Cosa Nostra (9 page)

THE VIOLENCE INDUSTRY

There was something rather English about the investigation mounted by Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino. Both men were great admirers of British liberalism and Sonnino owed his first name to his English mother. When they travelled to Sicily they were entering a land where the vast majority of the population spoke a dialect they could not understand. In the university and salon milieu that Sonnino and Franchetti left behind, the island was still a mysterious place known primarily from ancient Greek myths and sinister newspaper reports. So they planned for the considerable stresses and dangers of their journey with the resolve of explorers setting off for uncharted territory. Among the equipment they took on their journey in the spring of 1876 were repeating rifles, large-calibre pistols, and four copper basins each. The plan was to fill the basins with water and stand the legs of their camp-beds in them to keep insects away. Because roads were poor or non-existent in the interior of the island, the two researchers often travelled on horseback, choosing their routes and guides at the last possible moment to avoid brigand attacks.

Franchetti in particular was far from entirely naive when he went to Sicily; two years earlier he had hacked across large areas of the mainland of southern Italy on a similar expedition. Yet what he found on the island caused him to feel overcome by ‘a profound tenderness’ towards the rifle he carried across his saddle. ‘The nightmare of a mysterious, evil force is weighing down on this naked, monotonous land,’ he later wrote. The notes that Franchetti actually took during the journey have only recently been published; two of the many stories that emerge from those notes can serve to explain the shock of his encounter with Sicily.

Franchetti recorded that, on 24 March 1876, he and Sonnino rode into the central Sicilian city of Caltanissetta. Two days earlier, a priest had been shot dead in the nearby village of Barrafranca, a mafia stronghold, according to the authorities who informed them of what had happened. Sixty metres from where the priest lay dying stood a witness, a new arrival in Sicily, a government inspector from the northern city of Turin whose job was to supervise the collection of taxes on milled flour. This honest functionary ran to the priest’s side in time to hear his dying words of accusation: his own cousin was the murderer.

Profoundly disturbed, the tax inspector jumped on his horse and rode off to tell the
carabinieri.
He then went to inform the victim’s family. Not wanting to upset them by blurting out what he knew, he told them to follow him to where the priest needed help. Along the way, he gently broke the news. Grateful for his sensitivity, they told him that the murder was the culmination of a twelve-year feud between the priest and his cousin. The priest himself was a wealthy man with a fearsome reputation for violence and corruption.

Twenty-four hours later local police arrested the tax inspector, threw him in jail, and charged him with the murder. The witnesses against him included the priest’s cousin. But the people of Barrafranca, including the murdered man’s family, kept quiet. Mercifully for the tax inspector, the government authorities in Caltanissetta got wind of the case; when he was released the real murderer went into hiding.

A week after hearing of this episode, Franchetti and Sonnino arrived in Agrigento, a town on Sicily’s southern coast famous for its ancient Greek temples. Franchetti’s notebooks tell another story he learned there, of a woman who had taken 500 lire from the police in exchange for information on two criminals; they were in league with a local boss, a man with a hefty share of government road-building contracts. Soon after she accepted the money, the woman’s son returned to his village after a decade in jail. He was carrying a letter from the local mafia detailing what his mother had done. When he confronted her and asked for money to buy some new clothes, her evasive response triggered a furious row after which the man stormed out. He returned shortly afterwards with his cousin and together they stabbed his mother ten times—the son six times and his cousin four. They then threw her body out of the window into the street before giving themselves up.

As they journeyed round Sicily, Franchetti and Sonnino also encountered the seemingly hopeless confusion that had set in around the word ‘mafia’ during the ten years since it had first been heard. Everyone the travellers interviewed during the two months they were in Sicily seemed to have a different understanding of the new buzzword; everyone seemed to accuse everyone else of being a mafioso. The authorities in some places were confused. As one lieutenant in the
carabinieri
lamely told them: ‘Mafia is an extremely difficult thing to define; you would need to live in Sambuca to get an idea.’

When he subsequently published his findings, Franchetti explained how perplexed he had been to find that the situation was most worrying not in the treeless, yellow interior of the island, where most people would have expected there to be backwardness and crime, but in the citrus groves around Palermo. On the surface, this was the centre of a thriving industry in which the locals took great pride: ‘Every tree is looked after as if it were a rare plant specimen.’ These initial perceptions, Franchetti wrote, were soon changed by the hair-raising tales of murder and intimidation in the area: ‘After a certain number of these stories, the scent of orange and lemon blossom starts to smell of corpses.’ The presence of endemic violence in such a modern setting ran counter to one of the beliefs most cherished by Italy’s rulers: that economic, political, and social progress all marched in step. Franchetti began to wonder whether the principles of justice and freedom he so cherished ‘might just amount to nothing more than well-planned speeches to disguise ailments that Italy cannot cure; they are a layer of gloss to make the dead bodies gleam.’

It was a bleak and perplexing spectacle. But Leopoldo Franchetti was intellectually tenacious as well as brave; he passionately believed in a hands-on engagement with the nation’s problems. A patriotic shame burned within him at the thought that foreigners seemed to know Sicily much better than did the Italians. By patiently covering the territory and by studying its history, Franchetti overcame his doubts and confusion. He produced an account of the mafia business that is starkly systematic. Sicily was not chaotic; on the contrary, its law and order problems had an underlying and very modern rationality to them. The island, Franchetti argued, had become home to ‘the violence industry’.

*   *   *

Franchetti’s account of the genesis of the mafia opens in 1812 when the British, who occupied Sicily during the Napoleonic wars, began the process of abolishing feudalism on the island. The feudal system had been based on a form of joint land ownership: the king granted land in trust to a nobleman and his descendants; in return, the noble put his private army at the service of the king when the need arose. Within the nobleman’s territory, termed a ‘fief or ‘feud’, his word was law.

Until the abolition of feudalism, Sicilian history was shaped by tussles between a long series of foreign monarchs and the feudal barons. The monarchs tried to draw more power towards the centre; the feudal barons resisted the monarchy’s interference in the running of their estates. In this tug-of-war, it was the nobles who usually had the advantage, not least because Sicily’s mountainous geography and atrocious transport infrastructure made it impossible for central government to rule without letting the barons have their way.

Baronial privileges were wide-ranging and long-lasting. A custom dictating that vassals should greet their feudal lord with a kiss on the hand was only formally abolished by Garibaldi in 1860. The title of ‘don’, which was originally given to the Spanish noblemen who had ruled Sicily, was applied to any man of status for many years after that. (These practices were widespread in Sicily, and were not just mafia habits.)

The abolition of feudalism did not immediately do more than change the rules of the tug-of-war between the centre and the provinces. (The power of the landowners was slow to fade; the last of the great estates was only broken up in the 1950s.) However, forces for long-term change were set loose when feudalism ended; the legal preconditions were put in place for a property market. Quite simply, bits of the estates could now be bought and sold. And land that is acquired rather than inherited needs to be paid for; it is an investment that has to be put to profitable use. Capitalism had arrived in Sicily.

Capitalism runs on investment, and lawlessness puts investment at risk. No one wants to buy new machinery or more land to plant with commercial crops when there is a strong risk that those machines or crops will be stolen or vandalized by competitors. When it supplanted feudalism, the modern state was supposed to establish a monopoly on violence, on the power to wage war and punish criminals. When the modern state monopolizes violence in this way, it helps create the conditions in which commerce can flourish. The barons’ ramshackle, unruly private militias were scheduled to disappear.

Franchetti argued that the key to the development of the mafia in Sicily was that the state had fallen catastrophically short of this ideal. It was untrustworthy because, after 1812, it failed to establish its monopoly on the use of violence. The barons’ power on the ground was such that the central state’s courts and policemen could be pressurized into doing what the local lord wanted. Worse still, it was now no longer only the barons who felt they had the right to use force. Violence became ‘democratized’, as Franchetti put it. As feudalism declined, a whole range of men seized the opportunity to shoot and stab their way into the developing economy. Some of the feudal lords’ private heavies were now acting in their own interests, roaming the countryside as brigand bands that were sheltered by the landlords either out of fear or complicity. The formidable managers called
gabelloti,
who often rented bits of the landowners’ estates from them, were also adept at using violence to defend their interests. In the city of Palermo, societies of artisans demanded the right to carry arms so that they could police the streets (and force up prices or run extortion operations).

When modern local government institutions were set up in the towns of the Sicilian provinces, groups that were part armed criminal gang, part commercial enterprise, and part political clique, quickly organized themselves to get their hands on the spoils. Officials complained that what they called these ‘sects’ or ‘parties’—sometimes they were merely extended families with guns—were making many areas of Sicily ungovernable.

The state also set up its courts, but soon found that they were subject to control by anyone who was tough and well organized enough to impose his will. Even the police became corrupted. Instead of reporting crime to the authorities, they would often broker or impose deals between the victims and perpetrators of theft. For example, rather than send stolen cattle along the long chain of intermediaries to the butchers, rustlers could simply ask the captain of the local police to mediate. He would arrange for the stolen animals to be handed back to the original owner in return for money passed on to the rustlers. Naturally the captain would get a percentage of the deal.

In a hellish parody of the capitalist economy, the law was parcelled up and privatized just like the land. Franchetti saw Sicily as being in the grip of a bastard form of capitalist competition. It was a violent market in which there were only notional boundaries between economics, politics, and crime. In this situation, people hoping to run a business could not rely on the law to protect them, their families, and their economic interests. Violence was an essential asset in any enterprise; the ability to use force was as important as having capital to invest. Indeed, Franchetti thought that in Sicily violence itself had become a form of capital.

Mafiosi, for Franchetti, were entrepreneurs in violence, specialists who had developed what today would be called the most sophisticated business model in the marketplace. Under the leadership of their bosses, mafia bands ‘invested’ violence in various commercial spheres in order to extort protection money and guarantee monopolies. This was what he called the violence industry. As Franchetti wrote,

[in the violence industry] the mafia boss … acts as capitalist, impresario and manager. He unifies the management of the crimes committed … he regulates the way labour and duties are divided out, and controls discipline amongst the workers. (Discipline is indispensable in this as in any other industry if abundant and constant profits are to be obtained.) It is the mafia boss’s job to judge from circumstances whether the acts of violence should be suspended for a while, or multiplied and made fiercer. He has to adapt to market conditions to choose which operations to carry out, which people to exploit, which form of violence to use.

Men with commercial or political ambitions in Sicily were faced with two alternatives: either to arm themselves; or, more likely, to buy in protection from a specialist in violence, a mafioso. If Franchetti were around today, he might say that threats and murder belonged to the service sector of the Sicilian economy.

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Franchetti seems to have seen himself as a kind of Charles Darwin for a delinquent ecosystem, and as such he gives us a powerful insight into the laws of Sicily’s rich criminal habitat. Yet in doing so he makes Sicily sound like a complete anomaly. In fact all capitalism has a bit of the bastard in it, particularly in the early stages. Even the English society that Franchetti so admired had had its violent entrepreneurs. In Sussex in the 1740s, for example, semi-militarized gangs made huge profits for themselves and their contacts by smuggling tea. They caused a breakdown in law and order by corrupting customs officials, directly confronting troops, and performing armed robberies as a sideline. One historian has described England in the 1720s as resembling a banana republic, its politicians masters in the arts of patronage, nepotism, and the systematic pillaging of the public revenue. Franchetti’s analysis is also limited by the fact that he did not believe that the mafia was a sworn secret association.