Honoured Society (21 page)

T
HE MAFIA
flourished exceedingly, but slowly it was changing its face. A great number of mafiosi American gangsters had been deprived of their citizenship and sent back to Sicily, where they immediately assumed leading positions in the Mafia hierarchy of the island. There was little about these spectacular and exuberant deportees that recalled the
old-fashioned
man of respect, but their influence over a new generation of Mafia novitiates was irresistible. The new island recruits to the Honoured Society were the product of war devastation, of hunger and the universal petty criminality of the black market, and of the grim anarchy of the postwar years, and they were devoid of illusion or sentiment. These young men in their bright shirts and loud ties who killed for a fixed rate of two hundred thousand lire (£130), totally lacked the capacity for
self-deception
so marked in men of the calibre of Don Calò Vizzini.

Traditionally the Mafia had lived off the scrawny monopolies based upon scarcity. It held back the land so as to create huge reservoirs of cheap labour. Rivers in their winter spate were allowed to empty into the sea – precious water that could have been dammed back and that would have transfigured a countryside, but would have damaged the interests of a few water monopolists. The mind of the old Mafia had been formed in a feudal past when there was not enough to go round, and it could never free itself from its philosophy of controlled dearth. Now it was opposed by an expansive and capitalistic young Mafia that had no patience with restrictive practices. The old Mafia vetoed dams because a hundred sleepy old villains made a fat living from water pumped up from artesian wells, but the new Mafia wanted them because of the huge profits to be made out of the contracts involved in their construction. For the same reason they wanted modern roads, bridges, transport systems, urban development and industrial expansion of any kind. Psychologically, Don
Calò Vizzini and his followers were still living in the eighteenth century – when not in the Bronze Age itself – whereas the cousins just back from Buffalo, New York or Kansas City were emphatically men of our times.

A clash was inevitable, and the deadly war that broke out between the exponents of the rival ideologies was epitomised by the happenings at Corleone. In this unhappy town where, as Dolci discovered, killing a man made no more impression than killing a goat, the sinister Dr Michele Navarra, head of the old Mafia, faced his young rival, Luciano Liggio, murderer of the trade union leader, Placido Rizzotto. With Dr Navarra in control in Corleone, nothing could change. A project had been under consideration for building a dam, but Navarra, the
hidebound
traditionalist, would not hear of it, and as he stood between Liggio and a huge fortune to be squeezed out of contractors, Liggio simply killed him. Unfortunately for that tormented population of Corleone, the numbers on both sides were about equal, so the struggle went on – and does to this day – with hardly a month going by without the news of some fresh massacre as the factions of conservatism and progress dismember each other.

In Palermo itself, the issue was less clean-cut between the several ‘families’ of the various districts of the market and of the port, but the results were the same. Violent death became a commonplace, and the city’s homicide rate soon rose to be the highest in the world – exceeding that of the whole of Lombardy in the north, a province which contains all the great industrial towns of Italy. In the face of this bloody experience, the civil population maintained a stubborn reticence. On one occasion the police managed to cordon off the whole of a busy street after a killing, and every single person was questioned without even one admitting to having heard a shot. In another instance a passer-by took to his heels when the shooting started and had practically stumbled over a corpse when a policeman stopped him. Not only did he deny having noticed the body, lying practically between his feet, but while admitting to having heard alarming sounds, said he attributed them to thunder, and was running to avoid being caught in a storm.

These maladjustments and stresses within the Honoured Society’s
fabric were aggravated by the sudden death of that conciliatory genius, Don Calò, who had done so much in the cause of unity among the men of respect. Like so many mafiosi of the old school who were inclined to overeat and took little exercise, he had become increasingly sluggish and adipose in his declining years, and had suffered from a series of minor heart attacks. His end came one day while travelling home to Villalba by car. He asked to be carried out so that he could lie down in a more comfortable position on the road verge. A few minutes later he died peacefully, his last recorded words being, ‘How beautiful life is!’ When he lay in state, politicians, eminent clerics, and the heads of all the Mafia ‘families’ came to pay their respects, and there were ritual cries of wonderment at the delicacy of the fragrance the body was supposed to have exuded – ‘even in death he’s perfumed!’ And just as in 1909 Don Calò had stood by the bier of Don Pietro of Camporeale and taken the cord of the black flag covering the coffin in his left hand so that the powerful influence of the dead capo-Mafia could flow into his body, now Don Calò’s successor did the same. His memorial tablet in the church at Villalba says that he was chaste, temperate, forbearing, tireless in his defence of the weak, and that above all he was a gentleman. The nostalgic tributes of the hundreds of journalists who composed his obituaries went even further. One distinguished writer, speaking for them all, summed up: ‘In any society a category of persons must exist capable of adjusting situations that become too complicated … Simply by picking up a telephone, he could reach the Cardinal, the Prefect, the General, the President of the Region, the Mayor, or any deputy. Don Calò himself remained aloof and inaccessible, like a samurai or a German
field-marshal
in the exercise of his functions.’

In the political field – even after the withdrawal of Don Calò’s mesmeric influence from the Sicilian scene – things were going well for the Honoured Society. On April 10th, 1948, a conference of the heads of the Mafia of all Sicily had been held at a landowner’s seaside villa just outside Palermo, and following this the order was given for all-out support for the Christian Democrats. After the meeting some fifty cars departed, heading for all parts of the island and carrying supplies of the
Party’s emblem – a cross on a shield – for distribution among the Society’s affiliates.

But comforting as it might have been to have the assurance that henceforward Sicilian voters would return to the disciplined frame of mind of old, when the time came to go the polls, it went against the grain of some Demochristian politicians to have to give what was expected of them in return. Among these was Alessi, President of the Regional Assembly. Although Alessi was a firm friend and admirer of Don Calò, and had once described the Mafia as Sicilian folklore – ‘a matter of local colour’ – the new arrangement was too much for his stomach, and he resigned. There followed seven years’ rule by the Right Wing of the party, abetted by the Mafia with its authoritarian tactics. Not only was any prominent trade union leader slaughtered in this period, but even Demochristian politicians who stood for seats for which the Mafia wished to put forward its own candidate were resolutely eliminated by the double blast from the barrels of the
lupara
. All these numerous crimes went unpunished. The prize was control of the Regional Assembly and of the City Councils – as glittering an
el dorado
as the Spanish
Conquistadors
of the New World had ever dreamed of.

It was the men of the new Mafia who were to possess themselves of this treasure. The city of Palermo was entering a phase of huge postwar expansion, and all that was necessary to become a multimillionaire almost overnight was to know in advance – even better, to
decide
– just where the new suburbs were to be built, and then buy up the land. Instances have been quoted when land bought at sixty lire (9
d
.) per square yard became worth thirty thousand lire (£18) per square yard a few months later. Operating at this level, a capo-Mafia could make more in one single devastating coup than Don Calò had scraped together in five years of rigging the black market in olive oil, and more than the man who cornered the water supplies in a parched countryside could hope to extort in a lifetime. There were rich pickings, too, for the lower-grade mafioso in the city’s modernisation. A man not yet big enough to pull strings at the City Hall might simply walk up to the proprietor of some half-finished block of apartments, or garage, or cinema, and say, ‘I’ve
decided to go into business with you. I’ll pay for my shares out of salary – say half a million a week. I can save you money. You pay your contractors too much. They’ll work for half the price for me.’ Refusal, the man approached with this proposition knew, would almost certainly be punished by an explosion that might bring half the building down. The mafioso moved in.

Second only to the racket in land and building development as a source of spectacular profit was the traffic in drugs. Heroin, procured in the Middle East – principally the Lebanon – was shipped with reasonable security to Sicily, where the trickier business of arranging for its passage to the United States was organised. The rewards involved were so immense that a ten-pound parcel smuggled safely through to its final destination meant a small fortune for each man through whose hands it passed. The scale of these operations first became evident in 1958 through a pure accident. A league of Sicilian fishermen had been formed to put down fraudulent fishing by the use of dynamite, and by dragnets having an illegally fine mesh. The league bought its own fast motor-launch, and this, with its crew of sworn maritime police, patrolled likely waters on the lookout for offenders. One night, when just off Palermo, it detected the presence of a suspicious craft, but as soon as the patrol vessel approached with the intention of boarding, it was received with machine-gun fire. The stranger then made off at such a speed that it was quite clear from the power of its engines that it was no ordinary fishing-boat. The Mafia immediately moved in to suppress any possible repercussions of this encounter, and to rule out any possibility of a repetition of the incident. By order of the Customs authorities, the patrol boat was taken out of service, its captain was transferred to northern Italy, two NCOs of the Maritime Guard who made up the crew were also transferred, and a third found it necessary to resign.

Nowadays the traffic in drugs is accepted as commonplace. Everyone knows it goes on, and it is only new and ingenious methods, as they are occasionally brought to light, of concealing the heroin or cocaine on its
way to the United States that excite any interest in the Press. Of these, the most celebrated involved the confection of false oranges out of wax. For some time whenever a shipment was made, every crate of selected oranges contained one of these counterfeits filled by syringe with a hundred grams of heroin. The device is supposed to have been the brainchild of Lucky Luciano – who died in 1962, with a dramatic suddenness that put many Sicilians in mind of the poisoned coffee of the Ucciardone.

For a short time after his homecoming Luciano went into partnership with Don Calò in an enterprise described as a confetti factory, but as this was protected by security measures adequate to an atomic project, it is supposed that the two men may have been engaged in processing locally the raw materials of narcotisation imported in the usual way. Luciano’s other interest – prostitution – had had to be dropped because the white slave traffic was still
infamità
to the authentic Sicilian men of respect. Don Calò is supposed to have asked his partner once how ever he could have allowed himself to get mixed up in such an unpleasant business. Luciano excused himself on racial grounds. Foreign women, to him, were only half-human. He couldn’t imagine them in the guise of Sicilian wives or mothers.

While in the towns the flashy young Americanised mafioso of the new school was making his fortune out of contraband and administrative corruption, the power was slowly slipping through the fingers of the
old-fashioned
man of respect of the feudal estates. The fact was that the peasant had become spiritually broken-winded through a decade of
too-effective
terror. A law had been passed which in theory demolished the estates, as no single proprietor was permitted to retain more than five hundred acres, but it was applied at a snail’s pace, and with endless confusion. It was fifteen years, for example, after the law’s passage – only in September 1963 – that the peasants of the Brontë estate, given to Nelson and his descendants by the contemptible King of Naples, were to receive their first allotment of land. By this time many Sicilian peasants
had lost the capacity for hope, and when emigration offered them a way of escape from what seemed a state of affairs that was never to be remedied, they took it.

Michele Pantaleone, in his book
Mafia e Politica
, describes the incident that perhaps finally broke the will to resist of the peasants in a huge area in central Sicily. A vast roundup of suspected criminals and mafiosi was carried out by a force of four hundred carabinieri and police, in the course of which 182 persons were arrested. Many stolen animals were recovered, and numerous firearms were seized, among them three sawn-off shotguns and a number of cartridges loaded with the special shot traditionally employed in Mafia killings. The peasants showed their eagerness to co-operate with the police and gave so much useful information that peace returned at last to an area where murders had been an almost daily occurrence. ‘In that zone,’ Pantaleone says, ‘the presence of the State had destroyed the myth of the Mafia’s indestructibility – a myth which unfortunately was re-established when all the persons arrested were released for “lack of sufficient proof”. This produced a wave of emigrations to the north, and abroad.’