"The Accomplices": The Sicilian Mafia Goes Shopping For Journalists

While journalists who cover mafias do not have an easy time of it, new wiretaps show that the bosses are looking for journalists who are willing to be corrupted. The story of a book, The Accomplices, and the trouble that found the man who wrote it.

Narco-Mafie (Italy) reports this month.

There a number of alleged cases and intimations of the existence of such "approaches" here in Brazil, as I am always mentioning, most notably: José Messias Xavier of TV Globo, whose name was found on a spreadsheet containing the payroll of a mafia group running illegal gambling machines in Rio de Janeiro.

He was passing along information he gathered from law enforcement sources under the usual reporter-source confidentiality pledge.

Passing it along to the mafia.

A former chief of the state judicial police, recently elected to the state legislature, was also implicated in the case.

The Miami Herald went through quite a flap last year when it turned out that some of its journalists were getting paid by another source to serve an editorial mission other than the Herald's own commitment to inform its readers. (In that case, the outside influencer was the U.S. Government). A senior editor was fired over the incident. And rightly so, if you ask me.

Undisclosed, undue influence, black propaganda and stealth marketing: if you follow the tenets of "innovation journalism," of course, the question is: And what's wrong with that?

My Italian is not stellar, by the way. Roughly decent translation of an excerpt:

"What if Ferrara started writing again for the weekly Foglio … and wrote the things he should write. Is he [Ferrara] available?" Whatever we need to do [whatever we have to pay him for the articles], we are going to pay him." This conversation, captured by an ambient listening device, as reported in the book The Accomplices, by Lirio Abate and Peter Gomez, shows a Costa Nostra boss, Dr. Giuseppe Guttadauro, capo of the Brancaccio crime family, worrying about the fate of mafia men doing time in a Palermo jail. To help his jailed men, the boss wants to fund a media campaign to shine a spotlight on the awful conditions in the jails, and so is exploring the possibility of providing some journalists with … "reasons to reflect" on the subject. He even gets to the point of imagining them organizing a tour of the city jail at Ucciardone.

"The microphones that recorded Guttadauro's proposal did not reveal anything new, really: "Wiretaps and informant testimony in the courts bearing witness to attempts by the mafia to coopt journalists are plentiful in the recent history of Cosa Nostra," says Enrico Bellavia, a reporter for Repubblica and regional secretary of the Palermo chapter of the [press association].

"It's an old story that starts with the attempt by Leoluca Bagarella, in the 1990s, to get a newspaper to support the Sicilia Libera movement, of which he was an leader, and extends to the wiretaps of men recently arrested in Operation Gotha, who were caught discussing the possibility of hiring a journalist buddy of theirs. And let's not forget the letter from Matteo Messina Denaro to the mayor of Castelvetrano, Antonio Vaccarino, in which the boss writes of the need for a press campaign in support of the "men of honor." That mafia leaders are interested in information is a notable fact of our ties, for recent attempts to coopt journalists are docmented in new wiretaps, although given the state of the art it is not possible to know if those attempts to suborn journalists were actually carried out."

This is not, it is true, a completely new risk factor, although just a few weeks ago the Order of Sicilian Journalists and the regional Press Assocation approved a resolution in which journalists are forbidden from belonging to secret societies. "We felt the need to reassert, in a forceful way, the problems of reporting on the mafia after the serious threats to which our colleague Lirio Abbate has been subject," says Bellavia. "We did not want to place constraints on our solidarity, so we approved a document that provides a last line of defense against the desire the mafiosi have of influencing news reporting."

"The microphones that recorded Guttadauro's proposal did not reveal anything new, really: "Wiretaps and informant testimony in the courts bearing witness to attempts by the mafia to coopt journalists are plentiful in the recent history of Cosa Nostra," says Enrico Bellavia, a reporter for Repubblica and regional secretary of the Palermo chapter of the [press association].