The Mafia's Murderous Code

By Ed Magnuson

The ritual seems "ridiculous" now, the witness acknowledged, but it was deadly serious when he joined the Mafia 37 years ago in Palermo, Sicily. One of the four men conducting the ceremony pricked the initiate's finger and rubbed the blood on the picture of a saint. The picture was then set afire. The act meant that "if I should betray the organization, my flesh would burn like this saint," Tommaso Buscetta told fascinated spectators in a jammed federal courtroom in New York City last week. The stocky mobster then coolly proceeded to betray his blood brothers in a most dramatic way, fingering seven of the 22 defendants in the courtroom as Mafia members involved in a conspiracy to import and sell $1.6 million worth of heroin in the U.S.

Buscetta, the highest Mafia figure ever to inform on the Mob, said that breaking the organization's vow of silence was punishable by "morte--death." For his safety, he is being kept under close guard by the FBI in an undisclosed location while he testifies at the trial of some of the Mafia's top members from Sicily and the U.S.'s East Coast. They are charged in what has been called the "pizza connection" heroin case, since some of the drugs were allegedly peddled from pizza storefronts. Buscetta, 57, hopes his cooperation with prosecutors will lead to freedom and a new life under police protection, with a different identity and a face altered by plastic surgery.

Speaking in Italian through a translator, Buscetta began his testimony by describing the Mafia's structure and bylaws. Both in Sicily, where it began, and in the U.S., the criminal organization at one time imposed a strict, almost old-fashioned, moral code. Starting as a low-ranking "soldier," Buscetta said, "I was to be silent, not to look at other men's wives or women, not to steal." All "men of honor," as members called themselves, pledged never to lie to one another. Buscetta was suspended from Mafia activities for six months in 1952 for breaking the code. "I betrayed my wife," he admitted. Buscetta told how one insider could tell whether he was being introduced to another. "My friend" was the term used to introduce outsiders; "our friend" signaled a Mafia member.

Palermo's men of honor had long since abandoned their ideals by the late '70s, when savage gang wars broke out over control of the U.S. heroin trade. Two of Buscetta's sons, a brother and four other relatives were killed during the bloodletting in Sicily. Buscetta, by then a Mafia chieftain, fled to Brazil, where he was arrested in 1983 on a fugitive warrant from Italy. He was talking now, he explained, because he wanted "security for my family." Some undisclosed survivors in his family (which includes his Brazilian-born third wife) are under U.S. protection.

Buscetta occasionally stood up in the cavernous courtroom to point at defendants he claimed to have known as Mafia members. He identified Gaetano Badalamenti as a onetime capo, or boss, of the ruling Mafia commission in Sicily. Badalamenti, the key defendant, stared back impassively. Gaetano Mazzara's bemused smile turned to a look of disgust when he was picked out at the crowded defense tables and identified as the American distributor for the imported heroin. More such fingering is expected as Buscetta continues to testify in a complex trial that could last as long as six months. Defense attorneys will assail Buscetta's credibility, and are expected to charge that he is singing in an effort to avoid prosecution for Mob murders in Sicily. But to date, Buscetta has provided the most revealing glimpse into the Mafia since ( American Mobster Joseph Valachi first outlined the structure and the secret name of the Cosa Nostra in 1963.

Another cooperative witness helped federal prosecutors make their case against a group of alleged mobsters last week. In a federal courtroom in Kansas City, Roy Williams, the ailing former president of the Teamsters Union, admitted something that many investigators have claimed for years: the Teamsters' central states pension fund was long tapped by gangsters for huge loans to conduct their shadowy business. Suffering from emphysema and clutching an oxygen bottle, Williams, 70, was testifying in the trial of nine alleged Mafia leaders from Chicago, Cleveland, Milwaukee and Kansas City. They are charged with a conspiracy to skim some $2 million in profits from the Stardust and Fremont casinos in Las Vegas. Prosecutors contend they used a $62.5 million loan from the Teamsters' fund in 1974 to buy the casinos and operate them under the name of the Argent Corp.

As a pension fund trustee, Williams said, he helped arrange the casino loan for the late Nick Civella, boss of the Kansas City Mafia for about 30 years. In return, Civella paid him $1,500 a month until Williams was elected Teamsters president in 1981. Although Williams said he did favors for Civella at the direction of his "superiors," including the late Teamsters Bosses Jimmy Hoffa and Frank Fitzsimmons, he described Civella, who died of lung cancer in 1983, as "a very personal friend." Civella, said Williams, "was a deep thinker. He assisted me in my career, and I provided some help to him."

Under cross-examination, Williams admitted that he had tried to bribe former Nevada Senator Howard Cannon in 1979 to block deregulation of the trucking industry. Williams was convicted of attempted bribery in 1982, and is scheduled to start serving a ten-year prison term next month. He acknowledged that he was testifying in hopes of getting the sentence modified. Asked to explain the contradiction be- tween his admission now and his profession of innocence under oath at his trial, Williams had a simple explanation: "I lied."

With reporting by Joe Henderson/Kansas City and Barry Kalb/New York