Cosa Nostra (19 page)

At least one witness did not fail Sangiorgi. Despite the threats she faced—she had been forced to flee by night from her shop—Giuseppa Di Sano mustered her courage once again and told the story of her daughter’s murder. The two carriage drivers’ widows also bravely took the stand.

The tens of defence lawyers outdid each other in arabesques of oratory when it came to their summings-up. The case against a great number of mafiosi had not even been allowed to reach court, they pointed out, so surely this demonstrated the overall weakness of the prosecution’s evidence? What kind of criminal association could this be, they argued, if its members were constantly involved in bloody disputes among themselves? One advocate argued eloquently that the word ‘mafia’ came from the Arabic ‘ma-af and meant merely ‘an exaggerated concept of one’s own individual identity’; the attitude was a leftover from the Middle Ages—all Sicilians had it in some measure. Proceedings were regularly interrupted by the wolflike howling of one of the accused who had entered an insanity plea.

In June 1901, only thirty-two of Sangiorgi’s mafiosi—including the Noto brothers, Antonino Giammona’s son, and Tommaso D’Aleo—were convicted for forming a criminal association. Given the time that they had already spent in custody, most of them were released immediately. For Sangiorgi, it was a victory so small that it felt like a defeat. Interviewed about the case, he uncharacteristically betrayed his bitterness: ‘It was never going to turn out any other way, as long as people who denounced the mafia in the evening then went along and defended it the following morning.’

With Sangiorgi’s trial producing such mediocre results, it would have taken a determined political effort to take further action against the mafia and its system of protection. But Italian politics was returning to normal after the dramas of the 1890s. For the politicians in Rome, fighting the mafia was once again an unwelcome hindrance to the central business of government: building rickety pacts between factions. Allies had to be obtained wherever they could. If they were from western Sicily, and especially if they were close to the Florio shipping lobby, it was counterproductive to ask questions about their unsavoury friends. The Sangiorgi report was consigned to the archives.

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But the case of the four missing men was not the only strand of Chief of Police Sangiorgi’s investigations. When he had been sent to Palermo by General Pelloux in August 1898 he was also given a brief to look into the affairs of one particularly prominent individual: Don Raffaele Palizzolo.

THE NOTARBARTOLO MURDER

Marquis Emanuele Notarbartolo di San Giovanni was the mafia’s first ‘eminent corpse’, its first victim among Sicily’s social elite. In the century that followed its emergence, the mafia killed no one else with the stature of Emanuele Notarbartolo. He was one of Sicily’s outstanding citizens. He served a three-year term as mayor of Palermo in the 1870s that was marked by his uncompromising honesty: he made himself the mafia’s enemy by tackling corruption in the customs service. He was then appointed governor of the Bank of Sicily, a job he held until 1890. The integrity and energy with which he applied himself to that task would ultimately cost him his life. His assassination in 1893, and the sensational series of trials that resulted over the following decade, split Sicilian society in two and astonished public opinion across Italy by exposing the mafia’s relationship with politicians, legal officials, and police. The Sangiorgi trial was a local drama whose importance was lost on the national press; the Notarbartolo case, by contrast, was Italy’s first mafia media circus.

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Many years later, Notarbartolo’s son Leopoldo, a naval officer, wrote a moving biography of his father. It told how his own role in the Notarbartolo tragedy began in the terrible days following the murder. Crushed by grief, and assailed by fond memories, Leopoldo—a lieutenant of only twenty-three at the time—looked back over the previous three months, which he had spent on leave with his family, for any hint as to who might have killed his father. He kept returning in his mind to their time together on the family estate at Mendolilla. The estate symbolized everything about his father’s values, his capacity for hard work. It had been his refuge from the troubles of the city forty kilometres to the north-west. It would now be his monument.

Emanuele Notarbartolo had bought Mendolilla when Leopoldo was little more than a baby. It was a barren place then; its arid 125 hectares rose steeply on the left bank of the Torto from a rocky triangle of land where only wild oleander flourished. (The Torto is a typical Sicilian river—a torrent in winter and a dry, rocky ravine in summer.) The estate’s only building was a stone shack that lay two hours’ ride from the nearest railway station. Bandits haunted the area’s uncommonly bad roads.

As Leopoldo grew up he watched his father transform Mendolilla into a model farm. Despite his daunting workload at the Banco di Sicilia, Emanuele Notarbartolo ploughed into the farm all his spare time and all the money left over from his salary after his first priority: educating his children. He approached the task in a pioneering spirit, refusing to be an absentee landlord like most of his peers in Palermo. He also refused to use workers from the nearest town of Caccamo, a notorious mafia stronghold. Gradually winning the trust of the local peasants, he hired them to build a river defence that he planted with wych elm and cactus. The crumbling slope down to the Torto was stabilized with sumac, tough-rooted shrubs that in spring would cover the hillside with cones of tiny yellowish flowers. In summer the peasants would harvest the leaves to be dried and chopped for use in Palermo tanneries.

The estate was endowed with water supplies drawn from underground sources discovered at several points across the farm. Lemon trees, olives, and vines were planted. The oil and wine were stored in a vast cellar under the new farmhouse, built on the highest point of the property. Every single brick had had to be carried by mule from Sciara station. Just before his death, Emanuele Notarbartolo was working on plans to build a chapel for his peasants. Mendolilla was the local realization of a Utopian vision. (This was a dream that enlightened conservatives like Notarbartolo wanted to reproduce across the whole of Italy. They were aware of the new country’s poverty and instability, of the lawlessness of much of the southern Italian countryside, and yet they feared the social conflict that industrialization was bringing to northern Europe. As a result, they sought a more paternalistic, rural capitalism, a sheltered path to modernity. Mendolilla was more than an investment for Notarbartolo; it was a school of hard work and loyalty for the lower orders and middle classes alike.)

On 13 January 1893, as Leopoldo recalled, his father and he had spent what was to be their last full day together, riding across the estate to visit its every corner. Since leaving his job at the Bank of Sicily, his father had had more time to devote to his land. That evening he sat at his big square table taking notes of what he had seen during the day. As he worked, Leopoldo idly opened a drawer and came across a large tin box containing revolver shells and a great many packets of rifle cartridges. ‘It looks like the magazine on a battleship,’ he said.

His father smiled, put down his pen, and began to demonstrate the security measures in his room. The roof was built from fireproof bricks supported by steel beams. The exceptionally heavy door had the latest English lock. One window gave a view across a wide section of countryside, the other commanded the only entrance to the farmyard. ‘When I’m in here,’ he concluded, ‘I fear no one. With my weapons and a brave and trustworthy companion I can hold my own against twenty criminals.’ Mendolilla was a Utopia that had to be stoutly defended. He paused. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he added: ‘Anyway, it’s all nonsense. If they want to hurt me, they’ll do it through treachery, just as they did the first time.’

It was a phrase that lodged itself in Leopoldo’s memory. His father was referring to the time back in 1882 when he had been kidnapped by bandits in mysterious circumstances. This was the episode that had made Emanuele Notarbartolo so concerned about his safety; he had been kept for six days in a tiny cave in the hills while the ransom was negotiated and handed over. Paying the money was the only alternative to the crude frontal assault that the authorities threatened to launch. A few days after his father’s release, the chief kidnapper was found dead along the road to Caccamo, shot several times in the back. The others were captured after an anonymous tip-off to the police and a shoot-out in an empty villa belonging to a baroness in Villabate—the notoriously mafia-infested Palermo satellite town. The mystery of the kidnapping was never solved, but Emanuele Notarbartolo had strong suspicions. Thinking back on the terrible days after his father’s death, Leopoldo began to wonder whether the kidnapping and the murder were linked.

It was in Palermo harbour less than a week later—18 January—that Leopoldo set eyes on his father for the last time. He remembered being aboard the steamer for Naples; this was to be the first stage of a journey that would take him to Venice where he was to join a ship bound for the United States. The last three months spent with his family had been his first extended stay at home since he went away to naval college. It was also the first time that he and his father had been able to relate to each other on an equal footing, man to man, sharing ideas about business, politics, and careers. Leopoldo stood on the poop of the steamer as it slipped its moorings. He searched the busy harbour until his gaze found the familiar, upright figure of his father in a small boat. A brief glimpse, then the boat slid between two larger vessels and disappeared.

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In the late morning of 1 February 1893, after a two-hour journey on horseback from Mendolilla, Emanuele Notarbartolo climbed into an empty first-class compartment of the Palermo service at Sciara station. It was only then that he could relax. In the ten years since the kidnapping he had been very cautious—he never travelled in the countryside without a gun—but it was unheard of for bandits to mount an attack on a train, so he unloaded his rifle and set it carefully on the netting of the overhead luggage rack. He slung his raincoat, hat, and body belt on top before settling down to gaze out of the window, waiting for sleep to come, or for the gently darkening Tyrrhenian Sea to appear as the train turned west to follow the coast.

Notarbartolo was alone until the next station, Termini Imerese. There he was seen slumped, half asleep in the corner of the compartment, as if the stop had stirred him. The train left Termini Imerese at twenty-three minutes past six, thirteen minutes late. Not long before it pulled away, two men in dark coats and bowler hats got on.

The deputy stationmaster gave the signal for departure. As the carriages began to slide past, he looked carefully into the first-class compartments—he knew his friend, a railway engineer, would be travelling in one of them. Yet his attention was drawn by someone else standing in the compartment immediately before his friend’s. It was a well-dressed, thick-set, powerful man. Under his hat he had a broad, pale face, thick eyebrows, dark eyes, and a black moustache. Struck by the man’s sinister appearance and bearing, the deputy stationmaster would later say that he seemed immersed in grim thoughts.

It was only the autopsy and the state that the compartment was in when the train reached Palermo that allowed Emanuele Notarbartolo’s terrifying last moments to be reconstructed. As the train entered the tunnel between Termini and Trabia, he was attacked by two men, one wielding a stiletto, the other a bone-handled, double-edged dagger. Shocked from his half-sleep, he thrashed and leapt to avoid the flurry of blows. Some of them missed and cut deep into the seat and headrest. Notarbartolo was nearly fifty-nine, but he was a big man and a former soldier. With the din of the train in the tunnel drowning out his cries, he managed to grab one of the blades. Then he lunged desperately up towards his rifle in the rack above his head. A knife bit into his groin. Both his hand and the netting were slashed. He left a bloody palm-print on the window pane. At this point, Notarbartolo was held from behind by one of the men while the other planted four deep wounds in his chest. He was stabbed twenty-seven times in all.

The train drew towards Trabia station. Covered in blood and breathless from the struggle, the killers pulled Notarbartolo’s belongings down from the rack and searched him for anything that would make for an easy identification: the gold watch with the family crest; the wallet with business cards and gun licence. It was not yet dark, but rather than make a getaway at the first opportunity, the killers crouched below the window during the brief stop at Trabia. The place they had in mind to dispose of their victim was just two minutes further along the track. Once the train cleared the station, they propped the body against the door and then bundled it out as they crossed the Curreri bridge. But they did not throw it quite far enough to tumble into the ravine below and be washed out to sea. Instead it struck the parapet and fell by the track.

The two men got out at the next station, leaving the compartment blood-spattered and empty behind them.

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The city of Milan had some unusual visitors in the winter of 1899–1900. Hunched and cloaked against the cold, dozens of short, raven-haired men in caps tramped the northern Italian city’s foggy streets, struggling to feed themselves on the pittance that the authorities provided for their upkeep. They were the Sicilian witnesses for the Notarbartolo murder trial. The two extremes of Italy met in Milan’s Court of Assizes. The jury had to listen to many of the testimonies through interpreters.

The first scandal surrounding the Notarbartolo murder is that it took nearly seven years for the case to come to court. The reasons for that extraordinary delay were to be dramatically revealed before the jury. But in the meantime, even before the trial began it had become clear that robbery could not have been the killers’ intention. They evidently had an extensive organization behind them, including accomplices among the railway staff. A possible motive had also emerged; it promised to link the case to financial and political corruption. Not long before Notarbartolo’s murder, an inquiry found evidence of serious misconduct at the Banco di Sicilia under his successor as governor. The bank’s money was being used to protect the share price of NGI, the Florios’ shipping company, during delicate contract negotiations with the government. It was a simple scam. Loans were granted to intermediaries who bought NGI stock that was then deposited with the bank as security for the loan. The real borrowers, who included the bank governor and Ignazio Florio, remained anonymous—in contravention of bank regulations.