Salvatore Contorno

Salvatore Contorno (born May 28, 1946 in Palermo ), known as "Totuccio" , was a member of the Santa Maria di Gesù family and an important Mafia member of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra . In October 1984 he followed the example of Tommaso Buscetta and became " Pentito ". In the course of the maxi process , he made detailed statements about the internal structure of the Cosa Nostra and the Pizza Connection in the mid-1980s.

Life

Early years in the mafia

The butcher "Totuccio" Contorno was made a member of the Santa Maria di Gesù family in 1975. The Santa Maria di Gesù family was currently headed by Stefano Bontade , who held a high position on the Sicilian Mafia Commission . Contorno and Bontade had already been hunting companions in the 1960s . Although Contorno was only a soldier of the family, he was directly subordinate to Bontade and enjoyed his complete confidence. He was one of his hit men.

Contorno took part in cigarette smuggling and heroin trafficking . His cousins, the Grado brothers, imported morphine base from Turkey , which was refined into heroin in Sicilian laboratories. He was also involved in kidnappings , for which he was sentenced to 22 years in prison. From 1976 to 1979 Contorno was in compulsory exile in Venice after serving a partial prison sentence for belonging to a criminal organization . However, he had the opportunity to return to Palermo frequently. At that time he was bankrupt because his frozen meat business had failed. He had to borrow money to invest in heroin shipments.

Second Mafia War

During the Second Mafia War, when the Corleonesi, led by Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano , attacked the established Mafia families of Palermo, they killed, among others, Contorno's boss Stefano Bontade in April 1981, as well as other members of the Santa Maria di Gesù family, who lived on the La Favarella estate from Michele Greco were lured, where they were liquidated together. Contorno had not shown up for the fateful meeting at Greco's estate. He had a premonition and hid from the Squadra della Morte death squad that was swarming to wipe out rivals. On July 25, 1981, Contorno narrowly escaped an attempted murder by Pino “Scarpuzzedda” Greco and Giuseppe Lucchese , the Corleonesi's favorite killers. The Corleonesi followed a scorched earth policy to hunt Contorno, kill his relatives and friends, and prevent them from continuing to hide him. Nevertheless, the fleeting Contorno could not be picked up, which earned him the nickname "Coriolano della Floresta" among the population , a kind of popular Sicilian version of Robin Hood .

arrest

Hiding from both the authorities and the Corleonesi revenge, Contorno sent anonymous letters to the police revealing information about the mafia, its members, the various factions and the violent unrest. The police commissioner Antonino Ninni Cassarà contacted Contorno as an informant and called him "Fonte di Prima Luce - source of the first light" .

On March 23, 1982, Contorno was arrested in Rome , where he was preparing the murder of Giuseppe Pippo Calò , whom he had held responsible for the murder of his boss Stefano Bontade. "It's a shame I didn't succeed," he said later during the maxi trial. When “Totuccio” was arrested, the police confiscated several firearms, two bulletproof cars, tens of thousands of dollars in cash, 140 kilograms of hashish and two kilograms of heroin. The arrest likely saved his life and made Contorno one of the few survivors of the defeated factions in the Second Mafia War. Contorno's revelations marked the first time law enforcement actually learned of Michele Greco's senior membership in the Mafia. Previously, he was only considered a withdrawn large landowner with a suspiciously high income, although in truth he came from a long-established mafia family, the Grecos . Commissioner Cassarà used Contorno to gather evidence against families in the Palermo region. In addition, he prepared a report on their participation in the illegal drug trade, the so-called "Greco + 161-Report" of July 13, 1982. Two months later, in close collaboration with Judge Giovanni Falcone , the police drew up a list of 162 Mafiosi wanted for drug trafficking and murder.

Pentito in the maxi process

Despite his arrest, Contorno initially refused to work with Cassarà and Falcone. Only after Tommaso Buscetta's decision to cooperate did Contorno change his mind. Buscetta reportedly met Contorno, who allegedly fell to his knees and kissed Buscetta's hand. Buscetta allegedly put his hand on his shoulder and said, “It's all right, Totuccio, you can talk.” Contorno began working with them in October 1984, and a week later, 127 arrest warrants were issued against Mafiosi. Information from Tommaso Buscetta and the evidence from Salvatore Contorno led to the first maxi-trial in which 475 mafiosi were charged. It ended in December 1987 with 338 convictions. At the beginning of 1989, however, only 60 of those convicted in the Maxi Trial were still in prison. Contorno received a reduced sentence of six years for working with the prosecutor. While Buscetta provided important information about the inner workings of the Mafia, it was Contorno who was more effective as a witness, giving specific names and explaining the Mafia's heroin trade. He testified in a quick, often incomprehensible, specifically Palermitan dialect and Mafia jargon, which first had to be translated for the official recording. In the courtroom, Contorno showed his open contempt for the brotherhood of the "uomini d'onoro" to which he had once belonged. Changed inwardly, he said they were "just a gang of gangsters and murderers" . Contorno had not forgotten that the Corleonesi had killed a dozen of his immediate kin.

Pizza Connection

Contorno was also a key witness in the Pizza Connection process. He agreed to testify in return for being accepted into the U.S. witness protection program. He provided the evidence that directly linked the defendants to the heroin trade. “Totuccio” related how he was present at a meeting in the iron factory of Leonardo Greco in Bagheria, Sicily, in the spring of 1980. Among those present were the following five defendants: Salvatore Greco , Giuseppe Ganci, Gaetano Mazzara, Salvatore Catalano and Francesco Castronovo. Contorno witnessed how the men in question “took out two plastic garbage bags and extracted white powder packs in clear plastic sleeves, each with a different tiny paper cutout or pen or pencil markings to identify the individual owner. They poured samples of the powder into a bottle on a hot plate. "The same labeled samples were later intercepted by the DEA in a 40 kilogram seizure of 85 percent pure heroin, which was about " $ 8 million at Mafia importer prices and at least $ 80 million at street prices ” . The defense cross-examined believed that Contorno, who feared he would be killed in Italy , gave up his testimony about the meeting to please federal prosecutors who had enrolled him in a protection program in the United States.

Return to Sicily

Contorno struggled to adapt to life in the witness protection program in the USA and was unable to support his family. In November 1988 he returned to Italy. On May 26, 1989, Contorno was arrested again with his cousin Gaetano Grado and an arsenal in hiding in an area called the Death Triangle (Bagheria, Altavilla and Casteldaccia) near Palermo. In the past few weeks, members of the victorious factions from the Second Mafia War, allied with the Corleonesi, had been killed and police suspected that Cotorno might have something to do with the killings. However, examination of the weapons revealed that they were not used in the murders. This matter turned into a scandal in July 1989 when anonymous letters from "il corvo" (literally the raven, but figuratively it could also mean "provocateur" ) alleged public prosecutor Giovanni Falcone and his closest associate, Police Inspector Gianni De Gennaro , had organized Contorno's secret return from protective custody in the United States to Sicily to launch a government-sponsored campaign of revenge against the Corleonesi, but the allegations against Falcone and De Gennaro proved to be a joke and further weakened Falcone's already difficult position in the Palermo prosecutor's office Before his arrest, Contorno had contact with De Gennaro who was trying to monitor his movements.

Witness protection program

In April 1994, a bomb was discovered near the secret hiding place at Contorno near Rome amid a police operation against the Corleonesi. In January 1997, Contorno was arrested again for trafficking two kilograms of heroin in the early 1990s, according to investigations into the bombing. He was then sentenced to six years in prison. In October 1997, an arrest warrant was issued against Contorno and his cousin Gaetano Grado for trafficking in cocaine. Contorno was removed from the Italian witness protection program, but reopened in 2001. Contorno was arrested again in November 2004 for blackmailing a former cellmate, but the charges were dropped. According to the writer Leonardo Sciascia , Contorno still lives in the world of the Mafia “the way the rest of us live inside our own skin, as if the Mafia were a state into which you were born and always remained a citizen of - just like the rest of lives in our own skin as if the mafia were a state into which you were born and whose citizens you have always remained. "

literature

• John Dickie: Cosa Nostra. A story of the Sicilian Mafia . London. 2004. Coronet. ISBN 0-340-82435-2 .
• Pino Arlacchi: Mafia from within: The life of Don Antonino Calderone . S. Fischer Verlag
• John Follain: The Final Godfathers: Rise and Fall of the Corleones. Fischer paperback. 2017. ISBN 978-359-6-31906-0 .
• Frank Neubacher: Structures and Strategies of the Mafia - Insights into the modern Italian literature. New criminal policy. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft mbH. 2014. pp. 44–46

Web links

• Salvatore Contorno - Prima Deposizione MaxiProcesso (11/04/1986) (it.)

Notes and individual references

1. ↑ possibly the “Macellaria Messicana” according to Antonio Giangrande: Salvatore Riina Le Colpe dei Padri Ricadono sui figli. Volume 125 of L'Italia del Trucco, l'Italia che siamo.
2. ^ Admission / initiation rites of the Mafia
3. ↑ John Follain: The Final Godfathers: Rise and Fall of the Corleones. Fischer paperback. 2017. ISBN 978-359-6-31906-0 .
4. ↑ after the book "I Beati Paoli" by Luigi Natoli from 1909/1910
5. ^ Pentito Contorno: "Con lo Stato peggio che con la mafia". on www.adnkronos.com on September 27, 2019
6. ↑ in Italy there was no such program at that time
7. ↑ Mafia capo in mandamento Bagheria