7

THE PERIOD of the transformation of the Mafia into a kind of beleaguered landed gentry produced some strange episodes. At that time 1944–6 the Mafia could call on five bandit organisations to assist it in its work (there were another twenty-five or so fairly independent bands). One of these had been organised by Salvatore Malta, Mayor of Vallelunga, a particularly inspired nominee of AMGOT dating from the time of Don Calò’s original list of recommendations. Imprisoned for banditry and murder, Salvatore had performed the feat – considerable even by Mafia standards – of remaining nominally a registered inmate of the Ucciardone prison while actually being at large and gainfully occupied in the protection of the Tudia estate. In fact, while the authorities believed Malta to be safely in prison, he was engaged in organising another band known as the Capitano, which was employed not only to terrorise the Tudia peasantry laying claim to fifty thousand uncultivated acres, but was also successful in dissuading the peasants belonging to thirteen other feudal estates from pressing any claims for land. The Capitano band installed themselves in the manorial buildings of Tudia, converted into a fortress, in which they remained for two years. They murdered, robbed and kidnapped, but unlike Salvatore Malta they were common bandits, not mafiosi. When eventually they were rounded up and tried, they received life sentences, and for them the gates of the Ucciardone would remain closed. Salvatore Malta was called only as a witness at the trial.

At this stage one or two of the more intelligent bandits even moved in with offers of protection, Mafia style, on their own account. So long as they modestly restricted themselves to the less important estates, the Mafia tolerated the competition. Trabona, leader of the first band organised by Salvatore Malta, was one of these. Known to his friends as ‘Rickets’, Trabona – like so many bandits, but quite unlike the Mafia – possessed a kind of ingrained and frustrated respect for law and order, and a hankering after respectability. This made him a stickler for legal form, and when he offered to guarantee one of the barons’ estates against molestation by troublemakers, he had a proper contract drawn up before a public notary. Being at the time a fugitive from justice, with a considerable price on his head, it would have been unsuitable for Trabona’s own name to appear on the document, so his two infant sons, aged four and five, became the beneficiaries of a tenancy contract which gave them onehalf of the total revenues of the estate. In consideration of this, Trabona undertook to keep the other sixty-five sharecropping tenants in order and to persuade them to the voluntary renunciation of any claim to a division of the produce on the basis of a new law that had just been passed in Rome.

* * *

Some of the measures of reform hastily put through by the central government in the hope of easing Sicilian tensions proved impossible to carry out in practice, and this was a case in point. Traditionally, the landowner and his tenant had shared on a fifty-fifty basis – or rather, on what was called a fifty-fifty basis, but which, on examination, proves to have been an arrangement heavily weighted in the landowner’s favour. While the landowner kept his half-share intact, many deductions were made from that of the tenant. In the first place, he paid for the seed, plus an interest charge on the amount advanced of thirty-two per cent. He was subject to a tribute, dating from Roman times, known as ‘the land’s dowry’ and which amounted to one hundred kilograms of grain for every hectare (2½ acres). Other important deductions were for the maintenance of the armed guards, the upkeep of the roads, the annual feast of St Lucia, the Church, the monks of the local convent, and ‘for lighting the landowner’s house’. By the time all these levies had been exacted, the tenant’s share was possibly as little as one-quarter, or even less.

The new regulation, giving sixty per cent of the produce to the tenant, was intended to compensate him to some extent for these traditional exactions, and they were instantly and successfully opposed by every landowner in Sicily. The method generally adopted for negating the government’s efforts was a simple one. When the time came to divide the produce, the tenant would be summoned into the presence of the landowner, who would have with him the local carabinieri officer. The tenant would then be asked if he wanted to make the division ‘the way it’s always been done or the way the Reds do it’. If the tenant stuck out for his right to take sixty per cent of the produce, the landowner played his next card, which was to give formal notice in the presence of the police officer that he proposed to dispute the claim. It was now the policeman’s duty to impound the crop and hold it until a legal decision on the dispute had been reached. As in Italy civil cases take five years on average to settle, and as in any case the costs would have more than swallowed up any advantage the tenant might have gained, he was bound to give in. There were many instances during the six months when this law was theoretically in operation of the tenant being deliberately provoked into losing his temper and thereby committing the serious crime of oltraggio – assaulting or even insulting a police officer. In this case he would be hauled off to prison, where he might be locked up for a year or more while awaiting trial. The landowner would see to it that no bail was forthcoming.

Not only was the operation of the agrarian reforms sabotaged by the direct action of the Mafia and the Mafia’s hired bandits, but also by bureaucratic delays, many of them undoubtedly arranged by the Mafia at a high political level. Demands that fulfilled every legal prerequisites for the concession of uncultivated lands lay unattended for months and even years in the offices of the special commissions that had been set up. Meanwhile tens of thousands of fertile acres lay abandoned, covered with thistles and scrub. In some instances landowners decided to chasten a rebellious mood by actually reducing the amount of land under cultivation. This kind of reprisal produced calamitous effects in villages where the misery caused by desperate and chronic unemployment had been increased by the draining off of food supplies into the black market.

Then someone had the idea of organising what were called ‘cavalcades’, which took the form of large parties of peasants ‘symbolically’ occupying uncultivated estates. Two or three hundred peasants would usually invade the estate, mark out the plots of land they felt that they would like to possess, picnic on the spot, and then, after a certain amount of flag-waving and perhaps a little accordion music, troop off home again. Cavalcades usually started as holiday outings, but only too often ended as near-massacres. Typical of what happened at that time was the symbolical occupation of the estate of Santa Maria del Bosco.

The occasion was, once again, half political demonstration and half picnic, and an outsider would have taken it for one of those cheerful Mediterranean pilgrimages one sometimes sees on its way to the shrine of some local saint. A thousand or more peasants had gathered from three villages, and in their painted carts, or riding horses or mules, with flags flying and religious banners held up, they made a procession half a mile long. The estate had not been cultivated for sixty years, and their first job when they arrived was to clear away the stones laid bare by soil erosion. This was done in light-hearted fashion, singing to the music of accordions and guitars. By nightfall, the symbolical occupation was at an end and everybody went home.

Nothing was easier than to deal with this kind of thing. Next day the police descended on the villages and carried off thirty-five men – their lists were ready – on charges of creating a civil disturbance. The women, as usual, rushed out into the street and did their best to prevent their menfolk’s being dragged away. Rifle butts were used, shots were fired, and blood flowed. When eventually the men came up for trial, some of them were sentenced to as little as fifteen days, but they had already spent sixteen months in prison awaiting trial. Ten years later, in 1956, this feudal estate still awaited expropriation, and today in the three villages that had formed the cavalcade it is still only the youngest and strongest who can hope to work a hundred days in a year.

* * *

Elsewhere the peasant leaders acted with less obvious and vulnerable enthusiasm, and thus managed to avoid giving the police the excuse to intervene on the side of the landowner and Mafia combination. These were the tactics adopted in Corleone.

In this world one occasionally stumbles upon a place which, in its physical presence and the atmosphere it distils, manages somehow to match its reputation for sinister happenings. Such a town is Corleone. A total of one hundred and fifty-three murders took place in Corleone in the four years between 1944 and 1948 alone, the rate of death by violence in this town with its population of eighteen thousand being probably the highest in the world. Men and women go perpetually in black, worn for old tragedies; for a father, five years; for a brother, three years; for a son, three years; a piled-up account of mourning that can never be settled. Sorrow leaks from these people into the streets. A scurf of old election posters covers the town’s walls. Among them appears the astonishing slogan, ‘Long live God! Vote Christian Democrat’.

Corleone is built under a lugubrious backdrop of mountains the colour of lead, and its seedy houses are wound round a strange black rocky outcrop jutting up from the middle of the town. Upon this pigmy mesa is built the town lockup, and from its summit the crows launch themselves in search of urban carrion. Behind the cliff-shadowed menaced streets of Corleone stretches a savage entranced landscape of rock and grizzled pasture, for centuries the setting of a bloody routine of feuds and ambuscades. A few miles away is the famous wood of Ficuzza, a place of ghosts and legends, over possession of which the two families of Barbaccia and Lorello have been slowly destroying one another since 1918. The problems of the peasants of Corleone are complicated by inheritances from history and prehistory: they are an island of agriculturists in a hostile shepherd sea, and the sayings of the local herdsmen, including such proverbs taken straight from classical Arabic as ‘With the plough came in dishonour’, enshrine the nomad’s detestation of the encroaching farmer. ‘They talk about land reform,’ a young shepherd says. ‘That means there’s less and less grazing ground – they take everything away from us poor folk. All us goatherds and shepherds are worried – soon, if they go on parcelling out the fields at this rate, there won’t be a blade of grass left for our animals.’ The shepherds, then, are on the side of the Mafia. ‘We don’t hit it off too badly with the mafiosi. The barons haven’t robbed us of our pasture-land.’*

The shepherds furnished the Mafia with most of its hired killers.

Another complication in the lives of the peasants of Corleone in the immediate postwar period was the presence of two Mafias. One of these was the classic version, commanded by the town’s leading doctor and leading citizen, Michele Navarra. The other, diffusing its schismatic terror, was something quite new at the time: a hybrid between the home product and American-style gangsterism brought back by criminals repatriated to Sicily from the United States. The ‘New Mafia’, as it came to be called, was represented in Corleone by Luciano Liggio, who at nineteen had become the youngest Mafia chieftain in Sicilian history.

Liggio had made his name as a phenomenally successful cattle thief, and he was without any of the self-delusion of the old-fashioned men of respect. A threadbare vestige of the ancient Mafia tradition of the honourable state-within-a-state still adhered to the power-corrupted persons of Don Vito Cascio Ferro, and his successor Don Calò. Nothing is more certain than that the traditional Mafia chieftains saw themselves not as delinquents but as self-made aristocracy of the intelligence, and as such, at least as much entitled to their privileges as any aristocracy by birth. The old mafioso was jealous of his ‘respect’, and of the rough justice he dealt out in his own way. He was a man of iron self-control, often an austere man, sometimes – voluntarily, since wealth was his for the taking – a poor man. Liggio, prototype of the New Mafia, was none of these things. The overlord-to-come of Corleone and the most feared and cunning criminal of modern Sicily had modelled his career on a transatlantic pattern and cleansed himself of scruples. In exile in the United States, such mafiosi as Lucky Luciano had forgotten tradition to the extent of making fortunes out of prostitution – an unthinkable vileness to an old-fashioned man of respect – and now on return, and equally to the horror of the mafioso of the old school, they would set about the organisation of the traffic in narcotics. Liggio and his followers had nothing in common with the organisation presided over by Don Calò but its iron laws of secrecy and the vendetta, and the two Mafias were soon to be at each others’ throats.

When, purely as a last sop to the old Mafia tradition, Liggio became a gabellotto and the protector of the huge Strasetta estate, his first move was to drive out all the tenants who possessed sharecropping contracts and replace them by cowed day labourers. He did this simply by burning down their houses and cutting the throats of their animals – tactics which would certainly have shocked the warped paternalism of Don Vito. Liggio, whose unprecedented rise to stardom in the new gangsterism had been assisted by material aid supplied by his mistress, a baroness, is shown in photographs of the period as a loose-lipped, smirking, dandified youth, with a slight squint. Apparently the life of a feudal seigneur on the Strasetta estate soon irked, and he began to widen the scope of his interests. Liggio believed in moving with the times, and he saw that there was ten times more to be made out of seizing control of the supplies of meat to the Palermo market, say, than by growing and selling beans. He threw overboard all the old-fashioned Mafia pretence of reasonableness and persuasion. When anybody crossed Liggio’s path, he simply shot him, and he and his strong-arm men, recruited from the nomads of the bitter pastures, filled the streets of Corleone with the dead.

One of Dolci’s informants lists a few of the killings of those days, which leaves out of count the many disappearances – men who were spirited away and never seen again, ‘so that a vendetta could not be sworn in the presence of the corpse’.

The first of them to be killed after the war was a man called Cianciana, probably for political reasons. It happened right in the middle of the square.

Then there was the man whose father was at Belvedere [a prison]. He was an employee and they were afraid he might talk and so they got him out of the way.

Michelangelo Randisio and the son of Uncle Matteo Capra, the one with the withered hand, both disappeared. Their bones were found later. Donna Calorina Saporita’s son had been thrown into the same crevice. They found a whole cart-load of bones there. Angelo Gullota’s bones were there too. Ciccio Navarra’s brother had also disappeared. This crevice is on Monte Casale.

Then there were Grisi’s three brothers. They lived here at Corleone. They found the body of one of them on the railway line. Another brother came home on leave and they bumped him off the very same night near the armourer’s. It seems that the one who came home on leave said that the Mafia here were good for nothing but toothpicks. They heard him and killed him the same day. They shot him point-blank in the street.

Then there was a man from Palermo who’d only been living in Corleone a short time. He disappeared. His name was Pietro Montesanto, and he was a bit of a pansy. He used to wear a velvet suit that must have cost between thirty and thirty-five thousand lire, with kid-leather patches. Someone said to him: ‘Lower the flame or you’ll burst the pipe.’ Meaning, ‘Don’t show off too much or you’ll come to harm.’ His mother used to work spells and concoct poisons. The town here is full of people who’ve been crippled by these spells.

Then there was Pino Orecchione, the road-sweeper’s brother. They found him in the hamlet of Frattina with an army rifle slung round his body and his head stove in. He used to go round robbing the shacks to get something for his family, as he was out of work.

Then there was Vito Capra, who was killed in the town here. They guessed who it was that was sending out extorting letters; and they shot him one night.

Then there was another man called Selvaggio who was shot while he was bringing a load of corn into the town. The people say that he was a bit on the haughty side.

A man called Mariano Governale was killed at the second crossroads in Sant’ Elena. They shot him with buckshot and then split his head open with the butt-end of the gun. It was over a question of honour, people say.

Another stranger, who was employed at Madonna di Scala, was found shot dead in front of the Madonna del Mal Passo.

They cut off Mariano Scalisi’s hands after they’d shot him in the hamlet of Bingo.

They found another man dead in the hamlet of Pozzillo; but as he didn’t come from Corleone, no one took much notice here. Here in Corleone, they shoot people everywhere, wherever they happen to be. There’s not a corner of the town where some incident hasn’t occurred.

There was Salvatore Amenda. The people called him the ‘sheriff’ because he was a retired policeman. They shot him with buckshot. Buckshot is less chancy: you’ve only one bullet with a pistol. They say he was a scoundrel. ‘Carnazza successe – Only good for the slaughterhouse,’ as they say when a mule’s on the ground: by which they mean that it’s dead meat.

There’s another road in the neighbourhood called Via Vallone. They killed Michele Scuzzulato there; no one knows why.

At Bagarella there was a shooting affray in front of the chapel of St Christopher, as a result of a row over an engagement.

The Government protects the criminals here. Supposing you were to be killed, for example, they’d let your murderer out of prison after ten days. The Government is mad. It’s terrible how many people have been murdered here since the war. It’s happening all the time. Today, for example, one man will infuriate another, and for one wrong word he’ll be bumped off. Or it may be for a dispute over cattle. They take it into their heads to murder the fellow and that’s the end of that. One word can get a man murdered, something stupid. It’s their mentality. It’s habitual here. It makes no more impression on them than killing a goat or an animal. They’ll kill you or me to show that they’re the masters, always. And after the murder they always expect to get away with it.

Dr Michele Navarra, the leader of the traditional Mafia – and a dependant, as such, of Don Calò’s – was a man cast in a more conventional mould. Navarra, like Dr Melchiorre Allegra – whose police confession has already been examined – had passed over his soul to the Mafia and the devil for an excellent price. By a skilful manipulation of the Mafia network of mutual aid and graft the doctor had risen rapidly to become Medical Officer of Health, medical officer for the smallholders’ health insurance scheme, Inspector of Health for the area, and chairman of the hospital. Outside his purely medical interests, he was chairman of the local branch of the Christian Democratic Party, and President of the Cultivators’ Association of Corleone. He also had a valuable interest in an illicit slaughterhouse, where stolen cattle, kept hidden in the nearby Ficuzza wood, were slaughtered as required. The doctor’s photographs show him with a lined forehead and a sensitive, haunted expression, almost as though on the verge of tears over some unhappy memory. Despite the mildness of his appearance, he was given to arrogance – sometimes to impatience as well, as evidenced by his supposed assassination of Dr Nicolosi who preceded him in the various medical posts he held. At a later period he was to make a novel contribution to the science of faking the polls by issuing several hundred certificates of blindness or extreme myopia to the women of Corleone, who were then accompanied by Mafia bullies into the polling booths, to make certain that they voted Christian Democrat.

* * *

It was against this composite background of the Middle Ages, and gunplay in the streets, that Placido Rizzotto set about organising the peasantry of Corleone. From the Mafia point of view, it was the story of a promising lad corrupted by army life. Placido had done an acceptable six months in prison in his extreme youth, and he came of satisfactory family. His father had been a low-grade mafioso who had been caught in Prefect Mori’s net, sent to confino, and thereafter been inactive in the organisation. But years in the army, including a period of fighting with the partisans in northern Italy, had provided Placido with new perspectives and thrown him out of step with the old life back in Corleone. For an ex-army sergeant and a partisan, he seems to have been remarkably gentle in his manner. He was slight in build and is reluctantly admitted by his friends to have been rather girlish in appearance. Placido contrived to see some good in most people, and amazed his fellow trade unionists, whose moral judgments were clear-cut and lacking in in-between shades, by arguing that even the terrible gun-slinging Mafia bullies of Corleone were the products, as well as prisoners, of a tragic environment. One of his frequently-quoted actions was the supply, at a time when paraffin was almost unobtainable, of some of the trade union centre’s stock to a Mafia-run farm. When asked to justify this eccentricity, he replied that, having had to do it himself, he knew what it was like to try and run a byre in winter with the butt-end of a candle.

Ingrained in the Sicilian mentality – beaten into it, one might almost say – is the idea that it is respectable to keep oneself strictly to oneself: not to hear the shot fired at night, not to see the figure escaping down the alleyway, to turn back at the sight of the body lying in the gutter ahead, to know nothing of what is going on, to keep one’s own counsel, to leave other people to solve their problems in their own way. To the downtrodden Sicilian peasant the parable of the Good Samaritan is almost without meaning, and the conduct of its protagonist irrational. The response to Rizzotto’s urgings to unite and organise was slow. The whole conception of peasant unity, of fixing minimum wages, of demanding the division of produce according to the new laws, and of forming a co-operative with the ultimate intention of taking over uncultivated land, was too novel, and with the invisible presence of the Black Knight, Luciano Liggio – too frightening. Moreover, the police were suspicious of trade unionists, and the Church in western Sicily condemned them outright.

Rizzotto went from hovel to hovel convincing the doubters. In his own way he showed a flexibility of character that would have done credit to Don Calò himself. To refute the charge that as a trade union leader he must be an atheist, he took over the organisation of the annual festivities of the patron saint of the town, and provided more coloured bunting, more flowers, and more fireworks for less expenditure. In the end he grew on the people of Corleone, and they were willing to overlook his lack of manly gruffness and his un-Sicilian passion for bothering himself with other people’s affairs and for prying into things that didn’t concern him. He won over those who hung back from fear of the gunmen by a kind of infective courage. His argument was that only a few dozen out of Corleone’s population were members of the Mafia, and that if people got together and faced up to them, then the Mafia would be powerless. In the end Placido had ten thousand peasants behind him. Profiting from the mistakes of others, he gave the police no trouble. There were no rabble-rousing speeches, no symbolical occupation of uncultivated land; just a quiet, steady undermining of the enemy’s positions, and always with the law at his back. He worked to such good effect that while the Mafia was busying itself with the immense opportunities for self-enrichment of the postwar period, while Liggio was occupied with marketing his stolen beef, and while Dr Navarra was consolidating his medical monopoly, the citizens of Corleone voted in a left-wing town council.

With the Mafia hold apparently broken, Placido’s next move was the logical one. His co-operative applied to the court in Termini Imerese for the redistribution of the uncultivated land of the Drago estate, and was successful. A few days later a commission was sent from Palermo to inspect the lands that were to be taken over, and Placido showed them round. A mafioso recalling this circumstance said that the only thing that surprised him from the Honoured Society’s point of view was that things had ever been allowed to get as far as this, particularly when one remembered that Placido Rizzotto’s father had been a man of respect – from which it was to be supposed that his son must be in the possession of dangerous secrets.

On March 10th, 1948, Placido Rizzotto went out for a stroll before supper, telling his parents that he would be back in half an hour. What follows is taken from a signed statement made to an examining magistrate two years later by Pasquale Criscione, a gaballotto of the Drago estate that was to be expropriated, and a rank-and-file member of the Mafia. Criscione had begun his statement by saying that he was an old friend of Placido Rizzotto’s. They had been born in houses facing each other in the same street, had always played together as children, and in later years ‘we used to go around together quite a bit, arguing about one thing and another, just like all the other fellows of our age did – but always in a friendly sort of way.’

On the evening in question, I’d been out as usual trimming up the vines. I came home, had a clean-up, and decided to take a turn in the square. Just outside the Café Alaimo I noticed a group of three people, two of whom I recognised: Placido Rizzotto and Ludovico Benigno. I went up to them – actually, I was going past them when Benigno pulled out a chair by way of a joke and held me up. Both of them being friends, we started to chat, and the third person went off. We were walking up and down the Via Bentivegna together until about ten o’clock. After that we dropped Benigno near his house by the new bridge, and carried on together towards the Piazza Garibaldi.

Just as we were going by the Café Alaimo again I was called across the road by a certain Luciano Liggio, an acquaintance of mine. Turning round so that he had his back to Rizzotto, who was still waiting by the café, Liggio said, ‘Carry on with Placido as far as the Villa and remember, I’m behind you.’ I put up some sort of objection with the idea of getting to know what was behind it, but all he did was to pull up the right side of his jacket and put his hand on a pistol he had in his belt. He then said, ‘Do what I say, or I’ll kill you.’ Being aware of Luciano Liggio’s violent character and his reputation as a killer, there was nothing I could do but agree, so I went back to Rizzotto again.

Rizzotto didn’t ask me what Liggio wanted, and we started off again in the direction of the Villa. I noticed now that Liggio, having pretended to go off in the other direction, had turned round again and was following us. I made no attempt to put Rizzotto on his guard, and when he wanted to go back to the Piazza Garibaldi I went with him, but then induced him to turn back up the Via Bentivegna again. When we came to the end of the street I made out Liggio standing in the angle of a wall, and he signed to me to turn into the Via Marsala. I then suggested to Rizzotto that we should stroll on up the Via Marsala a bit and to this he raised no objection. We had just reached Triolo’s shop when Liggio came up from behind, took Rizzotto under the arm and pointed a gun into his ribs. He said, ‘Don’t be afraid. I’m not going to shoot you. We’re just going to have a quiet chat, and after that you can clear off.’

When Rizzotto saw the gun he was startled and half put his hands up. We went up the street the way Liggio said, and after Triolo’s shop we turned into the Via Misericordia and after that the Via Sant’ Elena. At the end of the street last mentioned, where the straw shacks are, I saw Vincenzo Collura waiting. As soon as we came up, Collura pulled out a gun and took Rizzotto by his free arm … Liggio pointed his pistol at me and told me to go back home. He said that if I ever let a single word drop about what had happened he would finish me off. Knowing he was quite capable of carrying out his threat, I didn’t feel like arguing about it. I went back and dropped in at my brother-in-law’s house to ask how a sick cow of his was getting on.

In answer to a question, the accused replied:

After I left them I had a chance to see that Liggio and Collura with Rizzotto in the middle went off up the footpath that leads to Sant’Ippolito. I can’t say that I heard any screams. In any case, I’m deaf in the right ear.

Answering a further question, the accused man said:

Next day, I got up early as usual and went over to Frattina to load up wood. When I got back at about midday, I heard that Rizzotto’s father had been looking for me. Later Rizzotto’s mother and sister came to ask if I could give them any news of him, as they had heard that we’d been seen together the night before.

Bearing in mind Liggio’s warning, I told them I’d parted company with Placido on the previous evening at about quarter-past ten at the corner of the Via Marsala, and that before going off he’d mentioned that he might look in at Coniglio’s tailor’s shop before going home. I confess that I invented the last detail so as to make my story sound more convincing.

* * *

Nearly two years later Criscione and Collura were arrested after Placido’s father (once again, a curiously medieval touch) had formally accused them to the assembled citizens of Corleone from the balcony of his house. Collura’s confession more or less bore out Criscione’s, although he alleged that Liggio had done the actual killing. Rizzotto’s body had been thrown into a ninety-feet deep crevice in Corleone’s sinister mountain – ‘so that the crows would not be attracted by the odour of decay, and give away the place where he lay by circling overhead’. The fire brigade brought up five shoes, a pair of braces, an ankle bone, a piece of overcoat, and a head in their first sack. The head had been lying in the mud and the features had gone, but Placido’s father recognised his son’s chestnut hair, and also the piece of overcoat. He had only had it made the year before, ‘with buttons down the middle, in the new fashion’. Further searches by the fire brigade produced more sacks full of bones. For many years this had been the hiding-place of bodies of the men of Corleone who had fallen foul of the Mafia.

Inevitably, at the trial, Criscione and Collura withdrew their confessions made before the examining magistrate, alleging that their statements had been obtained by violence used by the police. In addition, Collura – an American repatriate – produced an alibi, a number of witnesses appearing to support his statement that he had not been in Corleone on the day of the killing. The two men and Luciano Liggio were then acquitted for lack of evidence. This more or less is what has happened in the thousand or so Mafia trials (outside the Mussolini period) of which records exist.

Eyewitnesses have supplied a lugubrious account of Rizzotto’s abduction and his last minutes on earth. It happened on a fine evening of early spring at about nine o’clock – a time when the Via Bentivegna and the Piazza Garibaldi were crowded with people out for an after-supper stroll before going to bed. Everyone knew what was happening, saw the pointed guns, knew that Placido was being led away like an animal to the slaughterhouse. What took place was a sad Gethsemane sequence of averted eyes and abandonment, of doors quickly closed and lights quickly put out. Within minutes the streets and the square of Corleone were empty, and Placido walked alone with his captors towards the crevice on the mountainside of Casale. As a man present at this scene said, ‘He was our hero, and we let him go. All we had to do, every one of us, was to have picked up a single stone from the street, and we’d have been too much for them.’

As to the fashion in which Placido met his end, there will always be a doubt. Collura, in his first statement, said that Liggio shot him three times, but a macabre occurrence that took place immediately after the abduction throws doubt on this. A shepherd boy was brought into Dr Navarra’s hospital half-dead from fright. He said that he had been on the mountainside and had seen two ‘bandits’ hang another man from a tree. Dr Navarra listened sympathetically and then administered a ‘sedative’ injection. Soon after, the boy was dead. At that time Liggio and Navarra were good friends, and it was to be exactly ten years before it was Navarra’s turn to die from a burst from Liggio’s sub-machine-gun.

After the loss of Placido, the peasants of Corleone gave in. All idea of a co-operative was given up, and in 1963, fifteen years later, the feudal land they had been allocated remained covered with brambles and stones. Placido Rizzotto turned out to be one of the first of a series of thirty-nine trade union leaders assassinated more or less in this way. The Mafia regarded them not so much as a real danger, but as a nuisance that might grow into a danger, and their elimination was seen as a tactical success. The great Mafia strategic offensive was directed elsewhere – having as its first target a Separatist Sicily, and when that failed, the demolition of the peasants’ Popular Front and its threat to the political party the Mafia supported. For this it enlisted its own private army, and as its commander-in-chief it chose the bandit Salvatore Giuliano, who now comes on the scene.

* Danilo Dolci, Waste