Since the early 1960s, the central pipeline for heroin shipments to the United States has shifted away from Marseilles, France, following the New York Narcotics Bureau breakup of the so-called French Connection. The Marseilles shipments were thereafter replaced by the Palermo Connection—giving the Mafia, both Sicilian and American, a firm hold on heroin.
From 1973 to 1983 at least 60 percent of all heroin brought into the United States came through Palermo; as a result, that city, in impoverished Sicily, is one of the richest in Italy. Also as a direct consequence of the Palermo Connection, an average of two gang murders per week occur in the island capitol.
No one in Palermo has been safe. In 1982 alone, among the victims of Mafia violence were two judges, two police chiefs and a leading Christian Democrat political leader. The Sicilian Mafia’s power has remained undented despite unified political opposition.
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Pio La Torre, the leader of the Sicilian Communist Party, and a member of the Parliamentary Anti-Mafia Commission, became a forceful opponent against the secret society. He proposed the “La Torre law,” which would provide access to private bank accounts as well as legalize telephone taps on Mafia suspects. On April 30, 1982, La Torre was shot and killed in an ambush.
The same fate befell General Alberto Dalla Chiesa, the police official who had crippled the Red Brigades. Appointed prefect of Palermo, he demanded that the La Torre law be passed despite the death of the communist leader; instead, four months after La Torre’s murder, Alberto Dalla Chiesa was shot dead, along with his young wife and his police escort. This at last led to a vigorous campaign against the Mafia by the Catholic Church, with the pope visiting Palermo to denounce the society. The La Torre law was passed, and mass arrests and trials of alleged Mafia figures, including those in “white collar” professions, followed.
The international press was filled with reports of the inevitable decline of the Mafia, both in Sicily and, because of information gained through the investigation and testimony of high-ranking defectors, in the United States.
However, throughout the crackdown, at least 20 heroin refineries remained active in Sicily, with the capability of turning out a half billion dollars worth of heroin a week. As one expert stated in 1984, “It seems doubtful whether even the anti-Mafia law can get to the root of the problem.”
