Antimafia Commission
The Antimafia Commission is a bicameral commission of the Italian Parliament, composed of members from the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate of the Republic. The first commission, formed in 1963, was established as a body of inquiry tasked with investigating the "phenomenon of the Mafia". Subsequent commissions expanded their scope to investigate all "organized crime of the Mafia type", which included other major criminal organizations in Italy, such as the Camorra, the 'Ndrangheta, and the Sacra Corona Unita.
The Antimafia Commission's goal is to study the phenomenon of organized crime in all its forms and to measure the adequacy of existing anti-crime measures, legislative and administrative, according to their results. The commission has judicial powers in that it may instruct the judicial police to carry out investigations. It can ask for copies of court proceedings, and is entitled to request any form of collaboration that it deems necessary. Those who provide testimony to the Antimafia Commission are obliged by law to tell the truth. The commission can also submit reports to the Italian Parliament as often as desired but does so at least on an annual basis.
Preceding events
The first proposal to constitute a commission of inquiry into the Mafia was the result of post-war struggles for land reform and the violent reaction against peasant organizations and its leaders, culminating in the killing of 11 people and the wounding of over thirty at a Labour Day parade in Portella della Ginestra. The attack was attributed to the bandit and separatist leader Salvatore Giuliano. Nevertheless, the Mafia was suspected of involvement in the Portella della Ginestra massacre and many other previous and subsequent attacks.On 14 September 1948, a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the public security situation on Sicily was proposed by deputy Giuseppe Berti of the Italian Communist Party in a debate on the violence in Sicily. The proposal was turned down by the interior minister Mario Scelba, amidst indignant voices about prejudice against Sicily and Sicilians.
In 1958, senator Ferruccio Parri again proposed to form a commission. The proposal was not taken up by the parliamentary majority. In 1961, the Christian Democracy party in the Senate and Sicilian politicians like Bernardo Mattarella and Giovanni Gioia, both later accused of links with the Mafia, dismissed the proposal as "useless". In March 1962, amidst gang wars in Palermo, the Sicilian Assembly asked for an official inquiry. On 11 April 1962, the Senate in Rome approved the bill. It took eight months before the Chamber of Deputies put the law to a vote. It was approved on 20 December 1962.
First commission (1963–1982)
In February 1963, the first parliamentary Commission of Inquiry on the Mafia phenomenon in Sicily was formed, in the midst of the First Mafia War, under the presidency of Paolo Rossi of the Italian Democratic Socialist Party. It took a long time to form, because newspapers and parliamentarians alike were opposed to the inclusion of Sicilians. It lasted less than three months, before the general elections of 28 April 1963.The second president in the new legislature was the DC member Donato Pafundi, and was formed on 5 June 1963. On 30 June 1963, a car bomb exploded in Ciaculli, an outlying suburb of Palermo, killing seven police and military officers sent to defuse it, after an anonymous phone call. The bomb was intended for Salvatore "Ciaschiteddu" Greco, head of the Sicilian Mafia Commission and the boss of the Ciaculli Mafia family. The Ciaculli massacre changed the Mafia war into a war against the Mafia. It prompted the first concerted anti-mafia efforts by the state in post-war Italy. On 6 July 1963, the Antimafia Commission met for the first time. It took thirteen years and two more legislatures before a final report was submitted in 1976.
The PCI claimed the DC party put members on the commission to stop the inquiry moving too far in the political field, such as the commission's vice-president Antonio Gullotti] and Giovanni Matta, a former member of Palermo's city council. Matta's arrival in 1972 created a scandal, as he had been mentioned in a report and was summoned to testify in the previous legislature about the role of the Mafia in real estate speculation. The PCI called for his resignation. In the end, the whole commission under the presidency of Luigi Carraro had to resign, and be recomposed without Matta again.
New legislation
In September 1963, the Antimafia Commission presented a draft law. In May 1965, it was passed by the Italian Parliament as Law 575, entitled Dispositions against the Mafia, the first time the word Mafia had been used in legislation. The law extended 1956 legislation concerning individuals considered to be "socially dangerous" to those "suspected of belonging to associations of the Mafia type". The measures included special surveillance; the possibility of ordering a suspect to reside in a designed place outside his home area and the suspension of publicly issued licenses, grants or authorizations. The law gave powers to a public prosecutor or questor to identify and trace the assets of anyone suspected of involvement in a Mafia-type association.The efficacy of the new law was severely limited. Firstly, because there was no legal definition of a Mafia association. Secondly, because the obligation for mafiosi to reside in areas outside Sicily, opened up new opportunities to develop illicit activities in the cities of northern and central Italy. Amending this law during the next four decades was the main aim in the legislative fight against mafia. It was amended by La Torre-Rognoni law in 1982, and by some cornerstone judgement of Italy's Supreme Court of Cassation.
Interim reports
In 1966, Pafundi declared: "These rooms here are like an ammunition store. In order to give us the chance to the very root of the truth we don't want them to explode too soon. We have here a load of dynamite." The store never exploded, and Pafundi summed up the efforts of the Antimafia Commission in three discreet pages in March 1968. All the documents were locked away. Pafundi’s successor who took over the commission in 1968 was a different man, Francesco Cattanei, a member of the DC from the Northern Italy who was determined to investigate thoroughly.Cattanei came under attack by his fellow DC members. The party’s official newspaper Il Popolo wrote that the Antimafia Commission had become an instrument of the PCI. Despite the smears to his reputation, Cattanei was supported by the majority of the commission and supportive public opinion caused him to resist the pressure to resign. In July 1971, the commission published an intermediary report with biographies of prominent mafiosi, such as Tommaso Buscetta, and summarized the characteristics of the Mafia.
The Antimafia Commission investigated the activities and failed prosecution of Luciano Leggio, the administration of Palermo and the wholesale markets in the city, as well as the links between the Mafia and banditry in the post-war period. In its March 1972 report, the Antimafia Commission said in its introduction: "Generally speaking magistrates, trade unionists, prefects, journalists, and the police authorities expressed an affirmative judgement on the existence of more or less intimate links between Mafia and the public authorities... some trade unionists reached the point of saying that 'the mafioso is a man of politics'." The commission's main conclusion was that the Mafia was strong because it had penetrated the structure of the state.
The Antimafia Commission was dissolved when new elections made an end to the legislature. In the next legislature, Cattanei was replaced with Luigi Carraro, a fellow DC member who was more sensitive to the fears of the DC, that had been under attack of the commission.
Disappointing results
In 1972, Cesare Terranova entered the Antimafia Commission. He had previously been the chief investigative prosecutor in Palermo, who had prepared several Mafia Trials in the 1960s, such as the Trial of the 114, that had ended disappointingly, with little convictions. He was elected for the Independent Left under the auspices of the PCI. He became the secretary of the commission. Terranova, together with PCI deputy Pio La Torre, wrote the minority report of the Antimafia Commission, which pointed to links between the Mafia and prominent politicians, in particular of the DC party.Terranova urged his colleagues of the majority to take responsibility. According to the minority report, "it would be a grave error on the part of the Commission to accept the theory that the Mafia-political link has been eliminated. Even today the behaviour of the ruling DC group in the running of the City and the Provincional Councils offers the most favourable terrain for the perpetuation of the system of Mafia power."
In the final report of the first Antimafia Commission, the former Palermo mayor Salvo Lima was described as one of the pillars of Mafia power in Palermo. It had no formal consequences for Lima. In 1993, the fourth Antimafia Commission led by Luciano Violante concluded that there were strong indications of relations between Lima and members of the Mafia. By then, Lima had been killed by the Mafia.
In its conclusions, the commission made many recommendations and offered much advice to those bodies that were going to take the job on. It criticized some authorities and condemned others. The government did nothing, and when the results were published, every effort was made to confuse their message and diminish their value, and was drowned in a sea of slander. The reports and the documentation of the Antimafia Commission were essentially disregarded. Terranova talked of "thirteen wasted years" of the Antimafia Commission.
The final report was issued at a time when the question of the Mafia was pushed to the background by the political turmoil in the 1970s, known as the Years of Lead, a period characterized by widespread social conflicts and terrorist acts attributed to far-left and far-right political movements and the secret services.