The State witness phenomena in Italy only appeared within the legal framework at the beginning of the 1990s. The first piece of legislation, strongly wanted by judges Falcone and Borsellino, was law 82 of 15th of March 1991 which produced, in the following years, a number of legal directives.
The phenomena became increasing relevant in the mid -1980s when the so-called historic state witnesses (among which Buscetta, Calderone, Contorno, Sinagra and Marino Mannoia) started to reveal all they knew about Cosa Nostra, its strategies, activities, structure and individual crimes.
At the time, the only legal tool that provided reduced sentences was that for criminals charged with terrorism (law 6/2/1980 n. 15). An important point to make here is that there are profound differences between the motivations, objectives and characteristics of these two associations (terrorist groups and Cosa Nostra) and thus also in the motivations for choosing to collaborate with the State.
If this was the situation in Italy, in the USA, the Witness Protection Program had already been implemented in the 1970s which guaranteed extensive and concrete measures for witnesses/collaborators.
The law, which in Italy deals with the question of state witnesses and their benefits originates from a progression and parallel experience of the two different legal contexts, has been adapted to the specific crimes of mafia association in the Italian context. For a decade, law 82 of 15th of March 1991 permitted important operational successes to take place while at the same time there was a slow increase (especially between 1992 and 1995) in the number of collaborators entering the protection programme. Immediately after 1995, which marks the peak of the phenomena with 397 collaborators admitted to the programme, we witnessed a progressive decline of collaborators coming forward and a delegitimation of the programme. In 2000, for ex., only 91 state witnesses were admitted to the programme.
In this changing climate, the law of the 13th of February 2001 was passed which restricted the type of protection and modified the treatment of collaborators.
If this is, in brief, the legal context of the phenomena, it is also necessary for us to take into account other factors which have influenced these changes (Sciarrone 1998; Dino 2002; Becucci/Massari 2003). The ‘golden’ period of state witnesses took place thanks to a convergence of social and political factors and a particular ‘state of health’ of mafia organisations, all favourable to the decline of the criminal organisation. In the first phase, the declarations of ‘pentiti’ (state witnesses), the rigours approach of State institutions, the strong social approval of public opinion after the massacres of 1992-93 and a political class more attentive to the mafia threat, not only favours the state witness phenomena but also allows a number of operational successes in the fight against the Sicilian Mafia which even supposes a possible and definitive defeat of the mafia phenomena (Schneider and Schneider 2003). The successes of police activities, the withdrawal of guaranteed impunity and the increased level of violence (in which the organisation does not hesitate to sacrifice, even the lives of children and innocent victims) creates a real situation of instability which favours, even if only by cold calculation, collaboration with the State. The fact that the new ‘pentiti’ denounce subjectively a situation of profound unease, a true identity crisis, affirming that they feel ‘betrayed’ by the Mafia and are no longer able to recognise themselves in the organisation which has broken its ‘pact of faith’ with its members (Di Maria, 1989, 1998; Lo Verso et al, 1999; Lo Verso/Lo Coco 2003). Thus, from the mid-1990s to today, the climate has changed substantially.
More recently, a virulent campaign of public opinion has supported the main principles of the rule of law although in fact it paid more attention to the legal positions of the bourgeois professionals and politicians, it did however contribute to discredit the veracity of the declarations of state witnesses coming from Cosa Nostra, often pointing out that their confessions were full of imprecisions, incoherencies, additions or omissions of certain facts; more than one commentator has maintained that it is easy to prove the lack of authenticity of their declarations, that they could be altered merely by a simple, physiological change in memory, or by some emotional state or again by some incapacity to reconstruct logically the events narrated, that in most cases had happened quite a long time before. All this overlooking the fact that often it is these very lacunas, these contradictions, these blanks, these imprecisions that testify to the veracity of these memories. As Fabietti and Matera (1999) wrote ‘remembering is a ‘selective form of memory’ […] it isn’t a simple recording of the past but a representation of the past obtained through remembering and forgetting at the same time […] All ‘memory based phenomena’ are the product of an activity which remembers some specific elements, loading them with precise symbolic meanings, while obliterating others, during the reconstruction of the past’.
In the same way, the principle of the so-called ‘convergence of more than one piece of evidence’ according to which several converging declarations of state witnesses would already constitute proof, has come under some attack. On many occasions it has been stressed that the circles in which several ‘agents’ under protection find themselves cannot present guarantees against the possibility of internal circulations of news and information, thus, enabling the state witnesses to give concurring evidence against the accused.
This explains why in the new law of 13/02/01, n. 45, it is strictly forbidden for the defence to represent more than one accused who has given evidence against another accused for the same trial or in a related trial as defined in art. 12 and 371, comms 2 lettera b [art 16, comma 4 bis, lettera C].
However, we cannot explain why the law does not state the same incompatibility for the defence of Mafiosi accused of crimes who have decided not to collaborate. All the men of the mafia ‘faithful’ to the organisation are allowed to choose the same defence council, even when they are involved in the same or related trials.
In some cases even - confusing the legal sphere with the more or even ethical ones - it has been argued that since the collaborators never really repented their actions, their stories should not be taken into serious consideration (Fasullo, 1996, Stable, 1996; Scordato 1997).
Forgetting, thus, that the ‘legislation has not defined the ‘pentimento’ as an inner feeling of sincere repentance but has provided a law which completely leaves aside the establishment (which is in reality impossible) of a repudiation of the facts which are being divulged and which, in any case, encourages state witnesses even if they are motivated purely by utilitarian considerations‘ (Corte D’Assise di Palermo, II Sezione, Sentenza n. 15/97 Reg. Sent., Proc Pen. A carico di Bagarella +66, vol II).
The numerous attempts at isolating the former men of honour and at delegitimising their contributions to the reconstructions of Mafiosi networks carried out by the authorities, have created a general climate of scepticism as to the possible use of such method in the future.
Today, the contribution of state witnesses risks disappearing for good, to the great satisfaction of the Mafia. Already in 1993, the State witness, Salvatore Cancemi warned in fact ‘that Riina was doing all he could to discredit the ‘pentiti’ as he was convinced that in doing this he would bring about a revision of his own trial’. After his arrest, his strategy was adopted by Bernando Provenzano. In particular, I was told by Ganci Raffaele that Provenzano was trying either to discredit the pentiti or to bring about a change in the law on pentiti’.
From the remarks made above, it follows that in our research we will adopt an interdisciplinary approach from the fields of social anthropology, political science and law, which will attempt to decodify and study the weight and impact that some events and transformations – policies and changes in the law as well as change in public opinion - have had over a certain period of time on the behaviour and personal lives of state witnesses. Not forgetting of course the importance of the political framework, both at national and international level within which these changes have taken place in the role and representation of these individuals.
Our starting hypothesis is that the state witness phenomena has changed over time due to micro and macro-sociological variables, personal variables and choices as well as specific structures of the personalities of individuals and their lives stories. This study will attempt to establish connections between the social macro and micro dimensions of the phenomena, trying to identify the common threat which links the life-experiences of different individuals to the ‘formal’ rituals of social life and which, enables us to see, beyond the specificity and particularities of each life story, a common denominator of recurring elements and therefore establish comparisons between itineraries which otherwise would have remained enclosed in their own personal spheres. As Schwartz and Jacobs have said, referring to Simmel’s work (1989): ‘For Simmel, pure or formal sociology consisted in the study of forms of association, processes through which the members of a given group influence other members and are influenced by them. In studying the functioning of these interactions, we discover certain structures or forms that human beings use to deal with each other, forms that are in some way independent from the content of their relationship […]. Whatever may be the passions, the needs or tendencies of human beings, they translate themselves in somewhat constant forms of reciprocal relationships. Sociologists can isolate these forms, like one can isolate a virus. In other words, the forms of interaction identifiable and can be discussed taxonomically’ (1987, p. 208).
Within these wide legal and symbolic frameworks, codes and forms of interaction assimilated and shared in their recurrence (Goffman 1998), we intend to reconstruct the life stories of specific state witnesses, identifying the possible contextual elements and social conditions that may facilitate or on the contrary prevent specific subjective types of behaviour.