Don Raffaele Palizzolo would receive his clients in the morning in his Palermo home in the Palazzo Villarosa, in via Ruggiero Settimo. They approached him bearing flowers or other gifts as he sat up in bed with a blanket round his shoulders. Some were seeking a job with the municipality. Others might be magistrates or police officials who wanted a transfer, a promotion, a pay rise. Or they might be suspects in need of a gun licence or of protection from police harassment; councillors looking for a position of influence on a commission or committee; high-school or university students looking to be forgiven poor grades that threatened their progress.
Don Raffaele was not haughty and would listen to everyone indulgently; he would chat, ask after relatives, offer sympathy, promise help. The audiences continued as he washed, tended to the jaunty upward curls at the tips of his moustache, and slipped into the long, close-fitting, double-breasted jacket the Italians called a redingote (from ‘riding coat’).
In the afternoons, Palizzolo would take care of his interests and bestow favours. He was an owner of land and a holder of leases, a councillor in local and provincial government, a charity and bank trustee. He managed the merchant navy’s health insurance fund, and presided over the administration of the lunatic asylum. As a member of parliament he was a staunch supporter of the government, whoever was in power.
Palizzolo’s morning receptions, which were held throughout a forty-year political career, had a distinctively shameless style. But there is nothing exclusively mafioso, or exclusively Sicilian, about this kind of patronage and clientele building in politics. The same basic mechanisms are still found in many places in Italy, to say nothing of other countries across the world. Votes are exchanged for favours: politicians and state officials appropriate public resources—jobs, contracts, licences, pensions, grants—and reinvest them privately, in their personal support networks or clienteles.
Patronage, clientelism, and corruption are not the same thing as the mafia. In fact, the mafia would not have come into being if a modern state had not at least tried, however cack-handedly, to impose the rule of law in Sicily. In other words, the mafia does not grow naturally from a mulch of sleaze. There are plenty of places in the world where there is political corruption, and not all of them produce mafia-like organizations. Nor does the patronage factor in politics mean that the big issues like economics, democracy, and foreign policy count for nothing. That said, Palizzolo was certainly in league with the mafia, and the power of the mafia cannot be understood without grasping the patronage politics of which he came to be the most notorious exponent of his era.
Patronage is costly. Until 1882, the costs were relatively contained: only some 2 per cent of the population, all property-owning male adults, were entitled to participate in the Italian political process. The electorate in any given constituency might well consist of only a few hundred people. In those circumstances, the packet of fifty votes controlled by Antonino Giammona could make all the difference. In 1882, things changed when the franchise was extended to include one quarter of the adult male population. The era of mass politics was on its way. Elections suddenly became more expensive. It was a time of risk and opportunity both for politicians and mafiosi.
Don Raffaele Palizzolo rose to the challenge and devoted his life to brokering favours. His record was long and crooked: he defrauded charities, protected and used bandits, testified in favour of mafiosi. His domain had its nerve centre in the suburban township of Villabate, but it extended far to the city’s south-east, taking in Caccamo, Termini Imerese, and Cefalù. He was the protector of the Villabate cosca, the guest of honour at their banquets, the man who helped them turn their territory into an important terminal for the cattle-rustling routes leading from the great estates of the interior towards Palermo. He also had a strong enough support network in Palermo and its outskirts to get himself elected three times as member of parliament for a constituency there in the 1890s.
Gun licences are a good example of the chain of favours linking men like Palizzolo and the mafia. They could only be obtained with a reference from a leading citizen, such as a politician. This was an obvious opportunity to curry favour. In the run-up to elections the deal became more systematic. On the order of the Minister of the Interior, the prefect could withdraw all gun permits. His declared aim was to prevent the political contest spilling over into violence, but the real aim was to influence the vote. Only sponsoring letters from the central government’s favoured electoral candidate would allow the licences to be returned. The politicians would sell such letters for electoral funds, votes, or favours.
The fragmentation of the Italian political system was Don Raffaele’s great ally. For much of the history of Italy there have been few clear dividing lines within an unstable mosaic of cliques and interest groups. This has been true from the top to the bottom of the state, in the council chambers of provincial towns as in national assemblies. Amid the fragmentation, strategically placed minorities have been able to exert great leverage. In most cases, the mafia and its politicians have constituted a strategically placed minority.
Under normal circumstances in the late nineteenth century, Italy could not muster the political resolve and vigilance needed to expose the likes of Don Raffaele. The country’s quarrel-racked coalition governments were held in place for only a few months at a time with the support of Sicilian politicians. But in the 1890s Italy was swept by a crisis so grave that for a while it seemed as if the country might fall apart. The political turmoil was to lead to the most serious threat the mafia had faced since its birth.
In 1892, the two major Italian credit institutions folded. Later that year it was revealed that the Banca Romana, one of several banks that had the right to produce currency, had been effectively forging millions of lire; ‘genuine’ bills were found with duplicate serial numbers. The cash was channelled to some of the country’s leading politicians who used it to fund their political campaigns. The weakness of the lira precipitated a massive exportation of metal currency; silver and even bronze coins became so scarce that mutual aid societies and shopkeepers’ associations in northern Italy had to issue their own tokens. With the economy already at the bottom of a long depressive cycle, it looked as if the whole financial system was about to collapse. Martial law was declared in Sicily in January 1894 to quell violent confrontations between labourers and landowners. The Socialist Party was banned later the same year.
Under its first Sicilian Prime Minister, Francesco Crispi, the government responded to the crisis in the worst possible way: by staging a lunatic drive for colonial glory in Ethiopia. The result was inevitable. At the battle of Adowa in March 1896, a force of 17,500 Italian troops and locally recruited askari was destroyed by a better-armed and better-led Ethiopian army numbering over 120,000. It was the worst defeat ever suffered by a European colonial power. Fifty per cent of the Italian force was killed, wounded, or led away into captivity.
The country stumbled from crisis to crisis. In May 1898, martial law was declared even in Milan, the country’s economic capital: at least eighty people were killed by troops. Cannons bombarded Milan’s Capuchin monastery where rebels were thought to be hiding. When the smoke cleared, only a few friars were found, along with some beggars who had been waiting for their soup.
A month after the events in Milan a military man was appointed as the new Prime Minister. General Luigi Pelloux, who had served his king as a soldier since he was little more than a boy, has a bad reputation today because his period in office is associated with an attempt to pass a package of highly authoritarian reforms; they would have curtailed press freedom, banned unions in the public services, and allowed the government to send suspects into internal exile without trial. Nonetheless, Pelloux was no blind reactionary by the standards of the moment. His government was appointed with the aim of managing a transition back to something more like normality from what had been the most turbulent years in the short history of the Italian state. An attack on corruption in Sicily was a part of this programme. Thus it was that in August 1898, General Pelloux appointed a new Chief of Police in Palermo with instructions to tackle the mafia. In 1900, the Chief of Police described Don Raffaele Palizzolo’s political supporters as follows:
[they are] the mafiosi, the men with criminal records, the sort who are a permanent danger to public safety because they are engaged in all manner of crimes against people and property. None of them spares threats, violence and intimidation to force honest electors to vote for their candidate … To this end they use the same methods that the mafia uses to impose wardens on the owners of fruit farms and extort tributes from rich landowners.
Palizzolo would be worthy of his place in this book if he were only the prime representative of a new breed of mafia politician. But he also became the subject of the biggest mafia trial of the era; with Don Raffaele, the mafia returned to the national headlines for the first time in twenty-five years. Much less well known than Palizzolo—but just as important to the history of the mafia—was his adversary, the Chief of Police of Palermo appointed by General Pelloux. His name was Ermanno Sangiorgi and his story has only recently surfaced from the archives.
Among the innumerable documents now held in Italy’s Central State Archive in Rome is a restricted file containing a report, submitted to the Ministry of the Interior in instalments between November 1898 and January 1900. The report was written by Ermanno Sangiorgi, Chief of Police of Palermo, and addressed to the city’s chief prosecuting magistrate as part of the preparations for a trial. Reading its 485 yellowing, handwritten pages today feels rather like working away at the contours of a buried vase with an archaeologist’s probes and brushes, only to realize in the end that what has been exhumed is an unexploded bomb.
The report begins with the first complete picture of the Sicilian mafia ever produced. Earlier evidence about the mafia of the Palermo area always comes in scattered fragments. Here the information is explicit, detailed, and systematic. There is an organizational plan of the eight mafia cosche ruling the suburbs and satellite villages to Palermo’s north and west: Piana dei Colli, Acquasanta, Falde, Malaspina, Uditore, Passo di Rigano, Perpignano, Olivuzza. The boss and underboss of each cosca are named, and there are personal details on many of the rank-and-file members. In all, there are profiles of 218 men of honour, men who own land, who work in and guard the citrus groves, who broker fruit deals. The report tells of the mafia’s initiation ritual and code of behaviour. It sets out its business methods, how it infiltrates and controls the market gardens, how it forges money, commits robberies, terrifies and murders witnesses. It explains that the mafia has centralized funds to support the families of men in prison and to pay lawyers. It tells how the bosses of mafia cosche work together to manage the association’s affairs and control territory.
This diagram of the mafia is impressive enough; it chimes almost precisely with what Tommaso Buscetta sat down to reveal to Judge Falcone decades later. There is no more riveting illustration of Italy’s long-standing failure to see the truth about the mafia. But more riveting still is the sense that this dull-looking document—reference DGPS, aa.gg.rr. Atti speciali (1898–1940), b.1, f.1—could have changed history. It could have done as much damage to the mafia as Falcone’s maxi-trial of 1987. If the report had achieved its aim, the mafia would have suffered a devastating defeat only a few decades after it emerged.
The report’s author, Ermanno Sangiorgi, was a stern, square-jawed career policeman. The newspapers of the time say that he cut an unmistakable figure in Palermo. Although he was nearer sixty than fifty, and his hair had receded to the crown of his head, his striking blond beard was only just beginning to grey. His accent clearly betrayed his origins in the Romagna region of northern—central Italy. Sangiorgi was and remains all but unknown, and as a result there is precious little information available about him. Yet he understood the Sicilian mafia better than anyone. It was Sangiorgi who was called in to conduct the operation against the Uditore cosca when Dr Galati reported his story to the Minister of the Interior in 1875. It was Sangiorgi who led the round-up of the Favara Brotherhood in 1883. His appointment as Chief of Police in Palermo in August 1898 was the culmination of his career, a chance to use his patiently accumulated expertise to bring Sicily’s secret criminal association to its knees.
Sangiorgi wrote his report with attention to detail and no little passion. He was tackling head on the scepticism and complicity in the institutions, and he sensed that he was within reach of a landmark prosecution. He wrote his report at a time when it was difficult, but by no means impossible, to convict mafiosi for single crimes, or even bring isolated cosche like the Favara Brotherhood to book. Witnesses had to be convinced to take the stand and tell the truth; mafia informers had to be kept alive long enough to testify; judge and jury had to be protected from reprisals and insulated from bribery. Sangiorgi faced all of these problems, but he knew that the real challenge was to convict the mafia per se, and to base that prosecution on the protection rackets and political contacts that underlay its method.
For that reason he aimed to use a specific legal instrument: a law that proscribed criminal associations. Although this law did not bring particularly heavy penalties, a conviction based on his report would have a profound political significance. It would prove the seemingly outlandish theory that a secret, highly sophisticated criminal society had extended its influence across western Sicily and even overseas. Quite simply, if Sangiorgi had been successful, no one would ever again have been able to deny that the mafia existed.
But Sangiorgi failed. If his report constitutes startling proof that in 1898 Italy’s rulers knew precisely what the mafia was, then his failure, and the way that his precious knowledge came to be forgotten, is a disquieting lesson in how the country’s political system has helped the mafia survive up to the present day.
Sangiorgi was not just a good cop; he was also something of a storyteller in his own right. From among the hundreds of names, the dozens of carefully crosschecked witness statements, his policework slowly exposed an intricate pattern of crimes, a series of interlocking tales of murder and deception that illustrated the brutality and labyrinthine complexity of mafia influence at every level of Sicilian society. The Chief of Police even has moments of genuine narrative verve.
Most of Sangiorgi’s stories are set in the western part of the Conca d’Oro, the ‘golden basin’ curving around the outskirts of Palermo. The area has been famous for its beauty and fertility since Roman times. In 1890, the magazine Illustrazione Italiana portrayed it as a place where ‘the imagination catches fire and takes flight’, as ‘a whole oriental vision, an enchantment’. Here was proof that ‘poetry blossoms generous and abundant in the Sicilian people’. Palermo’s moneyed elite built out-of-town residences among the lemon groves of the Conca d’Oro. Spring was the season of villeggiatura, when the wealthy would abandon their city homes and head for huge villas, set in exotic gardens and tended by armies of servants. At the turn of the century, Palermo’s eighty barons, fifty dukes, and seventy princes mingled with Europe’s crowned heads and plutocrats in the city’s villas, clubs, theatres, salons, and boulevards. By the time of Sangiorgi’s appointment in Palermo, the yacht set had made the Sicilian capital into a favourite resort, a Paris by the sea. In his drive to discover the mafia’s secrets, Sangiorgi followed men of honour along winding Stygian channels that connected the ordinary people of Palermo with the gilded lives of Sicily’s internationally celebrated high society.
* * *
Much of Sangiorgi’s work revolved around a murder mystery that had already been vexing the police in Palermo for a year before he arrived. The papers called it the ‘case of the four missing men’, and it centred on a typical lemon business, the Fondo Laganà, that lay not far from the cemetery in Arenella, a village squeezed between the echoing shadow of Monte Pellegrino and the sea just to the north of Palermo. It was a place where, after dark, even the cries of the fishermen on the beach hundreds of metres away could be heard distinctly. Across the road from the main building on the fondo stood a shop where they made pasta in night shifts. Nearby was a post occupied twenty-four hours a day by customs guards. Yet nobody confessed to noticing anything unusual there in September and October of 1897 until a smell betrayed the fact that all was not right. The unmistakable sweet stench of rotting flesh had been drifting over the walls of the Fondo Laganà for several days before customs guards timidly alerted the police. And when the police broke into the fondo, they uncovered a mafia killing factory. The interior walls of the farm building, little more than a one-room brick box, were pocked with bullet holes and spattered with blood. The unholy odour came from a narrow, deep grotto nearby. Firefighters were called in to reach the bottom. There they found human remains in an advanced stage of decomposition—they had been sprinkled with quicklime. Within the space of six weeks, four men had died of multiple gunshot wounds on the Fondo Laganà.
The case of the four missing men was still unsolved when Sangiorgi arrived in Palermo to begin his duties as Chief of Police the following August. When he did, there was also a mafia war under way: men with fearsome reputations were found dead in the lanes and streets of the Conca d’Oro; others were disappearing without trace. The detectives under Sangiorgi’s command had their sources, but knew little about how the battle lines were drawn up, or whether the war and the four murders on the Fondo Laganà were connected. Then as now, not only was knowledge of mafia affairs hard to come by, but there was also a sizeable gap between knowledge and proof. The problem that the authorities faced was how to convince sources to become witnesses. For that reason, in his report Sangiorgi does not name most of the people who gave him his information. Terrified by the organization’s proven ability to punish anyone who gave evidence to the police, and suspecting that the mafia had agents among the police and prosecutors, people would only speak off the record. Sangiorgi’s journey towards the secrets of the Fondo Laganà only began when he found a courageous exception to this rule.
On 19 November 1898, Sangiorgi arranged for his detectives to interview Giuseppa Di Sano. As later newspaper reports suggest, Giuseppa was a plump, robust woman with plenty of grit and not too much imagination. But in many senses she is the quiet heroine of the Sangiorgi report. The story she told began two years before she gave her evidence to Sangiorgi, and nine months before the murders on the Fondo Laganà.
She was then struggling to make ends meet selling food and other supplies to the neighbourhood near the Giardino Inglese park. But she also had more than her usual lot of cares. The local commander of the carabinieri was visiting her store too often. More often, that is, than was strictly necessary to follow up his station’s orders for food and wine. The trade was more than welcome, of course. What concerned Giuseppa was the gossip: the quarter was alive with rumours that the officer was trying to persuade her eighteen-year-old daughter Emanuela to begin an affair. This was a big problem for a small businesswoman in a community not famous for its good relations with the forces of law and order. The rumours had to be dampened down—without offending the officer.
Giuseppa’s troubles did not end there. The owner of a local tannery had been sending his sons to her for supplies. They kept trying to pay in notes and coins that she knew were false. She also knew that the businessman and his sons had dangerous friends. When she politely turned down the proffered money, the tannery owner’s sons persisted. Finally one large-denomination note got past her husband. Giuseppa sent him off, ears still ringing, to sort the matter out. The tannery owner fobbed him off with only part of the debt, protesting that his boys had not known that the money was false.
Then came the most worrying episode of all. In late December 1896, the local women suddenly began looking askance at Giuseppa and avoiding her shop. Finally a housewife came in and complained audibly about ‘cheap women’ in the neighbourhood. Giuseppa challenged the housewife to spell out what was on her mind, assuming that this gibe was aimed at her daughter. The woman replied sharply that she was talking about police spies. Giuseppa was perplexed and afraid. There was something going on that was far more ominous than the rumours about her daughter or even the dispute over the phoney money.
On 27 December two suspicious-looking men, one of them barely out of his teens, came into her store. Across the street from the entrance was a wall surrounding a lemon grove. The wall now had a small hole knocked through it not far above the ground. In retrospect, Giuseppa realized that the two men were checking that the hole offered a clear line of fire into the shop. She recalled that the older man stopped long enough to say, out loud, apropos of nothing, ‘If I do something stupid there’s always my mother who will look after me, my wife and my children.’ A statement so oblique could only be read one way, as a threat. Giuseppa’s anxiety turned to alarm.
At eight o’clock the same evening a slim, pale young stranger entered and asked for half a litre of fuel oil. Picking up the container, he went to the door. Then he stretched out his right arm and made a gesture towards the other side of the street. Through the hole in the wall two shots were fired. Giuseppa was hit in the shoulder and side. As she fell, her daughter Emanuela came towards her to help. A third shot was fired, hitting Emanuela and killing her instantly.
When Chief of Police Sangiorgi asked Giuseppa Di Sano to come in to be interviewed, he was revisiting an old crime—one of the guilty men had already been caught. But, as antimafia investigators often have to do, Sangiorgi was reinterpreting an earlier episode, looking for loose ends, fitting them into a bigger pattern of intrigue. Crucially, for the progress of Sangiorgi’s investigations, Giuseppa was prepared to testify that her daughter’s murder was a mafia affair. Her words would allow Sangiorgi to turn this isolated case into evidence that the mafia was indeed a criminal organization with its own rules, its own structure and, most important of all, its own way of killing.
Sangiorgi’s underworld sources also told him that Giuseppa’s daughter was the first victim—an incidental one—of a sequence of betrayals and murders perpetrated by men of honour in the Conca d’Oro. The sequence was set in motion two weeks before the murder when the carabinieri raided a counterfeit currency factory near Giuseppa’s store and caught three men at the scene. The mafia suspected a leak. Inquiries were led by man of honour Vincenzo D’Alba; his brother was one of the mafiosi arrested during the raid. He did not take long to put together the various pieces of evidence: Giuseppa Di Sano resented the local mob because of the business of the forged banknotes; she and her daughter were friendly with the carabinieri; what is more, Giuseppa’s brother-in-law had installed a screw press in the machine shop that was the cover for the forgers’ operation. Everything seemed to point in the same direction. Before he even presented his case to the meeting of the cosca, Vincenzo D’Alba instructed his mother to orchestrate a gossip campaign by the women of the area. His aim was to ruin both Giuseppa’s business and her reputation: the unpopular are less likely to be missed, their deaths less likely to be investigated thoroughly. On 26 December 1896, Giuseppa Di Sano was condemned to death by the Falde cosca of the mafia for a crime against omertà that she did not commit. Twenty-four hours later D’Alba and his accomplice attempted to carry out the sentence, but only succeeded in killing Giuseppa’s daughter.
It was Vincenzo D’Alba who came into Giuseppa’s shop both to check the line of fire from the lemon grove across the street and to utter his abstruse threat. For a mafia hit is not just about the practicalities of ending someone’s life. It is also brutal, laconic theatre. The local people would have known who controlled the lemon grove opposite, and the hole in the wall was there to be seen. News of Vincenzo D’Alba’s threat would have travelled quickly. He came to the shop on the day of the planned murder as much to show his face as to prepare the ground for the attack. Although no casual passer-by would have been able to see the two killers through the hole in the wall, their identity would probably not have been a great mystery in the community. This deliberately public murder defied anyone who saw what happened to go to the police. The Falde cosca was parading its dominance over the territory.
It probably needed to. Sangiorgi surmised that the loss of the forgery operation had resonated well beyond the Falde cosca on whose territory the phoney mint was located. Just as the counterfeiters needed a wider network to pass their ‘money’ into circulation, so income from the operation was spread among other cosche. As a result, the cosca’s prestige had been damaged by the raid; it needed a rapid demonstration to the rest of the organization that everything was still under control.
When the mafia kills, it does so in the name of all its associates. It consults, it mounts trials, it looks for consensus, it seeks to justify its actions to its supporters and show that it is in charge. This is what Chief of Police Sangiorgi sought to use Giuseppa Di Sano’s evidence to prove. Today’s antimafia investigators would put it more starkly: the mafia kills in the way a state does; it does not murder, it executes.
Giuseppa’s testimony would be crucial evidence that the mafia was far more than just a mentality. Even the way that she had been persecuted since that terrible day in December 1896 showed as much:
It is almost as if I am the guilty one. Everyone shuns me or looks at me with scorn on their faces. Now very few people come and buy things from my shop. The only ones who come are the honest ones who are not receptive to the mafia’s influence. So the disaster that struck me did not just hurt me directly, physically (which cost me a huge amount in medical bills). And it has done even more than open up an incurable wound in my heart by killing my poor eighteen-year-old daughter. To all that must now be added the economic harm that the mafia’s persecution has brought. The mafia refuses to pardon me for an offence I never committed.
A week after dictating these words to detectives, Giuseppa looked out of the window of her store and saw that a new hole had appeared in the wall opposite. Palermo’s shadow state was already taking steps to counteract the threat posed by Chief of Police Sangiorgi.
* * *
The murder of Giuseppa Di Sano’s daughter also had an intriguing loose end that would lead Sangiorgi to discover how the first of the four missing men met his death on the Fondo Laganà. Remarkably, Vincenzo D’Alba’s careful preparations failed to protect him from prosecution. Within days of the murder, his young accomplice, Giuseppe ‘Pidduzzo’ Buscemi, was questioned by the police. Buscemi, whom Sangiorgi describes as a cocky young man, had his alibi prepared as any mafioso would. Yet he also helped himself to freedom by saying that he had seen Vincenzo D’Alba pale and trembling in a via Falde tobacco shop ten minutes after the killing. As a result of this hint D’Alba was arrested and, with Giuseppa’s testimony counting against him, was convicted and sentenced to twenty years. For Sangiorgi, D’Alba’s betrayal by Buscemi was an astonishing and therefore highly significant breach of omertà.
Whoever Sangiorgi’s sources within the mafia were, they told him that Pidduzzo Buscemi’s scandalous behaviour enraged mafiosi close to Vincenzo D’Alba. Antonino D’Alba, Vincenzo’s cousin, was a tavern owner and an influential man of honour in his forties with a record for fencing stolen goods. He denounced Pidduzzo’s betrayal of omertà to other senior bosses who agreed to hold a trial. Antonino D’Alba’s call for mafia justice was to lead eventually to his murder: he was the first of the four missing men.
Pidduzzo Buscemi’s mafia trial did not take place until September 1897; it was postponed until he returned on leave from military service. Standing before the assembled bosses, he still wore the uniform of the 10th regiment of Bersaglieri with its extravagant black plume on a broad-brimmed hat. When called on to explain why he had given evidence to the police, the young soldier nonchalantly claimed he had done so to turn suspicion away from the mafia as a whole, and that he had always planned to change his story later to favour his accomplice and confuse the investigators. Strangely, Sangiorgi learned, the mafia court found his flimsy testimony convincing and acquitted Buscemi.
Something more important than the mafia rulebook was clearly at stake. As so often in mafia wars, that something was territory. Among the ‘jurors’ at young Buscemi’s trial was the capo of the Acquasanta cosca, the hefty, walrus-moustached Tommaso D’Aleo, who suspected that Antonino D’Alba had orchestrated a challenge to an established protection racket over two wealthy lemon derivatives dealers; a bomb had even been detonated on the balcony of their house. Tommaso D’Aleo also happened to be Pidduzzo Buscemi’s godfather. He was almost certainly using the young soldier to manoeuvre D’Alba into a position where he could be killed.
Soon after Pidduzzo Buscemi was acquitted, another trial was called in secret—mafia justice can be very swift when it needs to be. Antonino D’Alba was found guilty in absentia. The sentence was death, and his execution was carefully arranged. This time it was not to be a public affair, as the shooting of Giuseppa Di Sano had been, because D’Alba’s punishment was an internal organizational matter.
A few days after the mafia trial that had acquitted him of breaking the code of omertà, Pidduzzo Buscemi, still in his dashing uniform, called at the tavern run by D’Alba. He found him washing out a barrel, and invited him outside into a cone of light from a street lamp to discuss their differences. The exchange was curt. Buscemi said he wanted to restore the damage to his honour caused by D’Alba’s accusations; he demanded a duel.
D’Alba agreed. But, as he may have suspected, he was being lured into a trap. According to his young son’s testimony as recorded by Sangiorgi, on the afternoon of the following day, 12 September 1897, the boss Tommaso D’Aleo and another mafioso came to D’Alba’s tavern where they ate, talked, and lingered. They offered a 100-lire note when asked to pay a 3.25 lire bill; it was a carefully pitched gesture of mistrust and hostility. At half past six in the evening D’Alba returned from the nearby shop where he had gone to change the 100-lire note. He took off his two gold rings, gold tie-pin, and other valuables, and placed them safely in a coffee cup on the shelf. Then he picked up his revolver and went out. Tommaso D’Aleo and the other mobster followed him.
Antonino D’Alba was never seen alive again. The mafia gossip mill churned out rumours of sightings in North Africa. A letter purporting to be from him was even sent from Tunis to his father. But by the time the letter arrived, the police had already found out that D’Alba had in fact been gunned down on the night of his disappearance by a large party of mafiosi on the Fondo Laganà.
* * *
Through his careful interviews with police informers, and his patient re-examination of evidence, Sangiorgi was beginning to piece together a complete picture of how the mafia operated; how its bitter conflicts were not merely the product of an outlaw sense of pride, but actually involved laws, legal proceedings, and a system of territorial control. The next stage of his investigation reached right from the Fondo Laganà to the domestic lives of the wealthiest and most famous families in Sicily: the Florios and the Whitakers. As Sangiorgi discovered, these two opulent dynasties lived alongside the mafia in contrasting ways. One of them was cynical, the other more resigned and put upon; but both were complicit in perpetuating the mafia’s power.
* * *
When European kings and princes visited Palermo, as they often did, there was one place where they were always received: a lavish villa set in a private park in Olivuzza in the Conca d’Oro. It belonged to Ignazio Florio Jr. In 1891, at twenty-three, Ignazio inherited the greatest fortune in Italy. It was said that 16,000 people in Palermo alone ‘ate his bread’. The Florios had extensive interests in sulphur, light and heavy engineering, tuna fishing, pottery, insurance, finance, Marsala wine and, above all, shipping. The house of Florio was the major shareholder in NGI, Navigazione Generale Italiana, Italy’s leading shipping concern and one of the biggest in Europe.
But when Ignazio Jr came into his inheritance, the family’s fabulous wealth had already begun to decay from the inside. NGI had grown fat on government contracts and subsidies arranged by his father’s carefully cultivated political contacts. Now it was becoming clear how uncompetitive it was. Moreover, the country’s political and economic centre of gravity was shifting inexorably northwards, to the cities of Genoa, Turin, and Milan. The Florios’ influence slipped away at increasing speed. Before he was forty, Ignazio Jr had lost control of a fortune that it had taken three generations to build. In 1908, he was forced to sell the family’s NGI holding; it is as good a date as any to mark the end of the Palermo belle époque that began when he became head of the family in 1891. These were the years when Sicilian high society orbited around the dying sun of Florio money. The press called Palermo ‘Floriopolis’, but this was its last flowering as a great European city.
Ignazio Florio Jr was urbane, gifted, and raffish. The figure of a Japanese woman was tattooed on his arm. His clothes were almost exclusively from London: ties from Moulengham, hats from Locke & Tuss, suits from Meyer & Mortimer—the Prince of Wales’s tailor. A flesh-coloured carnation adorned his buttonhole in the mornings, a gardenia in the evenings. In 1893, as his father had done, Ignazio consolidated his social status by marrying a titled woman. His bride, Franca Jacona di San Giuliano, was considered one of the most beautiful women in Europe. A few months after the wedding, during Franca’s first pregnancy, Ignazio went off to Tunisia on a safari that required the services of fifty porters and tens of camels. Franca found female underwear in his luggage when he got back. She was pacified with a string of fat pearls. The same penitence ritual was to be repeated many times during their marriage; Franca is said to have accumulated thirty kilos of jewels.
Her husband’s transgressions notwithstanding, Franca quickly asserted herself as the queen of Palermo high society. She patronized the arts. Her green eyes, olive skin, and rangy figure were celebrated by the poet Gabriele d’Annunzio. She caused a minor scandal by allowing the fashionable artist Giovanni Boldini to sketch her legs. An icon of Liberty style, she wore strings of pearls that almost reached her knees. Money meant display for Franca Florio. To the end of her life, she remained doggedly unmindful of the family’s worsening financial situation. When ageing threatened in the 1900s, she underwent pioneering cosmetic surgery by having her face ‘porcelainized’ in Paris.
Sangiorgi’s report relates that, one morning in the early weeks of 1897, Ignazio and Franca Florio were woken early by their servants. Ignazio was outraged to discover that a number of art objects had been stolen from the villa during the night. Nevertheless, the party most offended by this unprecedented burglary was not Commendatore Ignazio Florio Jr, but the man he bawled out and told to put the matter right: his gardener. Francesco Noto, a well-built, bald man with a sharply sloping moustache, would not have accepted this kind of dressing-down from anyone but Florio. For, as Ignazio Jr was well aware, the gardener was actually the capo of the Olivuzza cosca of the mafia. His younger brother and underboss, Pietro, was also employed in the Florio villa as a security guard. These lowly job titles should not fool us as to the immense strategic and symbolic importance of protecting the villa owned by the wealthiest family in Sicily, the hub of Palermo high society. The Noto brothers were the real targets of the Olivuzza villa burglary, and they knew who had carried it out.
Chief of Police Sangiorgi traced the reason for the robbery back to the moment a few weeks earlier when ten-year-old Audrey Whitaker was kidnapped by mafiosi under the command of the Noto brothers. Audrey had been out riding in La Favorita, the royal park on the north-western edge of Palermo where the idle wealthy shot quail, or attended horse races and show-jumping. Four men emerged from the bushes to set upon the groom that her family had charged with her protection. He was beaten up and tied to his horse while Audrey was taken away. Her father Joshua (‘Joss’) received a polite demand for a ransom of 100,000 lire.
Sangiorgi had no need to explain who the Whitakers were. The family belonged to the leading English business dynasty in Sicily. (Palermo’s British community had put down strong roots when His Majesty’s Forces had occupied the island during the Napoleonic wars.) Like their friends the Florios, the Whitakers were involved in the Marsala wine business. Along with the Florios, the Whitakers would be invited to London for Queen Victoria’s state funeral in 1901.
The extended Whitaker family also lent a strong dose of Englishness to the Palermo monde. It was they who introduced garden parties to Sicily; extravagant meals would be served in a marquee attached to the back of the villa. Whitakers also founded a charity for abandoned infants, an animal welfare society, and the Palermo Football and Cricket Club. Little Audrey’s mother Effie cultivated an eccentric image. She toured Palermo in her carriage with a parrot on her shoulder. It was fed with sunflower seeds from a silver box, and a silver trowel was kept ready for its droppings. Effie’s other passion was lawn tennis. In the Whitakers’ garden there were three courts, known as Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso. A visitor’s social standing largely determined which court he or she was permitted to use. Effie’s parrot was allowed to fly free during games. It was during one such match that Ignazio Florio’s teenage brother Vincenzo, not sharing the English sentimentality about animals, shot the pampered bird out of a tree.
Audrey Whitaker’s kidnapping was not the first trouble the family had had with the mafia. They were not as well connected as the Florios. As a young man, Joss’s brother Joseph (‘Pip’) had received a series of letters, demanding money and marked with a skull and crossbones. His Harrow masters would have been quietly satisfied with his bluff reaction. ‘I knew well enough who was the head of the local Mafia,’ he recorded, ‘so I sent him a message saying that the letters had been deposited at the police station giving the name of the man, in case I was killed. I had no more trouble after this.’ Some years later, Joss’s sister-in-law was strolling in the garden of the family villa when a severed hand was lobbed over the boundary wall, landing at her feet. This time the family’s response was more circumspect: they kept quiet about the incident in case it was a threat. By now mafiosi were ‘protecting’ some of the family’s own property.
Joss Whitaker opted for the same approach after his daughter’s kidnapping. He paid up immediately and denied that the whole episode had even happened. Little Audrey was back home within days.
Sangiorgi’s mysterious sources not only revealed the secret of Audrey Whitaker’s abduction, they also told him that the huge ransom caused friction within the Olivuzza cosca. Two of its members, the carriage drivers Vincenzo Lo Porto and Giuseppe Caruso, were not happy with their share of the loot. They decided on a chancy response, a sfregio. As Sangiorgi explained, sfregio is an important piece of mafia terminology that means two very closely related things. It is a disfiguring wound and, more importantly, it is also an affront, an insulting action designed to make someone lose face. Since, for the mafia, control of territory is all, the most blatant sfregio possible is damage caused to property protected by another mafioso. As Sangiorgi puts it, ‘One of the mafia’s canons is respect for another man’s territorial jurisdiction. Flouting that jurisdiction constitutes a personal insult.’
It was Lo Porto and Caruso who stole the art objects from the Florios’ villa. The burglary was a sfregio aimed at the leadership of the Olivuzza clan. The rollicking that Ignazio Jr gave Francesco Noto was the object of the whole exercise. To quote Sangiorgi again, ‘The aim that the two carriage drivers had set themselves, that is to humiliate their boss and underboss, had been achieved.’
The Noto brothers reacted to this sfregio with exemplary patience. First, they ensured that the damage to their reputation in Ignazio Florio’s eyes was repaired. They promised the two thieves a larger share of the Whitaker kidnapping cash, and even a reward for the return of the booty from the Florio robbery. Thus it was that, a few days later, the Florio family awoke to another, more welcome surprise: every single missing object had been returned to exactly the same place from which it had been stolen.
With the Florios’ property restored, their gardener and guard were ready to move against Lo Porto and Caruso. The killing of any man of honour is a potentially destabilizing act that is of concern to the whole mafia organization. The Florio family’s involvement in the case heightened its importance. So when the Notos secretly denounced Lo Porto and Caruso to other bosses, the outcome was a hearing that involved all the capos of the eight cosche. It was held on Falde territory rather than in Noto’s own Olivuzza domain—another demonstration that the decision had implications for the whole association. The Notos clearly wanted more than a guilty verdict: as Sangiorgi asserted, they were aiming for as wide a consensus as possible for the death penalty. They got what they were after: to avoid suspicion and to make the killings as efficient as possible, the death sentences would not be carried out for several months.
When the time came to carry out the executions, on 24 October 1897, the two carriage drivers were lured to the Fondo Laganà on the pretext that they were going to take part in a robbery. They were met there by a representative firing party comprising men of honour from each of the different cosche. Lo Porto and Caruso were shot first by the men who had arrived with them. The other mafiosi waited until the two had pulled themselves back on to their feet before finishing them off. Their bullet-riddled bodies were tossed into the grotto. On top of them fell the fourth and final corpse: that of another young mafioso executed on the fondo for stealing from his boss. A week earlier he had been shot several times in the head as he sat down, he thought, to play a game of cards.
* * *
It was one thing for Sangiorgi to tell a story of collective executions and protection rackets that explained how the four missing men had ended up on the Fondo Laganà. It was quite another to prove it in court and turn the story into evidence of the existence of what he called the ‘shadowy fraternity’. He needed more witnesses. Soon two would come forward and significantly both were, once again, women.
When the two carriage drivers’ wives discovered that they were widows, other mafiosi spun them a story that their husbands had died heroically, killed by a rival gang for refusing to take part in a plan to kidnap Ignazio Florio’s brother, the parrot-shooting teenager Vincenzo. The widows were told, in other words, that their husbands had died in the Florios’ service, and not because they had stolen from their villa.
This fiction was exposed a few weeks later by Ignazio’s mother, the formidable Baroness Giovanna d’Ondes Trigona. On 29 November 1897—not long after the smell of rotting flesh from the Fondo Laganà had led to the discovery of the bodies in the well—the baroness set off from the Florios’ Olivuzza villa to a nunnery of which she was a benefactress. Along the way she saw Vincenzo Lo Porto’s widow approach her carriage. The widow begged the baroness for help in bringing up her son. But her hopes were dashed by the baroness’s reply: ‘Don’t waste my time. Your husband was a thief who stole from my house with Caruso.’
When both widows came forward to tell what they knew, it was immediately evident to Sangiorgi that the baroness knew the whole story behind the burglary. She believed Lo Porto had got what he deserved. At this point in time, she plainly knew more than did the widows of the murdered mafiosi. She was also better informed than the police, who had by now found the bodies but knew little else about the case of the four missing men. The likely implication is clear: the whole Florio family had been discreetly told that the two men who had stolen the art objects from their home had met with the nasty end that their outrageous impudence merited. Because order had been restored through private channels, it would not have crossed the Florios’ minds to inform the police. Indeed, their role in the murders may even have gone deeper. Sangiorgi did not know the substance of Ignazio Jr’s conversation with his mafioso gardener on the morning after the robbery. It is legitimate to wonder whether in fact Ignazio actually intimated what he thought would be an appropriate fate for the culprits.
Chief of Police Sangiorgi draws on statements from the widows of both carriage drivers to tell this story with his usual sobriety and attention to detail. He also remarks that the Baroness Florio could profitably be interviewed by prosecution lawyers. It was his duty to do so. Yet it is hard not to imagine a bitterly ironic smile on Sangiorgi’s face as he makes the suggestion:
Signora Florio is a pious, religious noblewoman. It is difficult to tell which is greater: the immense riches she has at her disposal, or the illustrious virtues of her extremely noble, well-born mind. For that reason, if she were invited to testify under oath, it is likely that she would not be willing or able to conceal from justice her encounter with the widow.
There was no hope that Sangiorgi’s wish would be granted; the power of the Florio family placed them above the law. Sangiorgi now had three witnesses who were prepared to testify, all of them women, all of them bereaved, yet none of them decisive in his attempts to prove what the mafia really was.
* * *
Sangiorgi continued to send in further instalments of his report up to the end of 1898 and through the early months of 1899. At each stage of his work, the mafia took countermeasures. The brother of one of the carriage drivers killed for the Florio burglary was driven to suicide because of suspicions that he had collaborated with the authorities. One mafia informer, probably Sangiorgi’s most important mafia informant on the bodies in the well, emigrated for his own protection under a passport supplied by the police. To no avail: an assassin caught up with him in New Orleans and poisoned him. Sangiorgi confessed his worries about bringing the investigation to a successful conclusion in court. He complained that the investigating magistrate handling the case was a man with ‘a pusillanimous character, extremely open to influence’. All the while the mafia war was carrying on in fits and starts. The murders and disappearances continued; fragmentary news also emerged from the underworld of negotiations, shifting alliances, failed truces.
Then on 25 October 1899 came Sangiorgi’s big chance. A known man of honour was arrested red-handed at the scene of a shooting. The would-be victim of the attack survived; astonishingly, he turned out to be none other than the mafia’s former ‘regional or supreme capo’, as Sangiorgi called him. Francesco Siino, a gaunt man of fifty, capo of the Malaspina cosca and a successful lemon trader, had until recently been at the top of the organizational tree that the police had built up from confidential sources.
Sangiorgi grasped his opportunity rapidly and shrewdly, again aiming to exert pressure on what he now knew to be the mafia’s potential weakness: its women. He kept Siino hidden and let it be known that the wounded capo was close to death. He then brought Siino’s wife face-to-face with the hit man he had arrested. She could not contain herself, shouting, ‘Infame! Infame!’ (The term is the habitual mafia insult for a traitor—‘dishonoured scum’.) There and then she accused him and his associates of a series of murders. It was the beginning of her collaboration with justice. Francesco Siino soon learned that his wife had spoken to Sangiorgi and he too started to talk about what he referred to as ‘the company of friends’. Sangiorgi had the pentito he needed to build his case.
Interviews with the new defector allowed Sangiorgi gradually to understand the mafia war from the inside; just as importantly, they allowed him to demonstrate that the war was more than a chaotic skirmish between separate gangs, but the result of a breakdown within a single organization. Sangiorgi began to grasp that even when it is at war the mafia has its rules, its language, its diplomacy, and even its historical memory.
Francesco Siino’s power within the mafia had already been fading when the police learned of his position as ‘regional or supreme capo’. The dominant wealth and influence, and with it the mafia’s centre of gravity, lay not with Siino but with an alliance between the Passo di Rigano, Piana dei Colli, and Perpignano families. The patron of that alliance had a familiar name: Don Antonino Giammona, the ‘taciturn, puffed up, and wary’ mafioso who rose to power under Baron Nicolò Turrisi Colonna’s protection in the 1860s, and who was behind the persecution of Dr Gaspare Galati in the 1870s. In 1898, Giammona had a large house in via Cavallacci in the same suburban village of Passo di Rigano where he had been born seventy-eight years earlier. His son was installed as capo in charge of day-to-day business in the area. But the old man was still the mafia’s ‘executive mind’, according to Sangiorgi. ‘He gives direction through advice based on his vast experience and his long criminal record. He offers instructions on the way to carry out crimes and construct a defence, especially alibis.’ Old man Giammona’s continuing influence was proof that mafiosi were not fly-by-night thugs. By then, the ‘shadowy fraternity’ had been a settled feature of Palermo society for four decades.
The roots of the fitful mafia war of 1897–9 went back to the police raid on the Falde cosca’s counterfeiting operation, the same raid for which Giuseppa Di Sano had been blamed back in late 1896. It was Don Antonino Giammona who sought to manage the knock-on effects of this loss. A summit of the capos of the eight cosche—Piana dei Colli, Acquasanta, Falde, Malaspina, Uditore, Passo di Rigano, Perpignano, Olivuzza—was called in January 1897. As normal, Francesco Siino was in the chair. But this time the drop in the mafia’s income made the mood tetchy. Giammona detected weakness in Siino and was determined to manipulate the situation to his own advantage. Sensing a challenge to his authority, Siino stood up: ‘Well, since I’m no longer respected in the way I ought to be, let every group think and act on its own!’ The meeting went on to demarcate each group’s area of influence. But not long after the meeting, the Giammonas began making exploratory, symbolic incursions into Siino turf—calculated acts of disrespect. But Siino refused to be provoked. Both sides in the conflict knew that it was risky to be seen to start a conflict.
It took a young hothead to accelerate matters. Francesco Siino’s nephew Filippo, ‘a very impetuous, cocky and audacious young man’ according to Sangiorgi, was underboss in Uditore. He began to send threatening letters to old man Giammona. In response, some forty senior mafiosi were called to a meeting in the building that contained Don Antonino’s olive press. Although nothing explicit was said, the old boss made it plain where he thought blame for the letters was to be placed. Outside the meeting, another boss quietly suggested to Francesco Siino that he should bring his nephew to heel.
Instead the Siinos retaliated by cutting down some prickly pears on Giammona land. These fleshy, fruit-bearing cacti are virtually worthless in themselves, but destroying them was a clear sfregio. The Giammonas’ response was circumscribed: they vandalized plants on an estate guarded by the young Siino. He responded by again attacking Giammona property.
Don Antonino Giammona was now at a tactical crossroads. Young Filippo Siino did not own any property himself. Sangiorgi explains that, in the formalized language of the sfregio, a second reprisal against the estate that the young underboss protected would be interpreted as an insult aimed at the landowner rather than the guard. This was very definitely not the message the Giammonas and their allies wanted to give. An offence against a landowner could bring trouble down on the whole organization. The Giammonas chose instead to damage stock on land leased by Francesco Siino, the former supreme boss; it was still a manifest escalation of the dispute. For a third time, the ‘impetuous’ Filippo Siino destroyed plants on Giammona land in retaliation. The Giammonas concluded that it was time to go to war.
The conflict went badly for the Siinos from the outset. They lost both men and ground across the Conca d’Oro as the Giammonas and their allies edged them out of their jobs as wardens within the lemon groves. The decisive moment came at sunset on 8 June 1898, when ‘impetuous’ Filippo Siino was intercepted and shot dead in the street by four Giammona killers who had been given a tip-off from inside the Siino camp.
Sangiorgi also learned of the war’s innocent victims: confirmation, if confirmation was needed, that mafiosi do not only kill their own. On one occasion, Giammona assassins were sent after a particularly feared Siino killer; happening across his brother, they murdered him instead. As they followed their planned escape route they were spotted by a seventeen-year-old cowherd, Salvatore Di Stefano. Calmly, a month later, they went back to prevent him testifying against them. The killers found Salvatore watering plants with his shoes off and his trousers rolled up. Improvising, they drowned him in a well and put his shoes on the edge to make it look like an accident—which is precisely what the police had believed it to be.
By the time of the luckless cowherd’s murder, Francesco Siino had taken refuge in Livorno in Tuscany where he had contacts in the citrus fruit industry. This time he was joined by three of his surviving nephews, who abandoned their strategic jobs in the lemon groves. The Siino power base was crumbling. Following the spate of murders, police confiscated gun licences from all the most prominent mafia families, including the Giammonas and Siinos. The mafia’s response was to call in favours from the upper world of politics and high society. A series of distinguished public figures—parliamentarians (including Don Raffaele Palizzolo), businessmen, and even a princess—lined up to provide the character references needed to get the gun licences back. The Giammonas themselves were sponsored by an old family friend, the son of ‘sect’ expert Baron Nicolò Turrisi Colonna. The Siinos, by contrast, searched in vain for someone to speak in their favour. Word had got around the mafia-friendly sections of Palermo’s bourgeoisie that the Siinos had been expelled from the honoured society. They were being abandoned to their fate.
Sangiorgi tells us that in December 1898, Francesco Siino, back in Palermo once more, called his men together to spell out the situation. ‘We’ve counted ourselves and we’ve counted the others. We total 170, including the cagnolazzi [“wild dogs”—young toughs yet to be initiated]. There are five hundred of them. They have got more money. And they have contacts that we don’t have. So we’ve got to make peace.’ A truce was negotiated at another meeting of senior bosses at a via Stabile butcher’s shop. Siino then departed for Livorno again, followed by his whole family; he had been bested both militarily and politically. It only remained for the Giammonas to mop up the remaining pockets of resistance.
If Siino had stayed away from Palermo, he would never have become the witness Sangiorgi so desperately needed. But the following autumn he was drawn back for one last visit—just long enough for the Giammona faction to mount an attempt on his life. Sangiorgi had his breakthrough. The time had finally come when he could stop writing his report and start making arrests.
* * *
On the night of 27–8 April 1900, Sangiorgi ordered a round-up of mafiosi listed in his report. The police and carabinieri involved were not told of their duties that night until the last minute so as to prevent leaks. Thirty-three suspects were immediately arrested, as were many more over the coming months. In October 1900, the prefect of Palermo reported that Sangiorgi had reduced the mafia to ‘silence and inactivity’.
As a veteran mafia fighter, Sangiorgi had always known how difficult it would be for his investigations to bring results. He knew too that he would need political support if he were to have any chance of success. The instalments of his report were addressed to the prosecuting authorities in Palermo, but he also wanted the government, in the person of General Luigi Pelloux, to know what he had found. He made sure that a copy of each instalment reached Pelloux via the prefect of Palermo. Back in November 1898, Sangiorgi wrote a covering letter that was addressed to the prefect but intended for the Prime Minister’s eyes:
I especially need your respected and legitimate intervention, your good offices with the judicial authorities. And I need your support in dealings with the government. This is because, regrettably, the mafia’s bosses act under the safeguard of Senators, MPs, and other influential figures who protect them and defend them and who are, in their turn, protected and defended by the mafiosi.
The mafia had created a system of complicity to shield it from people like Sangiorgi, a system that stretched from the wealthy Florios down to the women of the Giardino Inglese neighbourhood who boycotted Giuseppa Di Sano’s store. For Sangiorgi to combat that system effectively he would need a determined government behind him. But unfortunately for Sangiorgi and for Sicily, the window of political opportunity for a decisive strike against the mafia closed at the very moment that his months of work seemed to be producing results.
The crisis of the late 1890s that had brought General Pelloux to power in Rome produced its final drama in the summer following Sangiorgi’s round-up of mafia suspects. In July 1900, the King paid for the corruption and inept brutality of his governments when an anarchist shot him dead near the royal palace in Monza. By that time the economy was picking up and the crisis was at its end. A month before the King’s death, a more liberal government was established when General Pelloux resigned; with him went support in Rome for the Palermo Chief of Police.
The first sign of the opposition to Sangiorgi was simply how slowly the case was progressing. The chief prosecutor of the city was proving to be very pernickety. He was the man to whom Sangiorgi’s report had been officially addressed. Yet, after each new arrest, the prosecutor’s office sent the whole case back to the investigating magistrate who was working with Sangiorgi so that the evidence could be updated. It took until May 1901—a year after the first arrests—for Sangiorgi’s trial to begin. Of the hundreds of members of the mafia, only eighty-nine were in the dock charged with belonging to the criminal association that had committed the murders of the four missing men. The chief prosecutor did not consider the evidence to be strong enough to bring the others to trial. The most notable of those released was Don Antonino Giammona; once again the earliest-known mafia capo went free and was left to live out his remaining years in peace.
Sangiorgi never complains about the chief prosecutor, a man from Naples whose name was Vincenzo Cosenza. Yet it seems likely that, in sending a copy of his report to the government in Rome, Sangiorgi was specifically hoping for backing against Cosenza. He would not therefore have been surprised if he had known that, in the month before the trial began, and nearly two and a half years since Sangiorgi had sent him the first instalment of his report, Cosenza had written to the new Minister of the Interior and declared, ‘During the course of performing my duties I have never noticed the mafia.’ The suspicion must be that Chief Prosecutor Cosenza was the key component in the system that the mafia created to protect itself from the law. It is perhaps a mark of his success that very little is now known about him. Just as Chief of Police Sangiorgi is a hidden hero of the history of the mafia, so Chief Prosecutor Cosenza is probably a hidden villain.
When it finally began in May 1901, the trial that Sangiorgi had been working towards for so long was eagerly followed, both by huge crowds at court and through extensive reports in the press. The whole of Palermo saw the Chief of Police’s work unravel before his eyes. The star witness was former ‘supreme boss’ Francesco Siino. It is impossible to know for certain, but it is likely that Siino intuited the change in the political climate, realized which way the trial was likely to go, and decided to make a peace offering to his former colleagues in the mafia. From their cage, the defendants all watched him in silent intensity as he spoke to the court. He denied that he had ever spoken to Sangiorgi of a criminal association as such.
Further witnesses followed. A man who owned land next to the Giammonas testified that they ‘have always been generous with everyone who has done business with them. No one has anything but good to say of them.’ Joss Whitaker was called into the witness box and denied that his little daughter Audrey had ever been kidnapped. Ignazio Florio Jr did not even deign to come to court; he sent a statement denying that he had ever had a discussion with the Noto brothers about the burglary at his Olivuzza villa. An employee of the Florio household did testify and asserted that the guard (and mafia underboss) Pietro Noto was ‘a real gentleman’ who deservedly enjoyed the respect of the Florios; he had even been entrusted on several occasions with transporting Franca’s jewels, valued at 800,000 lire.
At least one witness did not fail Sangiorgi. Despite the threats she faced—she had been forced to flee by night from her shop—Giuseppa Di Sano mustered her courage once again and told the story of her daughter’s murder. The two carriage drivers’ widows also bravely took the stand.
The tens of defence lawyers outdid each other in arabesques of oratory when it came to their summings-up. The case against a great number of mafiosi had not even been allowed to reach court, they pointed out, so surely this demonstrated the overall weakness of the prosecution’s evidence? What kind of criminal association could this be, they argued, if its members were constantly involved in bloody disputes among themselves? One advocate argued eloquently that the word ‘mafia’ came from the Arabic ‘ma-af and meant merely ‘an exaggerated concept of one’s own individual identity’; the attitude was a leftover from the Middle Ages—all Sicilians had it in some measure. Proceedings were regularly interrupted by the wolflike howling of one of the accused who had entered an insanity plea.
In June 1901, only thirty-two of Sangiorgi’s mafiosi—including the Noto brothers, Antonino Giammona’s son, and Tommaso D’Aleo—were convicted for forming a criminal association. Given the time that they had already spent in custody, most of them were released immediately. For Sangiorgi, it was a victory so small that it felt like a defeat. Interviewed about the case, he uncharacteristically betrayed his bitterness: ‘It was never going to turn out any other way, as long as people who denounced the mafia in the evening then went along and defended it the following morning.’
With Sangiorgi’s trial producing such mediocre results, it would have taken a determined political effort to take further action against the mafia and its system of protection. But Italian politics was returning to normal after the dramas of the 1890s. For the politicians in Rome, fighting the mafia was once again an unwelcome hindrance to the central business of government: building rickety pacts between factions. Allies had to be obtained wherever they could. If they were from western Sicily, and especially if they were close to the Florio shipping lobby, it was counterproductive to ask questions about their unsavoury friends. The Sangiorgi report was consigned to the archives.
* * *
But the case of the four missing men was not the only strand of Chief of Police Sangiorgi’s investigations. When he had been sent to Palermo by General Pelloux in August 1898 he was also given a brief to look into the affairs of one particularly prominent individual: Don Raffaele Palizzolo.
Marquis Emanuele Notarbartolo di San Giovanni was the mafia’s first ‘eminent corpse’, its first victim among Sicily’s social elite. In the century that followed its emergence, the mafia killed no one else with the stature of Emanuele Notarbartolo. He was one of Sicily’s outstanding citizens. He served a three-year term as mayor of Palermo in the 1870s that was marked by his uncompromising honesty: he made himself the mafia’s enemy by tackling corruption in the customs service. He was then appointed governor of the Bank of Sicily, a job he held until 1890. The integrity and energy with which he applied himself to that task would ultimately cost him his life. His assassination in 1893, and the sensational series of trials that resulted over the following decade, split Sicilian society in two and astonished public opinion across Italy by exposing the mafia’s relationship with politicians, legal officials, and police. The Sangiorgi trial was a local drama whose importance was lost on the national press; the Notarbartolo case, by contrast, was Italy’s first mafia media circus.
* * *
Many years later, Notarbartolo’s son Leopoldo, a naval officer, wrote a moving biography of his father. It told how his own role in the Notarbartolo tragedy began in the terrible days following the murder. Crushed by grief, and assailed by fond memories, Leopoldo—a lieutenant of only twenty-three at the time—looked back over the previous three months, which he had spent on leave with his family, for any hint as to who might have killed his father. He kept returning in his mind to their time together on the family estate at Mendolilla. The estate symbolized everything about his father’s values, his capacity for hard work. It had been his refuge from the troubles of the city forty kilometres to the north-west. It would now be his monument.
Emanuele Notarbartolo had bought Mendolilla when Leopoldo was little more than a baby. It was a barren place then; its arid 125 hectares rose steeply on the left bank of the Torto from a rocky triangle of land where only wild oleander flourished. (The Torto is a typical Sicilian river—a torrent in winter and a dry, rocky ravine in summer.) The estate’s only building was a stone shack that lay two hours’ ride from the nearest railway station. Bandits haunted the area’s uncommonly bad roads.
As Leopoldo grew up he watched his father transform Mendolilla into a model farm. Despite his daunting workload at the Banco di Sicilia, Emanuele Notarbartolo ploughed into the farm all his spare time and all the money left over from his salary after his first priority: educating his children. He approached the task in a pioneering spirit, refusing to be an absentee landlord like most of his peers in Palermo. He also refused to use workers from the nearest town of Caccamo, a notorious mafia stronghold. Gradually winning the trust of the local peasants, he hired them to build a river defence that he planted with wych elm and cactus. The crumbling slope down to the Torto was stabilized with sumac, tough-rooted shrubs that in spring would cover the hillside with cones of tiny yellowish flowers. In summer the peasants would harvest the leaves to be dried and chopped for use in Palermo tanneries.
The estate was endowed with water supplies drawn from underground sources discovered at several points across the farm. Lemon trees, olives, and vines were planted. The oil and wine were stored in a vast cellar under the new farmhouse, built on the highest point of the property. Every single brick had had to be carried by mule from Sciara station. Just before his death, Emanuele Notarbartolo was working on plans to build a chapel for his peasants. Mendolilla was the local realization of a Utopian vision. (This was a dream that enlightened conservatives like Notarbartolo wanted to reproduce across the whole of Italy. They were aware of the new country’s poverty and instability, of the lawlessness of much of the southern Italian countryside, and yet they feared the social conflict that industrialization was bringing to northern Europe. As a result, they sought a more paternalistic, rural capitalism, a sheltered path to modernity. Mendolilla was more than an investment for Notarbartolo; it was a school of hard work and loyalty for the lower orders and middle classes alike.)
On 13 January 1893, as Leopoldo recalled, his father and he had spent what was to be their last full day together, riding across the estate to visit its every corner. Since leaving his job at the Bank of Sicily, his father had had more time to devote to his land. That evening he sat at his big square table taking notes of what he had seen during the day. As he worked, Leopoldo idly opened a drawer and came across a large tin box containing revolver shells and a great many packets of rifle cartridges. ‘It looks like the magazine on a battleship,’ he said.
His father smiled, put down his pen, and began to demonstrate the security measures in his room. The roof was built from fireproof bricks supported by steel beams. The exceptionally heavy door had the latest English lock. One window gave a view across a wide section of countryside, the other commanded the only entrance to the farmyard. ‘When I’m in here,’ he concluded, ‘I fear no one. With my weapons and a brave and trustworthy companion I can hold my own against twenty criminals.’ Mendolilla was a Utopia that had to be stoutly defended. He paused. Then, with a shrug of the shoulders, he added: ‘Anyway, it’s all nonsense. If they want to hurt me, they’ll do it through treachery, just as they did the first time.’
It was a phrase that lodged itself in Leopoldo’s memory. His father was referring to the time back in 1882 when he had been kidnapped by bandits in mysterious circumstances. This was the episode that had made Emanuele Notarbartolo so concerned about his safety; he had been kept for six days in a tiny cave in the hills while the ransom was negotiated and handed over. Paying the money was the only alternative to the crude frontal assault that the authorities threatened to launch. A few days after his father’s release, the chief kidnapper was found dead along the road to Caccamo, shot several times in the back. The others were captured after an anonymous tip-off to the police and a shoot-out in an empty villa belonging to a baroness in Villabate—the notoriously mafia-infested Palermo satellite town. The mystery of the kidnapping was never solved, but Emanuele Notarbartolo had strong suspicions. Thinking back on the terrible days after his father’s death, Leopoldo began to wonder whether the kidnapping and the murder were linked.
It was in Palermo harbour less than a week later—18 January—that Leopoldo set eyes on his father for the last time. He remembered being aboard the steamer for Naples; this was to be the first stage of a journey that would take him to Venice where he was to join a ship bound for the United States. The last three months spent with his family had been his first extended stay at home since he went away to naval college. It was also the first time that he and his father had been able to relate to each other on an equal footing, man to man, sharing ideas about business, politics, and careers. Leopoldo stood on the poop of the steamer as it slipped its moorings. He searched the busy harbour until his gaze found the familiar, upright figure of his father in a small boat. A brief glimpse, then the boat slid between two larger vessels and disappeared.
* * *
In the late morning of 1 February 1893, after a two-hour journey on horseback from Mendolilla, Emanuele Notarbartolo climbed into an empty first-class compartment of the Palermo service at Sciara station. It was only then that he could relax. In the ten years since the kidnapping he had been very cautious—he never travelled in the countryside without a gun—but it was unheard of for bandits to mount an attack on a train, so he unloaded his rifle and set it carefully on the netting of the overhead luggage rack. He slung his raincoat, hat, and body belt on top before settling down to gaze out of the window, waiting for sleep to come, or for the gently darkening Tyrrhenian Sea to appear as the train turned west to follow the coast.
Notarbartolo was alone until the next station, Termini Imerese. There he was seen slumped, half asleep in the corner of the compartment, as if the stop had stirred him. The train left Termini Imerese at twenty-three minutes past six, thirteen minutes late. Not long before it pulled away, two men in dark coats and bowler hats got on.
The deputy stationmaster gave the signal for departure. As the carriages began to slide past, he looked carefully into the first-class compartments—he knew his friend, a railway engineer, would be travelling in one of them. Yet his attention was drawn by someone else standing in the compartment immediately before his friend’s. It was a well-dressed, thick-set, powerful man. Under his hat he had a broad, pale face, thick eyebrows, dark eyes, and a black moustache. Struck by the man’s sinister appearance and bearing, the deputy stationmaster would later say that he seemed immersed in grim thoughts.
It was only the autopsy and the state that the compartment was in when the train reached Palermo that allowed Emanuele Notarbartolo’s terrifying last moments to be reconstructed. As the train entered the tunnel between Termini and Trabia, he was attacked by two men, one wielding a stiletto, the other a bone-handled, double-edged dagger. Shocked from his half-sleep, he thrashed and leapt to avoid the flurry of blows. Some of them missed and cut deep into the seat and headrest. Notarbartolo was nearly fifty-nine, but he was a big man and a former soldier. With the din of the train in the tunnel drowning out his cries, he managed to grab one of the blades. Then he lunged desperately up towards his rifle in the rack above his head. A knife bit into his groin. Both his hand and the netting were slashed. He left a bloody palm-print on the window pane. At this point, Notarbartolo was held from behind by one of the men while the other planted four deep wounds in his chest. He was stabbed twenty-seven times in all.
The train drew towards Trabia station. Covered in blood and breathless from the struggle, the killers pulled Notarbartolo’s belongings down from the rack and searched him for anything that would make for an easy identification: the gold watch with the family crest; the wallet with business cards and gun licence. It was not yet dark, but rather than make a getaway at the first opportunity, the killers crouched below the window during the brief stop at Trabia. The place they had in mind to dispose of their victim was just two minutes further along the track. Once the train cleared the station, they propped the body against the door and then bundled it out as they crossed the Curreri bridge. But they did not throw it quite far enough to tumble into the ravine below and be washed out to sea. Instead it struck the parapet and fell by the track.
The two men got out at the next station, leaving the compartment blood-spattered and empty behind them.
* * *
The city of Milan had some unusual visitors in the winter of 1899–1900. Hunched and cloaked against the cold, dozens of short, raven-haired men in caps tramped the northern Italian city’s foggy streets, struggling to feed themselves on the pittance that the authorities provided for their upkeep. They were the Sicilian witnesses for the Notarbartolo murder trial. The two extremes of Italy met in Milan’s Court of Assizes. The jury had to listen to many of the testimonies through interpreters.
The first scandal surrounding the Notarbartolo murder is that it took nearly seven years for the case to come to court. The reasons for that extraordinary delay were to be dramatically revealed before the jury. But in the meantime, even before the trial began it had become clear that robbery could not have been the killers’ intention. They evidently had an extensive organization behind them, including accomplices among the railway staff. A possible motive had also emerged; it promised to link the case to financial and political corruption. Not long before Notarbartolo’s murder, an inquiry found evidence of serious misconduct at the Banco di Sicilia under his successor as governor. The bank’s money was being used to protect the share price of NGI, the Florios’ shipping company, during delicate contract negotiations with the government. It was a simple scam. Loans were granted to intermediaries who bought NGI stock that was then deposited with the bank as security for the loan. The real borrowers, who included the bank governor and Ignazio Florio, remained anonymous—in contravention of bank regulations.
The same fraudulent method was then used as a more direct way of making money by other people connected to the bank. If the value of the shares went up, the borrower was able to emerge from anonymity, ask the bank to sell them off, and take the profit. If the shares went down, the bank would be stuck with the devalued shares and no one to turn to when it came to exacting repayment of the advance. The anonymous borrowers could only win; the Banco di Sicilia could only lose. The inquiry also raised suspicions of mafia infiltration.
In the weeks before the murder, with news of the banking inquiry leaking out, there had been rumours that Emanuele Notarbartolo would return once more to the Banco di Sicilia. It was said that Notarbartolo himself had been influential in instigating the investigation into the bank’s affairs. Many senior figures connected to the Bank of Sicily would have had much to fear from a return to the old financial rigour. Could Notarbartolo have been murdered to protect these corrupt interests within the bank?
This scent of scandal in high places created considerable public interest in the Notarbartolo case as the hearings began in the Milan Court of Assizes on 11 November 1899. Yet only two railwaymen were in the dock. Pancrazio Garufi was the brakeman in the last carriage. Part of his job was to check that nothing fell from the train, but he claimed not to have seen anything amiss. The police asserted that the killers would not have thrown Notarbartolo’s body from the train without being sure that Garufi would look the other way. Even more suspicion surrounded the ticket collector, Giuseppe Carollo. He was unlikely to have been one of the killers because one of his duties was to walk along the platform at each stop calling out the station’s name. But the assassins would not have got on the train without tickets, performed a gruesome murder, and waited in the compartment at Trabia with the body if they had not been sure that there was someone—Carollo, the prosecution alleged—whose task it was to prevent their work being disturbed.
The first five days of the trial were a muddle. The two railwaymen floundered, had inexplicable lapses of memory, contradicted themselves. They even denied knowing each other when they lived fifty metres apart. The ticket collector Carollo, who had changed his story several times, made a particularly bad impression. One correspondent at the trial described his shifting eyes set in a ‘gaunt, yellowish face with muscles shaped into a fox-like snout’. To most lay observers it seemed a hopeless task to decide whether the two accused were killers, accomplices, or just innocent witnesses who feared the consequences of incriminating anyone far more than they feared prison.
The contrast was stark when the victim’s son, Leopoldo Notarbartolo, took the stand on 16 November. He stood tall and erect in naval uniform in the witness box, his head held so high that he seemed to be looking at the court down his strikingly long nose; like his dark, heavy-lidded eyes, it was a trait inherited from his murdered father. He delivered his evidence in a deep voice with a calm and speedy assurance that observers found disconcerting at first. Then, gradually, his honesty and directness made a profound impression. What Leopoldo Notarbartolo said stunned the court, made him a celebrity, and turned the case into one of the most famous trials in Italian history. ‘I believe that the murder was a vendetta and that the only man who hated my father is Commendatore Raffaele Palizzolo, the member of parliament. I accuse him of being the instigator of the crime, of commissioning these and other killers.’
Leopoldo then began to paint a portrait of Don Raffaele Palizzolo and to tell the story of his long battle with his father. The two had first become acquainted when they were young men—Palermo is a small place. The animosity between them had been sparked soon after Notarbartolo became mayor in 1873 when he forced Palizzolo to pay back money he had spirited from a fund intended to subsidize bread for the poor.
As mayor, Notarbartolo was in regular contact with the public prosecutors who suspected that Palizzolo was a protector of a notorious brigand; it seemed that Don Raffaele relied on his influence at election time in Caccamo. The enmity between Notarbartolo and Palizzolo became personal. Wherever possible, Notarbartolo avoided places frequented by Palizzolo. He loathed his unmanly bearing, his cowardice, his smarm. Notarbartolo made no effort to hide his revulsion on those occasions where Palizzolo’s company could not be avoided.
It was Palizzolo that Emanuele Notarbartolo had suspected of being behind his 1882 kidnapping. The empty villa where some of the kidnappers were captured was on land bordering Palizzolo’s own estate; both properties were in Villabate—the fiefdom of his favourite cosca. The abduction itself had taken place near Caccamo, which was ruled by another cosca sponsored by Palizzolo.
By the time of the kidnapping, the theatre of the conflict between the two men had shifted to the Banco di Sicilia; Notarbartolo was its director and Palizzolo a leading member of its governing body. Leopoldo’s account of his father’s time at the bank did not disappoint those who had been hoping to hear some scandal emerge from the trial. He explained how his father had fought a losing battle to stop the Banco di Sicilia being used as a great sluice-gate of favours, the most powerful clientele-building instrument on the island. Large sums were found to have been loaned to, and never recovered from, children, janitors, boatmen, the dead, and individuals who had been entirely invented.
Throughout the 1880s, Notarbartolo strove to clean up the bank’s affairs while Palizzolo made himself a constant nuisance. Notarbartolo tried to pilot reforms in the bank’s constitution that would reduce the influence of the politicians who made up two thirds of its governing body. In 1889, he sent the government a damning confidential report on the bank’s workings. With it went an ultimatum: back my reforms or I resign. These letters were stolen from the office of the Minister of Agriculture, Industry, and Commerce. A few weeks later they were shown to a meeting of the bank’s general council, which had been held while Notarbartolo was away in Rome on business. The meeting passed a vote of censure against him. Although nothing was ever proved, suspicions over the theft of the letters centred on Palizzolo. A registered package from a false address in Rome had been sent to his house on the day that the documents disappeared. The package was sealed with wax, bearing only the impress of a button from a particular Roman tailor. Palizzolo was among the tailor’s customers.
The whole situation presented the government with a dilemma: it could either back the bank’s council, which was increasingly dominated by crooks and clearly complicit in the theft of the letters; or it could back a principled, competent, but politically unreliable governor. It dithered for several months, and then took the first option. Notarbartolo was asked to resign. The bank’s administration was dissolved, but most of the old members were subsequently re-elected. After Notarbartolo’s enforced resignation, corrupt interests swooped on the bank to engineer the NGI share swindle. The subsequent investigation revealed that Palizzolo was one of the anonymous borrowers involved.
Leopoldo concluded his testimony to the Milan court with a solemn denunciation of the way the investigation into his father’s murder had been handled. ‘I repeatedly told the authorities all of these things. And yet Raffaele Palizzolo was never questioned. Perhaps they were afraid.’
The reports from Milan of Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s evidence caused consternation in political circles in Rome. The trial had been intended to offer up small fry to quell the increasing demand for justice in the Notarbartolo case. Now Don Raffaele Palizzolo suddenly became a huge political embarrassment. He wrote a letter to the press, claiming that he had always had a good working relationship with Notarbartolo. Then, as the atmosphere darkened around him in Rome, he scuttled back to Palermo.
Palizzolo’s parliamentary immunity from prosecution was removed when Prime Minister General Luigi Pelloux arranged a rapid vote in the Chamber of Deputies. Because of rumours that the controversial MP was preparing to escape abroad, telegraph communications between Sicily and the mainland were suspended so that he did not hear the news of the parliamentary vote. With the legal authorities in Palermo still dithering, Chief of Police Sangiorgi was given direct authorization by General Pelloux to go ahead and arrest Palizzolo that very evening. Officers found him relaxing on the same bed around which his clients used to cluster each morning.
A few days later in Palermo 30,000 people marched to place a wreath on a new bust of Emanuele Notarbartolo that had been set on a small Corinthian altar in Politeama Square. Palizzolo appeared to be finished. ‘The mafia is in its death throes,’ opined one commentator.
* * *
Leopoldo Notarbartolo was using the Milan courtroom as a stage; it was his chance to expose the whole affair to the glare of publicity—his father’s murder, the mishandled investigation, Palizzolo and the NGI share scandal. One of the striking aspects of his testimony was that he was not a witness for the prosecution. In Italy victims can pursue actions for damages during criminal trials, and they can even play a role in arguing the case for the prosecution. The young naval officer was one such ‘civil complainant’. He had good reason for wanting to drive the prosecution: he had become convinced that the prosecuting magistrates who were supposed to prepare the case against the killers were complicit in a cover-up. His suspicions centred on Vincenzo Cosenza—the same chief prosecutor in Palermo who would later do his best to undermine Sangiorgi’s prosecution of the mafia of the Conca d’Oro.
Over the six years since his father’s murder Leopoldo had done a great deal of investigative work himself. He had met opposition and indifference at every turn. In 1896, an old personal and political friend of his father’s, Antonio di Rudinì, became Prime Minister. Leopoldo went to see him, revealed his suspicions about Palizzolo, and asked for help. Rudinì was less than understanding: ‘If you really believe he did it, why don’t you just hire some good mafioso to kill him for you?’
It was only under Rudinì’s successor, General Pelloux (another family friend of the Notarbartolos), that enough political momentum was built up for any kind of trial, even one that only inculpated the two railwaymen. Under Pelloux’s influence, the murder trial was switched from Palermo to Milan where there was less likelihood that witnesses would be intimidated.
Following Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s testimony, the Milan trial continued and the reasons for the delay in bringing the case to court began to emerge. Witness after witness fuelled the scandal. The local army commander in Milan ordered his officers not to attend the trial because of the stream of subversive revelations. The Minister of War, who had been Royal Commissar in Sicily, testified that ‘the prosecution evidence for the Notarbartolo murder was prepared extremely negligently, extremely sloppily; indeed, it was carried out in a culpable way.’ A few days later the same Minister was forced to resign when a newspaper published a letter from him, asking the judicial authorities to release a politically influential mafioso in time to help a government candidate during elections.
From the moment that the body on the tracks over the Curreri ravine was identified as being that of Emanuele Notarbartolo, the whole of Palermo had been alive with rumours that Palizzolo was behind the murder. Yet it emerged in court that the chief investigating magistrate in Palermo at the time had been transferred, apparently for suggesting that the rumours might well have some substance to them.
One police inspector, after asking to take charge of the case, had hidden evidence, including a pair of blood-caked socks. He had also sent the investigation along a series of patently false trails, each of them based on hypotheses that cast a shadow over the murdered banker’s reputation. In Milan, to loud applause from the public gallery, the inspector was arrested in court. He turned out to be a close ally of Palizzolo’s; he had acted as his electoral ‘agent’.
The name of one of the men whom Leopoldo Notarbartolo believed had actually carried out the assassination also came out before the Milan jury. The deputy stationmaster at Termini Imerese—who had seen the sinister figure in Notarbartolo’s compartment—was called to the stand. After repeating his account of that night back in February 1893, he said that he had not managed to recognize the same man in an identity parade.
Then the advocate representing the Notarbartolo family began to probe: was it not true that he had recognized the man, but had told the police he was afraid of saying so in public because of the mafia? The witness began to tremble, but stuck to his story. Then he was brought face to face with one of Ermanno Sangiorgi’s predecessors as Chief of Police of Palermo—the very man who had conducted the identity parade. The stationmaster blushed and squirmed. There was considerable sympathy for his distress in the public gallery because he was evidently an honest man in fear for his life. Finally he cracked, and said in barely more than a whisper, ‘I confirm everything he says; it’s true; it really was the same man.’
The man he had identified was Giuseppe Fontana, age forty-seven, from Villabate. The former Chief of Police outlined for the court the suspect’s background. He was a member of the Villabate cosca of the mafia. Only a few years before, he had been released from the charge of counterfeiting money because of the connections he was able to mobilize. ‘I think that in this trial too, Fontana has been protected by a magical, powerful, and mysterious hand.’
As soon as these revelations were made in Milan, the order went out to arrest Fontana, who went into hiding. The rumour was that he was being sheltered by a prince and member of parliament whose estate he protected. The prince was interviewed by Chief of Police Sangiorgi who intimated that he might be accused of harbouring the criminal. The prince reported back to Fontana who dictated the conditions under which he would give himself up. Sangiorgi wearily agreed. The Times reporter in Italy was horrified at the deal:
Fontana … was driven into Palermo in the Prince’s carriage, accompanied by the Prince’s lawyers, interrogated at [Sangiorgi’s] private house instead of being taken ignominiously to the police station, allowed to pay a farewell visit to his family, and, without being handcuffed, was considerately conducted … to the chief prison, where he was placed in a comfortable cell. Yet this is a man who has on his record four murders and various attempts at murder and theft of all of which charges he has been acquitted for ‘insufficient proof’, or, in other words, on account of the impossibility of inducing magistrates and witnesses to rise above the terrorism of the Maffia.
Giuseppe Fontana was making a point when he gave himself up in this fashion. His was a world of relationships between men. In that world, institutions, like the state, were meaningless. His arrest was a personal matter between himself and a respected adversary, Chief of Police Ermanno Sangiorgi.
With both Palizzolo and Fontana now under arrest, the Milan trial was abandoned on 10 January 1900 to allow further investigations to be carried out. The judicial marathon was only just beginning.
* * *
Even after the revelations in Milan, Palizzolo was not without friends while in custody. Indeed, he nearly managed to avoid being brought to trial at all.
In June 1900, Palizzolo’s people put him forward for re-election to his central Palermo parliamentary constituency. The mafia, facing Sangiorgi’s trial, needed all the political help it could get. With Sicilian influence on the wane in the national political arena, NGI also needed its old friends. If Palizzolo had been elected, he would again have been given parliamentary immunity. Florio money funded the election campaign, and even Ignazio’s mother, the Baroness Giovanna d’Ondes, signed up to a ladies’ support association started by Palizzolo’s sisters. This local backing was not enough; the government supported his opponent, and Don Raffaele failed to secure victory.
Palizzolo’s supporters in the magistrature also nearly stopped the case coming to court. Chief Prosecutor Cosenza drew up a report advising that there was not enough evidence for a trial. Only direct pressure from the King forced him to change his conclusion, although he still called the evidence ‘slight’.
Before the second trial started, Fontana’s cause was also helped by the death—from cirrhosis of the liver—of the shifty ticket collector, Giuseppe Carollo.
* * *
The second trial was held in what was probably Italy’s most imposing courthouse, a palace in Bologna whose courtyard and noble façade were designed by Palladio. Its lavish interior was baroque, with the huge courtroom itself panelled in elaborately carved dark wood. Bologna was a politically conservative city, which would not give a sympathetic hearing to anyone trying to take advantage of the case’s subversive implications.
Don Raffaele Palizzolo was one of the first witnesses called from the cage where the defendants were held. The time spent in custody had aged him; he looked thin and grey, the flesh sagging around his prominent jaw. He was still dressed immaculately, peering at his notes through an elegant pince-nez. He gave evidence for two days in a tragic pose, leaning on the back of a chair, punctuating his testimony with sobs and flourishing gestures, his voice alternating between a piteous murmur and a defiant boom.
Members of the jury, I am sure that you have not discovered in me any trace of inborn ferocity. What you have seen instead … are the deep, ineradicable marks left by the inhuman, barbaric treatment to which I have unjustly been subjected by the factional hatred, vendetta and anger that have formed a pact with fear on the part of the strong and cowardice on the part of the weak. So, let scorned, outraged humanity speak!… I am alone, I am poor, and I do not belong to any party factions. My dead brother said to me with his last kiss, ‘Defend yourself, and defend your family’s honour.’
Exhausted by the strain of delivering his evidence, Don Raffaele succumbed to a chronic nosebleed.
Giuseppe Fontana, the man accused of actually carrying out the Notarbartolo murder, was as composed and concise in the witness box as Don Raffaele had been prolix. He was relaxed and well groomed. Dressed in a dark blue suit, he looked just like the upstanding citrus fruit entrepreneur he claimed to be. Journalists present noted his powerful physique, and the sunken slits of his eyes, ‘like two deep finger holes in a head modelled in clay’. Fontana had a characteristic way of pausing for reflection, head back and lips pursed, before continuing his statement with calm assurance. It seemed at times as if the evidence he was giving related to someone else and not to him. He even managed to raise a laugh from the courtroom when he said, with a smile, that if he had been a mafia boss as the prosecution claimed, then he would have sent one of his men to carry out the killing rather than do it himself.
It was an extraordinarily accomplished performance. As a member of the mafia’s military organization, Fontana was more exposed than his cosca’s political patron. Even politicians prepared to embrace Palizzolo as one of their own were edgy about spending any of their political credibility on protecting a thug.
Much attention in court was focused on the alibi that had helped Fontana avoid prosecution for so long. He provided plentiful company records to show that he had in fact been in Tunisia on the day of the murder. With no little courage, Leopoldo Notarbartolo had gone to North Africa on the mafioso’s trail in the spring of 1895. (Sangiorgi believed that there was a whole cosca operating there.) The Sicilians whom Leopoldo encountered in and around Hammamet confirmed Fontana’s alibi ‘with the uniformity of a phonograph’. But by meticulously comparing Tunisian post-office money order registers with those in Palermo, Leopoldo and his lawyers raised doubts about the alibi. It was quite possible for one of Fontana’s associates to have sent and received the money orders that supposedly proved that he had been away from Sicily at the time of the murder.
There had been sightings of the mafioso at key times, such as on the very evening of the murder in Altavilla where the two bowler-hatted suspects alighted from the train. In court, however, the witnesses who had earlier claimed to have seen Fontana made uneasy, contradictory denials.
Palizzolo’s response to cross-examination stood as one long proof of the truism that one excuse is better than many. In the teeth of the most evident implausibility, Don Raffaele portrayed himself as the victim of a political plot, and denied even the most trivial of the prosecution’s assertions. Far from being the leader of the mafia, he said, he was one of its victims. Fontana and he denied knowing each other. Yet it turned out that Palizzolo’s intermediary in the NGI share swindle was also Fontana’s business partner—a man who had provided a great deal of evidence in support of the Tunisian alibi.
One witness whose statement was followed with particular interest was Giuseppe Pitrè, the famous folklore expert. The professor of ‘demo-psychology’ gave a glowing account of Palizzolo’s character—the accused was a close colleague of his in local government. Pitrè asserted that the fact that Palizzolo had written a novel in his youth revealed that he had ‘a noble mind, devoted to virtue, averse to vice’. When asked to define the mafia, Pitrè explained that its origins lay in the Arabic word ‘mascias’. It meant an exaggerated awareness of one’s own personality, a reluctance to submit to bullying; in the lower social classes it could lead to criminal activity.
Chief of Police Ermanno Sangiorgi took a less bookish approach when called to the witness stand. The mafia, he said, was a sworn criminal organization based on protection rackets. It had bases across western Sicily and even in other countries. Sangiorgi was suffering from a bad cold at the time, and to many in court his hoarse voice was nearly inaudible. Advocates for the defence countered by pointing out that the recent trial in Palermo hardly gave convincing backing to his theory.
* * *
The Bologna jury retired to consider its verdict on the Notarbartolo murder at a quarter to ten on the evening of 30 July 1902. The sense of expectation matched the scale of the trial. It had lasted nearly eleven months. Fifty fat volumes of evidence were submitted; 503 witnesses were heard, whether in person or by sworn statement. They included three former government ministers, seven senators, eleven members of parliament, and five chiefs of police. The trial transcripts recorded fifty-four ‘tumults’. On six occasions the court had to be completely cleared to restore order. Several times the lawyers on both sides had to be separated before they came to blows. One of the presiding judges died during the trial; two jurors had to be substituted because of ill health. The numerous advocates on both sides performed feats of forensic oratory: one of the Notarbartolo family lawyers delivered a concluding speech that lasted eight days; another spoke for four and a half.
The night of 30 July was one of the hottest of the year. The gas lamps burning inside the packed courtroom made the atmosphere unbreatheable. The streets outside were crowded. The court was guarded by half a company of infantrymen, fifty police, and forty-five carabinieri, many of whom formed a rank around the dock with bayonets fixed. Rumours of a mafia plot to kill one of the Notarbartolos’ lawyers had spread during the judge’s summing-up.
At twenty-five past eleven the jury filed back into the courtroom. The foreman, an elementary school teacher, stood up and placed his hand on his heart. There was evident emotion in his voice as he listened to the judge’s list of questions.
‘Is the accused, Raffaele Palizzolo, guilty of having caused others to commit the murder of Commendatore Emanuele Notarbartolo?’
The ‘Yes’ response was greeted with applause and cries of astonishment. Fontana was also convicted of carrying out the Notarbartolo murder.
After the judge had issued the sentences—the accused were given thirty years each—Palizzolo demanded to say a word: ‘You have been deceived, I swear it, as I said from day one. I am innocent. There is a God who will avenge me. Not on you, the jury, but on those who have assassinated me despite knowing that I am innocent.’
Fontana chipped in with, ‘On my mother’s tomb, I am innocent too.’ They were led away.
The defence lawyers left the court to deafening whistles from the public gallery. Leopoldo Notarbartolo and his lawyers were already being mobbed to repeated cries: ‘Long live the jury!’ ‘Long live Bolognese justice!’ ‘Long live the civil complainant.’ They were unable to make it through the throng outside to their hotels, and had to take refuge in a nearby lawyer’s office. There, in answer to shouted pleas, they spoke of their gratitude from the balcony.
In Palermo the scene could hardly have been more different. Huge numbers had gathered before the telegraph and newspaper offices. Within fifty minutes of the news arriving, special editions were on the street. By then the crowd was already thinning out in silence. The next day signs reading ‘City in mourning’ appeared in some Palermo shop windows. Chief of Police Sangiorgi reported that they were printed and distributed by mafiosi. L’Ora, a newspaper owned by Ignazio Florio, declared its perplexity at the verdict and asked what concrete proof there had been of Palizzolo’s guilt.
In an article much quoted in the press across Italy, The Times too expressed surprise:
In view of the shuffling evidence of intimidated witnesses and of the testimony favourable to the character of Palizzolo given by several Sicilian magnates, it was expected that the jury would profit by the lack of material proof of the guilt of the accused to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Nevertheless, the article concluded, ‘Broad justice has been done, and done courageously.’
The tone in some papers was celebratory. ‘Glory and honour to the twelve men of the jury,’ proclaimed La Nazione. The Socialist Avanti! hailed a defeat for ‘one of the most barbaric and poisonous forms of delinquency—the maffia’. Sicily was still divided by the case. The Giornale di Sicilia, which had looked favourably on Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s cause throughout the trial, called the result a blow struck against ‘the mafia’s principal champion, political power’. Many papers joined Bologna’s Resto del Carlino in expressing pleasure that justice had prevailed, but also in drawing sombre lessons from the proven complicity of the authorities in protecting the guilty: ‘Let us hope that we have all learned something from this monstrous court case and that we never see its like again under an Italian sky.’
* * *
Six months later, the Court of Cassation in Rome quashed the whole Bologna trial on a technicality.
A minor witness had been called to give evidence. No sooner had he taken the oath than he had to withdraw while lawyers argued over whether he needed to testify at all. The next day he appeared in the witness box again, but made his statement without renewing the oath. Leopoldo Notarbartolo understandably thought that the episode had been deliberately arranged as a fail-safe for the defence.
In Sicily the Bologna verdict had given rise to a coordinated political response. Following the initiative of the ‘demo-psychologist’ Giuseppe Pitrè, a ‘Pro Sicilia’ committee was formed to express ‘public indignation’ at Palizzolo’s conviction, which was seen as an attack on the island as a whole. Two hundred thousand people signed up to show their support.
When things periodically go against them at the national level, the mafia and its politicians fall back on complaints of this kind, and even start to make noises about Sicilian independence. This tactic seeks to draw on some powerful ‘Sicilianist’ feelings on the island. During the Notarbartolo trials, there certainly had been some prejudiced interventions in the press. ‘Sicily is a cancer on Italy’s foot,’ one commentator proclaimed. These were also the years in which some academics were arguing that southern Italians were a backward race with oddly shaped heads and an innate proclivity for crime.
More importantly, what Palizzolo called his ‘martyrdom’ galvanized a powerful coalition of conservative political and business interests behind ‘Pro Sicilia’, which was much more than a mafia front organization, and more even than an extension of the NGI lobby. The Palizzolo case had come at a time when important right-wing Sicilian politicians were no longer influential in Rome. Now the liberal government was even making overtures to the Socialist Party. ‘Pro Sicilia’ was Sicilian conservatives’ reaction to their perceived powerlessness. The pressure group did not last long, but it did manage to get the government to listen. A grouping of this kind could be an important component of any governing coalition. The quashing of the Bologna trial may well have been a peace offering to the powers organized around ‘Pro Sicilia’.
* * *
The retrial began in Florence on 5 September 1903, more than a decade after the murder on the Termini–Palermo train. Now only Fontana and Palizzolo were in the dock. (Those acquitted in Bologna, including the brake operator on the train, were not asked to face the same charges again.) Nevertheless, the Florence trial lasted only two weeks less than the previous one, which it resembled in many ways.
Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s lawyers did call on a new and potentially very important witness. Matteo Filippello was reputed to be the man who liaised with Palizzolo on behalf of the Villabate cosca. In 1896, he had been wounded in a dispute thought to have arisen from the division of the payment for Notarbartolo’s murder. Early rumours in Palermo had named him as one of the assassins.
Filippello had to be threatened with arrest before agreeing to travel to the hearing. Once in Florence, he was arrested for intimidating another witness, and pretended that he was losing his sanity. The day before he was scheduled to appear in court, he disappeared. He was found hanging from the banisters in his boarding house near Santa Croce basilica. Suicide, the inquiry decided.
But by now public opinion had grown bored and sceptical. Nearly four years had passed since Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s stunning revelations in Milan. The case had at first triggered a huge public debate on the mafia. Some valuable accounts were published, including two by Sicilian police inspectors. Yet for every useful study of the famous criminal organization, there were two or three that helped confuse the issue. There were still many voices—including prestigious witnesses—denying that the mafia existed. It was an exaggerated sense of personal pride, a product of the way the islanders had been oppressed throughout history. Others suggested that it was simply the Sicilian name for a type of underworld that could be found in every modern city in Europe and the United States.
Strikingly, even Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s advocates in Bologna followed this line. In western Sicily, they argued, there were only isolated cosche that sometimes shared the same protector. ‘What is the mafia today? Is it, as some people believe, an organization with bosses and underbosses? No. That only exists in the dreams of the odd Chief of Police.’ There were obvious reasons for saying this. It would have been very unwise to pin the chances of a conviction in the Notarbartolo case on Sangiorgi’s misfired efforts to mount a prosecution of the whole mafia. Nonetheless the statement stirred even more sediment into the debate.
Thus, despite the spotlight of Milan and Bologna, ‘mafia’ remained a turbid and formless concept. Mafia fatigue was bound to set in. When it did, it diminished the risk of a politically disruptive bout of public indignation following an acquittal.
With the benefit of the Bologna dress rehearsal behind them, the defence lawyers in Florence gave a much better account of themselves. Don Raffaele abandoned the mawkish oratory of his earlier performances and adopted the submissive pose of an invalid who had to be helped into the witness stand by a carabiniere.
The prosecution case failed to gain the same momentum it had in Bologna, the same sense that all the contradiction and confusion in the defence testimonies added up to proof of guilt. On 23 July 1904, an 8–4 majority of the jury acquitted the accused for lack of sufficient evidence. Palizzolo fainted on hearing the verdict.
* * *
Despite a surprisingly rapid improvement in his health over the week following the trial, Don Raffaele swooned again on 1 August when he stepped off the gangplank in Palermo harbour as a free man. The ‘Pro Sicilia’ committee had hired an NGI steamer to bring him back in triumph from the mainland.
It was the culmination of days of celebration. The Florio newspaper L’Ora said the city had been liberated from a nightmare by the Florentine jury. Palizzolo supporters had pictures of him on their lapels. The festival of the Madonna del Carmine had been postponed to allow the returning hero to take part. When Palizzolo came to his senses again, he was accompanied home by a cheering, disorderly crowd. He found his house decked in lights spelling out ‘Viva Palizzolo!’ As he appeared on his balcony, a band struck up a specially composed hymn to his victory. One sycophant committed the shrill mood to paper:
After 56 months of harrowing martyrdom, Raffaele Palizzolo emerged triumphant, bathed by the light of his dazzling halo of Pain and Virtue. His Pain and Virtue were consecrated by the sublime self-denial he showed through five years of unparalleled torment. To pass the cheerless hours of imprisonment, in homage to Sicily, mistreated Sicily, he plaited Pain and Virtue like tear-sprinkled blossoms into garlands of harsh suffering.
Restraint has rarely been a strength of the mafia lobby. Many Sicilians, even those who thought that the evidence against Don Raffaele was not strong enough to merit a conviction, were disgusted.
Yet the jubilation did not last long. In the November parliamentary elections, the martyr of Bologna was soundly beaten. Despite his triumph, he was now too compromised and his powerful friends abandoned him. The bedside audiences resumed, for Palizzolo continued to hold office in local government, but his days as Sicily’s supreme clientele-builder were behind him.
A short time before Palizzolo’s apotheosis, Leopoldo Notarbartolo slipped back into Palermo aboard the postal steamer. Only a small party of friends were there to greet him in silence, hats in hands. There were tears as he was reunited with his sister. Taking on the legacy of his father’s struggle with Palizzolo had cost him dearly. The Mendolilla estate would have to be sold to pay legal costs.
Over the years that followed, Leopoldo’s naval career took him mercifully far from the island. He reached the rank of admiral, but faded from public memory. From the day of Palizzolo’s acquittal he had resolved not to lose faith in progress, not to collapse into a resigned vision of the world as evil and chaotic. The only way that he found to continue the fight for justice, to which he had dedicated the best years of his life, was to record the story of his father’s life. The long sea voyages afforded him plenty of time to write a biography that systematically understated his own role in the dramas of 1893–1904. His father would have approved of his modesty. In 1947, after a long and painful illness, Leopoldo died, childless, in his adopted home city of Florence. His wife published the biography two years later.
Giuseppe Fontana also left Sicily after the trial. Taking his four little daughters with him, he emigrated to New York to pursue his career in extortion and murder on the mafia’s new frontier.