“I am not a pentito [Italian slang for ‘informer’],” Tommaso Buscetta, a Sicilian mobster who turned star government witness in a blockbuster 1986 “Maxi Trial” that saw 360 convictions won against gangsters, once said. ”I am a man who had to defend himself, and to do so had to tell the truth.”
“The Traitor,” a beautifully staged and shot film from Italian director Marco Bellocchio, aims to recount how Buscetta (played by Pierfrancesco Favino) came to turn against his fellow mobsters and “brought down the mafia.”
The story begins in the early 1980s, as Sicilian mobsters are assassinating each other to try to corner the illicit heroin trade. Buscetta keeps a (relatively) safe distance by hiding out with his kids and third wife in Brazil. But in September 1982, mobsters murder his two oldest sons in Palermo. The gangsters follow up by murdering his brother, a brother-in-law, a son-in-law and four nephews.
Brazilian authorities arrest Buscetta in October 1983 and extradite him Italy. There Buscetta tells all (or a hell of a lot) to the Italian judge and mafia investigator Giovanni Falcone (Fausto Russo Alesi).
“Before, the mafia would have nothing to do with drugs,” the real life Buscetta testified to the U.S. Senate’s organized-crime hearings in 1988. “Drugs brought too much attention from the authorities, too much heat. Now, drugs were the main part of the mafia’s business, and everyone in the Sicilian mafia was rich because of it.”
“Over the years, I have seen our organization change from within,” Buscetta told senators. “I have seen money, drugs and greed corrupt and destroy the Cosa Nostra code of honor and loyalty to the families.”
Dishonorable attacks on family members, the film says, turned Buscetta against the mafia. He would say: “I decided to collaborate with the state to prevent others from believing in the dignity and honor of the Cosa Nostra. These values have been buried under a mountain of innocent victims.”
Of course, Buscetta was caught and this was a legal way to deal a devastating blow to his enemies—and to be rewarded with little prison time and a new life. The film doesn’t get into the details, but for his 1985 testimony in an American heroin trafficking case, he was granted American citizenship and a slot for himself and his family in the U.S. witness protection program.
“Tommaso Buscetta is the most important, most wanted and most endangered witness of all-time and he will be until the day he dies,” the real Falcone said—before he was murdered by the mafia in a 1992 car bombing. That attack is recreated here in a virtuoso scene pictured from inside Falcone’s bullet-proof car. But much of the film is curiously free of tension because the film recounts no real threat on Buscetta himself.
Bellocchio brings us into Italian courtrooms and witness protection homes in Salem, New Hampshire; Fort Collins, Colorado; and Miami. He unfolds the story at a leisurely pace—at times too leisurely.
“The Traitor” leaves us with a vision of Buscetta as a murderer, but this is almost the only time Bellocchio shows Buscetta up to anything nefarious. And even this moment is a parable about how Buscetta studiously avoided harming his victim’s family. The film could also address the compromises that law enforcement makes with bad guys in pursuit of badder guys. But instead, for all the movie’s sophisticated artistry, this telling reinforces a simplistic legend of this mobster as a “man of honor,” as Buscetta liked to describe himself.
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