The Tora Bora mountains, Osama bin Laden’s long-time presumed hideout, have little in common with the hills near Corleone, Sicily; and the highway leading out of Abbottabad, where the world’s most wanted man was found and killed, is not exactly the vegetable-lined stretch of road around Palermo; and the exploits of the Mafia’s now imprisoned top bosses, Salvatore Riina and Bernardo Provenzano, pale in comparison with Osama bin Laden, his spectacular demise and the location that served as a backdrop for the triumph of the U.S. Navy SEALS.
So why is it that, for some of us, the details emerging about bin Laden’s death inevitably harken to recent Mafia manhunts?
It may be that years of dealing with the Mafia will do that to your mind, or maybe that, at the end of the day, all stories of criminals in hiding look similar, regardless of whether the fugitives are international terrorists or local mobsters.
Are the crowds at Ground Zero rejoicing that “justice has been done” so different from the people who gathered outside police headquarters in Palermo to celebrate the 2006 arrest of boss of bosses Provenzano, and the other killers of heroic anti-Mafia prosecutors? Even the sense of pride expressed by our police investigators sounds much the statements made by U.S. law enforcement officials.
Many analysts have expressed surprise at the fact that bin Laden had been hiding in a compound just a stone’s throw from an important Pakistani military base, only protected by a tall wall and barbed wire. Many noted that there was no phone or Internet connection inside the compound, which confounds the common idea of sophisticated communications’ systems, satellite phones and so on.
While everyone thought bin Laden was hiding in Tora Bora, there he was, just a few miles away from Islamabad, from the center of security and intelligence services that had been looking for him since 1995, well before 9/11. Just like most of the Mafiosis, who were captured in their own homes: Riina lived in a quiet middle-class building in Palermo, Provenzano hadn’t left his home village.
Bin Laden and mobsters also avoided telephones? Provenzano would only communicate via “pizzini” – scraps of papers on which he wrote his orders. A slow but safe method of communication: they were only given to his most trusted aides.
Just like the messenger who unknowingly led the American “frogmen” right to the Abbottabad compound – showing that classic, old-fashioned tailing can sometimes work as efficiently as a high-tech investigation.
Even bin Laden’s presence in such an exposed location falls within the same logic employed by the Mafiosi: There are some things that a No. 1 boss cannot delegate but must do himself to impose his charisma – be it meeting with terror cells in Afghanistan or Pakistan, defining a strategy vis a vis the Arab uprisings, or agreeing to a suspicious meeting with other clans if necessary.
Details that have emerged about the long hunt for bin Laden suggest further links with the pursuit of the Mafia. Take for example, the US informant, perhaps attracted by the generous bounty on bin Laden, who was found beheaded with a sign reading: “This is what happens to traitors.” This primitive system of internal communication is typical of Mafia groups, when a murder is used as a deterrent, a warning toward those considering betrayal.
And fnally, there is the inevitable question that follows the announcement of the death of any larger-than-life mobster or terrorist – is he really dead? We’ve seen that one before, too. Indeed, just a few weeks ago, Italian authorities exhumed the body of Salvatore Giuliano, the Sicilian gangster who was killed under mysterious circumstances in 1950. Some will always believe it was a look-alike.
Read the original article in Italian
photo - Sarah Murray
