April 1, 2025 • 37 mins
In this episode we take a look at Letitzia Batagliga, an acclaimed photojournalist from Palermo, whose stories and art helped legislators end the Cosa Nostra as we know it.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. Letitia was thirty six years
(00:31):
old when she got her first newspaper job. It was
at Laura, a left wing daily newspaper in her home
city of Palermo, Sicily, Italy, and she'd gotten lucky. It
was August and everyone was out of town, so they
needed a catch all person to do odd jobs like typing, writing,
(00:55):
and photographing. She was only on the job three days
when she photographed her first murder. The crew drove out
to the country to a picturesque olive grove where the
corpse had lain for some time before. It was reported.
She would never forget the smell. It was a mafia casualty.
(01:19):
In nineteen seventy one. It was generally mafia killing mafia,
but it wouldn't take long to escalate into mafia killing
anyone who got in their way. This day was the
start of a story that would dominate the news cycle
for nineteen years. Before long, Letitia said it would become
(01:42):
not uncommon for her to visit four or five such
scenes in a day. Welcome to the greatest true crime
(02:07):
stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode, we're
calling the Sicilian photographer who shot the Mafia. It's the
story of a woman in Palermo who needed a job
to support herself and fell into a powerful photojournalist career,
(02:27):
a career that helped legislators end the Cosinastra as they
knew it. In the spring of twenty twenty three, we
(02:51):
took our honeymoon to Sicily. We didn't choose that location
only because The Godfather is one of my top three
favorite films, but also because we loved the second season
of White Lotus and Sicilian food is a combination of
Italian and Middle Eastern food, and we are big wine drinkers.
(03:12):
We also love an adventure. And it took two flights
plus an overnight train ride from Rome to get to
the island. And yes, you heard that right. We took
a train to an island. They rolled us right up
onto a ferry, scooted across the Strait of Messina and
it was just an hour or so before we arrived
in Tarmina. We took our time, making our way across
(03:35):
the north coast by train, note I do not recommend
roller board bags for centuries old cobblestones. But the city
of Palermo was incredibly beautiful and delicious, and everything was
tiled naturally. Because I am a nerd, we had to
walk through every museum and dip into every bookstore on
(03:58):
the off chance they might have an Inclish language section.
And in a bookstore in the new part of Palermo
I learned about Lititzia Battaglia. All the texts were naturally
in Italian. By the way, I do not speak Italian.
(04:22):
It's embarrassing how much I do not speak Italian, So
thank you for your patients in pronouncing these names and places. Still,
the lack of source material in English only encouraged me
to look for Lititia harder. It was pretty serendipitous for
this season. I wanted to cover the Mafia, but that
(04:43):
syndicate is a notorious boys club. If you're not super
familiar with the Cassa nostra, let me explain in very
brief overgeneralized terms. In Italian, Cassa nostra means our thing.
It was an open secret in Sicily that gangs basically
(05:03):
ran everything in America. We romanticized the mafia. I don't
feel like it's fair to blame the Godfather exclusively. Although
author Mario Puzzo straight up said it was a book
about family guys, my guess is that he meant family
with a capital F. Mostly, I blame our celebration of
(05:24):
the underdog. In and before the Second World War, Sicilians
immigrated to America on a huge scale. They fled Mussolini
and famine caused in part by Mussolini, and they wanted
opportunities in general, like nearly all other immigrants of the time.
Of course, the land of opportunity also discriminated against immigrants,
(05:49):
and our mythology says that the mafia manifested as a
sort of underdog government to protect their residence, that the
actual government wouldn't protect. Italian immigrants during that period also
fled the mafia, though because they weren't protecting anyone. It
was a straight up gang. And when you hear the
(06:10):
term gang by itself, you might think of discriminated against
racial minorities, indoctrinating children into their violent criminal lifestyle with
the promise of a brief but rich life or else,
and that is what the mafia was. According to the
No Mafia Museum in Palermo, there were three phases of
(06:32):
the Mafia's development. One social banditism or an act of
rebellion arising from the living conditions of the subordinate classes.
That's the underdog we're romanticizing. And two involvement in the
separatist movement and in the formation of a voluntary army
(06:54):
for the independence of Sicily. And three massacres of police
officials and attacks against socialist meetings. The next phase, and
the one we are dealing with. By the time Lititzia
Battaglia was an adult, was just power for the sake
of power, and violence for the sake of violence. I'm
(07:24):
embarrassed to say I didn't know about Lititzia Battaglia before
I visited Palermo, because she is a legend. Like I said,
a lot of source material is in Italian, but my
main sources for researching this episode are the documentary Shooting
the Mafia and the article by Melissa Harris, the Sicilian
(07:45):
photographer who fought the mafia, and naturally Litzia's photographs. She
was fiercely heroic, headstrong and determined. But I'm getting ahead
of myself. Let's start at the beginning. Lititia grew up
in Palermo, and at that time, which was just after
(08:07):
the Second World War, the neighborhood where she lived was
also where the mafia did the dirty jobs. That's where
the killers lived and men ran everything. The first time
she left the house on her own as a pre adolescent,
she rode her bike through town and she saw a
(08:28):
man expose himself and start masturbating. She didn't know what
that was. When she told her father, he responded by
not letting her out of the house. He was very
domineering for her own safety, but also for his own power,
and then he sent her to a strict Catholic boarding school.
(08:49):
If you're a naturally defiant person, you can imagine how
that went. Lititia got married quote to the first man
who asked me, which I'm I mean the hubris of
knowing that multiple marriage proposals would come her way. I mean,
I love that many of us only get the one. Still,
(09:10):
when she was sixteen years old, she met her husband
in the street one day when she went out to
get milk. His family checked the sheets for blood after
their wedding night. When they found it, they announced to
everyone that she'd been a virgin. I hate that. He
was also a very controlling man. I hate that too.
(09:33):
She wanted to continue her education and he thought it
wasn't appropriate. She had three children with him, and then
she had a mental breakdown that resulted in a two
year convalescence at a Swiss hospital. It seems like the
(10:00):
convalescence gave her the strength to leave her husband in
nineteen seventy one, at age thirty six. That's when she
got the newspaper job at Laura. She went to Milan
soon after and began writing for a newspaper there as well.
Rumor said she went to Milan to escape her soon
(10:20):
to be ex husband. It seems like she had wanted
out of that marriage for a long time, for at
least the two years she was convalescing, and there were stories.
One story said that her husband caught her in bed
with a lover and then he tried to shoot the lover.
Another story said that he'd tried to shoot her and
(10:42):
that's when she finally left him and took their daughters
to Milan. But she came back to Palermo not long
after documentary. Three of her male coworkers come on and
(11:03):
talk about her. The captions under their names read photographer
slash ex lover, which I found fascinating. Not because of
the infidelity, I can't abide that, but because she didn't
let a stifling marriage prevent her from living her life,
especially because most women at that time and place, which
(11:26):
nineteen seventy one in Catholic sicily didn't see a way
out of marriages like this one. I also thought it
was interesting because they're still friends. The men clearly love
and respect her even if their affairs ended. Also, and
this is just a personal thing that I noticed and
that I don't see very often. All of Latititia's lovers
(11:47):
that I came across in my research are younger than
she is. I've heard it said before that younger men
are not afraid of powerful women, and this is just
support for that argument. My own husband is just three
years younger than me. But look, I'm going to count
myself among the powerful by any means I can get there.
(12:17):
But back to Palermo. Since the nineteen fifties, Laura had
quote made a reputation for covering stories involving the mafia
in Palermo. It appears to have been a respected publication
that also had budgetary constraints. In the documentary, Letitia says,
(12:38):
to look at what they're holding. In the photograph she holds,
each of the photographers has a part of the camera,
one with just the lens, one with the light source,
et cetera. They had to share equipment. She would work
there through nineteen ninety two. To be frank when she
landed the job, she didn't know she'd be shooting mafia murders,
(13:02):
but that's the news that was happening then, and frankly,
this woman had the determination to pull it off. The
barricades would let TV crews passed men from the media,
but they tried to bar Latitia. She didn't let them,
even when people nearby spat at her and cursed her
(13:23):
and smashed her cameras. And not to make light of
a serious situation, but that could be a reason for
their equipment shortage. I'm actually reminded of the opening scenes
of the very fictional film The Godfather. Remember when Sonny
smashed the reporter's cameras at Connie's wedding and then stuck
a wad of bills in his chest pocket. Now imagine
(13:43):
that reporter was trying to take photos of a murdered relative.
Letitia said the job was very dangerous. She would set
up the exposure and timer and then cough to cover
(14:04):
the sound of the linz click. Her coworker confirmed that
the photographers were very exposed. Everyone there knew who they were.
There was no hiding, They had no real protection. Sometimes,
when they returned from a job, they'd circle the block
once or twice before parking, just to check if they
(14:27):
were safe. At first, the mafia killed the mafia. Even so,
Letitia said, you can never be truly happy when you've
experienced that horror. She also said photographing trauma is embarrassing.
After all, at a murder crime scene, the body is
(14:51):
not the only person at the site. The law enforcement
and the media are there, but so are their loved
ones or even passers by. They all feature often in
her photography, an older woman in an apron with her
hands clapped together, seeing a body lying flat by the
(15:12):
open door of a car on the other side of
the garage, or a line of children standing shocked behind
a smeared, wet puddle of blood after the corpse has
been cleared from the sidewalk. Letitia said, quote, you love
these people, but you have to take photos. I couldn't
(15:35):
tell them I was doing it with love. She might
have been taking photos out of love, but it didn't
take long until she weaponized those photographs to the greater good.
(16:08):
While Letitia was photographing the many crimes that happened in Palermo,
the mafia was being run from a little inland town
called Corleone, which probably sounds pretty familiar. The early nineteen
eighties were the period known as the Second Mafia Wars
nineteen eighty one to eighty four is also known as
(16:32):
the Great Mafia War or the Matenza, which is Italian
for slaughter. Thousands of people died during the early nineteen eighties.
There was still the violence within the mafia itself, but
there was also violence against the state, campaigns of planned
(16:52):
assassinations of politicians, activists, and detectives, not to mention the
murders of turncoats. The mafia family from Corleoni were the instigators.
I wanted to visit Corleoni on our honeymoon, since they
have a huge museum dedicated to preserving this part of
(17:13):
Sicilian history, but we didn't make it. I don't know
if you know this about Sicily, but traffic laws there
are more like suggestions. We weren't used to that. Also,
the roads through the mountains are winding and sometimes unpaved,
and your girl could barely drive around Tahoe without a
(17:34):
line of honking cars behind her. Plus neither of us
can really drive a manual transmission, and that didn't seem
like a good time to learn. I got some solace
from that failure when I learned that The Godfather wasn't
filmed there. Then it was still too dangerous to tangle
with the mafia there. To be fair, they were shooting
(17:56):
in the early eighties, Coosan Nostra families and Polaire called
the Koleonsi the peasants. This was before the Koleoni murdered
the heads of families. On November thirtieth, nineteen eighty two,
twelve mafiosi were murdered in twelve separate incidents. Letitia's photographs
(18:20):
of the murders show the kind of odd if you know,
you know, messages like wearing a blanket, or the victim's
shirt pulled up to show the tattoo of Jesus crying
on his back. Honestly, I'm not sure what those particular
details mean, but the bodies were positioned deliberately staged almost
(18:43):
The only example I can think of to elaborate is
when again in The Godfather, when the enforcer Luca Bratzi
goes missing and the family gets delivered a Sicilian message
of a dead fish meaning he sleeps with the fishes,
or actually he's been encased in a cement overcoat and
(19:03):
dumped in the East River. And by the way, those
weirdly staged bodies were just the bodies that they recovered.
There was always the white shotgun method, in which the
body is completely destroyed or at least never found. These
guys were ruthless. The brutal Luciano Leggio became the new
(19:28):
mafia boss of Corleoni by simply shooting the old one.
But you know who wasn't dissuaded by any of this
at all, Letitia. In the documentary, they describe the misery
(19:55):
of Corleoni as its code of silence. No one reported
disappearances for fear that they would be next, which, if
you recall our opening, could be a reason why the
first body she ever photographed was left alone in that
olive grove for so long. It was an open secret
(20:16):
that Corleoni was the mafia headquarters. Its citizens were too
afraid to speak out, which given who they're dealing with,
seems completely justifiable. No one wants to fall on a
grenade to no end, But as we know, to provide
justice for a crime, judicial systems need evidence in what
(20:39):
seems like a call to action, or at least an
inspiration to acknowledgment. Letitia and her crew took their work
to Corleoni for a sort of open viewing in the
early eighties, but when they took Letitia's photos to display
in a plaza in Corleoni, everyone cleared the square. Letitia
(21:09):
hated the corruption. People were so afraid of the mafia
that they wouldn't stand up to it or really even
acknowledge it. So in nineteen eighty five she held a
seat on the Palermo City Council for the Green Party.
She hated that too, she said, because everything was decided elsewhere.
(21:30):
She said in her documentary, I did nothing and was
paid a fortune, and the mafia was still in control.
That is until Judge Giovanni Falconi's success as a prosecutor
brought him into an informal group called the Anti Mafia
pool back in nineteen sixty one. He'd graduated from the
(21:52):
University of Palermo law school and he practiced just three
years before he became a judge. He was assigned to
investigate bankruptcy cases, which doesn't seem like it would have
a whole lot to do with the mafia, but it did.
In February of nineteen eighty six, Giovanni Falconi led the
(22:12):
prosecution on one of the most famous trials in Sicilian history,
the Maxi Trial. Let me tell you how the Maxi
trial came about. On March thirty first, nineteen eighty six,
years before the trial itself, a new law was drafted.
(22:32):
It introduced mafia conspiracy as a new crime to the
Italian legal system. It also allowed courts to seize and
confiscate goods of people involved in mafia conspiracy. That was huge.
Before this article four one six, the mafia had not
(22:53):
been recognized by the penal code at all. That meant
people did not consider mafia association a criminal offense, and
by people I mean judges. That didn't just mean judges
could acquit because mafia conspiracy wasn't a crime, although it
(23:13):
did mean that, but it also meant that judges could
be in the mafia legally, so nineteen eighty was a
game changer. Palermo's anti mafia pool started combining investigating magistrates
who shared information, which spread out the burden of being
the sole target. Because they were many, they diffused the
(23:37):
responsibility of being the one prosecuting the mafia. Falconi was
a big part of that pool. Falconi was a key member,
as was Paolo Borsellino, Giuseppe Dileillo, and several other magistrates.
The way I understand it, the anti mafia pool was
(23:57):
kind of the Italian equivalent of an American task force,
and it was hugely successful. Over the course of several years,
the magistrates heard testimonies from the pentiti, or informants. Several
of the witnesses were high ranking mafiosi who turned when
they realized their own lives were on the line. The
(24:20):
Maxi trial of nineteen eighty six was the first time
the existence of the Casinastra was judicially confirmed. A total
of four hundred and seventy four mafiosi were indicted. Not
all of them were fingered by the informants directly, and
even if they were, the accusations had to be supported
(24:42):
by evidence. Falconi's tactic in bringing hundreds of mafia to
court follow the money find the mafia, so simple, so effective.
He followed the cash flow of drug trafficking and extortion
and brought them all in. Letitia loved Falconi. Everyone who
(25:11):
hated the mafia loved Falcone. He was fearless, and he
was the one to finally get Luciano A Leggio. Well, actually,
Falconi was the one to make the charges stick to
Luciano Leggio. He'd been in prison for manslaughter in the
late nineteen forties and then again after the First Mafia
(25:33):
War in nineteen sixty four. For those crimes, he was
acquitted due to lack of evidence. His trials for those
myriad crimes are widely regarded as farcical, since he'd been
ordering murders since nineteen fifty eight and there was blatant
witness intimidation and witness tampering. Fourteen years later, he was
(25:57):
finally captured in Milan in nineteen seventy four, but he
still ran the mafia from his prison cell. Letitia had
photographed Leggio and the Mafiosi before. She said of Leggio
that he was so arrogant that when he was arrested,
he walked in front of the policeman, leading him like
a dog on a leash. And he hated being photographed,
(26:20):
especially by a woman. She said she was so nervous
photographing him. That quote only one shot isn't blurred. She
also said if he could, he would have killed me.
And Leggio was famous for leaving no witnesses. Falconi is
the one who led the prosecution against him. Like I said,
(26:43):
hundreds of Mafiosi were at that Maxi trial. It took
place in an underground bunker style structure right next to
the prison. If you watch the documentary, the layout of
the courtroom is kind of wild. They're all in like
prisons or cages around the court, watching and heckling during
(27:04):
all the proceedings. Lititia did not go to that trial.
She couldn't stand to look at them all. But also
maybe she couldn't stand for them to look at her.
(27:25):
She did always want to take a good photo of
Judge Falcone, though, but he wouldn't let her. The media
came down hard on him, and I really can't tell why.
Maybe it's because that's what the media likes. To do anyway.
He wouldn't pose for photos because he thought it made
him look arrogant. Instead, he told her to take the
(27:46):
photo while he walked past. Letitia always worried for him.
She said, they're going to kill you, and he consoled Lititzia,
don't worry. If they kill me, someone else will take
my place. She was right. The mafia bombed the motorway.
(28:06):
It's notorious under the name Capucchi bombing. It was May
twenty third, nineteen ninety two. A later informant described the attack,
detailing who tunneled under the motorway, who packed the thirteen
drums with TNT, who put them into place on a skateboard,
(28:27):
and who actually pressed the button They did kill him.
His assassination killed a total of five people, including Falcone's
wife and three of his security detail. One of Ltzia's
most famous photographs is actually of one bodyguard's widow. The
(28:48):
widow said at the funeral that she forgave the mafiosi,
but she hoped they would change their ways. Lititzia was devastated.
She couldn't go to the crime scene. She went instead
to the hospital to meet Falconi and his wife. They
both died there and she couldn't photograph him then either.
(29:31):
Latiticia photographed a lot of terrible murders ordered and executed
by the mafia, but she couldn't bring herself to take
photos of Falconi. Two months later, another murder happened that
she couldn't bear to photograph. Remember how Falcone said, if
they kill me, someone else will take my place. That
(29:53):
someone had been Paolo Borsellino. Paolo had been a part
of the anti mafia pool, and he was also a
prosecuting magistrate in the Maxi trial. He and Giovanni Falcone
had been childhood friends who both grew up experiencing the
violence of the mafia. Some of their classmates had been mafiosi,
(30:16):
and they were determined to stop it out. The mafia
murdered Paolo Borsellino by a bomb just two months later,
(30:38):
right in front of his mother's house on a Sunday.
Letitia did go to the side of this crime. She
remembered seeing bits of bodies. That was all that was left.
All that was left of Paolo was his stomach, and
she couldn't take a photo of just his stomach. She
(31:01):
didn't take any photos of that massacre. She couldn't even
take a photo of the car that got blown up
into a tree. She said in her documentary quote, the
photos I didn't take hurt me most. I miss them.
I feel disrespectful somehow. It's an interesting inversion to me.
(31:25):
Most of us regular people don't take photos of others
without their permission out of respect. Here, she felt the opposite.
Their deaths deserved to be documented. She said in her
documentary I hate these photos, referring to the mafia murders.
Suddenly I have an archive of blood. But that archive
(31:49):
would be instrumental not only at the time the photos
were taken, but later. Just like Falcone predicted, the efforts
(32:17):
of anti mafia investigators gradually came to fruition, and it
helped that by this time they had plenty of informants.
I've said it before, and I'll keep repeating it forever.
On a long enough timeline, everyone snitches. Julio Andreotti was
one of the most powerful Italian politicians, and through the
(32:41):
nineties he denied having contact with the mafia, which would
have been almost impossible even if it were true. One
important denial was that he denied ever knowing the Salvo
cousins Ignazio and Nino. They were wealthy businessmen as best
I can tell, they were also powerful politicians who collected
(33:04):
ten percent of the tax they collected on behalf of
the government. It's not clear how legal that was, but
it's clearly exploitation, legal or not. But in nineteen ninety three,
when they were following the money, they found evidence that
the Salvos were on the take from the mafia, and
they were suspicious that Giulio Andreotti was involved as well.
(33:28):
Giulio said he didn't know them at all, but police
combed through Letitia Bottaglia's photo archives and they found a
snapshot that proved otherwise. Back in nineteen seventy nine, she'd
taken a photo at a hotel of Giulio Andreotti with
Nino Salvo, which confirmed police suspicions that Nino was a
(33:51):
sort of ambassador between the Casinastra and Palermo's politicians. That
photo illustrated Julio Andreotti's corrupt and helped convict Nino of
a murder, even though for reasons I don't understand, the
conviction was overturned the following year. Letitia Battaglia died in
(34:22):
Sheffalu Sicily in April of twenty twenty two, but in
the documentary that released just a couple years before that,
she was with her younger artist lover, still photographing. She
photographed what she had always wanted to photograph, Sicilian life.
Though she had wielded her camera as a weapon for
(34:44):
decades fighting against political corruption and day to day brutalism,
her latest photos featured a different Sicilian way of life.
They were of children gazing at birds and self portraits
smoking in bed. Join me next week on the greatest
(35:30):
true crime stories ever told. For our first episode on
Cassie Chadwick. She was a woman who defrauded her way
into Gilded Age high society as an impostor heiress. I'd
like to shout out a few key sources that made
it possible for me to tell this week's story, especially
(35:50):
the documentary Shooting the Mafia, and of course the many
supporting sources that are listed in our show notes and
for which I'm very grateful to have read in English translation.
For more information about this case and others we cover
on the show, visit Diversionaudio dot com, sign up for
(36:11):
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(36:39):
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted this episode.
I also wrote this episode. Our show is produced and
directed by Emma Demouth, edited by Antonio Enriquez, Theme music
by Tyler Cash. Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis, and
(37:03):
Scott Waxman.
Diversion audio. A note this episode contains mature content and
descriptions of violence that may be disturbing for some listeners.
Please take care in listening. Letitia was thirty six years
(00:31):
old when she got her first newspaper job. It was
at Laura, a left wing daily newspaper in her home
city of Palermo, Sicily, Italy, and she'd gotten lucky. It
was August and everyone was out of town, so they
needed a catch all person to do odd jobs like typing, writing,
(00:55):
and photographing. She was only on the job three days
when she photographed her first murder. The crew drove out
to the country to a picturesque olive grove where the
corpse had lain for some time before. It was reported.
She would never forget the smell. It was a mafia casualty.
(01:19):
In nineteen seventy one. It was generally mafia killing mafia,
but it wouldn't take long to escalate into mafia killing
anyone who got in their way. This day was the
start of a story that would dominate the news cycle
for nineteen years. Before long, Letitia said it would become
(01:42):
not uncommon for her to visit four or five such
scenes in a day. Welcome to the greatest true crime
(02:07):
stories ever told. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer. Today's episode, we're
calling the Sicilian photographer who shot the Mafia. It's the
story of a woman in Palermo who needed a job
to support herself and fell into a powerful photojournalist career,
(02:27):
a career that helped legislators end the Cosinastra as they
knew it. In the spring of twenty twenty three, we
(02:51):
took our honeymoon to Sicily. We didn't choose that location
only because The Godfather is one of my top three
favorite films, but also because we loved the second season
of White Lotus and Sicilian food is a combination of
Italian and Middle Eastern food, and we are big wine drinkers.
(03:12):
We also love an adventure. And it took two flights
plus an overnight train ride from Rome to get to
the island. And yes, you heard that right. We took
a train to an island. They rolled us right up
onto a ferry, scooted across the Strait of Messina and
it was just an hour or so before we arrived
in Tarmina. We took our time, making our way across
(03:35):
the north coast by train, note I do not recommend
roller board bags for centuries old cobblestones. But the city
of Palermo was incredibly beautiful and delicious, and everything was
tiled naturally. Because I am a nerd, we had to
walk through every museum and dip into every bookstore on
(03:58):
the off chance they might have an Inclish language section.
And in a bookstore in the new part of Palermo
I learned about Lititzia Battaglia. All the texts were naturally
in Italian. By the way, I do not speak Italian.
(04:22):
It's embarrassing how much I do not speak Italian, So
thank you for your patients in pronouncing these names and places. Still,
the lack of source material in English only encouraged me
to look for Lititia harder. It was pretty serendipitous for
this season. I wanted to cover the Mafia, but that
(04:43):
syndicate is a notorious boys club. If you're not super
familiar with the Cassa nostra, let me explain in very
brief overgeneralized terms. In Italian, Cassa nostra means our thing.
It was an open secret in Sicily that gangs basically
(05:03):
ran everything in America. We romanticized the mafia. I don't
feel like it's fair to blame the Godfather exclusively. Although
author Mario Puzzo straight up said it was a book
about family guys, my guess is that he meant family
with a capital F. Mostly, I blame our celebration of
(05:24):
the underdog. In and before the Second World War, Sicilians
immigrated to America on a huge scale. They fled Mussolini
and famine caused in part by Mussolini, and they wanted
opportunities in general, like nearly all other immigrants of the time.
Of course, the land of opportunity also discriminated against immigrants,
(05:49):
and our mythology says that the mafia manifested as a
sort of underdog government to protect their residence, that the
actual government wouldn't protect. Italian immigrants during that period also
fled the mafia, though because they weren't protecting anyone. It
was a straight up gang. And when you hear the
(06:10):
term gang by itself, you might think of discriminated against
racial minorities, indoctrinating children into their violent criminal lifestyle with
the promise of a brief but rich life or else,
and that is what the mafia was. According to the
No Mafia Museum in Palermo, there were three phases of
(06:32):
the Mafia's development. One social banditism or an act of
rebellion arising from the living conditions of the subordinate classes.
That's the underdog we're romanticizing. And two involvement in the
separatist movement and in the formation of a voluntary army
(06:54):
for the independence of Sicily. And three massacres of police
officials and attacks against socialist meetings. The next phase, and
the one we are dealing with. By the time Lititzia
Battaglia was an adult, was just power for the sake
of power, and violence for the sake of violence. I'm
(07:24):
embarrassed to say I didn't know about Lititzia Battaglia before
I visited Palermo, because she is a legend. Like I said,
a lot of source material is in Italian, but my
main sources for researching this episode are the documentary Shooting
the Mafia and the article by Melissa Harris, the Sicilian
(07:45):
photographer who fought the mafia, and naturally Litzia's photographs. She
was fiercely heroic, headstrong and determined. But I'm getting ahead
of myself. Let's start at the beginning. Lititia grew up
in Palermo, and at that time, which was just after
(08:07):
the Second World War, the neighborhood where she lived was
also where the mafia did the dirty jobs. That's where
the killers lived and men ran everything. The first time
she left the house on her own as a pre adolescent,
she rode her bike through town and she saw a
(08:28):
man expose himself and start masturbating. She didn't know what
that was. When she told her father, he responded by
not letting her out of the house. He was very
domineering for her own safety, but also for his own power,
and then he sent her to a strict Catholic boarding school.
(08:49):
If you're a naturally defiant person, you can imagine how
that went. Lititia got married quote to the first man
who asked me, which I'm I mean the hubris of
knowing that multiple marriage proposals would come her way. I mean,
I love that many of us only get the one. Still,
(09:10):
when she was sixteen years old, she met her husband
in the street one day when she went out to
get milk. His family checked the sheets for blood after
their wedding night. When they found it, they announced to
everyone that she'd been a virgin. I hate that. He
was also a very controlling man. I hate that too.
(09:33):
She wanted to continue her education and he thought it
wasn't appropriate. She had three children with him, and then
she had a mental breakdown that resulted in a two
year convalescence at a Swiss hospital. It seems like the
(10:00):
convalescence gave her the strength to leave her husband in
nineteen seventy one, at age thirty six. That's when she
got the newspaper job at Laura. She went to Milan
soon after and began writing for a newspaper there as well.
Rumor said she went to Milan to escape her soon
(10:20):
to be ex husband. It seems like she had wanted
out of that marriage for a long time, for at
least the two years she was convalescing, and there were stories.
One story said that her husband caught her in bed
with a lover and then he tried to shoot the lover.
Another story said that he'd tried to shoot her and
(10:42):
that's when she finally left him and took their daughters
to Milan. But she came back to Palermo not long
after documentary. Three of her male coworkers come on and
(11:03):
talk about her. The captions under their names read photographer
slash ex lover, which I found fascinating. Not because of
the infidelity, I can't abide that, but because she didn't
let a stifling marriage prevent her from living her life,
especially because most women at that time and place, which
(11:26):
nineteen seventy one in Catholic sicily didn't see a way
out of marriages like this one. I also thought it
was interesting because they're still friends. The men clearly love
and respect her even if their affairs ended. Also, and
this is just a personal thing that I noticed and
that I don't see very often. All of Latititia's lovers
(11:47):
that I came across in my research are younger than
she is. I've heard it said before that younger men
are not afraid of powerful women, and this is just
support for that argument. My own husband is just three
years younger than me. But look, I'm going to count
myself among the powerful by any means I can get there.
(12:17):
But back to Palermo. Since the nineteen fifties, Laura had
quote made a reputation for covering stories involving the mafia
in Palermo. It appears to have been a respected publication
that also had budgetary constraints. In the documentary, Letitia says,
(12:38):
to look at what they're holding. In the photograph she holds,
each of the photographers has a part of the camera,
one with just the lens, one with the light source,
et cetera. They had to share equipment. She would work
there through nineteen ninety two. To be frank when she
landed the job, she didn't know she'd be shooting mafia murders,
(13:02):
but that's the news that was happening then, and frankly,
this woman had the determination to pull it off. The
barricades would let TV crews passed men from the media,
but they tried to bar Latitia. She didn't let them,
even when people nearby spat at her and cursed her
(13:23):
and smashed her cameras. And not to make light of
a serious situation, but that could be a reason for
their equipment shortage. I'm actually reminded of the opening scenes
of the very fictional film The Godfather. Remember when Sonny
smashed the reporter's cameras at Connie's wedding and then stuck
a wad of bills in his chest pocket. Now imagine
(13:43):
that reporter was trying to take photos of a murdered relative.
Letitia said the job was very dangerous. She would set
up the exposure and timer and then cough to cover
(14:04):
the sound of the linz click. Her coworker confirmed that
the photographers were very exposed. Everyone there knew who they were.
There was no hiding, They had no real protection. Sometimes,
when they returned from a job, they'd circle the block
once or twice before parking, just to check if they
(14:27):
were safe. At first, the mafia killed the mafia. Even so,
Letitia said, you can never be truly happy when you've
experienced that horror. She also said photographing trauma is embarrassing.
After all, at a murder crime scene, the body is
(14:51):
not the only person at the site. The law enforcement
and the media are there, but so are their loved
ones or even passers by. They all feature often in
her photography, an older woman in an apron with her
hands clapped together, seeing a body lying flat by the
(15:12):
open door of a car on the other side of
the garage, or a line of children standing shocked behind
a smeared, wet puddle of blood after the corpse has
been cleared from the sidewalk. Letitia said, quote, you love
these people, but you have to take photos. I couldn't
(15:35):
tell them I was doing it with love. She might
have been taking photos out of love, but it didn't
take long until she weaponized those photographs to the greater good.
(16:08):
While Letitia was photographing the many crimes that happened in Palermo,
the mafia was being run from a little inland town
called Corleone, which probably sounds pretty familiar. The early nineteen
eighties were the period known as the Second Mafia Wars
nineteen eighty one to eighty four is also known as
(16:32):
the Great Mafia War or the Matenza, which is Italian
for slaughter. Thousands of people died during the early nineteen eighties.
There was still the violence within the mafia itself, but
there was also violence against the state, campaigns of planned
(16:52):
assassinations of politicians, activists, and detectives, not to mention the
murders of turncoats. The mafia family from Corleoni were the instigators.
I wanted to visit Corleoni on our honeymoon, since they
have a huge museum dedicated to preserving this part of
(17:13):
Sicilian history, but we didn't make it. I don't know
if you know this about Sicily, but traffic laws there
are more like suggestions. We weren't used to that. Also,
the roads through the mountains are winding and sometimes unpaved,
and your girl could barely drive around Tahoe without a
(17:34):
line of honking cars behind her. Plus neither of us
can really drive a manual transmission, and that didn't seem
like a good time to learn. I got some solace
from that failure when I learned that The Godfather wasn't
filmed there. Then it was still too dangerous to tangle
with the mafia there. To be fair, they were shooting
(17:56):
in the early eighties, Coosan Nostra families and Polaire called
the Koleonsi the peasants. This was before the Koleoni murdered
the heads of families. On November thirtieth, nineteen eighty two,
twelve mafiosi were murdered in twelve separate incidents. Letitia's photographs
(18:20):
of the murders show the kind of odd if you know,
you know, messages like wearing a blanket, or the victim's
shirt pulled up to show the tattoo of Jesus crying
on his back. Honestly, I'm not sure what those particular
details mean, but the bodies were positioned deliberately staged almost
(18:43):
The only example I can think of to elaborate is
when again in The Godfather, when the enforcer Luca Bratzi
goes missing and the family gets delivered a Sicilian message
of a dead fish meaning he sleeps with the fishes,
or actually he's been encased in a cement overcoat and
(19:03):
dumped in the East River. And by the way, those
weirdly staged bodies were just the bodies that they recovered.
There was always the white shotgun method, in which the
body is completely destroyed or at least never found. These
guys were ruthless. The brutal Luciano Leggio became the new
(19:28):
mafia boss of Corleoni by simply shooting the old one.
But you know who wasn't dissuaded by any of this
at all, Letitia. In the documentary, they describe the misery
(19:55):
of Corleoni as its code of silence. No one reported
disappearances for fear that they would be next, which, if
you recall our opening, could be a reason why the
first body she ever photographed was left alone in that
olive grove for so long. It was an open secret
(20:16):
that Corleoni was the mafia headquarters. Its citizens were too
afraid to speak out, which given who they're dealing with,
seems completely justifiable. No one wants to fall on a
grenade to no end, But as we know, to provide
justice for a crime, judicial systems need evidence in what
(20:39):
seems like a call to action, or at least an
inspiration to acknowledgment. Letitia and her crew took their work
to Corleoni for a sort of open viewing in the
early eighties, but when they took Letitia's photos to display
in a plaza in Corleoni, everyone cleared the square. Letitia
(21:09):
hated the corruption. People were so afraid of the mafia
that they wouldn't stand up to it or really even
acknowledge it. So in nineteen eighty five she held a
seat on the Palermo City Council for the Green Party.
She hated that too, she said, because everything was decided elsewhere.
(21:30):
She said in her documentary, I did nothing and was
paid a fortune, and the mafia was still in control.
That is until Judge Giovanni Falconi's success as a prosecutor
brought him into an informal group called the Anti Mafia
pool back in nineteen sixty one. He'd graduated from the
(21:52):
University of Palermo law school and he practiced just three
years before he became a judge. He was assigned to
investigate bankruptcy cases, which doesn't seem like it would have
a whole lot to do with the mafia, but it did.
In February of nineteen eighty six, Giovanni Falconi led the
(22:12):
prosecution on one of the most famous trials in Sicilian history,
the Maxi Trial. Let me tell you how the Maxi
trial came about. On March thirty first, nineteen eighty six,
years before the trial itself, a new law was drafted.
(22:32):
It introduced mafia conspiracy as a new crime to the
Italian legal system. It also allowed courts to seize and
confiscate goods of people involved in mafia conspiracy. That was huge.
Before this article four one six, the mafia had not
(22:53):
been recognized by the penal code at all. That meant
people did not consider mafia association a criminal offense, and
by people I mean judges. That didn't just mean judges
could acquit because mafia conspiracy wasn't a crime, although it
(23:13):
did mean that, but it also meant that judges could
be in the mafia legally, so nineteen eighty was a
game changer. Palermo's anti mafia pool started combining investigating magistrates
who shared information, which spread out the burden of being
the sole target. Because they were many, they diffused the
(23:37):
responsibility of being the one prosecuting the mafia. Falconi was
a big part of that pool. Falconi was a key member,
as was Paolo Borsellino, Giuseppe Dileillo, and several other magistrates.
The way I understand it, the anti mafia pool was
(23:57):
kind of the Italian equivalent of an American task force,
and it was hugely successful. Over the course of several years,
the magistrates heard testimonies from the pentiti, or informants. Several
of the witnesses were high ranking mafiosi who turned when
they realized their own lives were on the line. The
(24:20):
Maxi trial of nineteen eighty six was the first time
the existence of the Casinastra was judicially confirmed. A total
of four hundred and seventy four mafiosi were indicted. Not
all of them were fingered by the informants directly, and
even if they were, the accusations had to be supported
(24:42):
by evidence. Falconi's tactic in bringing hundreds of mafia to
court follow the money find the mafia, so simple, so effective.
He followed the cash flow of drug trafficking and extortion
and brought them all in. Letitia loved Falconi. Everyone who
(25:11):
hated the mafia loved Falcone. He was fearless, and he
was the one to finally get Luciano A Leggio. Well, actually,
Falconi was the one to make the charges stick to
Luciano Leggio. He'd been in prison for manslaughter in the
late nineteen forties and then again after the First Mafia
(25:33):
War in nineteen sixty four. For those crimes, he was
acquitted due to lack of evidence. His trials for those
myriad crimes are widely regarded as farcical, since he'd been
ordering murders since nineteen fifty eight and there was blatant
witness intimidation and witness tampering. Fourteen years later, he was
(25:57):
finally captured in Milan in nineteen seventy four, but he
still ran the mafia from his prison cell. Letitia had
photographed Leggio and the Mafiosi before. She said of Leggio
that he was so arrogant that when he was arrested,
he walked in front of the policeman, leading him like
a dog on a leash. And he hated being photographed,
(26:20):
especially by a woman. She said she was so nervous
photographing him. That quote only one shot isn't blurred. She
also said if he could, he would have killed me.
And Leggio was famous for leaving no witnesses. Falconi is
the one who led the prosecution against him. Like I said,
(26:43):
hundreds of Mafiosi were at that Maxi trial. It took
place in an underground bunker style structure right next to
the prison. If you watch the documentary, the layout of
the courtroom is kind of wild. They're all in like
prisons or cages around the court, watching and heckling during
(27:04):
all the proceedings. Lititia did not go to that trial.
She couldn't stand to look at them all. But also
maybe she couldn't stand for them to look at her.
(27:25):
She did always want to take a good photo of
Judge Falcone, though, but he wouldn't let her. The media
came down hard on him, and I really can't tell why.
Maybe it's because that's what the media likes. To do anyway.
He wouldn't pose for photos because he thought it made
him look arrogant. Instead, he told her to take the
(27:46):
photo while he walked past. Letitia always worried for him.
She said, they're going to kill you, and he consoled Lititzia,
don't worry. If they kill me, someone else will take
my place. She was right. The mafia bombed the motorway.
(28:06):
It's notorious under the name Capucchi bombing. It was May
twenty third, nineteen ninety two. A later informant described the attack,
detailing who tunneled under the motorway, who packed the thirteen
drums with TNT, who put them into place on a skateboard,
(28:27):
and who actually pressed the button They did kill him.
His assassination killed a total of five people, including Falcone's
wife and three of his security detail. One of Ltzia's
most famous photographs is actually of one bodyguard's widow. The
(28:48):
widow said at the funeral that she forgave the mafiosi,
but she hoped they would change their ways. Lititzia was devastated.
She couldn't go to the crime scene. She went instead
to the hospital to meet Falconi and his wife. They
both died there and she couldn't photograph him then either.
(29:31):
Latiticia photographed a lot of terrible murders ordered and executed
by the mafia, but she couldn't bring herself to take
photos of Falconi. Two months later, another murder happened that
she couldn't bear to photograph. Remember how Falcone said, if
they kill me, someone else will take my place. That
(29:53):
someone had been Paolo Borsellino. Paolo had been a part
of the anti mafia pool, and he was also a
prosecuting magistrate in the Maxi trial. He and Giovanni Falcone
had been childhood friends who both grew up experiencing the
violence of the mafia. Some of their classmates had been mafiosi,
(30:16):
and they were determined to stop it out. The mafia
murdered Paolo Borsellino by a bomb just two months later,
(30:38):
right in front of his mother's house on a Sunday.
Letitia did go to the side of this crime. She
remembered seeing bits of bodies. That was all that was left.
All that was left of Paolo was his stomach, and
she couldn't take a photo of just his stomach. She
(31:01):
didn't take any photos of that massacre. She couldn't even
take a photo of the car that got blown up
into a tree. She said in her documentary quote, the
photos I didn't take hurt me most. I miss them.
I feel disrespectful somehow. It's an interesting inversion to me.
(31:25):
Most of us regular people don't take photos of others
without their permission out of respect. Here, she felt the opposite.
Their deaths deserved to be documented. She said in her
documentary I hate these photos, referring to the mafia murders.
Suddenly I have an archive of blood. But that archive
(31:49):
would be instrumental not only at the time the photos
were taken, but later. Just like Falcone predicted, the efforts
(32:17):
of anti mafia investigators gradually came to fruition, and it
helped that by this time they had plenty of informants.
I've said it before, and I'll keep repeating it forever.
On a long enough timeline, everyone snitches. Julio Andreotti was
one of the most powerful Italian politicians, and through the
(32:41):
nineties he denied having contact with the mafia, which would
have been almost impossible even if it were true. One
important denial was that he denied ever knowing the Salvo
cousins Ignazio and Nino. They were wealthy businessmen as best
I can tell, they were also powerful politicians who collected
(33:04):
ten percent of the tax they collected on behalf of
the government. It's not clear how legal that was, but
it's clearly exploitation, legal or not. But in nineteen ninety three,
when they were following the money, they found evidence that
the Salvos were on the take from the mafia, and
they were suspicious that Giulio Andreotti was involved as well.
(33:28):
Giulio said he didn't know them at all, but police
combed through Letitia Bottaglia's photo archives and they found a
snapshot that proved otherwise. Back in nineteen seventy nine, she'd
taken a photo at a hotel of Giulio Andreotti with
Nino Salvo, which confirmed police suspicions that Nino was a
(33:51):
sort of ambassador between the Casinastra and Palermo's politicians. That
photo illustrated Julio Andreotti's corrupt and helped convict Nino of
a murder, even though for reasons I don't understand, the
conviction was overturned the following year. Letitia Battaglia died in
(34:22):
Sheffalu Sicily in April of twenty twenty two, but in
the documentary that released just a couple years before that,
she was with her younger artist lover, still photographing. She
photographed what she had always wanted to photograph, Sicilian life.
Though she had wielded her camera as a weapon for
(34:44):
decades fighting against political corruption and day to day brutalism,
her latest photos featured a different Sicilian way of life.
They were of children gazing at birds and self portraits
smoking in bed. Join me next week on the greatest
(35:30):
true crime stories ever told. For our first episode on
Cassie Chadwick. She was a woman who defrauded her way
into Gilded Age high society as an impostor heiress. I'd
like to shout out a few key sources that made
it possible for me to tell this week's story, especially
(35:50):
the documentary Shooting the Mafia, and of course the many
supporting sources that are listed in our show notes and
for which I'm very grateful to have read in English translation.
For more information about this case and others we cover
on the show, visit Diversionaudio dot com, sign up for
(36:11):
Diversion's newsletter and be among the first to hear about
special behind the scenes features with hosts and actors from
Diversion's podcasts, more shows you'll love from Diversion and our partners,
and other exclusive tidbits you can't get anywhere else. That's
diversionaudio dot com to sign up for the newsletter. The
(36:39):
Greatest True Crime Stories Ever Told is a production of
Diversion Audio. I'm Mary Kay McBrayer, and I hosted this episode.
I also wrote this episode. Our show is produced and
directed by Emma Demouth, edited by Antonio Enriquez, Theme music
by Tyler Cash. Executive producers Jacob Bronstein, Mark Francis, and
(37:03):
Scott Waxman.
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