Cosa Nostra (23 page)

The meeting between Rossi and Verro produced one of the few first-hand portraits of the Fasci leader. It is an interview influenced by Rossi’s acquired New World prejudices, as well as his readiness to indulge his Italian readers’ sentimental view of Sicily. For all that, it reveals much about what Verro and the Fasci were really like.

Other people who knew Verro describe him as a bear of a man, energetic and short-tempered with an absolute devotion to his cause. Rossi, in contrast, had a metropolitan eye for the outlandish: ‘The president of the
Fascio
is a young man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He genuinely has a touch of the Arab in his face, his beard, and especially his large, bulging eyes.’

Nevertheless Verro’s hope and enthusiasm shone through his responses to Rossi’s questions. ‘Our
Fascio
has about six thousand members, men and women … Our women have understood the advantages of a union of poor people so well that they now teach their children socialism.’ Rossi also discerned Verro’s political acumen. The demands set forth in Corleone had become the template for every
Fascio
on the island. They were clear and moderate: new contracts that stipulated an even split of produce between the proprietor and the peasants who rented small plots of land. Even many conservatives saw this as a fair and efficient arrangement. Most of the landowners in Corleone had accepted the deal. ‘The richest ones have not given in yet,’ Verro explained to Rossi. ‘Not so much for economic reasons; it is more out of pique. They don’t want to look as if they have given in to the
Fasci.
’

Verro proudly showed the journalist round the large vaulted hall that served as the headquarters of the
Fascio.
At one end, above a table, was a terracotta bust of Marx flanked by portraits of the patriotic heroes Mazzini and Garibaldi. Underneath the table there was a display of superannuated weapons: sabres, muskets, and a blunderbuss.

Rossi interviewed some of the peasants there. They explained how the members who could read and write kept the illiterate up to date with news from the rest of the island. The old soldiers among the membership had formed a uniformed band to play patriotic songs and the workers’ hymn that was the Fasci anthem. Rossi asked the peasants what they meant by socialism. ‘Revolution!’ came one reply; ‘Putting property together and all eating the same,’ came another. ‘I am fifty years old,’ explained a third peasant, ‘and I have never eaten meat.’

Rossi saved until last the most sensitive issue, the one his readers were most curious about: the relationship between the Fasci and crime. Italians would remember the role that gangs of gunmen had played in the many revolutionary episodes in recent Sicilian history; the mafia was little understood, but widely feared. The Sicilian landowners tried to claim that the Fasci were just the latest disguise for the island’s savage picaroons and wreckers. ‘What attitude have you taken to people with criminal records?’ Rossi asked Verro. The reply was strenuously upbeat:

There are only a few, and they have been convicted of minor things like stealing from fields, so we accept them into the
Fascio
as a way of improving them. Since the
Fascio
started the crime rate has dropped. There are hardly any more disputes, because any issues are sorted out through the
Fascio:
we often act like magistrates or arbitrators. The real criminals are some of the landowners: loan sharks, former protectors of brigands; they rape young peasant girls and thrash the workers. If you only knew what these bullies get away with! It is still like the Middle Ages here!

Rossi was evidently touched; he had also got the simple story he came to Corleone to write. To outsiders like him, it sometimes seemed as if nothing in the Sicilian countryside had changed since Roman times when slaves worked the wheat fields. So on his return he gave his readers a fable of good and evil set in a timeless faraway land:

In this island, in the middle of areas that are heaven on earth, there are others that seem like Africa, where thousands of slaves labour on land belonging to a handful of great lords. Indeed they are worse off than those ancient slaves, who at least had their bread guaranteed.

Verro was written up as a noble barbarian, a latter-day Spartacus.

Reading Rossi’s reports, it is tempting to think that his lazy fondness for certain stereotypical ideas about Sicily may just have cost him the story of his career. For what he did not realize is quite how complicated it is to be a hero in western Sicily.

Unbeknown to Rossi, only six months earlier Verro had been woken at dawn by a handful of gravel thrown against the window of his house in via San Nicolò. As agreed, he dressed quickly. Once outside, he was led the short distance through narrow streets to the house of a man he knew, a
gabelloto
on one of the estates that surrounded the town. There he was shown into a room where he found a group of men around a table. At its centre were three rifles and a piece of paper with a skull drawn on it.

The presiding boss began by explaining that the purpose of the meeting was to examine a proposal to admit Verro to the secret association—the members called themselves the Fratuzzi (‘the Brothers’). When prompted, the initiate Verro explained how the social movement he had founded in Corleone aimed to champion the interests of the oppressed proletarian masses. Satisfied with this account, the boss warned of the dangers that faced any man who did not keep the society secret. Verro was asked to repeat the Fratuzzi oath of loyalty before holding out his right hand for the thumb to be pricked with a pin. The blood was smeared on the image of the skull, which was then burned. In the light of the flames, Verro exchanged a fraternal kiss with each of the mafiosi in turn. He was told that, to introduce himself as a member of the Fratuzzi, he was to touch his incisors and complain of a toothache. He was now a member of the Corleone
cosca
of the mafia.

*   *   *

In becoming a mafioso Bernardino Verro was far from typical of Fasci leaders; and in leaving a written account of how he became one, he was unique among mafia initiates at the time. But Verro’s story—which would only come to light after his murder—is nonetheless highly significant. For a long time it was treated with perplexed scepticism by left-wing writers, and not just because most people did not believe in such a thing as a mafia initiation ritual. Over the sixty years and more that followed the flowering of the Fasci movement, mafiosi would intimidate and murder countless socialists, Communists, and trade union leaders—so many, in fact, that it came to seem as if the mafia’s very purpose was to batter the organized working class in the countryside into submission. And yet here, at the very origins of Italian peasant socialism, was a socialist hero consorting with the mafia.

Verro’s initiation is easy to explain from the Corleone
cosca
’s point of view. Men of honour never set themselves square against change—their aim is to steer it in the direction they want—and in 1892–3 the situation was highly unpredictable. The Fasci could end up turning the peasants into a new force in the Sicilian countryside, changing the way land was owned and worked; or they could fail and be sucked back into clannish local politics. The
gabelloti
affiliated to the mafia were unsure whether to oppose the Fasci or use them to get better lease terms out of the landlords. By approaching the Fasci leaders, the mafia was trying to make sure that it would be able to maintain its influence whatever the future held.

The mafia has a serenely unscrupulous attitude to political ideologies. It has no guiding political ideas, only tactics. Opportunism is its masthead value. For that reason, no social or political movement, of whatever colour, is born immune to mafia influence. The mafia’s unscrupulousness even extends to its own traditions. The initiation is not quite as hallowed a rite as is often believed, even by many mafiosi. If it is cheaper, less risky, and more effective to offer someone membership than it is to buy or bully them, then senior bosses will run through the necessary ritual performance.

As a result, the Fasci had to take constant care to avoid mafia infiltration. Some local groups even had it in their statutes that known mafiosi were barred from membership. Not the least reason for this is that elements in government would have been very happy to have a pretext to suppress the peasant organizations on the grounds that they were merely criminal gangs. As it turned out, a government investigation showed that the Fasci had largely been successful in keeping their ranks free of wrongdoers.

Yet in some places like Corleone the relationship between the Fasci leadership and the mafia had a fearsome intimacy to it. The peasant chiefs and the mafia bosses were competing in the same political marketplace for hearts and minds. The peasants wanted to force a better deal, and some of them were happy to take it from whoever looked most likely to deliver it, be they mafiosi or socialists.

*   *   *

Bernardino Verro’s side of the story of his initiation into the Fratuzzi would only come out after his death. The train of events was set in motion during the winter of 1892–3. At this time a low-level campaign of intimidation and provocation against the Fasci was under way. Activists were beaten up and haystacks were burned down so that the socialists could be blamed, thus increasing the chances of a military crackdown. There was police harassment and the Fasci leaders were being arrested on trumped-up charges. Some peasants were also responding to the landowners’ intransigence with vandalism. Verro and the other Fasci leaders knew that there were politicians in Rome who were looking for a chance to send the troops into Sicily. Many Fasci leaders believed that a violent confrontation with the state was inevitable, sooner or later. Voices within the movement were airing the possibility of an armed socialist insurrection to pre-empt the repression.

It was during these tense months that Verro heard strong rumours that he was about to be made to disappear. To protect himself he made sure he never walked the streets of Corleone alone. One night he saw—and avoided—three unknown men waiting for him near his house. Then a man from Corleone approached him repeatedly, expressing sympathy for the peasant movement and offering reassurances about his personal safety. He explained that the landowners had ordered his murder, but that there was a secret society in Corleone that was prepared to protect him. The society was even willing to offer him assistance and membership. All they asked was that he modify his hostile attitude to certain local men with great qualities and notable courage.

Verro decided to accept the offer. He, like most other Sicilians, probably had only an imprecise idea of what the mafia really was: perhaps a kind of Masonic league, or something more vague and informal. Understandably enough, the chance that the Corleone mafia offered Verro to save his own life helped him make up his mind to join.

There was also a broader background to Verro’s decision. During the same tense months of early 1893 there were exploratory contacts between men of honour and the socialist movement’s leadership at a regional level. Both sides were cagey. If there was going to be a revolution, the honoured society in each area had to assess whose side it would fight on. Was it better to back a distant and frail Italian state? Or infiltrate the socialist peasantry? For their part, the peasant leaders began to wonder whether an alliance with the mafia might not be a price worth paying for victory in the coming struggle. A Utopian faith in the power of socialism perhaps even gave them hope that the mafia could be incorporated and neutralized.

At the end of April, Verro and two other senior members of the Fasci umbrella organization met Palermo mafia bosses. The proposal was that a peasant revolution, if it came, would be spearheaded by ‘200,000 lions’—these lions being the mafiosi and their skirmishers. (The discussion seems to have been marked by a Homeric level of exaggeration.) Not a great deal of progress was made towards a deal. Accounts differ as to why: either the mafiosi reached the conclusion that the Italian state, in the end, was going to prove stronger than the Fasci; or the peasant leaders suspected that the mafia was trying to draw them into an ambush on behalf of the police and the landowners.

Bernardino Verro quickly came to regret accepting membership of the Corleone
cosca.
The Fratuzzi invaded the ‘New Era’—a club he had set up as a centre of republican and socialist activity. They ran card games there and used the gambling to pass counterfeit money into circulation. It was obvious to Verro that both he and the Corleone
Fascio
risked being discredited and labelled as criminals by the police, so he stayed away from the ‘New Era’ club. The distance separating mafiosi and peasant activists in Corleone became wider when the former took over land left uncultivated because of a strike organized by the
Fascio.
Verro rapidly abandoned all hope that the Fratuzzi and the peasants might form a pact. He would spend the rest of his life trying to make amends for joining the mafia—a mistake that would eventually cost him his life.

On 3 January 1894, the hawks in Rome and Sicily finally had their way: 50,000 troops enforced martial law and the dissolution of the Fasci. The crunch had come in December when the Fasci staged tax strikes and demanded that corrupt local councils be dissolved—a direct challenge to the mafia’s vital political interests. The level of violence began to rise. The worst incidents occurred when troops fired directly into crowds of demonstrators; eighty-three peasants were killed. In places, the fighting was deliberately provoked when persons unknown fired random shots from low rooftops or windows; with decisive cunning the mafiosi were acting on their decision to back the landowners and the state rather than the Fasci. The discipline that Verro had managed to instil in the peasants of Corleone meant that it was one of the few places where there was no bloodshed.

Bernardino Verro tried to escape Sicily, but was arrested on 16 January 1894 on board a steamer to Tunis and brought before a military tribunal. The charges were of conspiracy to provoke a revolt, incitement to civil war, violence, and destruction. During the trial the authorities banned mainland newspapers from the island. Verro was found guilty and sentenced to twelve years in prison. The harsh penalty shocked even many conservatives. Unexpectedly, in 1896, he was released in an amnesty. But the next decade of his life would be divided between political activism, prison, exile, and persecution by the authorities.