Chapter Twenty

Ending the Myth

Did the Allies strike a deal with the Mafia to win the war in Sicily? It is a seductive idea that suits many supporters of conspiracy theories – especially those who have long objected to America’s foreign policy. It is just another piece of evidence for them of American skulduggery. But, having investigated the allegation, it appears to be untrue. Far from it, in fact.

The American, British and Canadian armies won the battle for Sicily through impressive logistical organisation and sheer hard fighting. The thousands of casualties suffered by all Allied forces is testament to this. It was no walk-over victory. The nature of the Sicilian campaign, with a relatively smooth conquest in the west of the island, but a hard-fought series of combats in the east, was not determined by any intervention by the Mafia on behalf of the Allies, but due to Axis decisions. The Italians declined to fight and the Germans chose to remove as many of their troops and vehicles as possible across the sea to mainland Italy by conducting a fighting withdrawal along the eastern coast.

Yes, it is true that one department of one US defence intelligence agency – US Naval Intelligence – did strike an alliance with Lucky Luciano and his Mafia henchmen. The primary concern of this was to ensure the security of America’s East Coast against enemy sabotage. At the time, Allied shipping was suffering badly from Axis submarine attacks and there were incidents of Nazi saboteurs on American territory. There was also significant support in New York among immigrant communities for Fascism and Nazism. All this is proven and explains US Navy concerns.

This collaboration between the US government and the underworld was then expanded to include preparations for the invasion of Sicily, requiring mobsters to provide any information available that was thought to be useful. But when it came to its deployment in the war zone, there were only four US Naval Intelligence agents present on the beaches during the first days of the invasion – just four. Their contribution, though useful, was tiny and cannot be said to have had any major impact on the rest of the campaign.

The hundreds of pages of subsequent witness interviews provided by the Herlands investigation have swollen this minor contribution out of all proportion to any other intelligence aspect of the campaign. The reality is that by far the largest intelligence contribution to the campaign was provided by the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps, who had 80 agents on the ground throughout the fighting. There is no evidence whatsoever of them entering into any kind of alliance with the Mafia in Sicily – before or during the campaign. Similarly, the OSS went out of its way not to employ Mafia contacts either before or during the campaign. That OSS agents in Palermo then linked up with local Mafiosi after the campaign is a different matter, although crucial to later interpretations of American relations with the Mafia. The same is true of the British. They won no significant advantages in their fighting through contacts with local Mafiosi.

The most famous reported encounter between Allied troops and the Mafia – the so-called Mafia-delivered victory at Cammarata/Villalba – is largely the invention of the author Michele Pantaleone. Although a fearless opponent of the Mafia, his view of events is biased and not backed up by any American military field records. In fact, at the time of the supposed intervention by Don Calogero Vizzini, American troops were already miles ahead of both Villalba and Cammarata, having secured the road to Palermo against minimal Axis opposition.

Yes, there are at least two pieces of evidence of the British and the Americans recommending that contacts be made with the Sicilian Mafia to help in any projected invasion of the island – and the American suggestion of arming the Mafia as guerrillas was approved at a very senior level – but neither of these pre-campaign suggestions appears to have been acted on. There was no need. Events moved far more rapidly and in different ways than any intelligence report could have predicted.

What about the second great accusation? That it was thanks to the Allies that the Mafia were returned to power in Sicily. This is far more complicated and reveals a problem faced by any force occupying another country. The same problem has been a challenge in more recent years to Coalition forces in the Middle East – how to dismantle a corrupt regime and yet still impose law and order.

It is very difficult to assess the success of Mussolini’s and Mori’s campaign against the Mafia in Sicily in the 1920s. On the one hand, many Mafiosi were rounded-up and imprisoned or fled abroad. On the other, senior members of the Mafia avoided arrest and continued to thrive by carrying out their activities ‘underground’ or seeking an accommodation with the Fascist authorities. That the word ‘Mafia’ appeared rarely in Sicilian press coverage of crime in the 1930s did not reflect a true triumph of the Fascists, but merely underlined the illusory nature of what perhaps was always only ever intended to be a propaganda victory. In truth, it seems, the Mafia survived the purges and the Fascists covered up their resurgence by merely avoiding any mention of them.

By the time the Allies arrived in Sicily in 1943, there was a determined Mafia network throughout the island. By dismantling the Fascist hold on local rule, the Allies created a power vacuum that was easily filled by local Mafiosi. This was neither the fault nor the intention of the Allies. It was certainly not a pre-planned conspiracy among the Americans or British to resurrect the Mafia. It needed no such outside help. In fact, it is clear in numerous reports from Lord Rennell downwards that the view of the Allied occupying forces was that the Mafia were a criminal nuisance – a virus Lord Rennell called them – that should be crushed. The Allies were aware of the part played by the Mafia in local crime and worked very hard to reduce the food shortages and black-market exploitation that made the mobsters rich in the immediate post-conflict period.

In many ways, Lord Rennell was very successful in handling the Allied administration of Sicily. He took a tough stance on law and order. He was quickly aware of the problems he faced, who was responsible for them, and sought to strengthen his administration by making maximum use of the local police force. He put much effort into re-building the confidence of the Carabinieri and reinstating their authority on the island. It was a clever move.

Although Lord Rennell and his administrators did their best to halt low-level crime and break the black market – arresting many minor Mafiosi in the process – it appears that not all Allied Civil Affairs Officers were on the same side. Some exploited the situation to make money for themselves. Mafiosi worked with these Allied officers to divert large amounts of Allied supplies on to the black market. The most notorious of these black market gangsters was Vito Genovese and he appears to have enjoyed the high level support of numerous US officers – among them Colonel Poletti. Over and over again, Poletti is criticised by other Allied officers – principal among them being Lord Rennell – for his poor administration of Palermo and his closeness to local Mafiosi. But the most damning evidence against him was his eccentric lack of interest in helping the heroic Orange C. Dickey deal with Vito Genovese.

The early success of Lord Rennell’s imposition of law and order on the island encouraged senior Mafiosi to pursue their grab for power through politics instead. Initially, they backed the Separatist movement as it promised them an independent realm far removed from the state intrusion of mainland Italy. The Mafia and the Separatists made much of their supposed support from the Allies, but this was mischief making and denied frequently by the Allied authorities. The British or Americans seem never to have seriously pursued a policy of encouraging an independent Sicily, as part of a strategy to establish an Allied military base in the Mediterranean. The OSS alone appears to be the most strongly convinced agency of such a conspiracy, but this reflected an anti-British bias that pervaded much of its work in Sicily throughout World War II. Curiously, in this period, the OSS feared the British Empire much more than the Soviet Union.

As Sicilian gratitude for Allied liberation quickly passed, a traditional malaise infected the island, favouring the Mafia and Separatists. Life might have been bad under the Fascists, went the popular feeling, but at least there was a strong sense of order. Once Allied troops moved on to other battlefields in early 1944, it was left to the Italians to maintain law on the island and they found themselves overstretched and out-gunned. Heavily armed with captured Axis and Allied weapons, criminal gangs took a grip of the country. The remaining Allied administrators could only stand back and witness the decline in security. They certainly did not encourage it.

At this stage, the 1944 – 7 period, the Allies wanted to see an end to Mafia-backed chaos and the restoration of a strong Italian state. Mafia-backed Separatism simply weakened the central state and so they did not support it. The activities of EVIS and other bandits alarmed them.

Major left-wing local election victories in 1947 brought a significant change in Allied attitudes to the Mafia – or more truly American attitudes. The year before, the Separatists had been big losers in the election and ceased to be a power in the island. As a result, the Mafia dumped their link with them and embraced the only other conservative political force – the Christian Democrats. This shift in political allegiances changed the attitudes of the Allies. Up until this point, the Mafia in Sicily were a lawless nuisance. After this, they became an integral part of the Western strategy against Communism. It may well be that close ties established between a handful of OSS agents in Palermo with local Mafiosi helped this process.

The OSS mutated into the CIA in 1947 and became major interpreters of Cold War threats for the US government. The CIA now portrayed the Mafia as effective enforcers for the Christian Democrats who were the favoured conservative alternative to left-wingers in government in Italy.

Giuseppe Alessi, one of the founders of the Christian Democratic Party in Sicily, quoted a colleague on the need of his party for armed support. ‘The Communists use similar kinds of violence against us, preventing us from carrying out public rallies. We need the protection of strong men to stop the violence of the Communists’, he said. Alessi did not like it, but could not see any alternative. With Stalin funding the Communist Party in post-war Italy, the Christian Democrats had to win the struggle with the Communists and they had the most powerful backers in the world – Cold War America. ‘I was in the minority’, recalled Alessi, ‘and the “group” [the Mafia] entered en masse and took over the party.’

The US backed the Christian Democrats with aid and influence and the Mafia were allowed to help deliver them election victory in Sicily in 1948. This established a near fifty-year alliance between the Mafia and the Christian Democrats that suited American anti-Communists just fine. It is from this, largely, that the myth derives that America engineered the resurrection of the Mafia in World War II. That is not true, but the end result was.

For an Italian view of these events, it is worth turning to two leading historians of the Mafia, Salvatore Lupo of the University of Catania, and Professor Francesco Renda. Both are sceptical of the idea of a wartime Allied plot to put the Mafia back in power.

It has often been assumed [says Lupo] that the Mafia owes its rebirth and subsequent success to an agreement made with the Allies when they disembarked in Sicily in 1943. The available sources do not confirm this view, but indicate that the relationships which developed between the Allied administration, the Mafia, local business leaders, the church and the political class were always in flux.

The myth is difficult to shift, partly, explains Lupo, because:

. . . the most pressing reason for the long survival of the myth of the American conspiracy, is that for Italians the ‘alien conspiracy’ theory nicely removes their own responsibility for what occurred in Sicily as a consequence of voting for fifty years for a party like the Christian Democrats or for supporting opposition parties that were completely incapable of upsetting the prevailing system of power.

What is true is that the renewed relations between American and Sicilian Mafiosi after the war, thanks to mobsters like Lucky Luciano, Vito Genovese and Joseph Bonanno, contributed to a new lease of life for the Mafia as an international crime organisation.

Americans who are accustomed to think of the Mafia as something that was imported from Sicily [says Lupo] may be shocked to learn that in the period after the Second World War many Italians considered the Mafia to be an import from the United States where it had acquired the attributes of gangsterism that made it different from and more dangerous than the older, indigenous Mafia.

In his definitive Storia della Sicilia Professor Renda also denies any intentional conspiracy on behalf of the Allies:

The way in which the Mafia and the Allied military forces infiltrated Sicily’s administration is particularly significant since it appeared to be entirely spontaneous . . . There is no proof or evidence to support any predetermined or intentional conspiracy despite that fact that the occupying forces, from the very top to the very bottom, effectively handed over power in Sicily to the hands of the Mafia.

This happened because the Allies never had any intention of hanging round longer than a few months. They did not want to rule Sicily any longer than they needed to achieve their war aims. The Mafia took over because they were more effective at dominating their local administration than any political party, especially the Communists. By using violence – often supplied by the bandit Salvatore Giuliano – at the most crucial electoral times they out-fought and out-threatened a Communist movement that infiltrated many other European countries in this period. Whether this was good or bad in the long term for the people of Sicily is a point for debate.

Was it morally right for one department of one US intelligence agency to strike a deal with a criminal mastermind such as Lucky Luciano? This is a curiously early twenty-first-century view of warfare. At the time, the US Naval intelligence agents involved had no such problem in justifying their action – you do what you do to win.

On a philosophical level, surely a government is morally obliged to conduct a war in the most effective way possible to protect its citizens? That fundamental moral obligation should override any other moral concerns about the methods used to achieve that end. British and Americans have formed alliances with all sorts of morally dubious characters in order to win wars around the world over the last sixty years. The Western alliance with Josef Stalin in World War II is just the most obvious example of this – a more murderous gangster cannot be found anywhere in our recent history. Overall, however, the worst moral result is to lose.

In the event, the so-called devil’s pact with Luciano is a minor footnote in the history of World War II – and not a major scandal. The Allies did not get and did not need the help of the Mafia to win their campaign in Sicily. Far bigger powers of industrial organisation, economic competence and military expertise eventually defeated the Axis forces in Europe – and the Mafia played no part in that.

As always, it was thanks to the sacrifice of honest soldiers that the Allies won the war.