The Perfect Murder, Mafia Style
And what mistakes to avoid
It is a well known fact that most people who are murdered are murdered by someone they know. This makes sense. After all, why would you want to kill a perfect stranger, whom you have never met?
Another fact is that most people who are murdered are murdered by someone like themselves. In other words, young men murder young men, bond traders murder bond traders, and so on. There are certain professions and states of life more dangerous than others, clearly. Swimming with piranhas is always dangerous.
A social worker friend of mine who works with criminal teenagers told me that most murderers are not a danger to the public because most murders are a ‘one off’, that is to say the result of an extraordinary coming together of circumstances, something that is most unlikely ever to happen again.
Bearing these three things in mind, one sees how murderers get caught. Someone is murdered: the killer is in their circle of friends and associates, indeed in their inner circle. What special circumstances pertained at the time of the murder? And how does the character of the person killed point to the person who killed them? On top of this you have all the help that can be provided by forensics, which is often crucial for securing a conviction. In contemporary cases, much of the evidence comes from the analysis of mobile phone data, blood stains and gunshot residue, along with the more old fashioned analysis of fibre deposits, footprints and so on. Because many killings are done on the spur of the moment, they leave a wealth of forensic evidence behind.
Mario Puzo, in The Godfather, tells us that the terrifying Luca Brasi was greatly prized as he could carry out a murder, from the planning stages to its execution, all on his own, thus avoiding potential collaborators who could then rat him out, which made detection, let alone conviction, almost impossible. Clearly, the less people who know, the better. And here we see one of the reasons behind the code of silence. Don’t talk, and above all, don’t ask questions. ‘What did you do last week?’ was the one question no one ever put to Luca Brasi.
So, how does the Mafia plan the perfect murder today? Naturally, I cannot answer that question, but I can let my imagination run riot.
First of all, no mobile phones, no email correspondence, no telephone calls on landlines. Indeed no conversations at all where there might be the possibility of people overhearing you, or taping you. So, one meets and speaks in crowded bars, under the cover of the noisy cappuccino machine; or in swimming pools, which are wet and noisy, double protection against electronic surveillance. Or one meets on the pavement, next to choking urban traffic. Messages, of course, are carried by small boys and are verbal, stuff the small boy is trained to forget.
The next thing is to make sure there is no possible forensic evidence. When Calogero and Traiano kill Michele Lotto the wild Romanian in The Nymph of Syracuse, they do so with knives, but the blood makes no difference, as they do it in the bathroom, and all Italian bathrooms have, by law, a drain in the centre of the floor, like wet rooms do in other countries, ideal for washing away the blood. Moreover, they take their clothes off to do the deed, so there are no bloodstains on their clothing. (This last, that you have to stab someone in a state of undress, is something I gleaned from a novel by PD James, A Taste for Death.) Again, after a shooting, make sure you go and have a very thorough shower and scrub your hands with soap. I am assured that this will get rid of any gunshot residue. Again, after you have committed a crime, dispose of your clothes, and put on a similar set of clothes, which is what Calogero does in The Chemist of Catania. As for the disposing of clothes, in the great British detective story, this is always done in a suspicion-inviting bonfire in your garden. But Calogero has no garden, and gets rid of what he needs to get rid of, if memory serves, by placing it in rubbish bins in Catania, from which recovery would be very hard. He makes extra sure that there will be no forensic evidence by burning down the scene of the crime.
The first thing that the police do at a murder scene is cordon it off to stop contamination of any possible forensic evidence. Thus the best place to kill someone is a crowded public place; this is what happens in The Chemist of Catania, when Carmine del Monaco meets his end in a packed pizzeria where two hundred or so people run around screaming in shock and effectively destroy any chance of recovering forensic evidence.
Having a few witnesses is dangerous, but having hundreds of witnesses is rather a good thing. Provided you are hiding in plain sight, that is, present nothing out of the ordinary, you can stab or shoot someone and walk away from the scene, and the multiple witnesses will all have slightly different recollections of the event, which will build up into a picture that is so lacking in telling detail as to be useless. After interviewing two hundred witnesses, no clear picture will emerge. All will be confusion.
Furthermore, the perfect murder can be a murder that does not look like a murder at all. Everyone knows that Fabrizio Perraino in The Nymph of Syracuse has been murdered, but everyone pretends that he may still be alive and well somewhere else in Italy. The police might prefer this as it helps them to massage their statistics, and a disappearance looks better than an unsolved murder. It certainly suits the Mafia, as a disappearance is less likely to be as thoroughly investigated as a murder. Lots of people in Sicily have been ‘disappeared’ rather than been murdered, and sometimes the incontrovertible proof of their death comes out only decades later with the discover of their body. (As in the case of Mauro de Mauro, which I wrote about here.)
There is one last point. There is no point in carrying out a murder unless you have a good reason to do so: either gaining great personal advantage, or to avoid a pressing danger. Murder cannot be a vanity project; it has to be a serious business. It requires a cool head, an ability to weigh up the risks and the possible advantages that may accrue, and it also requires daring, and the ability to strike when the opportunity arises, and not to delay when the circumstances are right. Successful Mafiosi are calm, indeed icy cold, and highly intelligent. Unsuccessful ones are people who do not have these qualities.
The way the murderers of Daphne Caruana Galizia have been brought to justice in swift (by Maltese standards) time is partly because they were so utterly incompetent. Let me count the ways.
First, Daphne was subject to endless threats while alive, so once the murder had taken place, it was not hard to know where to look. Her murderous enemies never made any attempt to hide themselves, even after she was dead. Their behaviour advertised their guilt or guilt by association.
Second, there were too many people involved in the plot: the three trigger men, the intermediary, the alleged mastermind. None of these people were particularly bright, or particularly resilient. Far from being tough, they all cracked under pressure. The intermediary tried to kill himself in prison; he and the three trigger men all went for plea bargains in the end and confessed. My reading of it is that they could not take the pressure of keeping their misdeeds a secret. But behind this is the fact that the alleged mastermind was himself a person of poor calibre, which was why he picked these incompetents to carry out his fiendish plot in the first place. The alleged mastermind was a person of overwhelming vanity, hooked on cocaine; not a self-made man, hugely rich, he was a contemptible character.
Thirdly, the incompetence of the plot is seen in the simple fact that it was put in motion by a man whose vanity was pricked by Daphne’s writings; and the terrible irony is that by killing Daphne the plotters brought what they most hoped to avoid, namely the destruction of themselves and their patrons and associates. If they had left Daphne alone, Joseph Muscat would still be Prime Minister of Malta; for she had exposed him and his friends, but this had not dented his vote-winning ability. It was only her death and the revelation that it had been caused by people close to the government that sealed Muscat’s fate.
I mourn Daphne; her son’s book simply has to be read. The people who killed her are beneath contempt. It was not just the trigger men, the intermediary or the alleged mastermind; it was an entire criminal political class, an entire criminal and incompetent political class. May God rebuke them.