Blood Brotherhoods (57 page)

The cowboys-cum-
capos
formula clearly worked. ‘Frenetic applause’ was reported at the first public screenings.
In the Name of the Law
went on to become the third most popular movie of the 1948–9 season in Italy, taking a bumper 401 million lire (roughly $9.3 million in 2011 values) at the box office, and standing toe-to-commercial-toe with such Hollywood classics as
Fort Apache
and
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
.

As mob movies go,
In the Name of the Law
may seem quaint at first glance—now that our tastes are attuned to
GoodFellas
and
Gomorrah
. Yet Germi’s film is sinister too: it has a back-story full of dark surprises, and a context of unprecedented mafia violence and arrogance. More recent classics of the mafia movie genre, like
The Godfather
, are often criticised for glamourising organised crime. But in this respect Coppola’s film has nothing on
In the Name of the Law
. The opening credits display a familiar disclaimer: ‘Any reference to events, places and people who really exist is purely coincidental’. But that is some distance from the truth.

In the Name of the Law
was based on a novel, and inspired by the example of the novel’s author. Written in the early months of 1947,
Piccola Pretura
(
Local Magistrate’s Office
) was the work of Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo, one of the country’s foremost authorities on the Sicilian mafia. Born and brought up in Palermo, Lo Schiavo was a hero of the First World War who, when the war ended, went into the front line of the fight against organised crime on his island home.

Lo Schiavo’s life was closely intertwined with the history of the Sicilian mafia under Fascism. In 1926 he was himself a young magistrate, like the hero of his novel. (The similarity between the names of author and protagonist—Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo/Guido Schiavi—is no accident.) In that year, Benito Mussolini’s dictatorship launched a long overdue attack on the mafia. The ‘cancer of delinquency’ was to be cut out of Sicily by the Fascist ‘scalpel’, the Duce boasted. The police and
Carabinieri
led the assault, and prosecuting magistrates like Lo Schiavo had the job of preparing the evidence needed to convert thousands of arrests into convictions.

Lo Schiavo was among the most enthusiastic instruments of the Fascist repression. In 1930, one of the mobsters’ defence lawyers, Giuseppe Mario
Puglia, published an essay claiming that the mafia was
not
a secret criminal society. Indeed
mafiosi
were not even criminals. Rather the
mafioso
was an incorrigible individualist, ‘a man who instinctively refuses to recognise anyone superior to his own ego’. What is more, the
mafioso
was a typical Sicilian, because this exaggerated pride and self-containment had seeped into the island’s psyche as a form of resistance to centuries of foreign invasions. Therefore to repress the mafia was inevitably to repress the Sicilian people. Puglia’s essay, in short, reads like the words uttered by countless other mafia apologists since the 1870s, and indeed like the words Lo Schiavo would later put into the mouth of mafia boss Turi Passalacqua in
In the Name of the Law
.

Lo Schiavo refused to let the defence lawyer’s claims pass unchallenged, responding to them in a pamphlet that is a little masterpiece of controlled anger. The mafia, Lo Schiavo argued, was ‘a criminal system’; it was not just illegal, it was an ‘anti-legal organism whose only aim was getting rich by illicit means’.

Lo Schiavo went on to give the mafia lawyer a lesson in mafia history. He explained how the Sicilian mafia first emerged from the political violence of the Risorgimento, when patriotic conspirators found the revolutionary muscle they required among the fearsome wardens, overseers and bravoes of the Sicilian countryside. From those conspirators, the criminals learned to organise themselves like the Freemasons. Lo Schiavo had also delved into the economic history of the mafia. His research showed that it had first grown rich by establishing protection rackets over the valuable lemon and orange groves surrounding Palermo.

Fear of the mafia pervaded society in western Sicily, reaching right up into parliament. Anything unfavourable said about the mafia would inevitably reach hostile ears. And that, argued Lo Schiavo, is why so many Sicilians could be found spouting the same drivel, along the lines that: ‘the mafia does not exist; at worst,
mafiosi
are local problem solvers who embody the typically Sicilian pride and truculence towards authority’. Even the landowners who were, in theory, the mafia’s most prominent victims, had bought into this fiction and espoused the belief that the mafia was somehow good for social peace, for law and order. On the contrary, Lo Schiavo asserted, the mafia was ‘a programme to exploit and persecute honest members of society while hiding behind a reputation for courage and welfare that was only so much lying garbage’.

So, in the early 1930s, the man who would later inspire
In the Name of the Law
was an anti-mafia crusader with the bravery to engage in a public spat with the crime bosses’ own defence lawyers. By 1948, Lo Schiavo had become one of the country’s most senior magistrates, a prosecutor at the
Supreme Court in Rome. In that year he published his novel, which was immediately adapted into a film.

Both novel and film tell a simple story about a young magistrate, Guido Schiavi, who is posted to a remote town deep in the arid badlands of the Sicilian interior. In this lawless place, the mafia rules unchecked, and runs a protection racket over the estate of the local landowner. When bandits kill one of the landowner’s men,
capomafia
Turi Passalacqua hunts them down: the bandits are trussed up and tossed into a dried-up well, or simply shot-gunned in the back in a mountain gully.

The young magistrate investigates this series of slayings, but he is frozen out by the terrified townspeople. When the courageous Schiavi confronts
capomafia
Turi Passalacqua on his white mare, he resists the boss’s attempts to win him over to the mafia’s way of thinking (the scene with which I began this chapter).

Eventually, Schiavi narrowly survives an assassination attempt. Resigned to defeat, he decides to abandon his post. But just as he is about to board the train to safety, he learns that his only friend in town, an honest seventeen-year-old boy called Paolino, has been murdered by a renegade
mafioso
. Indignant and distraught, Schiavi strides back into town. He rings the church bells to summon the whole population into the piazza for a do-or-die engagement. The state and the mafia are set to have their high noon—in what turns into perhaps the most bizarre climactic scene in the long history of gangster movies.

The church bell clangs out a continuous, urgent summons across the dust of the piazza, over the sun-weathered rooftops, and out into the surrounding fields. We are shown the unemployed sulphur miners, sitting and dozing in a line at the kerb, who raise their heads to listen. The camera then cuts to the women, young and old, who come out into the street wrapped in their black shawls; and then to the elegant club where the mayor and his cronies forget their game of baccarat and turn towards the source of the alarm.

Without discussion, everyone ups and walks towards the bells. The mule drivers scarcely pause to tether their beasts. Labourers drop their mattocks in the furrows. Soon streams of people are converging on the piazza. Led by Turi Passalacqua on his white mare, even the
mafiosi
–accompanied as always by the rhythmical trumpets of their signature theme–gallop into town to join the crowd gathering before the church steps.

There are loud murmurs of anxious curiosity as the young magistrate Guido Schiavi emerges from the church doors. Silence falls as he begins his address:

Now that you are all here, I declare that this is a trial. Half an hour ago we found Paolino’s body, blasted by a double-barrelled shotgun. He was seventeen years old and he had never harmed anyone.

Schiavi scans the crowd as he speaks, seeking to look directly into the eyes of every person there. Then, staring with still greater intensity, the magistrate hails the group of stony-faced men on horseback.

You there, men of the mafia. And you, Turi Passalacqua. Your bloody and ferocious brand of justice only punishes those who give you offence, and only protects the men who carry out your verdicts.

At these words, one of the
mafiosi
levels his shotgun at the magistrate. But with a firm but gentle hand his boss pushes the barrels downwards again.

Guido Schiavi does not hesitate for an instant:

And you chose to put your brand of justice before the true law–the only law that allows us to live alongside our neighbours without tearing one another to pieces like wild beasts.

Isn’t that true,
massaro
Passalacqua?

Everyone in the piazza cranes to see how the
capomafia
will react to this breathtaking challenge. A subtle change in his expression shows that he is troubled: his habitual composure is gone, replaced by solemnity. Silhouetted once more against the sky, Turi Passalacqua begins to make a speech of history-making gravity:

Those were tough words, magistrate. Until now, no one had ever spoken such tough words to us.

But I say that your words were also just. My people and I did not come into town today to listen to your speech . . . But listening to you made me think of my son, and made me think that I would be proud to hear him talk in that way.

So I say to my friends that in this town the time has come to change course and go back within the law. Perhaps everyone here did kill Paolino. But only one person pulled the trigger. So I hereby hand him over to you so that he may be judged according to the state’s law.

He turns and, with a mere flick of his head, gives the order to his crew. Amid clattering hooves, the Men of Honour corner the murderer before he can run away: it is the renegade
mafioso
, Francesco Messana.

The magistrate advances, flanked by two Carabinieri:

Francesco Messana, you are under arrest, in the name of the law.

The murderer is led away. The magistrate then turns, and with a look of glowing appreciation, gazes up towards the mafia boss to utter the film’s final words:

In the name of the law!

And with that we cut to yet another shot of Turi Passalacqua silhouetted against the sky. His serenity has returned, and the suggestion of a smile plays on his lips. The mafia cavalcade music rises yet again. As the credits begin to roll, the boss turns his white mare to lead the
mafiosi
in their heroic gallop towards the sunset.

Mafiosi
are not criminals,
In the Name of the Law
tells us. Turi Passalacqua is a man devoted to living by a code of honour that, in its own primitive way, is as admirable a law as the one Magistrate Guido Schiavi is trying to uphold. If only
mafiosi
like him are addressed in the appropriately firm tone of voice, they will become bringers of peace and order. The mafia finds its true calling at the end of the film, the best way to live out its deeply held values: it becomes an auxiliary police force. If Sicily were really Arizona,
and
In the Name of the Law
were really a cowboy film, then we would not know which of the two men should wear the sheriff’s badge.

In the Name of the Law
is not
about
the mafia; rather it is mafia propaganda, a cunning and stylish variant of the kind of ‘lying garbage’ upon which Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo had poured vitriol in the 1930s. In the 1940s, each day of chaos in Sicily was adding to a mountain of proof that
mafiosi
were anything but friends to the rule of law. Yet this was precisely the time that Lo Schiavo’s views on the mafia underwent an astonishing reversal. Lo Schiavo became a convert to the mafia’s lies.

Now, anyone inclined to be generous to Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo might suppose that Pietro Germi’s movie had twisted the meaning of the magistrate’s novel by grafting a happy Hollywood ending onto a grimmer Sicilian tale. And it is certainly true that, in 1948, it would have been tough to create a genuinely realistic portrayal of the mafia. Rumours circulated during production that, when director Pietro Germi first arrived in Sicily, he was approached by several senior
mafiosi
who would not allow him to begin work until they had approved the screenplay. After the movie’s release, during a press conference, a young Sicilian man in the audience argued with Germi about how true to life the Men of Honour in the film were: was the director not aware that the real mafia had killed dozens of people? Germi could only give a lame reply, ‘So did you expect me to meet the same end?’

But the local difficulties that Germi faced in Sicily actually do nothing to excuse Giuseppe Guido Lo Schiavo. Indeed, his novel is
even more
pro-mafia than
In the Name of the Law
. In Lo Schiavo’s tale, mafia boss Turi Passalacqua is ‘the very personification of wisdom, prudence and calm . . . pot-bellied, shaven-headed and smiling like a benevolent Buddha’.