Honoured Society E-Book

Norman Lewis

• Herausgeber: Eland Publishing
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2011

Seitenzahl: 448

Beschreibung

The Honoured Society describes how the US army returned the Mafia to power in 1944, after Mussolini came close to destroying them. It looks at the Mafia in their homeland - how in attempting to preserve Sicily for the Sicilians in the face of countless invasions it infiltrated every aspect of the island's life, corrupting landowners, the police, the judiciary and even the church. In one chilling chapter Norman Lewis details the escapades of eighty-year-old Padre Camelo, who led his monks on sprees of murder and extortion, frequently using the confessional box for transmitting threats.

Leseprobe

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Maps

THE HONOURED SOCIETY

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

Epilogue

The Death of Boris Giuliano

Publisher’s Note 2003

Index

About the Author

Copyright

To S. J. Perelman

1

ON JULY 10TH, 1943, the allied armies landed on the south coast of Sicily and, thrusting northwards, began their conquest of the island. The task of occupation was divided between the American and combined British and Canadian forces, the former including in their command a small contingent of Free French. The Anglo-Canadian army advancing up the east coast found an enemy poorly equipped to offer resistance. A great deal of ingenuity had gone into the construction of painted wooden cannon, artfully contrived to discharge firecrackers and thus draw fire, which deceived nobody. Key positions were defended by captured Russian guns which could not be fired because no one had been able to translate the operational manuals. Some battery commanders had no idea that they were about to be attacked as the telephone lines connecting them to their headquarters had not yet been laid. In one case, infantry rushed into battle had received an emergency issue of mouth organs but no ammunition. Yet all things considered, despite the fact that they were out-gunned, outnumbered by five to one, and faced by battle-toughened veterans of the Africa campaign, the Italians fought back well and sometimes desperately. It cost the British and Canadian army five slogging weeks, some stiff engagements, and several thousand casualties to reach their objective : the town of Messina on the northeast tip of the island.

The Americans, to whom had been allotted the seemingly stiffer proposition of subduing the mountainous centre and western half of the island, carried out their share of the operation with great speed. After a short initial period when the American Seventh Army seemed almost to be awaiting the signal to move, it suddenly began a brisk advance up two main roads towards Palermo, reaching the north coast of Sicily in only seven days and with hardly a shot fired. General Patton was to describe this campaign as ‘the fastest blitzkrieg in history’. It was certainly the least costly : casualties, once the Seventh Army had broken out of its beachheads, being negligible.

The key-point in the Italo-German defence system was the area of Mount Cammarata near the towns of Villalba and Mussomeli, and here, in positions dominating both main roads along which the Americans were certain to advance, a mixed brigade of motorised artillery, antiaircraft guns and 88mm anti-tank guns, plus a squadron of German tanks, including several Tigers, waited to give battle. The Cammarata redoubt had been most carefully chosen. This craggy solitude, with its concealed ravines and its caves reached by secret paths, had been the home of armed resistance since Roman antiquity and had sheltered slave rebellions that had taken decades to quell. Only a few miles away, and in similar terrain, the bandit Giuliano was shortly to hold two fully equipped divisions in check with a force of only a hundred men. In command of the defenders was a Colonel Salemi, a veteran described as possessing an inflexible sense of duty. The Colonel was pessimistic about the final outcome of the battle in view of the lack of air-cover, but he had no doubt of his ability to halt the American advance for a valuable period of days, or even weeks. Cammarata might, in fact, have supplied a foretaste of the unhappy experience of Cassino.

* * *

On the morning of July 14th, four days after the landing, an American fighter plane flew low over the town of Villalba, circled and returned to drop a packet which fell near the church. A yellow flag with the letter L in black had been stretched over the side of the plane’s cockpit, and when the packet was picked up its contents were found to include a small replica of this flag. Packet and contents were handed over to Carabinieri Lance-Corporal Angelo Riccioli, now a sergeant-major in the service at Palermo, who has no objection to discussing the occurrence with an interested visitor. Next day the plane returned and a second packet was dropped, this time a short distance from the house of Villalba’s leading citizen – Calogero Vizzini – for whom it was intended. The packet was recovered by a servant of the Vizzini family, Carmelo Bartolomeo, who must have been looking over his employer’s shoulder when it was opened, as he later told a newspaperman that he had seen a yellow silk handkerchief bearing the initial L. Bartolomeo’s employer, Calogero Vizzini – generally known as Don Calò – was the head of the Mafia of all Sicily, and as such considered by most Sicilians to be the most powerful man in the island.

Next morning, July 15th, a messenger left Villalba on horseback for the neighbouring town of Mussomeli. He was carrying a letter on behalf of Don Calò to Giuseppe Genco Russo, regarded at that time as second to Don Calò in the Mafia hierarchy. This letter, which the messenger had been told to swallow if intercepted, was couched in Mafia jargon, and its substance was that a certain Mafia chieftain known as Turi would be leaving on July 20th to accompany the American motorised division as far as Cerda (within five miles of the north coast), while he, Don Calò, would be going on the same day with the main body of the army. Genco Russo was asked to do all he could in Don Calò’s absence for the security and the comfort of the Americans.

On July 20th, in fact, while the advance guard of the Seventh Army was still thirty miles away, a solitary jeep made a dash to reach Villalba and carry off the indispensable Don Calò. The jeep, however, took a wrong turning, came under fire from an Italian patrol, and one of its crew was killed. Later that day three American tanks repeated the attempt and were successful. One of these was flying the by now familiar yellow flag with the black L, and when in the main square an officer climbed out of its turret, he spoke in the authentic Sicilian dialect of the region.

Citizens of Villalba who were present at the encounter between this officer and the formidable Don Calò say that the American seemed surprised by the presence in the flesh of the legendary Mafia chief. Characteristically, Don Calò appeared on the scene in his shirtsleeves and braces, waddling unemotionally towards the group of nervous and excited American soldiers standing under the guns of their tanks. At this time he was sixty-six years of age, a man of bulky features and inert expression, but with eyes that moved like lizards. Don Calò’s slovenly dress and laconic speech were typical Mafia affectations. It was not done for a Mafia chieftain to show off in the matter of his clothing or any other way, and sometimes, as in Don Calò’s case, this lack of concern for appearances was carried to extremes. From the Prince of Lampedusa’s description, Don Calò might well have been the twin brother of Don Calogero Sedara, the unshaven and unscrupulous mafioso mayor of The Leopard.

Reaching the shadow of the guns, Don Calò pulled out of his pocket the yellow handkerchief that had been dropped by the plane, and showed it to the officers. He and a nephew, Domiano Lumia, who had returned from the United States a short time before the outbreak of war, were invited to get into one of the tanks, which then moved off, followed by the others. During the whole confrontation Don Calò – true to his reputation for preferring action to speech – is reported not to have opened his mouth.

Next morning, July 21st, on the heights of Cammarata, visible from the town, two-thirds of Colonel Salemi’s men were found to have deserted. Some of them have since said that during the night they were approached by Mafia agents, who convinced them of the hopelessness of their position and supplied them with civilian clothes and whatever else was needed to get home to their families. The same day, the Italian Commander himself was arrested by a trick while passing through Mussomeli, and confined by the Mafia in the Town Hall. At four o’clock on the afternoon of the 21st, Moroccan troops under General Juin, who had been waiting since dawn at the village of Riffi for an order to advance, received the expected signal from a Sicilian agent coming from Mussomeli and began to move forward. The battle of Cammarata was over without a shell having been fired.

Don Calò was away from his capital for six days. During this time the Seventh Army divided itself in two columns, one of which, striking directly north along the Agrigento-Palermo road, reached Cerda, where it was joined by the other column which had carried out a wide encircling movement through Gela, Piazza Armerina, Nicosia, Mistretta and Santo Stefano – all of them notorious as Mafia towns. As indicated in the letter to Genco Russo, Don Calò considered his mission to end at Cerda. Here other Mafia potentates were ready to shoulder his responsibility.

In reality, although at this time Don Calò was the accepted head of the Mafia, there were certain weak links in his chain of command. Mussolini’s vigorous attack on the ‘Honoured Society’, as it was called by its members, had shaken its structure and left it weaker, probably, than it had ever been. Many of the best Mafia brains had been hastily converted to Fascism. Others, in 1943, were still in confino and only just about to be released. In the heart of western Sicily, the stronghold of great feudal estates, Don Calò – who had been too wily even for Mussolini – remained absolute master; but in the coastal plain between Cerda and Palermo the Mafia satraps had become used to their independence and had to be handled with diplomacy. It would be Don Calò’s first task to repair this weakness in the organisation.

By the time Calogero Vizzini returned to Villalba the war in western Sicily was at an end. He had dedicated the whole of his life to what the Mafia calls ‘winning respect’, and his prestige was now enormous. He had been nicknamed by the Allies ‘General Mafia’. Whether or not he was responsible for American strategy in western Sicily, his followers certainly gave him the credit for it, and no one could deny that the Mafia had most efficiently cleared all obstacles in the path of the American advance, while in the east the British and Canadians were still fighting their way round the slopes of Etna and it was to be three more weeks before they reached their goal at Messina.

But the war in western Sicily had been terminated bloodlessly, rapidly, and to the satisfaction of all but a few diehard senior Axis officers like the unfortunate Salemi. The Sicilians, always anti-Fascist, to all intents and purposes were now anti-Italian too. In so far as the loyalties of kinship were felt they were towards America, where by 1943 two million Sicilians, or first-or second-generation Americans of Sicilian origin, were living in a prosperity that was almost incredible by island standards. Many islanders were totally dependent on money sent back by relations in the States. Moreover, American Intelligence had seen to it that the Sicilian component of the invading force was as high as fifteen per cent. Hatred of the war had become so intense that, shortly after the invasion began, there were cases of Sicilian civilians attacking and destroying Italian military camps left unguarded by the rushing of troops to the beach-heads. To the Sicilians, resistance of any kind only signified a painful delay in an occupation wholeheartedly desired by all.

* * *

There was a precedent for the display of yellow flags and handkerchiefs which heralded this happy conclusion of hostilities on the western Sicilian front. The exchange of silk handkerchiefs was commonly practised among the Mafia and had become the equivalent of a password when an identity had to be established. In 1922 a certain Lottò, an associate-member of the Mafia of Villalba, committed a murder so outrageously ill-planned and with such an arrogant disregard for any attempt at concealment, that his arrest and conviction were inevitable. This kind of overconfidence was in breach of Mafia rules, which called for consultation and approval at high level before a liquidation could be carried out. But, to have left a ‘man of honour’ to his fate would have damaged the authority and prestige of the Mafia and have caused Don Calò himself serious ‘loss of respect’. He therefore arranged to have Lottò declared insane and transferred to a criminal lunatic asylum at Barcellona, where Mafia infiltration had been particularly successful. Soon after Lottò’s arrival, he officially died. The ‘corpse’ was removed for burial in a specially prepared and ventilated coffin, after which Lottò was supplied with false identity documents and smuggled away to the United States. On arrival in New York, he was met by a group of friends who had been warned to expect him, and to these he identified himself by the production of a yellow silk handkerchief given to him by Don Calò, which in this instance carried the initial C.

The bold black L on the flags flown at Villalba on these fateful days in July stood for Luciano. Lucky Luciano, originally Salvatore Lucania, had been born in Lercara Friddi, the next town of any size along the main road from Villalba to Palermo, and as head of the Mafia in the United States – which he had almost certainly become – Luciano would undoubtedly have been in regular contact with his opposite number in Sicily. In 1943, Luciano, who had been found guilty on sixty-two counts of compulsory prostitution, was serving a thirty–fifty years’ prison sentence. He had recently been transferred at the US Navy’s request from the State Penitentiary at Dannemara, a maximum security prison known to the criminal fraternity as ‘Siberia’, to the Great Meadows Penitentiary, where he was more conveniently accessible to parties of naval officers in plain clothes who went there to confer with him.

In February of that year – five months before the invasion of Sicily took place – he appealed through his lawyer, George Wolf, for a reduction of his sentence in consideration of ‘services rendered to the nation’. Following this, he appeared in 1945 before the State Parole Board, where some squeamishness seems to have been displayed by naval intelligence officers called upon to testify on his behalf. Whatever had been promised Luciano in return for his co-operation – and Luciano protested that it was his freedom – the naval authorities refused to be drawn in, and the fact that Luciano was eventually freed and deported to Italy was due to the action as a private individual of Commander Haffenden, a naval officer prominent in these negotiations, and his confidential letters to members of the Parole Board.

The late Senator Estes Kefauver, Chairman of the Senate Crime Investigating Committee 1950–1951, has referred in his book Crime in America to the background of these circumstances.

During World War II there was a lot of hocus-pocus about allegedly valuable services that Luciano, then a convict, was supposed to have furnished the military authorities in connection with plans for the invasion of his native Sicily. We dug into this and obtained a number of conflicting stories. This is one of the points about which the committee would have questioned Governor Dewey, who commuted Luciano’s sentence, if the Governor had not declined our invitation to come to New York City to testify before the committee.

One story which we heard from Moses Polakoff, attorney for Meyer Lansky, was that Naval Intelligence had sought out Luciano’s aid and had asked Polakoff to be the intermediary. Polakoff, who had represented Luciano when he was sent up, said he in turn enlisted the help of Lansky, an old associate of Lucky’s, and that some fifteen or twenty visits were arranged at which Luciano gave certain information.

… On the other hand, Federal Narcotics Agent George White, who served our committee as an investigator for several months, testified to having been approached on Luciano’s behalf by a narcotics smuggler named August Del Grazio. Del Grazio claimed he “was acting on behalf of two attorneys … and … Frank Costello who was spearheading the movement to get Luciano out of the penitentiary,” White said.

‘He [Del Grazio] said Luciano had many potent connections in the Italian underworld and Luciano was one of the principal members of the Mafia,’ White testified. The proffered deal, he went on, was that Luciano would use his Mafia position to arrange contacts for undercover American agents “and that therefore Sicily would be a much softer target than it might otherwise be.”’

There have been many apocryphal versions of what followed these transactions, some of them wildly improbable. It has, for example, been reported that Luciano was secretly released from prison in 1943 to accompany the invasion force, that he was freely to be seen in the town of Gela where the Seventh Army’s first headquarters were established, and even that he was a member of the crew of the tank that picked up Don Calò at Villalba. There is no evidence of Don Calò and Luciano getting together, however, until 1946, when they occupied adjoining suites in a Palermo hotel during the formation of the Sicilian Separatist Party.

* * *

The day after Don Calò’s return to his capital, an intimate little ceremony took place in the barracks of the carabinieri at which he was appointed Mayor by the American Officer of Civil Affairs. A sketch made from a photograph taken at the time captures the spirit of the historic moment. It shows Don Calò, who has agreed to put on an untidy jacket for the occasion, listening while the Civil Affairs Officer, who has been told that the new Mayor is illiterate, reads out the document conferring the honour upon him. The artist shows Don Calò’s attention as incompletely held by the ceremony, an eye swivelled sideways as if distracted by something that is happening behind his back. In fact, in the square below a cheering crowd had gathered, and among the cheers Don Calò was slightly embarrassed to hear cries of ‘Long live the Allies. Long live the Mafia.’

That evening the new Mayor gave a party for the Allied officers – ‘the sheep’ as Don Calò called them – and a number of his selected friends. The friends were the members of the Mafia of Villalba and such Mafia notabilities from the surrounding districts as could attend at short notice. Some of them wore their hair closely cropped, and their faces still bore the pallor of Mussolini’s prisons. Don Calò introduced them to the officers as victims of Fascism, as indeed they were. His enthusiastic recommendations easily persuaded the military authorities to issue firearms permits all round – ‘to guard against the possibility of any attempted Fascist coup’. Thus Don Calò had restored to him the armed bodyguard that had been taken away by Mussolini in 1924. The first of many victims of this resurgence of democracy was Pietro Purpi, the very carabinieri noncommissioned officer whose rueful task it had been to countersign the firearms permits.

Don Calò’s next step was a more important one – so important indeed that Sicily has not yet recovered from its far-reaching effects. He compiled a list of suitable candidates for the office of mayor throughout the whole of western Sicily, and this too was found acceptable. Many of these partisans of democracy, as Don Calò pointed out, had spent long years in confinement. No one seems to have had time to investigate his claim that his nominees had suffered for their political ideals, rather than for crimes ranging from armed train-robbery to multiple homicide. In a matter of days, half the towns in Sicily had mayors who were either members of the Mafia or were at least closely associated with it. One or two had been bandits into the bargain. A noteworthy appointment was that of Serafino Di Peri to be Mayor of Bolognetta near Palermo. Di Peri’s first task as head of the municipality was to form a band of 109 desperadoes, who thereafter terrorised the outskirts of Palermo for the next five years. Thus for the first time, due to the military authorities’ complete incomprehension of the situation in which they found themselves, the Mafia ruled directly, instead of, as in the past, exerting its influence indirectly through the control of corrupt public officials. Within days the maleficent genius of Don Calò had been able to repair much of the damage done to the ‘Honoured Society’ in the twenty years of Fascism. Now, in the absence of a constituted government, the Mafia chieftains had become the real rulers of Sicily.

A ceremony with a strangely archaic flavour brought this period to a close. A whispered suggestion to the Allies set the ball rolling with a gift to the municipality of Villalba of two Fiat trucks and a tractor taken from an abandoned Italian depot. The trucks were usefully employed in the black market, and the tractor was sold for scrap iron. Following this lead, presents for Don Calò began to pour in from all over Sicily. Every notability contributed to this avalanche of flour, cheeses, pasta, and stolen military equipment. Under the innocent gaze of the Allied Military Government a spontaneous revival took place of an ancient custom dating back to the days of Roger the Norman. Don Calò had become, for the second time in his life, a feudal ruler, and these gifts were the tributes of vassals who accepted him as their overlord.

* * *

Strangely, not all those who came to press Don Calò’s hand or to present their ceremonial offering were sycophants. Aside from the natural awe they felt for him, many people genuinely admired the head of the Mafia, and even those he had victimised sometimes seemed unable to repress their grudging esteem. Don Calò was a natural artist in the control of men, through their affections as well as through their fears. His immense dignity, the Johnsonian pithiness of his rare but massive utterances, the majestic finality of his opinions, appealed to the human search for leadership. Even men of education and intellectuals admitted their susceptibility to a strange power of attraction not uncommonly possessed by a capo-Mafia, and certainly highly evident in Don Calò. The Mayor of Villalba would have shaken his head at the puerility of anyone who could really have believed he was a criminal. He almost certainly saw himself as the head of a self-created aristocracy of the intellect, to which had been committed, as if by some divine right, the arcana of government. He believed in himself as only a mafioso could and with the stolid unwavering faith of religious fanaticism – and almost as though by telepathic contact, he forced those around him to become believers too. Don Calò knew that only he, the inspired realist in command of the Mafia, could rule Sicily as it should be ruled, and had anyone dared to oppose this assumption – which he would never have bothered to claim in so many words – he would have pointed to the total ruin Mussolini had left behind after a mere twenty years of Fascist rather than Mafia rule. Such mafiosi of the old school were only criminals in the eyes of the law and of abstract justice – and in a more confused and unfocused way in those of the peasantry they exploited. To the rest of the community they were ‘men of respect’, and of sincere if inscrutable purpose.

A conversation fifteen years later between a newspaperman and Don Calò’s chauffeur, after the old capo-Mafia’s death, illuminated a curious facet of his remarkable character.

‘Did Don Calò pay you well?’

‘He never gave me a lira.’

‘You mean you never had any wages? In that case, how did you live?’

‘I suppose you might say I robbed him. I used to tell him we needed a new set of tyres for the car. Or maybe it was petrol or oil. Once I told him we had to have a new engine. I just put the money in my pocket. He never said a word.’

‘But didn’t he realise what was happening all the time?’

‘Of course he did. Nothing ever got past him. Don Calò knew everything that was going on. He just wanted it that way. He never gave me any wages, so I cheated him and he pretended not to notice it. That was the way he wanted it.’

2

THE WORD MAFIA probably derives from the identical word in Arabic and means ‘place of refuge’. As such, it no doubt recalls the predicament of the relatively civilised Saracens after the conquest of Sicily by the Normans in the eleventh century. The Arabs had introduced smallholdings and scientific irrigation. Their rule by comparison with anything the island had known before (or since) was mild and beneficent. Had they remained, there is no reason why the prosperity and civilisation of Sicily should not have equalled that of Spain, but the Normans dislodged them and plunged the country back into the polar night of feudalism. Most of the Arab smallholders became serfs on the reconstituted estates. Some escaped to ‘the Mafia’.

These are the dry bones of probability as unearthed by the historians. But scratch below the surface and the evidence of an even earlier origin comes to light. One discovers archaic – even Bronze Age – ingredients in the seemingly down-to-earth, devil-take-the-hindmost materialism of the men of the ‘Honoured Society’. In times of crisis, men like Don Calogero Vizzini tend sometimes to behave not so much like big-scale black-market operators of the twentieth century as like the personae of a Greek tragedy, whose motives are often so remote from our own as to be incomprehensible. This – from our viewpoint – irrational element in Mafia behaviour comes out strongly in the great feud between the Barbaccia and Lorello families of Godrano, near Palermo.

The two families quarrelled back in 1918 over the possession of a wood. This in itself is perhaps significant, because the wood, standing unaccountably intact in a country denuded of trees since Roman times, may have survived through its supposed possession of sacred or magic attributes. The dispute over this ragged patch of stunted oaks and thorny underbrush cost these two families dozens of lives, until, it is supposed, Don Calò Vizzini – that great advocate of Mafia unity – intervened in 1942 to help repair the quarrel. Following age-old custom, the thing now would have been to arrange a marriage between two suitable members of the opposing families. This could not be done through lack of mutually acceptable candidates, and in 1944 the war flared up again with the commission by the Lorellos of what to the men of honour is considered the most odious of all crimes: Francisco Barbaccia, head of his family, was kidnapped and never seen again. It is at this point that the archaic component of the Mafia mentality – its utter separation from the outlook of the ordinary criminal of modern times – is apparent. The killing of Barbaccia was bad enough, but the final offence – held to be ten times more execrable than the killing itself – was the concealment of the body so that vengeance could not be ritually sworn ‘in the presence of the corpse’. By 1960, nearly one-tenth of the population of Godrano had become casualties as the feud developed and spread, the latest victim – in the absence of eligible adults – being a boy of twelve.

The Mafia stands outside Christian morality, but the uncorrupted form of the Mafia found in feudal Sicily has an iron morality of its own. No mafioso sees himself as a criminal, and the Mafia has always been the enemy of petty crime – and therefore, to a limited extent, the ally of the police, both in Sicily and the United States. The organisation demands blind obedience from its members, but will defend them in return through thick and thin – and in an alien land even extends its powerful protection to all immigrants of Sicilian birth. It can be regarded as a form of primitive human society that has somehow survived in the modern Western world; its cruel laws are those of tribesmen exposed to continual danger who can only hope to survive by submitting to the discipline of terrible chieftains. The capo-Mafia considers himself a lawgiver, concerned with the welfare of his people, and prides himself on watching over the advancement of deserving juniors in the organisation with the assiduousness of the master of novices of a religious order. In his own eyes, he never steals from the community, but he can see no objection to exploiting his power over men to enrich himself. To delinquents he awards only one punishment, usually after a warning: death. He is self-righteous and full of justifications. Listen to Nick Gentile, an American capo-Mafia, discussing the ethics of eliminating an uncontrollable young criminal: ‘There was nothing we could do with him, so he had to be rubbed out. We embalmed the body and sent it back to his people in Sicily. His folks were poor – they didn’t have anything – so we put a diamond ring on his finger, the way they’d see it as soon as they opened the casket. I guess we did the right thing. We figured otherwise he’d have finished up in the chair or the gas-chamber. That way they wouldn’t even have had his body back.’

A primeval law transcends the bonds of blood-relationship, and Mafia honour demands precedence over ordinary human loyalties. Between 1872 and 1878 there took place in the neighbourhood of the towns of Bagheria and Monreale the most calamitous vendetta known to history. The two clans involved, the Fratuzzi and the Stoppaglieri, were both active in the same area, frequently treading on each other’s toes but on the whole successful in keeping on terms of limited hostility. In 1872 Giuseppe Lipari, a member of the Fratuzzi clan, committed what the Mafia calls infamità by denouncing a Stoppaglieri to the police. The Stoppaglieri sent an emissary to their opponents describing what had happened, and calling upon the Fratuzzi to observe Mafia law and execute Lipari. This the Fratuzzi failed to do, and the feud was on. Within a short time all the close relations of the original disputants had been killed, and as more remote degrees of kinship were forced into the vendetta, the whole population began a terror-stricken rummaging back into its ancestry in search of dangerous ties of blood. By 1878 a man might be approached by some enshrouded, tragic crone he had never seen before – the female head of one of the clans – who would inform him that he was now the surviving head of the Fratuzzi, or the Stoppaglieri, and that he must consider himself in a state of ritual vendetta with some cousin he had never seen or heard of and who might even have had the foresight to take refuge in Tunisia or the USA. A case occurred of a young boy being assisted to fulfil his ritual duty by an outsider, who charitably loaded his blunderbuss for him and carried it to the place where it had been decided to stage an ambush. By the time the feud ended, fear of involvement had brought about the depopulation of the countryside. The survivors of the two clans were reconciled in characteristic fashion. A survivor of the Fratuzzi, Salvatore D’Amico, who had lost all his family, went to the police and told all he knew of the malfeasances of the Stoppaglieri. It was an act tantamount to suicide, of a man tired of life, as D’Amico made quite clear in his statement. This time the Fratuzzi did the right thing. They killed their clan member, and to make sure of his recognition, his body was displayed prominently, with an amulet of the kind worn by the Fratuzzi, made from a vestment stolen from an image of the Madonna, placed over each eye.

There are mild and rustic men, goatherds and ploughmen, drawn without hope of escape into these ancient, tragic games whose rules were established perhaps before their ancestors reached the shores of the Mediterranean. In 1944 I was engaged in army duties in Naples which committed me to a number of lugubrious visits to the prison of Poggio Reale. There I was introduced by the head warder to a Sicilian, D’Agostino, who had committed five vendetta murders. The maximum sentence for an ‘honour’ killing in Italy is ten years, so that D’Agostino was serving a total of fifty years. He was put on display for the benefit of privileged visitors with what can only be described as a sort of modest pride. D’Agostino was treated with immense respect. He was the only prisoner, not excluding a general occupying a cell in Poggio Reale at that time, who was addressed in the third person singular, being given a courteous lei instead of the familiar and slightly contemptuous tu. D’Agostino was small, puzzled, and yet resigned. He was slightly under five feet in height, with tiny hands and feet and hardly more than the frame of a child. His crime had been committed with an axe – the tomahawk-like weapon that Prefect Mori, Mussolini’s destroyer of the Mafia, had permitted shepherds to keep – and he had wiped out a whole family. This was the end of a period of close confinement, and on the assumption that after three years the prisoner had come to a working arrangement with despair, the forty-seven years that remained would pass under a slightly relaxed prison régime. D’Agostino always expected to be asked whether he would commit his crime again could the clock be put back, and his reply was always the same: ‘Surely you don’t imagine I had any choice, one way or the other? Honour’s honour and a vendetta’s a vendetta. You might say that destiny put its big fat thumb in my neck and squashed me like a beetle.’ The warders nodded their sympathy and their agreement. That was the way it was.  

What would Don Vito Cascio Ferro, who established his image as a forward-looking man by making a pioneer trip in a balloon and was head of all the Mafia until his final arrest by Prefect Mori, have said to anyone who pointed out to him that the organisation he commanded was psychologically still entangled in the prehistory of humanity? The sophisticated Don Vito can hardly have realised, either, that Mafia symbolism – the system of graded warnings from the cutting down of a vine and the maiming of an ass or mule, to the depositing at a man’s door of his beheaded dog or a sheep with its throat cut – is shared with certain African tribes of the Republic of Mali. How strange, too, that the custom of vendetta of Corsica, Sardinia and Sicily – whose peoples have presumably been separated for thousands of years – should be so similar in all its curious detail: the ritual denunciation of the slayer by the professional mourners at the funeral (ignorance of his identity will be feigned, if necessary, up till this point); the entrusting of the vendetta to the male nearest-of-kin by the senior female member of the household; the kissing, even the pretended sucking of the wounds, by close relations such as mother, wife or brother, followed by the spoken formula: ‘In this way may I drink the blood of the man who killed you’; the final consummation of the act of vengeance, which ideally should take place, after a period of ritual preparation, in full sunshine – an archaic blueprint for the mise-en-scène of High Noon.  

* * *

The vendetta was the weapon ready to hand of the poor and otherwise defenceless in a society where law did not exist and justice meant the baron’s court and the baron’s torture chamber. Sicily – the America of the ancient world – has been a colony exploited by the use of slave labour, either openly or in a disguised form, for two thousand years. The Roman armies marched to the conquest of Gaul and Britain on bread made from corn grown by Sicilian slaves. When, with the fall of Rome, the Papacy took over the great Sicilian estates, it was the chain gangs of Sicilian peasant labourers that provided three-fourths of its wealth. Sicily was exploited by Norman, German, Frenchman, Aragonese, Spaniard, and finally the Bourbons, but nearly always from a distance. After the Germans there was no central government, no monarch, no court, no resident hierarchy. So long as the corn was shipped out of Sicilian ports each year, nothing else mattered. Defining the seemingly endless ice-age of feudalism in Sicily, Filangieri, the social historian, said that an overbearing despotism had grown up to separate the Crown from the people. As a result, Sicily was a political hermaphrodite, neither monarchy nor republic, ‘which suffered from all the dependency of the former, while lacking the advantages of a constitution, and all the turbulence of the latter, although deprived of its liberties’.

And then, just at the time when the first stirrings of the modern world were visible elsewhere in Europe, another tragic yoke was laid upon the Sicilian neck by the establishment of the Inquisition. And in Sicily, through the remoteness of the Crown, its effects were even more deadening than in Spain itself. More and more to the modern observer the Holy Office appears as a device concerned primarily with economic situations, and only secondarily with matters of faith. Drawing its revenues from heresy, it saw to it that heresy was abundant. In Spain heresy provided an excuse for the ruin and annihilation of a class of rich Christianised merchants of Jewish or Moorish origin. In Sicily its objectives were all-embracing, although vaguer. Heresy started as religious dissent, but as religious dissenters – understandably enough – were remarkably few, the Inquisition widened its scope to include a miscellany of bigamists, ‘philosophers’, usurers, sodomites, priests who married their concubines, and finally opponents of any kind, who automatically became classed as heretics. Membership of the Inquisition, like that of an exclusive club, was open only to the aristocracy, and in Sicily the barons enrolled themselves with enthusiasm as familiars. All convictions were accompanied by forfeiture of property, and the Inquisition gave no receipts. In procedural matters the scales were heavily weighted against those whose reputation for original thought or whose conspicuous possessions happened to attract the Holy Office’s attention. Arrests were made on suspicion, often as the result of anonymous denunciation. The accused was presumed guilty and the functions of prosecutor and judge were combined. Women, children and slaves could be called as witnesses for the prosecution, but not for the defence. Nor could the victim be allowed a lawyer to plead his case, as this would have been tantamount to opposing the Inquisition, and, as such, an act of heresy.

The familiars of the Inquisition dominated Sicily for three centuries. Until the time of their disbanding in 1787 there were never less than two thousand of these psalm-singing marauders, each in command of his own band of retainers – all of whom enjoyed the same extra-legal privileges. They stripped rich men of their property, and sentenced them to murus largus – the most comfortable kind of incarceration the day had to offer. The poor were punished for their lack of seizable goods by torture and murus strictis, which meant that they were flung, fettered, into a deep dungeon and endured ‘the bread and water of affliction’ until they died. Horrified by these excesses, which he was quite powerless to check, the Spanish Viceroy, the Duke of Medinaceli, wrote: ‘It would take a year to describe the things they do. Unheard of things – the most hideous and frightful enormities.’ The poor man’s only shield was the Mafia and the vendetta. Justice was not to be come by, but the association of men of honour, silent, persistent and inflexible, could at least exact a bloody retribution for the loss of a wife or daughter, or the burning down of a house. Colafanni, an authority on the period, sums up: ‘The Mafia in Sicily under the Bourbons provided the only means for the poor and humble to make themselves respected … To the Mafia, then, went all the rebels, all those that had suffered injuries, all the victims.’

It was in the school of the vendetta, too, that the traditional character of the mafioso was formed. The common man, a victim of absolute power, had to learn to stomach insult or injury with apparent indifference so that vengeance could be delayed until the opportunity for its consummation presented itself. The mafioso therefore developed a kind of self-control closely resembling that quality known as giri by the Japanese, and so much admired by them. A true man of honour never weakened his position or armed his enemy in advance by outbursts of passion or of fear. When he sustained some grave injury he made a pact with himself to be revenged, and thereafter would wait patiently and unemotionally, half a lifetime if necessary, until his moment came – often seemingly on excellent terms with the man he proposed to destroy.

But when a man lost his head, threw Mafia-inculcated secrecy and caution to the wind and struck back openly, his only chance of salvation was to take to the maquis. For this reason there was never a time when Sicily was without its bandits. At the end of the Second World War thirty separate armed bands terrorised western Sicily, while even in the late winter of 1962–3 motorised bandits were still staging highway robberies on the main provincial highway between Castellamare and Ballestrate. A hundred and fifty years ago the Bourbon authorities decided to deal with this situation by creating the first pseudo-police force. The only qualification for enrolment in the ‘Armed Companies’, as they were called, was ruthlessness. Many of these upholders of the law were ferocious criminals reprieved from the gallows and allowed to rehabilitate themselves in this way. What the familiars of the Inquisition had overlooked, the Armed Companies took. After the depredations carried out in the name of religion, Sicilians were now doomed to suffer voicelessly under the agents of the State. Since then they have quite simply turned their backs on authority of any kind. For this reason the police charged with the investigation of the highway robberies of February 1963 met with nothing but the most intractable hostility from local villagers, while even the victims of the robberies appear not to have been specially helpful. For this reason, when a man is found lying seriously wounded, possibly dying, and the police appeal to him to identify his aggressor, the reply is usually couched in a formula: ‘If I die, may God forgive me, as I forgive the one who did this. If I manage to pull through, I know how to settle my own accounts.’

This is the famous Sicilian omertà – ‘manliness’, which rules the public conscience and is sustained so often even in the face of death. It is a word which calls for further examination, and is best understood by the study of an extreme case of omertà in action.

Some four or five years ago one of two brothers living together in a Sicilian farmhouse disappeared. The men were known to have been on the worst possible terms for years, and the younger and stronger one frequently knocked his older brother about and even threatened to kill him. Finally the older brother vanished and the police got to hear about it, searched the farmhouse, and found inefficiently cleaned-up bloodstains on the floor. It is a popular misconception that a case for murder cannot be made out if no body can be found. In this case it was decided by the examining magistrate that a corpus delicti existed, constituted by the threats of murder known to have been made, the man’s disappearance, the bloodstains, and the suspect’s immediate assumption of his brother’s property. The younger brother was accordingly tried for murder, found guilty, and sentenced to imprisonment for life.

A year or two later a carabiniere, who knew the older brother, suddenly found himself face to face with the ‘murdered’ man. He was working quietly as a labourer on a farm in the mountains, only two miles away. It emerged that as part of his plan to be revenged on his brother, the man had changed his name, although most of his fellow labourers and some of the neighbours knew who he was all the same. This was omertà with a vengeance. It simply did not occur to these people to go to the police, despite the terrific injustice that had been done. It was ‘manly’ to solve one’s own problems in one’s own way and leave others to do the same, and one ‘lost respect’ by poking one’s nose into other people’s affairs.

The Sicilian conscience is further bedevilled by an unfortunate linguistic confusion, arising out of the similarity between the words omertà and umiltà – humility, the Christian virtue so much extolled in the Church. Many illiterate Siciliane have combined the two words to produce a hybrid of mixed pagan and Christian significance. The virtuous man is in Mafia fashion ‘manly’ and silent, and as a Christian, humble.

Far from protecting the underdog, the Mafia today has taken the place of the oppressors of old, but it still benefits from a moral climate formed in past centuries. The Sicilian is a trifle cynical and quite self-sufficient. He fights his own battles, keeps his mouth shut, and has little interest in the doings of humanity outside the circle of his family, extended perhaps to include his second cousins. ‘Manliness’, once a barricade raised against injustice, now serves to keep justice out.

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In the past it was the Mafia – the product of weak government that had developed its own vested interest in governmental weakness – that whipped up the frantic jacqueries of 1820, 1840 and 1866. The savageries of these outbursts of peasant hatred are quite inexplicable to anyone unaware of the long years of contempt that had preceded them. As in Spain, the targets of popular fury were always the same: the landlord, the Church, the police. There is no better description of the kind of thing that could happen than that given by Giovanni Verga in his story ‘Liberty’, which is largely factual and based on the rising at Brontë, put down by Nino Bixio, lieutenant of Garibaldi – the man who was to have given the land to the peasants.

Like the sea in storm, the crowd foamed and swayed in front of the club of the gentry, and outside the Town Hall, and on the steps of the church – a sea of white stocking-caps, axes and sickles glittering. Then they burst into the little street.

‘Your turn first, baron! You who have had folks cudgelled by your estate guards!’ At the head of all the people a witch, with her old hair sticking up, armed with nothing but her nails. ‘Your turn, priest of the devil, for you’ve sucked the soul out of us!’ … ‘Your turn, police-sergeant, you who never took the law on anybody except poor folks who’d got nothing!’ ‘Your turn, estate guards, who sold your own flesh and your neighbour’s flesh for ten pence a day!’

Now they were drunk with the killing. Sickles, hands, rags, stones, everything red with blood. The gentry! Kill them all! Kill them all! Down with the gentry!

‘Don’t kill me,’ pleads the priest, ‘I’m in mortal sin!’ Neighbour Lucia being the mortal sin; neighbour Lucia, whose father sold her to the priest when she was fourteen years old, at the time of the famine winter. But the priest is hacked to pieces on the cobblestones of the street. Then it is the turn of the apothecary, the lawyer, and the lawyer’s eleven-year-old son. The estate guards fire on the crowd from the castle, but the castle is stormed and the defenders massacred, the baron’s young sons trampled to death, the baroness and her baby thrown from her balcony to the street.

And then suddenly the slaughter is over. They are free of the gentry and rage is dead. Now they have their liberty, but nobody knows what to do with it. And in any case there is no time to learn, for the Army, with its firing squads, is on the way. Quietly and sadly, arms folded, they sit waiting behind closed doors.

In those days the Mafia was still with the people; then, gradually, as it gathered its power it began to draw apart. The Mafia was paid for its part in Garibaldi’s triumph, it organised the plebiscite (at Lampedusa’s Donnafugata – Voters, 515; Voting, 512; Yes, 512; No, zero); its chieftains, like his illiterate Sedaras, married their daughters to penniless princes. From that time on the Mafia began to elbow the feudal aristocracy aside. By 1945 the process was complete. Don Calogero Vizzini was the feudal overlord of all Sicily as well as head of the Mafia. And thereby he had become the worst single thorn in the peasants’ side since the bad old days of the Bourbons.

Don Fabrizio, the ruminative and unworldly princeling of Lampedusa’s novel, philosophical in his acceptance of Garibaldi and the Mafia, felt queasy at the first sight of the infant democracy newly delivered at Donnafugata. ‘Something had died, God only knew in what back-alley, in what corner of the popular conscience.’ People always had done, and always would do, what they were told, and he found it in some way demeaning that anyone should find it necessary to construct this elaborate edifice of pretence dedicated to the lie that free will and freedom of choice actually existed.

However sickening to Don Fabrizio’s stomach the newly imported democracy might have been, for the Mafia it was an invention as promising as the new steam-engine. In the old days the Viceroy had given the orders – at most, and as a matter of courtesy, taking the advice of his council of nobles. Now it was to be the turn of anyone who could fight his way to the controls of this wonderful new machine. In 1881 communal elections were held at Villalba – the town that was to become Don Calogero Vizzini’s capital – and the Marchese of Villalba, supported by the Mafia, took his precautions ten days in advance. The two hundred and fourteen citizens possessing the qualifications entitling them to vote were locked up in a granary, from which they were released, eight at a time, and escorted by the Marchese’s armed guards to the polls. The Marchese was elected.

Later the Mafia invented and perfected new methods of democratic suasion. By the time the government of Giolitti reached power, the Mafia had become the only electoral force that counted in Sicily and the Government was realistic in its acceptance of the fact. Alongi, who published a study of the Mafia in 1902, describes the arrangements for voting he had witnessed a year or two previously: ‘Some short distance from the polling station the road was barred by a group of sinister figures. Here each voter as he approached was seized, thoroughly bastinadoed, and forced to drink a huge glass of wine. There followed a thorough search of his person, after which the government candidate’s voting slip was put into his hand and he was led or dragged to the ballot box, where the president took the slip from him and put it in.’

Later still, this physical suppression of the element of choice gradually came to be considered unnecessary; it was found that the same result could be obtained by making the voter understand what he stood to lose by voting for the wrong side. As it was never explained to the voter what programme the candidates stood for, and he was assumed to be quite ignorant of the function of Parliament, the contending parties might be represented by symbols such as the mule and the ox, and the agricultural voters warned that it was either a case of voting for the mule or looking elsewhere for work in future. The system recalls the last election held under French tutelage in parts of then colonial West Africa, where bloody disputes took place between villages over the relative merits in terms of strength, courage and sagacity of the lion and the elephant, which were the symbols adopted by two of the parties soliciting their votes.

This somewhat special interpretation of the democratic process persisted in Sicily even after the end of the Second World War. In 1945 when the Mafia and most of Sicily’s aristocracy were hoping that Sicily would secede from Italy to become an American state, or at worst a British colony, a Separatist congress was convened at which Don Calogero Vizzini appeared unexpectedly and without formal invitation. When asked who he represented, he replied with proud simplicity: ‘I have only to whistle, and every man in the province of Caltanisetta will vote Separatist.’

When a year or two after that the Mafia threw the idea of Separatism overboard, and became, by order of Don Calò, Christian Democrat, there was one serious breach in the Honoured Society’s political unity in the person of the awe-inspiring Don Vanni Sacco, head of the Mafia of Camporeale. To the remonstrations of Don Calò, when he refused to accept a badge sent him in the form of a cross on a shield – the Party emblem – Vanni Sacco replied: ‘I’ve been a liberal all my life, and my father before me. After all, politics, as I see it, is a stick, and I’ve got used to the feel of this one.’ It took lunch with the Archbishop of Monreale, Monsignor Filippi, and the Archbishop’s consent to Vanni Sacco’s request that his daughter, Giovanna, should be granted the honour of christening the cathedral’s new bell, before Don Vanni would agree to change his politics.

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