"Dark" side of the Giulietta

[AlfaRonny]

I found this in an article on car bombs:
History of the Car Bomb: "The poor man's air force"
by Mike Davis

The next destination for the car bomb was Palermo, Sicily. Angelo La Barbera, the Mafia capo of Palermo-Center, undoubtedly paid careful attention to the Algerian bombings and may even have borrowed some OAS expertise when he launched his devastating attack on his Mafia rival, "Little Bird" Greco, in February 1963. Greco's bastion was the town of Ciaculli outside Palermo where he was protected by an army of henchmen. La Barbera surmounted this obstacle with the aid of the Alfa Romeo Giulietta. ...

The first explosive-packed Giulietta destroyed Greco's house; the second, a few weeks later, killed one of his key allies. Greco's gunmen retaliated, wounding La Barbera in Milan in May; in response, La Barbera's ambitious lieutenants Pietro Torreta and Tommaso Buscetta (later to become the most famous of all Mafia pentiti) unleashed more deadly Giuliettas.

On June 30, 1963, "the umpteenth Giulietta stuffed with TNT" was left in one of the tangerine groves that surround Ciaculli. A tank of butane with a fuse was clearly visible in the back seat. A Giulietta had already exploded that morning in a nearby town, killing two people, so the carabinieri (military police) were cautious and summoned army engineers for assistance.

"Two hours later two bomb disposal experts arrived, cut the fuse and pronounced the vehicle safe to approach. But when Lieutenant Mario Malausa made to inspect the contents of the boot [luggage compartment], he detonated the huge quantity of TNT it contained. He and six other men were blown to pieces by an explosion that scorched and stripped the tangerine trees for hundreds of meters around." (The site is today marked by one of the several monuments to bomb victims in the Palermo region.)

Before this "first Mafia war" ended in 1964, the Sicilian population had learned to tremble at the very sight of a Giulietta, and car bombings had become a permanent part of the Mafia repertoire. They were employed again during an even bloodier second Mafia war, or matanza, in 1981-83, then turned against the Italian public in the early 1990s after the conviction of Cosa Nostra leaders in a series of sensational "maxi-trials". The most notorious of these blind-rage car bombings - presumably organized by "Tractor" Provenzano and his notorious Corleonese gang - was the explosion in May 1993 that damaged the world-famous Uffizi Gallery in the heart of Florence and killed five pedestrians, injuring 40 others.

Ronny

[TorW]

The matanzi are covered in the Italian 2008 TV-series Corleone about Salvatore "Totò" Riina and his gang. The tangerine grove incident is also in one of the episodes, but if I recall correctly, they are blowing up a Giulia, not a Giulietta. In any case, the series is chock full of period Alfas (and other Italian makes), from the 50's up until the 90's.

[k76]

This is also described in the book Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia. A highly recommended read, altough a fairly dark one. I can't recall if it was a Guilia or a Giulietta, but it became a highly symbolic morbid ritual.