Italian Police Anticipate Mafia Counterattack

Locked in bunker-like offices and guarded by the army, prosecutors and police fighting the Mafia are waiting for the beast to lash back.

The arrest June 24 of top mob boss Leoluca Bagarella, the man considered the mastermind behind the Mafia’s recent strategy of car-bombings, dealt a heavy blow to Cosa Nostra.

The Mafia is expected to answer, possibly with another spectacular act of violence.

The capture of Bagarella is the latest in a series of major arrests in a crackdown prompted by the 1992 murders of Italy’s leading anti-mob prosecutors.

Nourished by “omerta,” or the code of silence, and the force of intimidation, the Mafia thrives on symbols and signs. Thus, it “must react, because for Cosa Nostra, the state cannot appear to be stronger,” said Guido Lo Forte, the deputy prosecutor here and a 20-year veteran of the office.

A loss of prestige by the leadership could loosen its hold on its foot soldiers and criminal enterprises.

“In the worst of cases there can be a violent, sensational reaction similar to that after the arrest of (Salvatore) Riina,” the Mafia boss of bosses, Lo Forte said.

The Mafia also may try to recover prestige quietly by increasing its control of the Sicilian economy and stepping up intimidation of local officials, Lo Forte said in an interview in his office.

In the months after Riina’s capture in January 1993, car bombs went off in Milan, Rome and at the Uffizi museum in Florence. Two of the Rome bombs heavily damaged churches, including St. John Lateran, the pope’s titutar seat as bishop of Rome.

Prosecutors believe those targets were chosen also to answer John Paul II’s furious denunciation of the Mafia on a visit to Sicily that May.

Riina, who is married to Bagarella’s sister, already has received nine life sentences. He and Bagarella are on trial in Caltanissetta, in central Sicily, for the May 1992 car-bomb killing of their leading foe, former Prosecutor Giovanni Falcone. They also are blamed for the car-bomb murder of Falcone’s colleague, Paolo Borsellino, two months later, and the mainland bombings in 1993.

Bagarella told prosecutors Thursday that he had worked as a cheese salesman for his 4 1/2 years as a fugitive.

Despite the recent arrests, the Mafia still earns tens of billions of dollars every year with drug trafficking, extortion, prostitution and other rackets.