Honoured Society (22 page)

The first batches of emigrants to leave Sicily for northern Italy or Western Germany are said to have gone reluctantly, and saw themselves as the victims of an enforced expulsion; but once the movement was under way its character changed. What followed has been called by Italian sociologists a psychological collapse. There was an almost neurotic abandonment of the land. Where land from the estates was in the end made available, in many cases it was not taken up. Between 1951 and 1961, four hundred thousand Sicilians – more than ten per cent of the population – decided to emigrate. The majority of these were males who could expect to find work, and in large areas only old people, women and children were left behind. In the province of Messina women and children now make up eighty-five per cent of the population. For the first time since their creation a thousand years ago, some of the feudal estates – which still comprise twenty per cent of the cultivable surface of Sicily – are without labour; a situation which has compelled one
landowner
at Catolica Eraclea to hand the whole of his land over to the Forestry Commission. Parallel to this flight from the land is a growing process of ‘dis-industrialisation’. Potential investors from the mainland have come to sniff the Sicilian atmosphere and quickly departed. Northern capitalists do not take kindly to the notion of having to pay for ‘protection’ for their enterprises. Thus the so-called miracle of Italy’s economic expansion passed Sicily by. In 1962 the
per capita
income remained by far the lowest of any region – only £130 per annum, as compared with £250 in northern Italy, and £350 for the town of Milan. This figure, of course, included the incomes of relatively affluent city dwellers. A peasant’s income would be very much lower.

The climate for many of those Sicilians that remain is one in which the familiar
omertà
has slowly deepened into a real and paralysing fear, which has finally penetrated the Sicilian subconscious. From this has developed an almost pathological aptitude for suffering in silence, incredibly illustrated in the recent case of a whole community bowing its neck in resignation under the depredations of a handful of mafiosi monks.

It was 1958 before the activities of the Franciscan fathers of
Mazzarino received any publicity, although they had by that time been terrorising the neighbourhood for some years. Bandit monks and mafiosi monks were nothing new to the long-suffering inhabitants of rural Sicily. Time and again one reads of sinister Friar Tucks riding with outlaw bands to waylay travellers or attack farms. At the beginning of the century there had been a pitched battle between the peasants of Santo Stefano and robber monks from the local monastery, and in 1923 a mafioso Benedictine father who was a member of the same monastery beheaded the Abbot on the refectory table. The Abbot was capo-Mafia of the whole valley. Yet again in 1945 at Santo Stefano the Bishop of Agrigento was shot and nearly killed by a mafioso brother, while the Franciscan convent of Mazzarino had in the past sheltered a band of robbers and the monks had shared in the proceeds of their crimes.

What seems so extraordinary to the outsider is that only one man ever stood up to the monks, and even he never seems to have considered going to the authorities. This was Mazzarino’s richest citizen, Angelo Cannada, one of the many – including affluent monks in neighbouring
monasteries – who received letters of extortion, but the only victim who refused to pay up. For this obduracy he paid with his life.

The principal villain in the case was Padre Carmelo, the prior of the convent, who was a personal friend of Cannada’s and had often said mass in the private chapel in the Cannada house. At this time the Prior was approaching his eightieth year, a man of exceedingly fragile appearance but possessed of a sort of macabre, skipping vitality. Padre Carmelo was considered the best preacher in the province, a great quoter in his sermons of the
Divina Commedia
, but off-duty habitually expressing himself in the thieves’-slang of the Mafia. Cannada had received a
succession
of letters demanding ten million lire and ordering him to get in touch with the Franciscans, who would tell him how the money was to be paid. In the end he rang up Padre Carmelo, who came over in a taxi to discuss the matter with him. The old Prior’s story was that the monks had been forced by some mysterious organisation to act as agents for the collection of the money. He advised Cannada to pay up, did his best to make his friend’s flesh creep with an account of the ferocity of the extortioner’s character, and offended Cannada by a blasphemous outburst when Cannada said that he put his trust in God. All the old Prior’s arguments were without avail. Cannada said that nothing would make him pay a single lira. In the end Padre Carmelo went off in a fury. Some days later four masked men called at Cannada’s house, dragged him out and shot him in his own vineyard. Padre Carmelo officiated at the funeral service and preached movingly on the theme of the transience of human satisfactions, including wealth.

Now it was the turn of Cannada’s widow to receive the usual
threatening
letters, and the inevitable visit from Padre Carmelo. The widow’s brother was present at this meeting when ten million lire was again demanded, and he made a counter-offer of a hundred thousand lire. This produced the sarcastic suggestion from Padre Carmelo that he should keep it to buy cigarettes. However, on behalf of the extortioners he agreed to drop the asking price to three million. As a friend of the family, Padre Carmelo knew something of the Cannadas’ financial background, and he suggested to the widow that she should sell a piece of her property which
he valued at seven million. If the demand were not met, he warned her that some tragic fate was likely to overtake her only son. At this point the terrified woman agreed to hand over a million lire, and Padre Carmelo, who appears to have entered with relish into the mechanics of extortion, warned her to see to it that she kept no record of the numbers of the banknotes.

Thereafter the monks continued to terrorise the cowed citizenry of Mazzarino for two full years. A witness at the preliminary hearing of their trial described the fear, almost amounting to panic, provoked by the mere appearance of Franciscans in the streets of the town. A new police chief, Maresciallo Di Stefano, called in to investigate the killing of Cannada, ran up immediately against the usual barrier of silence. Isolated as he was from the population, an occasional rumour reached him of the goings-on at the convent, and finally induced him to investigate the monks’ financial background. The result of this enquiry produced some surprises. The Franciscans of Mazzarino depended for their revenue on public charity, on the produce of a small orchard, and, he discovered, on regular but smallish subscriptions they received from political sources for persuading the citizens of Mazzarino to vote Christian Democrat – which they did, almost to a man. Despite what was in theory a somewhat meagre income, all the monks he was investigating turned out to be lira millionaires, having large sums of money held in their original lay names in banking accounts dispersed about the country.

Anonymous letters began to reach the Maresciallo, and some of these contained fascinating accounts of the nature of monastic life at Mazzarino. Some of the monks carried guns. One in particular, Padre Guglielmo, delighted in blazing away at night with a heavy automatic from the window of his cell ‘at the stars’. One anonymous letter was probably from a domestic employed in the monastery, because it mentioned a monk who had been expelled after a row with Padre Carmelo, the old Prior, and who was seen to pack a sub-machine-gun away in his luggage before departing. The fathers were keen
businessmen
, and bought and sold property, loaned money at high interest, and in one case dealt in pigs. Vows of chastity received scant attention at
Mazzarino. For years, Di Stefano discovered, women had been visiting the monastery at night, disguised in Franciscan habits. The monks were interested in pornography, too, and had established a network of correspondents with whom they exchanged obscene letters. A girl working as a servant at a school in Gela was arrested, according to Di Stefano’s testimony, with enough such material in her possession furnished by the monks to constitute an anthology of pornographic literature. These revelations of life in a religious establishment, ventilated at the preliminary hearing, were debarred by a pact established between prosecution and defence when the case came up before the assize court.

It was two years before Di Stefano could be quite certain that the monks were carrying on an extortion racket, but even then the certainty that no witnesses could be induced to come forward prevented him from taking action. Di Stefano knew that it would have been fatal to move without overwhelming proof. The situation almost resolved itself when a member of the urban police force, who may well have been acting as a spy for the carabinieri, was ambushed and shot while prowling in the vicinity of the monastery. The three attackers took to their heels, and one of them in his panic dropped his gun. The gun was recognised, and the three men arrested. They confessed not only to the attack on the policeman, but also to the murder of Cannada, but said that they had acted under the domination of the monks’ gardener, Carmine Lo Bartolo. The news of his accomplices’ arrest reached Lo Bartolo before the police arrived. He disappeared, and it has since been proved that the monks managed to conceal him for several weeks, moving him from monastery to monastery, until he was smuggled away to Genoa, where the police finally picked him up.

Lo Bartolo’s arrest caused great excitement back in Mazzarino, where his criminal association with the monks had been a matter of common knowledge for years, and sensational revelations were expected. Nothing of this came to pass, for Lo Bartolo’s mouth was quickly sealed by death. Within hours of his arrival in Sicily, he was found hanged in his cell of the Caltanissetta gaol. Few Sicilians were surprised when an autopsy was refused and Lo Bartolo’s brother was denied permission to see the body.
Di Stefano, however, now took the bit in his teeth. He searched the monastery and found the typewriter with which he was able to prove the letters of extortion had been written. Padre Carmelo and three other fathers were arrested and brought to trial.

At the preliminary hearing the issue was quite simple. The Franciscans blandly admitted to all charges except complicity in the murder of Cannada, but claimed, like the three men already under arrest, to have been the helpless tools of their gardener, Lo Bartolo. A witness cast some doubt on this picture of the monastery’s enslavement to an illiterate labourer by recalling a conversation he had had with Padre Carmelo. He had asked the Prior how he got on with Lo Bartolo, who seems to have been a Caliban-like creature. Replying in Mafia jargon of quite untranslatable vulgarity, the formidable old man had said something like: ‘He responds well to a good kick up the backside.’ Among the monks’ victims had been the Father Superior of the Capucines of Syracusa, who was despoiled to the tune of 600,000 lire – a sum which he was later accused of abstracting from the monastery’s funds. Apart from the typed letters of extortion, the Franciscans of Mazzarino had habitually employed the confessional box to transmit their threats, and Padre Carmelo usually suggested that it would be convenient for payment to be made in church.

In March 1962 the monks were brought to trial, and for several weeks the Assizes at Messina offered a spectacle of entrancement and domination. What staggered the Press correspondents who attended from the Italian mainland was not so much that it was soon clear that the monks would slip through the fingers of justice – they had been warned that this was to be expected in such trials held in Sicily – but the servility and obsequiousness of the public’s attitude towards them. The atmosphere in court was fevered and ecstatic, and old Padre Carmelo acknowledged the applause that greeted his appearance by tracing the sign of the cross with a diaphanous hand. The carabinieri who escorted the fathers into the dock were cordiality and respect itself. Benefit of Clergy had seen to it that the monks were relieved of the ignominy of appearing in chains, although this privilege was not extended to the
three members of the laity who were on trial at the same time. It had not been considered necessary to suspend Padre Carmelo and his fellow defendants from the exercise of their sacerdotal functions, and while awaiting trial at the Assizes, they had continued to say mass and hear confessions. The corridors and antechambers of the courthouse at Messina were full of prominent ecclesiastics who seemed on good terms with the fathers, and whose presence was therefore taken to mean that the Church was expressing its solidarity with the accused men. Maestro Francesco Carnelutti, one of Italy’s most famous counsels, had announced that he would conduct Padre Carmelo’s defence without charge. His every sally in court was greeted with a rumble of
sotto voce
approbation which the judges were unable to suppress, and outside the courtroom members of the public struggled for the privilege of pressing the famous advocate’s hand and thanking him for the generosity of his action.

Later, an unnamed witness for the prosecution gave a newspaper some idea of what it felt like to stand up and give evidence against the monks in this atmosphere. He was unnerved by the concentrated hostility of which he was the target, and made almost to feel that he was a perjurer. He found that he could not stop trembling while giving evidence, and in the end, was hardly able to produce his words. When he left the court, all backs were turned as he passed. Disapproval was expressed in other ways, too. Another prosecution witness was found half-dead with a hand cut off. When the prosecution suggested that this had been an act of vengeance, counsel for the defence waved the allegation aside and supposed that the man had cut his hand off himself. The court did not seem to find this theory especially surprising.  

At an early stage in the trial the prosecution suffered a body-blow through the refusal of the murdered Cannada’s widow and her brother to give evidence – which necessitated their treatment as hostile witnesses. In conformity with the laws of
omertà
, the three men charged directly with Cannada’s murder blamed it all on the unfortunate Lo Bartolo, and refused to admit that the monks, of whom they spoke with the greatest respect, were in any way involved. A year’s respite had transformed the
monks of Mazzarino from criminals into victims. There was not a whisper of the orgies at the monastery, or of the extorted money spent on debauchery. The secret banking accounts were forgotten. The monks were found not guilty of complicity in the murder of Cannada, and were acquitted on all charges of extortion as having acted under duress. The three lay criminals got thirty years apiece, and when the sentence was read out there were screams from them of ‘assassins’ – directed at whom, nobody could be sure. They clearly had been led to expect milder treatment. Of the trial’s outcome, the Honourable Leone, President of the Sicilian House of Deputies, wrote: ‘This verdict almost upsets the glorious legend of the Little Flowers of St Francis.’