Pio La Torre: The Law and the Mafia

In Palermo, a law changed the relationship between the state and the mafia. Pio La Torre was one of its driving forces.

Pio La Torre: The Law and the Mafia

In the middle of the night, goods are sent from the countryside and the sea to Palermo’s Ballarò Market. There were no entrepreneurs, officials, or dukes cutting a ribbon, but merchants in the High Middle Ages began to gather in Ballarò and turned it into an open-air market. Because it never had an opening, it also has no closing. It is occupied twenty-four hours a day by buyers, sellers, workers, onlookers, tourists, and mafiosi. Palermo is a Ballarò Market on a grand scale. It never sleeps either. At dawn, when the sound of an engine or the shout of a sleepless passerby can no longer be heard, Palermitans doze, and traffic becomes one of their nightmares.

On the morning of April 30, 1982, the sun warmed the air enough to make people forget winter, which had formally left the Northern Hemisphere just a month earlier. That day, Rosario Di Salvo followed his usual routine. He got out of the car and waited, leaning on the passenger door, until Pio La Torre got in. They were heading to the headquarters of the Italian Communist Party, where they had been active for many years. Shortly after nine in the morning, they were trapped in the nightmare of traffic. The beige Fiat 132 driven by Rosario Di Salvo entered a narrow street. Parked cars forced them into a single-file line. When the street tightened and side mirrors struck against each other, two men on a motorcycle overtook the Fiat 132 and began shooting at them. From a parked vehicle, others joined the gunfire. Rosario drew his weapon and fired four times, trying to shield Pio with his body. Several bullets struck him. Others hit Pio, who died a few hours later.

Pio La Torre was born on Christmas Eve in 1927, in Altarello di Baida, a village on the outskirts of Palermo. The son of farmers, he worked from a young age alongside his four siblings in the Conca d’Oro, a region rich in resources controlled by landowners and the mafia. Despite long working days, he studied by candlelight and, at the age of eighteen, after the end of the Second World War, he enrolled at the University of Palermo and joined the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

After the expulsion of the Nazi army from Italy, the government launched a series of agrarian programs to guarantee minimum living conditions for peasants, especially in the south. The first Italian government, after the long night of fascism, included members from different political parties, including the Italian Communist Party (PCI).

Officials from the PCI promoted access to land for peasants. The leading figure was Fausto Gullo, a Calabrian who, in 1944, was appointed Minister of Agriculture. Four years later, through a decree bearing his name, the occupation of land by peasant unions was recognized. The decree led to the transfer of more than one hundred eighty thousand hectares of uncultivated or underused land from landowners to peasants. Gullo’s agrarian policy came to an end when he was removed from office. Two of the first victims emerged from the alliance between large landowners and the mafia.

Epifanio Li Puma was a peasant and union leader in western Palermo. A defender of trade union organizations, on March 2, 1948, two men on horseback approached him and shot him dead. Eight days later, in the town of Corleone, the peasant union leader Placido Rizzotto was kidnapped and murdered. The clan boss, the physician Michele Navarra, the following day administered a lethal injection to a twelve-year-old boy who had witnessed the kidnapping.

Violence against peasants spread rapidly. Large landowners used the mafia to threaten and murder unionists and peasant families who refused to comply with orders. One such family was that of Pio La Torre, who was already a reference point for many peasants in the area due to his political activity. A mafia family that had offered Pio La Torre the chance to join the political party they supported set fire to the stable doors after he refused them. Pio La Torre’s father asked his son to abandon political activity or leave the house. The rest of the family was neither accustomed to nor willing to draw the attention of landowners and the mafia. Pio gathered his clothes, his books, and left for Palermo.

The Conca d’Oro

A new wave of peasant protests began in southern Italy. Pio La Torre proposed the mass occupation of land in Bisacquino, south of Palermo. On March 10, 1950—on the second anniversary of the kidnapping and murder of Placido Rizzotto—Pio, together with six thousand people, divided up nearly two thousand hectares to distribute among the peasants. As the occupiers were returning to their homes, the police launched an operation to block their return. Insults flew back and forth, and within moments stones and bullets followed. Pio tried to stop the repression, but the police advanced anyway. One hundred peasants, including Pio, were arrested. He was accused of striking a police lieutenant during the clashes.

The trial took seventeen months to begin, during which he was held in Palermo’s Ucciardone prison. Considered a participant in a political crime, Pio La Torre was subjected to solitary confinement and, for several months, had no contact with the outside world. During those seventeen months, his mother died, and Pio was unable to say goodbye. While he was in prison, his first son, Filippo, was also born. To introduce him to his father, his wife Giuseppina had to hand the baby to a prison guard and wait in an office while he was brought to Pio. The trial finally began in August 1951. After ten hearings in which the police failed to present evidence proving the alleged assault, Pio was acquitted and released.

Pio quickly returned to party activities. His commitment and ability to mobilize people led him toward a more institutional political career: first, he was elected Secretary of the Chamber of Labor, and shortly afterward, a city councilor in Palermo. Pio’s years on the Palermo City Council (1952–1966) were marked by his fight against the alliance between the state and the mafia. From the late 1950s through the mid-1970s, a group of public officials from the Christian Democracy party (DC), along with businessmen and the mafia, demolished much of the city’s architectural heritage and replaced it with low-quality buildings. Officials granted construction permits and public funds to entrepreneurs linked to the mafia. Those who received the money were front men serving Cosa Nostra, which in return provided political support, especially during elections. In Palermo, on a single night, more than three thousand building permits were issued to just five individuals, among them a building janitor.

Pio La Torre’s commitment and political skills eventually took him to the position of General Secretary of the PCI in Sicily and later onto the national stage. By then, he had earned a degree in Political Science from the University of Palermo, and his understanding of Sicily’s two major problems was both solid and clearly articulated whenever he spoke. He ran for Parliament and was elected in 1972.

The Law

One of his first tasks as a member of Parliament was to serve on the Anti-Mafia Commission. Created after the First Mafia War, it had remained largely inactive for years. Pio La Torre understood the transformation of the mafia. Born from a close relationship with the countryside and the market, with the expansion of the state and the concentration of its power in the city, the mafia had moved to Palermo.

Together with deputy Cesare Terranova—a Sicilian magistrate who, after a series of judicial failures in the fight against the mafia, had agreed to run for office—they sought to revitalize the Anti-Mafia Commission. They produced new reports, interviewed victims, and identified public officials in Palermo who were colluding with the mafia. In one of these reports, they included a proposal to create new judicial tools to investigate the mafia.

In the annex titled “Provisions Against the Mafia,” they proposed two key innovations. The first was the legal definition of “mafia-type association,” making membership punishable by up to ten years in prison. The second—and the one that caused the greatest concern within the mafia—was the requirement that judges confiscate their assets. Pio La Torre and Cesare Terranova understood that mafia members accepted prison as part of the risk. Losing money, homes, and land, however, meant the collapse of their economic and symbolic power—and the strengthening of their main enemy, the state.

When his term ended, Cesare Terranova returned to his post as a magistrate in Palermo. Three months after returning to the island and beginning to investigate Cosa Nostra, on September 25, 1979, as he was driving to the courthouse, he was shot dead by hitmen along with police officer Lenin Mancuso, his driver and bodyguard. The order was given by Luciano Leggio, a mafia boss whom Cesare had once called a bastard when he refused to name his parents during a judicial proceeding. Leggio remembered that encounter for years, and the leadership of Cosa Nostra ultimately approved Terranova’s assassination.

The mafia had decided to kill state officials who challenged it. Terranova was not the first. Michele Reina, the regional secretary of the Christian Democracy party, and Boris Giuliano, head of the Mobile Squad of the police, were murdered earlier that same year. Piersanti Mattarella, President of the Region of Sicily, Emanuele Basile, a captain in the Carabinieri, and Gaetano Costa, a Palermo magistrate, were killed the following year. In Sicily, the bodies were piling up. And alongside mafia violence came the dangers of the Cold War.

In 1981, Pio asked the leadership of the PCI to allow him to return to Sicily to coordinate actions against the installation of a NATO military base. One of the first initiatives was a massive signature campaign involving everyone from the Communist Party to the Catholic Church. In one year, they gathered more than one million signatures, and on October 11, 1981, accompanied by more than thirty thousand people, they presented them to the national government. Protests against the installation of the base spread across the continent. In the city of Bonn, Germany, a demonstration organized by the European Peace Movement drew three hundred thousand people. Fourteen days after the march in Sicily, another demonstration from Milan to Rome brought together another two hundred thousand participants.

Aftermath

On the morning of April 30, 1982, as news of the murders of Pio La Torre and Rosario Di Salvo spread through the streets of Palermo, suspicion quickly fell on Cosa Nostra. One day after International Workers’ Day, their joint funeral was held in Piazza Politeama in Palermo. More than one hundred thousand people attended. Pio knew that, in that context, his actions amounted to signing his own death sentence, and he had asked his comrades that his funeral “not only be a day of mourning, but also a day of struggle for all workers.”

As had happened with many other high-profile killings, the mafia tried to cover its tracks by issuing false statements attributing the murders to far-left political groups. Despite these “poisonings”—as the diversionary maneuvers of the mafia and corrupt sectors of the state were known—Pio’s comrades and family consistently maintained that the mafia was responsible. The assassination of Pio La Torre forced the national government to respond, accelerating the deployment to Sicily of Carabinieri General Carlo Alberto Dalla Chiesa to confront the mafia.

Dalla Chiesa arrived on the island with a mandate but little material or political support. His time there was brief. On September 3, 1982, just a few months later, he was ambushed by the mafia along with his wife and a police officer serving as his escort. All three were killed instantly. In less than twenty-four hours, the national government was compelled to urge Parliament to approve the bill that Pio La Torre and Cesare Terranova had introduced when they were still deputies. On September 24, 1982, as Law 646, the offense of mafia-type association and the mandatory confiscation of mafia assets were incorporated into the Penal Code.

Clarifying the murders of Pio and Rosario required the cooperation of mafiosi who turned state’s witnesses and identified Pino Greco, Giuseppe Lucchese, Nino Madonia, Mario Prestifilippo, and Salvatore Cucuzza as members of the hit squad. Despite these confessions, for a long time there were suspicions that national and international intelligence services had also been involved. Finally, when Salvatore Cucuzza was arrested in 1996, he admitted his role in the hit squad, confirmed the identities of his accomplices, and stated that Salvatore “Totò” Riina—the head of Cosa Nostra—had ordered the killing.

The law promoted by Pio La Torre marked a turning point in the modern fight against the mafia. Asset confiscation opened a new way of confronting organized crime. Those assets began to be reused for social purposes. The law bears his name.