Cosa Nostra (18 page)

Sangiorgi grasped his opportunity rapidly and shrewdly, again aiming to exert pressure on what he now knew to be the mafia’s potential weakness: its women. He kept Siino hidden and let it be known that the wounded capo was close to death. He then brought Siino’s wife face-to-face with the hit man he had arrested. She could not contain herself, shouting,
‘Infame! Infame!’
(The term is the habitual mafia insult for a traitor—‘dishonoured scum’.) There and then she accused him and his associates of a series of murders. It was the beginning of her collaboration with justice. Francesco Siino soon learned that his wife had spoken to Sangiorgi and he too started to talk about what he referred to as ‘the company of friends’. Sangiorgi had the
pentito
he needed to build his case.

Interviews with the new defector allowed Sangiorgi gradually to understand the mafia war from the inside; just as importantly, they allowed him to demonstrate that the war was more than a chaotic skirmish between separate gangs, but the result of a breakdown within a single organization. Sangiorgi began to grasp that even when it is at war the mafia has its rules, its language, its diplomacy, and even its historical memory.

Francesco Siino’s power within the mafia had already been fading when the police learned of his position as ‘regional or supreme
capo
’. The dominant wealth and influence, and with it the mafia’s centre of gravity, lay not with Siino but with an alliance between the Passo di Rigano, Piana dei Colli, and Perpignano families. The patron of that alliance had a familiar name: Don Antonino Giammona, the ‘taciturn, puffed up, and wary’ mafioso who rose to power under Baron Nicolò Turrisi Colonna’s protection in the 1860s, and who was behind the persecution of Dr Gaspare Galati in the 1870s. In 1898, Giammona had a large house in via Cavallacci in the same suburban village of Passo di Rigano where he had been born seventy-eight years earlier. His son was installed as capo in charge of day-to-day business in the area. But the old man was still the mafia’s ‘executive mind’, according to Sangiorgi. ‘He gives direction through advice based on his vast experience and his long criminal record. He offers instructions on the way to carry out crimes and construct a defence, especially alibis.’ Old man Giammona’s continuing influence was proof that mafiosi were not fly-by-night thugs. By then, the ‘shadowy fraternity’ had been a settled feature of Palermo society for four decades.

The roots of the fitful mafia war of 1897–9 went back to the police raid on the Falde
cosca
’s counterfeiting operation, the same raid for which Giuseppa Di Sano had been blamed back in late 1896. It was Don Antonino Giammona who sought to manage the knock-on effects of this loss. A summit of the capos of the eight
cosche
—Piana dei Colli, Acquasanta, Falde, Malaspina, Uditore, Passo di Rigano, Perpignano, Olivuzza—was called in January 1897. As normal, Francesco Siino was in the chair. But this time the drop in the mafia’s income made the mood tetchy. Giammona detected weakness in Siino and was determined to manipulate the situation to his own advantage. Sensing a challenge to his authority, Siino stood up: ‘Well, since I’m no longer respected in the way I ought to be, let every group think and act on its own!’ The meeting went on to demarcate each group’s area of influence. But not long after the meeting, the Giammonas began making exploratory, symbolic incursions into Siino turf—calculated acts of disrespect. But Siino refused to be provoked. Both sides in the conflict knew that it was risky to be seen to start a conflict.

It took a young hothead to accelerate matters. Francesco Siino’s nephew Filippo, ‘a very impetuous, cocky and audacious young man’ according to Sangiorgi, was underboss in Uditore. He began to send threatening letters to old man Giammona. In response, some forty senior mafiosi were called to a meeting in the building that contained Don Antonino’s olive press. Although nothing explicit was said, the old boss made it plain where he thought blame for the letters was to be placed. Outside the meeting, another boss quietly suggested to Francesco Siino that he should bring his nephew to heel.

Instead the Siinos retaliated by cutting down some prickly pears on Giammona land. These fleshy, fruit-bearing cacti are virtually worthless in themselves, but destroying them was a clear
sfregio.
The Giammonas’ response was circumscribed: they vandalized plants on an estate guarded by the young Siino. He responded by again attacking Giammona property.

Don Antonino Giammona was now at a tactical crossroads. Young Filippo Siino did not own any property himself. Sangiorgi explains that, in the formalized language of the
sfregio,
a second reprisal against the estate that the young underboss protected would be interpreted as an insult aimed at the landowner rather than the guard. This was very definitely
not
the message the Giammonas and their allies wanted to give. An offence against a landowner could bring trouble down on the whole organization. The Giammonas chose instead to damage stock on land leased by Francesco Siino, the former supreme boss; it was still a manifest escalation of the dispute. For a third time, the ‘impetuous’ Filippo Siino destroyed plants on Giammona land in retaliation. The Giammonas concluded that it was time to go to war.

The conflict went badly for the Siinos from the outset. They lost both men and ground across the Conca d’Oro as the Giammonas and their allies edged them out of their jobs as wardens within the lemon groves. The decisive moment came at sunset on 8 June 1898, when ‘impetuous’ Filippo Siino was intercepted and shot dead in the street by four Giammona killers who had been given a tip-off from inside the Siino camp.

Sangiorgi also learned of the war’s innocent victims: confirmation, if confirmation was needed, that mafiosi do not only kill their own. On one occasion, Giammona assassins were sent after a particularly feared Siino killer; happening across his brother, they murdered him instead. As they followed their planned escape route they were spotted by a seventeen-year-old cowherd, Salvatore Di Stefano. Calmly, a month later, they went back to prevent him testifying against them. The killers found Salvatore watering plants with his shoes off and his trousers rolled up. Improvising, they drowned him in a well and put his shoes on the edge to make it look like an accident—which is precisely what the police had believed it to be.

By the time of the luckless cowherd’s murder, Francesco Siino had taken refuge in Livorno in Tuscany where he had contacts in the citrus fruit industry. This time he was joined by three of his surviving nephews, who abandoned their strategic jobs in the lemon groves. The Siino power base was crumbling. Following the spate of murders, police confiscated gun licences from all the most prominent mafia families, including the Giammonas and Siinos. The mafia’s response was to call in favours from the upper world of politics and high society. A series of distinguished public figures—parliamentarians (including Don Raffaele Palizzolo), businessmen, and even a princess—lined up to provide the character references needed to get the gun licences back. The Giammonas themselves were sponsored by an old family friend, the son of ‘sect’ expert Baron Nicolò Turrisi Colonna. The Siinos, by contrast, searched in vain for someone to speak in their favour. Word had got around the mafia-friendly sections of Palermo’s bourgeoisie that the Siinos had been expelled from the honoured society. They were being abandoned to their fate.

Sangiorgi tells us that in December 1898, Francesco Siino, back in Palermo once more, called his men together to spell out the situation. ‘We’ve counted ourselves and we’ve counted the others. We total 170, including the
cagnolazzi
[“wild dogs”—young toughs yet to be initiated]. There are five hundred of them. They have got more money. And they have contacts that we don’t have. So we’ve got to make peace.’ A truce was negotiated at another meeting of senior bosses at a via Stabile butcher’s shop. Siino then departed for Livorno again, followed by his whole family; he had been bested both militarily and politically. It only remained for the Giammonas to mop up the remaining pockets of resistance.

If Siino had stayed away from Palermo, he would never have become the witness Sangiorgi so desperately needed. But the following autumn he was drawn back for one last visit—just long enough for the Giammona faction to mount an attempt on his life. Sangiorgi had his breakthrough. The time had finally come when he could stop writing his report and start making arrests.

*   *   *

On the night of 27–8 April 1900, Sangiorgi ordered a round-up of mafiosi listed in his report. The police and
carabinieri
involved were not told of their duties that night until the last minute so as to prevent leaks. Thirty-three suspects were immediately arrested, as were many more over the coming months. In October 1900, the prefect of Palermo reported that Sangiorgi had reduced the mafia to ‘silence and inactivity’.

As a veteran mafia fighter, Sangiorgi had always known how difficult it would be for his investigations to bring results. He knew too that he would need political support if he were to have any chance of success. The instalments of his report were addressed to the prosecuting authorities in Palermo, but he also wanted the government, in the person of General Luigi Pelloux, to know what he had found. He made sure that a copy of each instalment reached Pelloux via the prefect of Palermo. Back in November 1898, Sangiorgi wrote a covering letter that was addressed to the prefect but intended for the Prime Minister’s eyes:

I especially need your respected and legitimate intervention, your good offices with the judicial authorities. And I need your support in dealings with the government. This is because, regrettably, the mafia’s bosses act under the safeguard of Senators, MPs, and other influential figures who protect them and defend them and who are, in their turn, protected and defended by the
mafiosi.

The mafia had created a system of complicity to shield it from people like Sangiorgi, a system that stretched from the wealthy Florios down to the women of the Giardino Inglese neighbourhood who boycotted Giuseppa Di Sano’s store. For Sangiorgi to combat that system effectively he would need a determined government behind him. But unfortunately for Sangiorgi and for Sicily, the window of political opportunity for a decisive strike against the mafia closed at the very moment that his months of work seemed to be producing results.

The crisis of the late 1890s that had brought General Pelloux to power in Rome produced its final drama in the summer following Sangiorgi’s round-up of mafia suspects. In July 1900, the King paid for the corruption and inept brutality of his governments when an anarchist shot him dead near the royal palace in Monza. By that time the economy was picking up and the crisis was at its end. A month before the King’s death, a more liberal government was established when General Pelloux resigned; with him went support in Rome for the Palermo Chief of Police.

The first sign of the opposition to Sangiorgi was simply how slowly the case was progressing. The chief prosecutor of the city was proving to be very pernickety. He was the man to whom Sangiorgi’s report had been officially addressed. Yet, after each new arrest, the prosecutor’s office sent the whole case back to the investigating magistrate who was working with Sangiorgi so that the evidence could be updated. It took until May 1901—a year after the first arrests—for Sangiorgi’s trial to begin. Of the hundreds of members of the mafia, only eighty-nine were in the dock charged with belonging to the criminal association that had committed the murders of the four missing men. The chief prosecutor did not consider the evidence to be strong enough to bring the others to trial. The most notable of those released was Don Antonino Giammona; once again the earliest-known mafia capo went free and was left to live out his remaining years in peace.

Sangiorgi never complains about the chief prosecutor, a man from Naples whose name was Vincenzo Cosenza. Yet it seems likely that, in sending a copy of his report to the government in Rome, Sangiorgi was specifically hoping for backing against Cosenza. He would not therefore have been surprised if he had known that, in the month before the trial began, and nearly two and a half years since Sangiorgi had sent him the first instalment of his report, Cosenza had written to the new Minister of the Interior and declared, ‘During the course of performing my duties I have never noticed the mafia.’ The suspicion must be that Chief Prosecutor Cosenza was the key component in the system that the mafia created to protect itself from the law. It is perhaps a mark of his success that very little is now known about him. Just as Chief of Police Sangiorgi is a hidden hero of the history of the mafia, so Chief Prosecutor Cosenza is probably a hidden villain.

When it finally began in May 1901, the trial that Sangiorgi had been working towards for so long was eagerly followed, both by huge crowds at court and through extensive reports in the press. The whole of Palermo saw the Chief of Police’s work unravel before his eyes. The star witness was former ‘supreme boss’ Francesco Siino. It is impossible to know for certain, but it is likely that Siino intuited the change in the political climate, realized which way the trial was likely to go, and decided to make a peace offering to his former colleagues in the mafia. From their cage, the defendants all watched him in silent intensity as he spoke to the court. He denied that he had ever spoken to Sangiorgi of a criminal association
as such.

Further witnesses followed. A man who owned land next to the Giammonas testified that they ‘have always been generous with everyone who has done business with them. No one has anything but good to say of them.’ Joss Whitaker was called into the witness box and denied that his little daughter Audrey had ever been kidnapped. Ignazio Florio Jr did not even deign to come to court; he sent a statement denying that he had ever had a discussion with the Noto brothers about the burglary at his Olivuzza villa. An employee of the Florio household did testify and asserted that the guard (and mafia underboss) Pietro Noto was ‘a real gentleman’ who deservedly enjoyed the respect of the Florios; he had even been entrusted on several occasions with transporting Franca’s jewels, valued at 800,000 lire.