Honoured Society (5 page)

Sicily is not Italy, nor – with the exception of the spas, the palms, and the mimosa of its eastern seaboard – is it even recognisably a
Mediterranean
country. Scenically as well as sociologically, this country is an archaism. The unbroken, limitless monotony of its interior landscapes has survived from Roman antiquity, when a ground-down multitude of slaves produced nothing but corn for export. A sullen mental climate of those days has not been wholly dispersed. By comparison with the Italy of Rome – above all of Naples – Sicily is morose and withdrawn.

Most Sicilians are peasants who live not in the country, but in small towns. There is only one village in the whole island having less than a thousand inhabitants. This phenomenon – unique in the Mediterranean area – is explained by the chronic and ineradicable banditry with which Sicily has been plagued throughout recorded history, and which itself is
an inevitable side-effect of an archaic social system. For this reason, the only isolated houses are the administrative buildings, the granaries, and the warehouses of the great feudal estates – the
latifundia
– which tend to assume a fortress-like character and are defended by armed guards. Much of a peasant’s time is taken up in reaching his work in the morning and in returning at night, and the streets of small Sicilian towns come alive long before dawn as long processions of shrouded figures go through, clip-clopping on their mules, towards the distant fields.
Sometimes
, in periods of seasonal urgency, the peasants live temporarily where they work, in an African-looking straw shelter called a
pagliaio
which serves also as a store for tools. An untouchable caste of petty criminals exists which specialises in robbing
pagliai
, and these are hunted down and slaughtered like animals by the Mafia. The men of respect do not tolerate small-scale unorganised crime. A visitor to the latest motel, built by the Italian petroleum company Agip on the outskirts of Milan, is warned not only to lock his car but to remove every article from its interior. This would be unthinkable in Sicily, where a traveller’s hotel bills are a little higher, but where, whether he realises it or not, he is under Mafia protection.

Sicilians are delivered up from the all-too-brief respite of work to restlessness and boredom. The narrow, shadeless channel of the main street of a small Sicilian town is full of wandering men. They walk together interminably, displaying their thoughts with small, precise hand-movements, as if assembling delicate machinery. This sombre and solemn human current courses sluggishly up and down the street, into the piazza, and out again. The movement is like a torpid circulation of blood through heart and arteries. There is no trace of the corvine affability, of the companionable noisiness of the southern man. This eternal womanless tramping of the streets is conducted in a glum
half-silence
only crashingly interrupted by the bells of the church in the piazza, which is usually as big as a cathedral. A stranger meets stares, and is sometimes followed nostalgically, as if for the momentary distraction of his presence from indestructible time. The chronically unemployed are not only labourers who work on average one hundred days a year,
but a miscellany of the town’s impoverished middle class, whose income is provided in one way or another by the peasant, and who are therefore compelled to share in the peasant’s enforced idleness and lack of prosperity. Pacing up and down in this interminable and frustrated perambulation, they are like bored animals behind invisible bars. The street imprisons them, just as their women are imprisoned in their dim harem quarters behind the shuttered windows. The
headlines
of the newspaper nailed up on the kiosk shout the twentieth century, but the rest of this scene remains the Europe of the Middle Ages.

At the root of the trouble one discovers the extraordinary fact that the feudal system, discarded elsewhere many centuries ago, has managed almost miraculously to survive in this neglected and mountainous corner of the Mediterranean. When the Norman invaders occupied the island, huge corn-growing estates – the largest in antiquity – still survived from Byzantine and Roman times, and the Normans were content to parcel them out without further thought among their followers. Subsequent monarchs regarded Sicily as a colony and ruled from a distance, so that provided the peace was kept and the taxes paid, the barons of Sicily were left to their own devices. Many of these lived outside the country, in Rome or even Paris, and never set foot in their domains. The few who chose to remain in the island were notorious for their detestation of a rustic environment, and preferred to keep to their palaces in Palermo.

Estates were originally administered by all-powerful stewards, who ground the last lira out of the peasants, raised private armies for the defence of their masters’ property, and dealt out their own form of justice in the feudal court. Later the
gabellotto
came on the scene. The Italian word means ‘tax collector’, but the
gabellotto
was more than that. A creeping social indolence had induced the aristocracy to adopt the practice of selling their feudal rights at auction to the highest bidder for a specified number of years. The
gabellotto
was the man who thus bought the lease, and he was usually a member of the Mafia. He in turn
leased out the land to sharecropping tenants, who were responsible to overseers and a manager, and the
gabellotto
hired armed guards to see to it that everyone kept his place. The estate normally consisted of huge fields, dedicated in the main to the raising of cereal crops, while the peasants, for reasons of security, would live, not dispersed about the countryside, but in the nearest village, from which they would be obliged to cover immense distances to reach their daily work.

This was feudalism in its simplest form – a rough-and-ready system adapted to the urgent needs of conquest and domination, but unsuited to a settled society. The feudal lord, as in the eleventh and twelfth centuries in England and Germany, finally gave away everything in return for a cash payment. The artificial prolongation of such an order produced not only extreme hardship but grave inefficiencies that would normally have brought about the decay and disintegration of the system. The
gabellotto
, for example, was not encouraged to interest himself in the improvement of the estate when he could only count on a few years’ tenure – and the same applied to the sharecropper who worked for him. What he did was to negotiate an extortionate contract with the sharecropper, who was then obliged to deal with his day labourer with equal severity. The outcome of this grinding-down process was the endemic banditry of desperate men who had nothing to lose, plus two or three peasant revolts a century of the kind northern Europe has not known for five hundred years.

Don Calogero Vizzini had no fault to find with the feudal system as such; in fact he was to become its greatest exponent and protector in modern Sicily. What he objected to was the fact that a somnolent and, as the Prince of Salina put it, a ‘defenceless’ aristocracy should have any part in its benefits. Previously it had become a function of the Mafia to keep a benevolent eye on the feudal estates and to suppress any of the periodical attempts on the part of the peasants to occupy uncultivated land. Now, under Don Calò’s leadership, the Mafia proposed to shoulder the barons aside. When, therefore, in 1922, the neighbouring Suora Marchesa estate came under the hammer in the usual way, Don Calò was a bidder, and quite naturally the only bidder, since it was obvious that no other
contestant felt like presenting himself at the auction. The estate was knocked down to Don Calò for a derisory figure. The idea quickly spread among the Mafia, and the lease of feudal lands began to fetch a tenth and a twentieth of their normal price. An attempt was made to withdraw lands from the market, but it was hopeless. There was nothing to be done. One or two aristocrats put aside their astral telescopes, bought
themselves
a farmer’s corduroy suit and a pair of top-boots, and appeared on the scene with the intention of organising resistance to this takeover. Within a few days, after they had found a percentage of their grapevines cut down and a few of their livestock with their throats cut, they gave in and went back to their decaying palaces. The Mafia had become the feudal lords of all Sicily.

A further profitable brainwave was Don Calò’s last before the
cataclysmic
advent of Benito Mussolini. In appearance it was a patriotic gesture in favour of the ex-servicemen just returning from the war. There was still a fair amount of uncultivated land about, and Don Calò put forward the idea of forming an agricultural co-operative for the men who had deserved so well of their country. With the government’s drugged assent, and the provision by the government of free land and equipment, the co-operative was founded under the presidency of Don Salvatore – Don Calò’s brother, the parish priest. When a year or two passed and not a single ex-soldier had been given an acre of land and it was evident that the Vizzinis were working the co-operative for their own benefit, yet another scandal exploded. A charge of fraudulent misappropriation was brought against the whole family. Twenty years later, when the Allies arrived, proceedings were still pending and the case was finally dropped. Three other co-operatives got off to a limping start in the Villalba area in the first years of Fascism, but the members were dogged with incessant ill-luck. Their crops were destroyed by mysterious fires, and their animals sickened and died. The co-operatives appeared to many of the conservatives of Villalba like a malevolent challenge to a system of property backed by divine law, and no one was surprised when all three co-operatives failed and Don Calò took over. Don Calò’s
overthrow
of the co-operatives was his last major coup before the
providential arrival of the Allies. In between stretched the lean years of the Mussolini dictatorship.

At first Don Calò found it hard to make up his mind about Mussolini. To the extent that he promised to stop the downhill slide towards socialism, he was obviously a good thing. But when he began to talk about governing with a firm hand, the Mafia chieftain was not so sure. Prudently, but without enthusiasm, Don Calò forked out a handsome subscription for the march on Rome. What actually saved him from the hurricane to come was nothing more nor less than a happy chance. In 1922, before Mussolini was finally in the saddle, the ‘Honoured Society’ sent Don Calò a young man, a
squadrista
who had injudiciously murdered a political opponent, asking Don Calò to look after him until the storm had blown over. This was done, the fugitive being concealed in the Vizzini house. Later, the young man became an undersecretary of state, and when the Mussolini purge against the Mafia was at its height and Don Calò had been sentenced to five years’
confino
, a letter to his grateful ex-protégé was enough to procure his release.

T
HE CLASH
between Mussolini and the Mafia was inevitable, although each side seems to have underestimated the opponent’s strength. Don Calò and the more far-seeing of the Mafia leaders were not the only Sicilians who had thought it advisable to take out an insurance policy by contributing to the Fascist war-chest. The Sicilian nobility also had a
paid-up
share in Mussolini’s revolution, and an anguished chorus of protest against the virtual expropriation of their land was soon heard in Rome.

It was clear enough to Mussolini that the Mafia had always had a vested interest in national weakness and division, and that their support for the revolutionary governments of the past had regularly been followed by a stab in the back. The pattern of obstruction and sabotage seemed about to be repeated. Fascist officials sent down to replace the old corrupt administrators controlled by the Mafia were ignored. Fascist courts trying criminal cases in which members of the Mafia were implicated found it was just as impossible to obtain convictions as it had been for the democratic courts of old. Although the Fascist hierarchs might rub their hands at the sight of a nation marching in step, unity and discipline applied only to the peninsula. In Palermo a member of the Party could be shot dead at midday, in the middle of the crowded Via Maqueda, in the sight of hundreds of people, without a single person being ready to admit to the police that they had even heard the shot. The cudgels-and-
castor-oil
methods the
squadrista
had used so successfully in northern Italy failed in Sicily against the ancient Mafia defence of silence and vengeance. A carabinieri officer reported: ‘Only two kinds of witness exist. The first live in the neighbourhood where a crime has been committed and in no circumstances have ever seen anything, or even heard a shot. The second category are the neighbours of anyone who happens subsequently to be accused of the crime. These have always looked out of their window
when the shot was fired, and have noticed the accused person standing peaceably on his balcony a few yards away.’

Disturbing facts came to light as the first enquiries into Mafia
activities
got under way. It was reported to the Duce that the Mafia had been in complete control of the Sicilian electoral machine, and that the deputies it sent to Parliament spent their time blocking investigations of the Honoured Society’s misdeeds, and specialised in the production of speeches attempting to prove that the Mafia did not exist. At this time the incidence of violent crime was ten times higher in Sicily than in the rest of Italy. The case of the small town of Favara was quoted which had suffered 150 Mafia killings in one year and where the Duce was told only one man in the previous decade had died of natural causes and in old age. More displeasing still to Mussolini, with the visions of imperial grandeur and conquest forming in his mind, was the island’s unpatriotic performance in time of war. Once again, at the beginning of the 1914–18 war, the Mafia had succeeded in spreading the old rumour that conscripts called up and sent to Italy for training were habitually castrated as soon as they got there. Means of evading service had been made available to those who could afford it, and throughout the war years the island swarmed with deserters who were at once protected and exploited by the Mafia.

Mussolini’s anti-Mafia campaign was finally set off by an incident which took place when he visited Sicily in 1924. Having driven through the streets of Palermo, where it was easy enough to stage-manage the display of noisy enthusiasm he had grown accustomed to expect, the Duce suddenly, and to the embarrassment of his retinue, asked to be shown a smaller town in the vicinity. It seemed that at some stage Mussolini had picked up a pamphlet produced for the tourist industry which warmly recommended a visit to Piana dei Greci. This somewhat wretched little township was peopled by the descendants of Albanian refugees from the Turks, who had been given shelter in Sicily, and tourists were often taken there and treated to a programme of folklore by girls dressed in an antiquated Albanian style. It was the only town in Sicily – or in Italy, for that matter – to have a Greek Orthodox Church, with an officiating ‘Pope’ with a long beard, and high, black hat.

There were two drawbacks to the satisfaction of Mussolini’s whim for a Balkan entertainment. The first, and more important, was the security risk involved. By mustering every policeman in Palermo and placing them back to back with loaded rifles at intervals of ten yards all along the Via Maqueda, it had been possible to guarantee the Duce’s safety during his flying visit to the capital. But Piana dei Greci, exotic folk-costumes apart, had a reputation with the police as a hive of peasant unrest and for its participation in an insurrectional movement in the ‘nineties. The second difficulty arose from the fact that the mayor, Don Ciccio Cuccia, who would officially welcome the Head of the Government, was a Mafia potentate, and one who was notorious for an inflamed sense of his own importance. It was seen that only the most delicate handling of this encounter, should it take place, could prevent an ugly clash of personalities.

Don Ciccio Cuccia, a malevolent frog of a man, was famous for the fantastic exploits in which he was involved by his all-devouring ego, and his traditional Mafia passion for ‘winning respect’. The Duce’s visit to Piana dei Greci had been preceded a few years before by one by King Vittorio Emanuele. At a certain moment the King – who is said to have been in a thoroughly bad mood, bored by the Albanian dancing, and even distressed by the wild music of the pipes – found himself being led into the church, which was decorated and lit up and redolent of incense for some unfamiliar Greek Orthodox ceremony just about to begin. His Majesty tried to back out, but was artfully separated from his retinue and manoeuvred towards the font. Here, in spite of his protests, he soon found himself holding a bawling infant, with Don Ciccio at his side, and within a few moments had become godfather to Don Ciccio’s son.

The prestige gained by this confidence trick played on the King – which had been followed automatically by the arrival of the cross of a Cavalier of the Crown of Italy – may have tempted Ciccio Cuccia to risk some sort of self-publicising exploit with Mussolini. On reaching Piana dei Greci, the Duce’s chief of police, who was not at all happy about the security arrangements, suggested that Mussolini should ride in Don Ciccio’s car for his tour of the town. The Duce took his seat at the Mayor’s
side and his motorcycle escort lined up on both sides of the car. At this point Don Ciccio asked in a loud voice, ‘Excuse me, Captain, but why all the coppers? Nothing to worry about so long as you’re with me. I’m the one who gives the orders round here!’ It was then that the Duce at last realised that things had reached such a pass in Sicily that even his own chief of police had thought it advisable to place him, the Head of the Government, under Mafia protection.

Mussolini refused Don Ciccio’s suggestion that he should dispense with his escort – a ‘lack of respect’ which Ciccio Cuccia punished to his own undoing by ordering the town piazza to be emptied when Mussolini made his speech. But where the King had been sulky, Mussolini was grim. As they stood on the balcony of the town hall together, Don Ciccio placed an arm on the Duce’s sleeve, bared a row of black fangs, and signalled to the photographers to expose their plates. When Mussolini began his harangue he found himself addressing a group of about twenty village idiots, one-legged beggars, bootblacks, and lottery-ticket sellers specially picked by Don Ciccio to form an audience. The fearful jutting of the Dictator’s jaw had not yet become a familiar danger-sign, so Don Ciccio had no warning of what was in store for him. It is unlikely that he even bothered to listen to what Mussolini had to say, although he would have been wiser to have done so, because the Duce’s speech amounted to a declaration of war on the Mafia. Weeks later he repeated in substance in the Fascist Parliament what he had said at Piana dei Greci, but by that time Don Ciccio was already in prison.

Of all the bombastic and beribboned figures that strutted on to the Italian stage in the first years of Fascism, none outdid the Prefect Mori, who was given the task of liquidating the Mafia, in terms of pathological delusions of grandeur.

Cesare Mori had come up in thirty years from being a policeman on a beat to the office of Chief of Police, and second only in importance in the hierarchy to the Duce himself. For all that, he remained at heart a simple policeman, who rated success in an operation such as this purely on the
basis of the number of arrests he could make.

The Prefect had been present on the fateful occasion of Mussolini’s discomfiture at Piana dei Greci, had been physically pushed aside by the preposterous Don Ciccio, and had heard himself referred to as a
sbirro
, a term of opprobrium sometimes applied to policemen in Sicily and roughly the equivalent of the French
vache
.

Mori, a man with a strong sense of the theatre, gave himself the pleasure of carrying out Don Ciccio’s arrest in person, calling on him one day with a pressing invitation to cocktails at what turned out to be the Ucciardone prison. Thereafter, armed with the Duce’s
carte blanche,
he put into operation what he sometimes jokingly called his ‘Plan Attila’. Unimpeded by the legal hair-splittings of democratic justice, Mori arrested suspects by the thousand. Victims of hearsay and denunciation were put in chains and sent off by the shipload to the penal islands. The Mori terror provided a never-equalled opportunity for the settling of old personal feuds and for the elimination of rivals in business and in love. In so far as the Fascist courts administered justice at all it was rough, muddled and perfunctory, and there were many instances of two or even three persons being condemned and imprisoned for the same crime. Mori’s descent on a village sometimes meant the arrest and removal of the entire male population, and it was discovered that the only hope of mollifying him when a visit was expected was to erect a triumphal arch bearing the words
AVE CAESAR.

The investigating methods favoured by the Prefect were those
employed
by the Inquisition, and, although illegal for over a century, still practised in secret in the dungeons of the police. Mori is credited with the re-introduction of the
cassetta
, employed in hundreds if not thousands of cases, to extort confessions – both in his day and much later. The
cassetta
was no more than a box, roughly three feet long by two feet wide and eighteen inches deep, and in essence formed a platform to which a human body could be secured while the torturer went to work. As with all such barbarities practised on a large scale, a standardised routine had developed, and had in fact been laid down by an ancient Inquisitional manual for the use of interrogators. Brine having first been poured over
the victim’s naked torso, he was scourged; it having been found that this system was more painful yet left fewer marks of violence than a normal flogging. If flogging did not produce a confession, the next stages were the forcing into the victim’s stomach of huge quantities of salt water, the removal of his fingernails, the removal of strips of skin, and the twisting and crushing of the genitals. The Inquisition had been dealing with dissenters in this way since the days of the Albigenses. Mori merely added a modern touch to the medieval procedure by introducing an
electric-shocking
machine into the sequence of torment. The
cassetta
often maimed for life.

Mori was the subject of extravagant whims. Once, having heard that many Mafia victims had been killed by shots fired from ambush from behind walls, he ordered every wall in Sicily to be reduced to three feet in height within twenty-four hours. He was capable of striking illogicalities, making it an offence punishable with a long term of imprisonment for a man to carry a stabbing or cutting weapon, but allowing herdsmen, as they had always done, to continue to arm themselves with a weapon like a tomahawk. An epidemic followed of violent deaths caused by this instrument.

In 1927 Mussolini assembled the Fascist Parliament to announce the end of his war against the Mafia. Holding up Mori’s arm, and to the tempestuous applause (as it was always called) of his deputies, Mussolini referred to his Prefect as the ‘incarnation of the pure white flame of Fascist justice’. The work with the butcher’s cleaver in Sicily became ‘heroic surgery, performed with a courageous scalpel’. In his enormously prolonged and detailed report of the surgical process it was noticed that the Duce dwelt with particular relish on operations in Piana dei Greci, and with the fate of ‘that ineffable Mayor who always took advantage of solemn occasions to have himself photographed’. It was clear that even after three years, Don Ciccio’s blow to his vanity still rankled. With
well-trained
enthusiasm the Press agreed with Mussolini’s optimistic forecast for Sicily’s future. As the
Resto del Carlino
put it (after a hyperbolical passage of the kind much admired at the time which claimed that ‘flowers miraculously bloomed wherever Mori’s caravan passed’): ‘The
extirpation of the Mafia will open the way to the rise of a middle class, based on the modern technical development of Sicily, which feudalism, served by organised crime and its network of political corruption, has always debarred.’

But the effect of the Mori repression could only be temporary, as at best it scythed the heads off a crop of weeds when what was needed was a change in the soil and climate that produced the crop. All the more astute members of the Mafia – professional men, who were largely lawyers or doctors – were clever enough to put themselves beyond Mori’s reach by joining the Fascist Party. Other men of influence were allowed to emigrate to the United States; still others to Tunisia – in this case in return for an engagement to stir up what trouble they could for the French in that country. It was the unimportant rank and file of the Honoured Society who went to prison.