the cold over the past year.

Many are vengeful victims of Riina's violence in gangland struggles for drug money and power. They are helping to kill Italian organized crime from within.

For bloody decades, nobody talked to the police about organized crime in Italy - until 1984, when a mobster named Tommaso Buscetta made history by becoming the first Mafia boss to defy omerta by cooperating with courageous young Sicilian prosecutors. Buscetta had worked 15 years in the Mafia, long enough to learn first-hand about 121 murders.

LIVING IN U.S.

Now 65 and living under protection in the U.S., Buscetta helped convict more than 300 Sicilian Mafiosi, including Riina, at a trial that climaxed in Palermo in 1987.

At that trial, Riina was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for murder. In a space of 57 days last year, two of the Palermo trial prosecutors, judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were murdered by bombs that also killed Falcone's wife and eight police bodyguards. Riina is accused of ordering both assassinations and dozens of other murders since he shot his way to power as boss of bosses of the Cosa Nostra around 1980.

Italian prosecutors savor the irony now as they watch Riina shielding himself in the silence which once was honored among organized crime throughout southern Italy: the Mafia or Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the 'ndrangheta in Calabria.

"I loved Cosa Nostra; I was fascinated by it," informer Gaspare Mutolo told investigators. "I thought it would guarantee me respect and honor. I believed this for many years."

Mutolo said he first realized how things had changed when Riina began ordering the killings of other Mafia members. Then he understood "that to stay inside Cosa Nostra, all you had to do was know how to kill. Honor has nothing to do with this Cosa Nostra, which is by now in the hands of men who want all the power at any price and all for themselves."

With Riina at the helm of the dominant Cosa Nostra family, about half of the 1,697 murders in Italy in 1992 were tied to organized crime, one study showed.

Riina is from the little Sicilian town of Corleone. As leader of a Corleone-based clan, he expanded its power through the island, destroying the disciplined feudalism among Mafiosi families in Sicily and achieving one-man rule.

In establishing hegemony of the Corleonese - years after novelist Mario Puzo invented Godfather Vito Corleone - Riina became undisputed boss of the Cosa Nostra, centralizing power at a time when drug trafficking became an ever larger part of its income.

"Buscetta and others have talked about how the drugs attracted new people and increased overall ferocity," said Cesare de Simone, an Italian reporter who covers organized crime. "Internal discipline and the respect for territory disappeared. So did the point of honor which insisted that while you might have to kill a man, you'd never touch his wife or kids. Buscetta, who lost nearly everybody in his immediate family, talked about the `desert of death.' The Mafia he joined was gone for good."

TEENAGER GOT LIFE

Giuseppe Marchese, once an up-and-coming Mafia killer, is another gangster disillusioned by Riina's leadership - and talking because of it. When he was arrested after a 1981 murder, Marchese says, Riina sent word: "Don't worry, I'll fix the trial." But Marchese, who was in his teens, got life.

In jail, Marchese says, he was ordered by Riina to kill a Mafia inmate, Vincenzo Puccio, because he "was getting too cocky." "Don't worry," Riina sent word that "they will say that there was a fight in the cell and that you defended yourself. A couple of years and you'll be out." But even as Marchese battered Puccio to death with a skillet inside Palermo's Ucciardone Prison, Puccio's brother was murdered outside. There was no way anybody would believe the cover story of a cell fight.

Defectors are making a mockery of organized crime's once-unbending don't-squeal ethic. At the same time, Mafiosi realize that the Italian people have turned openly against organized crime as business-as-usual. Even in Sicilian towns once cowed into silence, anti-Mafia demonstrations are common and well-attended.

Vito Schifani was one of the policemen killed with Judge Giovanni Falcone, and at the bodyguards' funeral, seen nationwide on television, his widow, Rosaria, spoke to the Mafia from beside his coffin. "I forgive you - but you should get down on your knees," she said.

Leonardo Messina, 37, one of the most important recent pentiti, decided to collaborate after witnessing Rosaria Schifani's anguish. DIA Deputy Director Gianni Di Gennaro said the widow's outburst had also dissolved Marchese's loyalty to omerta.

"I found him frightened; his face showed terror, and he told me that Rosaria's words had caused him great anguish. They made him understand that he didn't want to be a Mafioso any longer," Di Gennaro told the Rome daily newspaper La Repubblica.

One former leader of a drug gang, Francesco Marino Mannoia, says he became disgusted with uncontrolled brutality. His testimony, like much of what his fellow pentiti tell investigators, reads stranger than fiction.

`CRUEL AND HORRIFYING'

"To strangle a man, especially if he is young and strong, you need three or four people; and the whole thing, contrary to what you see in films, lasts for some minutes, not a few seconds," Mannoia once explained. "It is very cruel and horrifying. By comparison, dissolving the body in acid is nothing, because by then the victim has ceased to suffer."

Virtually all the pentiti are already in jail on Mafia-related crimes. In collaborating, all seek shelter under legislation approved last August that shortens the sentences of defectors, pays to support their families and helps relocate them in a rapidly expanding Italian version of America's witness-protection program. At least three major pentiti, in fact, have been resettled in the United States.

"There is tremendous response to the new law. I think we got 15 pentiti in the first 10 days," said anti-Mafia Judge Loris D'Ambrosio in an interview at the Justice Ministry here. "By now, everybody understands: Pentiti get soft time; omerta means hard time."