Honoured Society (13 page)

But as the days became weeks and the possibility of action seemed to become even more remote, scepticism began to corrode the spirits of Gallo’s army. A more vigorous discipline, the posting of sentries, and the surrounding of the barracks with barbed wire, giving it the appearance of a prison camp, failed to prevent the desertions. By the beginning of December the Separatist army of eastern Sicily numbered fifty-eight men. At about this time two loiterers captured in the vicinity of the camp were presumed to be carabinieri in disguise, and a plan was conceived by which the suspects, if indeed they were members of the police, should carry a false report of the Separatist strength back to their superiors. The guards who led them blindfold about the camp, were instructed to let drop casual remarks about tanks and artillery hidden in the wood. In one way the trick was effective. The Italian military authorities were indeed misled into the belief that the Separatist force was much stronger and well
equipped than it actually was. But their reaction was not to call off their projected attack, but enormously to strengthen the units employed to carry it out. By the end of December, Monte San Mauro was surrounded by five thousand troops with full armoured and artillery support. This imposing force was commanded by three generals. On the mountain top the 58 men of the Separatist army waited for battle to be joined.

The guiding principle of the battle that followed was caution, and this was adhered to by both sides. The attack on the Separatists’ positions began soon after dawn, and by ten o’clock a spirited exchange of fire was continuing. The tanks lumbered into position, but as so often happens, turned out to be useless in rugged and wooded terrain and were withdrawn, leaving the artillery to pound away somewhat vaguely in the general direction of the enemy. There was a prodigious expenditure of ammunition on both sides. The Separatists made use of the cover given by a network of irrigation ditches on the mountain’s lower slopes continually to shift the position of their machine-guns – a tactic which served to confirm the three generals in command of the attack in their pessimistic evaluation of the strength of the force opposing them. An infantry attack was tried and then hastily called off when a fusillade of bullets whistled round the ears of the attackers, and the army settled down to mortar the Separatists’ positions for the next few hours. Several of the defenders’ machine-guns jammed as a result of the almost uninterrupted fire they kept up in reaction to this treatment, but by nightfall, when action was suspended, they appear to have suffered no losses.

Next morning brought a brisk renewal of mortar fire from the
government
side plus a cannonade from anti-tank guns that had been manoeuvred into position during the night. The first newspaper reports of the conflict appeared. One of them described the mountain of San Mauro as being honeycombed, in the manner of the Maginot line, with reinforced concrete passages leading to a number of strong points, all of them linked to a main fortress on the summit of the mountain, which
had been constructed in conformity with ‘the most up-to-date theories of defensive military technique’.

Whatever his defects may have been as a tactician, Gallo at least believed that a commander ought to lead his troops in action. Accordingly he had taken up his position in a hole in the ground on the lower slopes, and here he remained all day long blazing away enthusiastically for hour after hour, until his machine-gun, too, jammed. He then gave the order to the two volunteers with him to withdraw, and there was a tense and heroic moment when they refused to do so and Gallo drew his pistol and brandished it at them. As even this gesture had no effect on their determination to stay where they were and fight it out to the last round of rifle ammunition, all three men embraced in an emotional leave-taking and the fight went on. Eventually when the defenders’ last shot had been fired, Gallo was knocked out by the blast of a hand-grenade, and all three men were then captured. After a few months in prison, Gallo was amnestied.

Night fell again, and with it came the end of the battle. In two full days of fighting hundreds of shells had been fired from artillery pieces of all kinds, and tens of thousands of bullets had been discharged from pistols, rifles and machine-guns. The desperate and bloody resistance described by the newspapers had cost the Separatists six wounded, while the government forces had sustained six casualties too, one man being killed. With the loss of Gallo, the Separatists accepted the impossibility of continuing an organised resistance from their mountain redoubt, and placing themselves temporarily under the orders of a bandit leader who possessed a professional knowledge of local topography, they were able to filter safely through the cordon of surrounding troops and make their escape under cover of darkness. Three of their wounded were in a dangerous condition, and through a prearranged system of liaison they were able to get these away safely by car to the Duca di Carcaci’s villa in Catania, where it was expected they would be well looked after. The presence of three wounded rebels in his house, however, seems to have caused the Duke grave embarrassment, and the men were shuffled hastily, and without medical treatment beyond doses of aspirin, from
hiding-place to hiding-place until one died. The unfortunate rebel’s naked body was tied on the back of a mule, taken up a mountainside, and thrown into a ravine. It was clear that by now the Separatist leaders had got cold feet.

The remnants of their eastern army dragged themselves miserably about the mountains throughout the bitter months of winter, chased from pillar to post by enormous bodies of soldiers and carabinieri. By early April their numbers were reduced by sickness and desertion to eight bandits and twelve volunteers. Some of the volunteers suggested calling the whole thing off, but the bandits always refused. While the volunteers stayed with them the bandits could still believe in the myth that they were the soldiers of a defeated army, with at least the possibility, when the end came, of being treated as such. Clinging to this straw of hope, the bandits refused to let the young townsmen out of their sight. Then five
broken-spirited
men laid down their arms, prepared even to brave the fury of the diehards rather than go on. There was a moment when the bandits surrounded them, guns in hand, and their lives seemed to hang by a thread, and then the remaining seven volunteers joined in and persuaded the bandits to let them go.

And now all contact with the headquarters of the movement in Palermo was broken. Always before, in the months of hardship spent wandering through the mountains, the handful of Separatists had been occasionally revived by a message from their chiefs assuring them that their sufferings would soon be at an end, that help was coming, that new insurrections would be announced at any moment, and that in the west Giuliano’s guerilla band had the army and the police at its mercy. But now they were encased in silence. The cold weeping mists of winter in the Sicilian mountains were behind them, spring – compressed into a single month – had come and was nearly gone, and not far ahead a burning and atrocious summer threatened. By the end of the month the remaining volunteers slipped quietly away, leaving the bandits as they had always dreaded they would be left – alone in the mountains. By the end of that year, all but two were dead.

Meanwhile, from the wings, Don Calogero Vizzini had been watching the comedy. Of the tiny handful of those who manipulated the Separatist movement from behind the scenes, he was probably the first to lose confidence in Separatism. Close as he was to the secret counsels of the Allies, this supreme realist must have realised that the Americans and the British had lost interest in this sickly political infant, and that without their succour it would never survive. It was becoming clear, also, that with Separatism gone by the board, the political party of the Right that stood the best chance in the battles ahead was the Christian Democrats, now vigorously supported by the Catholic Church. Preparing himself for a political conversion, Don Calò saw no reason to prolong the Separatists’ agony. The trifling fact that he himself was deeply compromised with them, and with what were seen at that time as their crimes, hardly troubled him in view of his intimate friendship with Messana. Now, to cement his friendship with the Chief of Police, Don Calò betrayed to him the Separatists’ plan of action for western Sicily, where, as arranged, Giuliano was engaged in attacking the carabinieri barracks. Nothing was farther from Don Calò’s intention than to bring about Giuliano’s annihilation, but he preferred him, the way things had gone, to be kept in check. When, therefore, Giuliano next attacked a police-station, he found that he was expected, and suffered a sharp reverse.

Following Don Calò’s furtive abandonment of their cause, the dukes and barons flocked back like prodigal sons to make their peace with the Italian Government. If nothing else, the faked-up popular revolt,
nine-tenths
of which had been banditry, had succeeded as a piece of blackmail. Meanwhile the storm clouds of real rebellion had gathered and muttered on the horizon. At Lentini and at Carletini infuriated peasants broke into the granaries of the feudal estates where corn was being hoarded against a rise in prices, and carried it away. The time had clearly arrived for conciliation and the peace of compromise.

In the negotiations that followed, the principle naturally enough was that the leading figures of the Separatist movement were to go scot-free. Writing to the Italian Premier, De Gasperi, the carabinieri commanding officer in Sicily, General Branca, said of such of the leaders as Tasca and
Don Calò Vizzini: ‘There is no evidence of their direct participation in the organisation of armed bands, and certainly insufficient proof to warrant their arrest.’ De Gasperi laid down the policy to be followed in a letter to his high commissioner. Everything possible was to be done to restore normality in Sicily. He was to show ‘benevolent discrimination in the case of those who had been misled by others and who now wished to draw back from the dangerous position in which they found themselves.’ However, it was clear that somebody had to pay the penalty for the loss of life and property, so common malefactors who had exploited the
emergency
to commit crimes were to be prosecuted with the utmost rigour of the law. It was hastily agreed that Sicily should be granted autonomy within the framework of the Italian State. The Central Government recognised the very special social structure of the island. In other words, there would be no land reforms pressed through over the heads of the feudal landowners. To sum up, the barons were given almost everything they had almost had to fight to get. In return, they believed themselves able to guarantee that Sicily would remain a perpetual reservoir of voters for the Right.

Against this background of fraternal hugs, misty-eyed reconciliation, and the popping of champagne corks in honour of the new autonomous Sicily, Giuliano, Colonel of the Separatist Army, still carried on what was now a meaningless private war. His coups were increasingly audacious, bloody and successful. He blew up carabinieri barracks, massacred soldiers and policemen from ambush, disrupted all traffic by road or rail in western Sicily, and was even almost successful in an attempt to take over the Palermo radio station. Until May 1946, when Sicilian autonomy was officially announced, he managed to see himself as a soldier
legitimately
killing the enemy. But with the declaration of autonomy and the turning of the Separatist barons’ backs on their unruly past, he was a criminal once again. There was to be no amnesty for Giuliano, and the violences he had been induced to commit as a result of his association with the Separatists enormously diminished any hope he may have had of eventual rehabilitation.

But even as a bandit there was still a use to be found for Giuliano’s
services. De Gasperi, the Premier, had ordered that normality should be restored in Sicily without delay, but the men in his service on the spot, the army and police chiefs, asked themselves how the head of the government supposed that his orders could be carried out, with the thirty armed bands still at large, and – with the exception of the Niscemesi, who had borne the brunt of the campaign against Gallo at San Mauro – still as active as ever.

The problem was solved with brilliant economy by Don Calò himself, who, having facilitated and come to terms with the Allied occupation of his country in such a way that western Sicily at least was spared from becoming a battlefield, now took it upon himself to tidy up the litter of the war’s aftermath.

A certain Cavalier Santo Fleres, a dependent of Don Calò’s and head of the Mafia ‘family’ of Partinico – a man who had grown so fat in his latter years that he could walk only with the aid of a couple of lesser men of respect propping him up on each side – met Giuliano and put a proposition to him. Giuliano was to persuade the electorate in the area under his control to vote Christian Democrat, and he was to go to work immediately to eliminate all the rival bands within his reach. In return, the Mafia would use its influence through its tame representatives in Parliament to obtain a pardon for him and his men. By this time the Honoured Society felt itself strong enough to add a stipulation: Giuliano was to cease his depredations in country areas and leave landowners alone. In future his tribute-raising activities were to be confined to the towns.

Giuliano went to work with speed and silence. After the months and years of half-hearted footslogging across the mountains by thousands of soldiers and carabinieri, the huge encirclements that closed in on nothing, the massive cannonadings that claimed no victims, what now happened was murder reduced to clean surgery. Working in unholy trinity, Inspector-General of Public Security Messana, Don Calò and Giuliano not only cleaned up the country but deftly removed most of the unpleasant traces of what had happened.

It was a task undertaken in traditional Sicilian fashion without
publicity. A handful of the condemned bandits actually met their deaths, gun in hand, in the open, but in nearly all cases they were the victims of cold-blooded betrayals by those whom they believed to be their friends. Don Calò suspended the code of
omertà
and death made its approach in many unexpected disguises. It was in the changed smile of the mistress waiting to signal from the window of a room where a worn-out fugitive sprawled on the bed, and in the hand clasp that become a grip from which a man could not tear himself free, while a knife struck down from behind. A new gun, the gift of an old friend, exploded in a man’s face the first time he tried it. A car crashed mysteriously into a wall, killing its driver, when the steering unaccountably failed. One simple-minded swashbuckler, grateful to receive an invitation to the house of a mafioso, was drugged with luminal tablets dropped into his wine, then carried outside and shot. Bandits were induced to come out of hiding by faked appeals from their families, or by promises that clandestine emigration had been arranged, and were then mown down from ambush. The Mafia showed no loyalty or fair play to the ‘trash’. All that counted was expediency. What had to be done was best got over with quickly.