Chapter One

The Burning Ram

Giuseppe Bonanno was head of one of the five Mafia families in New York. When he looked back on his life, at the age of seventy-eight, he remembered the colours and tastes of his childhood in Sicily. He grew up near the ancient Greek temple at Segesta:

The color of the temple would change with the progress of the sun, from a soft gold at noon to a bronze at sunset. Orange poppies grew on the hillside. You could hear the bleating of sheep and the lowing of cows. On rainy days, I would roam through the temple grounds foraging for snails, which my grandmother fried in garlic.

Bonanno was brought up in a Mafioso family. To him, it was a fine description, a word meaning spirited, brave, handsome, vibrant and alive.

His father, Salvatore, was a ‘Man of Honour’, the head of one of two rival clans in Castellammare del Golfo, a seaside town built around a castle on the north-western tip of Sicily. They owned land, some cattle and horses. Salvatore came to head his family when his older brother was shot dead in a stable. Two members of the rival clan later met their deaths.

Bonanno called the creed in which he was raised ‘the Tradition’. He said it developed in reaction to centuries of foreign invaders who had come to Sicily – Greeks, Romans, Moors, Normans and Spanish. Prevented from participating in the rule of their own land, Sicilians depended on their own extended families for justice and assistance. Everyone inside the family was a friend, everyone outside it a possible enemy. Because they could not even understand the languages of their colonial rulers, Sicilians developed their own laws and business practices. If a crime was committed against you, then it was up to you and your family to organise punishment. You could depend on no one else.

When revolution came to Sicily in 1860, men of the Tradition joined with Giuseppe Garibaldi and his Red Shirt army to throw out the hated Bourbons. But whereas Garibaldi saw this as a step towards the creation of a unified Italian state, the men of Tradition saw it differently – an opportunity to win more independence for themselves, or so Bonanno claimed:

The years between the unification of Italy and World War I have been described as the golden age of my Tradition. The new rulers were willing to tolerate or make accommodations with men of my Tradition in exchange for their political support.

The Mafiosi formed a shadow government existing alongside the official bureaucrats.

Salvatore Bonanno’s career as a Mafioso and rancher came to an end in World War I. He was drafted into the Italian Army, was wounded in combat with the Austrians in 1915 and sent back home. There, he became seriously ill from an infection in his wound. He died while holding his only son in his arms. Giuseppe Bonanno was just ten years old. His family was now without a protector and that role fell to a close family friend, Stefano Magaddino.

It was Stefano who taught Giuseppe how to hold himself as a man. He instructed him on the rules of the Tradition and how to fight. ‘If a man is in a fight, he would tell me, then he must fight to the end.’

In his memoirs, Bonanno described the Tradition as something worthy and vital, a weapon to defend himself and his family against outside oppression. But his family were winners in this struggle in which cattle-owning clans battled with each other. Bonanno even claimed that members of the Mafia elite were taller than other natives of the island because they ate more meat. Many, many more Sicilians suffered from a way of life in which the strongest constantly preyed on the weakest. Bonanno failed to portray the full horror of the situation.

One of the strictest rules of the Tradition was silence or omerta. If you suffered at the hands of someone, then you should not go to the state authorities for justice, you should instead go to your local Mafioso or, better, deal with the crime yourself. Omerta has been translated as meaning ‘manliness’ and you are a real man if you sort out your own problems. Anyone who broke omerta was called infame and faced terrible punishment.

On one occasion, a shepherd was searching for some sheep and a ram that had been stolen from him. He knew very well the rule about not dealing with the police, but when he heard that they had seized some animals from two bandits, he recognised them as his and had to claim them. The police offered to escort him back to his village, but when he got close to his home he felt nervous about being seen in their company and told them to leave him to carry on alone. A short time later, four masked men holding guns emerged from beneath a bridge over a stream and confronted the shepherd. Neither the shepherd nor the armed men said a word to each other. The shepherd knew exactly what this was about. He had broken omerta.

Two of the armed men held him, while the other two grabbed the ram from the herd of sheep. They then poured a can of paraffin over the animal and set it alight. The ram screamed and bucked, trying to escape from the pain, but the flaming animal soon keeled over. ‘You see what we did to your ram?’ said one of the armed men to the shepherd. ‘Now we’re going to do the same to you.’ They poured paraffin over his hair and clothes and flicked a flaming light at him. The shepherd died in agony as the men stood by. Then they took his sheep. That was justice in Sicily according to the Mafiosi.

This murder was recounted by Cesare Mori, a policeman born in Pavia in northern Italy and posted to Sicily in 1904. Mori spent twelve years on the island winning a reputation as a fearless man of the law. During this period, he made a detailed study of the criminals he fought against. Like Bonanno, Mori sought to explain the rise of the Mafia in Sicily. He too saw it originating in a legend of chivalric independence applied to bandit heroes who fought against foreign government. But, he said:

This process, in the course of time, ended in a special form of oppressive tyranny, tinged with boasting and veiled in deceit; it fixed itself parasitically on the country and gathered to itself all the criminals of the island, constraining them to adopt a point of view calculated, above all, to monopolise and exploit all criminal initiative and activity.

The result was that the Mafia substituted itself for the state power in all relations between criminal forces and the people.

According to Mori, the Mafia in Sicily at the beginning of the twentieth century was not a formally organised association or group:

There are no marks of recognition. They are unnecessary. The Mafiosi know one another partly by their jargon, but mostly by instinct. There are no statutes. The law of omerta and tradition are enough. There is no election of chiefs, for the chiefs arise of their own accord and impose themselves.

The logic of the Mafia was strange but understood in its community:

Starting from the almost mystical conception that crime exists and must exist since it was created, not only does [the Mafia] deny all effectiveness to the legal provisions for combating it, but considers the struggle against crime . . . an error, a useless waste of energy, and an act against nature . . .

The role of the Mafia was to intervene between the criminal and the victim so as to reduce the damage caused. Their aim was not to punish the criminal but settle the situation. A favourite Mafia phrase was ‘Le picciotti hanno a vivere!’ Bandits have a right to live too!

With that philosophy in mind, a Mafioso would deal with a crime in the following manner. If cattle were stolen, he would seek out the bandit responsible. He would then offer to return the cattle to the victim if he paid up a third of their value. If the victim agreed, he would get his cattle back, the Mafioso would take a commission, and the bandit would receive a portion of money. As part of his fee, the Mafioso would then assure the victim that his cattle would not be stolen again. It was, of course, a protection racket. Frequently, it would be the Mafioso himself who had organised the cattle theft.

This then was the golden age of the Tradition recalled by Giuseppe Bonanno. His father was accused of being one of these cattle-rustling Mafiosi and Giuseppe would probably have stepped up and joined the family business if the situation in Sicily had not changed radically during and after World War I. With the reduction of export markets in war-torn Europe, Sicily’s farming economy collapsed. Even its sun-rich wine, which could have been sold to the army, was deemed to be too high in alcohol for the military. Wheat and meat were requisitioned for the war, which meant there was little left to sell at market. When men were conscripted into the army it meant the end of profitable smallholdings. Wages dropped as food prices kept on rising.

The crisis worsened in 1918, when tens of thousands of soldiers came back from the war. While these young men had been risking their lives in battle, older members of the Mafia had been lining their pockets. With land rent so low, a Mafioso would sub-let a piece of farming land, raise crops and animals to sell at inflated prices, and generate ten times what the landowner was making from rent. The result of this was that many Mafiosi ending up buying land from the old aristocracy, further increasing their influence.

Young war veterans could see little in this for them. They joined gangs of bandits, stole cattle and threatened the lives of settled Sicilians. The older Mafiosi were overwhelmed by the sudden explosion in crime – the picciotti had no respect for them. Cesare Mori, who had been absent from Sicily during the war, was now called back in 1919 to help deal with the crime wave.

With his detailed knowledge of Sicilian crime and criminals, Mori would soon take a firm grip on the situation. But he was not there merely to protect the old order – including the Mafiosi – from the ravages of angry young men. Within a few years, he would take on the Mafia itself

World War I changed a lot of things in Italy. It was a turning point not only for the Mafiosi in Sicily, but also for a dynamic young man living in the north of Italy who had fallen foul of the state police. He had a police file that described him as ‘a member of the Dovia Socialist faction: height, 1.67 metres [5 feet 5½ inches]; build, robust; hair, light chestnut brown; face, pallid; forehead, high; eyes, dark; nose, aquiline; beard, dark chestnut brown; mouth, large . . .’ The outlaw was Benito Mussolini.

His crimes were not ones of material gain, but of political agitation. At the age of eighteen, he had passed his exams with distinction and gained his first job as a school-teacher. He then followed his father into revolutionary politics, making speeches at Socialist meetings, and travelling to Switzerland where he mixed with fellow socialists and anarchists. Looking every inch the bohemian rebel, he was eager to incite revolution, but when he called on the workers of Berne to start a general strike, he was arrested and deported. It was the beginning of his police record.

When World War I came, Mussolini was thirty-one years old. He faced a major dilemma. Italian Socialists wanted nothing to do with the war. Mussolini was a devout Socialist, but he also wanted to do the right thing by his nation. ‘Above all there was my own Country’, he recalled in his autobiography. ‘I saw that Internationalism was crumbling. The unit of loyalty was too large.’

Mussolini began to argue the case for war against Austria and Germany. It was a fateful decision. For this, he was sacked from his job as editor of the Socialist Avanti and expelled from the party he loved. A short time afterwards, he created the Fascisti – a group of young men committed to taking direct action on the streets of Italy. Outside the Socialist Party, Mussolini ‘felt lighter, fresher. I was free! I was better prepared to fight my battles than when I was bound by the dogmas of any political organisation.’

When Italy finally entered the war in 1915, Mussolini responded to jibes of cowardice by volunteering to join the elite Bersaglieri. He also founded a newspaper, Popolo d’Italia, and continued to write articles for it from front-line trenches in the Alps. Like Bonanno’s father, Mussolini was wounded in the fighting against the Austrians, although in his case it was an accident:

One of our own grenades burst in our trench. There were about twenty of us soldiers. We were covered with dirt, smoke, and torn by metal. Four died . . . My wounds were serious. The patience and the ability of the physicians succeeded in taking out of my body forty-four pieces of the grenade.

When Mussolini eventually returned home from the front line, he and his comrades in northern Italy faced social turmoil every bit as bad as that endured by the Sicilians. One day in Milan, Mussolini recalled with disgust:

I saw a Socialist procession – with an endless number of red flags, with thirty bands, with ensigns cursing the War . . . They had numerous meetings. They clamoured amnesty for the deserters. They demanded the division of the land!

Ex-servicemen were sickened by the attitudes of the Socialists. The last thing they wanted to hear was that their sacrifices had been in vain. They formed armed groups, called arditi and squadristi, and they fought the Socialists in the cities and the countryside, burning their headquarters, torching their newspaper offices, and beating their supporters. Many of these street fighters joined the black-shirted ranks of Mussolini’s Fascists.

The Socialists responded by calling out workers on strikes that paralysed industry and the transport system. Workers who refused to join strikes were assaulted and sometimes killed. In the countryside, Socialists called for the great estates to be broken up and handed over to the peasants. The middle classes and wealthy owners of factories and farms were running scared. They turned to anyone who could help them.

In 1919, Mussolini and the famous conductor Arturo Toscanini stood as Fascist parliamentary candidates in Milan. They pledged to end the disorder and political crisis provoked by the Socialists. But few people believed they could deliver on their promises and they were soundly defeated by the Socialists, who became by far the largest party in the Chamber of Deputies – Italy’s parliament – in Rome. The Fascists failed to win any seats at all.

It was an humiliating failure for Mussolini, but he would not give up his campaign. He took up fencing so as to be able to duel with any politicians he insulted in the pages of Il Popolo d’Italia, and his followers stored grenades in his newspaper offices ready for street battles. The arditi swelled his ranks of supporters, providing the same edge of steel as ex-stormtroopers did for anti-Socialist forces in Weimar Germany. Mussolini boasted:

They were our troops of assault, of the first rush. They threw themselves into the battle with bombs in hands, with daggers in the teeth, with a supreme contempt for death, singing their magnificent war-hymns. There was in them not only the sense of heroism, but an indomitable will.

Fighting between Socialists and Fascists and other factions grew in ferocity. Gangs of motorcycle-mounted Black Shirts led raids into the countryside, attacking and sometimes killing Socialists. The Socialists would strike back, beating to death any Fascists they caught. The police tended to side with the Fascists in these conflicts, sharing their hatred of Bolsheviks. Even the Italian Army ended up battling striking workers armed with rifles and machine guns in city streets in central Italy. Mussolini revelled in this:

In some contingencies violence had a deep moral significance. It was necessary to make our way by violence, by sacrifice, by blood; it was necessary to establish an order and a discipline wanted by the masses, but impossible to obtain through milk-and-water propaganda and by words, words and more words, and parliamentary and journalistic sham battles.

The parliamentary victory of the Socialists had failed to bring political stability and, as the unrest continued into 1920, more and more people turned to Mussolini’s Black Shirts in the hope that they would bring discipline back to their lives. In 1921, the Socialists lost a third of their seats in the Chamber of Deputies while the Fascists won thirty-eight seats. Among the new deputies was Mussolini himself.

The street fighting continued and in Bologna the Fascists turned on the prefect there. A prefect was the regional representative of central government and in Bologna the post had just been given to an implacable policeman with a reputation for taking on tough challenges – Cesare Mori.

The year before, Mori had cut short his battle against crime in Sicily. The reason he now returned to the mainland was because he had proved himself a fierce defender of civil order against both Socialists and Nationalists. As Questore (chief of police) of Rome, he had broken a protest by killing some students and faced prosecution as a result. He was the sort of man of action the Fascists liked, but his strength was a double-edged sword. Politically, Mori had no time for the Socialists, but his job was to uphold the law and that meant treating Socialists and Fascists equally. He insisted that local employment should not be conditional on which party you belonged to. The Fascists hated this and Mori became their enemy.

In May 1922, some 20,000 Fascists invaded Bologna. It was a massive show of strength and they surrounded the city hall. They demanded that Mori resign, but he refused and barricaded his offices against them. The Fascists refrained from storming the building, but instead showed their disdain for him by urinating against the walls of the city hall. As a result of this clash of wills, Mori was removed from his post in Bologna and appointed prefect of Bari in the south of Italy where the Fascists were not so dominant.

The Socialists responded to the increased violence by calling general strikes throughout major cities in northern Italy. The Fascists brutally broke the strikes. With the support of tens of thousands of armed Black Shirts, Mussolini now felt confident enough for an even greater display than the occupation of Bologna or Milan or Ferrara. He would aim for the centre of government in Italy – Rome.

Before that, through the pages of his newspaper, he reassured the army and the king of his loyalty to the crown. In October 1922, the Fascists took control of towns and government buildings throughout northern Italy. The army readied itself for confrontation but generally took a friendly approach towards the Fascists.

Some 26,000 Fascists were ready to march into Rome. On 28 October, King Victor Emmanuel was asked to declare a state of siege but he refused, fearing disorder. His decision paved the way for Mussolini’s final rise to power. The king invited the Fascist leader to become prime minister and form a government.

In Sicily, the Mafiosi read the newspapers with interest but had little real enthusiasm for their new Fascist prime minister and his government. They had their own problems with Socialist agitators, but not to the extent of the general strikes and mass violence in the north. In Sicily, resistance to the Socialists took a different form. Factory owners and grand farmers would have a quiet word with their local Mafiosi. A little later, the troublesome strike leaders would be found murdered.

Sometimes an ambitious local Mafioso might ally himself with a Socialist land grab. It would gain him great popularity with the local peasantry. A compromise would then be reached with the terrified owners and part of the land handed back. It was just another version of the Mafia protection racket, this time operated under a red flag.

Giuseppe Bonanno was seventeen years old when Mussolini took power, but he was not impressed by him:

Mussolini was a cowardly man pretending to be a tough guy and I think I have a measure of expertise on the subject . . . A true tough guy, whether you agree with him or not, knows he is superior to most men. The phony tough guy lacks this sense of security . . . Mussolini was a bully – a phony tough guy.

Cesare Mori did not welcome the news either. He was fifty years old and probably considered his public career at an end. With the Fascists in power, he could not see himself gaining any advancement under them. So, in November 1922, he resigned his office in Bari and went into early retirement in Florence.

Mori spent the next eighteen months writing his first book about the Mafia in Sicily, Tra le zagare oltre la foschi – ‘Through the orange blossoms and beyond the mist’ – a typically flowery title from a man who liked to write poetry. He even considered calling his later account of the battle against the Mafia, published in 1933, ‘Lictorial dawn over the flowering orange blossoms’.

When Mussolini took power in 1922, he wanted to reassure the country that he was no tyrant. In his first administration, there were fifteen Fascist ministers and under-secretaries of state serving alongside fifteen ministers from other parties. But he would not compromise on his pledge to bring an end to the instability and violence that had haunted Italy since the end of World War I.

In a speech to the Chamber of Deputies on 16 November 1922, he said: ‘I could have made of this dull and grey hall a bivouac of corpses. I could have nailed up the doors of Parliament and have established an exclusively Fascist government. I could have done these things . . .’ But for the time being he would not. Instead, he addressed those problems that needed immediate resolution. ‘We intend to give the Nation discipline’, he declared. ‘We will give it. Let none of our enemies of yesterday, of today, of tomorrow, have illusions in regard to our permanence in power.’

Mussolini wished to bring a new vigour to the solving of national problems. The army and the various police forces, including the paramilitary Carabinieri, fully supported him. His Black Shirt street fighters, the veterans of World War I, were transformed into a voluntary militia for national security and defence. They were now a reserve strength that could be called out whenever Mussolini needed to enforce his political manifesto.

‘With Fascism at the wheel’, he proclaimed, ‘everything illegal and disorderly had to disappear.’ At first, this meant the Socialists and Communists his Black Shirts had battled against. But this would come to embrace other enemies of the nation, and that included the Mafia, as he said in a later speech to the Chamber of Deputies:

Gentlemen, it is time that I showed the Mafia up to you. But first of all I want to divest this association of brigands of any kind of fascination or poetry, to which it has not the least claim. Let nobody speak of the nobility or chivalry of the Mafia, unless he really wishes to insult the whole of Sicily.

Here, Mussolini was attacking the very root appeal of the Mafia. Like Giuseppe Bonanno, he knew it justified itself as an opposition to outside oppression but, like Cesare Mori, he knew it had degenerated into a ruthless criminal organisation.

Fascism was a phenomenon of northern Italy where the fight against the Socialists had been at its most heated. Mussolini had very little knowledge or interest in the problems of the south. But, as Prime Minister of the whole country, he had a duty to raise support for his cause everywhere.

In May 1924, Mussolini went to Sicily on an official visit. He was shown around the island by the local Fascist leader, Alfredo Cucco. In a speech at Agrigento on 11 May, Mussolini stood on the balcony of the municipal palace and addressed a local audience:

I understand that you all need certain things. You’ve spoken to me about the streets, about water and about reclaimed land, but you’ve also said that you need me to guarantee the safety and property of the people who work in this city.

So, I tell you now that I will take every measure necessary in order to protect people from crime. It is intolerable that a few hundred criminals should be allowed to undermine, impoverish and demean people as magnificent as you are.

The speech was received with rapturous applause.

That Mussolini’s battle with the Mafia would go beyond mere rhetoric was demonstrated by a widely reported story of an incident during his tour of Sicily. An hour’s drive from Palermo is the town of Piana degli Albanesi. It was known then for its colourful immigrant community of Albanians. Cucco had little time for these people, considering them anti-fascist, but Mussolini was keen to visit the town. A strong police escort was arranged for Il Duce but his security was also discussed with the local mayor, a Mafioso called Don Ciccio Cuccia, who was allowed to drive in the same car as Mussolini.

After the visit, Mussolini wished to return to Palermo. Obviously feeling inflated by his association with Il Duce, Don Ciccio pointed at the accompanying police escort and told the dictator he had no need of such protection. Instead, he indicated his own henchmen. ‘Your excellency has nothing to fear when you are by my side’, said Don Ciccio in a loud voice, so everyone could hear his proclamation. ‘Let no man dare touch a hair of Mussolini’s head. He is my friend and the best man in the world.’ Mussolini was outraged and humiliated. His Fascists were supposed to be the power in the island, not Don Ciccio. It reinforced his determination to crush the Mafia.

A month before Mussolini’s visit to their island, Sicilians had expressed their approval of the new regime by giving the Fascist candidates sixty-eight per cent of the vote. Most of the votes, it is claimed, were raised by traditional conservative landowners, probably including some Mafiosi, who could see some virtue in allying themselves with the new strong man in town. This flirtation with Fascism quickly evaporated in June with the scandal caused by the murder of the left-wing political leader Giacomo Matteotti. Five Black Shirts had bundled him into a car outside his block of flats and then beaten him to death, quickly burying his body in wasteland outside Rome.

Suddenly the dark side of Mussolini’s regime was exposed. This, combined with the fact that Sicilians still felt ignored by central government, with a rural crime wave running out of control in western Sicily – the territory of the Mafia – meant that many Sicilians questioned the efficiency of the Fascists.

In the run-up to local elections in August 1925, former Prime Minister Vittorio Emmanuele Orlando gave an electrifying speech in Palermo – a rallying cry to all those who still believed in the value of the Tradition. He was the Sicilian-born leader who had seen Italy through the Great War and sat with the Big Four during the Paris Peace Conference. His words counted for much:

People of Palermo, if by ‘Mafia’ we mean an exaggerated sense of honour, a passionate refusal to succumb to the overbearing and arrogant, a nobility of spirit that stands up to the strong and indulges the weak, a loyalty to friends that is more steadfast and enduring even than death – if these characteristics, albeit with their excesses, are what we mean by ‘Mafia’, we are dealing with ineradicable traits of the Sicilian character, and I declare myself to be Mafioso, and I am happy to be such.

Alfredo Cucco was worried by this speech and so was Mussolini when they spoke on the phone. Their reaction was to put Black Shirts in trucks riding round the streets of Palermo on polling day singing patriotic songs. Later that day, Fascists clashed with local police armed with new steel truncheons for the purpose. The Fascists won the local elections but the opposition polled a good many votes too. The Mafia were rumoured to have delivered many of these anti-government votes.

Mussolini’s big claim, to bring an end to indiscipline in Italian life, was clearly running into trouble in Sicily. Cucco was summoned to Rome and he reminded Mussolini of his vow to end lawlessness in Sicily. Mussolini followed this meeting with a conversation with the Minister of the Interior, Luigi Federzoni. Cucco and Federzoni met for a meal at the restaurant Ulpia, overlooking the ancient Roman remains of Trajan’s market. There, they discussed launching a campaign against the Mafia in Sicily. It was a risky project. It might be popular with the ordinary people – outside the Mafia circle – but it might further alienate the Sicilian establishment who had already demonstrated their opposition in the local elections.

For Mussolini, however, the situation was intolerable. The Mafia had to be brought to heel. It was, he said later, the beginning of a broader crusade against organised crime: ‘an inexorable fight against the Mafia in Sicily, the bandits in Sardinia, and against some other less known forms of crime, which had humiliated entire regions.’

Over their meal, Cucco and Federzoni discussed who might lead the war on the Mafiosi. Cucco suggested a former prefect of Palermo, but he was unavailable. Then the name of Cesare Mori came up. Federzoni was not too keen.

The year before, Mori had been called away from his writing desk in Florence to deal with a crime wave in the province of Trapani, in western Sicily. Unsurprisingly, he came into conflict with the local Fascists. They, in turn, protested to Federzoni, who seemed ready to pension him off for good. But Cucco insisted that someone with a strong police background would be the right man for the job. Thus, reluctantly perhaps, it was decided to transfer Mori from Trapani to Palermo.

Mussolini would take on the Mafia and Cesare Mori would be his commander in the field. Under their breath, Cucco and Federzoni no doubt mumbled, God help the Fascists if we get this wrong. Mori, naturally, was more confident. ‘The struggle with the Mafia’, he later recalled, ‘was fought to a finish for the first time under the Fascist regime . . .’

It had to be. As Giuseppe Bonanno’s ‘Uncle’ Stefano had told him, ‘If a man is in a fight, then he must fight to the end.’