Palermo became an Italian city on 7 June 1860 when, under the terms of a ceasefire, two long columns of defeated troops snaked out from its eastern edges, and doubled back round outside the walls to await the ships that would ferry them home to Naples. Their withdrawal was the culmination of one of the most famous military achievements of the century, a feat of patriotic heroism that astonished the rest of Europe. Until that day, Sicily had been ruled from Naples as part of the Bourbon kingdom that encompassed most of southern Italy. Then, in May 1860, Giuseppe Garibaldi and around 1,000 volunteers—the famous Redshirts—invaded the island with the aim of uniting it with the new nation of Italy. Under Garibaldi’s leadership, this ragged but zealous force disorientated and defeated a far larger Neapolitan army. Palermo was conquered after three days of intense street fighting during which the Bourbon navy bombarded the city.
With Palermo liberated, Garibaldi then led his men—who were now growing in number and becoming an army in their own right—east towards the Italian mainland. On 6 September, the hero was welcomed into Naples itself by cheering crowds, and the following month he handed over his conquests to the King of Italy. He refused to take any reward, and headed back to his island home of Caprera with little more than his poncho, some basic supplies, and seed for his garden. A plebiscite quickly confirmed that Garibaldi had made Sicily and southern Italy into an integral part of the nation of Italy.
Even contemporaries thought Garibaldi’s achievements were ‘epic’ and ‘legendary’. But they soon came to seem like nothing more substantial than a dream, so tormented and violent did Sicily’s relationship with the Italian kingdom turn out to be. The mountainous island had a long-standing reputation as a revolutionary powder keg. Garibaldi had succeeded largely because his expedition had triggered another uprising; the Bourbon regime rapidly collapsed in the face of it. It now became clear that the revolt of 1860 had been only the beginning of the trouble. The incorporation of 2.4 million Sicilians into the new nation brought in its wake an epidemic of conspiracy, robbery, murder, and score-settling.
The King’s Ministers, mostly men from the north of Italy, had hoped to find partners in government from among the upper echelons of the Sicilian population, people who looked like themselves: conservative landowners with a sense of good government and a desire for ordered economic progress. What they found instead—they would often protest—looked like the face of anarchy: republican revolutionaries with strong links to semi-criminal gangs; aristocrats and churchmen with a nostalgia for the old Bourbon regime or a hankering for Sicilian autonomy; local politicians who were killing and kidnapping in a struggle for power with equally unscrupulous opponents. There was massive and enraged popular resistance to the introduction of conscription, previously unknown in Sicily. Many people also seemed to think that the patriotic revolution had entitled them not to pay any tax.
The Sicilians who had invested their political ambitions in the patriotic revolution were infuriated by what they saw as the government’s arrogant refusal to allow them access to power—the power they needed to address the island’s problems. In 1862, Garibaldi himself so despaired at the state of the new Italy that he came out of retirement and used Sicily as a base to launch another invasion of the mainland. His objective was to conquer Rome, which still remained under the authority of the Pope. But an Italian army stopped him in the mountains of Calabria, and he was even shot and wounded in the foot. (Rome would not become the capital of Italy until 1870.)
The Italian government responded to the crisis provoked by Garibaldi’s new invasion by declaring martial law in Sicily. In so doing it set a pattern for the coming years. Unwilling or unable to find the support to pacify Sicily politically, the government repeatedly tried the military solution: mobile columns of troops, sieges of entire towns, mass arrests, imprisonment without trial. But the situation failed to improve. In 1866, there was another revolt in Palermo, similar in some respects to the one that had overthrown the Bourbons. As they had done when Garibaldi attacked in 1860, revolutionary gangs descended on the city from the surrounding hills. There were unsubstantiated rumours of cannibalism and blood drinking by the rebels; martial law was once again the response. The 1866 revolt was quelled, but it was only after ten more years of turmoil and repression that Sicily settled into life as part of Italy. In 1876, for the first time, politicians from the island entered a new coalition government in Rome.
A constant counterpoint to the strife in Sicily between 1860 and 1876 was the impression that the island’s splendours made on the visitors who arrived in the aftermath of Italian unification. Palermo’s extraordinarily beautiful setting could not help but strike new arrivals. One garibaldino who approached Palermo for the first time from the sea said it looked like a city built to fit a child’s poetic vision. Its walls were enclosed by a band of olive and lemon groves, behind which lay an amphitheatre of hills and mountains. There was the same simplicity to its layout: Palermo had two straight, perpendicular main roads that met at the Quattro Canti (‘Four Corners’), a piazza built in the seventeenth century. At each corner of the Quattro Canti, an elaborate façade of balconies, cornices, and niches symbolized the four quarters of the city.
Despite the damage caused by the Bourbon shelling, Palermo in the 1860s offered numerous attractions for residents and outsiders alike; foremost among them perhaps was the famous sea front. During the seemingly endless summers, once the intense heat of the day had faded, genteel Palermitani took moonlit carriage rides along the Marina, perfumed by its flowering trees; or they sampled ice creams and sorbets while promenading to the sound of favourite opera melodies played by the city band.
In the narrow, tortuous alleys off the main streets and away from the Marina, aristocratic palaces competed for space with markets, artisans’ workshops, hovels, and no fewer than 194 places of worship. Visitors in the early 1860s were often struck by the sheer number of monks and nuns in the streets. Palermo also seemed like a stone palimpsest of cultures stretching back over many hundreds of years. Like the rest of the island, it was layered with the monuments left by countless invaders. For since the ancient Greeks, virtually every Mediterranean power from the Romans to the Bourbons had made Sicily its own. The island seemed to many as if it were a fabulous display case of Greek amphitheatres and temples, Roman villas, Arab mosques and gardens, Norman cathedrals, Renaissance palaces, baroque churches …
Sicily was also imagined in two colours. It had once been the granary of ancient Rome. For hundreds of years thereafter, wheat grown on vast estates painted the imposing highlands of the interior in golden yellow. The island’s other colour had more recent origins. When the Arabs conquered Sicily in the ninth century, they brought new irrigation techniques and introduced the groves of citrus fruit trees that tinted the northern and eastern coastal strip with dark green leaves.
It was during the troubled years of the 1860s that the Italian kingdom’s ruling class first heard talk of the mafia in Sicily. Without having a clear idea of what it was, the first people to study the problem assumed that it must be archaic, a leftover from the Middle Ages, some symptom of the centuries of foreign misrule that had kept the island in a backward condition. Accordingly their first instinct was to look for its source in the golden yellow of the interior highlands, among the ancient grain-producing estates. For all its desolate beauty, the interior of Sicily was a metaphor for everything Italy wanted to leave behind. The great estates were worked by droves of hungry peasants who were exploited by brutal bosses. Many Italians hoped and believed that the mafia was a symptom of this kind of backwardness and poverty, that it was destined to disappear as soon as Sicily emerged from its isolation and caught up with the historical timetable. One optimist even claimed that the mafia would disappear ‘with the whistle of the locomotive’. This kind of belief in the mafia’s antiquity has never quite died, not least because many men of honour keep resuscitating it. Tommaso Buscetta, too, thought that the mafia began in the Middle Ages as a way of resisting French invaders.
But the mafia’s origins are not ancient. The mafia began at roughly the time when beleaguered Italian government officials first heard talk of it. The mafia and the new nation of Italy were born together. In fact, the way that the word ‘mafia’ surfaced and became widely used is a curious affair, not least because the Italian government that discovered the name also played a part in nurturing the association that bore it.
As perhaps befits the mafia’s own fiendish ingenuity, its genesis involves not just one story, but a knot of them. Untying those narrative threads and laying them out in the following chapters requires a little chronological dexterity; it means moving back and forth in the turbulent period from 1860 to 1876, and a brief loop back through the half-century before then. It also means borrowing the testimonies of the people caught up in the story, the people who were participants and onlookers in the mafia’s beginnings.
It is best to start not with the word ‘mafia’—for reasons that will become clear—but with what the early mafia did and, just as importantly, where it did it. For if the mafia was not ancient, then neither was the golden yellow of the interior the place where it was born. The mafia emerged in an area that is still its heartland; it was developed where Sicily’s wealth was concentrated, in the dark green coastal strip, among modern capitalist export businesses based in the idyllic orange and lemon groves just outside Palermo.
DR GALATI AND THE LEMON GARDEN
The mafia’s methods were honed during a period of rapid growth in the citrus fruit industry. Lemons had first become prized as an export crop in the late 1700s. Then a long citrus fruit boom in the mid-nineteenth century thickened Sicily’s dark green hem. Two pillars of the British way of life played their part in this boom. From 1795, the Royal Navy made their crews take lemons as a cure for scurvy. On a much smaller scale the oil of the bergamot, another citrus fruit, was used to flavour Earl Grey tea; commercial production began in the 1840s.
Sicilian oranges and lemons were shipped to New York and London when they were still virtually unknown in the mountains of the Sicilian interior. In 1834, over 400,000 cases of lemons were exported. By 1850, it was 750,000. In the mid-1880s an astonishing 2.5 million cases of Italian citrus fruit arrived in New York every year, most of them from Palermo. In 1860, the year of Garibaldi’s expedition, it was calculated that Sicily’s lemon groves were the most profitable agricultural land in Europe, out-earning even the fruit orchards around Paris. In 1876, citrus cultivation yielded more than sixty times the average profit per hectare for the rest of the island.
Nineteenth-century citrus fruit gardens were modern businesses that required a high level of initial investment. Land needed to be cleared of stones and terraced; storehouses and roads had to be built; surrounding walls had to be erected to protect the crop from both the wind and thieves; irrigation channels had to be dug and sluices installed. Even once the trees had been planted, it took about eight years for them to start producing fruit. Profitability followed several years after that.
As well as being investment-intensive, lemon trees are also highly vulnerable. Even a short interruption to water supplies can be devastating. Vandalism, whether directed at the trees or the fruit, is a constant risk. It was this combination of vulnerability and high profit that created the perfect environment for the mafia’s protection rackets.
Although there were and are lemon groves in many coastal regions of Sicily, the mafia was, until relatively recently, overwhelmingly a western Sicilian phenomenon. It emerged in the area immediately surrounding Palermo. With nearly 200,000 inhabitants in 1861, Palermo was the political, legal, and banking centre of western Sicily. More money circulated in the property and rental sectors than anywhere else on the island. Palermo was the centre for wholesale and consumer markets, and it was the major port. It was here that much of the farmland in the surrounding province and beyond was bought, sold, and rented. Palermo also set the political agenda. The mafia was born not of poverty and isolation, but of power and wealth.
The lemon groves just outside Palermo were the setting for the story of the first person persecuted by the mafia ever to leave a detailed account of his misfortunes. He was a respected surgeon, Gaspare Galati. Almost everything that is known about Dr Galati as a person—his courage most notably—emerges from the testimony he would later submit to the authorities, who subsequently confirmed the authenticity of what he wrote.
In 1872, Dr Galati came to manage an inheritance on behalf of his daughters and their maternal aunt. The centrepiece of the inheritance was the Fondo Riella, a four-hectare lemon and tangerine fruit farm, or ‘garden’, in Malaspina, which was only a fifteen-minute walk from the edge of Palermo. The fondo was a model enterprise: its trees were watered using a modern three-horsepower steam pump that required a specialist operator. But when he took control of it, Gaspare Galati was well aware that the huge investment in the business was in danger.
The previous owner of the Fondo Riella, Dr Galati’s brother-in-law, had died of a heart attack following a series of threatening letters. Two months before his death, he had learned from the steam-pump operator that the sender of the letters was the warden on the fondo, Benedetto Carollo, who had dictated them to someone who knew how to read and write. Carollo may have been uneducated, but he had attitude: Galati describes him swaggering about as if he owned the farm, and it was widespread knowledge that he creamed 20–25 per cent off the sale price of its produce; he even stole the coal intended for the steam engine. But it was the way Carollo stole that had caused most worry for Dr Galati’s brother-in-law; it showed that he understood the citrus fruit business well, and was intent on running the Fondo Riella into the ground.
Between the Sicilian groves where the lemons grew, and the shops in northern Europe and America where consumers bought them, a host of agents, wholesale merchants, packagers, and transporters plied their trade. Financial speculation lubricated every stage of the process, beginning while the lemons were still on the trees; as a way of offsetting the high initial costs and spreading the risk of a poor harvest, citrus businesses usually sold the crop well before the fruit was ripe.
Dr Galati’s brother-in-law had followed this common practice on the Fondo Riella. However, when brokers bought options on the farm’s produce in the early 1870s, they found that the lemons and tangerines that they had already paid for began to disappear from the trees. The Fondo Riella quickly acquired a very bad business reputation. There seemed no doubt that the warden Carollo was responsible for the thefts, and that the young man’s intention was to drive down the price of the business so that he could then buy it out.
Upon taking control of the Riella fruit farm from his brother-in-law, Dr Galati resolved to save himself trouble and lease it to someone else. Carollo had other ideas. When prospective tenants came to view the fondo, he made his views abundantly clear to them as he showed them round: ‘By Judas’s blood this garden will never be leased or sold.’ It was too much for Dr Galati; he sacked Carollo and hired a replacement.
Dr Galati soon came to know how the young warden felt about having ‘the bread taken out of his mouth’, as he was heard to say. Disconcertingly, some of Dr Galati’s close friends, men who had no reason to know anything about his business, came to him and advised him in confidence to take Carollo back. The doctor stood firm.
At around 10 P.M. on 2 July 1874, the man whom Dr Galati had hired to replace Carollo as the warden on the Fondo Riella was shot several times in the back as he travelled along one of the narrow roads that passed between the lemon groves. The attackers had made a terraced platform out of stones inside another grove so that they could shoot him from behind the surrounding wall—a method used in many early mafia hits. The victim died in hospital in Palermo a few hours later.
Dr Galati’s son went to the local police station to report the family’s suspicion that Carollo was behind the murder. An inspector ignored this lead and arrested two men who had no connection with the victim. Subsequently they were released when no evidence was found against them.
Despite this lack of support from the police, Dr Galati hired another warden. He and his family then received a series of letters, which said he had been wrong to sack a ‘man of honour’ like Carollo and hire an ‘abject spy’ instead. They threatened that if he did not re-employ Carollo, he was going to meet the same end as his warden—only ‘in a more barbarous manner’. Looking back a year later, by which time he had found out exactly what he was up against, Dr Galati was able to explain this new terminology: ‘In the mafia’s language, a thief and a murderer is a “man of honour”; a victim is an “abject spy”.’
The doctor returned to the police with the threatening letters—seven in all. He was promised that Carollo and his associates, who included an adopted son, would be arrested. But the inspector—the same man who earlier had sent the investigation down a false trail—was not so keen. Three weeks passed before he took Carollo and his son into custody, and even then they were released after two hours on the grounds that they had nothing to do with the crime. Galati became convinced that the inspector was in league with the criminals.
As he fought to save his business, Dr Galati began to build up a picture of how the local mafia worked. The cosca was based in the neighbouring village of Uditore and operated behind the façade of a religious organization. A priest and former Capuchin monk known as Father Rosario ran a small confraternity in the village, the ‘Tertiaries of Saint Francis of Assisi’, ostensibly devoted to charity and assisting the Church in its work. Father Rosario, a man with a record as a police spy under the old Bourbon regime, was also a prison chaplain and took advantage of his role to ferry messages to and from inmates.
But Father Rosario was not the leader of the gang. The president of the ‘Tertiaries of Saint Francis’, and the mafia boss of Uditore, was Antonino Giammona. He had been born into a desperately poor peasant family and had started his working life as a labourer. His rise to wealth and influence coincided with the revolutions that accompanied Sicily’s integration into the Italian nation. The revolts of 1848 and 1860 gave him the chance he needed to show his mettle and win important friends. By 1875, at the age of fifty-five, Giammona was a man of status; he owned property worth some 150,000 lire, the Chief of Police of Palermo reported. He was strongly suspected of having executed several fugitives from justice to whom he had at first given shelter. Their deaths became necessary, the police thought, when they started to steal from local properties while under his protection. Giammona was also known to have received a sum of money along with instructions to carry out mysterious business on behalf of a criminal from near Corleone who had fled to the United States to escape prosecution.
Dr Galati summed up Antonino Giammona’s character as ‘taciturn, puffed up, and wary’. There is good reason to believe him because the two men knew each other; several members of the Giammona family were clients of Dr Galati who, on one occasion, had pulled two musket balls out of Giammona’s brother’s thigh.
The Uditore mafia based their power on running protection rackets in the lemon groves. They could force landowners to accept their men as stewards, wardens, and brokers. Their network of contacts with cart drivers, wholesalers, and dockers could either threaten a farm’s produce, or ensure its safe arrival at the market; when astutely applied, violence allowed the mafia to set up miniature cartels and monopolies. Once in control of a fondo, the mafiosi could steal as much as they liked, whether with the aim of raking off a comfortable parasitic ‘tax’, or in order to buy it for themselves at an artificially low price. Giammona was not just picking on Dr Galati; he was orchestrating a concerted campaign to control the citrus fruit industry of the whole Uditore area.
Now that he was alert to the fact that the mafia also had an influence over the local police, Dr Galati decided to report his evidence about the murder directly to an investigating magistrate. His resolve was strengthened when the police returned only six of the seven threatening letters to him—the most explicit one had been ‘lost’. From the investigating magistrate, Dr Galati heard that such ‘incompetence’ was common in that police station.
New threatening letters arrived: Dr Galati was given a week to replace his new warden with a ‘man of honour’. But he was fortified by the knowledge that his complaints had led to the removal of the police inspector whom he suspected of collusion with the mafia. Dr Galati also reasoned that the mafia was unlikely to take the risk of killing a man of property and status like himself, so he decided to ignore the ultimatum. Just after the deadline passed, in January 1875, his new warden was shot three times in broad daylight. Benedetto Carollo and two other former workers on the fondo were arrested on suspicion.
The attack brought Dr Galati’s first stroke of luck. Before the warden collapsed from his wounds, he was able to see and identify his attackers. At first, lying in hospital, he did not respond to police questions. Then, as his fever rose and death seemed near, he called for the investigating magistrate and gave a statement: the men who had fired on him were indeed the three who had just been arrested.
Encouraged by the magistrate, Dr Galati treated the wounded warden himself, tending him day and night. He never went out without his revolver and kept his wife and daughters at home. The family’s health had begun to suffer as threatening letters continued to arrive. Dr Galati was told that he, his wife and daughters would be stabbed, perhaps on their way out of the theatre; the blackmailers clearly knew that Dr Galati had a season ticket. The doctor learned that there was also a mafia spy in the magistrate’s office since the mafiosi let it be known that they had access to the details of his statements. Nevertheless there seemed to be a hint of desperation to these latest blackmail letters. Dr Galati became more hopeful that, with a case being prepared and a witness ready to testify, Benedetto Carollo had finally been cornered.
Then the wounded warden under the doctor’s care took matters into his own hands. As soon as he was well enough to move, he went to Antonino Giammona and asked to make peace. He was invited to celebrate the deal at a banquet, after which he changed his statement and the case against Carollo collapsed.
Without even waiting to say goodbye to his relatives and friends, Dr Galati took his family and fled to Naples, leaving behind his property and a client list that he had taken a quarter of a century to build up. All that he could then do was to send a memorandum to the Minister of the Interior in Rome in August 1875. He reported that Uditore was a village of only 800 souls yet, in 1874 alone, he knew of at least twenty-three people who had been murdered—the victims included two women and two children—and a further ten who had been seriously wounded. Nothing had been done to investigate these crimes. A war to control the citrus fruit industry in the area was going on while the police force remained impassive.
The Minister of the Interior ordered the Chief of Police in Palermo to look into the matter. A capable young police officer was put to work on the Galati case. It turned out that, like his murdered predecessor, the second replacement warden was a fearsome character. Although Dr Galati either did not know it or would not admit it, the likelihood is that both of the wardens he employed were also affiliated to the mafia. He was probably being used all along in a war between rival mafia cosche.
The Uditore mafia responded to the new investigation by showing off its friends. Benedetto Carollo made an application for permission to go hunting in the Fondo Riella; his partner for the day’s shoot was to be a judge at the Palermo Court of Appeal. A series of landowners and politicians lined up behind Antonino Giammona. Lawyers prepared a statement to the effect that Giammona and his son had been persecuted merely because they ‘lived from their own means and would not let themselves be robbed or bullied’. In the end, a police caution and intensified surveillance were the only response that the authorities could muster.
Evidently Dr Galati’s problems were not just the fault of a bunch of criminals; they came in large part because he could not trust the police, the judiciary, or even his fellow landowners. Thus Dr Galati’s story picks out another important strand in the story of the mafia’s origins. As will become clear later, the origins of the mafia are closely related to the origins of an untrustworthy state—the Italian state.
* * *
Protection rackets, murder, territorial dominance, competition and collaboration between gangs, and even a hint of a code of ‘honour’: enough clues emerge from Dr Galati’s memoir to reach the conclusion that many of the central components of the mafia method were being employed in the lemon groves in the early 1870s. The case also produced evidence of the most distinctive component of all: the mafia’s initiation ritual.
Although the police did not manage to bring the mafiosi of Uditore to justice following Dr Galati’s memorandum on his unfortunate dealings with Antonino Giammona’s cosca, the case did bring to light the first signs that the mafia was a secret association bound by a blood oath. Remarkably, the men under Antonino Giammona’s command not only had an initiation ritual, but it was virtually identical to the one that men of honour still undergo today.
When Dr Giuseppe Galati sent his memorandum to the Minister of the Interior in 1875, he provoked the Minister into asking for a report from the Chief of Police of Palermo. It is in this report that the Chief of Police revealed the mafia initiation ritual for the first time. His source for this discovery was reliable; it was probably the police themselves who, as is apparent from Dr Galati’s story, had a close and ambiguous relationship with the mafia from the outset.
According to the Chief of Police’s account, in the mafia of the 1870s any man of honour due to be initiated would be led into the presence of a group of bosses and underbosses. One of these men would then prick the would-be mafioso’s arm or hand and tell him to smear blood from the wound on to a sacred image. Then the oath of loyalty would be taken as the image was burned and its ashes scattered, thus symbolizing the annihilation of all traitors.
A special government envoy on his way to Sicily replied to the Chief of Police on the Minister’s behalf: ‘Congratulations! Now a huge and intricate field of investigation has opened up for the authorities.’ Doubtless the envoy would have been taken aback to learn that his ‘field of investigation’ would still be huge and intricate a century later, in May 1976, when Giovanni ‘lo scannacristiani’ Brusca was ‘made’. (The term Brusca himself uses is ‘combinato’, a vague, unexceptional Italian word that means ‘arranged’ or ‘got together’.) The ritual undergone by Brusca makes for a striking comparison with the 1875 version, and that comparison creates a better understanding of how and why it made sense for the mafia to be a secret association right from the outset.
The man who would later blow up Judge Falcone at Capaci was initiated young, at nineteen. The fact that his father was a boss had helped put him on the fast track; his first murder was already behind him. One day Brusca was taken to a house in the countryside on the understanding that one of the organization’s periodic banquets was to take place. Many men of honour were present, including the superboss, Totò ‘Shorty’ Riina, whom the young man already called padrino (godfather). Some of the men there began to ask Brusca, ‘How would you feel about killing a man? About committing crimes?’ This seemed rather odd; he had already killed, yet they were asking him how he would feel. He did not know it but the initiation had already begun.
At a certain point, the others gathered in a room, leaving Brusca outside. When he was called in a little while later, he saw that his father had withdrawn and that the other mobsters were sitting at a large round table which had a pistol, a dagger, and a small image of a saint placed at its centre. The men of honour began to fire questions at Brusca: ‘If you end up in jail will you be faithful and not a traitor?’
‘Do you want to be part of the association called Cosa Nostra?’
As he gained confidence, he began to reply with enthusiasm: ‘I like these friendships, I like the crimes.’
One of the men of honour then took his finger and pricked it with a pin; Brusca smeared the blood on the saint’s image, which he then held in his cupped hands while Riina himself set light to it. The godfather spoke the words, ‘If you betray Cosa Nostra, your flesh will burn like this saint,’ cupping his own hands over the flame as he did so, to prevent the initiate from dropping it.
Among the statutes of the organization that Riina set out to Brusca that day was the now famous one relating to introductions. No one is allowed to introduce himself as a mafioso, even to another man of honour. Instead, a third party, who has also been initiated, has to present one to another using a formula like ‘He is a friend of ours’ or ‘You two are the same thing as me’. This was even the phrase spoken by Riina when, after Brusca’s father was readmitted to the room to offer congratulations, he ‘introduced’ father and son as men of honour.
The rules on introductions as they were explained to Brusca betray some interesting differences from the original version contained in the Chief of Police’s 1875 report. A century before Brusca was ‘made’, mafiosi used a much more elaborate recognition system, a coded dialogue that began with a conversation about ‘toothache’:
A: God’s blood! My tooth hurts! (pointing to one of the upper canines)
B: Mine too.
A: When did yours hurt?
B: On the day of Our Lady of the Annunciation.
A: Where were you?
B: Passo di Rigano.
A: And who was there?
B: Nice people.
A: Who were they?
B: Antonino Giammona, number 1. Alfonso Spatola, number 2, etc.
A: And how did they do the bad deed?
B: They drew lots and Alfonso Spatola won. He took a saint, coloured it with my blood, put it in the palm of my hand, and burned it. He threw the ashes in the air.
A: Who did they tell you to adore?
B: The sun and the moon.
A: And who is your god?
B: An ‘Air’.
A: What kingdom do you belong to?
B: The index finger.
Passo di Rigano, mentioned here, is another village on the outskirts of Palermo. The references to ‘the sun and moon’, ‘Air’ and the ‘index finger’ are clearly designations of the mafia family into which mafioso B was initiated.
This original recognition ceremony is more cumbersome and less reliable than the contemporary version explained to Giovanni Brusca. (One wonders how the two mobsters know which of them is supposed to take the lead.) All the same, for the first time this strange dialogue confirms something very simple and very important about the early mafia: it was an association so extensive that its members did not always know each other. ‘Mafia’ was already more than a name for isolated local gangs, or a face-to-face criminal network.
More than anything else about the mafia, the initiation ritual bolsters widespread myths about how ancient the organization is. In reality, it is as modern as everything else about the mafia. It was almost certainly borrowed originally from the Masons. Masonic secret societies, which were imported to Sicily from France via Naples around 1820, rapidly became very popular among ambitious middle-class opponents of the Bourbon regime. The societies had initiation ceremonies, of course, and some of their meeting rooms were adorned with bloody daggers as a warning to potential traitors. A Masonic sect called the carbonari (‘charcoal burners’) also had patriotic revolution as its aim. In Sicily such groups sometimes developed into political factions and even criminal gangs; one official report from 1830 tells of a carbonaro circle involved in cornering local government contracts.
Becoming a single, secret association using Masonic-style rites of this kind offered many advantages to the mafia. Creating a sinister ceremony, and a constitution that has the punishment of traitors as its first article, helped create trust because it was a sensible way of putting up the price of betrayal among criminals who might normally betray each other without a second thought. In that way, the high risks involved in running protection rackets would be reduced for everyone who joined. The ritual was probably particularly effective in keeping ambitious and aggressive younger members in line. The secret society also offered a system of mutual guarantees with neighbouring gangs that would allow each cosca to operate relatively unmolested on its own patch. There were also great advantages vis-à-vis criminals outside the association, who would have to gain the mafia’s approval to operate—or face its united opposition. Many illegal activities, like cattle rustling and smuggling, involved not only travelling across territories ruled by other gangs but also finding trustworthy business partners all the way along the route. Membership of the association offered the guarantees required by all parties involved in these activities.
By the time the Minister of the Interior heard of Dr Galati’s encounter with the Uditore cosca in 1875, the story of the mafia’s genesis was nearly complete. Yet it still remains to explain where the mafia came from. There is more to discover about the ‘taciturn, puffed up, and wary’ Antonino Giammona, and finding it entails taking a step back into the decade before the story of the Fondo Riella.
BARON TURRISI COLONNA AND THE ‘SECT’
In the early summer of 1863—three years after Garibaldi’s expedition—a Sicilian nobleman who was soon to write the first ever study of the mafia was the target of a well-planned assassination attempt. Nicolò Turrisi Colonna, Baron of Buonvicino, was returning one evening to Palermo from one of his estates. The road he travelled ran through the prosperous countryside just outside the city walls; it was lined with lemon trees. At a point between the villages of Noce and Olivuzza, five men firing from different points at the roadside shot down the horses of his carriage before taking aim at the occupant. Turrisi Colonna and his driver were quick to pull out their revolvers and return fire while they ran for cover. The noise attracted one of Turrisi Colonna’s own wardens. A blast of his shotgun was followed by a scream of pain from the roadside greenery. The would-be assassins gave up and dragged their wounded companion away.
Turrisi Colonna wrote a study titled Public Security in Sicily the year after he was attacked. It was the first of many books published after the unification of Italy that made the Sicilian mafia a subject of analysis, controversy, and confusion. With the benefit of hindsight afforded by the work of Judge Falcone, historians now also have a good idea of which participants in the earliest debates about the mafia to believe. Turrisi Colonna turns out to have provided a peculiarly well-informed and credible account.
Part of the reason why Turrisi Colonna is such a good witness derives from his status and the important role he played in the dramas of the early 1860s. He had an impeccable record as an Italian patriot. In 1860, through his efforts as a leader of the new Palermo National Guard, Turrisi Colonna did his bit to try and ensure that the revolution did not lead to anarchy. He was already a member of the Italian parliament when he wrote his little book on the crime issue in 1864. Much later, in the 1880s, Turrisi Colonna would serve twice as mayor of Palermo. Even today he is honoured with a marble bust in the committee room of the Palazzo delle Aquile, the seat of the Palermo city council. His stern features are adorned with one of those beards—it seems resolutely glued on below the nose—that signified ‘august’ and ‘statesman’ to his contemporaries even more clearly than the medals on his chest.
Turrisi Colonna had an equanimity equal to his status. Law and order was a burning political issue when he wrote his pamphlet in 1864. The government was trying to claim that the opposition was conspiring against the new Italian state and was bent on causing disorder to further its aims. Opposition politicians maintained that the government was amplifying the law and order crisis in an effort to brand them as criminals. Turrisi Colonna took a careful line that would have pleased neither camp: he pointed out that organized criminals were a powerful force in Sicily, and had been for many years, but he also argued that the new government’s tough measures had only made the situation worse.
Turrisi Colonna’s study hinged on a sombre observation: the newspapers were full of extortions, robberies, and murders, he explained, but only a fraction of the crimes committed around Palermo were reported because the problem went beyond ordinary lawlessness.
We should not delude ourselves any more. In Sicily there is a sect of thieves that has ties across the whole island … The sect protects and is protected by everyone who has to live in the countryside, like the lease-holding farmers and herdsmen. It gives protection to and gets help from traders. The police hold little or no fear for the sect because it is confident that it will have no trouble in slipping away from any police hunt. The courts too hold little fear for the sect: it takes pride in the fact that evidence for the prosecution is rarely produced because of the pressure it puts on witnesses.
This sect, Turrisi Colonna guessed, was about twenty years old. In each area it recruited its affiliates from the brightest peasants, the wardens who guarded estates around Palermo, and the legions of smugglers who brought grain and other heavily taxed items past the customs posts that the city depended on for its income. The sect’s members had special signals that they used to recognize each other when they were transporting stolen cattle through the countryside to city butchers. Some of the sect members specialized in rustling cattle, others in transporting the animals and removing identifying brands, still others in illegal butchery. In some places the sect was so well organized, receiving political protection from the disreputable factions that dominated local government, that it could frighten any citizen. Even some honest men found themselves turning to the sect in the hope that it might be able to bring some semblance of safety to the countryside.
Driven by its hatred of the brutal and corrupt Bourbon police, the sect had offered its services to the revolutions of 1848 and 1860. Like many men of violence, the sect’s members had an interest in revolution because it offered the chance to open prisons, burn police records, and kill off police and informers in the confusion. A revolutionary government would—the sect hoped—grant an amnesty to people ‘persecuted’ by the old regime; it would form new militias that needed tough recruits, and give jobs to the heroes of the struggle to overthrow the old order. But the 1860 revolution had brought few of these benefits, and the new Italian government’s indiscriminately harsh response to the crime wave that followed only made the sect more eager to cause trouble.
It was only four months after the publication of Turrisi Colonna’s report that the sect would acquire its name when the word ‘mafia’ was written down for the first time. And given what is now known about the mafia, Turrisi Colonna’s account of the sect is strikingly familiar. He mentions the kind of kangaroo court that can be found in many later tales of mafia business; the sect members meet to decide the fate of any of their number who has broken the rules—with a death sentence a frequent outcome. Turrisi Colonna goes on to describe the sect’s code of silence and loyalty in terms that chime rather eerily with current knowledge:
In its rules, this evil sect regards any citizen who approaches a carabiniere [military policeman] and talks to him, or even exchanges a word or a greeting with him, as a villain to be punished with death. Such a man is guilty of a horrendous crime against ‘humility’.
‘Humility’ involves respect and devotion towards the sect. No one must commit any act that could directly or indirectly harm the members’ interests. No one should provide the police or judiciary with facts that help uncover any crime whatsoever.
Humility—umiltà in Italian or umirtà in Sicilian—is a word that jumps off the page. It is now considered to be the most likely origin for the word omertà. Omertà is the mafia’s code of silence, and the obligation not to speak to the police that it imposes on those within its sphere of influence. Evidently omertà was originally a code of submission.
Turrisi Colonna advised the government not to respond to the sect by ruling ‘with the scaffold and the torturer’. Instead he offered some well-thought-through reforms of policing that would, he hoped, change the behaviour of the people of Sicily, giving them ‘a second, civil baptism’. The balance, astuteness, and honesty that Turrisi Colonna demonstrated in his account of the sect was matched by his gentlemanly reserve. He was too modest even to mention the assassination attempt that he himself had suffered only the previous year; it was, after all, only one of many violent episodes in the countryside around Palermo in the difficult years that followed Garibaldi’s expedition. Turrisi Colonna’s discretion means that it is not known who ambushed him and why, or what later happened to the attackers. But reasons have now emerged for suspecting that they may not have lived for very long afterwards.
* * *
A dozen years later, on 1 March 1876, Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino, two wealthy, high-minded young Jewish intellectuals from Tuscany, arrived in Palermo with a friend and their manservant to conduct a private investigation into the state of Sicilian society. By this time—the year after Dr Galati wrote his memorandum—the word ‘mafia’ had been on everyone’s lips for a decade, but there was great confusion about what it meant, if, indeed, it meant anything at all. (There was even uncertainty about how to spell it: in the nineteenth century, mafia was sometimes written with one F, sometimes with two, without any difference in meaning.) Franchetti and Sonnino had no doubts that the mafia was a dangerous form of criminality, and intended to blow away the mist of different opinions that enveloped it.
The day after reaching Sicily, Sonnino wrote to a friend, asking her to arrange letters of introduction to Nicolò Turrisi Colonna, Baron of Buonvicino and expert on the sect:
Here they say he is linked to the mafia. But that doesn’t matter to us. We want to hear what he has to say … Mind you do not tell anyone what I have told you about Baron Turrisi Colonna and his supposed links with the maffia. Some friend of his could write to him about it and that would do us a nasty service.
There is a deal of evidence to suggest that Turrisi Colonna, author of the analysis of the sect, was indeed the strategic political protector of the most important and ruthless mafiosi in Palermo. Rumours of his mafia connections were widespread; even members of his own political grouping were expressing their concerns about him at court in Rome.
In 1860, Turrisi Colonna had made a leading sect member into a captain of his National Guard unit. The man was chosen because of his authority and military experience; earlier he had led one of the revolutionary gangs that descended on Palermo from the surrounding countryside as the patriotic revolution spread. The man in question was a canny thug named Antonino Giammona—the same Antonino Giammona who would later orchestrate the takeover of the Fondo Riella from Dr Galati. Turrisi Colonna was one of the landowners who supported Giammona when the Ministry of the Interior looked into Dr Galati’s allegations; it was Turrisi Colonna’s lawyers who prepared Giammona’s defence statement. According to the Chief of Police’s 1875 report, the mafia’s initiation rituals took place on one of Turrisi Colonna’s estates.
In three separate interviews with Franchetti and Sonnino in 1876, Turrisi Colonna was his usual lucid self on matters of economics. In addition to his interest in the sect, he was a forward-thinking farmer and an agronomist with a long list of academic publications on the citrus fruit business to his name. But he was uncharacteristically evasive on the crime issue. Two years previously, four of his men had been arrested on his estate near Cefalù. To Franchetti and Sonnino he protested their innocence, as, indeed, he had done at the time of the arrests. Landowners like him were the victims, he complained; out on their country estates they were forced to deal with bandits because otherwise they would be unable to protect their valuable crops and trees. He made no mention of a sect.
When Franchetti and Sonnino later interviewed the Palermo Chief of Police they found him pessimistic about a prosecution against Turrisi Colonna’s men because the baron had the political connections to undermine the trial. Other interviewees quickly changed the subject when asked for an opinion of him.
Turrisi Colonna embodies the puzzles of the violent years that saw the mafia appear. He probably based his 1864 pamphlet about the sect on inside sources—perhaps even on what he was told by Antonino Giammona himself. When he wrote it, he may also genuinely have hoped that unification with Italy could normalize Sicily. He may have been a victim of mafia intimidation, who wanted a powerful, efficient new state to help landowners like himself put the mafiosi in their place. Perhaps he saw himself as reluctantly collaborating with men like Giammona on a short-term basis, while he waited for the Italian government to take the violence out of Sicilian society. If so, these were hopes that he had lost long before he was interviewed by Franchetti and Sonnino in 1876.
A less generous interpretation is that Turrisi Colonna was never a victim at all. Giammona’s relationship with him may have been based more on deference than intimidation. Perhaps Turrisi Colonna was simply the first of many Italian politicians whose pronouncements on the mafia did not match their actions. For all the sophistication of its structure and the insidious grip of its code of honour, the Sicilian mafia would be nothing without its links to politicians like Turrisi Colonna. Ultimately, there would be little point in the mafia’s corrupting policemen and magistrates if the dignitaries to whom those officials are answerable were still intent on impartially upholding the rule of law. And in the mafia’s account book, a friendly politician is more useful the more credibility he has. If credibility has to be bought with thundering speeches against crime, or with learned diagnoses of the state of law and order in Sicily, then so be it.
The mafia deals with politicians in a currency that is rarely printed on the paper of parliamentary proceedings and law books. Rather it is stamped on the solid gold of small favours: news of government contracts or land sales leaked, overzealous investigators made to pursue their careers away from the island, jobs in local government given to friends. Thus, in public, Turrisi Colonna could take a detached, scientific interest in the sect, gazing down on it from the height of his intellectual and social prestige. In private, away from the domain of open debate, a close relationship with men like Giammona was integral to his business interests and political support.
Whatever went on between Giammona the mafia boss and Turrisi Colonna the politician, intellectual, and landowner, the Palermo revolt that took place two years after the publication of Turrisi Colonna’s pamphlet was probably an important stage in their relationship. In September 1866, armed gangs once again marched on the city from the surrounding villages. Turrisi Colonna’s National Guard, captained by Antonino Giammona, opposed the revolt. Whereas Giammona, like many other men of violence, had speculated on revolution in the past, he now realized that the Italian state was a body with which he could do business. Key members of the sect like Giammona were beginning to put their revolutionary past behind them, and as they did so the sect began to enter the bloodstream of the new Italy. Like other leading defenders of order, Turrisi Colonna was interviewed during a government inquiry into the trouble of 1866, and he had no hesitation in using the new word ‘mafia’ to describe some of the troublemakers who caused the revolt: ‘Trials cannot be brought to a conclusion because the witnesses are not sincere. They will only start to tell the truth when the nightmare of the Mafia comes to an end.’ ‘Mafia’, Turrisi Colonna had evidently decided, only meant criminals he did not know personally.
* * *
The question that still remains is how the ‘nightmare of the mafia’ began. In 1877, the two men who interviewed Turrisi Colonna published their own research on Sicily in a substantial two-part report. In the first part, Sidney Sonnino, a profoundly melancholic character who would later become Prime Minister of Italy, analysed the lives of the island’s landless peasants. Leopoldo Franchetti’s half of the report bears the less than racy title, Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily. But it has a unique stature; it is an analysis of the mafia in the nineteenth century that is still considered an authority in the twenty-first. Franchetti would ultimately influence thinking about the mafia more than anyone else until Giovanni Falcone over a hundred years later. Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily is the first convincing explanation of how the mafia came to be.
There was something rather English about the investigation mounted by Leopoldo Franchetti and Sidney Sonnino. Both men were great admirers of British liberalism and Sonnino owed his first name to his English mother. When they travelled to Sicily they were entering a land where the vast majority of the population spoke a dialect they could not understand. In the university and salon milieu that Sonnino and Franchetti left behind, the island was still a mysterious place known primarily from ancient Greek myths and sinister newspaper reports. So they planned for the considerable stresses and dangers of their journey with the resolve of explorers setting off for uncharted territory. Among the equipment they took on their journey in the spring of 1876 were repeating rifles, large-calibre pistols, and four copper basins each. The plan was to fill the basins with water and stand the legs of their camp-beds in them to keep insects away. Because roads were poor or non-existent in the interior of the island, the two researchers often travelled on horseback, choosing their routes and guides at the last possible moment to avoid brigand attacks.
Franchetti in particular was far from entirely naive when he went to Sicily; two years earlier he had hacked across large areas of the mainland of southern Italy on a similar expedition. Yet what he found on the island caused him to feel overcome by ‘a profound tenderness’ towards the rifle he carried across his saddle. ‘The nightmare of a mysterious, evil force is weighing down on this naked, monotonous land,’ he later wrote. The notes that Franchetti actually took during the journey have only recently been published; two of the many stories that emerge from those notes can serve to explain the shock of his encounter with Sicily.
Franchetti recorded that, on 24 March 1876, he and Sonnino rode into the central Sicilian city of Caltanissetta. Two days earlier, a priest had been shot dead in the nearby village of Barrafranca, a mafia stronghold, according to the authorities who informed them of what had happened. Sixty metres from where the priest lay dying stood a witness, a new arrival in Sicily, a government inspector from the northern city of Turin whose job was to supervise the collection of taxes on milled flour. This honest functionary ran to the priest’s side in time to hear his dying words of accusation: his own cousin was the murderer.
Profoundly disturbed, the tax inspector jumped on his horse and rode off to tell the carabinieri. He then went to inform the victim’s family. Not wanting to upset them by blurting out what he knew, he told them to follow him to where the priest needed help. Along the way, he gently broke the news. Grateful for his sensitivity, they told him that the murder was the culmination of a twelve-year feud between the priest and his cousin. The priest himself was a wealthy man with a fearsome reputation for violence and corruption.
Twenty-four hours later local police arrested the tax inspector, threw him in jail, and charged him with the murder. The witnesses against him included the priest’s cousin. But the people of Barrafranca, including the murdered man’s family, kept quiet. Mercifully for the tax inspector, the government authorities in Caltanissetta got wind of the case; when he was released the real murderer went into hiding.
A week after hearing of this episode, Franchetti and Sonnino arrived in Agrigento, a town on Sicily’s southern coast famous for its ancient Greek temples. Franchetti’s notebooks tell another story he learned there, of a woman who had taken 500 lire from the police in exchange for information on two criminals; they were in league with a local boss, a man with a hefty share of government road-building contracts. Soon after she accepted the money, the woman’s son returned to his village after a decade in jail. He was carrying a letter from the local mafia detailing what his mother had done. When he confronted her and asked for money to buy some new clothes, her evasive response triggered a furious row after which the man stormed out. He returned shortly afterwards with his cousin and together they stabbed his mother ten times—the son six times and his cousin four. They then threw her body out of the window into the street before giving themselves up.
As they journeyed round Sicily, Franchetti and Sonnino also encountered the seemingly hopeless confusion that had set in around the word ‘mafia’ during the ten years since it had first been heard. Everyone the travellers interviewed during the two months they were in Sicily seemed to have a different understanding of the new buzzword; everyone seemed to accuse everyone else of being a mafioso. The authorities in some places were confused. As one lieutenant in the carabinieri lamely told them: ‘Mafia is an extremely difficult thing to define; you would need to live in Sambuca to get an idea.’
When he subsequently published his findings, Franchetti explained how perplexed he had been to find that the situation was most worrying not in the treeless, yellow interior of the island, where most people would have expected there to be backwardness and crime, but in the citrus groves around Palermo. On the surface, this was the centre of a thriving industry in which the locals took great pride: ‘Every tree is looked after as if it were a rare plant specimen.’ These initial perceptions, Franchetti wrote, were soon changed by the hair-raising tales of murder and intimidation in the area: ‘After a certain number of these stories, the scent of orange and lemon blossom starts to smell of corpses.’ The presence of endemic violence in such a modern setting ran counter to one of the beliefs most cherished by Italy’s rulers: that economic, political, and social progress all marched in step. Franchetti began to wonder whether the principles of justice and freedom he so cherished ‘might just amount to nothing more than well-planned speeches to disguise ailments that Italy cannot cure; they are a layer of gloss to make the dead bodies gleam.’
It was a bleak and perplexing spectacle. But Leopoldo Franchetti was intellectually tenacious as well as brave; he passionately believed in a hands-on engagement with the nation’s problems. A patriotic shame burned within him at the thought that foreigners seemed to know Sicily much better than did the Italians. By patiently covering the territory and by studying its history, Franchetti overcame his doubts and confusion. He produced an account of the mafia business that is starkly systematic. Sicily was not chaotic; on the contrary, its law and order problems had an underlying and very modern rationality to them. The island, Franchetti argued, had become home to ‘the violence industry’.
* * *
Franchetti’s account of the genesis of the mafia opens in 1812 when the British, who occupied Sicily during the Napoleonic wars, began the process of abolishing feudalism on the island. The feudal system had been based on a form of joint land ownership: the king granted land in trust to a nobleman and his descendants; in return, the noble put his private army at the service of the king when the need arose. Within the nobleman’s territory, termed a ‘fief or ‘feud’, his word was law.
Until the abolition of feudalism, Sicilian history was shaped by tussles between a long series of foreign monarchs and the feudal barons. The monarchs tried to draw more power towards the centre; the feudal barons resisted the monarchy’s interference in the running of their estates. In this tug-of-war, it was the nobles who usually had the advantage, not least because Sicily’s mountainous geography and atrocious transport infrastructure made it impossible for central government to rule without letting the barons have their way.
Baronial privileges were wide-ranging and long-lasting. A custom dictating that vassals should greet their feudal lord with a kiss on the hand was only formally abolished by Garibaldi in 1860. The title of ‘don’, which was originally given to the Spanish noblemen who had ruled Sicily, was applied to any man of status for many years after that. (These practices were widespread in Sicily, and were not just mafia habits.)
The abolition of feudalism did not immediately do more than change the rules of the tug-of-war between the centre and the provinces. (The power of the landowners was slow to fade; the last of the great estates was only broken up in the 1950s.) However, forces for long-term change were set loose when feudalism ended; the legal preconditions were put in place for a property market. Quite simply, bits of the estates could now be bought and sold. And land that is acquired rather than inherited needs to be paid for; it is an investment that has to be put to profitable use. Capitalism had arrived in Sicily.
Capitalism runs on investment, and lawlessness puts investment at risk. No one wants to buy new machinery or more land to plant with commercial crops when there is a strong risk that those machines or crops will be stolen or vandalized by competitors. When it supplanted feudalism, the modern state was supposed to establish a monopoly on violence, on the power to wage war and punish criminals. When the modern state monopolizes violence in this way, it helps create the conditions in which commerce can flourish. The barons’ ramshackle, unruly private militias were scheduled to disappear.
Franchetti argued that the key to the development of the mafia in Sicily was that the state had fallen catastrophically short of this ideal. It was untrustworthy because, after 1812, it failed to establish its monopoly on the use of violence. The barons’ power on the ground was such that the central state’s courts and policemen could be pressurized into doing what the local lord wanted. Worse still, it was now no longer only the barons who felt they had the right to use force. Violence became ‘democratized’, as Franchetti put it. As feudalism declined, a whole range of men seized the opportunity to shoot and stab their way into the developing economy. Some of the feudal lords’ private heavies were now acting in their own interests, roaming the countryside as brigand bands that were sheltered by the landlords either out of fear or complicity. The formidable managers called gabelloti, who often rented bits of the landowners’ estates from them, were also adept at using violence to defend their interests. In the city of Palermo, societies of artisans demanded the right to carry arms so that they could police the streets (and force up prices or run extortion operations).
When modern local government institutions were set up in the towns of the Sicilian provinces, groups that were part armed criminal gang, part commercial enterprise, and part political clique, quickly organized themselves to get their hands on the spoils. Officials complained that what they called these ‘sects’ or ‘parties’—sometimes they were merely extended families with guns—were making many areas of Sicily ungovernable.
The state also set up its courts, but soon found that they were subject to control by anyone who was tough and well organized enough to impose his will. Even the police became corrupted. Instead of reporting crime to the authorities, they would often broker or impose deals between the victims and perpetrators of theft. For example, rather than send stolen cattle along the long chain of intermediaries to the butchers, rustlers could simply ask the captain of the local police to mediate. He would arrange for the stolen animals to be handed back to the original owner in return for money passed on to the rustlers. Naturally the captain would get a percentage of the deal.
In a hellish parody of the capitalist economy, the law was parcelled up and privatized just like the land. Franchetti saw Sicily as being in the grip of a bastard form of capitalist competition. It was a violent market in which there were only notional boundaries between economics, politics, and crime. In this situation, people hoping to run a business could not rely on the law to protect them, their families, and their economic interests. Violence was an essential asset in any enterprise; the ability to use force was as important as having capital to invest. Indeed, Franchetti thought that in Sicily violence itself had become a form of capital.
Mafiosi, for Franchetti, were entrepreneurs in violence, specialists who had developed what today would be called the most sophisticated business model in the marketplace. Under the leadership of their bosses, mafia bands ‘invested’ violence in various commercial spheres in order to extort protection money and guarantee monopolies. This was what he called the violence industry. As Franchetti wrote,
[in the violence industry] the mafia boss … acts as capitalist, impresario and manager. He unifies the management of the crimes committed … he regulates the way labour and duties are divided out, and controls discipline amongst the workers. (Discipline is indispensable in this as in any other industry if abundant and constant profits are to be obtained.) It is the mafia boss’s job to judge from circumstances whether the acts of violence should be suspended for a while, or multiplied and made fiercer. He has to adapt to market conditions to choose which operations to carry out, which people to exploit, which form of violence to use.
Men with commercial or political ambitions in Sicily were faced with two alternatives: either to arm themselves; or, more likely, to buy in protection from a specialist in violence, a mafioso. If Franchetti were around today, he might say that threats and murder belonged to the service sector of the Sicilian economy.
* * *
Franchetti seems to have seen himself as a kind of Charles Darwin for a delinquent ecosystem, and as such he gives us a powerful insight into the laws of Sicily’s rich criminal habitat. Yet in doing so he makes Sicily sound like a complete anomaly. In fact all capitalism has a bit of the bastard in it, particularly in the early stages. Even the English society that Franchetti so admired had had its violent entrepreneurs. In Sussex in the 1740s, for example, semi-militarized gangs made huge profits for themselves and their contacts by smuggling tea. They caused a breakdown in law and order by corrupting customs officials, directly confronting troops, and performing armed robberies as a sideline. One historian has described England in the 1720s as resembling a banana republic, its politicians masters in the arts of patronage, nepotism, and the systematic pillaging of the public revenue. Franchetti’s analysis is also limited by the fact that he did not believe that the mafia was a sworn secret association.
Political and Administrative Conditions in Sicily met with a mixture of hostility and indifference on its release. Many Sicilian reviewers berated its author for ignorant prejudice. In part this poor reception was Franchetti’s own fault. For one thing, his proposals for solving the mafia problem were outlandish and authoritarian: Sicilians were not to be allowed any say at all in how their island was policed. Franchetti even thought that their whole outlook was so perverted that they gave violence a ‘moral value’ and considered it ethically wrong to be honest. He seemed not to realize that people very often went along with the mafiosi simply because they were intimidated and did not know whom to trust.
Thus a pioneering account of the ‘violence industry’ failed to make an impact during Franchetti’s lifetime. After publishing his research in Sicily, he went on to serve as a backbench member of parliament, but his political career did not take off. In the end, it was the very same grim patriotism that had impelled him to investigate the mafia in 1876 that eventually killed him. (Even friends thought there was something dark and excessive about Franchetti’s love of his country.) During the First World War he was tormented by the thought that he had not been called to an important office in the nation’s hour of need. In October 1917, when news came through of Italy’s catastrophic defeat at the battle of Caporetto, he became so depressed that he shot himself.
‘THE SO-CALLED MAFFIA’: HOW THE MAFIA GOT ITS NAME
In Palermo dialect the adjective ‘mafioso’ once meant ‘beautiful’, ‘bold’, ‘self-confident’. Anyone who was worthy of being described as mafioso therefore had a certain something, an attribute called ‘mafia’. ‘Cool’ is about the closest modern English equivalent; a mafioso was someone who fancied himself.
The word mafioso began to have criminal connotations because of a hugely successful play written in Sicilian dialect, I mafiusi di la Vicaria (‘The mafiosi of Vicaria Prison’), which was first performed in 1863. The mafiusi are a gang of prison inmates whose habits look very familiar in retrospect. They have a boss and an initiation ritual, and there is much talk in the play of ‘respect’ and ‘humility’. The characters use the term pizzu for protection payments as do today’s mafiosi—the word means ‘beak’ in Sicilian. By paying the pizzu you are allowing someone to ‘wet their beak’. If this use of pizzu started life as jailhouse slang, it almost certainly entered general use because of the play; an 1857 Sicilian dictionary lists only the ‘beak’ meaning; an 1868 dictionary explains the alternative sense of extortion money.
The fact that I mafiusi di la Vicaria is set in Palermo prison also squares with what we know about the jail, which was soon to be confirmed as Sicilian organized crime’s business school, think-tank, language laboratory, and communications centre. One observer at the time called it ‘a kind of government’ for the criminal gangs.
I mafiusi di la Vicaria is at heart a sentimental fable about the redemption of criminals. This first ever literary representation of the mafia is also the first ever version of the myth of the good mafia, a mafia that is honourable and protects the weak. The gang’s boss stops his men picking on defenceless prisoners and kneels in prayer to beg for forgiveness after a man who had spoken to the police is killed, seemingly by mistake. In an implausible denouement, the capo leaves the gang and joins a workers’ self-help group.
Next to nothing is known about the two authors of I mafiusi, other than that they were members of a troupe of travelling players. Sicilian theatrical legend has it that they based I mafiusi on inside information given them by a Palermo tavern owner involved in organized crime. The character of the gang boss in the play is supposed to be based on this real-life mobster. There is no way of confirming this story, and I mafiusi is consequently destined to remain an enigmatic historical document.
The word ‘mafiosi’ is only used once, in the title of I mafiusi di la Vicaria (it was probably inserted at the last minute to help give the piece the kind of local flavour that a Palermo audience would expect) and the term ‘mafia’ never appears at all. All the same, it was following the great success of I mafiusi that the words ‘mafia’ and ‘mafioso’ began to be applied to criminals who seemed to operate in a way similar to the characters in the play. From the stage, the word’s new connotations filtered into the streets.
But a play alone was not enough to give the mafia its name. Baron Turrisi Colonna would certainly have known I mafiusi when he wrote his report at the end of 1864; the King of Italy’s son and heir even came to Palermo to see a gala performance in the spring of that same year. Yet Turrisi Colonna referred only to the ‘sect’, and not to either the mafia or mafiosi. The criminals and enforcers he knew did not call themselves mafiosi, or name their sect ‘the mafia’.
In fact it was only when the Italian authorities picked up on ‘mafia’ that the term entered general use and became a significant part of the sect’s own story. Although it was I mafiusi di la Vicaria that began to give ‘mafia’ its criminal meaning on the streets of Palermo, it was the government that turned the word into a subject of national debate.
The story of how it did so reveals what a devious and violent business ruling Sicily was in the years immediately following Garibaldi’s heroic expedition of 1860. Many Sicilians thought that the challenges of ruling their island had led the Italian government completely to abandon its liberal principles. The government’s critics pointed to two cases in particular: the ‘stabbers’ conspiracy’, and the torture of Antonio Cappello. It was cases like these that completely robbed the state of its credibility, and made many Sicilians very reluctant to trust it on any matter, let alone when it started to complain about the mafia.
Perhaps the strangest crime in Palermo’s long history of misdeeds was referred to by the press as the ‘stabbers’ conspiracy’. On the evening of 1 October 1862, in an apparently synchronized operation carried out within the same small area of Palermo, thugs emerged from the shadows to knife thirteen randomly chosen citizens, one of whom subsequently died of his wounds. Police on the spot only caught one of the perpetrators, a shoe-shiner and pedlar who also had a record as a police spy under the old Bourbon regime. His confession led to the arrest of another eleven supposed ‘stabbers’, who had apparently been paid for their work.
The attacks caused consternation in Palermo. When the stabbers’ trial took place early in 1863, there was huge public interest. Only the twelve men who were believed to have actually carried out the attacks were in the dock. The judge handed down death sentences to three ringleaders; the other nine got hard labour.
Yet the court showed a curious lack of interest in discovering who had funded the conspiracy and what its aims were. A Sicilian nobleman called Sant’ Elia who was close to the Italian royal family had been named by one of the stabbers as the man behind the plot, but he was not even questioned. Opposition newspapers were scornful: evidence weighty enough to condemn three poor wretches to death was apparently not considered sufficiently substantial to set in motion preliminary inquiries into a member of the new Italian establishment. (Sant’ Elia was also, as it happened, the head of a Masonic lodge.)
Sporadic stabbings that bore similarities to the events of 1 October 1862 continued. Whoever had set the plot in motion had clearly not yet achieved his aim. A second investigation began, and this time the nobleman Sant’ Elia was named as the chief suspect and his palace was searched. In response, the authorities rapidly closed ranks and the King pointedly chose Sant’ Elia to represent him at the Easter celebrations in Palermo. The case lost momentum, the stabbings ceased, and the investigators left Sicily.
It is still a mystery whether Sant’ Elia was really behind the stabbers’ conspiracy, although the balance of evidence currently suggests that he was not. What is certain is that the conspiracy came from within the institutions. Either it was dreamed up by interests in Palermo as a way of convincing the national government to put more power in their hands; or the national government was using terror tactics to try to create panic, accuse the opposition of the crimes, and generate the climate for a clampdown. Later in Italian history this move would be called the ‘strategy of tension’.
The year after the first stabbings, another episode cast further suspicion over the authorities. The political climate at the time—late in 1863—was fiery even by the standards of post-unification Sicily because a brutal campaign was being conducted to round up the estimated 26,000 deserters and draft dodgers at large in the island. In late October an opposition journalist went to follow up a story about a young man who was being held against his will in the military hospital in Palermo. The journalist found workman Antonio Cappello bedridden, with more than 150 small circular burns on his body. Doctors claimed that the burns were part of Cappello’s treatment, and their highly implausible theory was later backed up by a judicial inquiry.
The truth was that Cappello had entered the hospital a well man. Three military doctors from northern Italy had starved, beaten, and tortured him by placing red-hot metal buttons on his back. Their aim was to get him to confess that he was a deserter.
In the end, Cappello managed to convince the doctors that he had been a deaf-mute since birth and was not faking the condition to avoid conscription. Soon after he was released on 1 January 1864, photos of his tortured body were circulating in the streets of Palermo with a caption written by the journalist, accusing the government of being barbarians. Within three weeks, on the prompting of the Minister of War, the prison doctor was awarded the Cross of Saints Maurice and Lazarus by the King. At the end of March it was announced that the torturers would face no charges.
For a decade and a half after the unification of Italy, the authorities repeatedly lurched towards a blindly repressive response to the unruly island, only to stagger back towards decent principles that they were unable to uphold, or to sink into complicity with shady local enforcers. This toing and froing helped them pull off an extraordinary feat of political image-making: the Italian state managed to look brutal, naive, hypocritical, incompetent, and sinister all at the same time.
It is hard not to have some sympathy for the government’s plight as it faced a number of huge tasks: building a new state virtually from scratch while also dealing with a civil war on the southern Italian mainland, crippling debt, the prospect of an attack by Austria, and a population of which over 95 per cent spoke a variety of dialects and languages other than Italian. To a government so starved of credibility, the notion that there might be a devilish secret conspiracy against it was manna. So it was that a government conspiracy theorist gave the world the first written use of the term ‘mafia’.
On 25 April 1865, two years after the torture of Antonio Cappello, the recently appointed prefect of Palermo, the Marquis Filippo Antonio Gualterio, sent an alarming secret report to his boss, the Minister of the Interior. Prefects like Gualterio were key officers of Italy’s new administrative system; they were the eyes and ears of the government in the cities, with responsibility for monitoring opposition and supervising the maintenance of law and order. In his report, Gualterio spoke of ‘a serious and long-standing lack of understanding between the Country and the Authorities’. This breakdown resulted in a situation that enabled ‘the so-called Maffia or criminal association to grow more daring’. During the periodic revolutions in mid-nineteenth-century Palermo, wrote Gualterio, the ‘Maffia’ had developed the habit of offering its muscle to different political groupings as a way of increasing its leverage; now it was on the side of whoever opposed the government. Thus, with Gualterio’s report, the Palermo street rumours about the mafia reached the ears of Italy’s rulers for the first time.
Prefect Gualterio was quite explicit about what a good occasion for a clampdown the ‘Maffia’ offered. The government, he explained, could legitimately send in the army to deal with the crime emergency, and in doing so land a fatal blow against the opposition—or so it hoped. As a result of Gualterio’s report, 15,000 troops spent nearly six months trying to disarm the population, arrest draft-dodgers, round up criminals on the run, and track down the mafia. The details of this military campaign (the third in a few short years) are not important here; suffice it to say that it failed.
Gualterio was a conspiracy theorist, but he was not a fantasist. He did not conjure up the mafia out of nothing with the sole purpose of justifying repression. In some respects, his analysis of ‘the so-called Maffia’ ran along the same lines as Turrisi Colonna’s. Organized crime was an integral part of politics on the island. Gualterio’s convenient ‘mistake’ was simply to claim that all the villains were on one side of the political spectrum—the opposition’s. As the revolt of 1866 subsequently proved, some of the most important mafiosi, like Antonino Giammona, were now partisans of order and no longer revolutionaries.
From the day of Gualterio’s report, the word ‘mafia’ rapidly entered general use and simultaneously became the subject of furious controversy. For every person who used ‘mafia’ to mean a criminal conspiracy, there were others who maintained that it still meant nothing more menacing than a peculiarly Sicilian form of self-confident pride. Gualterio thus began to kick up the same dust cloud of bewilderment about what the term ‘mafia’ meant that Franchetti and Sonnino would encounter on their travels round Sicily a decade later—a dust cloud that would only finally be dispersed by Judge Giovanni Falcone.
By giving the mafia a name in these circumstances, Gualterio made a crucial contribution to its image. For since then the mafia and its politicians have frequently claimed that Sicily has been victimized and misrepresented. The government, they protest, has invented the idea that the mafia is a criminal organization as a pretext to oppress Sicilians—yet another version of the ‘rustic chivalry’ theory. One reason that these protests have won support over the past 140 years is that they have sometimes been true. Officials were constantly tempted to pin the label of mafioso on anyone who disagreed with them.
When the Italian government acted in this hypocritical way, it boosted the mafia’s reputation. Thus, unwittingly, when Gualterio gave the mafia its name, he set in place what could be called the mafia ‘brand’s’ positioning strategy vis-à-vis its main competitor. After Gualterio, every blind crackdown that failed to prosecute the mafia—whatever the government happened to take that word to mean—served further to undermine the state’s trustworthiness, and thus to boost the real mafia’s reputation not only for being smart and immune from prosecution, but also for being more efficient and even ‘fairer’ than the state.
More than a century would pass after Gualterio’s report before anyone would write perceptively about the mafia’s own attitude to its name. The writer in question was novelist Leonardo Sciascia, whose 1973 short story ‘Philology’ has a contemporary setting and takes the form of an imagined dialogue between two anonymous Sicilians about the meaning of the word ‘mafia’. The more educated of the two, evidently a politician, is intent first and foremost on displaying his erudition, citing a century-long list of conflicting dictionary definitions, and explaining that ‘mafia’ probably derives from Arabic. With the indecision proper to a gentleman scholar—one imagines him as a portly man in his late sixties, dressed in a crumpled suit—he refuses to settle on one meaning for the word.
The younger man is much more down-to-earth—the picture in the reader’s mind is of a chunky, middle-aged, flat-faced character in Ray Bans. Despite the respect that he evidently has for his partner in discussion, he cannot disguise that all the scholarly debate just makes him edgy. He prefers to hear that ‘mafia’ is the manly swagger of someone who knows how to look after his own interests.
It turns out, of course, that both men in Sciascia’s story are mafiosi and that their dialogue is a rehearsal in case they are called before a parliamentary commission of inquiry. The older man says he is so confident that he will even ask the commission to let him make his ‘little contribution’—’a contribution to the confusion, you understand’. At some point after 1865, Sciascia is suggesting, the name ‘mafia’ became the Sicilian mafia’s own little joke at the state’s expense.
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If the sources we have are to be believed—and, in the history of a secret society like the mafia, that ‘if’ is inevitably quite large—then the sect emerged in the Palermo hinterland when the toughest and smartest bandits, members of ‘parties’, gabelloti, smugglers, livestock rustlers, estate wardens, farmers, and lawyers came together to specialize in the violence industry and to share a method for building power and wealth that was perfected in the lemon business. These men extended their method to family members and business contacts. When they spent time in jail, they would also extend it to their fellow inmates. This sect became the mafia when the new Italian state made ham-fisted attempts to repress it. Thus by the mid-1870s at the very latest, and in the Palermo area at the very least, the most important components of the mafia method were firmly in place. The mafia had the protection rackets and the powerful political friends, and it also had its cellular structure, its name, its rituals, and an untrustworthy state as a competitor.
The great imponderable is whether, at this moment in history, there was one mafia or many. It is not clear how many of the ‘mafias’ referred to by the authorities in different parts of Sicily in the 1860s and 1870s were just autonomous gangs; they may have been copying methods that were widespread anyway, or may actually have recognized themselves as forming part of the same brotherhood as Uditore boss Antonino Giammona. The problem is how to interpret the historical documents. The authorities often referred to the mafia, but by no means everything that they called ‘mafia’ really was the mafia. Some policemen were evidently too keen to twist the facts to fit the conspiracy stories that their political masters needed to brandish against rivals.
Baron Turrisi Colonna’s 1864 account of the sect carries a great deal of weight on this question because of his close relationship with the mafia—and Turrisi Colonna definitely talked only of a single ‘great sect’. But this belief may derive from his Palermo-based perspective and may not be valid for the rest of western Sicily. There are also, by way of contrast, numerous police reports from the 1860–76 period that tell of different gangs locked in combat against each other in many towns and villages. But these are not a reliable indication that there were different mafias; the disputes referred to could just as easily have been generated within a single association in the same way that Cosa Nostra has internal wars today.
However all this evidence is interpreted, its very existence raises a question. If the mafia was around in the 1860s and 1870s, and if today’s historians have been able to find evidence of it, then all the information needed to understand the mafia and to oppose it must have been available to people at the time. By 1877, Italy had Turrisi Colonna’s pamphlet, the parliamentary inquiry into the 1866 revolt, Franchetti’s report on the ‘violence industry’, Dr Galati’s memorandum to the Minister of the Interior, and much more. The question is therefore why no one was able to stop the mafia. Part of the answer is that the Italian state simply had too many other troubles to cope with at the same time. But the main reason is far more sordid. For 1876 marks the point where the mafia became integral to Italy’s system of government.