Honoured Society (14 page)

Men who had been called to protect manorial property from the demands of land-hungry peasants were told that their services were no longer required. ‘Rickets’ Trabona, the brigand who had a legal contract drawn up by which his two infant sons received a half-share in the produce of an estate he ‘protected’, now found himself obliged to hide out in a
pagliaio
straw shelter, and in this he was shot dead in his sleep. The nights of Sicily were full of the stealthy comings and goings of the executioners.

Mafia orders were that none of the bandit leaders, burdened as they were with compromising secrets, were to be taken alive. Obsessed, almost, with security, the men of respect put themselves to trouble to prevent their victims’ identification, and there were hideous discoveries of assortments of corpses charred beyond recognition in country shacks destroyed by fire. Sometimes a carabinieri officer would manage to secure a recognisable body and have himself photographed beside it like a hunter with his trophy, but the dead man had always been dispatched elsewhere, and in circumstances that would have done little credit to the
law. The demoralised and leaderless rank and file of the bands were now rounded up by the police. At the ‘Trial of the Rags’ as it was called, by contemptuous allusion to the prisoners’ quality, two hundred and ninety-two obscure criminals stood in the dock, round which had been built an enormous cage. Among them there was only one notable figure. This was Salvatore Malta, the man who had performed the singular feat of being on the register of the Ucciardone prison while actually at large and engaged in terrorising the peasantry of the Tudia estate. Most of the prisoners received life sentences, but Inspector Messana, Don Calò’s friend and head of Public Security, as well as three other senior police officers, spoke in Malta’s defence and he was acquitted.

This trial marked the end of the period of postwar anarchy. By the end of 1946 order returned to five-sixths of Sicily. Only one band remained, but it was as active, as numerous and as apparently invulnerable as it had ever been. This was the band of Giuliano, and as the retired policemen publish their memoirs and the grains of evidence accumulate over the years, the fantastic reason why becomes plain.

Maresciallo Calandra in charge of the carabinieri of Montelepre tells us that he could have captured Giuliano at the beginning of the bandit’s career
but was not allowed to.
Giuliano, he says, always seemed to know in advance when any attack on his hiding-place was contemplated. Later we read from official Italian sources of Inspector-General Verdiani of the Public Security exchanging an affectionate correspondence with the bandit, and once joining him for an intimate little meal
en famille,
with sweet cakes and wine. Meanwhile, and at a time when carabinieri, public security agents and soldiers were dying in ambuscades staged by the Giuliano band, Pisciotta – Giulano’s second-in-command – was out shopping for silk shirts in Palermo, accompanied by a carabinieri captain. Pisciotta carried in his pocket two genuine police passes, one permitting him to move about freely, and the other to carry arms. One of these bore the signature, whether forged or not, of Mario Scelba, Minister of the Interior.

The fact is that there was no desire whatever to destroy the Giuliano band. On the contrary, the evidence is that it was kept in readiness; an instrument to be used in a final emergency for the performance of a grim task. On May 1st, 1947, Giuliano and his men, having at last received their orders, moved to the attack – not this time on the police, but on a great multitude of peasant holidaymakers. Italian politics have never
recovered
from the effect of the deed that was done that day.

T
O AN OBSERVER
of the Italian – and Sicilian – political scene in the immediate postwar period, a swing to the Left seemed certain as soon as parliamentary democracy could be established. Allied
Intelligence
agencies were surprised, and in some cases disturbed, at the strength and vitality of the emergent Left-wing parties at a moment when, in many places, it was felt necessary to confront the Communist Eastern bloc with an undivided and anti-Communist West.

The Italian drift to the Left was the foreseeable and indeed inevitable reaction from twenty years of government by a clownish dictatorship which had finally succeeded in dragging the nation after it to disaster. The weary disgust of nearly all Italians for the Mussolini régime was extended to embrace those many ex-Fascists, or Fascist collaborators, who now offered themselves under various labels as candidates for democratic election. The only parties harbouring none of these damaged reputations or political turncoats were those of the Left, and many Socialist and Communist leaders could speak of years spent in Fascist prisons in support of their political good faith. In so far as the Left attracted the Italian middle classes, it was because it promised a reversal of everything Fascism had stood for. In the Italian deep south and in Sicily, the
Socialists
’ and Communists’ appeal was based on their promise to assuage the peasants’ centuries-old hunger for the land. Peasants everywhere know little of and care less for the doctrinal concepts of Communism. If they are landless, and if there is uncultivated land within their reach, they will follow whoever shows them how that land can be occupied.

By 1947 the Sicilian peasantry were licking the very dregs of misery. The sparse and wretchedly-paid labour given them on the feudal estates provided hardly enough food to keep body and soul together, and they were mocked by the bitter vision of the weeds growing high on the
uncultivated land that had become theirs by a law which was seemingly never to be put into force. Where they had tried to stand up for their rights, the Mafia or hired bandits had quickly browbeaten them back into submission. Killers had been hired to assassinate their leaders. Occasional mass demonstrations which had been too strong for the Mafia to break up had been dealt with by police riot-squads with tear-gas and machine-guns. It began, in fact, to look as though autonomous Sicily was to be quite indistinguishable from a peasant’s angle from the feudal paradise the Separatist barons had planned for themselves.

Then the Right made a psychological blunder. A referendum was held to decide the fate of King Umberto II, and the Monarchists adopted as their campaigning slogan, ‘Whoever votes Republican votes for the Communists’. The slogan acted as a boomerang, because by this time Don Calò Vizzini himself had become a Republican and a Christian Democrat. Umberto then appealed to the American gangster Nick Gentile, who was erroneously believed by some to have replaced Don Calò as the head of the Honoured Society, and the esteem shown this gangster chieftain by Allied Military Government was exceeded only by that accorded to Don Calò himself. The ex-American capo-Mafia discusses his cosy relationship with the occupation authorities in his autobiography, published in Italy in November 1963. AMGOT, he says, found him indispensable in his home town, Raffadali. ‘One might say that Major Monroe and I formed an administration, a government of the territory.’ Unfortunately the British moved in and took over the whole province, and a British general sent both Gentile and the Major to gaol. But he was soon at liberty again, and this time provided with a more powerful ally, a Colonel Max Brod. It was the Colonel who begged Gentile to exert what he calls his persuasive labours in favour of the royal cause. Gentile agreed, and suggested that the Freemasons be roped in, and in due course he and his friend the Grand Master were received in audience by Umberto. The King asked Gentile for the Mafia’s support ‘for a last glorious victory for the scutcheon of the House of Savoy’. ‘Our talk was carried on in very affectionate terms,’ Gentile writes, ‘and when I told the King that all Sicilians were behind him, he was deeply moved.’
An admiral and a general were ordered to work with him, and we are told of their sincere and single-minded collaboration with this dark captain of the Western underworld.

Yet despite the power of the Mafia, and the secret labours of the service chiefs and the Freemasons, the House of Savoy was to founder, and to the peasants’ enormous astonishment, Umberto seen by them as the patron and ally of the feudal landowner – was – sent packing. The figurehead of an invincible order had been thrown down. Suddenly the peasants understood that there were weaknesses in what they had previously supposed to be the undivided ranks of their betters, and that their position at the bottom of the feudal pyramid was not necessarily preordained. Some of them certainly took the King’s word for it that the Republicans were Communists, and gave the Communists the credit for the demolition of the Royal House. There was some point, after all, in fighting for their rights.

The peasants took heart again. With the exception of Sicily’s
northwestern
corner, where Giuliano still reigned unchallenged in the mountains that look down on Palermo, the bandits were gone. Despite the Mafia bullies and the police who seized on any excuse to intervene that presented itself, the occupation of the uncultivated estates began again. In September 1946 the Prefect of Caltanissetta finally gave in to peasant pressure to enforce the law and signed the document by which five uncultivated estates were handed over, and within the next few weeks fourteen more estates were occupied, cleared of stones and brambles and put under the plough. When in one case a gang of ruffians was hastily organised in an attempt to drive the peasants out, a general strike was called throughout Sicily. At Sciara, when land due for legal expropriation was held back, the peasants thoroughly scared the authorities by arriving on horseback, six thousand strong, to protest at the town hall. To the Sicilian landowners, it must have seemed as though their gloomiest prophecies about the Red tidal wave that would eventually engulf the country if abandoned to irresponsible democracy were about to be fulfilled.

This was the stage-setting for the elections to the Sicilian Regional Parliament which took place on April 20th, 1947. The Separatist and Monarchist Parties had faded out of the picture now, and the real contenders for power were the Christian Democrats – which had absorbed the members of the two defunct parties of the Right – and the Popular Front amalgam of the parties of the Left: Independents, Socialists and Communists. The Christian Democratic Party supported by the Church and by the feudal landowners was considered a certain winner. A strong majority in the Regional Parliament was essential to the landowners at this strategic moment, because once they were in full control of local government, nothing would have been simpler than to neutralise the irksome measures of reform enacted from time to time by the central Italian government in Rome.

The electoral proceedings were conducted in the usual atmosphere of cajolery, intimidation and sheer violence. It was no longer possible, as it had been in 1900, to administer a thorough beating to the elector before allowing him to enter the polling booth, but many and varied were the forms of psychological coercion applied. The Church, more
politically-minded
possibly in Sicily than anywhere else on earth, electioneered in energetic fashion. On the Sunday preceding the voting a sermon was preached, by order, from every pulpit in the country extolling the benefits of Christian Democracy, and warning churchgoers against the atheism, licence and depravity of the state in which the ideals of the Popular Front were allowed to prevail. The usual inducements were held out to those whose votes could be cheaply acquired. To turn to the evidence of Danilo Dolci (
To Feed the Hungry
):

That was the worst risk of all – the risk of losing one’s job in a country in which, as Dolci’s informants told him, most people couldn’t even be sure that the ballot was secret. And there was not only the risk of losing a job that one had, but the fear of never being able to get a job again if one voted for the wrong party. No one in Sicily would ever think of presenting himself for employment without a ‘recommendation’ from either a priest or a politician (in 1963, 35,000 such recommendations were received by a petroleum company at Gela which had advertised eight hundred vacancies). It was unlikely that a recommendation would be forthcoming in the case of a man known to have voted for the Popular Front.

The final guarantee – or so one would have imagined – of a triumph by the Christian Democrats – was that Don Calò, in accordance with the Honoured Society’s tradition of supporting and then endeavouring to control the strongest political party, had ordered all the mafiosi of Sicily to back the party of the landowners and the Church. Popular Front political meetings were outlawed in Mafia territory, and when election day came, gun-slinging thugs hung about the polling stations to remind the voters where they were expected to put their cross. In these circumstances it seemed almost incredible that the Christian Democrats could have been defeated – but defeated they were, and by a substantial majority. At the very moment, in fact, when the feudal landlords and their allies believed that at last they were going to be able to put their house in order, this catastrophe – all the more terrible because so unexpected – confronted them with the spectre of the howling revolutionary mob, and Red ruin.

Seven days later occurred the turning-point in the bandit Giuliano’s criminal career when his brother-in-law, Pasquale Sciortino, reached his headquarters with what seems to have been a long-awaited letter. Several members of the band were present, but Giuliano and the brother-in-law went aside to read the letter, after which it was carefully burned. Giuliano seemed greatly excited by its contents. At the mass trial of the Giuliano band in 1950 for the massacre of the peasants at Portella della Ginestra, the judge said of this letter: ‘That it had some bearing on the crime that was to be committed a few days later by Giuliano and his band, there can be no doubt whatever.’

The judge’s opinion was based on a description of what took place by Giovanni Genovese, given to the examining magistrate at Palermo, and the inevitable conclusion is that the letter did in fact contain the order to carry out the massacre.

It is here that Giuliano’s obsession with liberation from his
predicament
is revealed. The muddled romanticism of the Robin Hood has been driven out by a bitter realism. Giuliano no longer thinks of punishing the Mafia, avenging the poor, or of ruling in a brigands’ cloud-cuckoo-land – a kind of police-free Sicilian Valhalla. What he craves now is simply ‘to go free’ at any price. The sterile liberty of the fugitive is no longer freedom, and the vast, silent amphitheatre of mountains has closed in on him to become a prison cell. Eighteen months before this Giuliano had treated on equal terms with the nobility of the country, who had promised to repay him for his support with high office in the government of a Separatist Sicily. Then, when Giuliano had agreed to assist in refurbishing the lost lustre of kingship, there had been more promises. But despite the bandit’s massive influence with voters at the time of the referendum, the King had gone, and Giuliano still trudged the prison corridors of his empty mountains. Now he dropped his price. All he asked was to be allowed to escape with his men – if the worst came to the worst, even to Brazil. The only political party in a position now to do business with him – or even to pretend to do business – was the Christian Democrats, who were in power in Rome but had suffered their unpredictable setback in the Sicilian elections. Giuliano had already followed Don Calò and the Mafia into Christian
Democracy
racy, and now for the third time a bargain was made, but this time the terms were cruelly high. At the great trial of the bandits held at Viterbo, Pisciotta, Giuliano’s lieutenant, summarised these occult transactions.