Repentance, operations and poison: the story of Contorno, the Raven and the shadows of the anti-Mafia movement

Turncoats come and go. A travelling troupe that accompanies them and sometimes manages them. An irritating misunderstanding that nips any attempt at reason in the bud: anyone who raises the slightest doubt (about the repentant criminals and their entourage) is automatically nailed to the cross of ‘anti-anti-Mafia’ or automatically labelled a reactionary and an enemy of Legality (that one, with a capital ‘L’, brandished by a select few, and distinct from the other, with a lowercase ‘l’, which is simply the heritage of us all).

The return to the limelight of Giovanni Brusca, who, as a free man, has ‘lifted the veil’ (bear this metaphor in mind) on the Mafia massacres of ’92 and ’93, provides a valuable opportunity to explore an incredible black hole in the history of the fight against Cosa Nostra: that of the relationship between state witnesses and representatives of the state.

According to Brusca, the massacres of 34 years ago were used “as a political tool, as if they had been suggested by the left” to give Berlusconi a helping hand. So, returning to the metaphor, he did indeed lift the veil, but on the lifeless body of a theory – like it or not – thoroughly debunked by the court rulings. All this in defiance of the law against ‘installment-style’ statements, which requires a cooperating witness to reveal everything they know within six months of the start of their collaboration. Brusca, who was granted the status of state witness in 2000, had never spoken about ‘Il Cavaliere’: who knows, perhaps between the memory of a child dissolved in acid and the recollection of a finger on the remote control at Capaci, a miracle has reignited his memory.

His long-standing lawyer is Luigi Li Gotti, who has also acted as defence counsel for other state witnesses such as Tommaso Buscetta, Francesco Marino Mannoia and Gaspare Mutolo. He is the key figure in the relationship between the public prosecutor’s offices and state witnesses, who would sign a letter of appointment appointing him as their legal representative, often on the formal recommendation of the investigating authorities and the Central Protection Service. A delicate role that Li Gotti has reconciled with his penchant for politics. His early days in the MSI, his activism in AN, his move to Italia dei Valori, and his post as Under-Secretary of State for Justice in the Prodi government bear witness to his vocation as a tireless navigator of the corridors of power.

Among Li Gotti’s clients was also the turncoat Salvatore ‘Totuccio’ Contorno, who is the true protagonist of this story. Today, those who are scandalised by Brusca’s return and by the attention paid to his hackneyed theories clearly do not remember or are unaware of Contorno’s exploits, which led to the most embarrassing and most hushed-up episode in the history of the anti-Mafia struggle. It is the story of the mysterious return to violence of a turncoat in Sicily and of an anonymous figure who would find a name thanks to a coffee cup, lose it thanks to an erased fingerprint, and vanish forever due to the incompetence of those who hunted him down. To recount this story, we must return to Palermo in the late 1980s and its perilous jungle: a world of snakes, moles, crows, and a Falcone.

“First Light” – In the 1980s, in Palermo, many members of Cosa Nostra were killed at the hands of the “Corleonesi”, who unleashed the Mafia war. In April 1981, among others, the “Prince of Villagrazia”, Stefano Bontate, was assassinated; he was a high-society Mafia figure, educated by the Jesuits at Gonzaga and with strong Masonic ties. Salvatore Contorno, nicknamed “Coriolano della Floresta” after the character of the same name in Luigi Natoli’s novel I Beati Paoli, had been Bontate’s bodyguard and knew that he would be the next to die. Indeed, a month later, he escaped the ambush in Via Giafar: alone, with a child by his side, against nine hitmen.

Totuccio is no strategist, but he is a determined soldier. The sophistication of his thinking lies entirely in a logical pendulum that swings between a thirst for revenge and a survival instinct. Every now and then the former prevails, but without affecting the latter. You don’t need a sharp mind to live by bloodshed; you need the skill to ensure that the blood is always someone else’s.

Contorno flees Palermo and makes a desperate attempt to reorganise the army of survivors – those who have not yet fallen victim to Riina and his cronies. In March 1982, he was arrested in a villa in Bracciano that had been converted into his headquarters, complete with weapons and drugs. A few months later, he met police commissioner Ninni Cassarà and began cooperating. He was given the code name ‘Prima luce’.

Following the San Michele raid on 29 September, which led to the arrest of 366 members of the Cosa Nostra, Contorno was secretly brought before Buscetta, who had recently turned state’s evidence. The meeting between the two mafiosi resembled a scene from a Francis Ford Coppola film. With the police officers holding their breath, Don Masino welcomed Contorno, who kissed his hand. The boss of two worlds looks at him and says solemnly: “Totuccio, you may speak.” And Totuccio speaks. First and foremost, he confirms Buscetta’s statements. His testimony underpins the backbone of the maxi-trial, which, with 475 defendants in the dock, becomes the most significant indictment of the world’s largest criminal organisation. He then flies to the United States, where he assists American investigators with the ‘Pizza Connection’ – the inquiry into the massive drug trafficking and money-laundering operation run by the ‘export mafia’. And little by little, Totuccio Contorno, the former ‘Prima Luce’, fades from the headlines, if not from memory. Until the dawn of Friday 26 May 1989.

Sabbia – “The former head of the Palermo mobile squad, Arnaldo La Barbera, told me about operations to tamper with weapons so that they could be altered. He told me about pistols and rifles taken to Ostia, filled with sand so that they would not match the ballistic results of the bullet casings found on the bodies of the murder victims prior to Contorno’s capture.” Thirty-five years later, in 2024, the former police officer and IT expert Gioacchino Genchi – who was in charge of the wiretaps that led to Contorno’s arrest – is testifying before the judges. The chapter on the sand-filled weapons is the most disturbing part of this story. It is the story of a mafia boss who was supposed to remain across the ocean but who instead found himself exactly where he should not have been: the land from which he had fled so as not to end up buried there prematurely.

It so happened that in the spring of 1989, the Palermo police, led by Arnaldo La Barbera (a key figure in the mysteries of Palermo and beyond), were searching for Gaetano Grado, a powerful, fugitive boss whose standing within the Mafia hierarchy is known only to those in the know. Grado is not a high-profile name. He is a mafioso who operates behind the scenes, but the lack of fanfare does not make him any less dangerous. In short, Gaetano Grado is a major figure in Cosa Nostra. On the morning of 26 May 1989, the officers raided a villa in San Nicola l’Arena, a hamlet in the municipality of Trabia, less than thirty kilometres from Palermo. Grado was in the bedroom with his partner. Meanwhile, from a caravan parked a short distance from the villa, a man fled through the citrus grove surrounding the area and tried to make his way to the coast. The officers who stopped him could not believe their eyes. It was Totuccio Contorno. He claimed to be there because he had come to visit his cousin Gaetano Grado. Immediately after the raid on the villa in San Nicola l’Arena, the police carried out a search of the property. However, in the caravan where the turncoat was staying, the search was conducted only superficially and yielded nothing but a sawn-off shotgun. Two days later, thanks to another search – this time carried out by the Carabinieri – an arsenal was uncovered.

Searches carried out in stages were a hallmark of those times. They served to divert attention from more complex and less palatable strategic plans. It would happen again four years later, with Riina’s hideout remaining untouched for days, a case that would trigger a gruelling exchange of accusations between Gian Carlo Caselli’s Public Prosecutor’s Office and Mario Mori’s ROS Carabinieri unit.

But let’s get back to the raid on San Nicola l’Arena: the investigators believe they have uncovered a story waiting to be written.

The Triangle of Death – Gaetano Grado, known as Contorno, is one of the survivors amongst the losers of the Second Mafia War. The suspicion is that he has reorganised his business operations (primarily drugs, in the trafficking of which he specialises) and that he has devised a plan to take revenge on the ‘Corleonesi’. It is no coincidence that, during those months, around ten Mafia members aligned with Riina’s men were killed. And they all died there in that area, between Bagheria, Altavilla Milicia and Casteldaccia, in the so-called ‘triangle of death’. In short, all the evidence is there to launch an investigation with potentially explosive consequences. Above all, there are those pistols and rifles to be examined to determine whether they are linked to the fresh corpses found in those districts. But this matter is easily swept under the carpet. How? By wiping the slate clean. By ruining the weapons with sand, as the former police officer Genchi would recount in 2024 during the Caltanissetta trial concerning the obstruction of the Via D’Amelio investigation: “The weapons were taken to Ostia and sandblasted…”. A bombshell statement, recorded in the minutes. And yet those words flow away in the trickle of everyday news, causing no more than a faint stir.

What is Contorno doing in Sicily? Wasn’t he in America for legal and security reasons? “It’s just a matter of money; I have to support my family,” he explains. Initially, whilst in the United States, Contorno received a monthly allowance of one thousand three hundred dollars. His wife and teenage son live with him. In September 1988, the informant expressed his intention to return to Italy, because the US authorities had told him that, from November onwards, they would no longer be paying him: to earn a living, he would have to work as hard as anyone else. But he says he cannot find a job. Despite strong advice from both American and Italian authorities against his return to Italy, on 18 November the state witness and his family flew back on a Pan Am flight.

Why the rush? Why are the Italian and American authorities so accommodating? In Italy, Salvatore Contorno has no particular obligations, apart from calling his contacts at Criminalpol every day to let them know where he is: in fact, he spends hours on the phone with the top police officer Gianni De Gennaro, who will shortly become head of the Central Operational Service. He moves about almost freely. The Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of the Interior, the judiciary in Palermo and the judges presiding over his trials are informed of his return. But the news does not filter through the barrier of confidentiality maintained by those in the know. He attracts little public notice. Then, on 18 May 1989, Contorno disappears without a trace. He is arrested eight days later in a sequence of events that, were this a work of fiction, would strain credulity.

The police in La Barbera, who are hunting down the fugitive Gaetano Grado, had not been informed of the turncoat’s return. Following some suspicious activity at a villa in San Nicola l’Arena – and in particular around a telephone box near the nearby railway station – the officers began staking out the area. It was then that they realised Contorno was present and that there was a direct link between him and De Gennaro. From that moment, a disturbing theory began to take shape—one that would never be confirmed, yet for which there were no convincing counter-arguments either: Salvatore Contorno had reportedly returned to Sicily to assassinate Totò Riina, then the most wanted man in the country. To do so, he is said to have exploited his family ties with the boss Gaetano Grado, who was supposed to summon Riina to a Mafia summit in order to set the deadly ambush in motion. But someone is said to have warned the head of Cosa Nostra of the trap; indeed, he did not turn up for the meeting, causing the criminal plot to fail.

Was Giovanni Falcone aware of all this? It is unclear. What is certain is that Contorno was speaking on the telephone with De Gennaro, a police officer very close to Falcone, and was using code words to refer to the movements of people in an area not coincidentally known as ‘the triangle of death’, where, at that very time, there had been many murders committed by the criminal faction opposed to that of the turncoat.

The spectre hanging over the Maxi-trial – Two separate trials were held in relation to the weapons found in the San Nicola l’Arena hideout. One was against Grado and his partner, who were convicted. The other was against Contorno, who was acquitted due to insufficient evidence. Why were the cases split? Why was the first search of the caravan carried out in such a hurry?

Faced with these questions, the emergence of a new theory is causing alarm amongst the magistrates on the front line in the fight against the Mafia. It is a cold and grim dawn, mirroring the fear that all the work done up to that point might be in vain. The spectre looms large over the Maxi-trial.

On 16 December 1987, after 349 court hearings, 1,314 cross-examinations and 635 defence closing arguments, President Alfonso Giordano had read out the verdict in the first major Mafia trial: 346 convictions, including nineteen life sentences, 2,665 years’ imprisonment and 114 acquittals. Salvatore Contorno, alongside Tommaso Buscetta, was one of the cornerstones of the prosecution’s case, which had held up perfectly until then. But this was still a first-instance verdict, and the Mafia was ‘investing’ in murders, political pressure and intimidation to turn the tide. The appeal trial began in February 1989, the very year of the tumultuous case surrounding Coriolano’s return to Sicily. It is not only Cosa Nostra that hates the turncoats. In Italy, a current of opinion – which has its leading figures in politics, particularly within the Christian Democrats – sees in the state witnesses and the revolutionary investigative methods of Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino the risk of an anti-democratic drift. That arrest and the trail of dramatic questions it has left in its wake threaten the stability of a verdict that is merely a first step on a path strewn with obstacles. Falcone had already been under attack from many newspapers for some time. And the barrage of criticism from then until 23 May 1992 – when the crater at Capaci would swallow up a piece of Italian history along with the bodies of five human beings – would be relentless.

The hour of poison – Meanwhile, the Raven has taken flight. There are six anonymous letters, typed, though the paper is not the same for all of them. The recipients are: the President of the Republic, Francesco Cossiga; the High Commissioner for the Fight against the Mafia, Domenico Sica; the Chair of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission, Gerardo Chiaromonte; the Secretary of the Communist Party, Achille Occhetto; and two prominent figures in the Carabinieri, Mario Mori and Antonio Subranni. The letters contain serious accusations against Falcone regarding his handling of the turncoat Contorno, who, according to the author, was a genuine state assassin. They were written by someone who is certainly no eavesdropper. The references are precise, and only someone with access to certain inner circles could have gathered and piled them up like stones ready for a stoning. It is the Raven of Palermo.

The anonymous source writes that Gianni De Gennaro and the senior leadership of Criminalpol were fully aware that Contorno was travelling to Palermo to strike at the ‘Corleonesi’ and flush out Totò Riina. “All this had, moreover, been agreed with magistrates as well, and in particular with Judges Falcone, Ayala and Giammanco, with whom De Gennaro had met in Palermo in recent times […]. De Gennaro, therefore, and the aforementioned magistrates sent Contorno to Palermo in the full knowledge that he would commit serious offences. This constitutes extremely grave responsibility when one considers that Contorno killed Mineo, Baiamonte, Aspetti, Messicati and Cerva […]. These are nothing less than state-sanctioned murders […]”.

The anonymous source speaks of confidential movements by officials, of secret wiretaps, and of contacts known to very few. Then there is a grim chapter, in which no venom is spared, entirely devoted to Falcone who, according to the Raven, “has been taking you for a ride right up to now, making you believe he is a champion of the anti-Mafia cause, when in fact he has turned out to be a sleazy opportunist”.

Il Corvo is gloating. Giovanni Falcone suffers in silence.

Meanwhile, a new figure has gradually entered the scene, one who will soon take on increasing importance, eventually becoming a key player in the season of political intrigue in Palermo.

On 5 August 1988, Domenico Sica was appointed High Commissioner for the fight against the Mafia. The appointment was made amid controversy, as the post seemed destined for Giovanni Falcone, who knew far more about the Mafia than Sica did. The very establishment of a High Commission was viewed as a mistake by many magistrates and investigators specialising in organised crime. Sica, nicknamed ‘Nembo Sic’ due to his natural inclination to involve himself in high-profile investigations, owed his success to an exceptional patron: the Christian Democrat Antonio Gava, who was Minister of the Interior at the time. Thanks to him, Sica managed to pipped Falcone to the post of High Commissioner, and this would weigh heavily on their relationship. For Falcone, it was the second setback – or rather, the second sign of his isolation – after the High Council of the Judiciary (CSM) had, a few months earlier, rejected his candidacy to head the Palermo Preliminary Investigations Office, preferring Antonino Meli, who was older than him and had not a single line on his CV.

To Sica, the letters from the ‘Raven of Palermo’ seem like a golden opportunity to relaunch his career. He demands to see them all and examines them. Reinforcing the theory that the author is someone with inside knowledge of legal matters is the fact that, in at least a couple of those letters, a typewriter supplied to the Palermo courthouse was used: a Triumph Adler. It was a very common model in those years, but it is enough to spark Sica’s desire for redemption. For the fingerprint analysis, however, the High Commissioner makes an unusual decision, one that will cost him dearly: instead of turning, as is standard practice, to the CIS (the Carabinieri Scientific Investigations Centre – now RaCIS, the Carabinieri Scientific Investigations Group), he sends everything to SISMI, the military intelligence service.

The coffee cup – Eight fingerprints are found on the letter from ‘Il Corvo’ sent to Sica. One of them triggers an exhausting series of expert reports, counter-reports, confirmations and denials. At one point, a clumsy manoeuvre by a SISMI technician irreparably damages it. All that remains of that fingerprint is a photograph. Sica lures magistrate Alberto Di Pisa into his office under false pretences and lifts a fingerprint from the glass table on which he is drumming his fingers. Not content with that, he offers him a coffee at the bar and has his associates secretly take the cup away. Despite the uncertainty surrounding the results of the analysis, the High Commissioner is convinced that the Raven is Di Pisa. So much so that he himself telephones the President of the Republic, Francesco Cossiga, to break the bombshell news. At the same time, the rumour creeps its way to the editorial office of the weekly magazine Epoca, which, for the first time, names Alberto Di Pisa, identifying him as the Raven of Palermo.

During those days, the Public Prosecutor’s Office launched an investigation into the anonymous contributor. Di Pisa stated that he was at the disposal of the colleagues who had placed him under investigation on charges of aggravated slander, and voluntarily submitted to having his fingerprints taken.

By a twist of fate, Di Pisa entered the courtroom just as Contorno was being released from prison following his arrest in connection with the raid on San Nicola l’Arena. Eighteen months later, the magistrate from Palermo was sentenced to a year and a half for aggravated slander. The appeal verdict came two years later, on 14 December 1993, in a different Italy, in a different era, in a different social landscape where the craters left by Mafia massacres were still smouldering. Di Pisa was acquitted.

In the grounds for the judgement, the judges are extremely harsh: “High Commissioner Sica and his colleagues did not confine themselves to mere fact-finding, nor to securing and preserving evidence, but went so far as to create and obtain, in a manner that was highly irregular and fraudulent, the fingerprints of the doctor from Pisa, which marked the beginning of this unlawful and arbitrary legal proceedings from the very outset […]. Through the mechanism put forward by the court, something that could never have been […] is transformed into evidence admissible in court; in other words, an expert report – or part of an expert report – drawn up outside the courts by experts who, by virtue of their membership of SISMI, were and are in the service of the political establishment, is introduced into the proceedings.”

In short, as well as being Di Pisa’s acquittal, it is a complete condemnation of Sica’s actions.

In 2016, in an interview with la Repubblica, Alberto Di Pisa gave his account of the case in which he played a leading role. He is seventy-two years old and has been retired for a few days, having left the Marsala public prosecutor’s office formerly headed by Paolo Borsellino. “In ’89, there was a deep-seated feud within the Criminalpol. There was De Gennaro’s team and Contrada’s. That’s where we should have looked for ‘Il Corvo’, but nobody did. The anonymous tip-off was telling the truth, as I myself had pointed out in a meeting at the Public Prosecutor’s Office with all my colleagues. Giammanco, Falcone, Sciacchitano and Signorino were there. I would have been an idiot to write that anonymous tip-off myself.” What had Di Pisa said at that meeting? “That we needed to investigate to understand what lay behind that very strange arrest of Contorno at San Nicola l’Arena. But someone thought to take advantage of the situation by fabricating the anonymous tip-off, which was immediately attributed to me, despite being written on Criminalpol letterhead (available only in the Rome offices where I had never been) and typed on a typewriter that was found not to be mine. The truth is that there was a convergence of interests – political, intelligence and powerful forces – whose aim was to strip me of the sensitive investigations I was handling: the one into the Mafia and public contracts, the one into the death of the former mayor of Palermo, Giuseppe Insalaco, the one into Freemasonry, and the ones into the murders of Beppe Montana and Ninni Cassarà.”

On 31 December 2015, Alberto Di Pisa left the judiciary due to reaching the age limit. He died in 2022 following a long illness. Il Corvo was never identified.

Salvatore Contorno, whose ‘Sicilian mission’ was ultimately regarded as little more than a day trip, after being released amid a flurry of apologies, narrowly escaped an assassination attempt orchestrated in April 1994 by Matteo Messina Denaro. In the years that followed, he was arrested twice, for drug dealing and for extortion: his witness protection programme was subsequently revoked.