Cosa Nostra (26 page)

In the central-northern city of Bologna, there was one man who was not prepared to tolerate the activities of the black-shirted gangs who believed that their struggle to save the fatherland from the red menace set them above the law. In 1921, Cesare Mori, the boy from the foundling hospital, reached the top of the career ladder when he was appointed prefect of Bologna. There he treated the self-styled ‘national youth’ of Fascism as he had done other subversives. And Mori stuck to his task until blackshirts from nearby towns converged on Bologna and set up camp around his headquarters. They dramatized their protest in Fascist style by urinating in concert against the prefecture walls. The government backed down and Mori was transferred. The episode would leave a legacy of bitterness between Mori and the leaders of the Fascist squads.

Although the Partito Nazionale Fascista did not have great numerical strength in parliament, its tight organization and willingness to take risks gave it the upper hand over divided, vacillating politicians. In October 1922, Mussolini’s ‘March’ on Rome challenged the state to either give him power or put down his movement by force. In response, he was invited to form a coalition government and would remain as his country’s leader for the next two decades.

After Fascism took power in 1922, the squad leaders took their revenge and dismissed Mori altogether. His career had run aground for the simple reason that he had backed the wrong political masters. He could hardly be blamed, since few outside the Partito Nazionale Fascista would have predicted a blackshirt seizure of power. In an effort to refloat his ambitions, Mori soon came to terms with Fascism and began to mobilize his network of powerful friends. He made known his admiration for Mussolini, and claimed that he had in fact acted ‘fascistically’ throughout his career. He inserted flattering references to the Fascist project in his book,
Among the Orange Blossoms Beyond the Mist
—the cloying title betrayed his self-dramatizing side. But before Mori’s career could resume, Fascism would have to decide to come to grips with the Sicilian mafia.

*   *   *

In Sicily, as in the rest of the South, Fascism was never a grass-roots movement. Sicilian politics, with its clienteles and cliques, was a less ideological affair than in the North. Nor was there much call for strike breakers since the mafia already did that job efficiently enough. But once Mussolini took power, interest groups all over the island suddenly developed a fondness for black shirts and mock Roman salutes. Mafiosi too jumped on to the Duce’s victory chariot: the prefect described the ruling group on Gangi town council as ‘Fascist-
mafioso
’; another report described the dominant faction in San Mauro as a ‘Fascistized mafia’.

The Duce was personally popular in Sicily, but his movement lacked a strong base of support, so initially he needed these new friends. For a time it looked as if Fascism would adopt the traditional method of ruling Sicily by delegating power to the local grandees and pretending not to notice if mafiosi managed their election campaigns. One prince who was generally acknowledged to have mafia ties became a Minister in Mussolini’s cabinet.

It proved to be a short honeymoon. In its early days Fascism soon began to attract accusations that it was deaf to Sicily’s economic needs, while at the same time militant senior Fascists were causing alarm in certain circles in Sicily by proclaiming the need for a crusade against the mafia as well as the landowners and politicians who protected it. In April 1923, one such militant wrote to Mussolini with a plea:

Fascism aims to sweep away all the corruption poisoning the country’s politics and administration. It aims to break the shady factions and maggoty cabals infesting the sacred body of the nation. It cannot neglect this terrible centre of infection. If we want to save Sicily we must destroy the mafia … Then we will be able to set up our tents on the island; and they will be sounder than the ones that we pitched in the north by doing away with socialism.

The lurid language overlay a simple formula. The mafia—whatever it was—could serve the same purpose in Sicily that socialism had done in the North: it could be a convenient enemy for Fascism. In time, Mussolini was to make this strategy his own. His blackshirt movement styled itself as the antidote to the old world of patronage and devious compromise. Because mafiosi were often linked to politicians, a crusade against organized crime would allow the Fascists to strike simultaneously at some of the VIPs of the liberal system. There could be no better way to accentuate Fascism’s no-nonsense image.

In May 1924, Mussolini went to Sicily for the first time, sweeping into Palermo on the battleship
Dante Alighieri
with an escort of planes and submarines. In the province of Trapani, the Duce heard about Cesare Mori’s achievements before and during the war, and about how serious the mafia problem was there. A deputation of veterans told him that 216 murders had been committed in Marsala in a year; they explained that the mafia was the main reason for Fascism’s failure to take root on the island.

While Mussolini’s cortège was moving through Piana dei Greci near Palermo, the mayor, mafioso Don Francesco Cuccia, gestured disparagingly towards the Prime Minister’s bodyguards and muttered unctuously in his ear, ‘You are with me, you are under my protection. What do you need all these cops for?’ The Duce did not reply and fumed for the rest of the day at the insolence. His visit to the island was cut short. Don Francesco Cuccia’s lapse in etiquette has passed into legend as the catalyst for Mussolini’s war on the mafia. Within a few weeks of Mussolini’s return to Rome, all Mori’s lobbying paid off when he was sent back to Trapani.

Then, in 1924, events in the Italian capital dramatically deepened the chill between Fascism and Sicily. Shortly after the Duce’s trip to the island, some of his thugs kidnapped and murdered the Socialist Party leader. Italian public opinion was horrified, and Fascism’s political allies started to drift away. The surest way for a national leader to fall out of favour with a certain kind of Sicilian politician is to lose power. In the summer of 1924 Mussolini looked like doing just that.

But opposition inertia allowed the Duce gradually to stabilize the situation and then to move openly towards putting an end to democracy in Italy. When his thoughts turned again to Sicily, he was ready to implement his strategy.

The local election campaign of August 1925, the last before democracy disappeared, was also the last hurrah for the old political dignitaries of Sicily. Too late, with defeat at the hands of Mussolini now inevitable, they came out in opposition to Fascism and discovered the cause of freedom.

Among them was Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, a former Prime Minister and the most powerful Sicilian politician of the old order, whose power base was in a heavily mafia-infested area. Shortly before the vote he made a speech in Palermo’s Teatro Massimo, taking his cue from the government’s proclaimed intent to combat the mafia:

If
by ‘mafia’, they mean having an exaggerated sense of honour; if they mean being furiously intolerant of bullying and injustice, and showing the generosity of spirit needed to stand up to the strong and be understanding towards the weak; if they mean having a loyalty to your friends that is stronger than anything, stronger even than death; if by ‘mafia’ they mean feelings like these, attitudes like these—even though they may sometimes be exaggerated—then I say to you that what they are talking about are the distinguishing traits of the Sicilian soul. And so I declare myself a
maffioso
and I am proud to be one!

It was a squalid tactic that only played into Mussolini’s hands. With the liberal state itself in mortal peril, Orlando could only fall back on the old ploy of deliberately confusing the mafia and Sicilian culture. His blatant winking at the bosses has entered history as one of the lowest moments in the long and shameless cohabitation between killers and the people’s elected representatives. Tommaso Buscetta would, much later, claim that Orlando was himself a man of honour.

It was time for Mussolini’s assault on the mafia to begin, and it was to Mori that he turned to impose Fascist authority on the unruly island. On 23 October 1925, Mori became prefect of Palermo with full powers to attack the mafia and with it the regime’s political enemies. He immediately began preparations for the campaign’s curtain-raiser: the siege of Gangi.

*   *   *

Cesare Mori prided himself on many things. Prominent among them were his beliefs about the way Sicilians think and behave, beliefs forged by his years of experience around Trapani. Homespun, dogmatic, and crass, they would be the basis for his campaign against the mafia.

I was able to penetrate the Sicilian mind. I found this mind, beneath the painful scars with which centuries of tyranny and oppression had marked it, often childlike, simple and kindly, apt to colour everything with generous feeling, ever inclined to deceive itself, to hope and to believe, and ready to lay all its knowledge, its affection and its co-operation at the feet of one who showed a desire to realise the people’s legitimate dream of justice and redemption.

The key to the mafia’s success, he argued, was its ability to strike an attitude designed to prey on this vulnerability and credulity at the core of the Sicilian makeup. The mafia, Mori believed, was not an organization. But, for the sake of maintaining law and order, the police and judicial system could assume that it was. In reality it was best described as ‘a peculiar way of looking at things’. Mafiosi were drawn together by a natural affinity rather than by initiation rites or formal bonds of any kind.

Upon these distinctly unpromising foundations Mori built his whole repressive programme. Quite simply, the impressionable mass of Sicilians had to be made to see, in as down-to-earth a way as possible, that the state was tougher than the men of honour. The Fascist state was to out-mafia the mafia.
Theatre
was to be the essence of Mori’s drive to establish law and order in Sicily. The Gangi operation was conceived in this spirit, as a way of striking awe into the simple souls still in thrall to the criminals.

Four months after the siege of Gangi, Mori put the same tactics to work against Don Vito Cascio-Ferro, a famous mafioso who had begun his career in 1892 by infiltrating the
Fascio
in Bisacquino not far from Corleone. Since then he had ventured as far as the United States and made his fortune smuggling cattle with a small fleet of boats. It is said that when Don Vito toured his mountain realm at the peak of his career, the officials of the towns he visited would wait for him outside the gates to kiss his hand. On May Day 1926, Cesare Mori came to address a public meeting in Cascio-Ferro’s territory. As a scirocco blew fine Saharan sand across the piazza, the ‘iron prefect’ opened with a pun both startling and corny: ‘My name is Mori and I will make people die!’ (‘Mori’ means ‘die’ in Italian.) ‘Crime must vanish just as this dust carried away by the wind vanishes!’

A few days later the ‘interprovincial’ antimafia police force that Mori had set up began a round-up in the area that included Bisacquino, Corleone, and Contessa Entellina. Over 150 suspects were arrested, among them Don Vito. His godson went to the local landlord to seek support but received a resigned reply: ‘Times have changed.’ It was the end of Don Vito’s reign. Soon afterwards, an old murder charge against him was resurrected. He adopted an acquiescent pose during his trial in 1930 while his lawyer forlornly ran through a familiar argument. Citing his client’s honourable behaviour in all circumstances, he maintained that ‘We must conclude that either Vito Cascio-Ferro is not a
mafioso,
or that the mafia, as scholars have often pointed out, is a conspicuous individualistic attitude, a form of defiance that has nothing wicked, base or criminal about it.’ It seems that the scirocco was blowing again when the judge handed down a life sentence. Don Vito died in prison in 1942.

*   *   *

Mori evidently thought that his dramatic techniques would work, not just on the Sicilians who were in awe of the mafia, but also on the mafiosi themselves. Soon after arresting Don Vito Cascio-Ferro in May 1926, he invited every estate warden in the province of Palermo to a stage-managed ceremony of loyalty. Twelve hundred of them assembled in military formation on a small hill near Roccapalumba. The only two invitees who could not make it sent medical certificates. Mori reviewed the ranks before making his speech: henceforth they were to protect private property on behalf of the state rather than the mafia. A military chaplain said mass on an open-air altar before reminding the wardens that they were about to take an oath of the utmost seriousness. Mori invited anyone present who was not prepared to swear loyalty to leave; he then turned his back to the audience. No one moved. When the ‘iron prefect’ turned round again, he read out the pledge. The wardens responded as one, ‘I swear.’ Martial music and Fascist hymns were played as they filed forward to sign their names.

The following year the redoubtable men who guarded the citrus fruit groves of the Conca d’Oro underwent a similar ritual. At the end, to mark their new allegiance, they were given boy scout-style brass badges, bearing crossed rifles on a background of orange blossom.

It should be said that this propaganda offensive was backed up by a hard-headed political strategy designed to win over the landowners to the regime. The masters of some great estates certainly appreciated Fascist efforts to cow overweening
gabelloti
and wardens. Many of Mori’s successes, such as the Gangi operation, were obtained by the eminently traditional method of putting pressure on landowners to betray the criminals they had been sheltering. More generally, Mori’s goal was to impress the population through strength rather than justice. The result was the kind of undiscriminating repression with which the islanders were all too familiar. Within less than three years of the start of Mori’s campaign, some 11,000 people were arrested, 5,000 of them in the province of Palermo alone. It is not possible that all of them were men of honour, or even members of bandit networks. Even one of the prosecuting magistrates involved in the antimafia war believed that honest men were arrested along with criminals.