Excellent Cadavers

by Marco Turco
First Run/Icarus Films, Brooklyn, NY, 2005
VHS/DVD, 92 min., col.
Sales, $398 (DVD); rental, $125 (VHS)
Distributor’s website: http:// www.frif.com.

Reviewed by Fred Andersson
Sweden

konstfred@yahoo.com

This documentary begins with some newsreels from 1992, the year when the Sicilian prosecutors Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino were murdered and thus joined the company of other “cadaveri eccellenti” (“excellent cadavers”, police jargon for prominent people that were killed by the Mafia). We see their blasted cars, we see the crowds of enraged mourners, and we see the now famous sequence in which the chief magistrate of Palermo, Antonino Caponnetto, is asked if there is still any hope for the city. The only thing he manages to answer at this moment of shock and despair is “È finito tutto” (“It's all over”). “It was clear”, a speaker voice comments, “that something had come to an end”. But what was it that had come to an end, exactly? The film sets out to answer that question and to show its relevance for understanding present-day Italian politics.

By the beginning of the Eighties, the situation on Sicily had become utterly precarious. The Mafia controlled all major sectors of the economy and infiltrated business organizations and public institutions alike. The number of Mafia-related killings increased day by day. Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino had been working together for a number of years in the inner circle of anti-Mafia investigation, and Falcone had developed a groundbreaking method of tracing criminal networks though the bank transactions of its members. In 1981, there occurred a first great wave of murders in order to silence Falcone's informants. At this stage, it wasn't even possible to legally consider the Mafia as a criminal organization, because it cleverly avoided to expose the conditions that characterized such organizations according to present Italian Law. However, a legal reform was underway, thanks to the unceasing work of Pio La Torre, member of the chamber of deputies and head of the Sicilian section of the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

The law proposed by La Torre represented a radical shift in legal praxis because it finally recognized the reality of the complex power structures of organized crime. It made it a criminal act to collaborate with the Mafia, and it made it possible to arrest and try not only the key actors but also the people who acted as cover-ups through various “reputable” businesses. This law was unpopular not only among the mafiosi but also within the political establishment. It was hardly a coincidence that a Communist deputy became its main architect and spokesperson, because it was a well-known fact that there had been a pact between the Christian Democrats, the Church, and the Mafia ever since the end of World War II. La Torre became a martyr for his own law — he was shot in his private car in Palermo in 1982. A few months thereafter, the head of the police forces of Palermo, General Alberto Dalla Chiesa, met the same destiny. Only after this second murder, the pressure on the reluctant Parliament became so great that it was finally forced to pass the law — a decision that made the Maxi Trials possible.

Basing the narrative on a book by Alexander Stille, the director Marco Turco tells the story of the trials and its background with the aid of a number of highly trustworthy eyewitnesses. One of them is the photographer and journalist Letizia Battaglia who is the author of many of the black-and-white stills that are used in the film and who worked for the newspaper L'Ora in the Seventies. Finally, we are told how the massive popular protests that followed upon the death of Borsellino led to the authorization of new strategies in order to intensify anti-Mafia work, and the prime minister Andreotti himself was finally prosecuted for being a Mafia collaborator.

What came to an end in 1992 was neither the Mafia, nor the systematic anti-Mafia work, but rather certain strategies of the Mafia and a certain dedication of its opponents. The Mafia of today has to a great extent abandoned its violent ways, and to fight it isn't as heroic an undertaking as it used to be in Falcone's and Borsellino's days. But this also means that it has become even more intertwined with the structures of political power, personified by such figures as the newly re-elected president Berlusconi. That's a conclusion that follows quite naturally from the evidence that is reflected in this urgent documentary.