Blood Brotherhoods (21 page)
Read Blood Brotherhoods Online
Authors: John Dickie
On behalf of one
mafioso
in particular: ‘Baron’ Pietro De Michele, the Burgio boss. Chief Prosecutor Morena knew all about the Baron’s past, but spent his credibility in spadefuls to defend him from Sangiorgi. De Michele had made a few mistakes in the past, Morena reported. But now he was a friend of the law and the government, who had become a victim of political persecution. To accuse the Baron of raping his future wife back in 1847 was unfair: the families had made peace afterwards. So the accusation of rape was based on an ignorance of Sicilian customs, Morena argued.
Kidnap and rape of this kind constitute a primitive phenomenon that occasionally crops up even in the most civilised societies. Sometimes there are no bad consequences arising from it. Indeed sometimes the very family who were supposedly harmed by the rape actually approve of it by agreeing to a subsequent marriage. Society readily approves of such arrangements. When that happens, the state should forget about the whole affair.
Morena went on to explain that the mafia was a local tradition of the same kind as kidnapping and raping young girls, albeit a much vaguer one.
The word mafia is such an ill-defined concept, which is spoken much more often than its meaning is understood.
Thanks to Chief Prosecutor Morena, the order to arrest
capomafia
‘Baron’ De Michele was rescinded.
Of course Morena knew perfectly well that the mafia was no ‘ill-defined concept’. It was a secret criminal organisation whose influence stretched right across western Sicily. At the lowest level, the network linking the local mafia gangs was held together by the long-distance business of banditry and cattle rustling. Sangiorgi discovered that the same cattle rustlers who were sheltered by De Michele were also friends with Palermo
mafiosi
like don Antonino Giammona, the Licatas, and Darky Cusimano. At an intermediate level, the mafia sought to control the market for buying and renting land,
which had its hub in Palermo. At the highest level, the mafia network’s strength came from the favours it could call in from ‘friends of the friends’ in politics and the legal system. Favours like persecuting policemen who had the temerity to mount an open fight against organised crime and the foolish courage to discover the Honoured Society’s secret initiation ceremony.
There was only one Sicilian mafia.
On 18 October 1877, the Minister of the Interior wrote to Sangiorgi’s boss, the Prefect of Agrigento, relaying the details of the case exactly as it had been set out in the
Gazzetta di Palermo
. Sangiorgi could and perhaps should have been prosecuted, the Minister explained. But he was still an important witness in some outstanding cases. Did the Prefect consider that a severe reprimand was sufficient punishment for his behaviour?
Only then did Sangiorgi’s luck change. The Prefect of Agrigento urged the Minister to hear the other side of the story. Sangiorgi rapidly put together a long and precise account of the ‘fratricide’ affair. This is the documentation I have drawn on to tell his story here.
The Prefect backed up Sangiorgi’s report by telling the Minister that Sangiorgi was one of his most intelligent and energetic officers, one who had gone beyond the call of duty to fight organised crime and to bring order to the province of Agrigento. He even recommended the supposed ‘protector of the mafia’ for a promotion.
Meanwhile the Minister of the Interior also received alarming reports on Chief Prosecutor Carlo Morena. In addition to defending the mafia boss De Michele, Morena had been sending urgent memos to magistrates around western Sicily, digging up every technicality possible to secure the release of
mafiosi
subject to police surveillance and ‘enforced residence’. The Minister pronounced himself ‘profoundly shocked’ by Morena’s behaviour.
The Interior Ministry now held a compelling body of evidence. The saga of Sangiorgi’s dealings with old man Gambino exposed gangland infiltration not only of the police, but also of the magistrature; it provided new evidence that the different
cosche
that used the same rituals were actually part of
one
criminal brotherhood; it made for the most vivid picture of the mafia yet assembled by any police investigation. For a moment, it seemed that someone in power in Rome was going to take notice.
But nothing happened. The Minister of the Interior who was ‘profoundly shocked’ by Morena was soon toppled, and his successor had other priorities.
There was no inquiry into the systematic mafia infiltration of the police and magistrature that Sangiorgi had uncovered. No one took the time to
make the connection between the whole ‘fratricide’ affair and the crucial role that Chief Prosecutor Carlo Morena had played in blocking any attempt to treat the mafia as a single criminal brotherhood. Morena kept his job, but for unknown reasons he volunteered for early retirement in 1879, at age fifty-eight. He was granted all the honours his prestigious legal career had earned.
Old man Gambino was left to the tender mercies of the Piana dei Colli mafia; it is not known what happened to him. His son Salvatore, aged thirty-four when he was wrongly convicted of murdering his own brother, broke rocks for the rest of his life.
The two
mafiosi
that Sangiorgi believed were the real culprits in the Antonino Gambino murder were not investigated; neither were the people responsible for framing his brother, Salvatore.
‘Baron’ De Michele became mayor of Burgio in 1878; his son would become a Member of Parliament.
Then there were the unspoken victims of the tragedy. Victims on whom not even Sangiorgi wastes enough ink for the historian to be able to cite their names: the women. We have no resource but the imagination to reconstruct their hellish fate. First, in Palermo, there was the Gambino daughter forced to marry the
mafioso
who raped her—a
mafioso
who was part of the same Cusimano clan that would end up murdering both her uncle and her brother. Then there was the Licata girl given in expedient marriage to a Gambino son who was destined to be framed for fratricide. Finally, in Burgio, there was the wife of ‘Baron’ De Michele: kidnapped, disgraced, kidnapped again, and forcibly married to the man who robbed her family. We can only presume that all of these women spent the rest of their lives performing their marital duties—duties which, as Sangiorgi had learned, included issuing smiling threats to the wives of policemen.
It is a sad truth that Inspector Sangiorgi himself bears some of the responsibility for the fact that the ‘fratricide’ affair went nowhere but the archives. Responsibility, but not blame. It was a question of tact. It seems certain that Sangiorgi believed that the Gambinos were
mafiosi
. But he was hardly stupid enough to say so in his report to the Minister of the Interior, when his career was on the line. For that would have given ammunition to those who accused him of being a protector of the mafia. He pitched his report with the utmost care, making it clear that he knew that the Gambinos were no angels, or no ‘saint’s shin-bones’, as the Italian phrase has it. But he had to stop short of drawing the obvious conclusion that they were deeply immersed in the mafia world.
Inspector Sangiorgi’s tact helped preserve his career. It may, just may, have helped preserve his life too. An obvious question that arises from the
‘fratricide’ affair is why the mafia did not just kill Sangiorgi. The answer is probably a cost-benefit calculation: killing a prominent cop would probably have brought more trouble than rewards for the Honoured Society. Far better to just discredit him. But then, for the mafia, discrediting someone is often only a prelude to killing them. Shamed murder victims are not mourned and not remembered.
As it was, the police authorities gave Sangiorgi the very mildest of warnings about his future conduct but turned him down for a promotion on the grounds that he was not old enough. In 1878, he had to defend himself again when the same accusations of colluding with the mafia appeared once more in the press. It turned out that ‘Baron’ De Michele was the author of the defamatory pieces. But Sangiorgi had much graver worries at this point: his life was thrown into turmoil when his wife died; he was a single parent once more. But he did not stop fighting the mafia. In 1883 he dismantled a
cosca
known as the Brotherhood of Favara, which controlled the infernal sulphur mines of the Agrigento area by using the same tactics the
mafiosi
of the Conca d’Oro used in the lemon groves. Hereafter, Sangiorgi’s unfolding career will lead us through another twenty-five years of mafia history.
The Left’s 1877 crackdown did not destroy the mafia, far from it. Granted, most of the bandits who roamed the Sicilian countryside were shot down or betrayed to the authorities. But the
mafiosi
who protected them—men like ‘Baron’ De Michele—were left unmolested. With a relative calm now restored in Sicily, the political agenda could move on. The Left’s great law and order campaign was to be the last for two decades. As in the low city of Naples, in Sicily it proved easier to govern with organised crime than against it.
Mafiosi
learned to keep their violence within levels that were suited to the new political environment. With the Left in power, Sicilian politicians could exercise their elbows in jostling for a share of the funds now being spent on roads, railways, sewers, and the like. With the help of their friends in the mafia, they could convert those funds from lire into the south’s real currency: the Favour.
Meanwhile the trials that had been triggered by Sangiorgi’s discovery of the mafia initiation ritual went ahead, with very mixed results. Many juries were profoundly and understandably suspicious of the police and were reluctant to issue guilty verdicts. As a rule, only the losers in mafia wars were successfully prosecuted. Losers like the Gambinos:
mafiosi
who had spent all their favours, who had lost their ‘friends of friends’, whose ‘spiritual kinships’ and marriage alliances had broken down, and whose enemies within
the mafia proved shrewder, more violent and better connected than them. And above all, thanks to Chief Prosecutor Carlo Morena, the trials treated the mafia as an unconnected and temporary ensemble of local gangs.
The country had been on a long journey between the Palermo revolt of 1866 and the anti-mafia campaign of 1877. Two parliamentary commissions of inquiry and countless police and judicial investigations had tried to define the mafia. But despite all the compelling evidence that had surfaced, the mafia was destined to remain what Carlo Morena had called it: ‘an ill-defined concept’. Within a few years, the Honoured Society’s initiation ritual would slip from Italy’s institutional memory.
Il tempo è galantuomo
, as they say in Italy: ‘Time heals all wounds’ or, more literally, ‘Time is a gentleman’. Perhaps it would be better to say that, in Sicily, time is a Man of Honour.
