Defiance (2 page)

It was as part of this unstable series of alliances that Salvatore Giuliano’s gang was lying in wait on May Day 1947 at Portella della Ginestra, a pass between two mountains. Up to 15,000 peasants from San Giuseppe Jato and Piana degli Albanesi had congregated in the fields around the pass to celebrate their election victory, but when the first speaker began his speech a series of sharp cracks suddenly rang out. A few people started applauding, thinking it was fireworks. But when the outer circle of horses and mules began to fall to the ground it became clear someone was shooting. The firing lasted for twenty long minutes. During this time, on a rocky flat plain, people desperately crawled around for whatever shelter they could find, and this was why many victims were hit in the side or the buttocks rather than in the chest, arms or legs.

It was a massacre. In total, 12 people were murdered and dozens were injured. Later, over a thousand empty bullet cases were recovered.

The following day the whole country was at a standstill because unions called a general strike. People understood that nobody organises mass murder on such a scale without being highly motivated and highly organised. But, despite the fact that the target was a highly political one, in parliament the minister of the interior said that it had nothing to do with politics – it was just local criminals.

The Vatican, through its newspaper
l’Osservatore Romano
, criticised the general strike. Indeed, soon after the massacre Cardinal Ernesto Ruffini, archbishop of Palermo from 1946 to 1967, wrote to the Pope saying he ‘certainly could not approve of violence’ from any side, but that ‘resistance and rebellion were inevitable in the face of the Communists and their bullying, lies and deceitful scheming, their anti-Italian and anti-Christian ideas’. The message coming from the two most powerful institutions, government and Church, was clear – the killing could continue.

Meanwhile, as far as national politics was concerned, the Cold War was gathering pace. Following the defeat of fascism, Italy had been ruled by an uneasy coalition government made up of Christian Democrats, Communists and Socialists, but it was an unelected government. The first democratic elections were scheduled for spring 1948, and the United States was anxious to ensure that Communists and Socialists did not win and bring Italy into the orbit of the Soviet Union.

During the month following the Portella della Ginestra massacre the national coalition government that had ruled the country since 1945 collapsed. The Christian Democrat leader Alcide De Gasperi came back from a visit to America, and soon afterwards announced that Communists and Socialists were to be removed from power, leaving the Christian Democrats as the main party of government, a position they would hold for nearly fifty years.

The leaders of the left went to ground. The Communist leader, Palmiro Togliatti, prevented a Communist MP from Sicily raising questions about the massacre in parliament. In Palermo, the Socialists and Communists thought it better to ignore the clear majority they had won in the Sicilian parliament, and allowed the Christian Democrats to form a minority administration.

Things were much more stark in the Sicilian countryside, as many peasants were not prepared to go back to the days of fascist oppression or domination by arrogant landowners and their Mafia enforcers. So the following month the killing began again in western Sicily, but this time it was coordinated on an even greater scale.

After having already suffered at Portella della Ginestra, the town of San Giuseppe Jato became a target again. Soon after dusk on the evening of 22 June a group of men opened fire on the local Communist Party branch, but luckily their three hand grenades failed to explode, and the 11 machinegun bullets that penetrated the rooms inside only managed to wound one woman. At 9.30pm on the same evening the Communist Party branch at Borgetto, just five miles away from San Giuseppe Jato, was also attacked. Three men were posted as lookouts while two other men wearing police uniforms moved forward and fired 40 bullets from a machine gun at the office, which fortunately was empty. Oddly enough, they were firing just 20 metres away from the police station.

The most serious attack that evening took place virtually simultaneously, just a mile away, in the main street of Partinico. People were killed here because, unlike all the other Communist Party branches attacked that night, this one was still open. It was about 10pm, and the office was unlit as it was about to close. As the attackers turned the corner into the main street they came face to face with their enemies; so as not to have eyewitnesses they immediately shot to kill. The Communists scrambled inside the darkened room, but from the street outside machine-gun bursts ripped into the darkness, three grenades and two petrol bombs were thrown as well. As the attackers disappeared into the night it quickly transpired they had seriously wounded several people and murdered two.

Five miles to the east, it was the turn of the Socialist Party branch at Monreale. At 2am, petrol was poured over the doors, but those living on the first floor quickly woke up and put the flames out.

Two more attacks took place in towns very close to the coast. The first was at Carini, where at 10pm machine guns opened up on the Communist Party branch, but on this occasion the attackers first threw bottles of petrol against the building, and then set them alight with grenades. This assault was particularly daring, as the target was just a few metres from the local police station. The final raid of that long night of violence occurred in the nearby town of Cinisi. At about 3am Rosa Orlando in Serughetti was blown out of her bed by an explosion on the ground floor below, where the joint branch of the Socialist and Communist parties had its premises. Yet this building was just a few yards from a police barracks, where a guard was on night duty in the street.

In all, within the space of a few hours, six towns were attacked in western Sicily, or rather six branches of the two left-wing parties. Each group launching the attacks numbered 10 to 15 men and used cars or lorries to move around. Machine guns, petrol bombs and grenades also indicated a high level of organisation. Many of these attacks were launched by the Giuliano gang, but the Mafia was directly involved in some of them, for example in Partinico the local Mafia boss was wounded in the attack. Even if all the attackers weren’t
Mafiosi
, at the very least the Mafia had to be consulted about attacks on its territory.

Very few of these crimes were ever punished. And the attacks continued. In October 1947 a Communist Party member and experienced peasant organiser, Giuseppe Maniaci, was murdered near Cinisi.

Immediately after the attack at Portella della Ginestra in May, most people instinctively blamed the Mafia
.
Indeed, following the attack on the Communist Party branch in Cinisi the police arrested two notorious local
Mafiosi
, Don Masi Impastato and Cesare Manzella, whom we shall meet again in the next chapter.

fter 1945 the redistribution of land and the introduction of mechanisation led to a rapid increase in unemployment in the countryside. Peasants were

pushed away from infertile and poor rural areas, and pulled towards the lure of secure and well-paid employment elsewhere. Under fascism it had also been virtually forbidden to move house and change jobs, so after Mussolini’s death the floodgates opened for migration.

The social consequences were enormous: in the 1950s Italy was transformed from a mainly agricultural nation into an urban society; for the first time the majority of Italians now lived in big towns or cities rather than in the countryside. The Sicilian capital Palermo saw the biggest increase in population, between 1951 and 1961 its population rose by 20 per cent, to 600,000. These new migrants needed somewhere to live, and at the same time, many of the people who until recently had been big landowners had money they needed to invest – so a building boom began.

The Mafia moved to the towns and cities too. This was where power and money were increasingly concentrated, and some of the more sophisticated
Mafiosi
saw that the building trade was an area ripe for picking. After all, both for housing and public sector works there was a great demand to invest, and at that time it was an industry which didn’t require a great deal of skill.

One emblematic case was Francesco Vassallo, who began his building career by winning a contract to build new sewer systems in two fast-growing Palermo suburbs in 1951. It was odd that someone who officially defined his trade as a ‘cart driver’ could win such a contract, and odder still given the fact he had served three jail sentences. The key factor, which has subsequently become a typical warning sign of Mafia activity, is that all other bidders suddenly withdrew their offers. Vassallo then engaged in another classic trick; once he had won the contract, costs suddenly spiralled by 11 per cent. Two years later he was again the only contractor to put in a bid to build a school, and after the contract was signed the cost eventually increased by 70 per cent. The fact that he was able to receive billions in unsecured loans was a further sign that the Mafia was moving into the financial sector. Vassallo went on to become one of Palermo’s most important builders over the next thirty years, participating in the notorious ‘sack of Palermo’ when the city was brutalised by unregulated building speculation.

One of the more unusual areas of Mafia interest was fishing. This was opposed by an activist who had moved to Sicily from the far north of Italy, Danilo Dolci, who helped local fishing families from Cinisi and the surrounding area to develop a campaign against illegal fishing. Not only were illegal boats unregistered, they also used explosives and fine-meshed nets that they dragged along the sea bottom, hauling in even the smallest fish and therefore jeopardising future stocks. One day a coastguard boat, with police aboard, came across some illegal fishermen who shot at them with a sub-machine gun before escaping at high speed. The response of the authorities was to withdraw the motorboat to Palermo and to transfer most of the police officers to other posts. It was the umpteenth example of collusion between the authorities and the Mafia. Naturally this demoralised the fishermen, who among other things had to pay a percentage to the Mafia for every catch they landed.

By the 1950s there was another reason for the Mafia wanting ‘sea power’ – drug smuggling. As early as 1952 Italian police, working with the FBI, had seized a 12-lb consignment of heroin just inland, at Alcamo, This shipment was part of an operation run by the notorious Italian-American gangster Frank ‘Three Fingers’ Coppola, who was arrested, along with Salvatore Greco and John Priziola, a family head from Detroit.

The real linchpin in this early period was Lucky Luciano. Born Salvatore Lucania in Sicily in 1897, he had emigrated to the US in his youth. He gained prominence under Al Capone and became boss of New York by the early 1930s through an alliance with a Jewish gangster named Meyer Lansky. The authorities finally managed to convict him of a serious crime in 1936 – running a prostitution ring – and he was given a minimum 30-year sentence. But he was suddenly released in 1946, when the head of the American navy’s secret service wrote that Luciano: ‘had been a great help to the armed forces’ during the Second World War. There is considerable evidence to show that Luciano used his Mafia links to provide US authorities with very useful intelligence and personal contacts.

Since he had never taken out American citizenship, Luciano was deported, and arrived in Sicily in April 1947. By 1950 he was already receiving 450 kilos of industrial heroin a year from Milan, refining it, and then getting his couriers to take it across the Atlantic. The following year the FBI sent an agent named Charles Siragusa to Italy to investigate Italian–American drug traffickers; he complained to a US Senate commission a few years later that Luciano was ‘the king of drug traffickers’, and lamented the Italian authorities’ lack of interest in Luciano’s activities.

The real turning point in the drugs trade, however, took place in Palermo a few years later. The decisions made there were to have major consequences around the world.

Despite its four stars, you hardly notice the Hotel Delle Palme in central Palermo, as much of its façade is covered with a thin film of soot caused by the exhaust fumes of the traffic that thunders past outside. It wasn’t always like this: in the nineteenth century it was one of the most elegant villas in the city, built by the British Whitaker family with profits from the growing wine trade.

The Wagner suite on the mezzazine floor, with antique mirrors reflecting a vaulted ceiling of gilt and cerulean blue, was the venue for a four-day meeting in October 1957 that set up the basis for the modern world drugs trade. Two closely associated groups were meeting: Italian-American gangsters and the Sicilian Mafia. When they sat down, the Americans were by far the most dominant of the two, but they had several problems they needed to solve. A very vocal US senator named Estes Kefauver had recently put them in the limelight in a series of public hearings, which had also led to new anti-drug laws being passed in 1956. Moreover, the traditional entry point for drugs into the United States, Cuba, was now in a very fragile state. Batista, the dictator who ran the island, was becoming an embarrassment for the US government, which withdrew military aid in 1958. Everything changed once Fidel Castro took power in a popular revolution in January 1959.

So, despite the Italian-Americans’ wealth and influence, the man who chaired the meeting, Giuseppe ‘Joe Bananas’ Bonanno, had some serious worries. He had been head of New York’s most powerful family since 1931, but now one in three family members were under arrest on drug charges. He could count on a positive reception from his poorer Sicilian allies, especially because he had come home. Along with many Italian-American gangsters, he was born in the old country, in Castellammare del Golfo, in 1905. But as with so many, he had left for the US during the fascist period, in 1924. Soon Bonanno became ‘Joe Bananas’, and in the prohibition period rose quickly in Mafia ranks, organising whisky bootlegging and running speakeasies. His emergence as the leader of one of the most important New York ‘families’, which took his name, occurred because he was one of the winners in the ‘Castellammarese War’ of 1929–31.

The undisputed winner of the war was Lucky Luciano, who set up a ruling ‘Commission’ of all the New York families. The Italian-American Mafia continued to modernise and look for political influence; for example, at the 1932 Democratic Party national convention in Chicago, Luciano shared a suite with leader of New York’s second assembly district. Luciano, living in Naples since 1946, was at the Hotel Delle Palme as well, alongside Bonanno, his comrade in arms from the Castellammarese War.

The Sicilian Mafia had consolidated its political contacts more recently. When Mafia leader Calogero Vizzini died in 1954, the growing links between the Mafia and the Christian Democrats were revealed by the attendance at his funeral. Given that two of his brothers were priests and one was a bishop, it was not surprising that 60 clergymen came to pay their respects. However, 52 Christian Democrat MPs also attended, including five government ministers, and afterwards the local party branch was closed for a week of mourning.

The new
capo di tutti i capi
, Giuseppe Genco Russo, attended the meeting, but he really didn’t count for much in Palermo. Having said that, he was certainly big in his hometown of Mussomeli, high up in central Italy. He owned large areas of land, was a major shareholder in a bank, and had an influential role as a member of the Christian Democrat Party. Now aged 64, he was very much a representative of the old rural Mafia, as he still kept his mule inside his house and had an outside toilet. Overall, Sicilian
Mafiosi
were the junior partners at the summit – yet over the next two decades they would slowly rise to dominate the alliance.

Collectively, the people who sat down together in the Wagner suite had spent hundreds of years in prison, been convicted or acquitted of dozens of murders and were frequently talked about in the press. Everybody knew who they were, furthermore the meeting wasn’t secret since the Americans checked in using their US passports. Under Italian law, hotels have [they still do today] to provide lists of residents to the local police immediately, and this was done. Indeed the police officer at the ‘foreigners’ desk’, Lo Piccolo, sent a note to Palermo police HQ telling them the head of the American Mafia was in town. The same day he told them that Genco Russo, along with ‘twelve unknowns’, were meeting with the Americans. The police didn’t move a muscle, neither then nor over the next three days of the summit, and they only told Interpol about the meeting nine months later. Although they sent an officer named Malannino to hang around the hotel bar, the meeting was allowed to go ahead.

In essence the Americans wanted the Sicilians to help solve their problems. The people from the old country were willing, had considerable skills and many of them were unknown to the US police. As an ‘offshore’ base it might be much further away than Cuba, but similar conditions existed in Sicily – a lenient police force and a working relationship with the main party of government. For this alliance to work, though, the Sicilians needed to organise themselves differently. They needed to leave their origins of being parasites on the rural economy behind them once and for all, and become international investors. In economic terms they had to become capitalists, linked to operations in three continents. Capital needed to be accumulated to invest in transport and buy raw materials, and areas for diversification and investment had to be found to reinvest the huge amounts of money that would be made. None of this could be done by men who still kept their mules on the ground floor of their houses. Given their long experience in the heart of the capitalist beast, the Americans understood that they needed to nurture a young generation of murderous entrepreneurs.

Most of this was discussed at a more private affair separate to the summit, an interminably long dinner at Spano’s restaurant on the Palermo sea front. Lucky Luciano and ‘Joe Bananas’ had invited some of the young Turks to join them. These included 29-year-old Tommaso Buscetta from Palermo, 34-year-old Salvatore ‘Little Bird’ Greco from the Palermo suburb of Ciaculli, and Gaetano Badalamenti from Cinisi, also 34. Bonanno told the Sicilians that they needed to set up a ‘Commission’ so that things could run smoothly – the Americans had suffered a long and costly history of gang wars. The Commission’s function would not be the creation of a mini Mafia parliament that centralised all activities, but a body that set the ground rules that allowed each local gang to prosper. A lot was at stake: millions could be made, but those taking part also risked long prison sentences.

The time was ripe for the Americans’ plan. Besides, many doors were still wide open. In 1959 the New York office of the FBI had 400 officers investigating communism, and just four dealing with organised crime. The Commission would provide the framework for
Mafiosi
to become global criminals.

Towns like Cinisi, to the west of Palermo, were ideal for transporting drugs to the United States – up to 80 per cent of the inhabitants had relatives across the Atlantic. To all intents and purposes, a visit to relatives was perfectly legitimate. Furthermore, many Mafia bosses had lived in America for many years, including Cinisi godfather ‘Don’ Cesare Manzella.

By the time he moved back to Cinisi from the US in 1946 Manzella had made large sums of money and began to play the role of a benefactor of charities, a man who resolved family disputes, or in other words a ‘man of honour’. Gaspare Cucinella, a post-office worker and amateur actor, remembers him well and agrees – sarcastically – with the stereotypical role he played: ‘Don Cesare Manzella was the town’s benefactor, he’d been in America, everybody would kiss his hand – “all the best, Don Cesare” – that was the environment you lived in. There was nothing else.’

As a supposed ‘man of honour’, Cucinella continues, ‘it was as if he was everybody’s relative, he was related to all of us’. And, given the strength of family ties, Manzella felt he had the right to interfere in the most intimate areas of people’s lives. Cucinella remembers: ‘When I got engaged, her parents didn’t want her to marry me – and it ended up with Don Cesare Manzella getting involved: “Do you really need to marry this woman?”, he said. “Why don’t you just leave her alone and mind your own business?”’ This is typical Mafia behaviour and language. Vague and indirect questions are asked about the consequences of not giving the answer that is expected – in other words they are threats. Cucinella was one of the few who threw them back in Manzella’s face: ‘So I answered: “What’s all this got to do with you? Why don’t you mind your own bloody business? And in the meantime, I’ll mind my own.” He just walked away, laughing.’

Manzella still visited the States very often, and was making huge profits in the emerging drugs trade. As early as 1958 a police report described him as follows: