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The 1960s Sicilian Mafia trials took place at the end of that decade in response to a rise in organized crime violence around the late 1950s and early 1960s. There were three major trials, each featuring multiple defendants, that saw hundreds of alleged Mafiosi on trial for dozens of crimes. From the authority's point of view, they were a failure; very few defendants were convicted, although later trials as well as information from ''pentiti'' confirmed most of those acquitted were Mafiosi members, and were guilty of many crimes including some of those they were acquitted of. Emanuele Notarbartolo was stabbed to death on a train in 1893. A number of suspected Mafiosi were rounded up and tried in 1900 of the murder, and though convicted they were acquitted on appeal due to a minor technicality. In the 1920s, Cesare Mori was sent to Sicily by Benito Mussolini to combat the Mafia, although Mori's crude method of imprisoning thousands of men - many of them innocent - without trial meant the Mafia were able to swiftly reestablish themselves as before once Mori had departed. In the late 1950s, there was an increase in violence around the town of Corleone as rival factions in the local Mafia clan, the group around Michele Navarra and the Corleonesi, battled it out. More significantly there were a wave of murders and car bombings in and around Palermo in the First Mafia War that started in 1962. The single event that triggered a major crackdown against the Mafia was the Ciaculli massacre, when seven police officers were killed on June 30, 1963 whilst trying to defuse a car bomb left by one group of mobsters who had actually intended it to kill some rival mobsters. The death of the policemen caused an outcry. In ''Octopus'' (see References), author Claire Sterling quotes the regional army commander for Sicily, General Aldo De Marco as ordering his men to: ''"Get everybody with a criminal record and throw them into jail, on my orders. Torture them and see what they let out, or shoot them on sight. I'll go to prison. But we can't go on like this."'' A crackdown – albeit not quite as disregarding of civil liberties as General Aldo De Marco initially requested – did indeed follow, and during the mid-1960s, 1,995 suspected Mafiosi were arrested and charged with hundreds of crimes. It took many trials to process the accused, including three major ones. ==The First Trial== The first trial opened in 1967 and concentrated on the growing involvement of the Sicilian Mafia in the international heroin trade. Specifically, the defendants were all those who had been at a series of meetings in October 1957 between American and Sicilian Mafiosi at the Grand Hotel Des Palmes in Palermo. The meeting was about heroin, with the Americans apparently not keen on getting too involved in drugs due to the lengthy sentences for trafficking, whilst the Sicilians were apparently all for it. At the time, authorities did not know of the decision the two organisations came to (which was for the Sicilians to import and distribute heroin into the US, with their American counterparts taking a slice of the profits), but they were aware it concerned trafficking heroin. (The meeting also concluded that, following the American model, the Sicilians should start up their own commission.) Amongst the defendants were Gaetano Badalamenti, Tommaso Buscetta and Giuseppe Genco Russo. They were mostly charged with Organized Delinquency, an old law that was the nearest prosecutors had to a charge of being a Mafiosi (many in authority - whether out of niavety or otherwise - denied the existence of the Mafia in the 1960s, and in fact it was not until 1982 that being a member of the Mafia became a formal crime.) All the Americans at the meeting, including Joseph Bonanno and Carmine Galante, were indicted, but none were extradited because the US had no such criminal charge of Organized Delinquency. Charles "Lucky" Luciano, who was the principal organizer of the meeting, would have stood trial but he had since died of natural causes. The prosecutors did not have a great deal of evidence at the trial, principally relying on information from Joseph Valachi, an American Mafiosi who began co-operating with the government in 1962. As a low-level mobster, Valachi was not at the Grand Hotel Des Palmes meeting, but he was aware of the growing heroin trade and the Sicilian Mafia's involvement in it. The police had also put those at the meeting under surveillance at the time and for months afterwards in the hope of collecting evidence that they were dealing in narcotics. The evidence was still thin on the ground and at the conclusion of the trial in August 1968 every single defendant was acquitted. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「1960s Sicilian Mafia trials」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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