Cracking Down on al-Qaeda

One night in 1993 Stefano Dambruoso came home to find half a pig’s head waiting for him. Packed in a yellow Christmas gift box, the traditional Mafia death threat was left in the lobby of the Italian prosecutor’s apartment building in the Sicilian city of Agrigento. (The other half of the head was delivered the same day to the local chief of police.) But Dambruoso recalls the episode with a shrug; for those who join the ranks of Italy’s anti-Mob crime fighters, a bloody swine at the door is just part of the price of admission. Now Dambruoso has new enemies. As an investigating magistrate in Milan, he probes international terrorism. One night in December 2001, his phone rang soon after midnight: it was a police chief calling to warn him of a plot in the works to assassinate him. Two guards with M12 submachine guns were stationed outside his apartment, and three armed agents were assigned to shadow his every move. This time it wasn’t mobsters but al-Qaeda terrorists who wanted Dambruoso dead. “I didn’t sleep at all that night,” he admits.

Since the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks there have been plenty of other sleepless nights — and busy days — for the 41-year-old prosecutor, who has helped lead Italy’s effort to unravel al-Qaeda’s European network. With the low, raspy voice and weathered good looks of a TV detective, he plugged away in obscurity for years before Sept. 11 — tracking and ultimately convicting key members of Italy’s fledgling Islamic terrorist operations. Five months before the World Trade Center attack, his team arrested in Milan five North Africans — including Tunisian-born Essid Sami Ben Khemais, considered one of al-Qaeda’s point men in Europe — in connection with a plot to blow up the Christmas market in Strasbourg, France. Ben Khemais, also known as Saber, got a five-year sentence.

Dambruoso admits that Sept. 11 stunned him. “It didn’t seem real,” he says. “I wasn’t able to connect my investigations with what I was seeing on television.” But slowly, he started to see how Italy fit into the worldwide terrorist matrix. “Over time, we have come to understand what bin Laden was doing here since 1997: how the organization was created, the recruitment and training.” Dambruoso says a “fringe” of terrorists shouldn’t be confused with all Muslims. “One of the best instruments to isolate the terrorists is to promote Islam’s moderate majority,” he says.

In the mid-1990s, the Bari native was the lead Mafia investigator in Agrigento during one of the bloodiest periods in recent Cosa Nostra history — 200 were killed in three years. Since moving to Milan in 1996, his terrorism probes have netted more than 50 arrests and 21 convictions.The success of the Milan investigations, which were publicy cited by U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell, stands out in comparison to recent terrorism arrests elsewhere in Italy that have ultimately proved unfounded.

His experience with The Mob has come in handy against al-Qaeda. “Both are jobs that require great patience,” he says. “You must be meticulous in verifying all the relationships. And you can never be satisfied that you know enough.” That kind of dedication ought to be keeping the terrorists awake at night