Cosa Nostra (15 page)

Under normal circumstances in the late nineteenth century, Italy could not muster the political resolve and vigilance needed to expose the likes of Don Raffaele. The country’s quarrel-racked coalition governments were held in place for only a few months at a time with the support of Sicilian politicians. But in the 1890s Italy was swept by a crisis so grave that for a while it seemed as if the country might fall apart. The political turmoil was to lead to the most serious threat the mafia had faced since its birth.

In 1892, the two major Italian credit institutions folded. Later that year it was revealed that the Banca Romana, one of several banks that had the right to produce currency, had been effectively forging millions of lire; ‘genuine’ bills were found with duplicate serial numbers. The cash was channelled to some of the country’s leading politicians who used it to fund their political campaigns. The weakness of the lira precipitated a massive exportation of metal currency; silver and even bronze coins became so scarce that mutual aid societies and shopkeepers’ associations in northern Italy had to issue their own tokens. With the economy already at the bottom of a long depressive cycle, it looked as if the whole financial system was about to collapse. Martial law was declared in Sicily in January 1894 to quell violent confrontations between labourers and landowners. The Socialist Party was banned later the same year.

Under its first Sicilian Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi, the government responded to the crisis in the worst possible way: by staging a lunatic drive for colonial glory in Ethiopia. The result was inevitable. At the battle of Adowa in March 1896, a force of 17,500 Italian troops and locally recruited askari was destroyed by a better-armed and better-led Ethiopian army numbering over 120,000. It was the worst defeat ever suffered by a European colonial power. Fifty per cent of the Italian force was killed, wounded, or led away into captivity.

The country stumbled from crisis to crisis. In May 1898, martial law was declared even in Milan, the country’s economic capital: at least eighty people were killed by troops. Cannons bombarded Milan’s Capuchin monastery where rebels were thought to be hiding. When the smoke cleared, only a few friars were found, along with some beggars who had been waiting for their soup.

A month after the events in Milan a military man was appointed as the new Prime Minister. General Luigi Pelloux, who had served his king as a soldier since he was little more than a boy, has a bad reputation today because his period in office is associated with an attempt to pass a package of highly authoritarian reforms; they would have curtailed press freedom, banned unions in the public services, and allowed the government to send suspects into internal exile without trial. Nonetheless, Pelloux was no blind reactionary by the standards of the moment. His government was appointed with the aim of managing a transition back to something more like normality from what had been the most turbulent years in the short history of the Italian state. An attack on corruption in Sicily was a part of this programme. Thus it was that in August 1898, General Pelloux appointed a new Chief of Police in Palermo with instructions to tackle the mafia. In 1900, the Chief of Police described Don Raffaele Palizzolo’s political supporters as follows:

[they are] the
mafiosi,
the men with criminal records, the sort who are a permanent danger to public safety because they are engaged in all manner of crimes against people and property. None of them spares threats, violence and intimidation to force honest electors to vote for their candidate … To this end they use the same methods that the mafia uses to impose wardens on the owners of fruit farms and extort tributes from rich landowners.

Palizzolo would be worthy of his place in this book if he were only the prime representative of a new breed of mafia politician. But he also became the subject of the biggest mafia trial of the era; with Don Raffaele, the mafia returned to the national headlines for the first time in twenty-five years. Much less well known than Palizzolo—but just as important to the history of the mafia—was his adversary, the Chief of Police of Palermo appointed by General Pelloux. His name was Ermanno Sangiorgi and his story has only recently surfaced from the archives.

THE SANGIORGI REPORT

Among the innumerable documents now held in Italy’s Central State Archive in Rome is a restricted file containing a report, submitted to the Ministry of the Interior in instalments between November 1898 and January 1900. The report was written by Ermanno Sangiorgi, Chief of Police of Palermo, and addressed to the city’s chief prosecuting magistrate as part of the preparations for a trial. Reading its 485 yellowing, handwritten pages today feels rather like working away at the contours of a buried vase with an archaeologist’s probes and brushes, only to realize in the end that what has been exhumed is an unexploded bomb.

The report begins with the first complete picture of the Sicilian mafia ever produced. Earlier evidence about the mafia of the Palermo area always comes in scattered fragments. Here the information is explicit, detailed, and systematic. There is an organizational plan of the eight mafia
cosche
ruling the suburbs and satellite villages to Palermo’s north and west: Piana dei Colli, Acquasanta, Falde, Malaspina, Uditore, Passo di Rigano, Perpignano, Olivuzza. The boss and underboss of each
cosca
are named, and there are personal details on many of the rank-and-file members. In all, there are profiles of 218 men of honour, men who own land, who work in and guard the citrus groves, who broker fruit deals. The report tells of the mafia’s initiation ritual and code of behaviour. It sets out its business methods, how it infiltrates and controls the market gardens, how it forges money, commits robberies, terrifies and murders witnesses. It explains that the mafia has centralized funds to support the families of men in prison and to pay lawyers. It tells how the bosses of mafia
cosche
work together to manage the association’s affairs and control territory.

This diagram of the mafia is impressive enough; it chimes almost precisely with what Tommaso Buscetta sat down to reveal to Judge Falcone decades later. There is no more riveting illustration of Italy’s long-standing failure to see the truth about the mafia. But more riveting still is the sense that this dull-looking document—reference DGPS, aa.gg.rr. Atti speciali (1898–1940), b.1, f.1—could have changed history. It could have done as much damage to the mafia as Falcone’s maxi-trial of 1987. If the report had achieved its aim, the mafia would have suffered a devastating defeat only a few decades after it emerged.

The report’s author, Ermanno Sangiorgi, was a stern, square-jawed career policeman. The newspapers of the time say that he cut an unmistakable figure in Palermo. Although he was nearer sixty than fifty, and his hair had receded to the crown of his head, his striking blond beard was only just beginning to grey. His accent clearly betrayed his origins in the Romagna region of northern—central Italy. Sangiorgi was and remains all but unknown, and as a result there is precious little information available about him. Yet he understood the Sicilian mafia better than anyone. It was Sangiorgi who was called in to conduct the operation against the Uditore
cosca
when Dr Galati reported his story to the Minister of the Interior in 1875. It was Sangiorgi who led the round-up of the Favara Brotherhood in 1883. His appointment as Chief of Police in Palermo in August 1898 was the culmination of his career, a chance to use his patiently accumulated expertise to bring Sicily’s secret criminal association to its knees.

Sangiorgi wrote his report with attention to detail and no little passion. He was tackling head on the scepticism and complicity in the institutions, and he sensed that he was within reach of a landmark prosecution. He wrote his report at a time when it was difficult, but by no means impossible, to convict mafiosi for single crimes, or even bring isolated
cosche
like the Favara Brotherhood to book. Witnesses had to be convinced to take the stand and tell the truth; mafia informers had to be kept alive long enough to testify; judge and jury had to be protected from reprisals and insulated from bribery. Sangiorgi faced all of these problems, but he knew that the real challenge was to convict the mafia per se, and to base that prosecution on the protection rackets and political contacts that underlay its method.

For that reason he aimed to use a specific legal instrument: a law that proscribed criminal associations. Although this law did not bring particularly heavy penalties, a conviction based on his report would have a profound political significance. It would prove the seemingly outlandish theory that a secret, highly sophisticated criminal society had extended its influence across western Sicily and even overseas. Quite simply, if Sangiorgi had been successful, no one would ever again have been able to deny that the mafia existed.

But Sangiorgi failed. If his report constitutes startling proof that in 1898 Italy’s rulers knew precisely what the mafia was, then his failure, and the way that his precious knowledge came to be forgotten, is a disquieting lesson in how the country’s political system has helped the mafia survive up to the present day.

Sangiorgi was not just a good cop; he was also something of a storyteller in his own right. From among the hundreds of names, the dozens of carefully crosschecked witness statements, his policework slowly exposed an intricate pattern of crimes, a series of interlocking tales of murder and deception that illustrated the brutality and labyrinthine complexity of mafia influence at every level of Sicilian society. The Chief of Police even has moments of genuine narrative verve.

Most of Sangiorgi’s stories are set in the western part of the Conca d’Oro, the ‘golden basin’ curving around the outskirts of Palermo. The area has been famous for its beauty and fertility since Roman times. In 1890, the magazine
Illustrazione Italiana
portrayed it as a place where ‘the imagination catches fire and takes flight’, as ‘a whole oriental vision, an enchantment’. Here was proof that ‘poetry blossoms generous and abundant in the Sicilian people’. Palermo’s moneyed elite built out-of-town residences among the lemon groves of the Conca d’Oro. Spring was the season of
villeggiatura,
when the wealthy would abandon their city homes and head for huge villas, set in exotic gardens and tended by armies of servants. At the turn of the century, Palermo’s eighty barons, fifty dukes, and seventy princes mingled with Europe’s crowned heads and plutocrats in the city’s villas, clubs, theatres, salons, and boulevards. By the time of Sangiorgi’s appointment in Palermo, the yacht set had made the Sicilian capital into a favourite resort, a Paris by the sea. In his drive to discover the mafia’s secrets, Sangiorgi followed men of honour along winding Stygian channels that connected the ordinary people of Palermo with the gilded lives of Sicily’s internationally celebrated high society.

*   *   *

Much of Sangiorgi’s work revolved around a murder mystery that had already been vexing the police in Palermo for a year before he arrived. The papers called it the ‘case of the four missing men’, and it centred on a typical lemon business, the Fondo Laganà, that lay not far from the cemetery in Arenella, a village squeezed between the echoing shadow of Monte Pellegrino and the sea just to the north of Palermo. It was a place where, after dark, even the cries of the fishermen on the beach hundreds of metres away could be heard distinctly. Across the road from the main building on the
fondo
stood a shop where they made pasta in night shifts. Nearby was a post occupied twenty-four hours a day by customs guards. Yet nobody confessed to noticing anything unusual there in September and October of 1897 until a smell betrayed the fact that all was not right. The unmistakable sweet stench of rotting flesh had been drifting over the walls of the Fondo Laganà for several days before customs guards timidly alerted the police. And when the police broke into the
fondo,
they uncovered a mafia killing factory. The interior walls of the farm building, little more than a one-room brick box, were pocked with bullet holes and spattered with blood. The unholy odour came from a narrow, deep grotto nearby. Firefighters were called in to reach the bottom. There they found human remains in an advanced stage of decomposition—they had been sprinkled with quicklime. Within the space of six weeks, four men had died of multiple gunshot wounds on the Fondo Laganà.

The case of the four missing men was still unsolved when Sangiorgi arrived in Palermo to begin his duties as Chief of Police the following August. When he did, there was also a mafia war under way: men with fearsome reputations were found dead in the lanes and streets of the Conca d’Oro; others were disappearing without trace. The detectives under Sangiorgi’s command had their sources, but knew little about how the battle lines were drawn up, or whether the war and the four murders on the Fondo Laganà were connected. Then as now, not only was knowledge of mafia affairs hard to come by, but there was also a sizeable gap between knowledge and proof. The problem that the authorities faced was how to convince sources to become witnesses. For that reason, in his report Sangiorgi does not name most of the people who gave him his information. Terrified by the organization’s proven ability to punish anyone who gave evidence to the police, and suspecting that the mafia had agents among the police and prosecutors, people would only speak off the record. Sangiorgi’s journey towards the secrets of the Fondo Laganà only began when he found a courageous exception to this rule.

On 19 November 1898, Sangiorgi arranged for his detectives to interview Giuseppa Di Sano. As later newspaper reports suggest, Giuseppa was a plump, robust woman with plenty of grit and not too much imagination. But in many senses she is the quiet heroine of the Sangiorgi report. The story she told began two years before she gave her evidence to Sangiorgi, and nine months before the murders on the Fondo Laganà.

She was then struggling to make ends meet selling food and other supplies to the neighbourhood near the Giardino Inglese park. But she also had more than her usual lot of cares. The local commander of the
carabinieri
was visiting her store too often. More often, that is, than was strictly necessary to follow up his station’s orders for food and wine. The trade was more than welcome, of course. What concerned Giuseppa was the gossip: the quarter was alive with rumours that the officer was trying to persuade her eighteen-year-old daughter Emanuela to begin an affair. This was a big problem for a small businesswoman in a community not famous for its good relations with the forces of law and order. The rumours had to be dampened down—without offending the officer.