And the arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro has only a part to do with it: Cosa Nostra has been trying to reorganize itself and rebuild a management team for some time
One of the recurring questions after the arrest of Matteo Messina Denaro is who is in charge now in the Sicilian mafia. The answer is: probably none. In fact, at the moment there is no top-down structure with a boss who commands all the gangs on the island. It certainly does not mean that the mafia is not currently rooted in the territory, but that it no longer has the organizational structure it had at the time of the domination of the Corleonesi by Totò Riina . In practice, the commission, also known as the Cupola, no longer exists for some time.
In reality there were more than one commissions: the provincial ones and the inter-provincial one. The former represented the gangs, i.e. the organized groups of mafiosi, of the various provinces. In particular, the Palermo commission was important and dominant: the heads of districts of all the families were part of it. The district leaders are the elected representatives of three neighboring families which constitute the district. The interprovincial commission was instead the "regional" one, which included the Palermitans together with the representatives of the gangs of all the provinces.
All the commissions met in fact to ratify decisions already taken by the Corleonesi who, with the mafia war of the early 1980s, had eliminated the rival gangs. Totò Riina and the Corleonesi dominated the provincial commission of Palermo and had placed loyal representatives at the head of the other provincial commissions.
After Riina's arrest, that hierarchical structure no longer existed or if it did, in any case, it never reunited. The chief prosecutor of Palermo Maurizio De Lucia said in an interview with the Gazzetta del Sud : «The commission does not exist at the moment, it exists only in the formal constitution of Cosa Nostra. So much so that all the most recent investigations by the Palermo prosecutor's office show a constant attempt to reconstitute the top of Cosa Nostra and to reconstitute the commission. The skills of our investigators have meant that this project has not been successful.
It is also unlikely that Messina Denaro himself , however still very powerful, exercised command over all of Sicily. Still speaking with the Gazzetta del Sud , Maurizio De Lucia explained: «Matteo Messina Denaro is not the head of Cosa Nostra and he never was. He was a very important character in the mafia dynamics having been raised by Salvatore Riina, so he knows well not only the rules of the organization but also many of the secrets especially of the years 1992-1993, the years of the massacres. He is certainly the head of the province of Trapani, which is an economically important reality ». Furthermore, the top of the Cosa Nostra has never been commanded by someone who was not the head of the Palermo gangs.
In recent decades, the Sicilian mafia has been decimated by arrests: not only the bosses have been taken, but also hundreds of sub-chiefs or simple "soldiers". Cosa Nostra has long ceased to be the strongest criminal organization in Italy, because it was supplanted by the ' Ndrangheta , powerful throughout the world, established throughout Europe and South America, allied with the most important cartels of Mexican and Colombian drug traffickers.
Enzo Ciconte, one of the leading experts in Italy on the dynamics of large mafia organizations, explains: «In the 1990s, after the season of massacres, when the State responded powerfully at a military level by inflicting very hard blows on the Cosa Nostra, another phenomenon: the drug market has changed, from the large flow of heroin to the large flow of cocaine. The 'Ndrangheta took that train, while the Sicilian mafia was forced to play a secondary role».
Since then the mafia has tried to change its profile, presenting itself less and less as a military structure but increasingly entering the world of finance and business. «Telling the story of Messina Denaro», Ciconte continues, «everyone underlines his role in the heinous murders and massacres but hardly anyone has remembered that he was the person who built big business with the spread of wind power in Sicily. We must forget the mafia like Totò Riina or Bernardo Provenzano. The mafia is now the one that does business with companies in the North. It hasn't disappeared, it's transformed."
It is written in the second report of 2022 presented by the Anti-Mafia Investigation Directorate to parliament: «This increasingly silent and mercantilist mafia would therefore favor a collusive-corruptive modus operandi where business agreements are not stipulated as a result of threats or intimidation but are the result agreements based on mutual convenience".
Dia confirms "the constant inoperativeness of the provincial commission of Palermo" and explains that "the direction and elaboration of the operational lines of action are carried out mostly by elderly men of honor who have been detained or who have recently returned to freedom".
The names being mentioned in the newspapers these days as possible new mafia bosses are in fact all relatively elderly people. There is a lot of talk about Giovanni Motisi, known as u' pacchiuni (“chiattone”, plump), currently a fugitive and one of the Corleonesi's trusted killers. But he has always been, precisely, an executor of the military wing of Cosa Nostra, probably highly respected and feared but perhaps not able to represent the new mafia needs, that is, the more business ones. Another name that is mentioned is that of Stefano Fidanzati, an old boss whose family has been doing business in Milan for many years. He is over 70 years old. The younger is Giuseppe Auteri, 48, known as Vassoio, of the Palermo district of Porta Nuova. And then again Sandro Capizzi, of the clan of Santa Maria del Gesù.
According to Ciconte, the so-called "escaped" could also play a role. They are the losing mafiosi, those who in the 1980s were defeated by the Corleonesi during the mafia war and sought refuge above all in the United States. Some of them have close ties with the Gambinos, a historic Italian-American mafia family. In recent years they have returned to Sicily in dribs and drabs with the hope of resuming the role that Riina had taken from them. «Certainly there is», Ciconte continues, «that by addressing the “escaped” and old bosses, the gangs make it clear that they are looking for a reorganization. The mafia is still strong but, apart from the arrest of Messina Denaro, it has been trying to reorganize for some time. One could say that at this moment the Cosa Nostra has a problem with the ruling class».
Dia's report also underlines this, explaining: "This difficulty in reconstituting an authoritative leadership fueled by the continuous, incisive and pressing judicial repression with which the mafia organizations are hit inevitably determines a situation of uncertainty for the Cosa Nostra" .
In fact, the mafia, unlike the other major Italian criminal organizations, has always had a top-down structure. There has never been a leadership group that brought together, for example, all the clans of the Camorra, and the ' Ndrangheta is indeed strictly compartmentalized, divided into closed, often impenetrable 'ndrine.
Cosa Nostra, on the other hand, has historically always sought unified coordination, which is even more necessary today given that the gangs tend to act "under the radar". Another passage from the Dia report explains it well: «The mafia strategy is aimed at strengthening the interlocution with professionals and institutional environments which, abandoning the traditional recourse to cruel methods for the control of the territory, favor where possible the corruptive approach. The unscrupulous and violent action of the past has also given way to the need to adopt silent strategies of contamination and corruption».
