DON CALÒ AND THE REBIRTH OF THE HONOURED SOCIETY
It is said that on the morning of 14 July 1943, an American fighter plane flew low over Villalba. It naturally drew the people out into the streets. When it roared down to rooftop level they could see, attached to its fuselage, a golden-yellow flag with a large L in the centre. As it passed over the house belonging to the parish priest, Monsignor Giovanni Vizzini, the pilot dropped a small package. But it was intercepted by an Italian soldier and passed on to the commander of the local carabinieri.
Four days earlier ‘Operation Husky’ had been launched when 160,000 Allied troops landed along a broad section of the south-eastern coast of Sicily; 300,000 more American and British fighting men followed. This huge force was now fanning out across the island. The British headed north-east towards Catania, Messina, and the mainland. The Americans advanced north and west. It was the first time the Allies had invaded the territory of an Axis power.
Villalba, in the very centre of Sicily, was hardly a major strategic objective. It was not much more than a collection of peasant hovels known principally for its lentils—an important component of the diet of the poor. The town’s sloping grid of narrow, dirt-track streets had grown in the eighteenth century to provide farmhands for the giant Miccichè estate that stretched out in all directions below. Life in Villalba revolved around the tiny Piazza Madrice where there were two bars, a branch of the Bank of Sicily, and a church.
Yet the fighter plane returned the following day, still bearing its unusual banner. Another package was dropped, and this time it found its way to the right person. Its nylon wrapping bore the Sicilian words ‘zu Calò’—’Uncle Calò’—who was mafia boss Don Calogero Vizzini, the priest’s older brother. It was picked up by the Vizzinis’ butler who took it to his master. It was found to contain a golden-yellow silk handkerchief with a large black L in the centre.
That very evening, the story goes, a rider left Villalba with a message for a certain ‘zu Peppi’ in Mussomeli. The message read as follows: ‘On Tuesday 20th Turi will leave for the fair at Cerda with the calves. I will set off the same day with the cows, the oxen, and the bull. Prepare the kindling for the fruit and organize pens for the animals. Tell the other overseers to get ready.’
The letter was in a code that had an Old-World simplicity. The addressee, ‘zu Peppi’, was ‘uncle’ Giuseppe Genco Russo, boss of Mussomeli. He was being informed that Turi (another mafioso) would lead the American motorized divisions (calves) as far as Cerda. Don Calogero Vizzini meanwhile would set off the same day with the bulk of the troops (the cows), the tanks (oxen), and the commander-in-chief (the bull). The mafiosi under Genco Russo’s command were to prepare the battleground (kindling) and provide cover for the infantry (pens).
On the afternoon of 20 July, three tanks duly rumbled up to the gates of Villalba. The turret of the first bore the same yellow flag with the large L in the middle. An American officer appeared from the hatch. In a Sicilian accent slurred by years in the States, he respectfully asked for Don Calò. Word reached the old capomafioso at home. He was four days away from his sixty-sixth birthday. On hearing of the Americans’ arrival, he shambled slowly across town in shirtsleeves and tortoiseshell sunglasses, his braces straining to keep a pair of crumpled trousers tethered high over the improbable protrusion of his gut. When he reached the Americans, he wordlessly proffered the silk hankerchief his butler had picked up. Along with his nephew—who spoke English because he had not long returned from the States—he then climbed up on to the tank and was driven away.
Meanwhile, back in Villalba, mafiosi began to intimate the meaning of these marvels to the townspeople. It was explained that Don Calò had contacts high up in the American government who had reached him through Charles ‘Lucky’ Luciano—hence the L on the flag. Luciano had been released from prison early in return for arranging the mafia’s help with the invasion. Not only that, some said, but the famous Sicilian-American gangster was himself inside the tank that carried Don Calò away. Because of his great authority, Villalba’s own man of respect had been chosen, on Lucky Luciano’s advice, to lead the American advance.
Six days later Don Calò returned to Villalba in a big American car, his mission accomplished. A perfectly executed pincer movement had brought the calves, cows, and oxen together at Cerda, thus completing the Allied conquest of central Sicily. Now Don Calò, with his American backers, was ready to return the mafia to its rightful place in Sicilian society after the dark days of Fascism.
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Most Sicilians know the tale of Don Calò and the yellow handkerchief, and many still believe it. The endless retellings of the episode have painted a thick crust of apocryphal conviction over it, blurring its detail in some places, building up hardened swirls of pure invention in others. Most historians now dismiss it as fable.
The events of Lucky Luciano’s life, intriguing though they are, certainly do not support the legend. Back in the autumn of 1933, Luciano led a combined Italian-Jewish syndicate in a move to establish centralized control of bordellos in New York City. The move was a commercial failure. When the madams complained that the burden of kickbacks was too heavy and that their margins were non-existent, they were met with a wall of dumb muscle from Luciano’s enforcers. The result was widespread ‘tax dodging’ throughout the industry. Isolated acts of intimidation could do nothing to stop the fall in the extortion syndicate’s income.
This misfired business venture had catastrophic legal consequences for Luciano too. In February 1936, he and the other members of his gang were arrested by agents working for special prosecutor Thomas E. Dewey. The testimonies of a number of sex industry workers were crucial in securing a conviction. In June of the same year Luciano began a thirty- to fifty-year term in New York State’s maximum-security penitentiary at Dannemora. It was the harshest sentence ever handed down for compulsory prostitution.
Luciano’s luck began to turn when the USA entered the Second World War. In February 1942, the SS Normandie, a luxury liner that had once held the Blue Riband for the fastest Atlantic crossing, caught fire and rolled over at her moorings on the Hudson River. It was probably an accident but at the time nobody was sure. To avoid further acts of sabotage, naval intelligence began to seek the help of the mobsters who controlled the waterfront. Their first contacts were with Joseph ‘Socks’ Lanza, the boss of the huge Fulton fish market. He organized false union cards for navy agents so that they could carry out investigations on the waterfront. On Lanza’s recommendation, Luciano was also recruited to help extend the navy’s anti-espionage operation. Lucky was brought from Dannemora to a more convenient (and comfortable) prison to be interviewed by intelligence officers. The rumours on the waterfront were that American mobsters had eliminated suspected German spies on the orders of naval intelligence.
That is almost certainly the full extent of Lucky Luciano’s collaboration with the Federal government. There is no evidence that Luciano was in Sicily during the war. Nor is there evidence of a deal to free him in exchange for enlisting Sicilian mafia support for the Allied invasion. Luciano was released and expelled from the USA to Italy only in 1946. There was nothing necessarily suspicious about Luciano’s release even then; ten years was still the longest anyone had served for his particular vice offence. The man who gave final approval for the decision was the Governor of New York State, Luciano’s nemesis, Thomas E. Dewey.
So there was no American plot to enlist the mafia as an ally in the invasion of Sicily. Quite simply, it is hardly likely that the Allies would entrust the secret of Operation Husky, then the largest amphibious assault in history, to hoodlums.
Yet the legend of Don Calò and the yellow handkerchief persists. In June 2000, a journalist from the Rome newspaper La Repubblica interviewed the original source of the story, Michele Pantaleone, a well-known left-wing writer and politician who was now ninety. It was put to Pantaleone that a leading historian had expressed scepticism about his tale. ‘Why doesn’t he go and say these things in Villalba?’ he replied. ‘They’ll spit in his face. An American jeep came, took Calogero Vizzini away from the town, and brought him back after eleven days.’ Despite his haziness about certain particulars, Pantaleone’s words do at least carry the authority of experience. The Pantaleone family home stands on the downhill side of Piazza Madrice in Villalba. Michele had tangled with Don Calò in person, and he was there when the Americans arrived.
The lasting uncertainties over what happened that day in Villalba are significant in their own right; they are just one small example of the doubts over many aspects of the history of the mafia since the Second World War. To many Italians the powers that be are enveloped in a mist of suspicion. Looming somewhere in the mist, people claim to make out the outlines of corrupt politicians and judges, businessmen, Masonic lodges, the intelligence services, right-wing subversives, the police and military, the CIA and, of course, the mafia. Mistrust has contaminated Italian democracy since its birth in the aftermath of the Second World War. Many Sicilians, indeed many Italians, either do not know whom to believe, or choose to believe whom they like. Peddling conspiracy theories is a national sport; the Italians call it dietrologia, literally ‘behindology’. The legend of Don Calò and the yellow handkerchief is perhaps the earliest instance of dietrologia. It tries to convince us that the US government was ‘behind’ the Sicilian mafia’s resurgence after the fall of Fascism. In other words, it tries to shift the blame.
The strongest argument against the Villalba legend is simply that the Sicilian mafia is too complex a creature to be resurrected by a mere plot. The real story of the mafia’s return to power spreads the blame for its revival more evenly than the fable of the yellow handkerchief. It is a story about Don Calogero Vizzini, the American secret services, and political violence. But it is primarily about how the mafia used its traditional strengths—networking and brutality—to engineer a place for itself within the Italian democratic system as it slowly took shape after the war. Given the opportunities that history offers, the Sicilian mafia is quite capable of determining its own fate.
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Another Villalba historian provides an account of that famous day in 1943 that is almost certainly closer to the truth. He says simply that Don Calò led a celebratory delegation of local people to meet an Allied patrol whose commander had asked to speak to whoever was in charge. A few days later the old capo was proclaimed mayor. In this respect Don Calò’s story is typical. In Villalba, as in every village, people gave the invaders a joyous welcome because they were tired of the hardship that Fascism and war had brought. They also loved America; many Sicilian emigrants—they called them americani—had returned from the New World with savings, an education, and newfangled consumer tastes to show for their travels. And a good number of the GIs were themselves from Sicilian families that had emigrated to ‘la Merica’.
As they advanced across Sicily, Allied troops summarily dismissed the Fascist mayors of the towns like Villalba that they liberated. They replaced them with men who sometimes owed their positions to nothing more than the say-so of a Sicilian-American interpreter. To fill the power vacuum, rural centres that had spent two decades without politics often turned, or were forced to turn, to the local men of honour; after all, many men of respect could present themselves as victims of Fascist repression.
Don Calò owed his nomination as mayor to the good offices of the Catholic Church as well as the American army. In the chaos that followed the collapse of Fascism in Sicily, the Americans often looked to senior churchmen for advice on whom to trust. Don Calò was one of the people they recommended. He had a long record of involvement with a Catholic social fund and there were clergymen in his family: two of his brothers were priests; one of his uncles was an archpriest, and another was Bishop of Muro Lucano.
According to Don Calò’s own account of the day he took office as mayor of Villalba, he was carried shoulder high through the town. He claims to have acted as a peacemaker; only his intervention saved his Fascist predecessor from being lynched. What is known for certain is that the official appointment ceremony was attended by both an American lieutenant and a priest representing the bishopric of Caltanissetta. According to some sources, the old mafioso was embarrassed to hear his friends outside shouting, ‘Long live the mafia! Long live crime! Long live Don Calò!’ It is thought that his first act as the town’s foremost citizen was to expunge from the court archives in Caltanissetta, and from the police and carabinieri headquarters, records of previous charges against him (robbery, criminal association, cattle rustling, corruption, fraudulent bankruptcy, extortion, aggravated fraud, ordering murders). Don Calò had erased his past, but there was still much to do before his, and the mafia’s, future would be secure.
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On 17 August 1943, thirty-eight days after the first landings, General Sir Harold Alexander telegraphed Churchill to say that Sicily was entirely in Allied hands. (By then the invasion of Italian soil had already precipitated the fall of Fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, deposed and arrested on 25 July.) For the next six months the island would be under AMGOT—Allied Military Government of Occupied Territory. It was under AMGOT that the mafia made its first attempts to determine the political shape of Sicily as it emerged from the war.
AMGOT had its hands full. The island was in a dreadful state in the late summer of 1943. Even before Operation Husky, many of its 4 million inhabitants lived in penury. Now food supplies were low and the railway infrastructure had been shattered by bombing. The crime rate soared. A number of prisoners had escaped in the confusion of the invasion, and the black market, which was already widespread during the last years of Fascism, became the only means of survival for many. In October it was discovered that the reserve of ration books had been looted in Palermo; at least 25,000 illegitimate books were in circulation. The Allies ordered the compulsory purchase of all grain. Small farmers and great landowners alike preferred to avoid this obligation, so that black marketeers enjoyed considerable popular support. Just as it had done after the First World War, banditry returned once again to the Sicilian countryside.
Soon after American troops passed through, police began to pick up clear signs of mafia involvement in the crime wave. One report to police headquarters in Palermo listed a series of towns in which mafiosi had seized power:
In Villabate the mafia has taken control of the town hall; the mayor is the butcher Cottone—a man with a criminal record … It is rumoured that, after the American troops came, maffiosi in Marineo, Misilmeri, Cefala, Diana, Villafrate and Bolognetta ransacked the farm buildings on the Stallone estate … they got hold of the weapons and munitions left by the German troops that had camped there … Yesterday criminals attacked Gangi town hall. It is thought that there has been violence against Baron Sgadari, Baron Marciano and Baron Lidestri who cooperated with the discovery of a vast criminal association that operated in the Madonie back in 1927.
Mafiosi were evidently seeking revenge for the defeats inflicted by the ‘iron prefect’.
The Allied authorities could hardly be blamed for these episodes. But they were far from innocent in the mafia’s resurgence as a political force. Even before the invasion of Sicily, the British and Americans certainly knew about the mafia, and envisaged gleaning information from local men of honour for the purposes of governing the island after its liberation. A secret British War Office document from before the invasion listed prominent residents who might be useful. It demonstrates a relaxed attitude to relations with mafiosi. One Vito La Mantia is described as ‘the head of a mafia cosca … An antifascist who, if still alive, could provide important information. Not educated but influential.’
Over the six months of AMGOT rule, all party political activity in Sicily was prohibited. British and American officials found that creating a compliant interim government in the towns and villages was a messy task. Sicilian anti-Fascist groups were an unknown quantity and did not always offer an obvious new governing elite. The Allied view was that left-wing influence had to be avoided at all costs. As ever, the mafia and its politicians were ready to act as a reliable ‘instrument of local government’. So it was that during the AMGOT period there were regular contacts between the Office of Strategic Services (the OSS, forerunner of the CIA) and senior mafiosi. Joseph Russo, the Corleone-born head of the OSS’s Palermo desk, has recently said of the bosses: ‘I got to know them all. It did not take them long to re-cement their solidarity.’
Naivety also played its part in the mafia’s re-emergence as a political force under AMGOT. The British thought that their empire offered a formula for finding reliable natives. In Sicily, as in the pink-shaded portions of the globe, landowners and aristocrats would exercise authority on behalf of London (and Washington). But Sicily was not the Raj. At the end of September 1943, the Allies nominated Lucio Tasca Bordonaro mayor of Palermo. He was a landed gentleman of just the kind that the British thought they could trust. But he lived ‘in the odour of mafia’; Nick Gentile later claimed that Tasca Bordonaro was actually a member of the honoured society. Other similar men were appointed across Sicily. Like his peers, Tasca Bordonaro sensed that the end of the war would bring a new struggle to control the land. His response was to lead the first political organization to become active in occupied Sicily: the Sicilian separatist movement. The separatists wanted Sicily to become a free country under the wing of the American eagle. That way, men like Tasca Bordonaro hoped, the authority of the old elite could be preserved and the dreaded leftists kept at bay. The separatist landowners had a natural ally in their cause: the mafiosi who guarded and managed their estates and found political protection in return.
In January 1944, political freedoms were restored in preparation for Sicily’s return to Italian rule, and the island sprang into tumultuous political life. It was then that one of the separatist movement’s leaders gave a revealing speech in the mafia stronghold of Bagheria. Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile was a frenzied, thin-lipped orator who had the habit of talking about ‘Winnie’ Churchill and ‘Delano’ Roosevelt as if he chatted with them on the telephone every day. In Bagheria he made it clear who else he included in his circle of close acquaintances: ‘If the mafia did not exist, it would need to be invented. I’m a friend of the mafiosi, even though I am personally against crime and violence.’ (Mafia defector Tommaso Buscetta would later claim that Finocchiaro Aprile was a member of his own mafia Family.)
In February 1944, AMGOT control ended and Sicily came under the authority of a new government, based on the liberated southern portion of the Italian mainland. By then both mafiosi and the separatists had managed to create the widespread impression that they were Uncle Sam’s favourite Mediterranean nephews. It looked to many as if Sicily’s future would be as an autonomous American protectorate and mafia fiefdom.
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With the mafia’s political wing lined up overwhelmingly behind the separatist cause, its military wing was called on to oppose a new threat from the Left. In the autumn of 1944, the Communist Minister of Agriculture in the new Italian coalition government piloted some radical reforms that were to open a new and bloody chapter in the story of the mafia’s renaissance. The reforms aimed at nothing less than a final resolution of the land question that had caused turmoil in the southern countryside for more than a century. The measures showed the influence of Bernardino Verro and the Fasci: peasants were to get a better share of the produce of land they worked and rented, and they were given permission to form cooperatives and take over badly cultivated land. The Minister of Agriculture even tried to ban middlemen from operating between the landowners and the peasants—a direct attack on the gabelloti.
The weak Italian state was in no position to enforce these new rules quickly, but the peasants took them as a signal that those in power were finally ready to back their yearning for land and justice. The landowners sensed that their fears of the red peril were soon to be realized. So, just as they had done after the First World War, the men of property turned to mafiosi to confront the peasants with force.
Once again it was a famous episode in Don Calò’s Villalba—a true one this time—that inaugurated this new phase in the mafia’s resurgence. Like many other mafiosi, Don Calogero Vizzini’s prime concern in 1944 was land—in his case the Miccichè estate round Villalba. To gain control of it, he had to see off a particularly bothersome enemy: Michele Pantaleone—the man who would later set down the story of the American fighter plane and the yellow handkerchief. Pantaleone was from a local family of professionals whose republican traditions placed them in the opposing faction to the Catholic Vizzinis. Don Calò had tried hard to persuade Michele Pantaleone to marry his niece Raimonda, but this small-town dynastic romance failed to blossom. (Pantaleone knew what dangerous obligations such a union with the Vizzinis would bring.) For Don Calò this failure of marriage diplomacy was bad enough. Worse still was the fact that Pantaleone became a Socialist. The young rebel drew attention to the Miccichè land issue in the burgeoning leftist press and was trying to use his leverage with the left-wing parties in Villalba. In return Don Calò arranged for crops on the Pantaleone family’s land to be vandalized, and there was even a failed attempt on Pantaleone’s life.
The attempt may just have been a warning, because the capomafioso was also mobilizing his contacts. Ever the peacemaker, he had offered a deal to the Communist Party in the provincial capital, Caltanissetta: he would help them set up a branch in Villalba—as long as one of his own estate wardens was installed as secretary. The Communists wisely turned down the offer.
With the equanimity that befitted his calling, Don Calò also continued to draw on his long-established links with conservative landowners. Lucio Tasca Bordonaro, the separatist leader appointed as mayor of Palermo under AMGOT, was a close ally (they both owned land nearby). On 2 September 1944, on Don Calò’s invitation, Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile—‘friend’ of Winnie, Delano, and the mafia—gave a typically incendiary speech in Villalba, promising riches for all if Sicily became independent.
The temperature in the town was rising. Michele Pantaleone increased it further by inviting regional Communist leader Girolamo Li Causi to speak. The Partito Comunista in Caltanissetta, perhaps worried that Pantaleone was leading their man into trouble, contacted Vizzini. The old boss gave them reassurances; he was offering them his personal hospitality, after all. There would be no trouble as long as they did not touch on local issues. On 16 September 1944, a truck carrying Li Causi and his comrades arrived in Villalba.
Don Calò began by politely addressing the new arrivals: ‘May I have the honour of offering you coffee?’ Sensing the menace in the welcome, the left-wing militants followed the old man as he shuffled across the square towards a bar. As they walked, they noticed that thick black crosses had been painted across the posters advertising their public meeting. Don Calò tried to reason with the visitors while they drank his coffee and smoked his cigarettes. Villalba was like a monastery, he said; it would not do to disturb its tranquillity. But if they insisted on speaking, then they should be polite. When Don Calò finished his little speech, the activists turned back towards the piazza, prepared for confrontation.
Apart from some local Communists and Socialists, most of the inhabitants of Villalba had thought it wiser to listen to the speeches from behind closed shutters. When the militants emerged from the bar, a pack of Don Calò’s men stood staring, with arms folded and smirks on their faces. Among them was Don Calò’s nephew; he had recently taken over as mayor from his uncle. Don Calò himself emerged from the bar to join the group.
Pantaleone got up on a table and introduced the main speaker. Communist leader Girolamo Li Causi was not a man to be intimidated. Only a few weeks earlier, he had returned to his native island for the first time in twenty years, most of them spent as a political prisoner under Mussolini and as a leader of the resistance against the Nazis in Milan. He was a calm and charismatic orator; mixing dialect into his Italian, he spoke of the abuse of workers and peasants by industrialists and landlords. The militants who were there with him later reported hearing assenting voices from behind the shutters: ‘He’s right! What he says is Gospel.’
Don Calò became agitated. Undeterred, Li Causi began to talk about the way the peasants in Villalba were being deceived by ‘a powerful leaseholder’—a scarcely disguised reference to Don Calò. ‘It’s a lie,’ bellowed the capomafioso. People immediately started to leave the piazza. An old man told Don Calò to let the speaker be heard; after all, this was a time of political freedom, he said. He was cudgelled to the ground as the first shots were fired. Pandemonium ensued.
Astonishingly, with bullets fizzing past him, Li Causi stayed on the platform and tried to calm the situation, offering to engage in an open debate with anyone who disagreed. Don Calò’s nephew lobbed a grenade. When it exploded, Li Causi fell, wounded in the leg. Pantaleone took charge, dragging the Communist chief to safety and firing his pistol in the air to cover his withdrawal. More than a dozen bullet holes were found in the wall behind the spot where Li Causi made his speech. Fourteen people were wounded.
Don Calò ordered his men to calm down, and offered to help repair the leftists’ truck, which had been damaged by a grenade. A few days later, he sent an emissary to offer apologies to Li Causi as he lay in hospital. These were empty gestures; the gunfight in Villalba had already served its intimidatory purpose. Six months later Don Calò’s local power base was secured when he became manager of the Miccichè estate.
The Villalba incident created headlines across liberated Italy. More than his other misdeeds it made Don Calogero Vizzini famous. He would not have been particularly concerned. Indeed, the way he avoided paying the judicial consequences of his actions only bolstered his reputation. By pulling strings, he engineered long periods of conditional freedom while the case ground slowly on. It was not until November 1949 that Don Calò, along with his nephew, was found guilty of wounding Li Causi and was sentenced to five years in prison. He simply went on the run until granted more conditional freedom during an appeal. In 1954 the sentence was confirmed, but he was given an amnesty. The judge admitted that ‘he was indicated as being the head of the mafia’, but decided to absolve him of any punishment on the grounds of his age and his lack of previous convictions.
The events in Villalba inaugurated a long season of mafia attacks on political activists, trade unionists, and ordinary peasants that lasted into the early 1950s. Dozens were not as lucky as Li Causi and Pantaleone. Each killing was followed by the familiar judicial outcome: the suspected murderers being released for lack of evidence. In some towns and villages, the peasant movement was simply terrorized into submission.
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The great question about Don Calogero Vizzini is whether he was as dominant within the mafia as he was famous outside it. Could the lentil-capital of Villalba really be the headquarters of the honoured society as well?
American secret agents certainly seem to have treated Don Calò as the mafia’s overall ruler. When the American consulate in Palermo was set up in February 1944, it relied on the OSS for its intelligence. The OSS in turn relied partly on the mafia, and particularly on Don Calò. At one period, the chief of the OSS Palermo office, Joseph Russo, met him and other bosses ‘at least once a month’. Vizzini was known by the codename of ‘Bull Frog’ in secret communications. Russo says the mafiosi came for ‘moral support’ and truck tyres, which they needed to do ‘their good work, their beneficence. Whatever that was.’
Even if these exchanges were as trivial as Russo believes, and even if Don Calò was bluffing the OSS about his power on the island, we should not assume that events in little Villalba were a sideshow. Way back in 1922, the semi-literate Don Calò, who had extensive sulphur mining interests, went to London for high-level talks on setting up an Anglo-Italian sulphur cartel to respond to American competition. The small Sicilian delegation included a future magnate of the Italian chemical industry.
Don Calò’s Church and political contacts also gave him a formidable power base. In the few years following Operation Husky, one Angelo Cammarata occupied the jobs of prefect of Caltanissetta, administrator of property belonging to the diocese of Caltanissetta, superintendent of provisions in Sicily, and commissioner for agrarian reform. He was close to both the bishop and Don Calò.
Economic changes beyond the mafia’s control also played in Don Calò’s favour. War and Fascism had made cattle and grain more important to the Sicilian economy during the first half of the twentieth century. The inland province of Caltanissetta produced the most corn of any western Sicilian province in the harsh year of 1944. The cash-crop lemon business—so fundamental to the cosche of Palermo—had been paralysed by an export crisis. Don Calò’s status within the mafia probably reflects a temporary shift in the balance of power within the criminal economy: from the capital and its environs to the countryside.
Not that Don Calò was always stuck out in the hills. He kept a base in the Hotel Sole in Palermo’s Corso Vittorio Emanuele where, to the end of his life, he could be seen being watched over by two young corduroy-clad minders.
But it was Don Calò’s political influence that was his most significant contribution to the mafia’s resurgence; he was intimately involved with the creation of a mafia-friendly settlement in post-war Sicily. That settlement would see the fading of separatism and the emergence of a new pan-Italian party prepared to use the mafia in the traditional way: as an instrument of local government.
In September 1945—a year after the gun battle in Villalba—Don Calò was the only mafioso present at a secret meeting of separatist leaders at which it was decided to mount an armed insurrection. It was a move born of desperation. The separatists’ American support had evaporated after the end of AMGOT. Now they had a strong new national party to compete with: Christian Democracy (Democrazia Cristiana, or the DC). By successfully proposing a regional assembly for Sicily rather than full independence, the DC had taken much of the steam out of separatism. Don Calò was at the meeting because through him the separatists could arrange the help of the large bandit gangs that still roamed the countryside. But the insurrectionary forces were easily defeated.
In the wake of the separatist debacle, Don Calò became increasingly convinced that the DC—and not the separatists—represented the best vehicle for his interests. It would be a gradual but decisive shift in his, and the mafia’s, allegiances. Some DC politicians were destined to become Sicilian organized crime’s favourite mediators with Rome for over four decades.
The DC was far from being a mafia front. At the birth of the Italian republic it stood for family values, private property, and social peace; and in Sicily it appealed particularly to peasants with small plots of land who were afraid of Communism. The DC also had the huge advantage of Vatican support. Once the Cold War began in 1947, the DC could also count on American backing against the Partito Comunista Italiano—the most powerful Communist Party in Western Europe. In the same year the DC leader excluded the leftist parties from the Italian national coalition government. In the spring of 1948, Italy held its first parliamentary election since Mussolini established his regime. The result was a DC triumph. Christian Democracy would hold power in Italy for the next forty-five years without interruption.
It was the traditional arts of favour-based politics that were at the heart of the DC’s appeal to the mafia. The Sicilian DC came to comprise a myriad of local factions based on patronage. The faction leaders could offer exactly the kind of personal relationships that mafiosi preferred. The exchanges between politicians and criminals that had become so difficult under Fascism could at last be restored: one hand washes the other, as the Sicilian saying goes.
The alliance between men of honour and DC politicians was hardly a secret. In the lead-up to the momentous polling day of 1948, Don Calò and his compare, the boss of Mussomeli, Giuseppe Genco Russo, attended a sumptuous DC electoral lunch in Villa Igea, a Palermo hotel that had been one of the Florio family’s old palaces. The two mafiosi sat at the same table as some of the party’s leading lights. In 1950, when Genco Russo’s oldest son married, Don Calò was a witness at the ceremony, as was the DC president of the Sicilian regional assembly. Encounters like these were not shamefaced and secret. When politicians and bosses met in this period, they often intended to be seen together because their encounters advertised the solidity of the alliance between the informal power of the mafia and the official power of the new political grandees.
It was the DC that finally, in 1950, brought the land issue in Sicily to a conclusion. The way they did it was typical of their methods. The redistribution of the remaining estates was entrusted to a quango that became a patronage engine for local DC politicians. Corruption was endemic; one third of its budget went on administrative costs. In the meantime many landowners gave in to the inevitable and began disposing of their land. They often sold it to mafiosi, including Don Calò, who then made a huge profit reselling plots to individual peasants.
In 1950, the government also announced a massive programme of investment for the backward economy of southern Italy. It was to be a major turning point in the history of the mafia. From now on, if the organization wanted access to Sicily’s major sources of wealth, it would have to turn to professional politicians and not landowners. The restoration of Italy’s democratic system—and of the mafia’s role as the island’s informal state—was nearing completion.
* * *
Still, despite all this evidence, the exact extent of Don Calò’s power within the honoured society is not known. Some later mafia turncoats denied that he was ever boss of the whole of Sicily. Indeed, it is said that Don Calò and his successor, Giuseppe Genco Russo, irritated other mafia leaders because of their high media profile. ‘Did you see Gina Lollobrigida in the newspaper today?’ one mafioso used to say, referring to the notoriously coarse and ugly Genco Russo.
We do not know how centralized the mafia was after liberation. A conservative guess is that during the pangs of its rebirth after Fascism, the mafia bosses first reestablished communications between themselves. They then sought information direct from the places where political decisions were taken, and a leader or leaders with diplomatic skill to balance their own competing interests. Don Calò was in a very good position to fulfil that transitional role.
He would never have admitted as much, of course. In a newspaper interview given just before his death, the wily old capo put about a modest account of his job. ‘The fact is that every society needs a category of person whose task it is to sort out situations when they get complicated. Generally these people are representatives of the state. But in places where the state doesn’t exist, or is not strong enough, there are private individuals who…’
Intrigued, the interviewer let slip the word ‘mafia’.
‘The mafia!’ Don Calò murmured with a smile. ‘Does the mafia really exist?’
Don Calò died peacefully in the arms of his nephew on 10 July 1954. The press recorded his last words as being, ‘How beautiful life is.’ He is said to have left a fortune of 1 billion lire, although there is no way of confirming this report; the true extent of mafia wealth for most of its history is destined to remain mysterious. At Don Calò’s lavish funeral, a slew of political and criminal dignitaries followed a hearse drawn by four black-plumed horses. Villalba town hall and the DC headquarters were closed for a week; an elegy was pinned to the church door:
Humble with the humble,
Great with the great,
He showed with words and deeds
That his mafia was not criminal.
It stood for respect for the law,
Defence of all rights,
Greatness of character:
It was love.
During Don Calò’s life, the peasants of Villalba had often cited a more down-to-earth couplet about him: ‘Cu avi dinari e amicizia, teni ‘nculu la giustizia’—‘He who has friends and cash, can take justice up the ass.’
The long-term future of the mafia lay not in little Villalba, but in the traditional mafia strongholds around Palermo. The mafia’s recovery from the battering it was given by ‘iron prefect’ Cesare Mori was due in large part to the fact that its methods worked at the grass roots in these areas. And those methods worked in good measure because, in an unstable society, they enabled men of honour to bring wealth and status to their families.
The years 1946–7 saw a particularly savage mafia war in the citrus fruit village of Ciaculli, set on the sea-facing slope of a high ridge just to Palermo’s east. As a later parliamentary inquiry into the mafia discovered, the war set two related blood families against each other. From their struggle would emerge some of the most powerful mafiosi of the coming decades. At first glance the Ciaculli war of 1946–7 seems to come right out of Sicilian folklore. It is what outsiders often expect the mafia to be about: debts of honour that lock families into spiralling pagan feuds. It sounds like a case of ‘blood washes blood’, to quote an overused Sicilian saying. But some of the facts shed a different light on the story, and on what ‘family’ means to the mafia.
One surname had commanded unconditional respect in the Ciaculli area for generations: Greco. In 1946, men bearing that name ruled both Ciaculli and a neighbouring village, Croce Verde Giardini. The two Greco clans probably had a common ancestor in Salvatore Greco, named in the Sangiorgi report as capomafia in Ciaculli at the turn of the century. As if to show the close ties that bound them, both branches of the family chose their children’s first names from the same narrow range of options; between them there numbered three Francescos, three Rosas, three Girolamas, four Salvatores and four Giuseppes. Nicknames were essential. The good relations between the two families had been cemented when the Ciaculli boss had married the Giardini boss’s sister.
The war that set the Giardini and Ciaculli Grecos against each other began in earnest on 26 August 1946. The victims were the two patriarchs of the Ciaculli branch of the family, two brothers aged fifty-nine and seventy-seven. The ferocity of the attack on the two old mafiosi—machine-guns and grenades were used—left no doubt as to its importance.
Yet again, no one was ever convicted of the double murder. But in Ciaculli everyone suspected that the boss of Giardini, another Greco, had masterminded the assault; he was known because of his war record as ‘Piddu the lieutenant’. The Ciaculli Grecos acted on their suspicions a few months later. Two of Piddu the lieutenant’s men fell victim to the short-barrelled Sicilian shotgun they call a lupara. In revenge for this act of revenge, the Giardini cosca kidnapped two of their enemies. Only their clothes were ever found. (Sicilians refer to such disappearances as lupara bianca—‘white shotgun’—killings.)
The struggle between the two Greco clans came to a climax with a full-scale gunfight in the piazza in Ciaculli on 17 September 1947. First an important member of the Giardini cosca was cut down by a blast of machine-gun fire. Watching from a balcony were two Greco women: Antonina (fifty-one) and Rosalia (nineteen), the widow and daughter of one of the Ciaculli bosses killed the previous year. When they noticed that the man below them had not died of his wounds, they went down into the street and finished him off with kitchen knives. (It is exceptionally rare for women to take part in the military aspects of mafia activity in this way.) Antonina and Rosalia were fired on in their turn by the brother and sister of their victim; Antonina was wounded and her daughter killed. Their attacker was then himself shot and killed by Antonina’s eighteen-year-old son.
Palermo bosses began to put pressure on Piddu the lieutenant to bring an end to the carnage. Clamorous incidents like the battle in Ciaculli drew unwanted public attention towards the whole mafia system. What is more, with the deaths of the two old Greco brothers from Ciaculli, Piddu the lieutenant was expected to take on responsibility for the welfare of both branches of the feuding family. His status among bosses would depend in part on how he faced up to that responsibility.
Piddu sought the help of the boss of nearby Villabate, a capo who was feared and particularly respected because of his family ties to some important US mafiosi. This was a period when the comparatively extravagant wealth of many US men of honour gave them great prestige back in Sicily. One sign of this influence was that at around this time the term ‘Family’ was imported from America as a name for mafia organizations (cosche) whose members are by no means all related to each other. Joe Profaci, born in Villalba, was a Brooklyn waterfront gangster, later named by Joe ‘Bananas’ Bonanno as being the head of one of the five New York Families. At the time of the Greco war Profaci was resident in Sicily and it seems that he played a key role in bringing peace to Ciaculli.
Piddu the lieutenant followed the advice he was offered by Profaci. Two of his orphaned nephews were given posts on the fruit farm he managed; it produced the tangerines for which Ciaculli is famous. The Greco cousins who had been at war were soon co-owners of a citrus fruit export business, and also partners in a bus company. Peace brought prestige to Piddu the lieutenant. His relationship with the Villabate mafia was formalized when his son married the Villabate boss’s daughter.
The police had little idea what had caused all the bloodletting between the Grecos. Since the initial double murder, a wall of omertà had blocked their investigations. Police contacts in Ciaculli said that the mayhem was triggered by a desire for vendetta following a dispute seven years earlier between cousins at the Festival of the Crucifix. The festival took place every year in Ciaculli on 1 October. On that day in 1939, six young men from Giardini came to Ciaculli to watch the crucifix being exposed to the adoration of the faithful. Two of them were the sons of Piddu the lieutenant. Following the example of the locals, they went into the church and brought out a pew to sit on. An argument over the pew developed with boys from Ciaculli of a similar age, among them a cousin of the two Giardini Greco boys. On the way home later that evening, the Giardini party suddenly found themselves faced by a group of Ciaculli Grecos armed with revolvers and knives. Piddu the lieutenant’s son Giuseppe, seventeen years old, was shot dead. His Ciaculli cousin was wounded; four years later he died in prison of natural causes while awaiting trial.
So a family feud, according to the rumours in Ciaculli, was the origin of the war that would explode in 1946. But historians are now rather sceptical about this theory. What actually happened is not in question. The issue is whether this adolescent spat would really have been allowed to become the catalyst for a hecatomb that put at risk mafia interests in the whole area east of Palermo. It is also striking that six of the victims in the war did not bear the Greco name. At stake was the control of the fruit business at a time when the mafia was emerging from under the thumb of Mussolini. In other words, this was probably a war between cosche—or factions within a cosca—which was motivated by power and money, and not between blood families motivated by honour and vengeance.
The implication is that Piddu the lieutenant stored up his son’s death in 1939 and used it after the event to justify his calculated bid to control the whole Ciaculli–Giardini area in 1946–7. Once he had killed the Ciaculli bosses, he then set the mafia rumour machine to work to retell the story of the war as if it all began with the teenage cousins fighting over a church pew, as if it was all a matter of blood. When a boss is seen to look after his kin, his mafia honour and his status in the community are bolstered; he becomes known as someone whose friendship is worth cultivating. By making out that he was aggressively defending his own family, Piddu the lieutenant was simultaneously boosting his business reputation.
In other words, the likelihood is that a version of the ‘rustic chivalry’ myth was once more being used as a tool of mafia interests. There is a precedent for this kind of deception in Ciaculli itself. Back in 1916, the village priest was shot dead. The Grecos, as leading members of Ciaculli’s religious confraternity, arranged the funeral and took a prominent role in it. At the same time they put about the rumour that the priest was a philanderer who had been killed by a husband he had cuckolded—a ‘typically Sicilian’ crime of passion and family honour, it would seem. In reality the priest, an honest and courageous man, had been trying to bring to light the Grecos’ crooked management of Church property and charity funds.
Because of this manipulation of the truth, when the Giardini Grecos emerged victorious from the war of 1946–7, they would have been able to look back on their role in it with greater tranquillity. Piddu the lieutenant could tell himself that he had reconciled his duties as a father with his duties as a capo. He is just one example of the care that mafiosi devote to managing the delicate entanglement of business and family. Much of that care is made manifest in rules. Regulations about the place of family members within the mafia organization are constantly made, bent, broken, and made again: no more than two sons of the same father may be allowed membership of any given Family; sons whose mafiosi fathers have been killed in a power struggle are barred from becoming members for fear that they will seek revenge.
By playing the rules carefully, men of honour can turn their blood families into mafia dynasties. The Grecos are the leading case in point. One of Piddu the lieutenant’s sons, Michele, was in his early twenties at the time of the war of 1946–7. Thirty years later, Michele Greco became boss of bosses. He was the very archetype of a mafia capo: unsmiling, taciturn, given to speaking only in maxims and allusive parables. VIPs, ranging from bankers to aristocrats, were invited to hunt and dine at his estate. There was also a heroin refinery in the grounds and, on one notable occasion during the mafia war in 1982, tens of mafiosi—virtually the entire Partanna Mondello Family of Cosa Nostra—were murdered there following a barbecue. Michele Greco dressed expensively and conservatively, deporting himself with an almost ecclesiastical dignity; his nickname was ‘the Pope’. His manner was not due to reticence or affectation; it was part of a professional skill-set that had been handed down by his forebears through the best part of a century.
The Greco war of 1946–7 pacified Ciaculli. But calm would not return to the rest of the island until Salvatore Giuliano, the last bandit, was shot down.
From its beginnings in the 1860s and 1870s, the mafia always had an intimate and duplicitous relationship with bandits; the honoured society used and protected bandits when it needed to, and then betrayed them to the police the moment they became an inconvenience. The pattern was repeated for the last time in the 1940s with Salvatore Giuliano, the most famous and murderous bandit of them all. But the Giuliano story is more than the grisly coda to the history of Sicilian brigandage. It set the seal on the mafia’s re-emergence from under the Fascist iron fist, and it may also have marked the beginning of the democratic Italian state’s collusion with terrorist acts against its own people.
At the peak of his notoriety, Salvatore Giuliano made himself as accessible for photojournalists as he was elusive for the authorities. Consequently his features are still instantly recognizable in Italy. In one of the most familiar photographs he looks straight into the camera, his thumbs hooked inside the belt from which his holster hangs, his jacket pushed behind his hips to reveal a loose shirt unbuttoned at the neck. Giuliano had what is called an open countenance. By a recent calculation forty-one biographies of him have been written since his death—more than of any other person in post-war Italian history. Each book has promised finally to reveal the secrets hidden behind that broad, handsome face.
Despite all these books, it took cinema properly to grasp the fundamental truth that, in the Giuliano story, seeing and understanding are not the same thing. Francesco Rosi’s masterpiece Salvatore Giuliano was made in 1961—a decade after the bandit’s death. It was shot on the mountains around Montelepre that were Giuliano’s stronghold; the extras were peasants from the same area; a woman who had recently lost her son played Giuliano’s mother in the scene where she identifies his body; Rosi even used the real bandit’s rifle. All this care to ensure the film’s authenticity makes it even more striking that the protagonist himself is only ever shown from behind or from an oblique angle; his famous face is hidden behind binoculars or masked by his mother’s shawl. He appears most frequently in the distance, dressed in a white overcoat, as if he were a blank in the centre of the picture, an empty screen on to which the other characters each project their own version of the story. The truth about Giuliano lies not in the figure of the bandit himself, Rosi is suggesting, but somewhere in a tangle of relationships between the bandits, the peasants, the police, the army, the politicians, and the media. At the centre of that tangle was the mafia.
* * *
Salvatore Giuliano was the youngest of four children from a peasant family in Montelepre in the mountains some fifteen kilometres west of Palermo. As a boy he worshipped all things American; this love of America was also one of the few constant features of his romantic and muddled political beliefs.
Giuliano’s career in banditry began in the autumn following the Allied invasion. He was twenty-one years old and working as an errand boy for an electricity company when the carabinieri caught him with a sack of black-market grain. He shot his way out of trouble and took to the hills, leaving a carabiniere dead on the ground behind him.
He machine-gunned the second of his many victims among the forces of order three months later. A dozen members of his family were arrested on suspicion of sheltering him. Early in 1944, with his help, they staged a breakout from Monreale jail that gave a huge boost to his prestige as well as providing the nucleus of his gang.
For the next year Giuliano ran his band in the classic fashion; most of its members came together for black-market operations, robberies, or kidnappings, and then melted back into the community when the job was done. Their leader had a rough-edged charm and a gift for publicity; he made a point of cultivating a ‘Robin Hood’ fable around himself. But intimidation and bribery were more effective than corny myths in ensuring the silence and collaboration of those around him. His pitiless execution of anyone suspected of betrayal gives the lie to the ‘robber prince’ image; the number of his victims has been estimated at a staggering 430.
Giuliano’s relationship with the mafia also fits a classic pattern; he would not have been able to survive these early years and build his band into the most successful in Sicily without protection from men of honour. When he kidnapped someone, the captive’s relatives knew that they had to turn to the local boss who would ensure a safe return in exchange for a portion of the ransom. In other words, the mafia ‘taxed’ both the bandit leader and the people he persecuted.
It was later revealed by one of Giuliano’s closest collaborators that he had been through a mafia initiation ritual. Mafia supergrass Tommaso Buscetta said that he was presented to Giuliano as ‘the same thing’. If true, this does not necessarily mean that the bandit was an integral part of the association; initiating him was more likely to have been a way of reinforcing his loyalty and keeping watch on his activities.
What distinguishes the last bandit from his predecessors is the fact that he became involved in political ideology. The separatists were the first to try to recruit him to their cause. In the spring of 1945, Giuliano met with separatist leaders including the son of Tasca Bordonaro, the former mayor of Palermo under AMGOT. The bandit demanded 10 million lire in return for joining the proposed separatist army. He was beaten down to 1 million, plus the rank of colonel, and the promise of arms and uniforms. Like some other bandit leaders, Giuliano did his part in the failed separatist uprising by attacking five carabinieri barracks. Nor did the workaday criminal activity cease; the band also held up the Palermo–Trapani train. Despite Giuliano’s efforts, elsewhere the main thrust of the separatist revolt was crushed.
The decline of separatism looked as if it might leave Giuliano politically marooned. Things seemed bleak for him in 1946 because the state was finally organizing an effective military response to the bands, while at the same time the mafia was beginning to abandon the outlaws it had protected. One after another, bandits were either killed or captured. It was often contacts between the police and mafiosi that led to the arrests. As so often in the past, an expedient line was being drawn between bandits who could be sacrificed and mafiosi who kept close to political power. The police found some of the bandit leaders dead—dispatched by hands unknown. In the communities of western Sicily, the mafia, once again, was posing as a force for ‘order’.
Giuliano responded publicly to the crisis with his habitual panache, by announcing that he had put a price on the Minister of the Interior’s head. Yet he would also have to win new political friends if he were to achieve his aim of being pardoned when Sicily reached a definitive political settlement. He decided to offer his guns in the struggle against Communism. Through an American journalist, he sent a letter to President Truman in which he complained of the ‘intolerable baying of the Communist hounds’ and announced his commitment to fighting the red menace. The results of the elections in April 1947 for the new Sicilian regional assembly came as a shock to Giuliano, as they did to many others. The leftist parties, united in a People’s Bloc, made huge gains; they took nearly 30 per cent of the vote and became the biggest single grouping. It was the cue for the so-called ‘King of Montelepre’ to commit his most infamous crime.
Salvatore Giuliano’s name will be associated for ever in Italian memories with a place—Portella della Ginestra. Today, nowhere in Sicily seems more bleak and haunted by violence than this piece of open ground at one end of a valley between Piana degli Albanesi and San Giuseppe Jato. It was here that peasants came together to celebrate May Day in 1947. Families assembled in their best clothes for a picnic, a song, and a dance; their donkeys and painted carts were decorated with banners and ribbons. It was to be a celebration of the freedoms that had returned after the fall of Fascism.
At 10.15 A.M. the secretary of the People’s Bloc from Piana degli Albanesi stood up amid the red flags to open proceedings. He was interrupted by loud bangs. At first many people thought they were fireworks, part of the celebration. Then the bullets fired by Giuliano’s men began to find their mark. Ten minutes of machinegun fire from the surrounding slopes left eleven dead, among them Serafino Lascari, aged fifteen; Giovanni Grifò, aged twelve; and Giuseppe Di Maggio and Vincenzo La Fata, both seven years old. Thirty-three people were wounded, including a little girl of thirteen who had her jaw shot off.
The impact of the massacre on the local communities was profound and lasting. When Francesco Rosi came to film the Portella della Ginestra sequence for Salvatore Giuliano, he asked 1,000 peasants to go back and enact exactly what they, their friends and relatives had been through fourteen years earlier. Events nearly slipped out of the director’s control. When the gunfire sound effects started, the crowd panicked and knocked over one of the cameras in the rush to escape; women wept and knelt in prayer; men threw themselves to the ground in agony. One old woman, dressed entirely in black, planted herself before the camera and repeated in an anguished wail, ‘Where are my children?’ Two of her sons had died at the hands of Giuliano and his band.
* * *
Despite public outrage at the horrors of Portella della Ginestra, the ‘King of Montelepre’ remained at large for a further three years. Following the massacre, the molten lava of social conflict in post-war Sicily slowly hardened into a new political landscape dominated by the Christian Democrats. It was these political changes, rather than the fury and sorrow aroused by Giuliano’s actions, that began to make him look like a wild anachronism. The electoral victories secured by the DC slowly removed the need for his clamorous brand of anti-Communist terror.
Giuliano continued his attacks on peasant activists and institutions, but the members of his band gradually fell into the hands of the authorities—often with the help of information from the mafia. At the same time, Giuliano’s actions became more difficult to read. In the summer of 1948, he killed five mafiosi including the boss of Partinico. It is not known exactly why. Not surprisingly, many people identify this as the moment when Giuliano’s fate was sealed. Nevertheless a year later he was still powerful enough to murder six more carabinieri in an ambush at Bellolampo just outside Palermo.
All this time investigations into the Portella della Ginestra massacre plodded on amid growing speculation that someone—possibly the Minister of the Interior—might have ordered Giuliano to carry it out. The bandit himself wrote a public letter, taking sole responsibility for the murders and denying that there was anyone behind him. He claimed that he had only intended his men to fire above the heads of the crowd; the deaths had been a mistake. He cited the fact that children had died as evidence that it was an accident: ‘Do you think I have a stone in place of a heart?’ The 800 spent rounds of ammunition found at the scene are enough in themselves to make this denial ring dreadfully hollow.
Speaking at Portella della Ginestra on the second anniversary of the massacre, Sicilian Communist leader Girolamo Li Causi, who had become a Senator since surviving Don Calò’s grenade attack in Villalba, publicly called on Giuliano to name names. The appeal led to an extraordinary public exchange. Li Causi received a written reply from the bandit leader: ‘It is only men with no shame who give out names. Not a man who tends to take justice into his own hands; who aims to keep his reputation in society high, and who values this aim more than his own life.’
Li Causi responded by reminding Giuliano that he would almost certainly be betrayed: ‘Don’t you understand that Scelba [the Minister of the Interior, a Sicilian] will have you killed?’
Giuliano again replied, hinting at the powerful secrets that he possessed: ‘I know that Scelba wants to have me killed; he wants to have me killed because I keep a nightmare hanging over him. I can make sure he is brought to account for actions that, if revealed, would destroy his political career and end his life.’ No one was sure how much of this to believe.
In the summer of 1950, Giuliano’s captured associates were finally arraigned in Viterbo near Rome for the trial that was supposed to answer all the questions. But no sooner had the hearing got under way than the mysteries deepened when Giuliano’s body was found in the courtyard of a house in Castelvetrano—outside his mountain realm.
The film Salvatore Giuliano opens with images—meticulously based on reality—of the bandit’s dead body lying face down in the small courtyard in Castelvetrano. He is dressed in socks, sandals, and a blood-soaked vest; there is also a small stream of blood dried into the beaten earth beneath him. His right hand, on which a diamond ring is visible, is stretched out towards a Beretta sub-machine-gun. In fact the sequence is shot through with irony; as Rosi knew very well, the ‘real’ scene of Giuliano’s death was as much a fake as this cinematic version. When the press came to photograph the bandit’s body, the carabinieri claimed that they had killed him in a furious gunfight. But a courageous investigative reporter soon exposed the official account as a fiction; the headline read: ‘The only thing certain is that he is dead.’ Once the official version of his death had been discredited, a more likely account emerged: Giuliano was shot in his bed, probably by his cousin and lieutenant Gaspare Pisciotta—an agent of the carabinieri; the carabinieri themselves moved his body into the courtyard to be photographed as the basis for a cover-up. Quite what they were covering up was to remain obscure. But the fact remains that Giuliano was killed when he very probably could have been captured, and there were certainly politicians, policemen, carabinieri, and mafiosi for whom he was less dangerous dead.
In the Viterbo courtroom, the members of Giuliano’s band fed the frenzy of public suspicion. The Minister of the Interior, Mario Scelba, was again said to have been involved in the plot to carry out the Portella della Ginestra slaughter. The accusations were often contradictory or vague—passing the responsibility upwards to politicians and policemen evidently served the bandits’ interests—but it was nonetheless an alarming and disconcerting spectacle. In the end the judge concluded that no higher authority had ordered the massacre, and that the Giuliano band had acted autonomously. Their aim had been to punish local leftists for the recent election results.
The verdict left few people satisfied simply because there were too many pieces of the puzzle that did not fit. Although it would be futile now to try to solve the mysteries surrounding Portella della Ginestra and Salvatore Giuliano, it is certainly worth listing some of the evidence. Ever since Giuliano’s death, ‘behindologists’ have been trying to assemble a coherent picture out of these and other facts:
• Several witnesses recalled that Giuliano received a letter just before he carried out the Portella della Ginestra atrocity. When he read it, he destroyed it carefully and told the members of his band, ‘Boys, the hour of our liberation is at hand’; he then announced the plan to attack the peasant celebration. No one has ever discovered who sent the letter.
• After the massacre at Portella della Ginestra, the Chief of Police in Sicily met senior Monreale mafiosi at his house in Rome. There they handed him a written testimony by Giuliano which he in turn seems to have sent to the home address of the chief prosecutor at the Palermo Court of Appeal, a man who may also have had contacts with Giuliano. The testimony has never been found.
• The same Chief of Police had a regular correspondence with Giuliano through the same mafia channels. On at least one occasion he actually met the bandit leader—they shared panettone and two different kinds of liqueur.
The one man able and possibly willing to reveal the truth about Portella della Ginestra was Gaspare Pisciotta, Giuliano’s dapper cousin who betrayed and probably killed him on behalf of the carabinieri. While he was with the band he had a pass, signed by a colonel in the carabinieri, that allowed him to move about the island freely. He had even visited a doctor under the supervision of another officer—he suffered from tuberculosis. During the Viterbo trial, Pisciotta had proclaimed, ‘We are one body: bandits, police and mafia—like the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit.’
At the conclusion of the Viterbo trial, Pisciotta was given a life sentence for his part in the events at Portella della Ginestra. While he was in prison—he spent his time writing an autobiography and doing silk embroidery—it became clear that the authorities were starting to give more credit to some of his evidence. There was to be a new trial at which he would be charged with Giuliano’s murder. Perjury and other charges were to be made against police and carabinieri. Pisciotta contacted an investigating magistrate and said that he was intending to reveal much more than he had done before.
On the morning of 9 February 1954, Pisciotta made himself a cup of coffee. Into it he stirred what he thought was his tuberculosis medicine. He took an hour to die, his body tormented by the violent head-to-toe convulsions that are the characteristic symptom of strychnine poisoning. His autobiography vanished.
Pisciotta was poisoned in the Ucciardone prison in Palermo—the mafia’s university of crime since the middle of the nineteenth century. It is inconceivable that he was killed without at least the honoured society’s approval. Whatever the mafia’s involvement in the intrigues behind Portella della Ginestra and the Giuliano band, it was they who made sure that the whole truth would never come out.