Italy Rethinks Treatment of ‘Repentant’ Mob Turncoats

He led police to the Mafia’s “boss of bosses” and gave prosecutors testimony that helped bring ex-Premier Giulio Andreotti to trial.

So Baldassare Di Maggio, as he later told a court, thought he could do anything he wanted, even kill.

Enjoying a state-paid bonus of a half-billion lire ($300,000), the Mafioso turncoat drove up and down Italy in his BMW, stocking up on Kalashnikovs and meeting with other mob songbirds to plot the elimination of rivals.

Arrested in October on murder charges and stripped of his turncoat benefits, Di Maggio is still paying for his spree. In March, his brother, Emanuele, a shepherd near Palermo, was fatally shot 11 times with a pistol. The slaying, like those of an uncle and nephew a few weeks earlier, were blamed on Di Maggio’s mob enemies.

Now questions are being asked about the whole small army of Mafia turncoats whose testimony has helped send hundreds of gangsters to prison.

As the Di Maggio affair unfolded, calls grew for an urgent overhaul of how turncoats are handled. Even leftists, traditionally the staunchest backers of the country’s powerful prosecutors, wondered how a man supposedly under police protection was apparently able to elude surveillance.

There was speculation that authorities might have turned a blind eye to let turncoats eliminate other mobsters. One turncoat told a court that Di Maggio had confided that “the dogs were tied up, they can’t bite me,” an insinuation that police let Di Maggio roam at will.

“There’s too much casualness in the use of ‘pentiti’ by police and magistrates when dealing with criminals who have shot 10, 20, 30, 40 people,” the head of Parliament’s Anti-Mafia Commission, Sen. Ottaviano Del Turco, said in his Rome office. “Collaborators were one thing when there were 20 or 30 of them and you could check out their declarations. It’s different when there are some 1,000 of them, with 6,000 to 7,000 wives, children and in-laws” to protect.

“Pentiti,” which means repentant ones, is how Italians refer to the turncoats. But one of every eight turncoats returns to crime, Del Turco said.

“The word ‘repentance’ is out of place. They’re either exalted, or condemned as criminals. [But] they’re somewhere in between,” said Alfredo Galasso, a founder of the anti-Mafia Rete [Network] Party and a lawyer representing a major turncoat.

Turncoats are a new phenomenon for the centuries-old Cosa Nostra. A few decades ago, authorities committed a would-be turncoat to a mental hospital on the rationale that anyone who dared defy the Mafia’s code of silence must be crazy.

But since the mid-1980s, when the state’s crackdown started winning the respect of some Mafiosi, mobsters have been coming forward in increasing numbers.

Del Turco is pushing a bill, now moving through Parliament, that would keep potential turncoats in jail for six months. During that time, a mobster would have to tell all, and prosecutors would then decide whether to grant protection.

The new law would also require turncoats to serve at least 10 years of a life sentence or one-quarter of lesser prison sentences. And it would allow only temporary living allowances until a new identity, home and job could be found, rather than stipends for life.

The day after Di Maggio’s brother was murdered, prosecutor Guido Lo Forte suggested that “outside forces”--some read that to imply American Mafiosi--might be using turncoats in a strategy to position one Sicilian crime clan over another.

Di Maggio told the court hearing Andreotti’s case that two men he took to be secret service agents offered him $3.5 million if he would testify that Palermo prosecutors put him up to saying that the reputed “boss of bosses,” Toto Riina, gave the ex-premier a kiss of honor. Di Maggio stuck to his version, damaging to Andreotti.

Riina was arrested in 1993 after 23 years as a fugitive after Di Maggio, who chauffeured him around Palermo, tipped police.

Andreotti, on trial in Palermo since 1995 on charges of Mafia association, has painted himself as a victim of political vendetta, and his lawyers seized gleefully on the Di Maggio business.

Di Maggio “says he wants to collaborate, but we discover he’s really trying to regain control of his territory” near Corleone, said Andreotti’s lawyer, Franco Coppi.