History of the Mafia

This was not a case of political terrorism like those that had blighted the years following Italian unification. Investigators rapidly discounted the possibility that this had been an assault by ordinary lawless brigands. A major factor in their reasoning was the “modern” and reassuring setting: a railroad passenger car. In fact, the victim had felt sufficiently safe to let down his guard, abandoning the precautions he had carefully employed since his kidnapping in 1882. He had unloaded the rifle he carried with him, and he had taken the opportunity to sleep during the train trip. (“Between brigands and the railroad there is a total incompatibility, a profound anachronism.”)² The murder was committed with a knife, the sort of weapon commonly used in crimes of passion, not in murders carried out “at the orders of others” (“Hired killers invariably … use firearms”).³ This was not a killing that belonged to the struggle among equals for control of the gabelle (subcontracting of farmland leases) or guardianìa (custodianships). We know that it was not customary for the mafiosi of the Palermo region to murder landowners, much less citizens as eminent as Notarbartolo. Nonetheless, the vox populi buzzed with rumors that this had been a Mafia murder. In fact, the public prosecutor Gualtiero Sighele declared, this was a murder ordered by “the highest ranks of the Mafia hierarchy.”⁴ Sighele named the killers—two members of the cosca (Mafia family) of Villabate, Matteo Filippello and Giuseppe Fontana—and the man who had ordered the killing as Raffaele Palizzolo. “In public gathering places, in the streets, everywhere, the refrain was: this must have been the work of Palizzolo.”⁵

The murder of Notarbartolo marked a qualitative change, but it stood alone, an isolated benchmark pointing to developments that lay far in the future. Let us put the murder into perspective: this case was the only time in nearly eight decades that the Mafia dared to strike a blow at such a highly placed individual. Notarbartolo’s dead body was the first cadavere eccellente (“excellent cadaver,” in the sense of social elevation; see Alexander Stille’s Excellent Cadavers), and it was also the last until the killing of public prosecutor Pietro Scaglione in 1971—the only such murder since Italian unification. The scale of the crime prompted an equally outsized reaction. A state of Mafia-related emergency reigned not only in Sicily but throughout Italy. In fact, on the grounds of what Italian law terms legittima suspicione, or recusal of the court, the three trials for the Notarbartolo murder were held in other venues, first in Milan (1899–1900), then in Bologna (1901–1902), and finally in Florence (1903–1904).⁶ Not only were the trials held far from Sicily, but the Italian press gave ample and prominent coverage to the proceedings. The media thus “nationalized” the dark subject of the Mafia, a distinctly Sicilian phenomenon, bringing it to the attention of the Italian public to a far greater extent than the parliamentary debates of 1875 had succeeded in doing. Beginning on what the Marchese di Rudinì described as the “spotlit stage of Milan,”⁷ all Italy watched spellbound as if witnessing a sensational spectacle that featured hundreds of witnesses who had traveled north from Sicily, garbed in outlandish costumes, speaking in an incomprehensible tongue that required the intervention of court-appointed interpreters.

In the first trial, only two defendants were summoned to appear, the railroad employees Garufi and Benedetto Carollo. It was evident from the mechanics of the events that they had been accomplices to murder, not the killers themselves. No charges were brought against Palizzolo and Fontana (the original evidence against Filippello had proved too slim). This approach prompted outrage from the Notarbartolo family. In particular, the self-restraint of the victim’s son, Leopoldo, was sorely tested by the timidity and the contradictions that had characterized the preliminary judicial investigation. Now, in the “free air of Milan,”⁸ he electrified the courtroom by openly accusing Palizzolo.

“I can hardly convey the thrill of concern, the astonishment of the magistrates, the members of the jury, and the audience when these words were spoken,” wrote the correspondent of L’Avanti! “An overwhelmingly heightened state of attention, acute and verging on painful, bound the entire courtroom to the rapid, incisive, and confident speech of that twenty-eight-year-old youth who was standing forth, demanding revenge upon his father’s alleged murderer, a man of great power.”⁹

Driven by pressure from the civil plaintiff, the trial was transformed into a “public preliminary investigation”¹⁰ that stood in sharp contrast to the official preliminary investigation. The police detective Cervis accused his colleague Francesco Di Blasi, manipulated by his master, Palizzolo, of having steered the investigation in the wrong direction and of concealing important evidence. Di Blasi was placed under arrest in the courtroom. An investigation undertaken by the prefect of Palermo unearthed a note in which, just one day after the murder, Di Blasi, on his initiative, asked to be put on the case and suggested preposterous “leads.” The Palermo prefect concluded his report with these words: “His close relationship with Commendatore Palizzolo offers solid grounds for suspicion that he had ulterior motives for wishing to have access and control of the threads of this intricate skein in order to protect his friend and master.”¹¹

Cervis insinuated that the Palizzolo “party” was treated with indulgence, if not full-fledged complicity, by the questore (administrative director of the district police) of Palermo in 1893, Ballabio. When Di Blasi and Ballabio were brought together face-to-face in court, Ballabio was unable to control his temper and berated Di Blasi, calling him “a liar and a coward [who] has brought dishonor upon the questura (police administration) of Palermo.”¹² General Giuseppe Mirri, who served as minister of war in 1899 in the Pelloux government and was head of the police in Sicily during the state of siege, accused the magistrature of “the greatest imaginable lassitude, negligence, indeed, criminal neglect.”¹³ The subsequent questore, the former detective Michele Lucchesi, was equally emphatic: “A magical hand, mysterious yet powerful, has manipulated this trial! How else can we explain the fact that it is only taking place after an interval of six years, even though four months would have been quite sufficient time to prepare.”¹⁴ All these witnesses, and a great many others, testified to Palizzolo’s “propensity for criminal acts” and his ties to the Mafia.

As we shall see, both General Mirri and the questore Ballabio had various matters on their conscience and thus contributed in turn to a scandal that was “so broad and murky,” as Pelloux and Sonnino observed with concern, that it called into question the larger political equilibrium.¹⁵ In the Milan court, the content of the debate was so subversive that the local military command found it advisable to prohibit officers from attending the sessions of the trial.¹⁶ Despite that cautious measure, the press served up a distressing picture: lawyers accusing the public institutions of complicity with the Mafia, politicians and police officers charging one another with involvement, to the disgust of respectable citizens and the delight of subversives. The respectable citizens were forced to admit that there was “mysterious and subtle poison [at work …]: under the façade of the Mafia the power of politics was at work, and under the façade of politics the power of the Mafia was at work.”¹⁷ The subversives, on the other hand, were able to point to the squalor of the Italian state, which had deigned to condemn them: “Let’s not talk about ‘sloppiness,’ however grave, nor about ‘negligence,’ even enormous negligence, in all this. More than ‘guilt,’ there is a larger organized crime in the administration of justice, justice is complicit with and protective of murderers, there is infamy, shame, and dishonor.”¹⁸

Concerning certain episodes, the Milanese public prosecutor admitted, judgment should be left “to public opinion, which is right more often than not, and which rightly assigns praise and blame.”¹⁹ And public opinion found magistrates, questori, and prefects all guilty, a guilt that tainted the governments under which the investigations had been led into various dead ends.

Among those governments, oddly enough, was the government led by the Marchese di Rudinì, a personal friend of the victim, Emanuele Notarbartolo, and head of Notarbartolo’s political party, the Destra (or right). These were the years (1896–1897) of the commissariato civile (special but nonmilitary government) for Sicily. Rudinì assigned Giovanni Codronchi to that post. Codronchi’s official task was to attack clientelism; his real assignment, as Sonnino sarcastically noted, was to create a “Commissariato elettorale” that would disintegrate the party of Francesco Crispi and recapture that party’s moderate wing, restoring it to a pro-government position.²⁰ And Codronchi was the right man for the job: a member of the right wing, and therefore scorned by Sicilian democratic forces as far back as 1875, but in 1889–1890, when he served as the prefect of Naples, the faithful executor of Crispi’s policies.

In April 1896, even before he was officially appointed, Codronchi expressed his intentions: “We all know who carried out the crime, who gave the orders. Justice was reluctant to take on important people who were close to Crispi…. I told Rudinì that I had no intention of respecting even his friends, representative Palizzolo, to mention just one name. Rudinì answered: ‘That’s fine, Palizzolo is a rogue.’”²¹

Codronchi overestimated his own importance. The fact that the case was reopened was probably the result of instructions from Rudinì; those instructions, however, proved difficult to execute, as the chain of evidence led not to the supporters of Crispi, as had been hoped, but rather to Palizzolo. “Rogue” though he might well be, he constituted one of the mainstays of the Sicilian right wing. On the other hand, the member of parliament, Palizzolo, absolutely needed government support. Alongside the suspicions accumulating in connection with the Notarbartolo case, there was growing and troubling evidence concerning the murder of a certain Francesco Miceli, which Palizzolo attributed to the persecution of Giolitti—hence the feigned commitment to the defense of civil rights on which his support of the project of a commissariato civile was based:

It should therefore come as no surprise to us to learn of the unpleasant situation that faced Leopoldo Notarbartolo, when he found out that Codronchi was in cahoots with Palizzolo.²³ In the months that followed, there was a daily correspondence between the pair, in which Codronchi, the count from Imola, imparted instructions for the high-level political decisions, and Palizzolo, the parliamentarian from Palermo, oversaw local operations: the dissolution of municipal administrations, the parceling out of state-owned land, the extension of terms for the debt of various companies, the selection of pharmacists summoned to provide medical services for Palermo’s poor, the recruitment of the corps of tariff and customs police.²⁴ Palizzolo was especially attentive to the selection of police officers. He objected to the transfer away from Palermo of the delegato di PS (or police inspector) Olivieri, calling him “my loyal constituent who could provide great assistance to me,” while, in contrast “you have chosen to leave in place in this [province] and in my own district other officers who wish me no good at all!” He intervened on behalf of a former delegato di PS, a certain Francesco Saitta, and in this case Palizzolo prompted outrage from the high commissioner, who wrote: “This Saitta has been found guilty, sentenced, and expelled from his office; and now you are recommending that he be appointed chief of the Guardie Campestri (or rural and agricultural police)!” Palizzolo expressed particular interest in obtaining appointment as city police commissioner in the clerical-moderate administration, under the leadership of Senator Amato-Pojero. Thanks to Codronchi’s string-pulling, that administration took power in 1897 in the Palermo city hall: “I have numerous friends whose rights and considerations have been trampled underfoot, and they are fully determined that I, if only for a month, become a member of the executive power [sic!]…. Amato should have depended upon Your Excellency’s learned advice, as well as that of the friends without whom he could not last for forty-eight hours in the office of Mayor.”²⁵

If we wish to understand what “friends” Palizzolo was talking about, let us note that, in view of the coming administrative elections in Palermo, the island’s capital, a reform of the electoral system was put in place that gave the candidates put forth by the borgate, or outlying suburbs, an outsized importance. According to De Felice, individuals with strong Mafia ties were thus elected with dozens of votes, while in the center of town opposition candidates were rejected who had obtained more than a thousand votes. Among others, there was Salvatore Licata, son of the same Andrea Licata whom we encountered in the 1870s.²⁶ No one but Palizzolo could control individuals of this sort. We should not be surprised, then, to learn that in 1897 Codronchi declared that he was confident of Palizzolo’s innocence and, instead, that he had his suspicions concerning the Crispi followers Paolo Figlia and Francesco Tenerelli.²⁷

Lucchesi was the questore of Palermo. The high commissioner considered Lucchesi to be “a highly capable man, [who] knows everything and everyone,” though the high commissioner expected he would have to expel him from office at some point, because he was a “scoundrel.”²⁸ In fact, Lucchesi was a fine-edged tool of police work, who was fully knowledgeable concerning the various “toxins” (veleni) of Palermo at least as far back as the Malusardi years. On one occasion, when he had been caught in friendly conversation with a notorious mafioso, he is said to have cried: “You see what I’m forced to do? This individual deserves to be clapped in handcuffs, and I would be only too glad to march him straight into prison myself.”²⁹ Of particular note were the instructions that the questore gave his subordinates in the summer of 1896. He ordered them to ignore all complaints against the mafiosi of Villabate “lest individuals wrongly accused of serious crimes [should go into] hiding, thus endangering the conditions of public safety.”³⁰ This was the man in charge of reopening the case with the new public prosecutor, Vincenzo Cosenza. He decided to focus on the “rumor-mongering” of a convict, a certain Bertolani, who claimed to have heard Fontana (at the time in prison in Venice for distributing counterfeit banknotes) boasting that he had murdered Notarbartolo. Bertolani identified as the man who had ordered the killing—interpreting in the most expansive manner imaginable the wishes of his guardians—no less a personage than Francesco Crispi himself.³¹ As a result, the judicial investigation was modified, and Garufi and Carollo were indicted. In the new bill of charges, Fontana was no longer a suspect; his alibi now seemed ironclad, but this was in part because Cosenza failed to bring Lucchesi face-to-face with the railroad employee Salvatore Diletti. Diletti had told the questore that he had recognized the mafioso Fontana as the man who had been present aboard the train on the day of the murder. Left unprompted, Diletti retracted his testimony, and it was not until the trial was actually under way that he once again leveled his accusations against Fontana.³²

As we can see, in 1896–1897 a number of mechanisms were at play that differed sharply from those put into operation in 1893 by Palizzolo’s supporters. Codronchi was determined to identify the man who had ordered the killing, and then, when all evidence pointed toward Palizzolo, he wound up focusing on Fontana alone. That target was missed as well owing to Cosenza’s reluctance. On the other hand, both the high commissioner and his even higher political mastermind would remain convinced that their former ally was not guilty, or at least that he was not alone in his guilt: “I do not offer any warranties for Palizzolo,” Rudinì wrote to Codronchi in December 1899. “The body of opinion that has formed against him says that he is a man who is capable of committing crimes. But … the ferocity shown against him, in the first preliminary investigation, shows, practically, that a special effort was made to send justice in the wrong direction, misdirecting the investigators.”³³

The letter called for cool and collected behavior during the frantic days of the Milan trial, when everyone was trying to establish their distance from Palizzolo. Rudinì continued to insist that the only real scandal was the failure of the state to indict Fontana, and that therefore, “if there is something rotten,” it should be searched for among the ranks of the magistrature.³⁴ Codronchi was forced to make limited admissions concerning Palizzolo’s “willingness to commit crimes.” In contrast, Lucchesi thundered accusations against the magistrates but also against the member of parliament, Palizzolo, without realizing that he was causing embarrassment for his protectors. “This behavior of his,” Rudinì commented once again, with some irritation, “strikes me as astonishing!”³⁵ The explanation for the behavior of the former questore, according to the prefect of Palermo, Francesco De Seta, was quite simple: “He gauged his behavior in terms of his own personal interests: it was opportune to attack Palizzolo violently, even though in different times the two had been close friends.”³⁶

In Palermo, the progress of events was a cause of considerable concern for the magistrature, which had been the target of such devastating accusations. Cosenza protested at the forum that the Milanese court was providing for the airing of the “ignoble and nauseating spectacle of … a personal vendetta.”³⁷ This anomalous procedure was justified by the civil plaintiffs as a “revolutionary” act of force in the face of Palizzolo’s undue influence over the public prosecutor, who has “provided grievous evidence that we have no reason to hope for the victory of truth and justice at his hands.”³⁸ While Palizzolo placed his reliance on the machinery of Palermo’s judicial and police apparatus, the Notarbartolos utilized their network of contacts and relations in the moderate and aristocratic camps, especially during the months of the Milan trial. In particular, support was provided by none other than Humbert I (Umberto I), king of Italy, at the behest of the prince of Camporeale, and was redoubled through the personal ties that linked Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s uncle, a major in the Italian army and a baron, Gaetano Merlo, to the prime minister, General Luigi Pelloux.

“We clearly saw that the Ministry was supporting us,” wrote Notarbartolo, Jr. “If something was too intricate or jumbled, my uncle … would take the train to Rome and obtain from his friend Pelloux whatever we wanted. And so we managed to secure on behalf of the institutions of justice highly confidential documents of the Banco di Sicilia, of the questura, and of the high command of the Royal Carabinieri of Palermo, and even documents from the Ministry of the Interior.”³⁹

The whole affair, however, was also the venue for an unprecedented mingling of this bloc of traditional and moderate forces with the far left. The extreme left played an important role, first and foremost, in the management of the trial. Leopoldo Notarbartolo hired two socialist lawyers, Carlo Altobelli and Giuseppe Marchesano. Marchesano came to constitute a link with the Palermobased socialism of Aurelio Drago and Prince Alessandro Tasca di Cutò. During the year of the Italian banking scandals (1893), this convergence was less paradoxical than it might otherwise have seemed. Between the right and the left there existed a point of contact in the general denunciation of the blending of opportunism and profiteering, politics, and the administration, as well as a general critique of the systemic degeneration that led to utilization of the Mafia: “Just what should the government do?” Drago wondered. “Fight the Mafia? Then who will run the elections? And so the Mafia must be organized. And the government organized it, armed it, and paid it.”⁴⁰

Socialists and radicals, for that matter, needed to get back into the political game from which they had been expelled by the state of siege of 1894. And so, taking a shared anti-Crispi position, they attempted to establish ties with the followers of Rudinì who had previously been allied with Codronchi. Their advances, however, were spurned. Hence the violent accusations that in 1899 Giuseppe De Felice Giuffrida, the Catanian socialist who had once been a leader of the fasci, would in particular level against “the former viceroy of Sicily.” “We two are the favorite targets of the famous De Felice,” Lucchesi wrote to Codronchi, “because you as a sincere monarchist competed against him in the election, and I put him on trial and sent him to prison.”⁴¹

The trial in Milan came in the wake of the violent repression of the uprising of 1898 and the early phase of parliamentary obstructionism in opposition to the “freedom-murdering” laws proposed by Pelloux (June 1899). The last two months of 1899 and the beginning of 1900 were a time of a left-wing offensive against a government that had shown itself to be exceedingly harsh toward the socialists and equally pliant toward the mafiosi. As Leonida Bissolati put it, Italian politics “has two faces, and on one face is the symbolic figure of Palizzolo, on the other face we see the image of the representatives De Ambris, Chiesi, and Turati, under surveillance by the state police.” In the wake of a particularly strident speech by De Felice, one of the leading figures in the obstructionist movement, Pelloux was moved to admit that Milan was offering “a lesson, a bitter lesson for us all.”⁴² The shock wave of the exploding scandal, for that matter, also struck the government in the person of Mirri, who was forced to tender his resignation when the public prosecutor Venturini, whom Mirri had violently attacked in Milan at the trial, handed over to the newspaper Il Tempo a number of letters dating from 1894 in which General Mirri had demanded the release from prison of the mafioso Saladino, who had close ties to Crispi’s followers.⁴³ On 8 December, while rumors were spreading that Palizzolo had fled the country (in fact, he was still in Sicily), Pelloux blocked all telegraph lines between Rome and Palermo and, trampling on proper legal procedure, managed to bring about an immediate vote in the Italian parliament authorizing Palizzolo’s arrest, which was promptly carried out without a magistrate’s warrant.

This was a significant problem, considering the Palermo affiliations of the now jailed member of parliament, Palizzolo. As had been the case so often in the past, there was a clear disconnect between the police and the magistrature, which (as the Giornale di Sicilia noted) “rather than serving as the natural ally and supporter of the police, actually hinders its action, rendering it powerless and ridiculous.”⁴⁴ The delegato di PS Lancellotti—indicted for abuse of power after the members of the cosca (Mafia family) that he had investigated were all acquitted, “as usual,” for lack of evidence—revealed that one of those mafiosi said openly to him that he felt much safer as long as Judge Pezzati, a friend of Palizzolo, was in Palermo.⁴⁵ Palizzolo, from prison, repeatedly stated that he placed “all his hopes, all his trust” in the public prosecutor.⁴⁶ The resistance that Cosenza was displaying in response to the pressure of the minister of justice of the new Saracco government, Emanuele Gianturco,⁴⁷ threatened to foment a clash between the executive power and the judiciary, especially once the public prosecutor decided to himself undertake the bill of indictments, since he did not trust the prosecution, which clearly thought the defendants were guilty. In the end, Cosenza was forced to bring Palizzolo and Fontana to trial, but the charges were such that they constituted a sort of impassioned plea on their behalf. In this atmosphere of divisions, pressures, paradoxes, and new and far more serious suspicions, the trial of Bologna got under way.

“Palizzolo was good-hearted, kind, affectionate, a poet in his spare time, a little vain, quite loquacious, incapable of keeping a secret, and hence incapable of ordering someone to carry out a murder.”⁴⁸ This is the portrait that Palizzolo’s defense team painted of him. In fact, he was a colorless individual, who indulged in old-fashioned oratory that veered off into almost ridiculous effects, at least to the sophisticated ears of a Milanese journalist who listened to him speak at the Bologna trial: “He speaks leaning on a chair, with a tragic stance, abounding in gestures, modulating his voice, sometimes sweetly, at other times gravely, and occasionally impetuously, with an evident attempt to achieve dramatic effects.” The defendant’s tone became gentler when he explained his own degree of influence: “I was the only member of parliament accessible to my constituents…. I lived among the people and came down to their level, doing my best to be their adviser and friend. And the people felt gratitude.”⁴⁹

As the defense had little or no reluctance to admit, Palizzolo, the administrator of charitable organizations, the member of a countless array of civic commissions, and member of town and provincial councils, had created a network of clients that included people from every walk of life. Among them, therefore, were also a number of mafiosi of whom he made use “in the elections,”⁵⁰ not unlike any number of other parliamentarians. In certain points, this interpretation converges with that of Gaetano Mosca, who handed it down to posterity, sanctifying it with the seal of approval of a great intellectual:

In Mosca’s view, then, we are not dealing with a criminal, but rather with the typical product of expanded suffrage, one of the homines novi (new men) who take up politics as a profession, accustomed to winning the consensus of the constituents with a practice of performing small favors for a small-scale clientele. In practical terms, Mosca downgraded the family capo to clientele capo, in order to render more acceptable the evident collaboration between him and Rudinì and Codronchi. He thus depicted Palizzolo as one of those petty bourgeois parvenus against whom the marquis of Rudinì, his political mentor, often railed.⁵²

Palizzolo in fact had created for himself a sizable fortune through the purchase of state-owned property. Still, he was not a “new man,” as we can divine from the aristocratic attribute of cavaliere that was frequently used in accompaniment to his surname. He became a member of the Italian parliament in 1882, a date that was emblematic of the expansion of Italian suffrage. Still, he was no pro-Crispi democrat. Instead, he was a regionalist, a leading member of the Palermo party that, as we know, was focused on the general issue of the post-Risorgimento “perturbance.” The investigation that was conducted into his career takes us back to the crucial years of 1876–1877 and flatly contradicts any sugary portraits of his loyalties. Instead, we clearly see him as a manutengolo, or abettor, of the brigands Valvo, De Pasquale, and Leone, and an unwilling collaborator of Lucchesi and Malusardi. In later years as well, Palizzolo proved to have been involved in episodes of brigandage, among them the kidnapping of Emanuele Notarbartolo (1882).⁵³ Many threads of evidence lead to this member of parliament. It was a client of Palizzolo’s who obtained for the bandits the bersagliere uniforms in which they disguised themselves. After the ransom had been paid, the bandits hid out on farmland adjoining one of Palizzolo’s properties in Villabate. Through a mysterious intuition, it was none other than our old friend, detective Di Blasi, who uncovered their hideout. According to Girolamo De Luca Aprile, it was the usual mechanism at work: Bardesono, feeling the pressure of public opinion as well as that of Depretis, must have “bared his teeth at Palizzolo,”⁵⁴ persuading him to cooperate.

The manutengolo was a certain Giuseppe Fontana (son of Rosario), who in 1882, in Villabate and “over a certain expanse of territory that extends all the way to the boundaries of the adjoining province [Messina] … exercises uncontested mastery.” In 1866, he was subjected to the special security regimen of ammonizione, and in 1873, he wound up in prison for murder, where he waited confidently for his liberty to be restored through the efforts of “individuals of distinguished social standing.” In the 1880s, he was sent into internal exile, once on the island of Ventotene and twice on the island of Ustica, where Palizzolo came to pay him a visit and succeeded in obtaining his liberation.⁵⁵ Fontana was a cousin of Giuseppe Fontana (son of Vincenzo, identified as the killer of Notarbartolo). Another link between Palizzolo, the member of parliament, and the cosca (Mafia family) of Villabate was Filippello from Caccamo, formerly a manutengolo, or abettor, of Leone, who was ordered to move there in 1875 by none other than Palizzolo. Nearly all of them were previously identified as supporters of brigands. The members of the fratellanza (brotherhood), said by the police to hold meetings between Villabate and Ciaculli, devoted themselves to extortion, robbery, cattle theft, murder of alleged spies, as well as political activity carried out on behalf of the mayor Pitarresi—as well as Palizzolo.

The sphere of operations and influence of this association of wrongdoers is not, however, restricted to the territory of Villabate alone. Instead it extends over the neighboring borgate of Palermo, to Ficarazzi and to Misilmeri, and its numerous offenses nearly invariably went unpunished due to the terror that the organization inspired in witnesses and in the victims as well who, rather than exposing themselves to certain death, preferred to suffer their losses in silence.⁵⁶

Responsibility for the 1882 kidnapping can be assigned in accordance with this territorial logic, inasmuch as the location of the kidnapping itself (Caccamo) and the place where the brigands holed up after collecting the ransom (Villabate) had only one thing in common: the patronage of Palizzolo. In 1892, this area was not part of his electoral district. In particular, the Albergheria, a quarter of Palermo where he boasted an especially fervent constituency, is located in the historic center of the city. Both Mosca and the defense team cited that location with special emphasis in a bid to debunk the idea that he had any ties to the Mafia, which of course is located primarily in the borgate, while in the older urban quarters, the criminality tends instead to assume the configuration of ricottaro, or exploiter of prostitutes, that is, pimp.⁵⁷ The argument points us instead to the time when Palizzolo first ran in Caccamo, and in any case it may implicate connections quite different from mere electoral ties. In Caccamo, just as in the area to the southeast of Palermo, in Mezzomorreale, Ciaculli, and Villabate, Palizzolo owned land, and therefore had relations in the milieux of the guardiani (rural watchmen), the gabellotti (renters and sublessors of parcels of farmland), and the fontanieri (or water administrators). Here we might well point to the more general category of the bond linking mafiosi and landowners, were it not for the fact that Palizzolo was not a sufficiently large landowner to employ—as, however, he did—numerous full-time salaried employees, “all ready and willing to commit crimes …, even though, as at Inserra, the revenue of the estate was insufficient to pay the salary of the castaldo, or agricultural administrator: we might say that he maintained these patches of land for no other reason than to give work to convicts!”⁵⁸

In this connection, the Miceli murder can provide some illumination. Palizzolo was charged in this murder as well as in the Notarbartolo murder.⁵⁹ The scene of the crime was the enormous “Rocca di Monreale” estate, whose owner, Marianna Gentile, died in 1873, leaving as the principal (but not sole) heir her nephew: a highly intricate situation, because there were no fewer than five hundred interested relatives, some of them receiving sizable bequests, while others contested the validity of the will. Palizzolo acquired the rights to a substantial number of shares of the inheritance and invested a disproportionately large sum, given the loss-making operations of the farm, the modest income, and the generally chaotic conditions of its workings. Nonetheless, he failed to complete his sweep of the inheritance on account of “the costs of … administration and legal representation, the greed of many who had already laid hands on their inheritance, and the shortage of resources.”⁶⁰ He therefore altered his tactics, working to achieve an agreement of some sort and striving to prevent the introduction of Francesco Di Liberto into the estate. Di Liberto had been appointed a gabellotto by the court-appointed administrator. In consideration of the “many affiliations” of the member of parliament, Palizzolo, Di Liberto withdrew “in the interests of quiet living.”⁶¹

Working to block his ambitions was Francesco Miceli, fattore (overseer) of the Villa Gentile, an individual who was “courageous, strong, and industrious in his attempts to keep farmers honest.” By family tradition as well he was not the sort of man who could be easily intimidated. He was the son of Turi Miceli, leader of the squads of Monreale of 1848, 1860, and 1866. Palizzolo stated that he had no fear of “Miceli’s Mafia” and announced that he “would bring people to the estate to keep him in his place.”⁶² Among those “people” were a pair of rough customers named Nicolò Trapani and Filippo Vitale, the latter a convict sentenced to internal exile serving under Malusardi, capo of the Mafia of Altarello di Baida. Miceli continued to bring criticisms of the management of Palizzolo and his protégés, persuading along the way some of the heirs not to sell their property. Nor did he show any signs of fear when Palizzolo, member of the Italian parliament, boasted of his past relations with the bandit Leone. Miceli also failed to soften his position when a revolver bullet narrowly missed his head. He only gave up when a shotgun blast struck him dead on 17 July 1892. After his death, Palizzolo’s men had free rein and turned the Gentile estate into a key point in the network of tobacco smuggling and cattle rustling, along the route that ran from the interior to Palermo. For instance, animals stolen from Sciara, about 30 kilometers (20 miles) from the capital, Palermo, were found there in 1889. Also, a girl who was kidnapped and then released through Palizzolo’s mediation was brought to Sciara.⁶³

This may help explain the lack of economic sense in Palizzolo’s business affairs, and it may also help us to understand why Francesco Paolo Vitale, who was born into a well-to-do family, was willing to live and work there as a modest guardiano along with his cousin Filippo. This was not so much a farming operation run with mafioso personnel as it was a strategic marshalling point for criminal activities. Palizzolo did not deal with mafiosi as a landowner or a politician. Rather, he viewed property and politics as links in the relations among the cosche (Mafia families), making him a large-scale coordinator on a subprovincial scale. Already for some time, the police had considered it a solid piece of information that Palizzolo was the “patron of the Mafia of the Palermo countryside and especially the southern and eastern sectors.”⁶⁴ But it was during the trial in Milan, and to an even greater degree, during the Bologna trial, that his role emerged most clearly, with no uncertain outlines. Aside from the initiative by the civil plaintiffs, the credit for this outcome should go to Ermanno Sangiorgi, the one-time persecutor of the family, or Cosca dell’Uditore, who in August 1898 Prime Minister Pelloux appointed questore of Palermo, alongside the prefect Francesco De Seta, to wage the battle against the member of parliament, Palizzolo, and the Mafia.

In the questura, the anti-Palizzolo faction reared its head once again. Sangiorgi arranged Palizzolo’s arrest even before the recalcitrant Cosenza issued a warrant. Sangiorgi also cut through the delays in taking Fontana into custody; Fontana had been hired by the prince of Mirto to challenge the depredations visited on that aristocrat’s inland properties by the brigand Varsalona, and Sangiorgi summoned the noble gentleman to his office and even threatened to jail him if he failed to produce Fontana. Fontana thereupon turned himself in, but to the gentleman and not to the police. In other words, he surrendered at the Sangiorgi home (and not in the questura), turning up in the prince’s carriage, accompanied by his lawyer. The ritual was described in the press as the sort of negotiation that is carried on “between equal powers.” “That prince has properties and large landholdings in many different provinces across Sicily, and arresting Fontana would have been a very difficult undertaking,” De Seta said in justification. “Here it is no source of shame for a landholder, even an honest landholder, to garrison his property with guards and extend his protection, with this end in view, to individuals linked to the Mafia.”⁶⁵ Once again, it was the questore, in both Milan and Bologna, who testified to Palizzolo’s “willingness to commit crimes” and who extracted from the archives of his office documentary evidence of the pressures exerted by the member of parliament, Palizzolo, on behalf of a great number of mafiosi. Those documents became the strongest argument available to the civil plaintiffs. Meanwhile, both questore and prefect dissolved all “commissions and administrative boards of which Palizzolo was a member” and managed the political elections of 1900, in which the convicted member of parliament ran for office, “at the behest of his numerous and eager clientele,” and victoriously supported the lawyer Giuseppe Di Stefano Napolitano, a candidate who had all the right qualities: “He was young, wealthy, respected in the courts and throughout the city, and new to politics.”⁶⁶

The vox populi had for some time “insisted that there were links” between the Notarbartolo case and other murders, “both typical and characteristic,” speculating on how to explain all the various elements “without relying upon the idea of an association, or at least a network of criminal interests.”⁶⁷ The old questore, Farias, had already begun investigations; the new questore reached out for old contacts and, “under the seal of professional secrecy,” obtained information about a plant for the production of counterfeit banknotes; he identified its location, raided it, and confiscated the equipment and arrested the counterfeiters. The same informer at this point provided a key with which to solve the interpretation of other crimes.⁶⁸ There reappeared, as during the time of the Amorosos and the stoppagghieri, a deus ex machina, the superinformers, the anonymous “reliable source” who “can and must be trusted implicitly.”⁶⁹ This informer led the authorities by the hand and painted a picture of the “shadowy partnership” operating behind the individual crimes. The occasion offered by the Notarbartolo case led Sangiorgi to attempt to demolish with a single grand blow the mafioso power, providing elements of understanding that by their character of completeness and detail are unparalleled. In thirty-one handwritten reports, totaling 485 pages, composed between November 1898 and February 1900, the questore laid out a description of a major organization, focusing on its hierarchies and its crimes:

The names, well known to us (and to Sangiorgi), of the Giammonas, the Siinos, the Bonuras, and the Biondos, represented the leadership of the organization. We find Gaetano Badalamenti, who was already a leading figure in the feud with the Amorosos. The “mastermind” remained Antonino Giammona, “who provides leadership in the form of advice, grounded in his long experience as an old ex-convict, and instructions on how to commit murders and create defensive positions.”⁷¹ The operative management was placed in the hands of the younger members, Giuseppe Giammona for Passo di Rigano and Francesco Siino for Malaspina. Francesco Siino also served as the capo, or boss, of the organization as a whole. Apparently, it consisted of some 670 members, scattered among the “groups” established in the borgate that surrounded the capital to the southwest (the Conca d’Oro, to use the official name), while the questura was unable to prove that it extended its authority into the provinces. Neither did the capos of the cosche in the area that runs from southeast of Palermo to the sea participate in the summit meetings, nor were they involved in the bloody wars within the organization itself. In particular, the followers of Palizzolo were left out: the mafiosi of Villabate and the intermediaries of the significant reconciliation between Palizzolo himself and the Mafia boss of Settecannoli, Salvatore Conti, yet another of Codronchi’s town councilors of 1897 who, having attempted to break free, wound up being forced to kiss the hand of the member of parliament, Palizzolo. Their names are Salvo Saitta, Francesco Motisi, Filippo Vitale, and Salvatore Greco.⁷²

It is in any case worth noting the degree of acrimony with which “Calpurnio,” a hack writer guided by Palizzolo, covered the roundups and arrests of 1900: “Throughout Palermo, it was with horror that we recall the trial that implemented a vast criminal conspiracy stitched together by Sangiorgi! Hundreds of unfortunates languished in prison, and when they had been reduced to poverty and they had served the few months of their sentence, what irreparable ruins they found once they set foot once again in their homes, back among their loved ones!”⁷³

As De Seta put it, “the Mafia … was reduced to silence and inaction.”⁷⁴ The trial for criminal conspiracy that was held in 1901 ended, however, with a great many acquittals and a few very light sentences. This result prompted a comment from Sangiorgi, pointing to circumstances and relationships that are, however, unfortunately all too obscure to the modern reader. “It could not have gone otherwise, if those who indicted them in the evening rose in their defense the following morning.”⁷⁵ In the absence of a pentito willing to provide sworn testimony in court, the associative nature of the Mafia remained a thesis impossible to prove to a jury.

According to Sangiorgi, we are in the presence of a centralized organization. Perhaps we should actually speak of a federation among the cosche of the borgate. Here, too, it would be appropriate to wonder whether the police officials behind this depiction of matters were not exaggerating their information in order to accommodate the laws concerning criminal conspiracy, with a view to increasing the alarm already spreading among the government authorities. However, the judicial sources did not provide much greater assurances of objectivity, but for the opposite reasons, given that the obstacles to bringing maxiprocessi (maxitrials) to trial might well lead the magistrates to prosecute individual crimes and to refrain from investigating more complex and subterranean structures.⁷⁶

In fact, the questura might perhaps have been overstating the case in claiming that the Mafia’s infrastructure extended to a provincial scale; but there was no exaggeration in pointing out the ties linking the various groups in the western Palermo area. That linkage is evident from the overall array of circumstances documented and from the very history of the Mafia of the borgate, extending back to 1875. There are those who might question the highly formalized nature of these criminal organizations: the “members,” who regularly pay cash dues and who assemble in regular meetings to make especially important decisions; the fact that in some cases suspected traitors were offered an opportunity to defend themselves before those same assemblies;⁷⁷ the ritual nature of murders, which whenever possible were to be perpetrated collectively; the election of capi, sottocapi, and capo supremo—bosses, underbosses, and overlord. The natural response would be to point out the resemblance between this structure and the structure described in the descriptions provided by the various pentiti (Buscetta, Contorno, Calderone, and others) for the 1860s, 1870s, and 1880s. Judge Giovanni Falcone and the questore Sangiorgi—separated by a full century in time—were both able to state that there existed ties of coordination between the leaders of organizations with the same territorial base. The Mafia leadership required a proxy from its membership, and therefore an electoral mechanism and a body of laws. Of course, the balance of equilibrium governing such a structure was highly unstable, and this particular juridical system, more than other such systems, was liable to be subverted through the use of raw force. Consensus and conflict constituted two cyclical phases, one organic and the other critical, in the life cycle of individual cosche and, to an even greater degree, in the context of the coordination among a number of cosche. Here, too, the processes that operated at the end of the nineteenth century worked pretty much like those at play in the 1970s. Mafia wars brought about new states of equilibrium, shattering age-old alliances: in the case at hand, the alliance between the Giammonas and the Siinos.

The conflict came to a head in December 1896, when the discovery of a first clandestine printing shop created economic difficulties and reciprocal mistrust. Nor was the situation resolved by the vicious and blind vendetta carried out upon the young daughter of the suspected spy, the tavern-keeper Giuseppa Di Sano.⁷⁸ The reputation of Francesco Siino began to decline, and the Giammonas, the Biondos, and the Bonuras, capos, respectively, of the cosche of Passo di Rigano, Piana dei Colli, and Perpignano, began to question his leadership—“since they were all well-to-do people with substantial reputations within the Mafia, they were unwilling to accept Siino’s superiority.” Siino, in turn, during a general meeting held in January, exclaimed: “All right then, because I am no longer accorded the respect that is due me, let each group think as it wishes and fend for itself.”⁷⁹ This marked the beginning of a phase of recurring territorial violations and reciprocal provocations. “Among the laws of the Mafia,” noted Sangiorgi, “there is the rule of respect for the jurisdictions of others, and infraction of that rule constitutes a highly personal insult.”⁸⁰ Once all attempts at peacemaking (we have no idea how sincere those efforts might have been) had been exhausted, there began an “unequal battle for resources and power,” in which the Giammonas were victorious, as a result of their superior economic and military resources, the greater number of adherents to their faction, and the unidentified protection in high places that they were said to enjoy. “We counted our own numbers,” Francesco Siino was forced to admit following the murder of his nephew Filippo, “and we have counted the numbers of the others: there are 170 of us, including the cagnolazzi (aspiring mafiosi), and there are five hundred of them…. We must make peace.”⁸¹ The surrender took the concrete form of the Siinos’ renunciation of the “front” of the guardianìe that they had formerly controlled, and the flight to Livorno of Francesco Siino himself, the clan’s capo.

The concluding phase of the Mafia war was intertwined with the police roundups and sweeps that hit the Giammona faction especially hard. Some of the information that Sangiorgi possessed, for that matter, could have come from nowhere other than the interior of the Mafia, which illuminates the methods whereby “the questura … silently penetrated into the organism of the Palermo Mafia.”⁸² The identity of the mysterious informer leads back to the usual factional structure that involved sectors of the Mafia and sectors of the state. From the very beginning of their disagreement, the Giammona group accused Siino of being “in league with the questura.” One mafioso shouted, immediately following his arrest, “I know that the cause of the persecution of so many sons of good mothers is none other than that infamous cop-lover Francesco Siino, but, by the blood of the Madonna, we shall not rest until we have exterminated him and all his ilk.”⁸³

The war was not especially bloody: four dead and several more wounded, all on the Siino side, and only a tiny portion of the murders attributed to the organization by Sangiorgi. Those murders formed part of the everyday activity of the cosche, which consisted of a total control of all economic transactions carried out in the territory of the borgate in order to impose “castaldi, or agricultural administrators, guardiani, labor, gabelle, prices for the sale of citrus and other products of the soil.”⁸⁴ Among the 218 mafiosi documented in close detail in the Sangiorgi Report, the most sizable group was that of the full-time, salaried employees in charge of guarding and supervising agricultural operations: there were forty-five of them, an assortment of giardinieri (or keepers of a citrus grove), custodi (custodians), curatoli (guards), and castaldi (agricultural administrators), and to them we should add the six mechanics who were in charge of the steam engines used to pump water. We then find twenty-six landowners, who owned giardini, or citrus groves, land, and rural estates, who had in many cases only recently attained the status of landowners (an element that here as elsewhere was emphasized by the questura); that is to say, they were of the civil class and had received academic diplomas. Another twenty-five individuals could be classed under the heading of intermediaries: dealers, smugglers, middlemen, businessmen and manufacturers, and gabellotti, while there were twenty-seven laborers, farmers, and herders. The eleven goatherders and the seven teamsters represent a typical category, providing links between the town, the hinterland, and the countryside. Then there were small businessmen and wage earners of various sorts: innkeepers, bakers, pasta makers, haberdashers, cobblers, shop porters, bricklayers, masons, stone carvers, and so on. A comparison with the provincial Mafia of Termini and Cefalù not only shows the obviously greater presence of urban characters, but especially the greater specialization in protective roles (for instance, the category of campieri, or rural custodians, and watchmen). We might say that the rural Mafia more generally reflects the social structure; in fact, I have been obliged to remove from the comparison the “first category” of grand notables present in the provincial lists, as they would not have had any counterparts in the Palermo organization, which was more compact, both in social and in functional terms.

“Ordinary people, in the countryside and the city”⁸⁵ were the individuals whom the Notarbartolo affair brought (or brought back) to public attention. Once again, the social hierarchy corresponded to the criminal hierarchy, and custodians and dealers/smugglers, landowners, and gabellotti formed something close to the entire governing body. According to Mosca, “the social status of the most influential members of the cosche is somewhat more elevated than that of the poorer sector of the general Sicilian population; only rarely, however, does that ruling class of the Mafia reach the level of the middle class.”⁸⁶ Here, as is his custom, the political scientist did his best to defuse the issue in a display of a certain ideological prudishness in the face of a concept like that of the middle class, a concept that was so crucial to the symbolism of moderate liberalism and for that very reason employed by Franchetti previously with specific and polemical intent. This was indeed a middle class, though it had only recently risen to that standing and its elevation remained suspect.

Even in the ancient center of Palermo, among the “alleys and lanes of the Castro and Albergheria quarters” (the heart of Palizzolo’s electoral constituency), “ancient and stratified” organizations operated, composed of beggars, thieves, and pickpockets and cutpurses, often underaged, burglars, prostitutes, and pimps or ricottari. “Parallel to the hierarchy of persons is the hierarchy of crime,” and the leadership belonged to those who ran bordellos and gaming houses, the fences and receivers of stolen goods who operated flourishing businesses based on “self-proclaimed lending agencies or pawn shops.”⁸⁷ A few years later, a vast organization was reported, diffused throughout the city, and devoted to robbing coach drivers.

On the whole, this street variety of criminal operations appears to be quite distinct, by social makeup and by function, from the Mafia of the giardini and the borgate with its hierarchy of landowners, smugglers and dealers, guardiani, and fontanieri. Only a closer examination can show the differences between the western sector of the hinterland (the Conca d’Oro) and the eastern sector (Villabate, Mezzomorreale, etc.). First, it would appear that in the former case (street Mafia) the powerful organizational bonds controlled by the Mafia itself represented a different reality than that constituted in the second case by the large-scale political broker. It is true, of course, that the emergency of the Palizzolo case led to a closer focus on local politics, which, in the western sector, more extensively examined by Sangiorgi, led only to a generic disdain for the protection that “members of parliament, senators, and other influential individuals” provided the mafiosi, “and subsequently, in exchange, were protected by them and defended.”⁸⁸ In any case, it should be noted that Villabate and Monreale, in contrast with the borgate, were in dependent townships where the Mafia party could directly engage in the takeover of local power, while in the context of the larger city of Palermo, the Mafia as an organization was obliged to take into account more complex interests and political aggregations. The groups from the eastern sector of the hinterland then displayed a lesser degree of territorial and criminal specialization, making use of more extensive networks of relations, at least along the line running from Caccamo and Sciara to Palermo through Ciaculli and Monreale. These towns not only subsisted on prosperous and intensive agriculture; they also constituted the portal to the interior of the island, while the immediate point of reference for the entire Conca d’Oro was the city of Palermo. A comparative analysis of the crimes committed by the two criminal organizations, respectively, to the east and the west of the capital, shows that on the east there was a greater abundance of “common” crime (robberies, kidnapping, cattle theft), while in the west what prevailed were functions of “order-keeping” (guardianìa; commercial brokerage).

We should not overstate the case, of course. Even on the eastern side of Palermo we find the typical murder of a middleman. Fontana provides favorable rates for the repayment of a debt, thus preventing the forfeiture of his brother-in-law’s giardino.⁸⁹ Filippello can put on the appearance of a proponent of law and order, not only in the defense of his patron Palizzolo but also that of such individuals as Gaetano Focher, the inspector from the monte di pieta (charitable lending and pawn institution) of Palermo, who sent him to Altavilla to take possession of property from a bourgeois who was clearly reluctant to pay his debts. The former manutengolo, or abettor, of Leone does no more than explain to the former landowner that there is such a thing as downward mobility, urging him “no longer to avail himself of the funds of Focher that had been seized, because otherwise things would turn out badly for him.” Then he left the village, having impounded the estate, leasing it for the benefit of the local Mafia capo.⁹⁰

On the other hand, smuggling and passing counterfeit bills, robberies, and extortion letters were all crimes extensively practiced in the Conca d’Oro as well. However, and this may be no coincidence, it was neither Siino nor Giammona who killed Notarbartolo. The events described in the Sangiorgi Report depict a Mafia that stayed “in its place.” We will not speak of a “plebeian” criminality, as does Marcella Marmo, depicting a nineteenth-century Neapolitan camorra that attempted to “caccià l’oro de’ piducchie” (literally, “dig gold out of lice”), meaning that it exploited the commercial transactions of the poor and skimmed a take from salaries. Percentages skimmed off of small-scale business activities, the componenda or kickback for resolving such cases of extortion, and for obtaining the return of petty thefts, also existed in Palermo, but for the most part they involved the quarters of the inner city.⁹¹ The Mafia of the borgate, the terminal point of a wealthy economy, lived on the relationships among small-scale criminality, the middle class, and the upper classes, an interstitial phenomenon in which contact between the world of criminals and the world of the highest classes was limited to certain milieux. There was never a case of a member of the upper classes being murdered. Or rather, there was one case only, in which a lawyer who attempted to obtain compensation for unpaid gabelle was wounded by a rifle shot.⁹² The response to an excessively independent-minded landowner was always that of a general boycott and ostracism, or else a chain of murders that created a vacuum around him. When Senator Eugenio Olivieri appointed a cousin as overseer to reduce the depredations of the mafioso curatolo, the cosca did its best to discredit the interloper through various means and worked to ensure that for years he was unable to hire a guardiano, but it never physically harmed him. If he had been a giardiniere (or keeper of a citrus grove) instead of a townsman, the outcome would have been far different. Even the distinctive “message” sent by the damaging of trees could only be conveyed once for each giardino because, if it were repeated, it would constitute an insult to the landowner, and no longer to the gabellotto or the guardiano.⁹³ This subtle aspect of the ritual once again points to the caution and prudence with which intermediaries interacted with the upper classes.

The men who drafted the report said that they were certain that the function of the Mafia as an organization was to restrict the right to private property. Still, they could not conceal the fact that it was precisely the defense of private property that served as the underlying motivation for most of the murders committed by the Mafia. For instance, that was the case with the four individuals murdered around the end of 1897, whose corpses were made to vanish in order to hinder the investigations and contribute to the myth of the Mafia’s omnipotence. There were also refined grace notes of misinformation, with eyewitnesses volunteering accounts of having seen the murdered men alive and well in Tunis, and letters from the vanished men arriving, again from Tunis, until finally the corpses were uncovered. At the time, the current Mafia term, lupara bianca, literally, “white shotgun,” meaning a Mafia murder in which the corpse is made to disappear, was not yet in use. Instead, the case was known as the caso dei quattro scomparsi (“case of the four vanished men”).

The first of the four was the baker Tuttilmondo, executed for stealing from his master. The second was Antonino D’Alba, innkeeper and member of the cosca of Falde. This time, we are talking about an individual who possessed a “small degree of authority,” based on “two strategic points”—one of the many inns or taverns in which the mafiosi meet, and a ware house in the Arenella, “a neighborhood that might well have been designed for smuggling.”⁹⁴ The innkeeper was the cousin of a certain Francesco D’Alba, who worked for Eduardo and Samuele Hamnett, important citrus merchants who belonged to the British colony that had transplanted itself in Palermo. The Hamnetts suspected their employee of being the author of certain “begging” letters, as well as the dynamite attack in September 1897 that targeted their home, as well as the homes of other manufacturers of allied products. This may have been an indicator of the tensions that in this period divided the various operators in the citrus fruit market.⁹⁵ In order to protect themselves, the Hamnetts mobilized a relative, Francesco Serio, gabellotto of the civil class, “who maintained relations of patronage and clientelism with the Mafia.” But when he entered into contact with the bosses of the Falde group, they realized that Francesco D’Alba was given information by his cousin: a betrayal that cost the innkeeper his life.⁹⁶

Last of all, there were Vincenzo Lo Porto and Giuseppe Caruso, coach drivers affiliated with the cosca of the Olivuzza. In the borgata of the Olivuzza stood the renowned villa of Ignazio Florio, the great shipowner and financier, scion of a business family who had married into the crème de la crème of Palermo’s aristocracy. Both halves of Florio’s personality—both the aristocratic half and the bourgeois half—aspired to tranquility and security; the guardianìa of the villa was entrusted to Pietro Noto, who with his brother Francesco was the capo of the local cosca. In the summer of 1897, relations between Lo Porto and Caruso and the Noto brothers—all at one time “close friends”—were rapidly deteriorating because, according to the coach drivers, the Notos had taken the lion’s share of the profits from the sum obtained by a “begging letter,” or extortion, that had been sent to Joshua Whitaker, another major British merchant and entrepreneur.⁹⁷ The two coach drivers decided to undertake a spectacular and provocative project: they would steal from Villa Florio a number of artworks of great value. Once again, the theft constituted above all an insult, a way of heaping scorn on the credibility of the organization and its capos, and possibly bring about a new leadership. This shows how the instability of the Mafia hierarchies exposed the members of the dominant classes, who wished to be in contact with an “order-bringing” Mafia, to involvement in criminal deeds that were hardly compatible with the quality of their status and reputations. Ignazio Florio, “surprised and indignant” over what had happened, personally demanded an explanation from Pietro Noto as the head of security for the villa and, more generally, of the quarter of Olivuzza. “The objective that the two coach drivers had set out to obtain, the humiliation of their boss and underboss, had been attained.”⁹⁸ And the Notos were obliged to undertake a negotiation that resulted (perhaps following the payment of a ransom) in the recovery of the loot, which mysteriously reappeared in the Florio villa, in the exact location from which it had vanished.

There followed a feigned truce between the coach drivers and the Notos. In reality, the Notos had called a summit meeting with the city coordinating committee, with the attendance as well of mafiosi from the province. During that meeting, the disrespectful rank-and-file mafiosi, who were habitual burglars and thieves, were accused of having operated outside of the control of the “society,” and in particular of having failed to contribute the percentage of the take that was due to it. The pair were sentenced to death, and, on the night between 24 October and 25 October, they were lured into an ambush and executed.

This time the organizational strategy, an astonishing collective execution carried out by some thirty individuals as an internal warning to the members of the cosche and the affiliated and neighboring structures, a shrewd mixture of true and false information in order to disorient the authorities, was unable to fully attain the desired goal. This was in part because omertà was more of an ideal model than an actual model of real-world behavior that could be relied upon in all circumstances. Caruso’s father, “without reluctance, both in private and in public,” explicitly denounced the responsibility of the Mafia for the killing and threatened to go to Rome to demand justice from the national government “if the local authorities failed to render justice in the face of such horrible murders.”⁹⁹ It took new and unmistakable intimidations to persuade him to moderate his protests. More interesting in this context, however, was the reaction of two women, the widows of Lo Porto and Caruso, because their story unveils the crucial point, the relations between the world of the violent and the upper classes.

Toward the end of November, roughly a month after the murders, Agata Mazzola, the widow of Lo Porto, walked up to Donna Giovanna d’Ondes Trigona in Florio (meaning Florio was her married name—translator’s note), the mother of the two young brothers, Ignazio and Vincenzo. Donna Giovanna was walking from her villa to the convent of the Sisters of Charity. Agata Mazzola asked her, in that context, for a little charitable assistance on behalf of her orphaned children and herself, now deprived of any means of support. Sangiorgi believed that the widow knew nothing of the theft from the villa. Perhaps, however, it is more plausible that the woman wished to clear up the situation with a desperate provocation. Signora Florio, however, remained unperturbed and brusquely replied: “Don’t bother me, because your husband was a thief who came to steal from my palazzo together with Caruso.”¹⁰⁰ Later, when Donna Giovanna emerged from the convent, the discussion resumed, this time with the participation of Caruso’s widow as well. The two widows claimed that their husbands had been murdered for refusing to take part in the Notos’ proposed plan to kidnap the young Vincenzo Florio, and therefore, not because they had insulted the illustrious family, but instead because they had insisted on showing the highest respect for the Florios. This was a blatant attempt to capture the proud matron’s benevolence, raising the stakes still more in the game against Pietro Noto and invoking the suspicion triggered by the violation of the villa’s security: “The thieves,” claimed Agata Mazzola, “were employed in your palazzo, where outsiders cannot think of entering.”¹⁰¹

This singular and public exchange between the widows of two coach drivers and the most renowned matron of upper-class Palermo shows a paradoxical fact. Of the two parties to the discussion, the party that was most accurately aware of the actual nature of the criminal act in question was not the widows of the two thieves, but the noblewoman. She was so fully involved in the order-keeping function of the Mafia as a structure that she considered the murderous punishment of the theft to be a normal course of events, provided that the two coach drivers had actually committed the theft for which they were murdered. The widows, on the other hand, could do nothing more than to deny that their husbands were guilty of that theft, and they never questioned the proper devotion of the lawless class to the upper classes in the society in which they lived. The unfortunate Sangiorgi was unable to place these relations within the context of the articles of criminal law, and specifically how to discuss a person of such great prestige and wealth:

Two eminent men of late nineteenth-century Palermo, Notarbartolo and Palizzolo, were both involved with the sordid mafiosi of Villabate in a grand plot involving murder. Why was the former director of the Banco di Sicilia murdered? The answer to this question is a decisive one, and not only for the straightforward solution of the murder investigation. This episode marked a fundamental turning point in the history of the Palermo Mafia: the involvement of an authoritative member of the ruling class in the violent dealings that had heretofore been reserved to the reciprocal relations among criminals implied a watershed transformation, and perhaps a shattering of the filter that had until then separated the two worlds, or perhaps we should call it the valve that had governed communications between those two worlds. For that matter, Palizzolo already represented a case that in his own time was unusual in the realm of relations between politicians and mafiosi. What remains to be identified is the common ground shared by these two radically diverse figures—the notable, famous for his moral integrity, and the politician, “much discussed” for his relations with brigands and criminals. That common ground was one on which Notarbartolo, who boasted that he had never had private dealings with Palizzolo, to the degree that he had refused to frequent social gatherings where he was invited,¹⁰³ was forced to set aside his haughtiness as a great aristocrat and, let us say, a respectable individual.

First of all, there is the field of the representative public institutions where, in fact, the first clashes between the two did take place in 1873, at the point of transition in the city government of Palermo between the clerical-regionalist coalition, in which Palizzolo was the commissioner of the food administration board, and the liberal administration led by Notarbartolo. At that point, the new mayor brusquely demanded that the former commissioner pay the sum of 3,625 lire that he owed the administration in relation to a purchase of flour.¹⁰⁴ But, beginning in 1875, Notarbartolo was the director of a major publicly owned bank, apparently sheltered from the most treacherous currents of the political system. He was placed in this office by the last of the right-wing prefects, Gerra, and was left there even after the “parliamentary revolution” because of his distinguished achievements in restoring the bank, in serious difficulties, to financial health.

As soon as he took office, the new director analyzed the reasons for this financial crisis according to the formula of an old-style moderate, in contrast with the blithe approach to finance seen elsewhere, and in support of a prudently deflationary line: “Perhaps the scale of credit issued [was] greater than needed, hence the fever for risky speculations of all sorts, which rather than helping, actually undermined the true and productive types of commerce.”¹⁰⁵ Later, modifying his judgment, he aimed instead at the excessive concentration of finances provided to two companies at risk, “La Trinacria” (a Palermo shipping company) and Genuardi (an Agrigento sulphur-exporting company), on account of the presence of individuals involved in these companies on the supervisory staff of the bank itself.¹⁰⁶

According to the bank’s charter, a government-appointed general manager served alongside a fifty-member general board of directors composed of representatives of the provinces and the chambers of commerce, an institution that theoretically represented the interests of a civil society and that established itself as a political and clientelistic counterweight to the powerful administrative structure of the bank. As Notarbartolo wrote in an 1889 letter to the minister of agriculture in the Crispi administration, Luigi Miceli, it had become increasingly “difficult if not impossible to administer and securely safeguard the interests of the institution,” because the general board of directors intended “to subjugate the executive management and the discount committees, … intrude into every field.”¹⁰⁷ The members of the board of directors had no banking expertise, but it was they “who were most active in the provincial, town, and commercial elections.” Indeed, “the aim of succeeding in obtaining a chair on the boards of directors and the discount committees of the Banco di Sicilia was the source in Sicily of electoral battles.” Even a “diplomatic” evaluation, offered in private to his son, Leopoldo, described a board composed of a few galantuomini (gentlemen), profiteers such as the Catanian Senator Tenerelli, and protectors of mafiosi and criminals such as the Messinese Orioles, and the Palermitans Figlia, Muratori, and Palizzolo.¹⁰⁸ “They consider,” he confided to the prince of Camporeale, “the Banco di Sicilia as a res nullius [ownerless property].”¹⁰⁹

The general manager’s concerns grew in the wake of 1887, when in southern Italy the economic crisis hit the publicly owned banks working on behalf of the land reform and indirectly hit the Banco di Sicilia and the Banco di Napoli (Bank of Naples), institutions that ensured those banks of rediscount. This meant the risk of returning to the plight of 1875, with the difference that now there was not a single major debtor affecting the available choices, but rather a number of small banks in trouble, a few of which had members of the board of directors, such as Todaro from Agrigento, Palermo from Messina, and even Muratori, as officers or shareholders, and therefore in the dual role of controllers and controllees.¹¹⁰

A few days after the first letter, Notarbartolo returned to the topic in a second letter to Miceli: “The general board of directors is leveling a personal opposition that cannot be described in any other terms. The more-or-less feigned battle has been going on for many years now…. Actually, of the four elected advisers on the Central Board, three (Marchese Ugo, Commendatore Palizzolo, and Figlia, Esq.) always voted against the proposals of the administration.”¹¹¹

Notarbartolo achieved a reform of the charter that would reduce the importance of the board and change the way its members were appointed, while in contrast emphasizing the group of officials that he had created. On the other hand, the support offered him by Miceli, a cabinet-level minister in the Crispi administration, might not necessarily have been enough to allow a supporter of Rudinì to ward off the influence of such faithful followers of Crispi as Figlia, Muratori, and even Tenerelli. In fact, Notarbartolo was forced to suffer considerable political isolation. On 23 April, two “personal” letters were pilfered from the minister’s desk, and through Palizzolo’s efforts they reappeared as copies in the 19 May session of the general board of directors, in the absence of the chairman. Since Tenerelli asked to see the originals, it was Muratori, after some hesitation, who showed them to him. At that point Palizzolo “attacked Notarbartolo, saying that he was incapable of judging himself and his colleagues, criticizing him as an abuser of his office because of the accusations he had made against board members who had been on the board for years. He suggested a vote of confidence, which was in fact taken under consideration.”¹¹² The vote of confidence was annulled by the minister (the general manager did not serve at the pleasure and confidence of the board of directors), and a criminal investigation was begun into the theft of the letters. Nonetheless, the measures asked by Notarbartolo were not adopted. In fact, on 6 February 1890, after months of uncertainty, Crispi ordered the dissolution of the administration of the Banco di Sicilia (Bank of Sicily), along with that of the Banco di Napoli (Bank of Naples).

The conditions of the two banks were, considering the period, fairly good; the government order was therefore perceived as unforeseen and unjustified. Girolamo Giusso, chairman of the Banco di Napoli, told the Italian chamber of deputies: “I feel as if I have wandered into a village of brigands, and as if I had just been stabbed in the gut…. Those decrees look to me like crimes!”¹¹³ Crispi eliminated two members of the old right wing, Giusso and Notarbartolo; it was paradoxical that they should have been charged with loading the banks with excessive exposure when it had been the government in the first place that had pushed the banks not to reduce their lending or issues.¹¹⁴ In other circumstances, for that matter, the two southern banks had offered their support, as in the case of the plan, much cherished by Miceli, of an Italo-British shipping company that would give southern Italy’s agricultural products access to the British market, following the breaking off of relations with France.

Notarbartolo had encountered some difficulties in managing this operation in August 1889: “The events of May and all that followed,” he wrote to Minister of the Post Office Pietro Lacava, “offer full grounds for the fear that the assembly is no longer willing to obey the minister’s wishes.”¹¹⁵ The issue, for that matter, was hardly likely to increase the chairman’s popularity in his hometown. In Bari, Catania, and Naples, the project had demonstrated the government’s attention to the exporting interests, but in Palermo the fears of the Navigazione Generale Italiana (NGI) over establishing a government-sponsored line outside of the monopoly that it held on a national scale were to provoke quite a different effect, as shown by the virulent attacks that immediately targeted the Banco di Sicilia; those attacks came from the press linked to the shipowners’ trust.¹¹⁶ Because of his support for Miceli, Notarbartolo found himself in front of the opposition to the city’s far more powerful lobby, a lobby that extended from the broad base of support of Casa Florio in the aristocratic and bourgeois circles, extending through the labor bloc and based on the shipyards and the Oretea foundry, constituting a transverse party that included nearly all of the municipal political world: the followers of Crispi, first of all, but then the entire conservative front, and even Colajanni and the “Florio-brand” socialists.

This lobby, which extended its tentacles from Palermo toward Genoa and everywhere else that Navigazione Generale Italiana had any interests, employed Raffaele Palizzolo as an instrument, along with the follower of Crispi, Rocco de’ Zerbi (another questionable individual), both in the parliamentary battles for state funding and against the antimonopoly reforms that were periodically planned and proposed. Those reforms had their most authoritative supporter in the person of Giolitti.¹¹⁷ In this case, Palizzolo, a sworn enemy of the Palermitan followers of Crispi, found himself aboard a ship that was helmed by none other than Crispi; this is in contrast with Mosca’s simplistic view, but also in contrast with the depiction of the southern Italian politician—or ascaro—described by Salvemini, given the ability to place himself in the intersection between the small-scale and large-scale circuits of political life.

Upholding the interests of the NGI in Italy’s parliament, with a mixture of historical references and learned quotations, Member of Parliament Palizzolo acquired the nationalist and labor party tones so typical of many other pressure groups. In 1885 he recognized “Florio and Rubattino as meritorious individuals who have performed immense services for the Italian fatherland.” He praised their altruism; he emphasized their contributions to the defense of the nation; and he defended their right to obtain public funding: “It is wrong to say ‘there is not enough money.’ One less battleship, the cry goes up all over the land, but don’t deny the merchant marine the aid it so greatly needs, this great national force, this great industry of our nation.”¹¹⁸ In February 1893, a few days after the murder of Notarbartolo, Palizzolo took the floor again on behalf of state support for NGI, painting an apocalyptic picture of the results of blocking them: “Should this contract fail to receive approval, we shall see in the course of a single day one hundred six steamships lowering the Italian flag, and six thousand families, that is to say, twenty-four to twenty-five thousand individuals, left without food to eat, while millions and millions will cease to travel to our homeland; … it would constitute a national disaster.”¹¹⁹

Perhaps success for the Italian-British shipping company would also have been a disaster (but for whom?). Fortunately, following the expulsion of Notarbartolo, the Banco di Sicilia’s attitude toward the company gradually became increasingly chilly (certainly a contributing factor in its bankruptcy), especially once Giulio Benso, duke of Verdura, a loyal follower of Crispi and a shareholder in the Navigazione Generale Italiana, took over as director of the bank (February 1891). From that moment forward, relations between the largest bank in Sicily and the shipowners’ trust became increasingly close and frequent. In July, while the bitter political debate over the extension of the maritime conventions was under way, the new general manager began buying up shares, for the very substantial sum of 1.8 million lire (equal to dozens of billions of lire, or, today, tens of millions of Euros or dollars), and actually purchased 6,950 shares of NGI stock in order “to sustain the share price in the markets of Milan and Genoa.”¹²⁰ The first lot of shares (3,000 shares) was purchased on behalf of none other than Florio, who, however, did not make the transaction legal with a written order until the beginning of the following year, after one of the government-appointed board members, the duke of Craco, expressed the concerns of the various officers, who considered this sort of speculation illegal for a publicly held bank. In any case, this was the group that had been assembled by Notarbartolo and that had remained loyal to him, as the victors of 1889 knew full well. Since then, they had roundly criticized the “Notarbartolo faction,” made up of bank employees who were “arrogant and vain, elevated to the highest ranks of the bank by the favoritism of the late director.”¹²¹

It was they who had informed Notarbartolo of the new developments in the NGI affair: the purchases of 1892 were no longer being made on behalf of Florio, but, without any real collateral, on behalf of other, less illustrious individuals, such as a certain Salvatore Anfossi. Then a secret report was sent to Minister of the Treasury Giolitti, followed by an inspection entrusted to Commendator Biagini (the same one who three years before had uncovered the misdeeds of the Bank of Rome), who was rightly believed to be “guided by Notarbartolo”¹²² and who began to bring light to the intricate affair. Anfossi, an intimate of Palizzolo, served as a front: Member of Parliament Palizzolo, as an administrator of the bank itself and intimately acquainted with the NGI, was deeply involved with the operation of driving up the value of company shares and decided to turn the already shady affair, conducted with public money by Florio and by the duke of Verdura, to his own advantage. Biagini’s inspection threatened to ruin everything; behind that inspection loomed the shadow of Notarbartolo, who might well soon become the general manager again, in a phase in which the national government alternated between Crispi and Rudinì and Giolitti. Giolitti intended to reduce the disproportionate power of the shipowners’ trust.

“Anfossi,” Biagini declared, “who is nothing more than an exchange middleman, and not a member of the association of businessmen of the Chamber of Commerce, is of little value himself, leaves much to be desired in terms of personal ethics.”¹²³ It would therefore be unthinkable for the Banco di Sicilia to risk large sums of money based on the word of such an individual. Here, perhaps, the ministerial inspector remained at a superficial level, at least in comparison with the investigation of Antonino Cutrera, the delegato di PS–criminologist whom the questura sent to dig into Anfossi’s story. Cutrera discovered that the banks accepted the exchange agent’s guarantee even for large sums of money, even though he was widely known to be an individual “who was involved in all the shadiest operations of the business world.” He had no assets of his own, and yet he was a fiduciary for a number of British import-export companies involved in financing middlemen prior to the beginning of the citrus season. At the same time, Anfossi stocked up on the checks of other businessmen, which he then exchanged, taking a commission on each one.¹²⁴ Anfossi’s work as a middleman must indeed have been strategic if he was capable of turning into exporters individuals such as Antonio Rizzuto, aka Perez, and Pietro La Mantia, manutengoli, or abettors, and ex-convicts, well known to be deeply involved with the Mafia, both of whom had been rescued from “entanglements” with the law through Palizzolo’s intervention.¹²⁵ They had been involved in the citrus trade in partnership with Fontana precisely during the winter of the Notarbartolo murder. That had been in Tunisia, so as to provide the killer with a lavish, almost perfect alibi.

Anfossi played in the world of mafioso profiteering the same liaison role with Palizzolo that Filippello played in the world of Mafia banditry. The power of the Palermo cosche remained tied to the territorial control of the borgate, but the networks of relations and the business of the mafiosi rose to a far different scale. This range was linked first and foremost to their roles as trustees of the major merchants or landowners. Salvatore Di Paola, one of those sentenced to death in the Amoroso trial, moved from Palermo to the sulphur mines of the Agrigento district in the service of Signore Reys. In order to track down Fontana, the police were obliged to put the “squeeze” on a certain Santomauro and a certain Perricone, respectively, the administrator and the business agent of the prince of Mirto in Villafrati and in Agrigento.¹²⁶

In other cases, it was the charitable organizations concentrated in Palermo, but with large landholdings throughout the island, that constituted a vehicle for expanding the Mafia network, and it was within one of these structures that we find one of the Badalamentis (Bartolomeo) as far off as in the province of Catania, in Palagonia, the administrator and later the occult gabellotto of the large landholdings belonging to the Fidecommissaria “Principe di Palagonia”:

The Badalamenti family left a trail of corpses and engaged in profitable business ventures over an increasingly vast territory extending from Palermo to New York, in accordance with a tradition of converting custodians or watchmen into Profiteers. That tradition took Gaetano Badalamenti, già giardiniere (“formerly keeper of a citrus grove”), and turned him into an exporter of citrus fruit.¹²⁸ The former middlemen, lacking sizable capital of their own, established relations with shipowners such as the Florios or else with easygoing bankers like the Muratoris, the financiers of the Camera di commercio italo-americana (Italian American Chamber of Commerce), and the Jews who controlled the citrus auctions in New York City. This was the worst of the agricultural crisis that swept away the entire old generation of large-scale exporters, often of foreign birth, who established residence and set up business in Sicily before Italian unification. In Palermo, the growing fragmentation of the commercial structures was very evident: in 1892 there were eighty-one exporters in comparison with the thirty-nine exporters operating in the most important citrus marketplace in Sicily, Messina; there were a great many “speculators, who show absolutely no restraint … in their illegal trafficking.” Many demanded a closer examination of the criminal records of those speculators. One solution that might help to reduce the role they played could have been the establishment of bonded customs ware houses, but one attempt to do so in 1898 ended in failure because (as the Chamber of Commerce pointed out) the success of such a venture “would offend the powerful interests of loan-sharking organizations.”¹²⁹

Economics and politics, but especially the relationship between the two sectors, the profiteering at the end of the century, shattered the class-based configuration of the power structures of Palermo, but also of the Mafia, which for the first time, with Palizzolo and his intimate ties at both the top and the bottom of society, glimpsed a huge stake and reached out to grab it. “Whoever was interested in arranging for a report to vanish from the office of a cabinet-level minister, spending thousands of lire to do so, this time must have spent twice as much money to kill Notarbartolo,” a Mafia member stated without particular concern, speaking with Cervis in the aftermath of the murder.¹³⁰ In fact, someone capable of reaching the minister’s desk could also eliminate a troublesome scion of an age-old aristocracy. We therefore have a motive that ties together exceedingly diverse settings: the inland countryside of Sicily, the stamping ground of brigands, the gardens of Villabate, the beaches of Tunis, the branch offices of the Banco di Sicilia (Bank of Sicily), the office of Anfossi, and the far more luxurious offices of the Navigazione Generale Italiana, the stock exchange, or Borsa, of Milan, and the halls of the Italian parliament in Montecitorio. All of this takes on a logic all its own in relation to Sicily, to this new Italy at the end of the century, in which profiteering, the Mafia, and politics provoked a chain reaction in connection with the issue of banking, a crucial topic for a modernizing nation.

By this point, many years had passed since the murder, as well as since the scandal that had exploded in Milan. The intense involvement of public opinion in the first two trials was nothing more than a faded memory. The elements of evidence “were falling to the ground one after the other like the tiles of a decaying mosaic, and the tragic core that had endowed them with life was missing by now.”¹³¹ A single new important witness, Filippello, was summoned to testify by the civil plaintiffs, whose suspicions were aroused by the fact that he had not been called by the defense during the trial at Bologna. In fact, Palizzolo’s castaldo, or agricultural administrator, did represent the sole potential weak point in the front of omertà. In 1896, the castaldo had been wounded in an attack, according to numerous rumors, in the wake of a dispute with his partners over sharing the payment for the murder.¹³² A few days prior to his scheduled deposition, he was found in a Florentine pensione, hanging by the neck. The inquiry ruled it suicide. There followed a general acquittal for lack of evidence, and the Notarbartolo case was finally closed (23 July 1904).

Palizzolo returned aboard a steamer of the Navigazione Generale Italiana shipping line to Palermo, where he was given a hero’s welcome:

The martyrdom of the victim, beginning with the first calumny of the cowardly informers, would culminate, step by step, in the triumph of Justice. And thus triumphed Raffaele Palizzolo, after fifty-six months of excruciating martyrdom: a triumph circumfused by the glittering halo of his suffering and his Virtue. And this Suffering and this Virtue, consecrated with sublime abnegation, through the unprecedented torments of the previous five years, in a tribute to this mistreated and outraged Sicily, were the tear-stained laurels with which, in the sad hours of his durance vile, Raffaele Palizzolo was enabled to compose the garlands of his harsh torment; those Memories that made us quiver in horror, that make us recoil in infinite pity.¹³³

The paradox of this spreading rhetoric of martyrdom and persecution shocked, among others, Mosca, who responded that the supposed apotheosis “offended his sense of morality.” He went on: “Certainly, it was impossible or almost impossible to bring solid evidence against the man accused of the murders of Miceli and Notarbartolo, but the man was shown in the worst possible light, if not as a criminal at the very least a protector of criminals and even suspected of having relations with brigands.”¹³⁴ A pro-innocence movement had taken form well before the verdict in the Florence trial, put into operation by Palizzolo’s clientelistic network, and given the name of “Pro-Sicilia.” What was going on, in fact, was an attempt to assemble a broad consensus on the basis of the most low-minded regionalistic ideology. This movement pointed to Palizzolo, the member of parliament and mafioso, as yet another victim of the wrongs and oppressions visited upon the long-suffering island of Sicily. The “Pro-Sicilia” movement grew in strength and support, expanding well beyond the Palermo area, but over the course of its geographic expansion all references to the specific details of the Palizzolo case began to fade, while themes modeled on Nitti’s arguments concerning northern and southern Italy gradually prevailed, as did the free-market polemics concerning the “colonial market” and the other dynamics of the southern protest movement.¹³⁵ It was exactly the same as what had happened with “Nasism,” another, even larger Sicilianist movement that formed in relation to the cause of Nunzio Nasi, a Trapani-born cabinet minister who was accused of corruption. In these early years around the turn of the twentieth century, the Sicilian governing class increasingly relied on the regionalist theme because it could no longer drape itself in the great national function it boasted in the preceding phase, with Crispi and Rudinì, concerned as it was over the states of equilibrium that threatened to marginalize and penalize that class, in economic terms as well.

The rallying point of the alignment favoring Palizzolo was represented by L’Ora, the daily newspaper owned by the Florio family,¹³⁶ in a clear demonstration of an enduring political relationship that lasted throughout the array of hearings and trials. Presiding over the committee that presented Palizzolo as a candidate for parliament, though in 1900 he was still imprisoned, for his traditional district of Palazzo Reale, was none other than Signora Florio. Marchesano, who had planned to run in the same district, was apparently persuaded to desist by the promise of an electoral financing by the shipowning company. A singular transaction between the two opposing alignments may perhaps be explained with the subsequent hiring of the socialist leader to a position on the legal staff of the NGI. He later even took on the role of head mediator in the negotiations with Giolitti and the Bank of Italy.¹³⁷

Florio was interrogated in Bologna (through a rogatory letter) as a defense witness. Here is the account offered by the Palermo socialist newspaper La Battaglia:

This news item does not appear in any other source, and we can consider it an exercise in satire, justified, however, by the political stances taken by the great shipowner, who managed to remain miraculously exempt from the brawl. He was not involved, for instance, in the episode of the killing of the two coach drivers, evoked by the popular press as evidence of the power of “certain mafiosi in kid gloves” but attributed to a certain “gentleman of Palermo,” not otherwise identified.¹³⁹ It was only one of the prudent omissions made every time the well-known name of Ignazio Florio appeared: in the minutes of the trials, in the summation of Marchesano, or in the Memoirs of Notarbartolo, Jr., we find no reference to the NGI as part of the bloc of forces hostile to the murder victim, or at least as a political cohort of Palizzolo; while we have seen in what ways and how frequently the shipowning trust surfaces in the story, the pride and major industry of the cities of Genoa and Palermo.

Florio maintained active relations in every sector of the political landscape, including the socialists. Just a few years afterward, the popular bloc and Casa Florio would be described as the true trust of Palermo’s political life.¹⁴⁰ In this specific case, however, the operation being carried out was distinctly conservative in nature, aiming to restore to power the conservative forces that had been soundly defeated by the socialists and radicals in the administrative elections of July 1900. In the new elections in September, a result of the dissolution of the city council, that outcome was overturned by the success of a list of candidates with a strong monarchist focus, led by the prince of Camporeale. This turn of events was portrayed as a mending of divisions among the ruling class, triggered by the Notarbartolo-Palizzolo case, “to prevent the triumph of those who hope to turn Palermo city hall into a pulpit for anti-institutional propaganda, propaganda that would rail against the sacred patrimony of the ideas of family, homeland, and liberty.”¹⁴¹ The supporters of the “Pro-Sicilia” movement were also limited to the moderate forces in Sicily, almost entirely excluding the left wing. In contrast, the left wing proved to be a useful interclass component in the subsequent case of Nunzio Nasi and the larger mobilization on the issues of sulphur mining and the citrus industry. The “persecution” that Palizzolo suffered was, moreover, laid to a plot put together against a Sicilian member of parliament by northern Italians and by that “motley crew of police spies, highwaymen and extortionists, barroom slanderers and bordello libelers who usurp in Italy the honorable name of the Socialist Party.”¹⁴² It would not be the topic of the Mafia that would lend itself to a straightforward and untroubled communication between the conservative wing and the progressive wing of the Sicilian political landscape.

It is clear here how much time had passed since 1875. Concerning these themes, the regionalist stance, once the exclusive property of the Italian left, was inherited by the moderate forces, while the struggle against the Mafia, once a war horse of the Destra storica (historic right wing), became an integral part of the Italian left’s polemical arsenal. These political forces defined themselves in a radically different manner from the past: it was the extreme left, radical or socialist, that played in ideological terms the decisive role in managing the Notarbartolo affair. All the same, five years of discussion did not pass in vain, and by now the public, the common people who got their news from the daily press, could rightly think that behind the shadowy mysteries of Sicily could be found one of the interpretative codes for deciphering the history of Italy, shaken to its foundations by the explosion of the political and banking scandals.

As a tool for renewal, the moral question proved quite effective. On the other hand, in radically different situations involving radically different players, the major political transitions in the postunification history of Palermo were inevitably linked to anti-Mafia mobilizations. The offensive launched by Malusardi had marked the advent of the left wing in power; the Mori operation was the Fascists’ attempt to induce a significant shift in the mechanisms of political representation and the relationship between state and society. In a comparable intertwining, the Notarbartolo case demonstrated that the Mafia flourishes in an atmosphere of “normality” and began to be the subject of discussion in a climate of mobilization. Indeed, this very phenomenon has occurred in very recent years. “The moment of moral rebellion has arrived,” declared De Felice.¹⁴³ The moral issue alone at the turn of the century was capable of restoring energy and momentum to the urban socialist movement in the south, both the Palermo group and the Neapolitan group of “La Propaganda,”¹⁴⁴ and to the battle being waged against the various “mafias” and camorras. Eventually, that battle led to investigations into the “urban government corruption,” or “malgovernment,” in the major cities of southern Italy, an essential foundation for the Giolitti government’s operation of renewing the local political staff. In Sicily, in particular, there was an increasing trend toward the period of “popular blocs,” the new “open” system of alliances with which the far left offered to play a leading role in the political and administrative role of the early twentieth century. In this way, the “democratic and socialist elements on the island” attempted to complete the project of “reclamation of social terrain” that the leaders of the Italian Socialist Party (PSI) had assigned to them in the aftermath of the verdict of Bologna.¹⁴⁵

In reality, during the course of their populist experience, the former subversives who had converted to reform socialism did not display a moral profile much superior to that of their adversaries, just as the administrations under Giolitti did not stand out for their ethics, at least in the south, although they were more ethical (despite what is widely believed) than their predecessors had been. Northern radicals and socialists wavered between acknowledging the complexity of relations between state and society and a demonization of southern Italian society, concerned first and foremost, based on their experience of the Crispi-led reaction, that their civil Italy might be exposed to the contagion of a barbarous Italy, both corrupted and corrupting, an obstacle to the development of the country as a whole.

In the south, where there was no industry, no extensive agriculture, no initiative, no inborn vigor to found industries and undertake agriculture, there sprang up, out of an emulation for quick money, out of envy for the wealth of northern Italy, a breed of adventurers and conmen, who … sank their claws into the political life suddenly laid bare to their vanity and greed, and they invaded the administrations, began to connive with the banks, and they had as their minimalist and maximalist platform the program of selling themselves to the highest bidder. This sort of improvised barons, of whom De’ Zerbi was the brightest and most refined example, and Crispi the most ruthless and energetic (hence the king of the tribe, as in savage hordes, by divine right), attired in ceremonial cutaway coats, but beneath them, the bandolier of the old-style brigand, living on filth and in filth, they are the true political saprophytes of the nation.¹⁴⁶

It is only in appearance that these anthropologic observations concerning the southern political class were shared by the socialists of the north and those of the south, Turati and Salvemini, that is, on the interior of the same radical-positivist culture, shared with Lombroso and Colajanni. Here we encounter a crucial question: should the moral disease of southern Italy be laid simply to a “lower” level of civilization or to a national intertwining with the large system of power? And in any case, could the corruption of the ruling classes entail a negative judgment of an entire society? “To me—wrote Arturo Labriola, in [a] polemic with the Critica sociale—it appears a glaring defection from every criterion of historical materialism to believe that regions or nations taken as a whole can be considered corrupt or perfect [as] the chosen people and the damned people, elevated or rejected by the Lord.”¹⁴⁷

The Notarbartolo case offered a new opportunity to develop this theme. Faced with the balanced opinion of such moderate newspapers as Il Corriere della Sera, the radical press often gave signals of intemperance. Thus Alfredo Oriani, the republican and imperialist who was destined to be elevated to the empyrean as one of the forerunners of Italian Fascism, in an article headlined Le voci della fogna (“Voices from the Sewer”) called Sicily “a paradise inhabited by demons,” “a cancer on Italy’s foot, … a province in which neither customs nor laws can be civil.”¹⁴⁸ The answer that came from an individual above all suspicion like Colajanni still focused more on the responsibilities of the state than on those of society: “The Sicilians are tired of being civilized by people like Govone, Serpi, Pinna, Medici, and Bardesono. Among those who have happily swilled and rolled about in that sewer are Ballabio, Venturini, Codronchi, … and Mirri … all born and raised north of the river Tronto.”¹⁴⁹

The question of the Mafia represents only one of the possible occasions for regionalist quarrels. For the Neapolitan area, devoid though it might be of the Sicilian separatist traditions, we should consider, for instance, the excessive reactions of someone like Scarfoglio in the face of Rosano’s suicide, caused by accusations of profiteering and corruption with the Camorra, charges leveled by the extreme left. This is still in the context of the polemic of southern moderatismo (moderation) against socialists and northerners:

The intertwining of the controversy between left and right with a regionalist quarrel makes it all the more difficult to analyze and evaluate the complex relationships that were established in these same years among politics, finance, corruption, common criminality, and Mafia-driven criminality. The fundamental problem was that of the by-products of the modernization and democratization of the country, bringing new social actors into the inner circles of power, with new mechanisms. The risk involved in a debate of this sort is the demonization, in the eyes of the public, of the trial itself, and not that of its less attractive ramifications.

This again opened the way to a position comparable to that of the old Destra storica (historic right wing), which progressively imposed itself in the face of the impossibility of eliminating the obstacles blocking the political system save through the slow adjustments of “Giolittism.” In Leopoldo Notarbartolo’s Memorie (Memoirs), written during the years of the “regenerative” Great War, the respective figures of a father with a rigid code of Kantian ethics and a son on a desperate quest for justice, would stand out in stark isolation, and necessarily in defeat, within a historical context marked by the perverse effects of a “parliamentarianism,” identified less in the person of the mafioso Palizzolo and more in the persons of the dishonest Cosenza, the malevolent Crispi, the slimy Rudinì, and the cowardly Giolitti. There was no reference, save for a few merely personal considerations, to the forces that worked to fight against the Mafia: Marchesano and the other socialists, Sangiorgi, the public opinion of Milan, Bologna, and (in some cases) Palermo, the radical papers and the moderate papers, including the leading daily on the island, Il Giornale di Sicilia. Italy at the turn of the century, torn between a conservative camp and a progressive camp capable of providing, for the first time, an acute and critical analysis of the concealed workings of power, in part through the news media and other instruments of information and the mass political debate, all freely employed for the first time, would eventually degenerate into a cluster of the corrupted and the corruptors. It would become a land in which “it was raining mud, and everyone played with balls of mud,” in which “every public square became a pillory of shame; and the role of torturer fell to every muddy newspaperman who brandished as a weapon the filthy rag pumped out from the sewers of the workshops of extortion.”¹⁵¹

This is the interpretation, perhaps, of someone who has already set out in search of a Duce to whom they could entrust their destiny.

In comparison with the trials of the stoppagghieri and the Amorosos, the Palizzolo-Notarbartolo trial marked a giant step forward in terms of the logical concatenation of events and the absence of the more evident contradictions in the construction of a prosecution position in Mafia cases. Amazed that the Bologna trial had not ended in acquittal for absence of evidence, the correspondent of The Times wrote that “the jurors seem to have based their verdict on general impressions … rather than on one specific fact or another.”¹⁵² And the “general impressions” were those created by the only solid piece of factual evidence in Milan and Bologna (but already less burning in its significance at Florence): the role played by the public institutions in the maneuvers to cover and protect Palizzolo and, more in general, in the genesis and continuation of the phenomenon of the Mafia. That role had been indicated by the prosecution, and it had been abandoned, for reasons of interest, by the defense, managed by the Marinuzzis and the Gestivos. This major murder cast a beam of light, as had the political developments of 1875–1876. Colajanni with his successful pamphlet, Nel regno della mafia, reconstructed a piece of history in which, beginning from the Risorgimento, the governments on both the right and the left had adhered to a line of appalling continuity with more recent ones. This emerged as well from the trial. For instance, consider the public’s scandalized reaction in Bologna to the revelation of the negotiations between Palizzolo and Malusardi-Nicotera in 1877: “These elections held with the Damocles’ sword of the special security regimen of ammonizione held over the heads of the candidates cast a tawdry light, on the one hand, on the candidates but also, on the other hand, on the activity of the government.”¹⁵³ The responsibility of the public institutions was present even in the works of the two functionaries Cutrera and Alongi, printed or reprinted in this period, and rich with other observations of considerable interest. In the daily press, numerous articles were published, one of which, in the Giornale di Sicilia, deserves to be cited among the finest writing on the topic. This article contains a denunciation of the factional nature of the relationship between cosche (Mafia families) and police, the Albaneses, the Bardesonos, and the Lucchesis, who made use “of a part of the Mafia to uncover the mischief of the other part.” It concludes that in the countryside around Palermo, the “secret relations” between “guardiani, curatoli, and all such people” point to “a vast organization.”¹⁵⁴ This is the topic, as we know, of the Sangiorgi Report. However, considerable linguistic confusion remains:

In fact, all knowledge and understanding seem to have been overwhelmed and concealed within a political and journalistic debate that was as chaotic as it was unrestrained, on the one hand incapable of restricting the subject within reasoned bounds, and on the other hand excessively greedy for explanations concerning the nature of the Mafia.

This is the sort of question that, during the three separate phases of the trial, the “continental” judges asked of a great many witnesses, just as witnesses had heard those questions in the preceding years when they were interviewed by the parliamentary commissions. It is the sort of question that might be asked of a demo-psychologist, that is, an ethnologist, an expert by definition of the peculiarities, “beliefs,” and “prejudices” of the Sicilian people. In Bologna, Giuseppe Pitrè, summoned as a defense witness, reiterated that the word “Mafia” was originally used to indicate the concept of “beauty, gracefulness, and excellence in a certain context.” In the modern era, it came to indicate “the awareness, in some cases exaggerated, of one’s own personality, superiority, and dignity, which does not willingly accept abuses of any sort” and can “lead to criminality.”¹⁵⁶ Pitrè tended to identify a custom of the Sicilians, originally positive and, in this sense, attributable as had been done at an earlier point by Member of Parliament Morana: “If by Mafia [we] are describing those individuals who are unwilling to submit to abuse, violence, and offenses … then everyone in Sicily is a maffioso.”¹⁵⁷ With Franchetti (mutatis mutandis), Oriani instead believed that all the inhabitants of the island were lost to civilization, and therefore, mafiosi. The third, intermediate, position remains that of Rudinì expressed by Mosca, with his distinction between criminality and the “Mafia spirit,” in this case, amiable or even benign, but always widely diffused throughout the island.¹⁵⁸ The three theories, and in particular the two extreme ones, are singularly convergent inasmuch as they presuppose that the Mafia is nothing other than a regional culture and represents a phenomenon that is not limitable, in and of itself not recognizable, and practically invincible, in part because the identification makes all Sicilians, at least in terms of a logical reaction, the defenders of the Mafia itself: it is the scheme describing movements such as the “Pro-Sicilia.”

During his summation in the trial of Bologna, Marchesano called Pitrè an “outstanding scholar of folklore, but a very poor witness. When questioned about the Mafia, instead of telling us what it is, he told us the origin of the word.”¹⁵⁹ In fact, this reference to a Mafia that was originally benign and always a presupposition, never glimpsed in operation, this continual research of the definition as an ecceitas, or fundamental uniqueness, of the phenomenon to be studied in the profound (and unplumbable) recesses of social psychology, represents an extremely slippery field of endeavor. A compilation of the countless references to the few pages that Pitrè actually devoted to the Mafia would offer us an accurate and reliable map of the naïve and the corrupt from the end of the nineteenth century to the present day, all of them failing to realize (or pretending to overlook) the openly apologetic and misleading nature of those observations; all of them believing (or pretending to believe) that they were in the presence of the objective source of the culture of the Sicilians. There are highly concrete elements that will allow us to judge the ethnologist’s position: his close collaboration in the town council and in the management of charitable works and agencies with Palizzolo, “a true gentleman, … a scrupulous and honest administrator”; his rejection of the government’s invitation to run for office in the Palizzolo-run district of the Palazzo Reale; his active involvement, as an ideologue as well, in “Pro-Sicilia.”¹⁶⁰

Between an old and a positive meaning and a new meaning—vernacular and imprecise, which could also indicate something negative—Pitrè refers to an inscrutable essence (“it is almost impossible to define [it]”),¹⁶¹ and therefore not greatly differentiated from the defendants and the defense lawyers in the Mafia trials, who all claimed that they had no idea what the word means. This was the answer given by Carmelo Mendola, a member of the Amoroso cosca, to the magistrate who asked him if he belonged to the Mafia: “I don’t know what that means.”¹⁶² The exchange of question and answer appeared revealing to Hess, who used it as an epigraph at the beginning of his book, as well as to Sciascia, who cited it repeatedly.¹⁶³ A mafioso actually does not know what the Mafia is, since legality is a fairly abstract concept for the Sicilians, a legality embodied by an alien state, and what we would describe as mafioso behavior is the only behavior possible in this society. For that matter, this is not the only case in which the witnesses heard in the Amoroso trial appeared as somewhat extremist supporters of various social and anthropological theories, for instance, the theory of southern familism. When he was asked whether the members of the cosca were friends of his, Caravello answered: “I am a friend only to my wife and my children … outside of that, I know no one.” When asked about his “party” hatreds, Emanuele Amoroso answered: “My party is my wife and my children.” Adhering to this line, the defendants wound up exaggerating, emphasizing their “true” family (the core group of fellow criminals) in opposition to their blood relatives. For instance, one of the Amorosos claimed a total absence of interactions with his own brothers to keep anyone from supposing that he could serve as an intermediary in the vendetta against the Badalamentis, who had murdered another brother of his.¹⁶⁴

Hess has interpreted a tremendously intentional source, that is, a judicial source, as if it somehow reflected the “culture of the Sicilians.” It evidently did not occur to him that the Sicilians can say things, or fail to say things, as it serves them best: that may be a matter of political and ideological utility (or utility of other sorts?) in Pitrè’s case, a last-ditch attempt to save their lives in the case of the targets of a trial destined to conclude with a round of death sentences. When Giuseppe Amoroso, uncle of the defendants, revealed circumstances that implicated them in the murder of his own son (their cousin), the defendant Emanuele Amoroso dared him to swear an oath on the soul of his father, a shared ancestor of both the victim and the alleged murderers. The chief magistrate, with some consternation, observed: “Here, we have only one kind of oath, the oath called for by the law,” but the lawyer Marinuzzi insisted: “That is not appropriate to this case … because the populace does not believe in that,” and finally the witness was sworn as requested by the defense.¹⁶⁵ For Hess, this would be a demonstration of the social and cultural distance separating the Italian state from the Sicilians, of the “gap between the social sensibility and the morality of state government,” which engendered the behavior of mafiosi.¹⁶⁶ To my eye, however, it looks more like a skillfully maneuvered piece of stagecraft put on by Marinuzzi, tending to construct before the eyes of the jurors (and perhaps even in the view of the witness himself) an image of his clients as individuals who had been wrongfully accused, who believed in the same family values as the ordinary people around them, and who could therefore absolutely not be the cold-blooded savage murderers of one of their own close relatives. But it is clear that such instrumentalizing use of a traditional culture can create a certain amount of confusion in the mind of a German sociologist, if only through a complex and learned mediation, in which Pitrè himself played a central role, and which the lawyerly culture of the island helped to diffuse.

This culture set out primarily to conceal beneath the folk tradition the reality of conspiracy, calling it a “chimera, a dream sprung from the overheated imagination of a delegato di PS,” the “mysterious something,” the “pasted-on tail” denounced by the defending lawyers of the stoppagghieri and the Amorosos.¹⁶⁷ The war among Mafia families was reduced to family hatreds, in a world artfully depicted as primitive, in which wealthy smugglers and businessmen like the Amorosos were passed off as “commonfolk,” and someone like Fontana who dealt in citrus fruit on an intercontinental basis was described as illiterate.¹⁶⁸ Gone was the effect of the great scandal. The perception of the Mafia was adjusted to this folkloristic and traditional level, thus losing, among other things, its link with the larger topic of banking scandals, which for a moment had endowed the phenomenon with a far different, a “modern,” and a particularly dangerous dimension.

Sensing the advantage that a disagreement concerning the essential nature of the Mafia offered to the defense, Marchesano began his summation for the defense by stating that he wanted to speak only about specific criminal actions and behaviors, a promise that he did not keep in full:

Here the information provided by the questura, who was an invaluable ally for the civil plaintiffs, is almost rendered ridiculous. The interrelations among the Mafia families are reduced to the mere commonality of protectors; concepts of no particular heuristic value are employed, such as “natural sentiment.” Clinging to the old and superficial definition supplied by Bonfadini, Marchesano undercuts the massive job of documentation on the connections among events and individuals done by himself and by Sangiorgi, from which a much different story is derived, certainly not one of working “spontaneously in concert.” Once again, the trial strategy leads the prosecution to simplify without obtaining the desired goal in the end. Pitrè and Palizzolo lost the battle, but they were preparing to win the war: the Mafia was thus neither “sect nor association,” it had no “regulations nor statutes,”¹⁷⁰ it was identifiable as a certain behavior and culture. Instead, I believe that there exists a Mafia ideology that reflects its cultural codes, but primarily to deform them, reappropriate them, and make out of them a mass of rules designed to ensure the survival of the organization, its cohesiveness, its ability to create consensus and to strike terror into hearts both within and without.

The canti carcerari (prison songs) express great contempt for “l’omu chi parra assai,” who “cu la sò stissa vucca si disterra.”¹⁷¹ Rosario La Mantia was rejected even by his own family. The accusation of spy, ’nfami, or cascittuni, constituted a weighty burden for all those who were targeted as informers, as well as a useful justification for those who killed them. Therefore, it lent itself to use as a weapon in the factional wars. After murdering Damiano Sedita, the Amorosos exclaimed: “he will no longer have a carte-blanche weapons permit from the police”; Cusumano was described as an “infamous spy.” The organization called for a boycott of the people of the borgata against Di Sano, a woman who ran a dive and who was thought to be an informant, and after that attempted to murder her. In the context of accusing Filippo Siino of being “in league with the questura,” Giuseppe Biondo did nothing other than “what he needed to obtain power for himself,”¹⁷² which is to say, that he worked to slander his adversary in the face of a larger public opinion made up of cagnolazzi (literally “wild dogs,” or young thugs) and confederates. Omertà, understood as a sense of “moral” repulsion with respect to the idea of availing oneself of the legal system, may perhaps represent a general value, an ideal model of behavior of the Sicilian populace and, in particular, of the larger criminal universe. Certainly, it is no guide to the actual behavior of mafiosi, who—as we have seen over and over—collaborate with the law whenever and however it furthers their own interests. We should not forget that the organization must mediate between state and criminals, and must therefore be credible in the eyes of all sides. The authorities frequently know who is responsible for committing crimes and murders because the mafiosi are willing to speak, without any ideological preclusions, although they are unwilling to expose themselves by testifying in court. It is from here, not from a more generic society at large, that the police obtain their frequently cited voce pubblica or “public opinion.” Then there is the case of the mafioso on the losing side of a gang war who turns to the police in search of help and protection, perhaps obtaining a passport to escape to America, as was the case with the castaldo, or agricultural administrator, Santo Vassallo, sentenced to death for betraying his fellow mafiosi from the same cosca. In this specific case, however, the unfortunate informer was tracked down and followed all the way to New Orleans, where he was murdered.¹⁷³ The Vassallos, or even worse, the La Mantias and the D’Amicos, threatened to leave the cosca to the mercy of the collaborationist impulses of its members and enemies. The response to a propalazione (the information provided by an informant) that endangers the organization’s very existence had to be one involving terror, since individuals necessarily made their own calculations of the likelihood of reprisals, even many years later and thousands of miles away. As Sangiorgi put it, “everyone, from the most prosperous landowners to the poorest peasants, from the most renowned notables to the most obscure individualists, says nothing, because they are afraid,”¹⁷⁴ but the previously emphasized factor, that not all of them were equally afraid, because they did not all fear the same penalty—death—gave the precept imparted to the world of criminals a varying degree of efficacy.

Unless the mafiosi were willing to be reduced to the role of confidential informers, if they intended to maintain or accentuate their independence of the authorities, they would need to safeguard the coherence of the association with methods other than exclusively terroristic ones, ensuring loyalty, like the method that led Filippello, despite the fact that he had been abandoned and threatened by his confederates, to kill himself rather than testify against Palizzolo.

Clearly, blood ties are not sufficient to guarantee all the alliances, although they (in this and any other society) do represent a solid core. Mazzara might take on Giammona, boasting of the “active solidarity of the members of his family.”¹⁷⁵ The Siino party had a distinctively family-oriented physiognomy. In a context of nuclear families like that of the island, it was the setting that determined whether the potential for compact coherence intrinsic to the institute of the family would be utilized. The Schneiders, for instance, demonstrated with a careful analysis how relations among brothers, fragile at best in the laboring families of the Agrigento village of Sambuca, were instead exalted in the sheepherding enterprises that spawned the middle classes of the gabellotti because that type of activity entails an especially trust-based relationship among its various adherents.¹⁷⁶ That requirement is of course particularly important in a criminal organization, though the context of family and relatives would not always be sufficient to supply the cosche: the comparaggio, an artificially created family tie, represents a bridge toward more complex relationships, in which, as we know, diverse links and bonds are at play, based on the models of Carbonari or Freemasons from the period of the Risorgimento.

In many cases, for instance, in that of the fratellanza of Favara, the inductee promises to abandon such common crimes as theft, readying himself to take on the role of the uomo d’ordine, literally, the man of order, the notable, or at least the business intermediary. This is how the Mafia likes to present itself, even though the reality is more prosaic, and, as Alongi already noted, matters are more complicated: those who guarantee generally act in close coordination with those who violate it, a scheme that tends to expand from its original setting of rural custodianship to a diverse array of criminal manifestations. The santoni (literally, “big holy men,” roughly equivalent to “high muckamucks”), who promise the Palermitan coach drivers to get back their coaches in exchange for sums of money that they “claim has been claimed by the picciotti (lower-level mafiosi),” had already made a prior deal with them to split the ransom.¹⁷⁷ The Mafia d’ordine represents more than anything else an ideal model, to be dangled before the ruling classes, but also attractive to the ordinary, “common” criminals. The chief of the band of safecrackers and muggers of Albergheria broken up in 1904, when questioned by the police, did his best to elevate himself high above the level of small-time criminals: “Skilled and experienced mafioso that he was, he took on the pose of an offended gentleman…. He said in fact that he could have been involved in murders and assaults, and that he had been convicted of assault and battery, but that he displayed a lofty scorn for thieves and burglars.”¹⁷⁸

Therefore, the codes of the Mafia are linked to the necessity of preserving an internally compact structure and a public acknowledgment of a capacity to strike terror into potential rivals and spies. The most efficient of the guardiani would be the one who, with his reputation alone, not so much by his physical presence, would discourage thieves, in accordance with the popular saying, “Fear guards a vineyard.” The archival documents, as well as the pages of Alongi and Cutrera, take us into a world where a theft of lemons might constitute an offense to be washed away with blood, where even the slightest damage to crops represents a sgarro, a grave insult to one’s authority, a ritual provocation to which one must respond in an unfailingly and overwhelmingly disproportionate manner. As in any and all kinds of feud, “the gravity of the crime lies not so much in the intrinsic characteristics as in the challenge to the victim’s prestige.”¹⁷⁹ That is the symbolism present in so many episodes already familiar to us, in which the son of the landowner who has been forced to sell his citrus grove to a mafioso continues to make a point of stealing lemons every evening from that same grove until the final, inevitable, bloody settling of accounts.¹⁸⁰ But, without being either an ethnologist or a man of letters, Sangiorgi already utilized the twofold concept of economic damage and an offense to the cosca to explain why the refusal to provide water to the Vitale cousins (the ones from the Miceli murder) led to the killing of the fontaniere La Mantia. Sangiorgi urges us not to be surprised if, “for this reason, in appearance and in any other context, not particularly serious, the Vitales and their partners decided, as they did, to kill him.”¹⁸¹ The inability to respond to an offense is an element of dishonor, which adversaries will harp on in a ritual manner. The curatolo Ajello, fired from a farm that he had run for many years, was persecuted on a nightly basis by a “serenade” entitled “Senti l’acqua e di siti mori”—literally, “You hear water and you die of thirst,” which means: you are close to the source of authority, power, and wealth, but you can’t touch it. This took him to the brink of exasperation and to the crucial error that led to his death. His corpse was taken below the windows of the Ucciardone prison and displayed to his convict sons in a final act of disrespect.¹⁸²

For that matter, the honor that mafiosi attribute to themselves diverges in significant ways from the general understanding of honor, in southern Italian society and elsewhere. It would not be necessary to recall how many murders have masqueraded behind alleged but nonexistent questions of sexual honor, if behind one of those murders there were not the presence of the “Alta maffia dei Ciaculli,” in the persons of Salvatore and Giuseppe Greco. In December 1916 they ordered the murder of the priest Giorgio Gennaro, who, during his Sunday sermon, denounced the Mafia’s interference in the administration of ecclesiastical revenues. Of course, rumors were circulated that it was the vendetta of a cuckolded husband.¹⁸³ The gabellotto Gaetano Cinà was, instead, eliminated by a plot crafted by his brother Luigi, who had fallen in love with his sister-in-law, and by the Mafia capo Giuseppe Biondo, determined to punish someone who deprived him of control over a citrus grove:¹⁸⁴ brothers who murder brothers, establishing alliances with “outsiders,” passions and interests ferociously pursued with no regard for family ties. There are murders of women, as in the case of the serving girl seduced by one of the Amorosos or in the murder of the Di Sano girl. There was the torpedo of Monreale, who having failed to find the enemies of his cosca capo, killed their young son so that he would not have to return empty-handed.¹⁸⁵ On the other hand, in an extreme situation, the mafiosi themselves would remark on the difference between “true” honor and the honor the cosche attributed to themselves. While Antonio Badalamenti was running to find a midwife for his wife who was going into labor, he was killed by Amoroso killers, cursing at his enemies who “murdered treacherously”; Scalici referred sarcastically to the “loyal gentlemen of Piazza Montalto” in a novel published in installments, which was inspired by those tragic events.¹⁸⁶

The model of fair competition, or a fair fight, solidly rooted in popular culture, and still identifiable in the dagger duels between Camorrists or ricottari, or pimps, in the duels of the spataioli (criminals) of Palermo, Catania, or Messina, is absolutely distinct from the ambushes laid by killers armed with rifles, concealed behind the enclosure walls around the giardini, who carried out Mafia murders without offering the victim the slightest possibility of self-defense. The term usticano, used by ricottari to describe someone who attacks treacherously,¹⁸⁷ might well be a reference to behaviors and associations that developed out of confinement on the island of Ustica or other such islands. Arlacchi’s view that the hierarchies among mafiosi were determined by a “free competition for honor” involving “challenges and fights”¹⁸⁸ may perhaps reflect a difference between the “traditional” ’ndrangheta and the Mafia but especially in a literary documentation very far removed from reality. In the real Mafia, the elimination of one’s enemies was generally accompanied by ragionamenti (reasonings), false claims, and alleged agreements that served primarily to make the condemned victims lower their guard. Thus, the murder of Filippo Siino, preceded by a solemn reconciliation in church between the two sides, was made possible by the betrayal of a friend of the intended victim, who led him to the site of the ambush, and thus by spergiuro (falsehood) and tradimento (betrayal).¹⁸⁹ The honor-saving provocation to a duel was only utilized in a utilitarian context. Antonino D’Alba, whom the cosca of Falde had decided to eliminate, was a man who had been warned, and he took great care never to be caught outside of his home. Only when an enemy provoked him, and dared him to fight face-to-face, did he leave the house armed with a revolver, but on the proposed site of the duel he found a dozen people, who shot him down like a dog.¹⁹⁰ Opposing the rite of individual competition based on courage and prowess was that of the collective execution, an emphasis on the fact that it was the organization that had ordered the death penalty and its members were taking on the responsibility for that action together, much like the state firing squad; it was on the state that the Mafia tended to model itself.