The Mafia Enters the Italian System
‘AN INSTRUMENT OF LOCAL GOVERNMENT’
The evidence of Dr Galati’s misfortunes at the hands of the Uditore mafia was not allowed to gather dust; it was included in papers submitted to a full-scale parliamentary inquiry into law and order in Sicily that was set up in the summer of 1875, but only delivered its findings in January 1877. The story of the parliamentary inquiry—the first explicitly to address the mafia issue—demonstrates just how much Italy’s rulers knew about the mafia problem in Sicily. It is also part of a much bigger political drama that took place between 1875 and 1877, illustrating how the Italian political system not only failed to combat the mafia in its early years, but actively contributed to its development.
The map of Italian politics after unification was a little like the map of Palermo at the time: a maze of little alleyways within the simple outlines of the main streets. Italy was ruled for a decade and a half after unification by a loose coalition called the Right; at its core were conservative landowners from northern Italy. The opposition, an even looser grouping called the Left, with strongholds in the South and Sicily, was in favour of higher government spending and more democracy. But the differences between the two coalitions were as much cultural as they were political. It often seemed to the Right—with no little justification, it must be said—that many southern and Sicilian members of parliament owed their election to boss politics, and to electoral machines that bribed supporters and bullied opponents. In the eyes of the Left, the Right seemed haughty and hypocritical; it had betrayed the ideals that had led to the foundation of the Italian state and it had badly neglected the South.
The story of the parliamentary inquiry begins in 1874 at a time when the Right coalition began to run into serious trouble. Sicily—where there had always been few Right supporters—was the primary cause of the government’s difficulties. By 1874, for a number of reasons (tax policy was top of the list), Sicily was slipping completely from the Right’s political grasp. In the November elections of that year, forty out of forty-eight Sicilian constituencies returned opposition representatives to the national parliament in Rome. And expert on the ‘sect’, Nicolò Turrisi Colonna was among the leading campaign managers for the Left. His work was assisted by Antonino Giammona—his favourite mafia boss and the persecutor of Dr Galati. Giammona had a political following that brought some fifty votes under his direct control—this at a time when only 2 per cent of the population were enfranchised and a few hundred votes were regularly enough to win a constituency.
In Rome, following the November 1874 elections, the Right clung to power. During and after the election campaign, it resorted to a tactic that it had used previously: stoking up the crime issue to discredit the opposition. In more strident tones than ever, the Right accused the Sicilian Left members of parliament of wanting to undermine the country’s unity, of being corrupt, of using bandits to rake in votes, of being mafiosi.
As part of this strategy, the government put forward some highly repressive legislation soon after the elections: it was proposed that suspected members of criminal associations and their political patrons could be imprisoned without trial for as much as five years. A wealth of compelling evidence garnered from prefects, investigating magistrates, and the police was presented to the committee examining the draft laws. It was pointed out that during 1873 there had been one murder for every 44,674 inhabitants in the northern region of Lombardy; in Sicily the figure was one murder for every 3,194 inhabitants. Official reports indicated that the mafia now reached right across western Sicily and even into some cities in the east like Messina—a major port for the citrus fruit industry. The prefects’ opinions were divided on whether the mafia was a united organization, and on what role the Sicilian mentality played in it. But most of them were clear that the mafia based its power on extortion rackets and the intimidation of witnesses, and that its recruits included Sicilians of all social classes. The prefect of Agrigento, in the south-west of Sicily, believed that mafiosi were a special ‘grade’ of man:
The grade of Mafioso is acquired by giving evidence of personal courage; by carrying prohibited arms; by fighting a duel through whatever pretence; by stabbing or betraying someone; by pretending to forgive an offence in order to take vengeance for it at some other time or place (to take personal vengeance for injuries received is the first canon law of the Mafia); by keeping absolute silence regarding some crime; by denying before all the authorities and the magistrates the knowledge of any crime he has seen committed; by bearing false witness in order to procure the acquittal of the guilty; by swindling in whatever way.
The sober and well-informed Rome correspondent of The Times read through some of this material and concluded in alarm that the mafia was an ‘intangible sect whose organization is as perfect as that of the Jesuits or the Freemasons, and whose secrets are more impenetrable’.
In producing all this evidence and putting forward its new anti-crime legislation, the Right was making a last-ditch bid to create the impression that it was an antimafia government facing up to a pro-mafia opposition. To the Left it seemed that the Right had overreached itself. Not only were men like Turrisi Colonna being directly targeted by the government’s proposals, but a great many Sicilian property-owners who were simply victims of the mafia also felt threatened. Since unification they had been hoping in vain that the government would help them lever themselves from the clutches of organized crime. But now that their patience was entirely exhausted and they had voted for opposition candidates, they found that they were becoming potential targets for the police. The scene was set for a crucial political confrontation between the two sides.
The confrontation came during a tense debate in parliament about the proposed reforms over ten days in June 1875. When the discussion began, one Sicilian member after another stood up to defend the island’s reputation. Some denied that the mafia existed; it was just a pretext for putting down the opposition, they claimed. They pointed to the venomous anti-Sicilian prejudices displayed by one prefect who had asserted in a leaked report that Sicilians were a ‘morally perverted’ people who could only be governed by force.
One speech finally detonated the controversy; because of it the debate would be remembered as the rowdiest since the Italian parliament was founded in 1861. During the early exchanges, various speakers from the Left began to wonder out loud why a man sitting on their own benches had not yet intervened. A wiry, balding, bespectacled member from southern Italy, Diego Tajani had been chief prosecutor at the Palermo Court of Appeal between 1868 and 1872, and he therefore knew a great deal about how the Right itself had ruled Sicily. The Left members regarded him as their secret weapon against the government, and their asides were intended to provoke him into telling what he knew. As a former public servant, Tajani was reluctant to speak about the duties he had once performed. But eventually, stung both by the comments from his colleagues on the Left benches, and by the government’s attempts to capture the moral high ground on the crime question, he stood up to address the chamber.
Tajani’s speech began with a gibe directed at the men of the Left sitting alongside him: denying the existence of the mafia, he said, was like denying the existence of the sun. Then he turned much sharper barbs against the Right. With what one pro-government newspaper called a ‘cold smile’ on his lips, Tajani revealed that, following the revolt of 1866, the Right had encouraged the police to collaborate with the mafia. Mafiosi, he alleged, were given freedom to operate in return for supplying information to the authorities on unauthorized criminals and on anyone the government regarded as a subversive.
Tajani had been personally involved in the most scandalous cases, which centred on the figure of Giuseppe Albanese, the Palermo Chief of Police appointed in 1867. Albanese had no qualms about admitting that he was an admirer of a Bourbon official who had ‘got the mafia interested in keeping the peace’. This was what one contemporary called the ‘homoeopathic’ approach to law and order. It involved making friends with the mafiosi, using them as vote-gatherers and unofficial police agents, and in return helping them to keep their rivals in check.
In 1869, Tajani explained, Chief of Police Albanese had been stabbed by a mafioso in a Palermo piazza. It turned out that he had been attacked because he had been trying to blackmail his assailant. Albanese also had links with a criminal band that had broken into the offices of the Court of Appeal, tunnelled under a main street to rob a savings institute, and stolen a number of precious objects from the Palermo museum. All of the objects were subsequently found in the home of a man who worked in Albanese’s office at police headquarters.
Chief of Police Albanese, Tajani asserted to parliament, was more than an isolated corrupt policeman. In 1869, in the course of his duties as chief prosecutor, Tajani had learned that crimes in Monreale near Palermo were committed with the approval of the commander of the National Guard. Soon after the story emerged, two criminals who seemed prepared to give evidence about the case were ambushed and murdered. Albanese himself, despite being Chief of Police, not only discouraged an investigation into why and how the two men had died, he even told the magistrate responsible that ‘reasons of public order had induced the authorities to order their deaths’. In 1871, on Tajani’s orders, Albanese was charged with the murder of the informants in the Monreale case. It was when the Chief of Police was released for lack of evidence that Tajani resigned in disgust and stood for election under the Left banner.
Before Tajani could finish his speech to parliament, he was angrily interrupted by Giovanni Lanza, a gaunt man in his mid-sixties. Lanza had been Prime Minister and Minister of the Interior at the time of the alleged policy of collusion with the mafia. The austere, self-made son of a blacksmith, he embodied the Right’s claims to moral superiority over the Left. But he had hardly begun to vent his rage in response to Tajani’s accusations when his words were drowned out by shouts, boos, and whistles. What had already been a rowdy sitting descended into chaos as supporters of the two men jostled each other and traded insults. Tajani remained motionless, his cold smile still fixed on his face as he watched four of Lanza’s friends drag the former Prime Minister from the chamber for his own good. The turmoil spilled out into the corridors of parliament and the session had to be abandoned.
It was only the following day that Tajani was able to bring his speech to its stark conclusion: ‘The mafia in Sicily is not dangerous or invincible in itself. It is dangerous and invincible because it is an instrument of local government.’ Having recovered his calm, Lanza tabled a demand for an inquiry into the accusations, but the political damage to the government was already done. The Right’s law-and-order platform had collapsed. Nobody could now believe that parliament was divided between pro-mafia and antimafia politicians. It would prove easier for both sides to just drop the whole subject. So, when the repressive laws were passed (they were destined to remain a dead letter), both Left and Right agreed on what for politicians the world over is the preferred means of smoothing over a controversial issue: they set up a parliamentary commission of inquiry. The mafia was included within the inquiry’s terms of reference, but so much else about Sicilian society was also included that the real contours of the mafia issue would almost certainly be blurred.
It is no wonder that the two ‘English’ intellectuals Franchetti and Sonnino did not trust the parliamentary inquiry to be incisive and they subsequently decided to mount their own private one instead. The people to whom Franchetti and Sonnino spoke, after the parliamentary inquiry had finished gathering evidence in Sicily, would confirm the account of events that Tajani had given to parliament. It is also now known that, with Tajani’s arrest warrant hanging over him, Chief of Police Albanese fled Sicily and was only persuaded to return by the then Prime Minister Lanza, who received him in his house and assured him of the government’s support. It is also thought that an attempt to assassinate Tajani was being prepared just before he left office.
The nine members of the parliamentary commission of inquiry made their way round Sicily in the winter of 1875–6. Each town welcomed them warmly—municipal or military bands would accompany them to their hotels—and they held their interviews in the town hall. Various Senators and members of parliament used their interviews with the commissioners as a chance to explain away the crime problem: ‘What is this maffia then? First of all, there is a benign maffia. The benign maffia is a kind of spirit of defiance … So I too could be a benign maffioso. I am not one, of course. But anyone who respects themselves could be.’ Less cynical politicians, lawyers, police officers, and administrators, as well as ordinary citizens like Dr Gaspare Galati, also submitted evidence. Plenty of witnesses spoke of the mafia’s role in the citrus fruit industry and in the revolts of 1860 and 1866. Together all these testimonies provided a confused but deeply worrying portrait of organized crime and political corruption. Italian politicians now had at their disposal even more evidence about the mafia.
The papers of the inquiry were never published. When the time came for the commission to submit its findings to parliament early in 1877, the Right coalition had already fallen. What little will there had been to make political use of the mafia issue was now gone. Neither the Right nor the Left had much interest in a serious understanding of organized crime in Sicily. (Hence also the poor reception given at the same time to Franchetti’s work on the violence industry.)
The parliamentary commission’s final report was delivered to an almost empty Chamber of Deputies. The conclusion it reached was both bland and wrong: the mafia was defined as ‘an instinctive, brutal, biased form of solidarity between those individuals and lower social groups who prefer to live off violence rather than hard work. It unites them against the state, the law and regular bodies.’ In short, the mafia was conveniently dismissed as a disorganized bunch of poor, lazy crooks—enemies of the state rather than ‘instruments of local government’. By 1877, Italy’s politicians had most of the knowledge they needed about the mafia in order to fight it, and all of the reasons they needed to forget what they knew. The first stage of the process by which the mafia entered the Italian system was complete.
* * *
The second stage began when a Left coalition government was formed in March 1876. It was joined, cautiously, by the Sicilian parliamentarians who had been elected with the opposition in 1874. The new Minister of the Interior was Giovanni Nicotera, a lawyer who had fought with Garibaldi and who understood southern Italian boss politics better than anyone—for the simple reason that he was its leading exponent. Nicotera set about turning the Ministry of the Interior building off Piazza Navona into a formidable vote-farming machine for the Left. Opposition supporters were cut from the electoral roll or harassed by the police; government funds and jobs were placed at the disposal of friendly candidates. In November 1876, Nicotera managed the elections so successfully that the Left won 414 parliamentary seats, leaving only 94 to the Right. He was returned in his own Salerno constituency with 1,184 votes to his opponent’s 1; it is to be hoped that the poor man’s relatives were at least allowed to abstain.
Nicotera approached the crime issue with the same gusto. The state of law and order in Sicily was still intolerable in 1876. For one thing, it was an international embarrassment. On 13 November, the young English manager of a sulphur company, John Forester Rose, was kidnapped just outside the mining town of Lercara Friddi. The Times reported that he was treated well before a ransom was surrendered and he was freed, although the American press subsequently said that his wife received his ears in the post before she was persuaded to pay up. It was clear, all the same, that the kidnappers had informers among the well-to-do Palermo circles that Mr Rose frequented, and that the ransom was paid through a mafia intermediary.
Nicotera knew that something had to be done. He was clearly no political ingénu: the sources of support that he drew on in his own fiefdom included the Freemasons and—it is suspected—the Camorra, the Neapolitan equivalent of the mafia. But he did not know Sicily well and did not have a power base there. So when he took office even he was genuinely taken aback by what his civil servants told him about the mafia’s ties with the most powerful people in Sicily and about its far-reaching influence over the police and magistrature. He concluded that the wealthy classes in Sicily were ‘heavily compromised with the mafia’.
A month after the Rose kidnapping, and without bothering to propose authoritarian legislation along the lines that the Right had wanted two years earlier, Nicotera appointed yet another tough prefect of Palermo and gave him instructions to implement yet another brutal crackdown on crime. Just as had happened under the Right, towns were encircled at night and suspects deported en masse. Just as they had done under the Right, the police colluded with some criminals against others. Just as under the Right, the repression produced howls of protest from some Sicilian politicians—including the friend of the ‘sect’, Baron Turrisi Colonna—about the illegal means used by the police. And, just as his Right predecessor Lanza had done, Nicotera used the repression to hit anyone he regarded as subversive and to bring potential allies to heel. When one Sicilian landowner who was heavily suspected of links with mafiosi wrote a newspaper article critical of Nicotera’s antimafia campaign, the brother of the newspaper’s editor was arrested and only freed in return for a promise to change the paper’s uncooperative line.
But unlike the Right’s campaigns of repression, Nicotera’s proved to be successful. In November 1877, a year after his electoral triumph, he was able to announce the total defeat of the ‘bandits’ who had terrorized the countryside in Sicily since 1860. Even the man who had kidnapped the unfortunate Mr Rose was shot down. Nicotera’s secret was that he had offered politicians in Sicily an implicit bargain: they would be looked on favourably by the government as long as they handed over the bandits. ‘Bandits’, in this case, often meant mafiosi who created problems for the government or who did not have the right political protection. The politicians were being asked to make sure that their friends in the violence industry kept crimes like kidnapping down to politically acceptable levels. Only the most flagrant aspects of the deep-seated crime issue were to be addressed in the process of, finally, making the island governable. To demonstrate that the bargain had been accepted, seventy town councils in the province of Palermo sent letters and petitions in support of Nicotera and the police. This warm demonstration of loyalty was probably orchestrated by Nicotera’s prefect, but it did at least show that, seventeen years after Garibaldi invaded Sicily in the name of the Italian nation, some sort of political consensus between Rome and Sicily was finally taking shape.
A month after proclaiming the total defeat of Sicilian ‘banditry’, Nicotera was removed from office. His shameless authoritarianism had made him both a threat and an easy target for rival faction leaders on the Left. Before then, his dragnet had hauled in some mafia-like criminal associations, and operations against them did not stop with Nicotera’s departure. Over the coming years, a series of high-profile trials followed investigations into groups like the ‘Stuppagghieri’ (‘Fuse Burners’) in Monreale, the ‘Brothers’ in Bagheria, the ‘Fontana Nuova’ in Misilmeri, and a gang of extortionist millers in Palermo. (The story of one such association, the ‘Fratellanza’—or ‘Brotherhood’—from Favara, is told in the next chapter.)
The picture of organized crime that emerged from these trials was predictably murky. Some pentiti came forward, and one or two were murdered. But for every witness whose credibility was confirmed posthumously in this way, another turned out to be too close to the authorities to be reliable, and still another turned out to have important political friends shielding him from prosecution. Whereas some policemen were overzealous in their hunt for evidence of secret societies, others were themselves linked to gangs. Accordingly the verdicts varied from complete acquittal on appeal, as in the case of the ‘Stuppagghieri’, to the twelve death sentences handed down in 1883 to the Piazza Montalto cosca, which was based on the south-eastern edge of Palermo. The few high-level suspects arrested for their connections with organized crime escaped conviction. Many mafiosi were left untouched by the repression—as long as they had the right political cover.
As the trials followed one another in the late 1870s and early 1880s, it became clear that the bargain pioneered by Nicotera was proving to be a turning point. Governments in Rome were resigning themselves to working with Sicilian politicians who had mafia support. Mafiosi were gradually becoming part of a new political normality. The men of honour built up their extortion rackets and other business interests, but they also learned that political friendships had become more important than ever to their survival. For their part, Sicilian politicians were given the opportunity that the Right had denied them for so long: they could now launch themselves into the national arena, into the mysterious dance of coalition partners that determined how power and resources were distributed from Rome. There was a bonus in that the Left spent much more public money in Sicily than the Right had done—on roads, bridges, harbours, hospitals, schools, sanitation, slum clearance, and asylums. All of these were potential sources of income and power for politicians and criminals alike. Thus mafiosi found that the Left was willing to use them as ‘an instrument of local government’, just as the Right had done, only in a slightly different way. Whereas the Right had tried to run Sicily by oiling guns, the Left preferred to grease palms. Under the Left, the mafia and the politicians it dealt with began to sink their arms deep into the Roman pork barrel.
Nicotera’s bargain thus created a blueprint for governing Sicily that would remain more or less in place for the next forty years. Indeed, even today, the mafia aims to be an ‘instrument of local government’ of the kind that it became under the Left. And today, as during the critical years of 1875–7, men of honour do not set the political agenda; only very rarely do they have either the inclination or the power to turn the tide of Italian politics. They merely adapt to circumstances by striking bargains with politicians of all colours.
THE FAVARA BROTHERHOOD: THE MAFIA IN SULPHUR COUNTRY
In the early nineteenth century blemishes of a more sickly shade of yellow began to appear in the grain-coloured highlands of the Sicilian interior. The island had a virtual natural monopoly in an element that was an essential raw material of the industrial revolution: sulphur, used in the production of a host of things from fungicides and fertilizers to paper, pigments, and explosives. The plains and hillsides of the south-western and central provinces of Agrigento and Caltanissetta were torn open to expose the precious element that lay in thick seams below the surface. It was as if a congenital geological illness were finally beginning to make its symptoms manifest. In the mining regions, unearthly bluish smoke could often be seen emanating from the calcaroni, huge buried mounds of sulphur-bearing rock that were slowly burned to release a brown liquid. The fumes poisoned the countryside around and ruined the health of men and animals alike. And life in the sulphur mines was more infernal even than the landscape: collapses were common, and any fire would create lethal sulphur dioxide fumes. One hundred men were killed in 1883—by no means an untypical year.
Sicily’s sulphur mines were a running national scandal, and not just because of the physical risks. Italian public opinion was most concerned about the little boys, some as young as seven or eight, who were hired in small teams to carry the rock from the workface to the calcaroni. These children led a wretched life. Their miserable pay went straight to their parents; they often saw no more than the odd cigar or cup of wine as a reward for their efforts. The huge baskets of rock they carried deformed their bodies. Worse still, concerned observers talked darkly of their ‘wild instincts of wickedness and immorality’—pederasty was endemic in the sulphur mines.
In March 1883 in Favara, a town in the heart of sulphur country not far from the south-western coast of Sicily, a railway worker came to the police to say that he had been invited to join a secret republican society called la Fratellanza—the Brotherhood. He had been approached by a builder who told him that the society had special recognition signals that he would have to use if he wanted to avoid being attacked by other members. The railwayman felt he was being threatened, and guessed that there was a criminal intent behind the association.
The railwayman’s evidence came soon after what had been weeks of tension and violence in Favara. The trouble began on the evening of 1 February when a man was shot dead by two hooded assailants outside a tavern where a christening was being celebrated. The police assumed that the killing was the conclusion of a fight in the tavern and interpreted the guests’ blanket failure to recognize the killers as a sign that they were complicit. Everyone at the celebration was arrested.
The rumours in Favara were that the victim was a member of a criminal association. And those rumours became more credible the following day when a member of a rival gang was found dead outside the town. He had been shot in the back and his right ear was missing. Favara was suddenly on the verge of civil war. In the following days men from the two factions went about the town in groups, armed and wary. But then, just as suddenly, the tension dissipated and the threatened fighting between the two gangs failed to materialize. It was only when the railwayman told his story that the police began to reconstruct what had happened.
Between March and May 1883, more than 200 people were arrested in Favara and the surrounding area. One of the Brotherhood’s leaders was actually caught in the act of initiating two hooded brothers. Extraordinarily, he even had a written copy of the association’s statutes in his possession. He confessed, explaining that members would draw lots to decide who was to perform any killing that the leaders deemed necessary to the Brotherhood’s interests. More confessions followed. Skeletons were recovered from remote grottoes, dried-up wells, and abandoned sulphur mines. Further versions of the statutes and a diagram of the Brotherhood’s organization were recovered.
The trial of the Brotherhood took place in the specially adapted church of St Anne in Agrigento in 1885. One hundred and seven men were led in four chained lines into the dock. Many now denied the charges, claiming that they had confessed under torture. But the tactic did not work. The Brothers were convicted and imprisoned—a rare success against such a criminal association.
The case of the Favara Brotherhood gave the police a unique insight into the kind of mafia organization that grew up away from Palermo, in the sulphur regions of Agrigento and Caltanissetta provinces. But just as significant as the investigators’ discoveries, which they proved in court, is what they failed to see about the Brotherhood’s profound hold on the society around them. Historians now believe that the Brotherhood was a much more sophisticated and dangerous organization than the authorities realized. And if the mafia has survived so long in sulphur country, just as it has in the rest of western Sicily, it is partly because of the way that, like the Brotherhood in Favara, it has consistently been underestimated.
The Brotherhood was, in fact, only a few weeks old when police learned of its existence. It was formed when the bosses of Favara’s two factions met to discuss the escalating violence in the town following the murder at the christening. Remarkably, given the interests at stake and the violence of the conflict, the two sides not only agreed a peace but decided to merge and form a single association.
The Brotherhood’s rules were older than the association; they were followed by both of the gangs that came together to form it. And to anyone familiar with the story of Dr Galati and the Uditore mafia, those rules are strikingly familiar. The initiation ritual, for example: new members had their index finger pricked so that blood could be smeared on a sacred image. As the image was burned, the initiate recited an oath: ‘I swear on my honour to be faithful to the Brotherhood, as the Brotherhood is faithful to me. As this saint and these few drops of my blood burn, so I will spill all my blood for the Brotherhood. As this ash and this blood can never return to their original state, so I can never leave the Brotherhood.’ Because the Brotherhood had some 500 members recruited from several sulphur towns near Favara, a recognition ritual was also necessary. Like the Palermo version, it began with an inquiry about a sore tooth and proceeded with a similar exchange. (A report by the Palermo Chief Prosecutor to the Minister of Justice in 1877 claimed that this ritual was recognized across the island.)
The structure of the Brotherhood even bears similarities with the structure of Cosa Nostra that Tommaso Buscetta would first describe a century later. Members of the Brotherhood were divided into decine—groups of ten. Each decina had a commander known only to its members but secret from the rest of the brotherhood except for a single boss.
Investigators also learned that the Brotherhood regarded the bond between its members as more sacred than family ties. One member of the Brotherhood of Favara, Rosario Alaimo, told police how the Brothers had called him to a tavern to tell him that his nephew was a traitor; they then gave him a choice between killing his own nephew and being killed himself. When he accepted the first option, fear drove him to demonstrate his resolve with a toast: ‘Wine is sweet, but the blood of a man is sweeter.’ A few days later he helped lure his nephew into a trap so that other Brothers could murder him. As proof of his confession, Alaimo took the police to the ruined castle where his nephew’s body was hidden. On returning to his cell, he hanged himself. It was said that he wanted his own end to mirror as closely as possible the way his nephew had been killed—by garrotting.
Even today, the mafia takes great care to manage blood relationships between its members. Because kinship can help the cohesion of a Family, nephews, brothers, and sons are often brought into the organization. But affection for a relative can also be destabilizing if it interferes with the first duty of obedience to the capo. So mafiosi are sometimes forced to show in dramatic fashion where their loyalty ultimately lies. If you, as a mafioso, have a brother who is also a man of honour and he breaks the rules, you may well be offered the same stark choice as the Brothers offered Alaimo: either you kill him or you both die. In such cases the firm has to be seen to come first. The elimination of a family member may become a point of pride for some men of honour. As captive mafioso Salvatore ‘Totuccio’ Contorno boasted in the 1980s, ‘I’m the only one who can bathe my hands in my own blood.’
The similarity between the Brotherhood’s rules and the ones adopted by the cosche around Palermo was striking even in 1883. Yet its significance seems largely to have escaped the magistrates and criminologists of the day. Favara and Palermo are on opposite coasts. One hundred kilometres of Sicily’s mountainous interior, with its terrible roads, lie between them. That the mafia in two such distant places should share the same rules is probably explained by the fact that, before 1879, some of the leading Brothers had been confined on prison islands like Ustica with mafiosi from Palermo. It was in prison that these men were first told of the mafia and, quite possibly, initiated into it. They maintained links with mafiosi from other parts of Sicily once they were released. Being part of the early mafia meant joining a local gang; but it was also a passport to a wider world of criminal connections.
The prosecutors in the Favara Brotherhood case thought that the rituals binding the association together were merely ‘primitive’. They suggested that crude instincts for vendetta and omertà were the Brotherhood’s main motives. One magistrate talked of the ‘barbarous mysticism’ of the initiation ceremony; ‘pure cannibalism’ was his comment on the toast that Alaimo had drunk after agreeing to help murder his own nephew.
Words like ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ mark one of the great blind spots in nineteenth-century Italy’s understanding of the mafia, as will become apparent in the next chapter. In this case they helped turn attention away from what was almost certainly the Brotherhood’s tactically astute role within the local sulphur economy. Of the 107 men tried for membership of the gang, 72 worked in the sulphur industry. In addition to miners there were overseers and even small-time mine owners. These shared mining interests probably explain why the two rival gangs successfully united as la Fratellanza: economic rationality won out over the desire for vendetta. The trial also brought the Brotherhood’s network of protectors out into the open: landowners, noblemen, and former mayors submitted character references. No one thought to ask exactly why these notables were seeking to protect the ‘primitives’.
For all their hellishness, Sicily’s sulphur mines were operated in almost as sophisticated a way as the lemon groves. The young boys who were treated as little more than beasts of burden in the industry were at the bottom of a long chain of contractors and subcontractors. The landed gentry leased out mining rights to entrepreneurs; the entrepreneurs hired overseers on commission; the overseers in turn engaged surveyors, guards, and miners. As the chain became longer, the risks of dealing in a commodity that was traded on international markets were spread more thinly.
The miners themselves—known as ‘pickmen’—were paid piece rates. It was they who hired the teams of boys. They were a notoriously hard and quarrelsome crew known for their murderous drinking bouts. By the standards of their time and place they were far from poor; indeed, they were entrepreneurs of a kind. Some of them were in charge of three or four other miners. Many were keen to flaunt their hard-won social status. One observer, an Englishwoman who married a landowner in a sulphur region, wrote of the typical pickman: ‘He is very ambitious in his way of dressing, and is often seen on Sundays arrayed in fine black cloth, with patent-leather top-boots and a large hooded cloak of fine dark cloth lined with green.’ (It is not clear whether the hoods worn by the Brothers had a ritual significance, or were badges of the pickmen’s status, or both.)
Sulphur was a highly competitive business for everyone involved. And, as in most of western Sicily, violence could give an edge over the competition. At every tier in the hierarchy running from the landowner down to the miner, the ability to use force in an organized and tactically astute way was a key economic asset. Entrepreneurs, managers, overseers, guards, and pickmen could form cartels to force out rivals. Like the lemon groves around Palermo, the sulphur mines were a breeding ground for criminal associations.
Viewed without ‘primitivist’ preconceptions, the Favara Brotherhood case also provides an early hint of what it means to be a godfather within the mafia. It is far from incidental that the murder which ultimately led to the foundation of the Brotherhood was carried out at a christening. Killing a man at a christening was a calculated offence aimed not just at a family, but at a whole enemy gang. That is why the murder brought an equally calculated retort when the second victim had his ear cut off after being shot in the back.
In Sicily as in much of southern Italy, christenings were important less because of the child’s baptism than because the ceremony also meant welcoming a new godfather into the family. Baptizing the child made the father and godfather into compari—‘co-fathers’. It was a solemn undertaking: even brothers who became compari had to stop using the familiar ‘tu’ form of address and speak to each other with the formal ‘voi’ instead. For the rest of their lives, the two ‘co-fathers’ would be obliged to respond to each other’s requests, of whatever kind. Peasants and sulphur miners told many hair-raising folk tales about the terrible vengeance that John the Baptist, the patron saint of compari, wrought on any man who betrayed his ‘co-father’.
The institution known as comparatico was a kind of social glue; it extended the family bond further out into society, encouraging peace and cooperation. Two men at daggers drawn might decide to bury their differences and become compari in order to avoid a violent dispute that would only harm both of their families. A labourer might enlist a more influential man as the godfather of his child, offering him deference and loyalty in the hope of favours in return. Choosing a powerful godfather for your child could bring a job in the sulphur mine, some land to cultivate, a loan, charity.
But becoming a godfather sometimes had another side to it. The Sicilian phrase ‘fari u cumpari’ (‘to act like a co-father’) also meant to be an accomplice, to help someone commit an illegal deed. If the link between compari could help keep society together, it could also bind men into a criminal pact. Mafiosi frequently strengthened the bonds between them by becoming compari. Senior men of honour were sometimes called ‘godfather’ in imitation of the prestige with which the title was endowed in society. Even today, just as a compare oversees a baby’s baptism, so a mafia godfather presides over a young recruit’s initiation—his rebirth as a man of honour.
The mafia has, from the outset, been highly sophisticated in the way that it infiltrates the leading sectors of the Sicilian economy, and equally sophisticated in adopting and adapting any sources of loyalty within Sicilian culture that it can use for its own murderous purposes. The mafia, in other words, is anything but backward.
By the time the Favara Brotherhood was discovered, the mafia had left the headlines and entered the quieter domain of academic debate. The chief prosecutor in the Favara case sent an account of the Brotherhood’s deeds to an academic journal, The Archive of Psychiatry, Penal Sciences and Criminal Anthropology to Serve the Study of Deranged and Delinquent Man. It was edited by leading criminologist Cesare Lombroso who, outside Italy, was the most famous Italian intellectual of his day. The book that made his reputation was Delinquent Man, first published in 1876. In it he argued that criminals could be identified by certain physical deformities: jug-handle ears, low foreheads, long arms, and so on. He termed these physical signs ‘criminal stigmata’. What they demonstrated, according to Lombroso, was that crooks were actually biological anachronisms, accidental throwbacks to an earlier stage in human evolution. That is why they looked like ‘primitive’ non-European peoples and even animals. Non-Europeans were, Lombroso confidently assumed, stationed at a lower rung on the ladder of racial development and were therefore inherently criminal. Pushing his own logic through to breaking point, Lombroso also thought that all animals were criminal too.
The lunacy of what Lombroso called his ‘criminal anthropology’ is considerably more apparent today than it was then. Italians were the anxious citizens of a fragile new state and, since unification, had been the victims of an alarming crime wave. As a result, many of them found Lombroso’s ideas reassuring. The implication of his theory was that it was not Italy’s fault if it had so many wrongdoers—biology makes a good scapegoat. As well as offering political comfort, the many new editions of Delinquent Man (and its even racier sequel, Delinquent Woman) gave Lombroso’s readers a prurient thrill with their copious illustrations of criminal ears, delinquent genitalia, and so on. To the large audiences that came to his lectures at Turin University, Lombroso—a tubby, squirrel-like man—would demonstrate the presence of the stigmata of delinquency on the bodies of live felons.
Lombroso’s thinking on the mafia was more than usually muddled; he attributed it to a bundle of causes including race, weather, ‘social hybridism’—whatever that was—and the fact that monasteries had promoted idleness by doling out soup. He had plenty of critics ready to point out that his theories were contradictory and unsupported by any evidence. But many of those critics also seriously underestimated the mafia. Crime had social causes, they argued. It was poverty that led peasants and workers to form secret societies. The mafia was primitive, certainly, but it was socially primitive. It existed because Sicily was still stuck in the Middle Ages. Some left-wing thinkers saw the Favara Brotherhood as a very rudimentary trade union. They trusted that economic modernization and the advance of the working class would soon bring an end to all symptoms of backwardness like the mafia. (This illusion would hamstring left-wing thinking on the mafia for decades to come.)
In the 1880s, the new ideals of scientific criminology and social progress inspired a generation of policemen who were beginning to build up considerable expertise in fighting organized crime. One such policeman, who was a follower of Lombroso, was Giuseppe Alongi. His 1886 book, The Maffia in its Factors and Manifestations, lays great stress on the ethnic psychology of Sicilians. They displayed ‘an unbounded egotism’, ‘an exaggerated sense of themselves’, ‘a capacity for violent, tenacious disdain and hatred that are implacable until vendetta is achieved’. Alongi did not believe that such people could create a large criminal association that had fixed rules. The mafia, he maintained, was nothing more than a label for disparate, self-contained cosche in individual neighbourhoods and villages. He saw the Favara Brotherhood as an example. Alongi may have been right to discount the theory that the mafia was a centralized conspiracy. But he was almost certainly wrong to discount the possibility that many local cosche were part of a bigger network.
Despite his primitivist preconceptions, Alongi was an astute observer of the lifestyles of families who benefited from the trickle-down profits of crime in areas of mafia activity. He saw that money was spent conspicuously in the villages around Palermo. The men wore expensive hats, boots, and gloves, and had thick gold watch chains and rings. On Sundays the women donned silk dresses and little plumed hats. Feast days saw a heavy consumption of meat and desserts. The families of doctors, professionals, and bureaucrats could not compete with the sartorial display mounted by their social inferiors.
Alongi also noted that pawnbrokers did a good trade. As Dr Galati had observed of the Uditore cosca a decade before, only the mafia bosses became truly rich. ‘Most of them squander the fruit of their thieving. They spend it on living it up, and engage in debauchery, gluttony, and every kind of vice.’ The excess of these lifestyles was not reflected in the way the men of honour themselves talked and behaved, according to Alongi:
These people are imaginative and their villages hot; their day-to-day language is mellifluous, exaggerated, full of images. Yet the maffioso’s language is short, sober, clipped … The phrase lassalu iri (‘let him go’) has a disdainful meaning along the following lines: ‘My dear chap, the man you are dealing with is an imbecile. You only compromise your dignity by picking him as an enemy’… Another phrase—be’ lassalu stari (‘let him be’)—seems identical, but has the opposite meaning. It translates as, ‘That man deserves a severe lesson. But now is not the time. Let us wait. Then, when he is least expecting it, we will get him’… The true maffioso dresses modestly. He affects a brotherly bonhomie in his attitude and speech. He makes himself seem naïve, stupidly attentive to what you are saying. He endures insults and slaps with patience. Then, the same evening, he shoots you.
Alongi’s book helped him make an outstanding career. His insistence that the mafia was a primitive gang and the fact that he was very reticent about its connections among politicians, policemen, and magistrates probably had something to do with his success.
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Italy’s fascination with its ‘primitives’ also had a softer and yet ultimately more sinister side to it. For more than four decades before the First World War, Giuseppe Pitrè, a lean, high-browed doctor, toured Palermo and its environs in a battered carriage that doubled as an office—papers and notes permanently littered its interior. As he went he collected peasant sayings, fables, songs, customs, rituals, and superstitions. Pitrè, who liked to think of himself as a ‘demo-psychologist’, was building up a vast portrait of the collective Sicilian mentality. The result was an invaluable, if sentimental, archive of a disappearing ‘primitive’ world. Almost everything that people have thought about Sicilian folklore since the late nineteenth century—and almost every stereotype about the Sicilian character—can be traced back to it.
Here is how the professor of ‘demo-psychology’ defined ‘mafia’ in 1889:
Mafia is neither a sect nor an association, it has no regulations or statutes. The mafioso is not a thief or a criminal … Mafia is the awareness of one’s own being, an exaggerated notion of one’s own individual strength … The mafioso is someone who always wants to give and receive respect. If someone offends him, he does not turn to the Law.
When Cavalleria rusticana met with its astounding success the year after Pitrè published these words, he could have been justified in feeling a certain pride. The opera that peddled the myth of rustic chivalry to the world is based on a short story and a one-act play by the leading Sicilian author of the era, Giovanni Verga, who drew heavily on Pitrè’s work. Although it is filtered through the words of other men, the Sicily that Mascagni set to music, and set in stone, is in good measure Pitrè’s Sicily.
Pitrè became a talisman for Sicilian gangsters and their lawyers for a long time afterwards; his cosy definition of the mafia was even quoted in court in the mid-1970s by fearsome Corleone boss Luciano Leggio. It is unlikely that Pitrè was actually a member of the mafia. Yet at the time of the first performance of Cavalleria in 1890, he was working closely in local government in Palermo with a member of parliament whom he gushingly proclaimed was ‘a real gentleman … an extremely upright and honest administrator’. That ‘honest administrator’ was in fact the most notorious mafioso of the turn-of-the-century era, a man who belied any notion that the mafia was backward: Don Raffaele Palizzolo. When the public came to learn more about Don Raffaele, it would also learn just how deep into Italy’s system of government the mafia had extended its power—at the very time when the country was busy convincing itself that men of honour were nothing more than primitives.