Blood Brotherhoods (52 page)

. . . and friend to the Sicilian aristocracy.

The Mori Operation was only ever going to be a short-term measure. The aim was to draw a decisive line between the new regime and the corrupt democratic past; it was to show that Fascism was still vigorous even though the cudgels and the castor oil had been cast to one side. Fascist ‘surgery’ on Sicily was never intended to prepare the patient for a life of law and order. It was about putting on a propagandistic spectacle; it was about winning for Mussolini the support of the island’s landed elite—the very aristocrats whose ‘baronial and princely coats of arms’ had shielded the Marasà brothers, like so many other
mafiosi
before them.

The Iron Prefect, the orphan boy from Pavia, was besotted with the sumptuous decadence of Palermo’s
beau monde
. When Mori socialised in the Sicilian capital, he went out in a luxurious carriage, its lustrous black body-work bristling with gilt, intaglio, and all manner of baroque ornamentation. He was ‘on heat for the nobility’—to use an enemy’s crude phrase—as he swished from ball to ball, from salon to salon. The Iron Prefect believed, or chose to believe, that the landowners he played
baccarà
with were exactly what their lawyers had always said they were when, from time to time, their underworld connections were exposed: they were
victims
of the thugs, and not their strategic protectors.

The charges against the ‘slimy octopus’ that were meticulously assembled in the Inspectorate’s 1938 report took until 1942 to come to court. By that time the Men of Honour who had told their secrets to the Inspectorate had retracted their confessions. Before the trial most of the
mafiosi
named in the 1938 report were released for lack of evidence—including the
generalissimo
Ernesto Marasà, with his brothers. And in the trial itself, most of the fifty-three men who were eventually convicted received only short sentences. The case set out in the 1938 report had slowly crumbled until it became a comparatively minor inconvenience for the Sicilian mob. As Ermanno Sangiorgi could have told the men of the Inspectorate, many earlier anti-mafia cases had fallen apart in the same way. What was different in 1942 was that the Fascist regime, which was busy crowing about dazzling feats of bravura by the Italian army in the Second World War, completely suppressed all mention of the Inspectorate’s report and the resultant court proceedings. Once again, Italy had proved just how resourceful it could be when it came to denying the truth about the Sicilian mafia.

 
32 

M
ASTER
J
OE DANCES A
TARANTELLA

I
F THERE IS A SERVANT OF THE STATE WHO ENCAPSULATES ALL THE CONTRADICTIONS
of Fascism’s long fight against the Honoured Society in Calabria, but also elsewhere, then perhaps it is Giuseppe Delfino.

Delfino was a homespun hero of law enforcement. In August 1926, just as Fascism was first cranking up its clampdown, he took command of the
Carabiniere
station in Platì, overlooking the Ionian Coast. This was the territory where Delfino was born and he knew it as well as anyone. Both the picciotteria citadel of San Luca and the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi were on his beat. Cussed and smart, Delfino would disguise himself as a shepherd to patrol the mountain unobserved, or slip into taverns so he could overhear the
picciotti
as they bragged. Among the peasants he earned the respectful nickname
Massaru Peppi
(‘Master Joe’)—
massaru
being the word for a farm overseer or factor. Master Joe dismantled a cattle-rustling network centred on San Luca in January 1927, and thereby—despite the murder of his key witness—brought seventy-six
mafiosi
to justice. Among them were men called Strangio, Pelle and Nirta: perhaps not coincidentally, families with these surnames would much later be caught up in the blood feud that led to the massacre at Duisberg on 15 August 2007.

The Calabrian press, which was generally sparing in its coverage of the anti-organised crime campaign, said that Delfino had ‘brought honour on himself’.

Meanwhile this resourceful station commander has not even allowed himself a day’s rest, and is pressing on with his pursuit of the lawbreakers.

Shortly afterwards, once the rustlers he had arrested had their convictions confirmed on appeal, ‘Master Joe’ Delfino even earned himself a walk-on part in the canon of Italian literature. Corrado Alvaro, the San Luca–born author who was our witness to the pilgrimage to the Sanctuary at Polsi, also wrote a vignette about Master Joe’s relentless hunt for a small-time goat thief. Borrowing the peasants’ own spare vocabulary, Alvaro evoked the holy terror that Delfino inspired on Aspromonte throughout Fascism’s twenty-year rule.

Delfino was the
Carabiniere
who couldn’t hear a robber’s name mentioned without setting off in pursuit as if he’d staked money on it . . . With his short cloak, his rifle, and his sparkly eyes, he rummaged everywhere: he knew all the hiding places, he knew every renegade’s habits like he knew his own pocket—the hollow trunks, the grottoes that no one apart from the mountain folk could find, the perches high in ancient trees.

As publicity goes, this may not seem much. Indeed, compared to the Iron Prefect, the inveterate blowhard whose battle with the mafia in Sicily received glowing worldwide press, Master Joe’s profile was positively meek. But the odd line in local newspapers and the hushed respect of the peasants amounted to about as much fame as anyone could possibly hope to accumulate by serving the law in far-off Calabria, even at the height of Fascism’s short-lived enthusiasm for facing down the bosses.

Local legend and family memory are the only source we have to draw on to reconstruct much of Master Joe’s long career on Aspromonte. But that memory, however much time may have embroidered it, gives us access to a truth that the newspapers and trial documents disguise. Even Master Joe’s son, the current guardian of Delfino lore, portrays him as a man with very violent methods. This was a part of the world where there were two paths in life—‘Either you became a
Carabiniere
, or you entered the ’ndrangheta’—and brutality lay along both of them.

The story goes that Master Joe once waited until Christmas for a runaway
picciotto
to return home, and did not swoop until his target had hunkered down over a plate of
maccheroni
with goat meat sauce. Master Joe then stood below the window, disguised as a shepherd, and played a wistful song on the bagpipes. The
picciotto
was so moved that he stopped eating and leaned out of the window to offer the minstrel a drink of wine, only to find a pistol pointed at his face. Recognising Master Joe, he said, ‘Let me finish my
maccheroni
, at least’. The reply was blunt. ‘That would be pointless, because back at the barracks we’d only make you vomit them all up again anyway’.
Master Joe, it is said, was as good as his word: the thief spent a week on his back being punched and forced to drink salt water. When a doctor was finally allowed in, he saw the man’s grotesquely swollen stomach, shook his head, and said, ‘You don’t need a GP here, you need an obstetrician’.

If this story sounds far-fetched then perhaps we should recall that Cirella, where the members of the picciotteria who killed Maria Marvelli’s husband were tortured until they confessed, was also part of Master Joe’s beat.

There is one more family memory of Master Joe that shows us another side of his, and Fascism’s, battle with the ’ndrangheta.

In the autumn of 1940 station commander ‘Master Joe’ Delfino was still on duty. With only one officer to help him maintain order during the annual pilgrimage to the Sanctuary of the Madonna of Polsi, it is said that he took a Chief Cudgel aside and made a deal so that there would be no trouble. If there were any murders decreed at Polsi that year, then they were performed at a polite distance in time and space from the Sanctuary. Indeed Delfino’s son later recalled that, ‘for all the years my father was in charge, nothing happened’ at Polsi. The station commander would even join the celebrating crowds during the pilgrimage, taking his turn to dance a
tarantella
with the members of the Honoured Society. The picture Delfino’s son paints in our mind’s eye is vivid. The sanctuary set amid the chestnut trees. The hectic trilling of a squeeze box. A circle of swarthy grins, some of them traversed by ghastly razor-blade tracery. And there in the middle, the
Carabiniere
, kicking out the bold red stripes on his black uniform trousers.

‘Master Joe’ (seated). The
Carabiniere
who fought the Calabrian mafia under Mussolini.

Don ’Ntoni Macrì, the most powerful of post-war
’ndranghetisti
, and Master Joe’s dance partner at Polsi.

Se non è vero, è molto ben trovato
: if the picture isn’t true, it’s a very smart invention—one that historians should cherish. What official sources can scarcely ever record is just this kind of informal accord between the authorities and the mob. A cagey mutual respect. An improvised agreement to share power and territory. At Polsi, as in so many other parts of Sicily and southern Italy, after the roundups, and the beatings, and the trials, and the propagandistic speeches had passed, the Fascist state settled back into Italy’s traditional dance with organised crime.

 
33 

L
IBERATION

T
HE
S
ECOND
W
ORLD
W
AR WAS THE GREATEST COLLECTIVE TRAGEDY EVER ENDURED BY
the Italian people. Between 1935 and 1942, Italian armies visited death and destruction on Ethiopia, Albania, France, Greece and Russia. In 1943, death and destruction came home to the peninsula with vengeful fury.

Italian territory was invaded for the first time on 10 July when seven Allied divisions launched a seaborne assault on Sicily. Up in Rome, in the early hours of 25 July, a meeting of the Fascist Grand Council voted to bring twenty years of Fascist rule to an end; Benito Mussolini was arrested the following evening. As news spread across the country, Italians tore down Fascist symbols; many people thought the war was over. But the catastrophe had only just begun.

On 17 August the last Axis troops completed their evacuation of Sicily. On 3 September the Allies crossed the Straits of Messina into Calabria, where they met only token resistance. On 8 September the Allied Supreme Commander, General Dwight D. Eisenhower, announced Italy’s surrender. The very next day saw the beginning of Operation Avalanche—the landing at Salerno, just south of Naples. The Germans—no longer allies but invaders—rumbled down the peninsula to carry on their war. Italy’s king fled. All semblance of his government’s civil and military authority dissolved and the Italian people were left to find their own path to survival.

Naples was liberated on 1 October. But the Allied advance ground to a halt soon afterwards. For the next twenty months Italy was a battleground, as the
Reich
and the Allies slogged out a slow and bloody contest. Behind German lines in the north and centre, a civil war pitted recalcitrant Fascists
against the Resistance. There were collective reprisals and atrocities, mass deportations of Italian workers and troops, and a campaign of racial extermination directed at Italy’s Jews.

The south scarcely fared better under Allied Military Government in the Occupied Territories, known as AMGOT. In preparation for AMGOT, the War Office had drafted
Zone Handbooks
on the society and mores of Sicily, Calabria and Campania. Those
Handbooks
are revealing in two ways. First, they tell us what the world knew about organised crime after a century of history. Second, they allow us to measure how shocked the Allies were by the chaos that followed liberation and the rapid collapse of the Italian state. Score settling, hunger, contagion, corruption, black-marketeering and banditry: these were ideal conditions in which Italy’s gangsters could announce to the world that, whatever Mussolini might claim, they still had a role to play on the historical stage.