Cosa Nostra (24 page)

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Verro was released at the end of a second prison sentence in the summer of 1907. (He had been convicted of slander after a newspaper that he had set up revealed that a senior local police officer had procured a young woman for the deputy prefect—her husband was in jail. Verro was sentenced to eighteen months when his key defence witnesses retracted.)

Hundreds of socialist peasants from the interior came to Palermo to welcome him on his release. Carrying flags and banners, they arrived early in the morning on a specially chartered train from Corleone. The town band, dressed in red shirts, led a procession through the streets. Women in traditional peasant costume marched under a banner that read ‘Corleone women’s section’. Heavily guarded, they walked along via Macqueda to the Ucciardone prison and there greeted Bernardino Verro with cheers, embraces, and tears. After a meeting in the Palermo workers’ chamber, they took him back to Corleone in triumph.

Now, thirteen years after the repression of the Fasci, morale in the peasant movement had never been higher. There was a more liberal government in power in Rome. The year before Verro’s release, a new law made it possible for cooperatives to borrow from the Banco di Sicilia on behalf of the peasants; the money was to be used to rent land directly from the owners. In Corleone, Verro immediately assumed the leadership of a cooperative formed for just this purpose. It had the potential to be the most powerful weapon yet against the mafia. The aim was to cut the middlemen, the
gabelloti,
out of the rural economy. Verro knew that the approaching struggle would probably be violent; two men who worked closely with him had been murdered while he was away. He knew too that the Fratuzzi in Corleone had a personal score to settle with him; he still carried the mortifying secret of his initiation.

The Fratuzzi were cautious at first. They initially attempted to bribe Verro to stop the cooperative taking their leases. Although the mafia managed to infiltrate many peasant associations across western Sicily, Verro resisted and by 1910 his cooperative had taken charge of nine estates, freeing hundreds of labourers from near-serfdom in the process.

But Verro’s cooperative also faced political opposition from a Catholic fund, the Cassa Agricola San Leoluca. It was a sign of a fundamental change happening across Italy. When Italian unification was completed in 1870 with the occupation of Rome, the Pope had declared the Church ‘despoiled’, shut himself in the Vatican, and instructed the faithful not to take any active part in the political life of the godless new country. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did Catholics, with the approval of the clergy, begin to take political action. What drew them into the public domain was the need to protect the faithful from the subversive materialist creed of socialism.

Mafiosi had always dealt with priests as they did with politicians—man to man, favour for favour. Now the Church and the mafia also had common ideological ground in their hatred of socialism. The priests and lay believers who ran the Cassa Agricola San Leoluca are obscure figures; little is known about the Corleone Church. But some idea of the atmosphere among the local clergy emerges from the letter one canon wrote to the archbishop in 1902, asking him to stop Corleone priests carrying guns ‘both by day and by night’. The Catholic cooperative used the Fratuzzi to guard the land it rented. The most deadly phase of Verro’s struggle against the mafia was about to begin.

In 1910, Bernardino Verro launched a tax strike in protest at a corrupt Catholic mayor. The municipal administration collapsed. During the subsequent election campaign, Verro gave a speech denouncing the ‘mafia affiliated with the Catholics’. The reaction was swift. On the evening of 6 November he was waiting in the pharmacy for voting to finish when someone fired both barrels of a shotgun at him through the window. His hat was blown off and his wrist cut, but astoundingly he was otherwise unhurt. It seems that the would-be killer’s aim had been thrown off by the bright lights and reflections in the pharmacy cabinets. When Verro rushed outside to see whether he could identify his would-be assassin, he came face to face with a well-known mafioso who was evidently surprised to see him still alive. ‘You see, your boys could only make smoke this time,’ Verro said.

If in public he maintained a brave face, in private Verro was terrified. He began to discover just how far the mafia’s contacts reached; its links with the local member of parliament, the magistrature, and the clergy. The bullets fired at him, he said, stank of ‘mafia and incense’. He was forced to leave his beloved Corleone once again. Although he denounced to the authorities the men he thought had tried to kill him, the case went nowhere because witnesses were afraid to come forward.

In the spring of 1911, Verro wrote to a friend in despair when he heard that his comrade Lorenzo Panepinto, the peasant leader in Santo Stefano Quisquina, had been shot dead on his doorstep:

Have you seen what they did to poor Panepinto? The clerical-mafia
gabelloti
have risen up against the cooperatives. The truth is so terrible that it almost makes me insane with despondency. Every time I look at the wound on my left wrist I see two corpses in the scar: one is my own, and the other belongs to my good friend and comrade Panepinto. I have had to leave Corleone, where the maffia has declared me a traitor. What is there left for me to do? Become a criminal myself, and take vengeance with lead and dynamite? Or wait, like a dead man on holiday, to be murdered?

Troubles continued to pursue Verro. The treasurer of the peasants’ cooperative in Corleone was arrested for fraud and falsely stated that he had been working on Verro’s orders. (Strong evidence suggests instead that the treasurer had the support of the Fratuzzi.) Although there is now no suspicion that Verro was guilty of deliberate wrongdoing, it does seem that he was naive and lax in supervising the cooperative’s accounts. He was arrested and spent nearly two years in jail on remand.

When Verro was finally released in 1913, he still had the fraud charge hanging over him and seemed to his enemies to be a broken man; he was reduced to selling wine and pasta to get by. But his intention was merely to wait until his name was cleared before returning to politics. The peasants, their faith in him unshaken, begged him to head the socialist list in the local elections. They now had the vote at last; universal male suffrage, which had been introduced in 1912, was an unprecedented opportunity to fight for justice and equality by democratic means. Verro knew the dangers he faced; he would say to friends that the mafia was bound to end up killing him because it could not beat him any other way. But he felt it was his duty to accept the peasants’ plea. In 1914 he was overwhelmingly elected mayor of Corleone.

Verro’s political life in 1914 and early 1915 was dominated by the First World War. Like most socialists, and indeed most Italians, Verro opposed Italian intervention in the war. Three times in the previous two decades the people of Corleone had seemed to be on the brink of securing a more just future for themselves. In 1894, their Fasci were repressed by martial law; in 1910, their cooperative was checked by intrigue and violence; now, just as a broad-based democracy arrived, their hopes were to be denied by conscription. Italy eventually joined the war in May 1915.

But these were important months in Verro’s personal life too. After years on his own, the itinerant activist had settled down, and his partner (the couple were ideologically opposed to marriage) gave birth to a daughter; they named her Giuseppina Pace Umana—‘Josephine Human Peace’. In the autumn of 1915 the fraud trial that had caused Verro so much anxiety also, finally, began to draw near. Having spoken to the lawyers involved, he felt optimistic about his prospects for success.

On the afternoon of 3 November 1915, Verro left the Corleone town hall under a rapidly darkening sky. The downpour began as he turned the corner to climb via Tribuna. Just as he reached a flight of four steps that stretched the full width of the top end of the street, a bullet fired from a stable hit him under the left armpit. He staggered, turned, and pulled out his Browning pistol. He got off one futile shot before it jammed. Five more bullets hit him from two angles. He was probably already dead when he fell face down into the mud.

One of the killers then calmly emerged from cover and, it seems, knelt on the small of Verro’s back. He aimed his pistol at the base of his victim’s skull and fired four times. He then put the muzzle to Verro’s temple and pulled the trigger again. The state of the corpse was to serve as a warning to others.

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Reports of the demonstratively savage murder were limited to a few lines in most national newspapers. News of the fighting on the western front, in Serbia, and on Italy’s north-eastern borders dominated the nation’s interest.

For many years following the failure of Sangiorgi’s maxi-trial in 1900 and the acquittal of Palizzolo and Fontana in 1904, it was hugely difficult to raise any interest in the fight against the mafia. Public opinion in Italy was resigned and sceptical; people greeted news of organized crime in Sicily with apathy and distaste. It was taken for granted that the Corleone mayor’s death was a mafia affair and that, very probably, no one would be held to account.

Not even the remarkable evidence produced in the trial helped it attract the public attention it deserved. Among Verro’s personal papers, the police discovered a testimony in his own hand that added a new layer of intrigue to a life that fully reflected a dramatic period in Sicilian history. It was Verro’s posthumous confession. In it he told the full story of his initiation into the Fratuzzi—a secret he had never divulged to anyone before—and gave a detailed account of how the mafia in Corleone operated. The policemen who discovered the document all swore to Verro’s absolute integrity and devotion to his cause; they believed that if he had revealed what he knew about the mafia, he would have been killed much earlier.

As expected, despite the highly public nature of the murder, no one was ever convicted; the trial ended after a few days when the chief prosecutor withdrew his evidence, stating that he did not feel it stood up. The collapse of the trial saw to it that, yet again, a reliable witness to the reality of the ‘honoured society’ was not believed.

The Fratuzzi had plenty of reasons to assassinate Bernardino Verro. The question is why they did it when they did. The police later surmised that the mafia feared Verro would use the fraud trial to expose what he knew about the association. It may also have entered the
cosca
’s thinking that the ongoing war would muffle the publicity surrounding the murder. Over the years, the Fratuzzi had tried without success to coopt Verro, corrupt him, defeat him politically, smear him, and intimidate him. Apparently, by 1915, only one instrument was left.

Even where it is at its most powerful, the mafia cannot just eliminate anyone it wants to without preparing for the consequences. Any killing involves calculating risks, and the killing of a powerful man like Verro, who had many passionate supporters in Corleone and beyond, was a particularly risky undertaking. Tragically, it seems that in this case the mafia had made its calculations accurately.

Verro was far from the last martyr of the peasant movement. A spate of political killings by the mafia followed both world wars. The tactics adopted against the Fasci in Corleone were to be used again; wherever the honoured society could not infiltrate peasant organizations, or create more pliable alternatives, it confronted them with terror. Among the mafia’s political victims at around the time that Verro fell were also five brave and honest priests whose names deserve to be recorded: Don Filippo Di Forti, in San Cataldo, 1910; Don Giorgio Gennaro, in Ciaculli, 1916; Don Costantino Stella, in Resuttana, 1919; Don Gaetano Millunzi, in Monreale, 1920; Don Stefano Caronia, in Gibellina, also in 1920. The new socially committed Catholicism was not entirely oblivious to the reality of the mafia, and paid a price in blood as a result.

In 1917, the peasants of Corleone erected a bust of Bernardino Verro in Piazza Nascè where the labourers gathered every morning in the hope of being hired by a
gabelloto
for a day’s work. Verro was depicted looking up via Tribuna to the spot where his murder had taken place. In 1925, the bust was stolen; it was never found. In 1992, a courageous young left-wing mayor of Palermo erected another bust as part of his effort to weave into the fabric of the town the memory of the mafia’s misdeeds. After being vandalized several times, the monument was finally destroyed in July 1994. The mafia was making the point that it pursues its victims even beyond the grave.

THE MAN WITH HAIR ON HIS HEART

In January 1925, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini stood up in parliament, assumed personal responsibility for the violence of his Fascist gangs, and launched the process of suppressing all opposition. Mussolini’s Fascist Party was no longer a government; it was a regime. A year later the new dictatorship brandished its authority by inaugurating a war on organized crime in Sicily.

The siege of Gangi, the opening showpiece of the war, began on the night of 1 January 1926 as heavy snow fell on the Madonie mountains. In the preceding days police and
carabinieri
in mobile parties of fifty had been gradually narrowing a cordon, arresting all those suspected of collaborating with bandits. The cordon and the cold together forced the bandits themselves back up into Gangi, which was known to be their headquarters. The police occupied hilltops and other strategic points near by. Telephone and telegraph wires were cut. Lorries and armoured cars blocked the access roads below. Then large numbers of police, with a sprinkling of black-shirted militiamen, struggled up the steep and narrow road into Gangi itself.

Gangi had seemed impregnable in its lofty isolation, dominating the landscape of the whole of central Sicily from its position in the Madonie; on a clear day the looming outline of Mount Etna can even be made out half across the island to the east. Locally the bandit leaders were referred to as ‘the prefect’ or ‘the chief of police’. They had been so powerful that they had even succeeded in persuading the mayor to turn down a government street-lighting subsidy on the grounds that the town’s steep alleys were actually safer in the dark.