Cosa Nostra (20 page)

The same fraudulent method was then used as a more direct way of making money by other people connected to the bank. If the value of the shares went up, the borrower was able to emerge from anonymity, ask the bank to sell them off, and take the profit. If the shares went down, the bank would be stuck with the devalued shares and no one to turn to when it came to exacting repayment of the advance. The anonymous borrowers could only win; the Banco di Sicilia could only lose. The inquiry also raised suspicions of mafia infiltration.

In the weeks before the murder, with news of the banking inquiry leaking out, there had been rumours that Emanuele Notarbartolo would return once more to the Banco di Sicilia. It was said that Notarbartolo himself had been influential in instigating the investigation into the bank’s affairs. Many senior figures connected to the Bank of Sicily would have had much to fear from a return to the old financial rigour. Could Notarbartolo have been murdered to protect these corrupt interests within the bank?

This scent of scandal in high places created considerable public interest in the Notarbartolo case as the hearings began in the Milan Court of Assizes on 11 November 1899. Yet only two railwaymen were in the dock. Pancrazio Garufi was the brakeman in the last carriage. Part of his job was to check that nothing fell from the train, but he claimed not to have seen anything amiss. The police asserted that the killers would not have thrown Notarbartolo’s body from the train without being sure that Garufi would look the other way. Even more suspicion surrounded the ticket collector, Giuseppe Carollo. He was unlikely to have been one of the killers because one of his duties was to walk along the platform at each stop calling out the station’s name. But the assassins would not have got on the train without tickets, performed a gruesome murder, and waited in the compartment at Trabia with the body if they had not been sure that there was someone—Carollo, the prosecution alleged—whose task it was to prevent their work being disturbed.

The first five days of the trial were a muddle. The two railwaymen floundered, had inexplicable lapses of memory, contradicted themselves. They even denied knowing each other when they lived fifty metres apart. The ticket collector Carollo, who had changed his story several times, made a particularly bad impression. One correspondent at the trial described his shifting eyes set in a ‘gaunt, yellowish face with muscles shaped into a fox-like snout’. To most lay observers it seemed a hopeless task to decide whether the two accused were killers, accomplices, or just innocent witnesses who feared the consequences of incriminating anyone far more than they feared prison.

The contrast was stark when the victim’s son, Leopoldo Notarbartolo, took the stand on 16 November. He stood tall and erect in naval uniform in the witness box, his head held so high that he seemed to be looking at the court down his strikingly long nose; like his dark, heavy-lidded eyes, it was a trait inherited from his murdered father. He delivered his evidence in a deep voice with a calm and speedy assurance that observers found disconcerting at first. Then, gradually, his honesty and directness made a profound impression. What Leopoldo Notarbartolo said stunned the court, made him a celebrity, and turned the case into one of the most famous trials in Italian history. ‘I believe that the murder was a vendetta and that the only man who hated my father is Commendatore Raffaele Palizzolo, the member of parliament. I accuse him of being the instigator of the crime, of commissioning these and other killers.’

Leopoldo then began to paint a portrait of Don Raffaele Palizzolo and to tell the story of his long battle with his father. The two had first become acquainted when they were young men—Palermo is a small place. The animosity between them had been sparked soon after Notarbartolo became mayor in 1873 when he forced Palizzolo to pay back money he had spirited from a fund intended to subsidize bread for the poor.

As mayor, Notarbartolo was in regular contact with the public prosecutors who suspected that Palizzolo was a protector of a notorious brigand; it seemed that Don Raffaele relied on his influence at election time in Caccamo. The enmity between Notarbartolo and Palizzolo became personal. Wherever possible, Notarbartolo avoided places frequented by Palizzolo. He loathed his unmanly bearing, his cowardice, his smarm. Notarbartolo made no effort to hide his revulsion on those occasions where Palizzolo’s company could not be avoided.

It was Palizzolo that Emanuele Notarbartolo had suspected of being behind his 1882 kidnapping. The empty villa where some of the kidnappers were captured was on land bordering Palizzolo’s own estate; both properties were in Villabate—the fiefdom of his favourite
cosca.
The abduction itself had taken place near Caccamo, which was ruled by another
cosca
sponsored by Palizzolo.

By the time of the kidnapping, the theatre of the conflict between the two men had shifted to the Banco di Sicilia; Notarbartolo was its director and Palizzolo a leading member of its governing body. Leopoldo’s account of his father’s time at the bank did not disappoint those who had been hoping to hear some scandal emerge from the trial. He explained how his father had fought a losing battle to stop the Banco di Sicilia being used as a great sluice-gate of favours, the most powerful clientele-building instrument on the island. Large sums were found to have been loaned to, and never recovered from, children, janitors, boatmen, the dead, and individuals who had been entirely invented.

Throughout the 1880s, Notarbartolo strove to clean up the bank’s affairs while Palizzolo made himself a constant nuisance. Notarbartolo tried to pilot reforms in the bank’s constitution that would reduce the influence of the politicians who made up two thirds of its governing body. In 1889, he sent the government a damning confidential report on the bank’s workings. With it went an ultimatum: back my reforms or I resign. These letters were stolen from the office of the Minister of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce. A few weeks later they were shown to a meeting of the bank’s general council, which had been held while Notarbartolo was away in Rome on business. The meeting passed a vote of censure against him. Although nothing was ever proved, suspicions over the theft of the letters centred on Palizzolo. A registered package from a false address in Rome had been sent to his house on the day that the documents disappeared. The package was sealed with wax, bearing only the impress of a button from a particular Roman tailor. Palizzolo was among the tailor’s customers.

The whole situation presented the government with a dilemma: it could either back the bank’s council, which was increasingly dominated by crooks and clearly complicit in the theft of the letters; or it could back a principled, competent, but politically unreliable governor. It dithered for several months, and then took the first option. Notarbartolo was asked to resign. The bank’s administration was dissolved, but most of the old members were subsequently re-elected. After Notarbartolo’s enforced resignation, corrupt interests swooped on the bank to engineer the NGI share swindle. The subsequent investigation revealed that Palizzolo was one of the anonymous borrowers involved.

Leopoldo concluded his testimony to the Milan court with a solemn denunciation of the way the investigation into his father’s murder had been handled. ‘I repeatedly told the authorities all of these things. And yet Raffaele Palizzolo was never questioned. Perhaps they were afraid.’

The reports from Milan of Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s evidence caused consternation in political circles in Rome. The trial had been intended to offer up small fry to quell the increasing demand for justice in the Notarbartolo case. Now Don Raffaele Palizzolo suddenly became a huge political embarrassment. He wrote a letter to the press, claiming that he had always had a good working relationship with Notarbartolo. Then, as the atmosphere darkened around him in Rome, he scuttled back to Palermo.

Palizzolo’s parliamentary immunity from prosecution was removed when Prime Minister General Luigi Pelloux arranged a rapid vote in the Chamber of Deputies. Because of rumours that the controversial MP was preparing to escape abroad, telegraph communications between Sicily and the mainland were suspended so that he did not hear the news of the parliamentary vote. With the legal authorities in Palermo still dithering, Chief of Police Sangiorgi was given direct authorization by General Pelloux to go ahead and arrest Palizzolo that very evening. Officers found him relaxing on the same bed around which his clients used to cluster each morning.

A few days later in Palermo 30,000 people marched to place a wreath on a new bust of Emanuele Notarbartolo that had been set on a small Corinthian altar in Politeama Square. Palizzolo appeared to be finished. ‘The mafia is in its death throes,’ opined one commentator.

*   *   *

Leopoldo Notarbartolo was using the Milan courtroom as a stage; it was his chance to expose the whole affair to the glare of publicity—his father’s murder, the mishandled investigation, Palizzolo and the NGI share scandal. One of the striking aspects of his testimony was that he was not a witness for the prosecution. In Italy victims can pursue actions for damages during criminal trials, and they can even play a role in arguing the case for the prosecution. The young naval officer was one such ‘civil complainant’. He had good reason for wanting to drive the prosecution: he had become convinced that the prosecuting magistrates who were supposed to prepare the case against the killers were complicit in a cover-up. His suspicions centred on Vincenzo Cosenza—the same chief prosecutor in Palermo who would later do his best to undermine Sangiorgi’s prosecution of the mafia of the Conca d’Oro.

Over the six years since his father’s murder Leopoldo had done a great deal of investigative work himself. He had met opposition and indifference at every turn. In 1896, an old personal and political friend of his father’s, Antonio di Rudinì, became Prime Minister. Leopoldo went to see him, revealed his suspicions about Palizzolo, and asked for help. Rudinì was less than understanding: ‘If you really believe he did it, why don’t you just hire some good mafioso to kill him for you?’

It was only under Rudinì’s successor, General Pelloux (another family friend of the Notarbartolos), that enough political momentum was built up for any kind of trial, even one that only inculpated the two railwaymen. Under Pelloux’s influence, the murder trial was switched from Palermo to Milan where there was less likelihood that witnesses would be intimidated.

Following Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s testimony, the Milan trial continued and the reasons for the delay in bringing the case to court began to emerge. Witness after witness fuelled the scandal. The local army commander in Milan ordered his officers not to attend the trial because of the stream of subversive revelations. The Minister of War, who had been Royal Commissar in Sicily, testified that ‘the prosecution evidence for the Notarbartolo murder was prepared extremely negligently, extremely sloppily; indeed, it was carried out in a culpable way.’ A few days later the same Minister was forced to resign when a newspaper published a letter from him, asking the judicial authorities to release a politically influential mafioso in time to help a government candidate during elections.

From the moment that the body on the tracks over the Curreri ravine was identified as being that of Emanuele Notarbartolo, the whole of Palermo had been alive with rumours that Palizzolo was behind the murder. Yet it emerged in court that the chief investigating magistrate in Palermo at the time had been transferred, apparently for suggesting that the rumours might well have some substance to them.

One police inspector, after asking to take charge of the case, had hidden evidence, including a pair of blood-caked socks. He had also sent the investigation along a series of patently false trails, each of them based on hypotheses that cast a shadow over the murdered banker’s reputation. In Milan, to loud applause from the public gallery, the inspector was arrested in court. He turned out to be a close ally of Palizzolo’s; he had acted as his electoral ‘agent’.

The name of one of the men whom Leopoldo Notarbartolo believed had actually carried out the assassination also came out before the Milan jury. The deputy stationmaster at Termini Imerese—who had seen the sinister figure in Notarbartolo’s compartment—was called to the stand. After repeating his account of that night back in February 1893, he said that he had not managed to recognize the same man in an identity parade.

Then the advocate representing the Notarbartolo family began to probe: was it not true that he
had
recognized the man, but had told the police he was afraid of saying so in public because of the mafia? The witness began to tremble, but stuck to his story. Then he was brought face to face with one of Ermanno Sangiorgi’s predecessors as Chief of Police of Palermo—the very man who had conducted the identity parade. The stationmaster blushed and squirmed. There was considerable sympathy for his distress in the public gallery because he was evidently an honest man in fear for his life. Finally he cracked, and said in barely more than a whisper, ‘I confirm everything he says; it’s true; it really was the same man.’

The man he had identified was Giuseppe Fontana, age forty-seven, from Villabate. The former Chief of Police outlined for the court the suspect’s background. He was a member of the Villabate
cosca
of the mafia. Only a few years before, he had been released from the charge of counterfeiting money because of the connections he was able to mobilize. ‘I think that in this trial too, Fontana has been protected by a magical, powerful, and mysterious hand.’

As soon as these revelations were made in Milan, the order went out to arrest Fontana, who went into hiding. The rumour was that he was being sheltered by a prince and member of parliament whose estate he protected. The prince was interviewed by Chief of Police Sangiorgi who intimated that he might be accused of harbouring the criminal. The prince reported back to Fontana who dictated the conditions under which he would give himself up. Sangiorgi wearily agreed. The
Times
reporter in Italy was horrified at the deal: