Word count: 945 | Reading time: 4 min read
Pretzel Logic
Eugenio Selvaggi and Giovanni Salvi will probably take in the Liberty Bell, the Art Museum and a couple of soft pretzels when they come to Philly for the weekend. As visitors to our little town, they might even hit Penn’s Landing or tour the ItalianMarket.
Then again, they may not have much time to check out all that the city has to offer.
Selvaggi and Salvi are not your average camera-toting turistos.
Selvaggi is a judge in the Ministry of Justice in Rome. Salvi is a prosecutor in the Anti-Mafia Division of the Court of Rome.
The two are touring the States to find out how the courts and the cops in this country handle the mob. The Romans were invited to town months ago by the International Visitors’ Center — the official representative for federally invited guests toPhilly.
Talk about timing.
A grumpy Sicilian named John Stanfa — the Dour Don — just happens to be a defendant in one of the biggest, and certainly one of the most bizarre mob trials this decade.
A trial that has given us the testimony of John “Tool Time” Veasey, a drill sergeant in Stanfa’s army. A trial that has given us a guy nicknamed Santa Claus testifying about helping Stanfa blow away his enemies. A trial that has given usthis bon mot from wheelchair-bound co-defendant Tony “Buck” Piccolo: Upon seeing a reporter squash a huge roach with her shoe as he was being wheeled out of the courtroom, he said to her, “Now you know how easy it is.”
Forget the Philly Phlash, boys.
Put away those maps of Historic Places.
There’s a couple of seats in Courtroom 17A of the U.S. District Court at 6th and Market just waiting for yiz.
Salvi and Selvaggi say they know little of John Stanfa, even though his defense team visited Sicily this summer, where a waiter had fled after being the target of a botched mob hit.
The two know little of the Philly mob, or Philadelphia for that matter, even though Salvi’s home address — 36 Via Rizzo — would have strong appeal here.
But they do know plenty about how the Mafia operates in Italy. And the way they tell it, Stanfa, his arch-rival Skinny Joe Merlino, and the rest of the Meatballs Who Can’t Shoot Straight have some learning to do.
“Let me give you an example of how the criminal associations work in Italy,” says Salvi through an interpreter, speaking over the phone from his hotel room in Denver. “In 1981, there were a series of earthquakes in Italy. It iscalculated that about half the public funds sent to Campagna fell into the hands of the Mafia.”
How much are we talking about here?
“One hundred thousand billion lire,” says Salvi.
“One hundred thousand billion lire? How much is that in dollars?”
The translator tells me to divide one hundred thousand billion by 1,400 — the number of lire per dollar at the time.
Salvi can’t help me with the math, but he tells me this much. The mob take of the earthquake relief money “would be close to the budget of a small country.”
Compared with that, John Stanfa’s reputed racketeering enterprise is like the kid on the corner selling lemonade.
And, unlike the case against Stanfa, most Mafia activity in Italy does not involve control of illegal activity like drug dealing and bookmaking. The Mafia in Italy, say Salvi and Selvaggi, is much more troubling. It controls legal activity likepublic works, through kickbacks, corruption and extortion.
And there’s another thing about the Italian Cosa Nostra.
They don’t just go after each other.
They go after guys like Salvi and Selvaggi.
In May, 1992, the Italian mob blew up Giovanni Falcone, who, like Salvi, was a top prosecutor in the Ministry of Justice. “He was really in the core of criminal policy,” says Salvi. “He could push the government to wield criminalpolicy against the Mafia. That is why he was killed.”
Falcone’s killing proved to be a turning point in Italy’s war against organized crime. That, combined with the election of a new government in 1992, has resulted in some serious hurting on the mob.
A hurting that the folks who are supposed to be teaching the Romans could learn from.
“You know what omerta means?” Salvi asks about the famed code of silence, not knowing how silly a question that is for anyone who has covered the local Mafiosi, considering that Philly mobsters sing better than the Opera Company andhave been singing for years. “Well, after the bombing, the code of omerta has finally been broken in Italy.”
The result, says Salvi, is that 2,500 people are under protection as witnesses. “We have a number of commissioners of the Cosa Nostra cooperating with the authorities,” he says. “The central director of the Cosa Nostra is cooperatingwith the authorities. There is such a big explosion of investigation that we have never seen before.”
Ah, but unlike Angelo Bruno, Michael Ciancaglini, Giovanni Falcone and other victims of mobsters the world over, the Italian Mafia is far from rubbed out, says Salvi, whose latest investigation is a hush-hush look at the relation between Italian andRussian mobs.
“The organization is not going to die,” says Salvi. “We have a lot of people in custody. Thousands of people in custody. Omerta has been broached completely. But the Cosa Nostra is in such a deep way founded in some regions ofour country that we will be a long way from eradicating that organization.”
Sounds like he could be talking about South Philly.
A region of this country he’ll learn all about in Courtroom 17A.
Home of Stanfa Tour ’95.
