It took nine months for Mussolini to declare war; despite Italy’s ‘Pact of Steel’ with Hitler’s Germany, Il Duce was warned of the consequences that an early entry into the conflict would have for the underprepared nation. Chief in advising caution was Marshal Badoglio, who knew his troops would lack the necessary equipment. By 10 June 1940 however, everything appeared to be pointing towards success for the Axis powers as one nation after another fell to the German advance. Mussolini was tempted by the possibilities of this territorial grab and he threw Italy’s weight behind Hitler’s forces.
The situation in 1943 was far from the glorious imperial victory envisioned by the Fascists when they had entered the fray three years previously. Initially, Italy had turned its envious eye on the North African coast and it was with the aim of making the likes of Tunisia and Egypt into an Italian fiefdom that Mussolini ordered his troops across the Mediterranean. The campaign went badly wrong and the defeated army was routed by the British. Doubtless to the dictator’s annoyance, it was the German Afrika Korps who came to their rescue, although even Rommel’s troops were defeated at El Alamein in November 1942.
The focus of attention now turned to Sicily. As Churchill pointed out, it must have been obvious to all that the Allied invasion would come through the island, so a diversionary measure was needed to persuade Hitler and Mussolini otherwise. The covert distraction came in the form of Operation Mincemeat which involved the corpse of a vagrant Welshman dressed as a major in the British army. Ten weeks prior to the invasion of Sicily, ‘Major William Martin’ was dropped into the waters off the Iberian Peninsula where his floating body was spotted by a local fisherman. The Spanish authorities rifled through the briefcase still attached to the body and found supposedly compromising information.
The Allies were banking on the fact that Franco would pass this documentation to Hitler, despite his theoretical neutrality. True to form, the Spanish authorities did their duty and the Germans took possession of information stating that Sardinia and Southern Greece were to be the invasion points, and that Sicily would only be half-heartedly attacked as a diversionary ploy. In July 1943 Axis troops were deployed to reflect Major Martin’s deadly indiscretion — the commanders of the German and Italian soldiers stationed in Sicily were only expecting a cursory skirmish as a prelude to the main event elsewhere.
To add fuel to the combustible mixture of disinformation and expectation, it was clear to Allied intelligence that all was not well between the Germans and their Sicilian hosts. The British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) Handbook on all matters concerning the island noted that there was no love lost between the locals and the foreign troops stationed there. Germans were blamed for food shortages as Sicilians believed preference was given to export; conversely, Hitler’s soldiers looked down upon the islanders whom they considered little more than illiterate brutes. The SIS text even concluded that Italian involvement in the war had encouraged Sicilian separatist leanings. The natural assumption was that a war-weary populace might welcome the forthcoming invasion.
Those working in the field of covert operations were keen to exploit any feelings of resentment and rebellion on the island. The British and Americans played to their strengths, trying to cultivate influence in two separate directions. For the class-obsessed British, it was natural that they should focus on fostering relations with the aristocracy and those wealthy businessmen who once graced the foyer of The Palms. The Americans drew on the more intimate familial connections already in place through mass migration to the US.
On the night of 9 July 1943, 2,500 ships made for the south-east coast of Sicily, a far larger convoy than the expected distraction, for a landing code-named Operation Husky. Amongst the thousands of regular troops were small groupings of intelligence officers who had been fomenting the aforementioned networks. One such was a team of American Naval Intelligence lieutenants whose story is told in Tim Newark’s book, The Mafia at War. The team consisted of Lieutenants Anthony Marsloe, Paul Alfieri, Joachim Titolo and the lesser-ranked Ensign James Murray. The small unit split into two teams of two — one embarking with the Americans at Licata and the other with the GIs who came on shore at Gela.
After the war, Alfieri explained how they had planned to contact immigrants who had been deported back to their homeland from the US after committing a crime. It was in Licata that this strategy came to fruition. Alfieri used his connection with a local mafioso to gain entry to the building which housed the Italian naval command. It was not American forces but a raggle-taggle bunch of local gunmen who stormed the headquarters, killing the German guards. Lieutenant Alfieri then blew the door off the safe inside, thereby discovering plans detailing the island’s defences, a stack of radio codebooks and maps of minefields dotted throughout the Mediterranean.
This story would lead one to believe that the push towards Palermo was conducted hand in glove with the mafia. Real events, however, were far more complex and nuanced. Certain tales have been repeated so often that they have passed into the island’s folklore and their veracity is seldom questioned. One story in particular centres on the central hilltop town of Villalba. Prior to the arrival of the American ground troops, it seems the central Piazza Madrice was buzzed on two occasions by a fighter plane which had a yellow flag attached to its tail. If legend is to be believed, the said flag sported a prominent black ‘L’. The plane also dropped a package addressed to Uncle Calò, which included another yellow piece of fabric emblazoned with an ‘L’.
When a scout group of American troops eventually arrived, the leading tank also carried the yellow standard. From inside the armoured vehicle, a Sicilian-American officer emerged and, using the local dialect, asked for Don Calò. Once he had made himself known, the Americans then invited Uncle Calò to accompany them. Don or Uncle Calò was in fact Calogero Vizzini, the capo mafia of the town who had an island-wide reputation. The ‘L’ on the flag stood for Lucky Luciano, a Sicilian-American gangster born in Lercara Friddi who had been imprisoned in the US — the implication was that Luciano was collaborating with the American forces and was requesting the help and arms of his island brethren. The problem with this account is, as mafia expert John Dickie points out, that most historians consider it to be more fiction than fact. Having only been written down in 1962, the story is taken from an account by Michele Pantaleone, a left-wing politician and author who had had many justified run-ins with Vizzini.
Vizzini did go on to become the mayor of Villalba, irrespective of whether he had or had not spoken in detail to American forces at that moment and regardless of the yellow flag and other such elaborate embellishments. Furthermore it is impossible to deny that, from the other side of the Atlantic, Luciano was involved in the war effort. Long before the Americans reached Palermo and requisitioned The Palms, Naval Intelligence had been in contact with Lucky Luciano in his prison cell in Dannemora in upstate New York. The gaol was nicknamed ‘Little Siberia’ because of its freezing position near the Canadian border, but Luciano was to be moved closer to the Big Apple as he continued to co-operate with officialdom.
Details of mafia collusion with the navy’s espionage branch can be found in the Herlands Report of 1954, an investigation instigated by Luciano’s nemesis, the prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey. It focuses on organised crime’s role in protecting the New York dockyards from infiltration by Fascist sympathisers. The Normandie, a liner being prepared for troop transport, caught fire and sank whilst docked in the city; enemy sabotage was suspected. This escalated the authorities’ attempts at countering Axis infiltration, whether it came from American supporters of Fascism or from the landing of covert agents. During such a time of national crisis Lieutenant Marsloe, one of the intelligence officers who subsequently landed on the Sicilian beaches, was convinced of the need to obtain information from whatever source, no matter how dubious the credentials, even if it meant dealing with the criminal underworld. Luciano was charged with the task of helping naval intelligence set up a network of Italian-American informants working in the fishing industry who could alert the government to possible sabotage.
It is easier to demonstrate how American mafiosi lent their support to securing North American coasts than it is to verify the more nebulous connections they may have facilitated in Sicily itself when it came to helping troops in combat. Initially, as US forces moved across central Sicily towards Palermo, they required little in the way of such aid. The British, who had advanced along the east coast towards Messina, encountered much more resistance, especially from the German contingents they met who were retreating towards the Straits for an escape to the mainland. After fierce initial fighting, the US army often rolled into isolated central villages finding nothing but the smiling faces of locals relieved to be at the mercy of a more benign regime. GIs of Italian extraction would chat with the villagers and hand around the kind of treats Sicilian children would not have seen for years.
The commander of the US Seventh Army was General George Patton, nicknamed ‘Old Blood and Guts’. Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, the British commander, was expecting Patton to act as protection for the flank of his troops as they pushed inland from the coasts of Pachino and Avola. Patton, however, had other ideas and rather than stationing himself centrally, he persuaded the campaign leader, General Harold Alexander, to allow him to take Palermo. Strategically, this made little sense as the capital is situated a considerable distance to the west of Messina where all the action was taking place, however Patton saw Palermo in propagandist terms; he knew the occupation of Sicily’s capital would make a good news story.
When General Patton’s army entered Palermo on 22 July 1943, the people took to the streets. Throngs, many rows deep, lined the roads — some Palermitani even brandished banners of welcome. A black and white grainy image taken on the day shows a poster proclaiming ‘Le nazioni unite’. By way of elaboration, its words of hurt — ‘dopo venti anni di ogni sorta di angherie e di soprisi’ (‘after twenty years of all kinds of harassment and arrogance’) — are salved by the final line which celebrates ‘l’ora della desiderata libertà’ (‘the time of longed-for freedom’).
Patton, riding in a motor convoy behind the initial troop contingent, was in a desperate hurry to reach the city and proclaim its liberation. His jeep, proudly displaying the three-star pennant of his rank, came to a grinding halt in an unlikely traffic jam on a Sicilian mountain road. It seems the hold-up was due to a stubborn mule pulling a cart painted in the island’s traditional bright colours. Patton drove to the head of the convoy and, a few minutes later, traffic started to move freely. As the soldiers passed the point where the mule had refused to budge, they saw the animal lying dead at the bottom of a ravine and the cart smashed to pieces. The short-tempered Patton had berated the peasant owner and ordered a minion to shoot the obstinate beast. In a moment the job was done and the wooden wagon destroyed. Nobody was going to spoil Patton’s moment of glory.
As befitting this rather self-aggrandising capture of a city with no strategic value, General Patton commandeered the most lavish hotel, The Palms, as his bed and breakfast whilst setting up headquarters in the Palazzo dei Normanni. Undoubtedly, the recapture of Palermo would eventually have been a part of the Allied invasion, but Old Blood and Guts wanted it now and wanted the best it had to offer. It is not difficult to imagine his self-assured, dominant presence confidently striding through the hotel foyer, whilst staff obsequiously obeyed his barked orders. As it transpired, his residence at The Palms was short-lived. A few days later, leaving a skeleton military command behind, he turned his attention to Messina. Leading his troops along the Tyrrhenian coast, he orchestrated an amphibious landing which resulted in the capture of the city before the battle-weary British and Canadians were able to arrive.
Although Patton beat his rival, Montgomery, to Messina, he would have reached the city more quickly had he not been distracted by Palermo. A German Panzer division had landed on the northern coast, thereby providing more resistance than he would have previously encountered. In fact, Operation Husky was considered in some quarters something of a failure despite the victorious outcome. The Germans were able to evacuate, according to official figures, 39,569 men, 9,605 vehicles and over 2,000 tonnes of ammunition and fuel; in fact, General von Senger described the operation as ‘a glorious retreat’. The Italians also managed to evacuate a considerable number of troops; although, with the fall of Mussolini, they would take little part in the remainder of the war.
Having taken the island, the Allies were now charged with its governance and administration. Major General Rennell, an English aristocrat, was appointed as head of AMGOT (Allied Military Government for Occupied Territories). The island was split into areas administered by a SCAO (Senior Civil Affairs Officer) — the SCAO for Palermo and its surroundings was the American Lieutenant Colonel Charles Poletti (1903–2002) who chose The Palms as his base of operations. Poletti was a multilingual son of Italian immigrants, who had studied at Harvard and the University of Rome. He was a trained lawyer and subsequently a politician, becoming the 46th governor of New York in 1942, albeit for just one month.
Whispers of controversy have long surrounded Poletti’s tenure as Civil Affairs Officer in Palermo, most of which are mere hearsay. It is often repeated that Vito Genovese, the notorious American mobster who had been born near Naples, acted as his driver and interpreter. Naturally, Poletti always refuted this claim — and, to be fair, his counter-argument made the solid assertion that he had no need of such services given his fluency in Italian. It is true that the exiled Genovese pursued many black-market activities, but the majority of these were conducted from his base in Nola, a town some thirty kilometres outside Naples.
Poletti and his senior, Lord Rennell, faced a very complicated situation in trying to stabilise Sicilian governance. From his room in the hotel the problems faced by the citizens of Palermo would have been all too obvious to the former Governor of New York. The city had been heavily bombed by the Allies with the extensive damage evident from Via Roma. Many people were homeless, demobbed soldiers roamed the streets in search of gainful employment and food shortages were plaguing an already malnourished population. In short, the conditions for a surge in crime were perfect.
The SCAOs had to strip away the layers of Fascist administration and replace them with a civil service untainted by the years of Mussolini’s rule. When an AMGOT representative arrived at a town hall, he had to think on his feet and make decisions on the spur of the moment that often had lasting consequences. Many mafiosi had solid anti-Fascist credentials and were quick to push themselves forward when the Allies were casting round for someone new to appoint as a mayor or councillor. Sometimes, the appointment was made with knowing complicity and sometimes with simplistic naivety. Poletti was aware of what he called a lot of ‘free-wheeling on [the] part of officers of AMGOT’. He correctly noted that ‘confusion, misunderstanding and dispersion of responsibility will result’. He wanted greater decentralisation of powers hitherto based in Rome.
One of the greatest criticisms aimed at Charles Poletti was his connection with the kind of Sicilian separatists who would have welcomed his desire for a degree of self-rule, seeing it as the gateway to independence. Lucio Tasca (1880–1957), son of Giuseppe (see chapter 2), was a leading figure in the movement that quickly formed to promote Sicilian separatism. Tasca and the Duchess of Cesaro visited Poletti at The Palms and invited him to dine at the restaurant. The trump card played by the wily Tasca was his ability to present himself as an opponent of Mussolini. Perhaps falling into the same trap as the free-wheelers he had previously condemned, Poletti was happy to see Tasca appointed as Mayor of Palermo. Lord Rennell was less happy with the new incumbent and saw clearly enough the repercussions of Tasca’s elevated position. He understood that separatism was, at the time, inextricably linked to the mafia and that the incoming mayor had some very dubious friends. He would take no part in the convivial dinners where the Nero d’Avola flowed freely.
The separatist movement created a rift between the Allies, with the Americans thinking the British were encouraging such notions and the British laying the blame at the Americans’ door. Tim Newark, in The Mafia at War, quotes from a British Foreign Office memorandum written by Harold Swan, the Consul-General based in Naples, which states that the landed gentry, who supported independence, had thrown their lot in with the mafia. The criminal organisation sensed an opportunity to forge the island in its own image. Swan felt that Poletti, unwittingly or otherwise, was encouraging the burgeoning desire for separation and he had a point; in fact, a letter exists from Tasca to Poletti, in which the former thanks his dear friend for all his assistance and help.
As rich separatists dined with AMGOT representatives, the state of the island was becoming perilous. In Palermo alone, the murder rate virtually trebled and the number of burglaries increased six-fold. The old spectre of banditry arose once again — late night travel was inadvisable, especially if carrying any luggage of value. Two decisions were made: one, rather controversially, involved the strengthening of the carabinieri, and the other, rather bizarrely, saw London ‘bobbies’ pounding the beat outside the Liberty-style entrance to The Palms. The officers were seconded from the Metropolitan Police and were asked to perform all manner of tasks from straightforward administration to the monitoring of the Italian police. Tim Newark tells us that one of the officers quipped that AMGOT really stood for ‘Aged Military Gentlemen on Tour’, given that the majority of the policemen were closer to retirement than initial recruitment.
If this vignette has a faint whiff of Dads’ Army, some of the stories that emerge from this era are more serious. In his book, The Mafia and the Allies, Ezio Costanzo mentions an OSS (Office of Strategic Services) report that accuses Poletti of readmitting former Fascists to the police force. It makes the damning allegation that he ‘does not understand the situation in Sicily, its population or the forces at work within local politics’. Poletti would undoubtedly have countered with the claim that the carabinieri were best placed to understand the criminal world they faced and that reconstructing a police force from scratch was not a viable option.
Sicily was not unusual in having a wartime black market; the figure of the spiv has consistently featured in British films set during this period of conflict, but Sicily’s particular circumstances made the illegal trading of rationed goods a godsend for the mafia. AMGOT did not only rely on the Met, they also turned to special investigators who had experience in the worst aspects of North American racketeering. Newspaper reports began to circulate in America that once again raised the spectre of the mafia as a dangerous phenomenon. Some even expressed surprise that organised crime had made a reappearance after the repressions of Cesare Mori (see chapter 3).
Poletti actively encouraged the rearming of the carabinieri, even if weapons were carried by men who had once supported Mussolini. To ensure standards of policing were appropriate, these men often had shadows — the aforementioned bobbies or even the military police. Poletti’s rationale was simply that he thought the populace would not respect the forces of law and order if they did not carry guns. Despite such reinforcements, the Allies would never redirect too many military personnel in the chasing of criminals — they still had a war to win. Evidence of the woeful under-resourcing of the police could be seen by the beginning of December 1943, when major demonstrations and disturbances broke out across the island’s large conurbations, especially in Palermo. At their heart were the usual complaints surrounding rationing and the inequitable distribution of food but, more alarmingly for AMGOT, these complaints were driven by political forces, particularly Communism, the rise of which disturbed Poletti and his fellow civil officers.
The separatists were fervently anti-Communist, a stance that pushed them further into the arms of certain AMGOT representatives, despite the official policy that all political activity should be avoided as far as possible. American Military Intelligence Officer Captain W.E. Scotten, a former Vice-Consul in Palermo, wrote a report that recognised the political dangers of over-reliance on certain factions and the complications of having the mafia as part of the mix. He alleged that eighty per cent of appointments made by Allied Civil Officers were given to those who had separatist leanings. The waters were becoming so muddied that Allied officials found it nearly impossible to establish a clear picture.
This was not the case with Joseph Russo, an American OSS agent stationed in Palermo whose father hailed from Corleone. More than one book on the subject of AMGOT quotes Russo’s 1993 BBC TV interview in which he admits to actively seeking out the criminal element:
When I got to Sicily and took over, the first thing I did I started looking for the malavita — the criminals — and it turned out they were mostly Mafiosi. They liked my name and the fact that my father was born in Corleone… I got to know these people — the high Mafiosi — and they were big. They got to be real big. It didn’t take them long to re-cement their solidarity…
Ezio Costanzo even claims that Russo met these bosses monthly and valued their inside information. Costanzo enumerates a litany of jobs offered to mafiosi that would have provided them with diversification opportunities with no questions asked. These included roles such as interpreter, warehouse operative, harvest administrator and, of course, mayor. In the same BBC interview, Russo laid the responsibility for the appointment of mafiosi to important positions squarely at the door of Charles Poletti, a claim that Poletti always refuted, just as he had denied Genovese’s presence as his interpreter.
Costanzo asserts that Poletti held parties and working meetings at The Palms for ‘mysterious characters connected to organised crime’. It is not clear who these ‘characters’ may have been, or whether they visited Poletti in the guise of people who supported the politics of independence. We have not been able to find tangible accounts of these meetings but have discovered descriptions of the hotel during this time. Having been commandeered as a centre for operations, some of the building’s more extravagant elements were gradually stripped back to accommodate the needs of administration. Plush furnishings, expensive carpets, velvet drapes and Art Deco ornaments were put into storage, replaced by more functional and sober items befitting a country under military occupation.
When Poletti was meeting the aristocratic Lucio Tasca to discuss matters of separatist politics, he was also in contact with Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile (1878–1964). Aprile had been an Under-Secretary of State in the era prior to Fascism and was at the head of a faction that preferred a complete schism between Sicily and the Italian mainland. His leadership was favoured by the landed gentry and organised crime. Like many espousing the taking back of control from a wider power, his rhetoric was full of vague promises and exaggerated sunny uplands, only attainable through his version of independence. He was profuse in his criticism of anyone who stood in his way, whether they were monarchists, Communists or the Allies themselves.
In Corleone in January 1944, he rose to his feet and gave a speech boasting of how Sicilian-Americans would persuade their government to back independence whilst casually name-dropping Anthony Eden as a man who understood the average Sicilian’s desire for separatism. This was the latest of many such speeches and Poletti must have regretted his part in letting the separatist genie out of the bottle. Later, in a meeting held in Bagheria, Aprile even admitted to being a friend of the mafia, whilst maintaining his abhorrence of violence. It became apparent that Aprile’s oratory bombast, together with increased poverty, was leading to riots, which had started in October of the previous year when Italian soldiers had turned their weapons on a crowd storming the Palermo Prefecture resulting in 162 casualties.
Traces of this era of conflict are still visible today in the urban fabric of Palermo. This may not include the bullet holes from the weapons discharged in October 1943 but is evident in the occasional ruined building in the Kalsa district. Conventional wisdom places the blame on the mafia, and this has a degree of veracity, but not in the way that many would expect. Wearing his anti-racket hat, Poletti put a stop to demolition contracts after a few months of AMGOT rule. Costanzo tells us that the newspaper Sicilia Liberata, begun by the Allies to keep the local populace informed, had reported that a gang were cornering the market in falsely over-recording the amount of rubble to be removed, whilst threatening the civil engineers who needed to accurately report on the work. Many of the demolition contracts were never reinstated, but this paled into insignificance compared with the so-called ‘Sack of Palermo’, the construction boom that began in the 1950s which saw a concrete blanket descend on the Conca d’Oro.
The quagmire faced by AMGOT — a mix of rationing, the breakdown of law and order, political in-fighting and the rush to fill a power vacuum — must have contributed to the Allied powers’ overwhelming desire to pass the government of Sicily back to native authorities. On 11 February 1944 overall control was returned to the Italian government, although the Allies maintained a strong presence through the ACC (Allied Control Commission). Francesco Musotto became the governor of Sicily; he was Poletti’s favoured candidate and not from Finocchiaro Aprile’s party. Tim Newark suggests, via the evidence of an OSS report, that Sicilians were not impressed with Musotto who had been a lawyer engaged in defending mafia clients during the Mussolini era.
The change of government had a negligible impact on the problems faced by the island. By the end of 1944, Sicilian High Commissioner Salvatore Aldisio was still talking about the link between the mafia and separatists, adding the extra component of vagabond banditry to this fusion of forces. The most famous of all Sicilian bandits during the post-invasion era was Salvatore Giuliano (1922–50), a handsome and charismatic young man from Montelepre, a small town twenty-seven kilometres to the west of Palermo. His life on the run started in September 1943 when he was stopped by the carabinieri and two guardie campestri, who wanted to see his ID card and then demanded information regarding the grain he was carrying. Giuliano knew the black-market provenance of his load but refused to divulge the details, even under threat of violence. He was in no position to pay a bribe and understood that criminal charges would have a significant financial impact on his family.
Three of the men were distracted by the arrival of a second mule and its owner. Giuliano was left with one of the carabinieri, and then witnessed the three officials of the law take money from the mule owner. Enraged and feeling as though he had no option, Giuliano knocked the gun from the hand of the remaining carabiniere and made a run for it. Before he could disappear into a nearby thicket, he was fired upon and wounded. He took a gun from his sock and pulled the trigger, killing the officer nearest to him. In the confusion, the young man from Montelepre escaped to the hills, where others joined him, forming a band of thieves who styled themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods. As with all legends, the reality was far more complex.
It is true that some of the money and goods taken from the richer members of society were given to the poor, but it is also true that Giuliano needed the downtrodden of Montelepre and the surrounding districts to act as his shield and protection. When he descended from the hills, somebody had to accommodate him and remain silent regarding his whereabouts. As a counterbalance to the legend of altruistic robbery and kidnapping, John Dickie points out that Salvatore’s band were ruthless in dealing with any betrayal, leaving a trail of corpses as evidence.
Throughout his reign as Sicily’s most famous bandit, Giuliano was constantly seeking a form of redemption that would enable him to return to the family hearth. His father had spent time in America and, consequently, Salvatore looked fondly upon the American way of life, an outlook which made him a fervent anti-Communist. He was approached by the separatists to become an active part of the Esercito volontario per l’indipendenza della Sicilia (Voluntary Army for Sicilian Independence). EVIS, as it was known, was intended to be the military wing of the political movement sympathetic to cessation, and its role was to attack the Italian state. Giuliano enthusiastically took to the job of waging war on the carabinieri. He saw an independent Sicily as his opportunity to return to his old life.
Giuliano even went to the unusual extreme of writing to the US President, Harry S. Truman. Gavin Maxwell, in his book, God Protect Me from My Friends, quotes the letter in full. The most pertinent section contains the following statement: ‘We definitely do not intend to remain with a nation that considers Sicily a land to use when they need it and as something evil and diseased when they do not. For these reasons we wish to be joined to the United States of America.’ It was a futile gesture from a man boxed into a corner who saw little other recourse. Many who have written on the subject believe that Giuliano could not have maintained his outlaw status for such a sustained period without the tacit support of the wilder fringes of the independence movement and its mafia friends.
However, to imagine that Giuliano was restricted to the caves, hills and friendly refuges of western Sicily would be a mistake. There is more than one report of his entering Palermo, and the oddest account comes from the pen of playwright Arthur Miller (1915–2005). Miller had struck up a friendship with Vincent Longhi, a lawyer running for Congress in 1948, who also had a sideline as a folk musician, playing with the likes of Woodie Guthrie and Leadbelly. Longhi had decided to travel to Calabria and Sicily in a bid to appeal to Italian-American voters and Miller happily tagged along. When the pair reached Palermo, they checked into The Palms.
Miller was disappointed with what he found, both inside and outside the hotel. His diary mentions the effects of the bombing on the city along with a vignette detailing the sparse interior of The Palms, further denuded of its decorative furnishing, in spite of the lingering glamour of the Art Deco architecture still intact after the harsh attentions of the US Airforce and several near misses during bombing raids. One missile had actually passed through the room of Baron Vincenzo Greco Militello, awakening the startled aristocrat but otherwise causing little damage. Longhi and Miller knew they would have to leave the hotel’s confines to find a black-market meal worth eating. They happened upon a restaurant in a down-at-heel little square. Inside, they found a bizarre mix of clientele from bleached blonde wannabe starlets to Sicilian mamas in widows’ weeds. Ages ranged from skinny adolescents to elderly intellectuals and professions from prostitute to doctor.
No sooner had they sat down than Longhi started to behave unnaturally, his face colouring profusely. Miller, in his autobiography Timebends, describes the scene in tragicomic tones. In response to Longhi’s serious plea that under no circumstances should he turn around to see who was sitting behind him, Miller laughingly suggested it might be Mussolini. Longhi was unable to see the funny side, whispering to his friend that the diner causing him such consternation was none other than Lucky Luciano. Luciano had been released from gaol in America in 1946 and expelled to Italy. Contrary to the more outlandish speculations concerning Luciano’s war effort, the gangster was not in Sicily during World War II and, if his sentence had been shortened at all, it was due to the aid he had given in protecting the eastern seaboard of the US. The New York Times reported he had been of some use with regard to Operation Husky but the article lacks detail. John Dickie says that Luciano’s length of incarceration was customary, if not longer than usual, for the offence he had committed.
To make matters worse for Miller and Longhi, Luciano engaged the pair in conversation, suggesting they order what he was eating. He strolled over to their table and pulled up a chair. He was particularly intrigued to learn Vincent had an Italian surname and was familiar with Brooklyn, an area that had been Luciano’s old stomping ground. The gangster’s eye wandered to the case that Miller had placed on the floor by his seat — doubtless he was envisioning some form of weapon. As the conversation turned to its contents, the other diners had vanished, leaving the trio by themselves. Rather sheepishly, Miller handed the case, containing nothing more sinister than a camera, to the interested mobster. If Luciano was somewhat nonplussed by its innocence, he was even more surprised that the playwright and lawyer were touring in post-war Palermo.
Longhi explained his political mission whilst Miller obliquely observed Luciano’s divided visage. The right side of his face was drawn downwards, in evil contrast to its more lively left-hand neighbour. At the end of the meal, the gangster offered to pay the bill, dropping a wedge of folded notes on the table without counting them. Much to Miller’s horror, Luciano insisted that his bodyguard drive them back to the hotel and, to add to the pair’s dismay, slipped into the back of the car next to Longhi. When the green Lancia pulled up outside The Palms, they all climbed out and headed for the reception. When Luciano saw Miller’s key, he remarked that his own room was the one next door. Miller made the mistake of hastily getting into the lift before the ageing mobster and the silent ride to their floor must have felt like an eternity.
Semi-safely ensconced in their room, Longhi and Miller whispered their post-mortem of the evening’s events. Longhi, all too aware of Luciano’s reputation, feverishly imagined the gangster’s impressions of their intention. Were they there to kill him as mob rivals? Or were they clandestine FBI agents looking for covert information on his criminal activities as an exile? Worry and exhaustion eventually compelled the two men to fall asleep. It was Longhi who was first awoken by a rap at the door, swiftly followed by a more insistent knock. Miller laughed at Longhi’s heightened state of alert, prompting the pair to double over in silent hysterics.
After the third knock, Longhi opened the door to a handsome, striking young man in a blue cap and woollen plaid jacket. Despite shortages in petrol and a lack of cars to rent, the visitor, who had clearly been informed by Luciano of their desire to tour Sicily, offered to put a car at their disposal, refusing payment except for some American cigarettes. Ten years later, Miller was on an aeroplane seated next to the director Peter Brook. Brook was enthusing about a new movie project, showing the playwright clippings from various newspapers about a Sicilian bandit who had been gunned down some years previously. The director told Miller of the fame achieved by the bandit and his folkloric status that had charmed more than one female journalist. As Miller flicked through the pages, he came across a close-up of the dead outlaw’s face. At that moment, his mind raced back to post-war Palermo and that insistent knock on his hotel room door. Miller believed that their generous visitor had been none other than Salvatore Giuliano.
That Giuliano could have obtained black market gasoline is plausible; that he would have been Luciano’s gopher or have brazenly strolled into The Palms is less so. By 1948 the bandit’s notoriety had taken an altogether darker turn, owing to an incident on one fateful day in 1947. It was May Day and families of a Communist persuasion had gathered at Portella della Ginestra, situated between the towns of Piana degli Albanesi and San Giuseppe Jato. The celebratory picnic was suddenly and brutally interrupted by indiscriminate gunfire coming from the surrounding hillside. Eleven people died, including children, and many were wounded. Giuliano and his band had carried out the attack which he said had initially been a plan to capture and execute Li Causi, the Communist Senator; he claimed that he had ordered his men to fire over the heads of the crowd. Li Causi was not in attendance and the supposed blow for separatism backfired as the wider Italian public were horrified by the massacre.
The incident did little for the already dwindling support for separatism. Out of the tangle of competing interests for political power in post-war Italy, the Christian Democrats were beginning to emerge as a force to be reckoned with. The 1947 constitution had given Sicily a degree of autonomy which took the sting from all but the most vociferous voices in the independence movement. Giuliano’s usefulness to those wishing to wield political power had almost run its course. In 1950 he was found dead, sprawled in the courtyard of a house in Castelvetrano close to the southern coast of the island. The circumstances surrounding his death are still unclear; the official story has him being shot by the carabinieri, although many believe it was his cousin and second-in-command, Gaspare Pisciotta, who fired the fatal bullets in collusion with the police and other powers. Pisciotta mysteriously died in prison before he could reveal the truth.
Giuliano’s gang may have been the last of Sicily’s famous bandit outlaws, but the organisation that tolerated its existence showed no signs of demise; the mafia continued to spread its roots through the nascent and fragile democracy established on the island. Contacts with North American mobsters were now even easier after the likes of Lucky Luciano had been exiled to Italy. Luciano did not stay in Sicily and moved to Naples, although he always maintained close contact with the land of his forefathers. Often under surveillance by the authorities, his passport was revoked in 1952 and two years later he was placed under curfew at home which lasted a few more years. These actions were prompted by suspicions of his involvement in the drugs trade.
Miller and Longhi had good reason to be wary of Luciano at The Palms in the light of this report (uncovered by Tim Newark) from the British Consulate in Palermo during his first stay in the city: ‘… I am told, on good authority, that some of the leading members of the Mafia have called on him at the hotel on more than one occasion.’ In 1957 The Palms would come into even sharper focus when it was used as the venue for a momentous meeting for organised crime. The backdrop to this infamous gathering was a burgeoning trade in narcotic smuggling and the post-war sack of Palermo. Having infiltrated the construction business and cultivated connections with the ruling Christian Democrats, the mafia had taken control of building projects in the city. Districts of innate natural beauty and elegant Baroque architectural design were in the process of being swept aside as concrete towers started to populate the landscape on the outskirts of the city. Furthermore, the Sicilian mafia and their North American brethren had their sights set on dominating the international heroin trade, using Palermo as the major transportation hub on the route to America.
A central figure at the meeting was Giuseppe Bonanno, nicknamed ‘Joe Bananas’ by the American press. He had been born in Castellammare del Golfo, just over an hour’s drive west along the coast from Palermo. Bonanno had left for America during the dictatorship of Benito Mussolini and had been involved in the internecine struggles for the control of organised crime in certain districts of New York, ending up as one of the five bosses of the New York mafia families. Ostensibly on holiday in Sicily in 1957, Bonanno toured the sites, visiting his former home, the nearby ancient temple of Segesta and places of interest in the city itself. The actual meetings at the hotel are shrouded in mystery — even the principal room given over to discussion is up for debate. Some authors have placed the mobsters in the Blue Room (Sala Azzura), with its appropriately azure papered walls and rich gold cornicing; others have suggested the heavily embossed style and marbled flooring of the Sala Wagner. It is probably just as likely that the men visited each other in their suites.
John Dickie in his history of the Sicilian mafia, Cosa Nostra, dates the gathering to October of that year and recounts that it lasted four days. Unsurprisingly, a comprehensive list of attendees will never be available, but Dickie details participants from the US, naturally those from the Bonanno crime family, and Sicilians including the head of the Castellammare del Golfo family and Giuseppe Genco Russo, the mafioso who had close wartime connections with Calogero Vizzini. Lucky Luciano seemingly also made an appearance, taking a trip down to Palermo from Naples.
The story of the ‘conference’ is often portrayed as an overarching deal between organised crime on both sides of the Atlantic; in reality, it brought together, under one roof, those gangsters who felt connected by their heritage and blood. Despite the surveillance of characters such as Luciano, the police paid scant attention to the powerful gathering. Given the increase in heroin trafficking after 1957, hindsight tells us that it should have been higher on their list of priorities.
Watching from the wings was a curious character, impeccably dressed, a Havana cigar hanging from his lips, who, by the time of the meeting, had already been resident at The Palms for ten years or more. To tell his story, we firstly have to head south for the town of Castelvetrano. Although some have questioned his aristocratic status, we will give this character the title by which he was universally known, Baron Giuseppe Di Stefano. His Baronetcy was supposedly linked to the town of Sciacca, but his lands were just to the north of Castelvetrano. How Di Stefano (1906–98) came to live as a permanent resident in The Palms is, like so many Sicilian stories, a patchwork frayed at the edges.
Di Stefano’s estate was a mixture of citrus and almond cultivation, olive groves and wide stretches of scrubland, ideal for hunting. In this respect, he was a landed gentleman typical of many from this region. A 1995 article in the weekly magazine Famiglia Cristiana claimed that Di Stefano had inherited his wealth from an aunt, an assertion backed up by the one-time mayor of Castelvetrano and former senator, Giuseppe Bongiorno. If we imagine a man having just turned forty, strolling amongst the almond trees on his estate, we would likely picture a well-dressed squire carrying a hunting shotgun, its barrel unhinged across his arm, perhaps a faithful dog at his heel. Suddenly, Di Stefano sees movement amongst the trees, where a clandestine figure appears to be picking the fresh produce from the branches. Instinctively, he loads the gun and snaps the barrel shut, taking aim at the interloper on his land — he may never have meant to kill him.
One shot was enough to fell the youth who had the kind of mafia connections that made the Baron wish he had never pulled the trigger — at least this is one version of the story that leads to Di Stefano’s exile in the palatial confines of The Palms. Another account involves a car and the same youth who absentmindedly strays into the path of the speeding aristocrat; yet another story distorts the first, seeing the young man cruelly kicked by the Baron for stealing his almonds in place of being shot. The youth subsequently expires from his injuries. In all these versions the problem — aside from the obvious fact that the young man dies — concerns the deceased’s connections to the mafia. Usually, blood would wash blood to maintain honour, but the Baron seemingly escaped such a death sentence. Whether this was through wealth and aristocratic connections or, as some have speculated, his own association with organised crime, the story has Giuseppe Di Stefano’s sentence commuted to life inside the hotel’s gilded cage.
What was the Baron’s own explanation for the unusual decision to spend over half his life as a hotel guest? For some kind of answer, we turn to Toti Librizzi, the renowned barman of The Palms’ Gattopardo Bar. Librizzi knew Di Stefano better than most and reports that the Baron was clipped in his responses to those who dared to ask the dreaded question regarding mafia involvement in his exile. His favoured repost was ‘Sono favole’ (‘They are tall tales’). Although Librizzi feels that the real reason will never be known, he is at pains to point out that the Baron was a good and generous man who attracted many well-known friends, taking meals with some of the brightest and best in the fields of show business, art and science. The barman’s celebrity revelations and Di Stefano’s friendship with the beau monde will feature in subsequent chapters.
Librizzi’s first encounter with the Baron reveals the reverence in which the hotel staff held their esteemed guest. On the fourth floor of the building there was a terrace that had come to be known as the roof garden. Drawn to the greenery, the newly employed barman saw a man in shorts with swept-back thinning hair attending to the lemons, jasmine, cactuses and hibiscus. Unaware of his identity, the barman complimented him on his care of the plants. Di Stefano responded with the offer of a coffee, which Librizzi parried with his own offer of an espresso. The barman was somewhat shaken when, on reporting to colleagues his meeting with ‘the gardener’, they told him in hushed tones that this was the Baron, and could not believe that he had summoned the temerity to address Di Stefano so casually.
When the pair met again, Librizzi was far more obsequious in his language — a move understood by Di Stefano who, years later, confided to the barman that he had appreciated the spontaneity of their first meeting. For the Baron, Librizzi would always be ‘Totino’, the man who never asked awkward questions and was ready with a smile and a greeting. Like many bar staff in prestigious establishments, Librizzi was in a unique position to observe the comings and goings of the guests. The website of the foundation Il Giardino di Colapesce, established by Librizzi after his retirement, refutes the hearsay that Di Stefano never left the interior of The Palms.
During the 1970s, the aristocrat would escape for short stays in Naples where he could indulge his love of opera at the Teatro San Carlo. There were also rumours that he kept a mistress in the city, but her identity has never been revealed. It is also true that during the later years of his stay, Di Stefano would spend part of August at the Villa Igiea — that other Basile masterpiece transformed into a hotel. If the mafia did have a fatwah on his head, it seems they had somewhat relaxed their surveillance after he had spent so many years of comfortable incarceration behind the Liberty doors of The Palms. The Baron even took the extreme measure of affording himself a walk after lunch, slipping into Via Roma and along Via Wagner before returning by way of Via Principe di Granatelli.
The Baron’s unusual lifestyle has been a gift for writers who have either fictionalised his story or attempted to piece together the facts in documentary accounts. Among those who have sprinkled fact with fiction is Philippe Fusaro, the French son of Pugliese parents, in his novel Palermo solo. Many journalists have been fascinated by the mystery surrounding his supposed house arrest, including Gaetano Basile who gave space to the story in his book, Palermo è… Sebastián Montero Sánchez even co-opts little Rosalia Lombardo, the embalmed child entombed in the Capuchin Monastery, to relate Di Stefano’s complex tale in the book El Barón y la niña eternal (The Baron and the Eternal Girl).
Fusaro accurately portrays the Baron’s daily routine which gave structure to an otherwise rudderless existence. Each morning would see a visit from the barber who would come up from the Kalsa district and, according to Fusaro, knock three times on the suite door before entering and shaving the aristocrat’s well-proportioned visage. Di Stefano would sit in a leather chair by the window overlooking Via Roma, and lean his neck backwards into the headrest, vulnerable but without fear. His meals were not those that would be served to the other guests at the hotel; instead, he would have his favourite chef, Paolo Sciacca, prepare something to order, often incorporating fresh produce that he had requested from his land in Castelvetrano or fish, caught that day, from the port of Mazara del Vallo. Apparently, the Baron was so fond of garlic that the pungent fumes of his breath would warn of his imminent arrival.
Di Stefano abhorred any form of mass media; he refused to read the papers and reacted to the arrival of television at The Palms with patrician distaste. He received his news from the chef who would give him the edited highlights on a daily basis, doubtless a mixture of local gossip and national politics. His meals were taken at the ‘tavolo del barone’, that is to say, the table set aside for him in the restaurant (La Palmetta) which afforded him views of each corner of the room. Prior to placing himself on public display, in the earlier years of his stay it is said that he only had his food delivered via room service.
One of the biggest blows suffered by Di Stefano during his sojourn was the closure of his beloved roof terrace. The hotel management wanted to commandeer the space for what we would now describe as networking events. By way of compensation, the director agreed to amalgamate two suites, thereby creating number 204 — the suite of rooms always associated with Di Stefano. He was able to populate the enlarged space with his favourite plants and tend to them each day.
All the Baron’s financial needs were covered by a man from the Banco di Sicilia who would pay a personal visit to the hotel. His sartorial requirements were met by a visiting tailor instructed to take measurements and then deliver the fabricated item at a later date. Di Stefano would only invest trust in those people he saw on a regular basis and who provided him with the precise services he had requested. He also had a favourite amongst the hotel waiting staff, Giacomo Maniscalco — the only member of The Palms’ personnel to receive a bequest in his will, namely his shoes and linen suits.
Clearly, the Baron was a creature of habit, and further evidence of this can be seen in his yearly clandestine trip to Castelvetrano every November. Librizzi, the barman, informs us that a driver would collect the Baron at 2 a.m. and drive him to the cemetery where his parents were buried. He would lay flowers on their graves and return to the hotel, arriving back no later than 5 a.m. Presumably, these quiet hours before dawn allowed him the privacy he required. However, the nature of these visits can be contrasted with eye-witness accounts from the early 1950s. Vito Marino of Castelvetrano News can recall seeing him in the town during this period when he was supposedly restricted to the hotel’s confines.
Marino remembers him striding through the streets, his head held high with his brilliantined hair catching the light. During the cooler hours of the burning summer, he would sit by the grandiose front door of his palazzo trying to catch a breath of fresh air. Apart from these dog days and the grape harvest, when he would supervise the unloading of the carts, Di Stefano was not to be seen. Just when you think you have a clear picture of the Baron’s enigmatic life, these glimpses of the man on his home turf, however brief, send disturbing ripples through the water.
Gaetano Basile is one of the journalists who remains unconvinced of Giuseppe Di Stefano’s patrician pedigree. He undertook an investigation that was adapted by Japanese television and turned into a screenplay, actually filmed at the hotel. Basile makes the claim that his choice to live as a perpetual guest was self-inflicted and merely a way of enjoying his wealth and power at the heart of Sicily’s capital. Stripping away the eccentricities and stories of habitual obfuscation, there remain vestiges of possible criminal association. Nonetheless, Librizzi was aware of only two friendships with people he felt exuded the ‘odore di mafia’, namely the Italian-Americans Giacinto Di Simone and Charles Orlando. Orlando was under suspicion by the Federal Bureau of Narcotics of having used his olive oil and cheese importing business to mask quantities of heroin being brought into the US.
In 1965 Orlando was arrested at The Palms; his reaction had the typical sang-froid of a man belittling his own fate. He requested that the police take him as quietly as possible, so as not to disturb the guests in the surrounding suites whom he claimed were good people. We are unaware of the room inhabited by Orlando, but we wonder if Di Stefano was tending his plants nearby. In 1966 The New York Times reported that Charles Orlando was petitioning to have his name cleared by the Italian courts.
It is more favourable to remember the self-exiled aristocrat as a great lover of music, one aspect of his life that is an irrefutable fact. When opera premieres were held at the Teatro Massimo and its smaller cousin, the Politeama, Di Stefano liked nothing better than to throw a party for the artists involved. A salon in The Palms would be set aside for this private affair and food dear to the Baron’s heart would be sent from Castelvetrano, including delicate pastries from his favourite bakery. The elegant gathering is reminiscent of scenes in Visconti’s 1963 film, The Leopard, where those selected from the cream of society would discuss matters of the day.
The Baron was a close friend of Giuseppe Di Stefano — no relation, but uncannily bearing the same name. The tenor, Giuseppe, was known as the ‘Golden voice’ and performed regularly through the decades from the 1940s until the 1990s. Both Luciano Pavarotti and José Carreras are on record as describing Di Stefano as their inspiration. In the 1950s, Di Stefano recorded a series of popular Italian operas for EMI with the equally lauded and famous Maria Callas. Both singers would stay at The Palms when working in Palermo and both would be guests of the Baron.
After more than fifty years of luxurious confinement, whatever the explanation behind it, the Baron had reached the venerable age of ninety-two. Even his medical care was provided by itinerant nurses who attended him at his request. During the Easter celebrations of 1998, the faithful Librizzi explains that they had prepared roast kid and the traditional dessert of cassata, but Di Stefano was not to taste this final meal, dying in his sleep. Contrary to the practice of most hotels, his body was not removed via the staff corridors, leaving by the back entrance next to the rubbish bins, but was accorded the honour of being carried, ceremoniously, through the ornate foyer. Some say that he had asked his faithful waiter, Giacomo, to cover his face with a large handkerchief in order to mask his features from his enemies, even in death. The Baron’s body was cremated at Santa Maria dei Rotoli to the north of Villa Igiea along the Tyrrhenian coast towards Mondello.
From his eyrie in suite 204, Di Stefano would have seen Palermo’s progression from post-war privation to its dubious overdevelopment in the era of concrete. Hand in hand with this unrestrained urban sprawl came the city’s role as an entrepôt for hard drugs. The 1957 meeting of mafiosi had obviously been intended as a way to orchestrate this trade; however, life beyond the rule of law takes on its own momentum. Soon, the amount of money to be made in the drug trade had rival factions eyeing the prize. The early 1960s saw a spate of shootings, bombings and retaliatory violence erupt on the streets of Palermo — it was met with hysterical newspaper headlines. Mafia historian John Dickie says it all started when a drug deal went bad and certain parties were short-changed in their share of the final product.
Palermo was now a far cry from its fin de siècle self; some neighbourhoods had changed out of all recognition. The famous example that typifies this wholesale destruction is that of Villa Deliella, another stile Liberty building of Ernesto Basile design situated in Piazza Croci. Its construction began in 1898 for the Deliella family who were related to the powerful Lanza Brancifortes. The building was recognisable by its hexagonal tower, capped with a spiked roof, with an ostentatious palm softening the lines of the architecture.
Despite having been initially protected in 1954 as a building of significance owing to its stile Liberty origins, the protection was rescinded thanks to the fact that less than fifty years had passed since its completion. This loophole allowed those behind the 1959 town plan to push through permission for the destruction of the building. On the afternoon of 28 November that year demolition began, and those waking to croissants and coffee the following morning would have been aghast at the gap in the skyline. By the end of the day, Villa Deliella had almost completely disappeared. The town plan was riddled with amendments, petitions and variations leading the first Antimafia Commission to declare that ‘the administrative management of Palermo City Council reached unprecedented heights of deliberate non-observation of the law around 1960’.
At the height of what came to be known as the First Mafia War, Palermo was also attracting the attention of film directors, already enamoured with the glamour of Rome, and looking for further filming locations. The 1960 film La Dolce Vita, ‘the sweet life’ of Rome, became such a phenomenon that it was impossible for Italy’s provincial centres to avoid pleasurable contamination by association. It was a change for reporters to focus on the visit of a starlet as opposed to the calculations of the mafia, whose worst excesses in the aforementioned war culminated in the 1963 Ciaculli car bomb massacre — an attempt on the life of capo mafioso, Salvatore Greco, thought to be present at the 1957 meeting at The Palms. Greco was unharmed, but the bomb killed four carabinieri, a police officer and the two army engineers sent to diffuse it.
In many ways, this explosion had a similar impact to the fateful assassination of Judge Giovanni Falcone in 1992, and the killing of his colleague Paolo Borsellino a few months later (see chapter 6). As with the events of 1992, the Ciaculli bomb brought the mafia to the wider attention of the Italian public as an organisation that could not only put in harm’s way the forces of law and order, but also innocent bystanders. It made headline news throughout the country as journalists tried to think of a similar atrocity with which to compare it — inevitably the name Giuliano and the location Portella della Ginestra came to mind. The news would even have reached the ears of Baron Di Stefano, filtered through the colourful lens of his chef’s daily reports.