Thus Sonia Alfano began her speech in Barcellona this last Saturday with her father's written words. Civil society once again united to commemorate the memory of Beppe Alfano, an investigative reporter and school teacher, slaughtered in Barcellona in the province of Messina on January 8th, 1993. Rita Borsellino, center-left candidate for the Presidency of Sicily, had strong words of support and empathy for the Alfano family. Ms. Borsellino lost her brother, Judge Paolo Borsellino, to Mafia terrorism in 1992. Father Luigi Ciotti, invited the Mafia informants in the public to refer to their bosses that civil society had the firm intention to continue its battle. Giuseppe Lumia, opposition leader within Parliament's perennial Anti-mafia Commission, asserted that the Alfano assassination would be discussed in the minority report.
Alfano's executioner, Nino Merlino, has been condemned in two out of three trials to 21 years and six months in prison. A final decision in the case is fixed before the Supreme Court on February 2nd. Giuseppe Gullotti, the local boss, was condemned initially to 30 years in prison, but his case is unlikely to go through the complex legal process that would lead to a definitive judgement. In the meantime he's serving time for other crimes, whereas Merlino, a first offender according to the law, is free. And with this government's spate of pro-mafia laws (the so-called ex-Ciriello, for example), he's likely to be let off.
But who was Beppe Alfano? A self-supported amateur who was paid a few thousand lire for each piece he wrote, Beppe was finally admitted to Italy's powerful journalist syndicate four years after his death. Yet in two and half years of reporting, he put the category to shame.
Beppe Alfano invented investigative journalism. What else could he have done in a sleepy, dull town like Barcellona in the province of Messina? It's a received idea that the province of Messina, just a boot-tip off the Italian peninsula, is little more than a gentile gateway to the real Sicily. A nice little province composed of dumb little towns. Beppe Alfano turned that idea inside out.
If there's a word to describe the Sicilian press for the past fifty years, it's complacency. In particular, the Eastern provinces are ruled by an absolute monarch, Mario Ciancio, Re Sole he's called, who has moulded public opinion since he inherited the Catania daily, la Sicilia, in the Sixties. In his news empire there's no place for inconvenient muckrakers. Sure, there's room for petty delinquency, all the local drug spin one can handle, isolated cases of corruption, and an occasional gangland murder, especially if it's on the other side of the island. It's always been an established truth that organized crime, the Mafia, is alien to the mentality of the rich, dynamic, cosmopolitan, enterprising Eastern Sicily.
So it comes as a surprise that Mario Ciancio's daily began to host the dispatches of an unknown small town school teacher. Perhaps la Sicilia overlooked the significance of Beppe Alfano's work. After all, sales boomed around Barcellona Pozzo di Gotto, thanks to Alfano. Soon his articles appeared on a daily basis.
But Alfano was someone rare in the Sicilian landscape. He combined an uncommon investigative spirit with moral outrage and civic pride. He made it perfectly clear that Barcellona had a solid Mafia presence. Nor did he chase scoops for the sake of the scoop. His overriding interest was to unmask corruption and fraud. And rather than publish an exposé he would first organize a town meeting and tell the citizenry and the authorities what he had discovered and pieced together. In the end the police and investigative judges relied on Beppe as much as he relied on them. Beppe would often beat the police to the scene of a crime.
Had he stuck to the military aspects of criminality in a context of local territorial drug wars, perhaps he would still be with us. But Beppe focused his investigative skills on the collusion between local bureaucracies, corrupt politicians and organized crime.
Perhaps his most famous scoop was the exposé of the rampant corruption and nepotism involving the local health care unit. In a world ideologically dominated by outsourcing, services for the handicapped had been sub-contracted to a corporation which did little else than abuse its patients, swindle its workers and rip off the State. Beppe's relentless action culminated in the classical offer he shouldn't have refused, an offer comforted by the friendly arguments of his own party's potentates. When he refused the conspicuous sum, the corporation president, Antonino Mostaccio, remarked, -You should watch out, with the snap of my finger I can have people disappear. For Beppe it was no longer a secret he was a dead man walking. He predicted his own murder with a ten-day margin of error, a lucid yet terrible professional deformation.
Rather than stop, it seems he pushed himself beyond reasonable bounds. The number of cases Alfano worked on in his last year is simply astounding. He had an uncanny knowledge of the territory he worked. One day he noticed that a truck load of fresh oranges was driving in the wrong direction. He reasoned that a truck on that road driving in that direction should only contain orange peels. And if this was a hunch that eventually evidenced a colossal fraud against the European Union, Beppe also understood it as a solid indication that the Catania mafia, under the fugitive crime lord, Nitto Santapaola, was firmly established in the area.
"...People often accuse my father of being a rightwing extremist. My father was a moderate, civil rightwing extremist. Tano Grasso (left, anti-racket leader) once remarked that there was no one as open minded as my father in a discussion...
"The right reproaches our family for working with the left. But the local branch of Allianza Nazionale has never commemorated my father's memory. There has never been an interrogation in parliament by the right concerning my father. The Anti-Mafia Commission declared that a special commission had been instituted to investigate my father's death, yet in three years there has not been a single reunion. The name of Beppe Alfano appears nowhere in the majority report of the Anti-Mafia Commission."
-Sonia Alfano, Rome press conference, January 10, 2006
Like Mauro de Mauro (the first reporter to be assassinated by the Mafia in 1970) before him, Beppe came from rightwing militancy. Whereas Mauro fought with Prince Valerio Borghese's infamous Decima Mas during the German occupation of Italy, Beppe is said to have participated in his teens in Borghese's attempted coup d'état (perhaps not coincidently, 1970). Beppe's father, a fascist republican, a doctor who had lost an arm in the African campaigns, had been for better and worse a powerful figure in his childhood. Twenty years later Beppe's youthful extremism may have been his undoing. He knew his ex-comrades by face, name and reputation. And when one of them, a subversive expert in explosives, suddenly showed up in Barcellona after decades in the North, Alfano was in alarm.
We now know that the sleepy dull town of Barcellona, the scene of drug faidas, was a strategic operative center for the Mafia's all out war against the Italian state in the 1980's and 1990's. Barcellona, precisely because of its reputation, was a favorite resting spot for fugitives at large. It's strategic position on the Tyrrhenian sea made it an ideal center for international drugs and arms traffic, a safe haven where the Sicilian Mafia and the Calabrian `Ndrangheta could hammer out agreements and strategy.
We now know that one, if not two, of Beppe's ex-comrades, specialists in explosive and illegal arms traffic, helped contrive the bomb that slaughtered Giovanni Falcone, his wife and escort in Capaci on May 23, 1992. We now know that the Santapaola underling and Barcellona boss, Giuseppe Gullotti, personally consigned the detonation device to Giovanni Brusca.
We now know the Mafia triumvirate Totò Riina, Nitto Santapaola and Bernardo Provenzano frequented the Barcellona area.
We now know that Nitto Santapaola was in hiding in a villa not far from Beppe's house on the night Beppe was assassinated.
The Alfano family was gradually isolated within the community following the classic script of the many mafia victims that preceded him. On January 8th 1993, Beppe picked up his wife at the train station after the evening shift and drove her home. Her colleagues no longer offered her a ride home. As he got out of the car he saw someone walk quickly away. He yelled to his wife to run upstairs and lock herself in. Don't open to anyone! as he jumped in the car and drove off. Two hundred meters later he was dead.
We have yet to know who commissioned his murder.
Sonia Alfano is convinced there's only one question to ask her father. A question whose answer she's knows with certainty: For all of his investigations, his accusations, his search for the truth, was it worth it to die?
Sonia is certain her father would have said yes.
-Valeria Scafetta, Ammazzate Beppe Alfano
We do know that Beppe Alfano was the living memory of his city and its citizenry. And for this we remain grateful.
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This piece owes a great deal to Valeria Scafetta's book "Ammazzate Beppe Alfano" which was published this week. She has done a superb job investigating the loose ends and obscure aspects of Beppe Alfano's investigations, his murder and the ensuing cover-up, in a well-paced narrative devoid of rhetoric.
The periodical "Antimafia 2000" contains two excellent articles published two years ago available on line by Monica Centofante Riaperto il caso Alfano and Un giornalista contro i padrini di Messina.
Several articles appeared in l'Unità this week to commemorate Beppe Alfano. An interview with Sonia Alfano by Marzio Tristano is available on line Il killer che mi ride in faccia.
The box quotes in this article are based on the press conference held in Rome last Tuesday in the presence of Sonia Alfano and the reporter and author, Valeria Scafetta.
All factual and grammatical errors are mine. Corrections are welcome as always.
