COLUMN ONE : A Dying Silence Bleeds Mob : Arrest of Sicily’s boss of bosses illustrates how the Mafia code is crumbling. Hundreds of informers have given Italian police a rare chance to cripple organized crime.

Salvatore Riina faces his accusers with exaggerated politeness and a cloying peasant servility. Arrested this month after 23 years in hiding, Riina says he is a misunderstood old man with diabetes, a heart ailment and nothing to say.

Investigating magistrates know Riina as the sanguinary boss of bosses of the Mafia, for more than a decade among the most powerful and dangerous criminals on Earth.

“I am not the monster that everyone thinks,” Riina told one of the judges. “That monster does not exist. What really exists is what stands before you, your honor, a poor, sick old man. Your honor, I have never been part of Cosa Nostra.”

In duress, the 62-year-old Riina has turned reflexively to omerta , the conspiracy of silence that historically has insulated organized crime in Italy from its pursuers.

Real men don’t talk.

But men like Salvatore Riina are a dying breed. It took decades to develop a chink in organized crime’s armor of silence. In recent months, the chink has become a gaping hole.

Omerta is dying, the Mafia is bleeding. Italy is riveted by unabashed, often surrealistic testimony that ridicules those who remain silent.

It is a historic turning. Better-trained police armed with stiffer anti-Mafia laws are parlaying inside information from resentful and suddenly talkative Mafiosi into Italy’s greatest success against organized crime in half a century.

“As an institution, the Mafia as we have traditionally understood it is finished,” said Col. Domenico Di Petrillo, the Rome commander of a new national anti-Mafia police force called DIA after its acronym in Italian. “It is not dead, but it has a lovely cancer.”

Nearly 300 Mafiosi, including about 10 major Cosa Nostra figures, are talking to police with the earnestness of Catholic penitents confessing their sins. Most of the pentiti , as Italians call them, have slipped quietly in from the cold over the past year.

Many are vengeful victims of Riina’s violence in gangland struggles for drug money and power. Together they are helping to demolish Italian organized crime from within.

And the heaviest shoe has yet to fall. Sooner or later, investigators believe, a high-ranking Mafia renegade will talk about liaisons between the Mafia and the nation’s political establishment.

Momentum builds. Italy has never seen anything like it. Or America.

“As far as I know, there has never been a phenomenon of collaboration of this size in the United States,” Di Petrillo said in an interview.

For bloody decades, nobody talked to the police about organized crime in Italy--until 1984, when a mobster named Tommaso Buscetta made history by becoming the first Mafia boss to defy omerta by cooperating with courageous young Sicilian prosecutors.

Buscetta had worked 15 years in the Mafia, long enough to learn firsthand about 121 murders.

Now 65 and living under protection in the United States, Buscetta helped convict more than 300 Sicilian Mafiosi, including Riina, at a maxi-trial that climaxed in Palermo in 1987.

At that trial, Riina was sentenced in absentia to life in prison for murder. In a space of 57 days last year, two of the Palermo trial prosecutors, Judges Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were murdered by bombs that also killed Falcone’s wife and eight police bodyguards. Riina is accused of ordering both assassinations and dozens of other murders since he shot his way to power as capo di tutti i capi (boss of bosses) of the Cosa Nostra around 1980.

Italian prosecutors savor the irony now as they watch Riina shielding himself in the silence once time-honored among organized crime throughout southern Italy: the Mafia or Cosa Nostra in Sicily, the Camorra in Naples, the ‘ndrangheta in Calabria.

“I loved Cosa Nostra; I was fascinated by it,” informer Gaspare Mutolo told investigators. “I thought it would guarantee me respect and honor. I believed this for many years.”

Mutolo said he first realized how things had changed when Riina began ordering the killings of other Mafia members. Then he understood “that to stay inside Cosa Nostra, all you had to do was know how to kill. . . . Honor has nothing to do with this Cosa Nostra, which is by now in the hands of men who want all the power at any price and all for themselves.”

With Riina at the helm of the dominant Cosa Nostra family, about half of the 1,697 murders in Italy in 1992 were attributable to organized crime, according to one recent study.

Riina is from the little Sicilian town of Corleone. As leader of a Corleone-based clan, he expanded its power throughout the island, eventually destroying the disciplined feudalism among Mafiosi families in Sicily and achieving one-man rule.

In establishing hegemony of the Corleonese--years after novelist Mario Puzo invented Godfather Vito Corleone--Riina became undisputed boss of the Cosa Nostra, centralizing power at a time when drug trafficking became an ever larger part of its income.

“Buscetta and others have talked about how the drugs attracted new people and increased overall ferocity,” said Cesare de Simone, an Italian reporter who covers organized crime. “Internal discipline and the respect for territory disappeared. So did the point of honor which insisted that while you might have to kill a man, you’d never touch his wife or kids. Buscetta, who lost nearly everybody in his immediate family, talked about the ‘desert of death.’ The Mafia he joined was gone for good.”

Giuseppe Marchese, once an up-and-coming Mafia killer, was also disillusioned by Riina’s leadership--and talking because of it. When he was arrested after a 1981 murder, Marchese says, Riina sent word: “Don’t worry, I’ll fix the trial.” Nevertheless, Marchese, then still in his teens, got life.

In jail, Marchese says, he was ordered by Riina to kill a Mafia inmate, Vincenzo Puccio, because he “was getting too cocky.”

“Don’t worry,” Riina sent word, “they will say that there was a fight in the cell and that you defended yourself. A couple of years and you’ll be out.” But even as Marchese battered Puccio to death with a skillet inside Palermo’s Ucciardone Prison, Puccio’s brother was murdered outside. There was no way anyone would believe the cell fight story.

A penitent Marchese, briefly Riina’s driver, is now a giant among defectors who are making a mockery of organized crime’s once-unbending don’t-squeal ethic. At the same time, Mafiosi realize the Italian people have turned openly and overwhelmingly against organized crime as business-as-usual. Even in Sicilian towns once cowed into silence, anti-Mafia demonstrations are common and well-attended.

Vito Schifani was one of the policemen killed with Judge Falcone, and at the bodyguards’ funeral, seen nationwide on television, his widow, Rosaria, spoke to the Mafia from beside his coffin. “I forgive you--but you should get down on your knees,” she said.

Leonardo Messina, 37, one of the most important recent pentiti , decided to collaborate after witnessing Rosaria Schifani’s anguish. DIA Deputy Director Gianni Di Gennaro told Italian reporters that the widow’s outburst had also dissolved Marchese’s loyalty to omerta.

“I found him frightened; his face showed terror, and he told me that Rosaria’s words had caused him great anguish. . . . They made him understand that he didn’t want to be a Mafioso any longer,” Di Gennaro told the Rome daily newspaper La Repubblica.

One former leader of a drug gang, Francesco Marino Mannoia, says he became disgusted with uncontrolled brutality. His testimony, like much of what his fellow pentiti tell investigators, reads stranger than fiction.

“To strangle a man, especially if he is young and strong, you need three or four people; and the whole thing, contrary to what you see in films, lasts for some minutes, not a few seconds,” Mannoia once said. “It is very cruel and horrifying. By comparison, dissolving the body in acid is nothing, because by then the victim has ceased to suffer.”

In the disenchantment with their organizations now obvious among some Mafiosi, investigators see a parallel to the penitence of Italian terrorists in the 1970s.

“As the Mafia has lost its values, many members have lost their confidence and their terms of reference. It’s like watching terrorists lose their ideology,” said the DIA’s Di Petrillo, who fought Red Brigade terrorists for more than a decade.

Special laws promising clemency to talkative terrorists helped destroy the Red Brigades. Now an updated version of the idea is taking a heavy toll on organized crime.

Virtually all the new-wave pentiti are already in jail for Mafia-related crimes. In collaborating, all seek shelter under legislation approved last August that shortens the sentences of defectors, pays to support their families and helps relocate them in a rapidly expanding Italian version of America’s witness-protection program. At least three major pentiti have been resettled in the United States.

“There is tremendous response to the new law. I think we got 15 pentiti in the first 10 days,” said anti-Mafia Judge Loris D’Ambrosio in an interview at the Justice Ministry here. “By now, everybody understands: Pentiti get soft time; omerta means hard time.”

The flip side of the law adds an extra third to the sentences of Mafiosi who don’t talk, with the time to be served in maximum security without chance of parole. An old island prison has been renovated for Mafia hard-liners.

New laws also give police more teeth. Parliament has approved broader use of bugging and wiretapping in Mafia investigations. For the first time, police are authorized to work undercover. Courts can seize the property of convicted Mafiosi: The state recovered $1.4 billion last year, from businesses to villas, sports cars and yachts.

In addition to the DIA--born last year with 1,500 members hand-picked from Italy’s three national police forces--there is the new, elite 800-member special operations unit of the Carabinieri, Italy’s paramilitary national police.

It was a special operations team, 10 cops under a young captain, that neatly plucked Salvatore (the Beast) Riina out of morning rush-hour traffic in Palermo. Riina was their only job, and they had been tracking him for months.

If the gangs’ impunity is gone, its firepower is not. Pentiti have few illusions about their longevity.

“Sooner or later they’ll kill me. I’m certain of that today; I’ll be certain tomorrow,” Buscetta said not long ago. “It’s like being a condemned man who lives in death’s embrace.”

Even when a pentito survives, people die--usually his relatives. “When Messina decided to talk last spring, we practically had to send a bus to get all of his family away,” said Antonio Bargello, who leads the former Italian Communist Party delegation on the 50-member Anti-Mafia Commission of the Chamber of Deputies. “We can protect the pentiti. The relatives are more difficult.”

In the new rush to talk, there are many small-fry informers whose knowledge is limited. Altogether, though, the pentiti are painting the most detailed portrait of organized crime Italian authorities have ever seen. They name names. Mutolo alone is said to have given investigating magistrates more than 1,000.

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle,” said Di Petrillo. “One pentito gives you one piece, and another one more. Eventually you can even see the outline of the missing pieces.”

Key clues come from defectors big and small. “Even small fry give us important leads. They’ll say things like: ‘In Palermo, so-and-so liked to stop for a coffee every afternoon about 5.’ Then it’s time to find out which bars in so-and-so’s neighborhood serve the best coffee,” said Judge D’Ambrosio, who regularly interrogates pentiti.

Thanks to Mafia renegades, police last fall made 241 gang arrests in Sicily alone, in their biggest operation in eight years. Top bosses have fallen not only in Sicily but also among crime families in Calabria and the Naples region. Others have been extradited from abroad.

Not only mobsters are taking the fall. More than 40 city councils in southern Italy have been shut down after being declared Mafia-infiltrated. A Sicily judge committed suicide after being tagged as a Mafia associate; he left a note proclaiming his innocence. On Christmas Eve, a ranking policeman active against the Mafia for nearly 20 years was arrested after pentiti claimed he had ties with criminals he was supposed to be hunting.

Salvatore Riina, of course, could become the best catch yet. The first murder he was questioned about was that of Salvo Lima, European Parliament member and close political and personal friend of Italy’s ex-Prime Minister Giulio Andreotti.

Lima, who police say was killed last year in Palermo at Riina’s orders, is widely reported to have been a conduit between the Cosa Nostra and Andreotti’s Christian Democrats, which have held or shared power uninterruptedly since World War II.

Riina a pentito? Don’t count on it. Omerta , like the Mafia, may be wounded, but it lives still.

In the town of Corleone, Antonietta Bagarelli recently returned to the public eye after more than 20 years. When people ask about her husband, she answers directly, as the women of old Sicily were taught to answer: “I wish everybody could be like him--an exemplary father.”

Antonietta Bagarelli and Salvatore Riina were married, under the seal of silence, in Palermo more than 20 years ago. Riina was already a fugitive. There are four children--all born, silently, in the same Palermo hospital, all under the protection of omerta.

Turning Against the Mob

Here are some of the key informers whose testimony has enabled Italian police to make unprecedented inroads against the Cosa Nostra in Sicily:

Tommaso Buscetta, 65, member of Cosa Nostra for 15 years--long enough to gain knowledge of 121 murders. After his sons, brother, father-in-law and other relatives were murdered by rival gangs, he became Italy’s first important informer in 1984 and charged that under top boss Salvatore Riina, the Cosa Nostra had lost its code of honor. His testimony helped bring 338 convictions of Mafia defendants in Palermo, including Riina in absentia. Now free, he lives under federal protection in U.S.

Salvatore (Totuccio) Contorno, mob killer, 51, defected after his Mafia clan was decimated by Riina’s Corleonese in early 1980s war over heroin trade. About 20 friends and relatives were also slain. Contorno was responsible for dozens of convictions of Mafia figures.

Gaspare Mutolo, 48, Riina’s driver, arrested in 1991. He is said to have given investigators the names of about 1,000 Mafiosi. Considered as important a witness as Buscetta but more up to date. Testimony eventually produced 24 arrest warrants over the murder of European Parliament Deputy Salvo Lima, a prominent politician said to have had mob ties. Mutolo’s accusation of mob involvement against one judge led to his suicide. Another judge was killed a few weeks after beginning to take Mutolo’s testimony; Riina is accused of the murder.

Francesco Marino Mannoia, 42, self-taught chemist and senior member of clan allied with Riina. Sentenced in absentia to 17 years at Palermo trial. His brother was murdered in 1989, reportedly on orders of Mannoia’s clan boss, which prompted Mannoia to give himself up. His mother, sister and aunt were later killed. Mannoia has named killers in a series of major assassinations and talked about Mafia infiltration into investigative organizations. He now lives in U.S.

Leonardo Messina, 37, jailed Cosa Nostra boss who began collaborating in June. His evidence has led to 203 arrest warrants. In November, 15 of his relatives were hustled from their homes by police and put on a plane at Catania airport, destination unknown.

Giuseppe Marchese, 29, a mob killer who has helped identify about 300 Mafia bosses and the Mafia hierarchy of the ‘90s. While still a teen-ager, he was sentenced to 30 years for murder of Mafia boss in Bagheria in 1981. He subsequently killed a fellow prisoner, reportedly on Riina’s orders, but says his boss double-crossed him.