Cosa Nostra (27 page)

The huge round-ups were followed by equally huge trials. The most prominent ones were carried out in an intimidatory atmosphere. Mori censored press accounts of proceedings, and endeavoured to create the sense that defending a mafioso was tantamount to being a mafioso. The convictions that Fascism needed often followed. The Duce proudly announced to parliament that the boss who had cheeked him in Piana dei Greci had received a lengthy sentence.

One of Mori’s most loudly trumpeted successes was triggered by the theft of a single ass in Mistretta. The case provides a good example of the ambiguities of the Fascist repression of organized crime. The theft of the ass set in motion a long chain of leads for the police, who eventually raided the offices of a wealthy defence lawyer and politician, Antonino Ortoleva. They discovered ninety suspicious letters describing transactions involving ‘saddles’ and pleas for intervention on behalf of ‘young students’ from across Sicily. The police thought they were coded references to animal thefts and arrested criminals. In fact the code was by no means clear. The letters may just have referred to the management of day-to-day shady favours—common political sleaze rather than violent organized crime. But Mori’s police entertained no such doubts: Antonino Ortoleva, they asserted, was nothing less than the boss of the ‘interprovincial mafia’.

Soon afterwards their theory found support when a man claiming to have been a member of the gang sent a letter of confession to the sub-prefect of Mistretta. A mafia court had been held regularly in Ortoleva’s office since 1913, he said. There, with Ortoleva presiding, the leaders—a ring comprising other professional men and some twenty toughs—would decide on the fate of anyone who obstructed their business. Soon afterwards the informant was shot down in the open countryside.

In all, 163 members of the ‘interprovincial mafia’ were put on trial in August 1928. Ortoleva did not turn up to pre-trial hearings, pleading that he was ill. The judge ordered that he be examined by two doctors. Their opinion was unequivocal: ‘Ortoleva has a normal constitution; his temperature is normal; there are no irregularities in his respiratory and cardio-vascular system; his nervous and sensory organs are normal, as are his mental state and intelligence.’ Two days later he was found dead in his cell.

It is not known whether there was any foul play involved in Ortoleva’s death. What is certain is that he never got the chance to put his side of the story, or to implicate anyone else. Ortoleva could have been the capo of the Mistretta-based organization, or simply a client of the criminals, impelled more or less against his will to favour their interests. He may have been murdered to stop him involving people higher up who were close to the regime.

There is much else that remains obscure about the ‘interprovincial mafia’. Although many of the defendants in the case were clearly up to no good, it is not known whether they did in fact constitute an organized, exclusive mafia on the model of the
cosche
of western and central Sicily. It may be that they were just the losers in a struggle between local factions. (But in the 1980s, Antonino Calderone, the same
pentito
who had such painful memories of the Fascist era, would name a descendant of one of the main Mistretta defendants as a member of Cosa Nostra.)

Despite all these doubts, there was only ever going to be one verdict to such a case in the ideological climate of the late 1920s. The propaganda value of dismantling a giant, centralized mafia conspiracy was just too high: 150 men were duly convicted of forming a criminal association.

*   *   *

Not all mafiosi fared badly under Fascism. Official American sources estimate that 500 of them escaped Mori’s clutches by emigrating to the USA. As will be clear from the following chapters, they found Prohibition America a welcoming refuge. Others discovered that the iron fist of Fascist repression often concealed a greasy palm of corruption. Giuseppe Genco Russo, the boss of Mussomeli in central Sicily, would survive the Mori operation to become one of the most prominent men of honour of the post-war years. Through the Fascist decades of the 1920s and 1930s, he accumulated a criminal record that is a mafioso archetype. He was repeatedly charged with theft, extortion, criminal association, intimidation, violence, and multiple homicide. Again and again charges were dropped or he was acquitted for ‘insufficient evidence’—the formula used when witnesses are too scared to come forward. Genco Russo was even snared in one of Mori’s round-ups near Agrigento, but he only ever served three years. In short, Fascism’s much-vaunted war on the mafia left Giuseppe Genco Russo all but unscathed. The most that can be said is that the increased attention from the law was an annoyance; the ‘special surveillance’ to which he was subjected between 1934 and 1938 certainly hampered his operations. In 1944, Genco Russo was officially declared ‘rehabilitated’. He was, of course, no such thing.

*   *   *

The word ‘mafia’ was coined both as the description of a criminal organization and as a political weapon, an accusation to be hurled at opponents. Cesare Mori recognized this truth. ‘The label of
mafioso
is often applied in complete bad faith,’ he wrote. ‘It is used everywhere … as means to carry out vendettas, to work off grudges, to pull down enemies.’ His words were strikingly disingenuous. Mori’s ‘surgery’ on organized crime showed that Fascism pushed this old method of smearing opposition to new extremes.

The final irony of Mori’s campaign was that the ‘iron prefect’ himself was guilty of using the label mafioso in his own interests. In January 1927, as the Fascist Party was purged, Mori brought down his rival for influence in Rome, the Palermo Fascist chief Cucco—the ophthalmologist who had shared a platform with Mori in Gangi. The instrument of Mori’s wrath was the accusation that Cucco had helped young men fake eye diseases to avoid the draft. Mori did not stop the smearing there. Cucco was soon accused of fraud and being a member of the mafia. It took him until 1931 to clear his name.

Black shirts, badges, and nationalistic slogans notwithstanding, the ‘Mori operation’ was ambivalent in the same way that earlier attempts to repress the mafia had been: it combined brutality with hypocrisy. In the long term, the state’s reputation in Sicily could only suffer, and the results of Fascism’s war on the mafia were destined not to last; the mafia was suppressed, but it was not eradicated.

On 23 June 1929, after more than three and a half years as prefect of Palermo, Cesare Mori received a brief telegram from the Duce to tell him that his job was finished. Changes in the political balance of power within the party and the regime had undermined his backing. In a farewell speech to the Fascist Federation of Palermo, Mori tried his hand at modesty:

[T]here remains the man, the citizen Mori, the Fascist Mori, the fighter Mori, the man Mori, living and vital. Today he takes his path towards the horizon that is open to all men, to all men of good will. I have my star. I watch it faithfully because it shines, and will continue to shine, along the path of work and duty. I will be guided by the light of the Fatherland. There, my friends, we will meet again.

In reality, Mori was bitter about his removal. When he returned to Rome, the regime carefully avoided giving him much of a platform from which to make trouble. The former ‘iron prefect’ gave himself over to writing a self-glorifying, sententious account of his ‘hand-to-hand fight’ with the mafia. ‘Men of action make things happen, but do not judge them … From words I passed immediately to deeds.’ It was given a poor reception by the Fascist press. Some blackshirts had clearly not forgotten the day they pissed against the prefecture walls in Bologna.

During the 1930s, the official line was that Mori’s task had been completed. Fascism had beaten the mafia; it had solved the problem for good. Mori’s successor ordered the press to play down reports of crime. There were to be no more roundups or show trials. It was much easier and less conspicuous just to send suspects into internal exile without proper legal process; this, after all, was how the authorities had dealt with the mafia problem through most of the pre-Fascist era. Grey Fascist functionaries rapidly followed one another through the corridors of Palermo’s public buildings. With the regime’s attention switched elsewhere, Sicily sank into a sump of corruption and factionalism.

Mori’s death in 1942 went virtually unreported. The following year the Fascist regime collapsed and his work was entirely undone. The mafia’s salvation came from the United States. For during the same decades in which it struggled with socialism, Fascism, and war in Sicily, the mafia had become a part of American life.

FIVE

The Mafia Establishes Itself in America

1900–1941

JOE PETROSINO

Between 1901 and 1913, some 1.1 million Sicilians emigrated—a little less than a quarter of the island’s entire population. Of those, roughly 800,000 made the United States their destination. Inevitably, some were men of honour, smart and ruthless criminals who sought to establish protection regimes and other criminal activities among their fellow migrants and along the trade routes connecting the two shores of the Atlantic.

For most of the nineteenth century, men on the run in Sicily had sought refuge in the USA. The lemon trade, heavily infiltrated by mafiosi, connected Palermo with New York. In the 1880s and 1890s, American police had linked some violent deaths in the Italian community with the mafia. Particularly notable was the murder of New Orleans Police Chief David Hennessy in 1890; the Sicilian suspects were lynched. But it was only from the days of the great migration after 1900 that the traffic between the US and Italy in criminal ideas, resources, and personnel became a vital part of mafia operations.

There are two fables about the mafia’s arrival in America. The first was born at the time of the mass Sicilian migration. Following a famous mafia murder in 1903, the
New York Herald
proclaimed in alarm: ‘“The boot” [i.e. Italy] unloads its criminals upon the United States. Statistics prove that the scum of southern Europe is dumped at the nation’s door in rapacious, conscienceless, lawbreaking hordes.’ To natives of New York, the mafia seemed like an invasion, an infestation borne in the teeming bellies of steamships. Or, in a variant on the same account, it was an international criminal conspiracy bent on expansion into the virgin territory of the USA.

The second fable is recent; it was fashioned in the 1960s and 1970s by the descendants of Italian immigrants who were by now completely integrated into American society. They recreated the mafia’s arrival in the USA as a tale that almost turned the ‘criminal invasion’ fable on its head. The Sicilian peasants who crossed the Atlantic were steeped in ancient ‘rustic chivalry’ traditions. Faced with the grimy savagery of big-city capitalism and machine politics, they adapted the cultural resources that they had brought from their rural homeland. The mafia was born when the old Sicilian values of family and honour met the dark side of the American dream—or so the story went.

In reality, urban America and Sicily were not as wildly different as either of these fables would have us believe. Corleone, for example, was not a country village. It was one of many ‘agro-towns’ where market economics, patronage politics, and organized violence held sway. Although they were poor, superstitious, and downtrodden, the peasants of Corleone were not the innocents that Italian-American journalist Adolfo Rossi suggested when he went to interview Bernardino Verro and write his sentimental portrait of the Fasci. The working people of Sicily knew how important it could be, in terms of their livelihoods, to be loyal to the right faction in town, the faction able to dole out work, land, and charity. Many had no illusions about what it took to get on in politics and business. Most aimed to accumulate money and contacts in the US and then return to Sicily. The island’s emigrants were not like the Jewish refugees who spat on the quay at Riga before setting sail for a wholly new future across the Atlantic.

Neither Sicilian politics, nor the island’s sophisticated violence industry, had much that was antiquated about it. Sicilians of all kinds were well equipped for life in the burgeoning cities of the United States. When they crossed the ocean they found a home from home, whether they wanted to or not. Their first access to American society was often through the
padrone
system. To get a job—typically in construction—you had to become a client of a boss. Sometimes, the boss would use intimidation to corner a sector of the jobs market. Bosses would even advance poorer emigrants the price of their steamer ticket and recoup it later, with high interest, from their wages. Like Sicily, the world of the new immigrant in North America was one where power was invested not in institutions, but in tough, well-networked individuals.

Politics in the Italian quarters of New York City would also have had a familiar look to Sicilians. Bosses farmed wards of the city for votes on behalf of the Democratic Party organization—Tammany Hall, ‘the Wigwam’. They did so by tapping into every possible source of influence and patronage on their turf, including criminal gangs. In America as in Sicily, organized labour militancy would often be met by a combination of corruption and violence.

Elizabeth Street was the heart of the New York Sicilian community. In 1905, roughly 8,200 Italians—the vast majority of them Sicilians—lived in ‘Elisabetta Stretta’, as they called it. This concentration of people constituted a territory comparable in size to many of the agro-towns of the Sicilian interior. Cinema has done a fairly good job of recreating the look of places like Elizabeth Street in the early twentieth century, with its cramped tenements, its sweatshops, and its streets lined with laden traders’ carts. (Italian export industries prospered on keeping emigrants in the US supplied with the foodstuffs they had grown up on.)

At the time of the great Sicilian influx, Americans observed the development of the immigrant quarters with a mixture of alarm and pity. As one reformer wrote of Elizabeth Street in 1909: