Honoured Society (24 page)

It began to seem now to some observers that the Honoured Society was fast sliding into a phase of self-destruction, and the impression was
strengthened by the wild savageries perpetrated at the end of June 1963. On the morning of the 29th two bakers on their way to work in the small town of Villabate, near Palermo, noticed smoke coming from an
Alfa-Romeo
car parked outside a garage. Incredibly enough, they did not run for their lives, as they probably would had they known that the garage was the property of the Di Peri family – a notorious dynasty of mafiosi. While one of the bakers sauntered on a few paces, the other went to find the watchman in charge of the garage, and was just returning with him when the car exploded, blowing them both to pieces. The second baker was crippled for life.

Next day, with the police department in a state of rising hysteria, a telephone call was taken at headquarters from Ciaculli – also a few miles from Palermo – to say that another dubious-looking Alfa-Romeo had been found abandoned in a lane. A few minutes later a second call was received. ‘Don’t touch the Alfa-Romeo,’ the caller said, and then rang off. No one would have dreamed of touching the Alfa-Romeo in the ordinary way, but when the squad of policemen and army engineers reached Ciaculli, they were relieved to find that this was not an occasion when they would be expected to risk their lives exploring the intricacies of the wiring of an explosive charge. For once, the bomb – a primitive affair with a fuse – had been left on the car’s back seat, and the fuse had been lighted and had gone out. One of the rear tyres was flat, and that, quite clearly, was why the car had been abandoned. Having removed the bomb from the back seat, somebody then opened the boot, and the real charge exploded. The bomb on the seat had been only a decoy. All seven soldiers and policemen were killed.

Thus had the Mafia played into the hands of the investigatory Commission. Or so it seemed. A wave of arrests began, only equalled before in the days of Mussolini’s Prefect Mori and his celebrated ‘Plan Attila’, and within a few days some three hundred new prisoners had been crammed into the lugubrious cells of Ucciardone. The newspapers published row after row of photographs of the arrested persons, but studying these glowering and unshaven faces, the public began to wonder just what was happening. Nobody seemed to have heard of most
of these men, and people studied these almost daily rogues’ galleries in vain for any appearance of a politician-manipulating, cocktail-sipping capo-Mafia of the La Barbera type. These faces were those of the foredoomed, half-demented, gallows-fodder of François Villon – ‘rags’, as the Sicilians call them. A confident rumour spread abroad that all the mafiosi who mattered were ‘on holiday in Switzerland, and that a
four-star
hotel in Lugano was full of them’.

And then suddenly the public mood veered round towards hope, for once again peace returned to Palermo – and now, too, to the confounding of the cynics, the big names began to appear in the headlines: Di Peri, Passalacqua, Nicoletti. ‘Zu Tanu’ Filippone was arrested – an
octogenarian
man of respect of the highest rank. When Zu Tanu was approached by a subordinate the man bent to kiss his ring, and if he only had a foot on one of the lower rungs in the organisation, he actually knelt. Zu Tanu was a chronic asthmatic, and it was said of him that the sound of his laborious breathing was as comforting to his followers as that of the gentle pounding of the surf to a fisherman. Hearing that a warrant had been issued for his arrest, Zu Tanu disappeared. He was found hiding in a lavatory, and all the newspapers published pictures of him, a mountainous patriarch with a slightly oriental cast of features, like one of the old Chinese gods of good fortune caught in an unguarded moment of ill-humour. It was generally agreed that at last the police were doing their job.

The trial of the thirty mafiosi of Tommaso Natale was to be the
proving-ground
of the bright new millennium to be ushered in by the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry into the Activities of the Mafia, which in September 1963 presented its first proposals for anti-Mafia laws for the approbation of the Senate in Rome. By this time this case – one of the most publicised and closely followed of the century – had for several months been passing through its preliminary stages. Much of its fame, which had spread beyond the confines of Sicily, was due to the
circumstance
that a woman, Rosa Messina, who had lost her husband and two
sons in Mafia killings, had dared to break with the tradition of
omertà
and had told the magistrates all she knew. Her courage had been acclaimed in the Press of five continents, and she had been photographed over and over again in her widow’s weeds, her face ravaged by grief, as she called down vengeance on those who had bereaved her of her family. And what was more to the purpose, thirty mafiosi, charged with a total of nine murders, were to appear in dock as the result of her denunciations. Here, then, the moment had clearly come for the trial of strength between a renascent and invigorated justice and a seemingly enfeebled Mafia.

Tommaso Natale is a mountain village only fifteen minutes by bus from Palermo, and its inhabitants are the inheritors of a parsimonious land supporting a few olive trees and a scraggy miscellany of animals. In these primitive places where water and pasture and fertile earth are precious, strong families arise, and in the end establish some sort of squatters’ rights to the use of a well, or to the pasturing of sheep on a mountainside. Where the central authority is able to impose little
restraint
, they frequently punish infringement of their privileges with death, so that the blood feud winds intricately, like a scarlet thread, through the brief moment of their history. There are a hundred places on the edges of the deserts of Africa and Asia where a comparable situation exists. The mafiosi of Tommaso Natale are Bedouins in double-breasted suits and gaudy pullovers, with nomad faces and eyes still screwed up from searching the depths of hallucinatory landscapes for their straying beasts. Without realising it, they have killed each other as far back as anybody can remember, and still kill each other, not so much out of bloodthirsty sentiment, but from economic necessity. There has never been enough to go round, so the vendetta becomes a device for keeping down the population.

By the time the new sequence of murders began, a few droplets of the industrial prosperity of Palermo had spilled over into these outlying regions. Now, with an impudent travesty of affluence, the men of the strong families drove about in worn-out Fiat cars instead of riding their mules, but nothing in their minds had changed. Scorn, previously demonstrated by stealing a man’s cow and then depositing its horns and
hooves outside his door, was now translated into the slashing of tyres, or setting light to a car. The lesser families, the plebeians of wrath who were excluded from participation in the Mafia’s vengeance, still set about an enemy’s ruin by getting possession of his photograph and placing on it a lamb’s heart stuck through with skewers.

Francesco Riccobono was the head of one of the strong families, and he used his official position as forest guard to keep his neighbours’ sheep off the best grazing sites in the mountains. He was a village Esau, a huge, hairy fellow with a knack of improvising boisterous and bawdy verse with which he lampooned his enemies. One day he was found with half his head blown away. His wife, Rosa Messina, went to the police, and they listened and did nothing, so his son, Natale, decided to take the law into his own hands, shouldered his
lupara
, and departed to hunt down the men responsible for his father’s death. Several members of the rival Cracolici family were slaughtered by Natale before the police captured him, and locked him safely away. Now it was the turn of the surviving Cracolicis to counter-attack; Natale’s younger brother disappeared and his decomposed body was found in a crevice a month later.

But in the bookkeeping of the vendetta, accounts still failed to
balance
, and in their determination to see to it that they did, the Cracolici faction ran up against a minor difficulty. Four of the Cracolici clan and their allies had been killed, and there was a shortage of male Riccobonos within reach of the
lupara
or the sub-machine-gun. Francesco Riccobono and one of his sons were dead, two more sons were in prison, and another was a fugitive from justice, hiding out in the mountains somewhere nearby. A further adjustment in the score was made by the murder of Pietro Messina, a close relation of Rosa Messina’s, but this still left a debit balance on the Cracolici side of one life. It was therefore decided that in the absence of any accessible adult male, the
thirteen-year
-old Paolino, youngest of the Riccobono family, should be dispatched to even the accounts.

Pitilessness apart, only patience was required to accomplish this. Local intelligence sources were well aware that young Paolino paid occasional visits in secret to his fugitive brother, so a watch was kept on
the house, and the next time Paolino slipped away along the path to the mountains he was followed and riddled with bullets, just out of sight of the village. Three men took part in this assassination, one of them bearing the baptismal name Crocefisso (Crucifix), commonly given to the child of an exceptionally devout family. On their way home the execution squad caught sight of a youth whom they feared might have heard the shooting, and who had seen and recognised them. He was chased with wild bursts of machine-gun fire, staggering and bleeding from his wounds, all the way back to the final haven of his home.

It was the death of her boy that drove Rosa Messina to do what she did. She went to the police, and to them – and thereafter to the examining magistrate – she gave the voluminous, detailed, and largely verifiable evidence that led to the arrest of the mafiosi. She was supported by Anna Galletti, the widow of Pietro Messina, whose evidence was even more damaging to the Mafia’s cause. Anna Galletti was a native of the northern Italian town of Perugia, and therefore less susceptible to the intimidating climate of a Sicilian village. Both women spoke as freely to the news papermen as they did to the police, and it seemed to those who saw them that they wore their immense sorrow like an armour that not even the deadly hostility of the Mafia could penetrate.

On September 19th at the Assize Court of Palermo, Rosa Messina was called to give evidence against the men she accused of the murder of her husband and her two sons. It was a moment of supreme dramatic suspense, as this was expected to be one of the few cases in the history of Mafia trials when a witness did not retract the evidence given in hot blood, before the Mafia had had time to undermine their will to resist. The usher called Rosa Messina’s name again, but there was silence, followed by a babble of excitement. The accuser did not appear. A reporter tracked her down in Tommaso Natale a few hours later, where, through a door opened only a few inches, she told him that even if the carabinieri came for her she would refuse to testify in court. Anna Galletti, the woman of Perugia, however, did appear. Entering the witness-box, she said in a loud clear voice, which rose almost to a shriek: ‘I live alone at Tommaso Natale. I have four children. Therefore I know
nothing about anything.’ The next week was spent in hearing the fifty witnesses for the defence, who were unanimous in describing the thirty mafiosi, chained together in the dock, but now relaxed and smiling, as ‘decent working men who never gave anybody any trouble’.

But justice, put on its mettle, had not yet admitted defeat, and when all appeared to be lost, it produced an even greater surprise than Rosa Messina had been before her collapse. An inhabitant of Tommaso Natale had been found in a remote gaol who was prepared to confirm all Rosa Messina had said, and to add to it even more conclusive evidence of his own. This man, Simone Mansueto, announced that he had been on the mountainside on the evening of the killing of the Riccobono boy, had heard the gunfire, and had seen the three murderers returning from their bloody errand.

The new champion of the law had written to the President from prison, an ill-spelled and unpunctuated letter which was read out in court: ‘… and therefore I beg Your Excellency to allow me to come and declare all I know this being of the greatest importance and I shall be proud to be able to serve the cause of justice if Your Excellency will allow me to appear before the court …’

The reading of the letter was interrupted by a scream from the man’s wife, present in the public gallery. ‘He’s mad! Anybody who listens to him will go to hell!’

‘There is God in these people,’ Danilo Dolci once said, ‘like the fire beneath the ashes.’ At this moment it looked as though yet another generation might be used up before the flame could break through.

At the time when the Riccobonos and Cracolicis of Tommaso Natale were engaged in the last rabid phase of mutual extermination, a
commission
of experts appointed by the European Parliament in Luxembourg arrived in Sicily. The Commission had come to investigate the island’s economic predicament with a view to reporting on the feasibility of aid by the European Bank. All the members of the Commission were northerners, and the spectacle to these men from France, Belgium and the German Federal Republic of a member nation where the Middle Ages still kept a foothold was novel and disconcerting. The visitors were briefly entertained among the baroque splendours of Palermo, taken on a round of the Greek temples of Agrigento, and then without further ado plunged into the island’s austere hinterland. The harshness of the contrast evoked a heartfelt comment in the
Commission’s
report: ‘Sicily reminds one of a gloomy picture in a gilded frame.’

This penetration of the Sicilian interior – seeming as it did to the visiting specialists something akin to an exploration back into social history – produced a succession of surprises. The report noted the nonexistence of European- style villages. People lived as they had done a thousand years before in small townships, perched for the most part on laboriously accessible hilltops, and to these they returned at nightfall, leaving the countryside deserted. The peasants cultivated tiny holdings, often widely separated, the farthest of them located at huge distances from the town. Thus much of their working lives was taken up in sterile journeyings from one patch to another, and back to their homes. A governmental programme of land reform had set out to rectify this absurdity by building small colonies of houses for agricultural workers in
between the widely spaced towns, and the Commission was invited to inspect several of these. It found that not a single house was inhabited. Observing this phenomenon through northern eyes, the experts drew what was almost certainly a mistaken conclusion. The peasants, they supposed, had rejected the houses because they lacked electricity and water and, as the report put it, were ‘too small to live in, and too large to be buried in’. No one thought fit to explain to them the grim legend of the bandit on every mountain-top who had been there throughout the centuries and might at any moment return.