Chapter Two

Humiliation in Gangi

‘The hour of liberation had come’, declared Cesare Mori. ‘In the name and by the will of the Duce action was at last going to be taken. Thus it was that, called to the honour of taking part in it, I returned to Sicily for the third time.’

Mori was itching to take on the Mafia. He had spent the best part of two decades studying their ways and now he was ready to deliver to Mussolini their heads on a plate. He knew it would not be easy:

The country, forced into silence, remained shut into itself. The authorities said that it was impossible to act against crime because not only did the people refuse to help them, but the very sufferers favoured the evildoers instead of co-operating with justice.

They did this because they feared the retribution and punishment of the Mafiosi more than the state.

But Il Duce presented Mori with a useful weapon – a new sense of determination unhindered by the niceties of constitutional government. ‘Under the Fascist conception of the State’, said Mori, ‘the government was specifically concerned in rendering the existence of the Mafia – an-anti-state – impossible.’ It helped, he argued, that the Fascists abolished the electoral system from which the Mafia gained much of their local influence. The bitterly fought Palermo election of 1925 was the last one in the island until a national plebiscite in 1929. No more would ex-prime ministers declare themselves to be Mafiosi.

Several attempts on Mussolini’s life in 1925 and 1926 sharpened his intolerance towards opposition forces. In April 1926, an English woman pulled a pistol near his car and fired a close-range shot that grazed his nose. A centimetre difference and the shot might have been fatal. A few months later, a young anarchist fired a shot at him as he sat in his car at an official function. ‘The shot burned my coat’, Mussolini remembered, ‘but again I was quite safe. The crowd in the meanwhile, seized by an impulse of exasperated fury, could not be restrained. It gave summary justice to the man.’

Mussolini’s response was immediate. He instructed the Ministry of Internal Affairs to introduce a series of laws for the defence of the regime. Among these was the abolition of the independent press.

Step by step, the attributes of democracy, which had been perverted by the Mafia to their own profit, were being removed by the Fascist state. Mori was not disappointed by this turn of events. It was for him a simple question of will in which reluctance to undertake responsibility, sentimentality and legal formalism needed to be overcome. If the Mafiosi had abused the legal system in Sicily by manipulating and intimidating it to their own ends, then Mori would not be held back by the strict word of the law in his own battle against them:

For my own part, though in these matters I respect the sanctity of law, I am, and have always been, for granting free initiative, naturally within the limits of the law, but regarding the law as a guiding principle, not an obstacle to action.

Mori would deploy the law to the greater purpose. The ends would definitely justify the means and neither clever lawyers nor corrupt judges would get in his way.

You could not challenge Mori’s integrity or his adherence to the principle of fairness before the law. He was incorruptible. He had proved that against the Fascists in Bologna and to the cost of his own career. But clearly he admired Mussolini’s dynamism and that included putting aside aspects of democracy and legality in order to win a battle against evildoers.

By doing this, Mori felt he had a good chance of winning a war against the Mafia.

Mori’s campaign strategy involved two main points of attack. One was to launch a major assault against the strongest and most significant of the positions held by the Mafia. This would be a highly visible demonstration of state power. The second was to win the hearts and minds of the ordinary people of Sicily – a classic doctrine of anti-insurgency warfare. He wished to:

. . . involve the Sicilian people in the action, by executing it in their name . . . to give the timid, the disappointed and the discouraged confidence in themselves . . . and to give the Mafia, not only a severe blow from without, but a feeling that its environment was against it.

It helped that Mori was an impressive man in his own right. He had a strong, solid frame, had a healthy, ruddy complexion, could stand before an audience and give a rousing speech, was intelligent and observant, and could ride well. He was a natural leader of men and was physically and mentally fearless.

Mori was born in Pavia in northern Italy in 1872. The first seven years of his life were spent in an orphanage before his natural parents finally acknowledged him as their own. He was maybe in pursuit of some emotional security when he sacrificed a military career in order to marry his wife, Angelina Salvi. Her father could not afford to pay the dowry expected of a military officer, but Mori went ahead with the marriage anyway, preferring to give up the army. He remained devoted to her for the rest of his life.

At the age of twenty-three, Mori won a medal for valour by disarming a gunman who had just wounded a soldier in a fight in a brothel. This incident pointed him towards a career in law enforcement and he came first out of 107 in a national public security competition. His first major posting as a policeman was in Ravenna, but an embarrassing incident in which he frisked a knife-carrying politician led to his placement in Sicily.

It was in Sicily that Mori won his spurs. In his early years there, his most celebrated encounter was with the cop-killing bandit Paolo Grisafi. The outlaw had such a notorious reputation for being untouchable that locals believed he was maato or bewitched. With a small group of policemen, Mori hunted down the bandit and his gang.

When Mori rode out with his men, he dressed elegantly, befitting a man of his status. He wore a necktie around a stiff collar, a smart jacket with a white handkerchief, neatly pressed, protruding from the breast pocket. He wore trousers tucked into riding boots, a wide-brimmed hat, and carried his favourite Winchester repeating rifle.

Mori and his team eventually cornered the outlaws in a little whitewashed house in Sciacca. At 2.30 one morning, a fierce fire-fight broke out in which the police riddled the cottage with bullets. The bandits placed mattresses on a balcony so they could fire more accurately at the surrounding police. The shooting continued until dawn when it started to attract an audience of local people. After more volleys poured into the cottage, Mori could hear the bandits shout out their surrender. At first, Mori would not accept it, then the cries became desperate. When the police eventually entered the cottage, they found a small armoury loaded with Mauser rifles, revolvers and a large store of ammunition. So why did Grisafi give himself up?

He looked at me and made no answer [said Mori]. And at that moment, in the eyes of the man who had shed so much blood and caused so much terror for the last twelve years, I saw the frightened look of a bull that is being led to slaughter.

With such high-profile arrests behind him, Mori brought with him to Palermo in 1925 a useful reputation. It amused him that Sicilians called him ‘a man whose heart is covered with hair’. Others called him simply ‘the beast’.

Mori set about the first part of his campaign – a major assault against a high-profile target – by raising an inter-provincial police service. These policemen were drawn from all parts of the island. They were to be independent of provincial concerns and to be highly mobile, able to swoop on criminals without the need of bringing in local police. Their first task was to gather accurate information on major gangs. Their second task was to bring overpowering firepower to secure their surrender. In order to move easily among the Sicilian population, Mori instructed his men to behave well and respect local customs. To slow the passage of criminals around the island, Mori insisted that photographs appeared on all passports and identity documents.

For his curtain-raising battle, Mori settled on the Mafia based in the Madonie, a range of mountains situated between Palermo and Messina along the northern edge of the island. For three decades, the Mafia and bandits associated with them had dominated the region, creating a state within the state. They dominated the local government, farming, and virtually every aspect of daily life. Armed gangs rode around the countryside extorting heavy taglie or taxes from the land-owners. All criminals in Sicily regarded the Mafia of the Madonie as the most successful and powerful. If Mori could break them, it would open up the rest of the island.

Mori’s intelligence gathering told him there were about 130 Mafia ‘soldiers’ in the area and that they belonged to three gangs led by Nicolo Andaloro, the Ferrarello brothers, Giuseppe and Nicolo, and the Dino brothers, Giovanni and Carmelo. These men were wealthy, owning their own houses and farms. The centre of their operations was the hillside village of Gangi with its buildings hewn out of the rock. Each of the leading gangsters had a house there with special hiding places and secret exits burrowed into the side of the hill. No detailed plans were available for the layout of the village and Mori anticipated it would be a hard nut to crack.

Mori chose the winter of 1925 – 6 as the best time to approach Gangi. His men rode into the area of the Madonie, their intention being not to make contact with the gangsters but merely to alert them to their presence. That way, they confined them to the region. Mori’s small army included Carabinieri and militia volunteers from Palermo alongside his inter-provincial police servicemen.

After a few days, Mori drew the net a little tighter, encircling the area around Gangi. At first, the bandits made no response to this, considering it yet another show of force intended to reassure civilians, but make no real effort to catch them. They sat comfortably in their houses, enjoying the food they had pillaged from their neighbours. Then Mori sent his police force into the farms and estates of the friends of the Mafia, taking over the buildings and setting up his own men to guard the roads and paths out of Gangi.

By now, the gangsters knew it was something more than just a routine action, but it was too late for them to escape. They retired to their hiding places within the village, beneath the floors and in the walls of their houses. It was what Mori expected. ‘While waiting on events’, he recalled, ‘they all disappeared into the bowels of the village, as though sucked up by a colossal sponge.’ There was one policeman who had the thankless task of patrolling the village and he informed Mori that the gang leaders had gone to ground.

In early January, Mori pounced and sent his men into Gangi so they completely surrounded the village buildings. The scene was set for a major shoot-out, but Mori did not want to create martyrs out of the Mafia leaders. He wanted to humiliate them. He sent a telegram to the mayor of Gangi saying: ‘I summon the latitanti [renegades] who are in your territory to give themselves up within twelve hours, on the lapse of which I shall proceed to extreme measures.’ A town crier walked among the deserted streets of the village, pounding his drum, and proclaiming the ultimatum.

Mori then sent his men into the houses of the bandits, tramping around above their hiding-places but not hauling them out. Mori had one final insult for them. He took their cattle and slaughtered them in the streets, selling the pieces of meat to the oppressed villagers at bargain prices. It was not looking good for the gangsters. Men who had proudly walked the streets of the village were holed up like rats. Where were their guns now? Mori relished their discomfort:

People began to laugh at these terrible bandits who, though laden with arms and ammunition and distinguished by a past of bloodshed and conflicts with the police, stayed like rabbits in their burrows without the courage even to put their noses out to resist the havoc that was being played with their property.

It has been claimed that it was not only their cattle that Mori’s men took. They also took their women and children as hostages. Mori makes no mention of this at Gangi, but he does admit, during other sieges, to loading families of gangsters – men, women and children – on to lorries and taking them away until the Mafiosi gave up.

Knowing that they had blown their opportunity for an heroic armed resistance, the subterranean bandits felt they had little choice but to give themselves up – and one by one, they emerged out of their trap-doors. One pretended to be ill and escaped through a secret passage into the countryside, but the now emboldened villagers volunteered to hunt him down and he gave himself up. The humiliation hung heavily on the bandits and one of their leaders, Giuseppe Ferrarello, hanged himself as soon as he got to prison.

Mori’s tremendous victory over the Mafia of the Madonie had its effect. Other bandits from around the island gave themselves up to the prefect. Mussolini was delighted and sent a congratulatory telegram to Mori on 6 January 1926:

Fascism, which has healed Italy of so many wounds will, if necessary, cauterise with fire and hot iron the wound of crime in Sicily. Five million hard-working and patriotic Sicilians must no longer be oppressed, held to ransom, robbed or dishonoured by a few hundred criminals.

With this seal of approval from Mussolini, the local Fascists now rallied to Mori’s triumph and paraded before him at the Teatro Massimo in Palermo. In his speech Mori told them:

The offensive which has now been fully launched will be pushed inexorably to the finish without regard for anybody. To those who stand on the other side I say these few but solemn words. It is useless to be under the illusion that this is merely a puff of wind. It will be a regular cyclone which will carry away everything, root and branch . . .

There is, therefore, nothing left for you, unhappy men on the other side, but the inexorable dilemma which I put to you now for the last time either to redeem yourselves loyally through honest labour or to die.

One of these unhappy men on the other side was Giuseppe Bonanno, future head of a New York Mafia family. He now felt himself caught up in the Fascist cyclone.

With his father and mother dead and ‘Uncle’ Stefano busy protecting his clan, Giuseppe Bonanno had to decide his own future. Living on the coast at Castellammare del Golfo, he looked to the sea for his career. He decided to become a sea captain and enrolled in a nautical school at Trapani. For his second year of studies, he transferred to Palermo. He loved the freedom of living in a big city and enjoyed chasing women, parading around town in the brilliant white uniform of a naval cadet. In 1924, he was nineteen and entering his third year of naval studies when he collided with the Fascists.

Images of Mussolini were everywhere in Palermo and Bonanno witnessed how a totalitarian regime penetrated every aspect of daily life. At his college, students were expected to sing a Fascist song each morning. They were told they should demonstrate their patriotism by joining the Fascist party and wearing black shirts rather than their usual white. Bonanno hated this.

Bonanno rallied other students around him and they protested. The college authorities were furious when they turned up still wearing white shirts. They threatened to expel any students who refused to wear a black shirt. Only seven students refused – including Bonanno and his cousin Peter Magaddino, nephew of Uncle Stefano. He could not blame the others for choosing their careers first. Bonanno and his cousin were suspended for three months and returned to Castellammare. There, they realised that if their naval career was denied to them they had little choice but to embrace the Mafia lifestyle of their family, but the Fascists were closing that down too. Bonanno recalled:

The special prefect for Sicily was Cesar [sic] Mori. He claimed that the island’s ‘mafioso’ tradition was keeping its people mired in a feudal society. Mori spoke like a contemporary sociologist; but when it came to hunting down men, he did his job as well as any medieval grand inquisitor.

In the local newspapers, Bonanno read of hundreds of Mafiosi rounded up and imprisoned. ‘They were tried and sentenced with utter disregard for their civil liberties’, he observed, without any trace of irony. Bonanno could see no future for himself in Sicily and his cousin agreed. They decided to start a new life in America and would travel there via Tunisia and France. Neither of them had a visa to enter the USA and so they ended up sailing from La Havre to Havana, Cuba. From there a little fishing boat took them to Tampa, Florida.

Intent on making it all the way to New York, they caught a train to Jacksonville. By then, their luck had run out and they were picked up by immigration officers and slammed in a detention centre. Bonanno had one telephone call and he phoned the brother of his mother who lived in Brooklyn. He phoned another cousin, Stefano Magaddino in Buffalo, nephew of Uncle Stefano, also from Castellammare. Three days later, $1,000 was paid for each of the young illegal aliens to get them out of the detention centre.

Waiting for them outside were two men. One of them was Willie Moretti, an associate of Joe the Boss – the most powerful figure in the New York underworld in the mid-1920s. Moretti would later join Lucky Luciano’s family. Bonanno had landed on his feet. To celebrate their first day of freedom in America, Moretti fixed up the newcomers with a couple of broads in a hotel. It was just as Uncle Stefano told him – it was important for a man to have friends.

Giuseppe Bonanno had become Joe Bonanno.

Mori followed up his victory at Gangi with more round-ups – retate – of bandits and Mafiosi. With such a visible challenge to the Sicilian Tradition, the practice of omerta was loosened and peasants came to Mori and his men with tales of ‘deaths unavenged, sorrows without a name, obscure tragedies, formidable losses, impositions, vexations, injustices and terrible obsessions’. All were logged and saved for the trials.

Over 150 people were arrested in the Madonie region for crimes including murder, blackmail, robbery and cattle-stealing. It was not only the little criminals that were swept up, but the Mafia bosses too. The head of the Mafia in the district of Mistretta was taken away, along with ninety letters implicating his whole crime network. The letters revealed how the Mafia had set themselves up as a tribunal, passing sentences on trouble-making criminals who refused to pay them a tribute.

In this process of multiple arrests, Mori was happy to pick up merely suspicious characters, whom he knew full well might not be convicted for want of evidence, since this served his purpose of stamping out all criminal activity in an area, even if it was only temporary. Sometimes this would be a major operation – involving the arrest of over 300 people in five villages or more. It would come at the time of harvest when peasants were especially vulnerable to Mafia stealing wagon-loads of grain and rustling hundreds of animals.

Some have alleged that torture was used to extract confessions from suspects. Knowing the violent nature of the Fascists, this is not surprising, though there is little direct evidence. Mori is said to have reintroduced the cassetta, a wooden box to which a prisoner was secured while he was flogged:

His dangling hands and feet were fastened with wires to the side of the case [claimed Socialist journalist Michele Pantaleone]. The wretched man was then drenched with brine and whipped with an ox-thong. In this way the lashes were the more painful but left no mark. Then his hair and his nails were torn out and the soles of his feet burnt. He was given electric shocks, his genitals were forcibly squeezed, and every now and then a funnel was stuck into his mouth, his nostrils were pinched, and he was made to swallow salt water till his stomach swelled.

But Mori did not even need confessions. He formulated an offence of association for criminal purposes to get round the difficulty of linking particular crimes with specific evidence. It was enough to have a bad reputation to get you arrested. His purpose was to revive the power and prestige of the state and he did not care how many people he swept up in his net. Many of the convicted felons were banished to penal islands off the Sicilian coast.

Mori’s reward was to win the respect of the people of the countryside who called him prefetto contadino – the Peasant Prefect. To tighten this relationship, Mori instituted the awarding of medals for valour to civilians who had taken direct action against criminals. Many Sicilians paid with their lives for giving information to Mori and the police.

On one occasion, Mori visited the small town of Misilmeri, not far from Palermo. There, a young man called Mariano Da Caro had recently stood up to the local Mafia but been killed for being so bold. A few students dared to tell the tale of his death, but the rest of the townspeople kept quiet, not wanting to bring the wrath of the Mafia on themselves.

Mori wanted to commemorate the death of Mariano Da Caro with a memorial stone and to celebrate its unveiling he arranged a concert in the middle of the town square. At first, the townspeople were reluctant to approach the stage, but, as the sun set, when the pianist started to play so the crowd relaxed. When he finished, the once silent crowd gave him a rousing round of applause.

Some townspeople feared that the memorial stone would be immediately mutilated by local criminals, but when they looked closely at the inscription it said – a memoria – ad onore – a monito.

‘What does monito (‘a warning’) mean?’ said one.

‘It means “Ca cu tocca ca ci sata a testa”’, said another. ‘Anyone who touches it will get his head cut off.’

Mori was delighted to hear this – it meant they feared him more than the Mafia.

On the economic front, Mori struck two further blows at the Mafia. He instituted a new system of branding and marking in which owners received official documents recognising their ownership of their animals. This greatly reduced the incidents of cattle-rustling but annoyed insurance companies who had made a good deal of money out of insuring against frequent theft.

Mori also attacked the widespread racket in which the Mafia rented land from the great property owners at a pittance of its true value. It was, in effect, forced land redistribution, in which the Mafiosi sublet the land to peasants at a huge profit to themselves. Mori brought in the police and Commission of Agriculture to ensure that the rental value for a piece of land reflected its true yield. A grateful landowner told Mori that an estate worth only 4,000 lire a year over the previous three decades was now bringing in 60,000 lire. This enriched everyone in the rural community but denied the Mafia a significant source of income. The Bank of Sicily noticed the difference – its agricultural loans went up from 61 million lire in 1924 to 154 million in 1928.

To cut away further at the power of the Mafia, Mori raised a 1,300-strong irregular unit of armed, mounted volunteer agents who could ride to the assistance of the police. He recruited them from the armed field guards of landowners – known as campieri. Their typical outfit was jacket and breeches, a cap (coppola) and riding boots. On a field near Roccapalumba, he gathered them together for a swearing-in ceremony. With a roar, all the volunteers swore to serve the King and the state – and not the Mafia.

When they distinguished themselves in defence of their farming comrades, Mori would reward a campiere with a small brass buttonhole badge in the shape of an ear of corn between two crossed muskets. At an award ceremony, Mori asked a recipient if he minded wearing the badge. ‘You would have to wear it all the time and what if someone called you sbirro [a derogatory word for a policeman]?’ he said.

The man shrugged. ‘Then I would have to shoot him’, said the campiere.

‘Bravo!’ said Mori.

It seemed he was winning their hearts and minds.

To check if Mori’s triumph was true it is useful to hear the voice of an independent eye-witness. Charlotte Gower was an American anthropology student who came to Sicily in 1928 to research a study of a typical peasant community. Her trip coincided with the final phase of Mori’s crusade.

The journey to Milocca, a village in western Sicily, was a difficult one. No railroad or highway led to it directly and you had to pick your way by foot or mule along rough paths. It had no electricity. For this reason, it had avoided much of the modern world and that suited Charlotte Gower just fine. She had spent the previous year at the Illinois Institute for Juvenile Research in Chicago, learning the Sicilian dialect spoken in the region. She knew the place would give her the most authentic view of the old Sicilian ways.

It was a hot topic, for in the first decade of the century thousands of Sicilians had left their island for a better life in America – half of all Chicago’s Italian immigrants were Sicilian – and it was important that the US government understood the culture they were coming from. As Gower observed:

The lure of America is strong, especially to the younger peasants [of Milocca] who dream of riches gained by labor lighter than that which they know, riches with which they could return, buy land, and settle down as respected proprietors.

No other part of the world held the same promise for these Sicilians and their narrow view of life outside their village was reflected in the name they gave to all non-Catholics, regardless of their nationality or faith – Turks.

Arriving in Palermo, Gower first received a letter of introduction from Prefect Cesare Mori. He did not have much good to say about the little community, but the letter ensured that the mayor of Milocca set up the student with lodgings in the home of the village midwife. She stayed for eighteen months.

The surrounding countryside was harsh. ‘In the late summer’, she wrote, ‘the broken landscape is burned to a yellowish white, with here and there giant outcrops of gypsum . . . It is no garden land but stark and, as seen from the train, apparently uninhabited.’

A large sulphur mine was located near Milocca, but none of the locals worked there. Instead, they scraped a living from the tough land, growing wheat, broad beans, olives, grapes and almonds. They ate pasta with basic tomato sauce, sometimes enlivened by a slaughtered goat.

Immediately after World War I, Milocca had suffered from Socialist unrest like elsewhere in Italy. In 1920, several hundred peasants took over the estates of absentee landlords. Local communities fought with these men to regain the estates and the conflict was only settled when the Milocchese were allowed to rent some of the land they had taken. The Socialist rebels were led by Don Toto Angilella, a wealthy merchant at odds with the local aristocracy.

A lawyer associate of Angilella went even further and declared Milocca an independent Socialist state with the red flag flying over the town hall. The little republic lasted only twelve hours, by which time the Carabinieri arrived and banished the lawyer. Come the Fascists, Don Angilella ingratiated himself with the Black Shirts and was eventually rewarded with the post of local commissar in 1927. He used the position to ensure that a leading member of a rival faction in the village was imprisoned on suspicion of being a Mafioso.

Bowing to Prefect Mori was not enough. Because of its isolated position, Milocca was a favourite refuge for bandits and Gower was clear that the Mafia presence was strong in the village. Among the ordinary people, she observed a powerful sense of menace:

Those were days when a woman saw her husband go off to the fields and did not know whether he would return alive, or whether he would be killed with his own mattock by the men who stole his mules . . .

Men who had to ride long distances went in groups, or took a police guard, and even that was not secure, for one traveller was murdered despite the presence of an armed guard. Law-abiding citizens did not dare incur the disfavor of the mafiosi, and almost anyone who had extensive property in the country was obliged to protect himself by extending favors to them.

At the beginning of his war, Mori had concentrated on the major Mafia strongholds in Sicily but by early 1928 he was sweeping lesser crime zones. He had already expressed his dislike for the village when Gower approached him for a letter of introduction. Now he was to act on the information he received. It came from the mother of a bandit killed in a dispute between gangsters. In her grief, she pointed the finger at Milocca. Gower witnessed the crackdown:

The police descended in force, by night and proceeded to make their arrests. Some of their victims escaped, in spite of the suddenness of the attack, but the members of their families were taken and held in their stead. If this did not produce the desired persons, all their livestock was confiscated . . .

No one felt safe. A bride who set out to make her nuptial calls was ordered back to her home, for this was no time to be abroad. Pity was mixed with fear, pity for the unhappy animals, the bereft families, the arrested men, and even for the police, who had come without adequate provisions and had to beg bread from the terrified townspeople.

About 100 Milocchese were imprisoned. Gower, because of her letter from Mori, was believed to have some influence with the prefect and was treated well in the hope she might be able to help the release of the prisoners. The entire village went into mourning. Feast days were not celebrated with their usual enthusiasm. Many of the wives of the imprisoned Mafiosi suffered real hardship and were given free food by the community. But, Gower, had to admit, crime itself had come almost to a full stop. Paradoxically, although the local people mourned the loss of so many of their menfolk, the action of the government in making arrests and destroying crime was always praised.

It must be considered, however, that Gower had the whiff of Mori about her and no one would be foolish enough to denounce the prefect in front of her. A truer view perhaps was expressed in 1929 when the Fascists held a plebiscite throughout Italy to demonstrate popular support for their regime. On this occasion, Gower overheard a local man say ‘We will vote as they tell us, but God knows what is in our hearts.’

The Mafia may have been brought to heel by Mori, but he now faced the even greater challenge of putting them on trial – and not even Mori could guarantee that Sicilians would look beyond centuries of mistrust of outside justice.