History of the Mafia

In 1890, Captain David Hennessy of the local police in New Orleans died in an ambush for which eighteen Sicilians were charged. They were tried and acquitted.¹ Control of the docks and the fruit trade was the classic Mafia-related motive for conflict between two groups, the Provenzanos and the Matrangas, and that conflict constitutes the background of the murder. We are also very familiar with the general outline of the alliance between one of the factions (the Provenzanos) and the police. Apparently, that alliance led to Hennessy’s murder, as a reprisal. The conclusion of the affair, on the other hand, is as American as apple pie: the lynching of eleven of the acquitted men by an enraged mob. It appears that the mob had been incited by those who wished to prevent an alliance of interests between the Irish and the Italians, which might have led to their taking control of the city government.

The “Mafia” makes its first appearance in Louisiana, and from there we see the development of the theory of the “foreign plot” that was subsequently destined to reemerge in various forms and circumstances. Nothing can provide a more gripping confirmation of that theory than a mysterious and “subversive” organization. We may suppose that it dates back to the Sicilian Vespers, that its mastermind and control center was in Sicily, and that it had adherents everywhere. A variant on that theory provides some information about the situation in Sicily by stating that the Mafia was commanded by a brigand named Leoni.²

White Anglo-Saxon Protestant America, moreover, refused to tolerate the voluntary “segregation” from “other races” or from the “natives … wherever there is a concentration of Italian manpower,”³ a situation that was blamed for the persistence of a number of deplorable habits, including the existence of the Mafia. It is an unpersuasive argument. In the United States, the Mafia lost its regional characteristics and crossbreeds with other forms of criminality. It began to connect with a phenomenon rife with problems of its own: the new and multiethnic universe of immigrant America, which was much more significant than the residual world of the society from which it originated. The very same Anglo-Saxons who were so scandalized by the reluctance to accept the cultural standardization that is a requisite feature of the melting pot were the same ones who reinforced the internal forces binding the world of Little Italys. These were the same Anglo-Saxons who made use of prominent Italian Americans as mediators, who directed the immigrants, via the so-called padrone system (a term used by Italian immigrants, referring to a system revolving around the padrone, the intermediary who procured work and other benefits for the immigrants), toward various markets—the labor market, the housing market, and the credit market—and who made substantial profits off their compatriots.⁴ In this case, organized crime represents a variant on the political, business, or trade union tradition of “bossism.” Ever since the 1920s, using a straightforward functionalist approach, numerous American scholars, often of Italian descent, have worked on these topics, identifying the link between crime and the clientelistic and political “machines” that have run major cities, one of the few vehicles offering social integration and promotion to new emigrants. This function of the political machines was acknowledged as early as the turn of the twentieth century with amiable shamelessness by one of the top leaders of Tammany Hall, New York’s Demo cratic electoral organization.⁵ These political “machines,” depending on the phases of the migratory cycle, were made up of Germans, Irish, Jews, and Italians, and unfailingly they took their place as the leaders of “organized crime.” And the organized crime they operated took its place as the link between public institutions (the local police, city hall) and the demimonde of gambling, prostitution, and smuggling. As Joseph Albini has pointed out, Anglo-Saxon xenophobia presupposes that the “innocent, defenseless American public is the victim of foreign evil-doers who secretly rob it of its moral virginity.”⁶ In reality, by offering a demand for these more-or-less illegal goods and services, American society expresses for itself sufficient pathogenic germs to offer a venue for any and all “immigrant” criminal traditions. One such tradition is the Sicilian criminal tradition, which here, just as back in Italy, finds a triangular system made up of political class, police, and criminality.

Nonetheless, the theory of transplantation, alongside various accompanying paranoid extremisms, expresses fragments of realism that, perhaps out of piety toward their homeland (or ethnic group), Italian American scholars have failed to appreciate adequately. Viewed from the Sicilian perspective, the Hennessy case does little more than to indicate the considerable expanse of the business network of Palermitan intermediaries with greater or lesser degrees of Mafia ties. For them, New Orleans represents nothing more than a terminal, as does Tunisia with its immigration from the Italian Mezzogiorno, its teeming traffic of fugitives from the law and merchandise of all sorts (the citrus fruit Fontana was selling, but also stolen livestock) crossing from one bank to the other of the Strait of Sicily (Canale di Sicilia). At the turn of the twentieth century, New Orleans was the second-ranked port for the Sicilian citrus fruit trade in the United States. Smaller importers and businesses turned to New Orleans if they wished to break free of the giant Palermo–New York mercantile organization.⁷ It was in New Orleans that Salvatore Marino⁸ died twelve years before the Hennessy murder. It had been from New Orleans that one thread of the complex skein had run, resulting back in Sicily in a series of trials for criminal conspiracy. Here, Vassallo, who fell under suspicion as a spy for the Palermo cosca (Mafia family) had been found and killed. Marino was a trader in fruit. The Provenzanos and the Matrangas were traders and importers. The surname Matranga would surface frequently during the Badalamenti-Amoroso wars of the 1870s and 1880s, and it is not clear whether those are people who just happened to share the same surname. There is no question, however, that the two groups warring in Louisiana took on the well-known denominations of stoppagghieri and giardinieri (keepers of a citrus grove).

Between 1901 and 1914 alone, more than 800,000 Sicilians landed in the United States. While Sicily was arriving in America through its people, in every tiny village throughout Sicily, America presented itself in the person of the “emigration agent,” a broker who readily paid for trans-Atlantic passages and who would find work on the far side of the ocean. At first, going to America was tantamount to disappearing. In fact, according to the authoritative testimony of the brigand Bufalino (1901), the expression “send [someone] to America, buy someone a ticket to America” was an ironic way of saying “to kill someone.”⁹ Over time, however, the two opposite shores of the Atlantic Ocean seemed to draw much closer together as temporary emigration between them became exceedingly common. All sorts of people left Italy, returned, and left again—the poor, the adventuresome, fugitives from political persecution, and other fugitives for less noble reasons. Obviously, convicts, people who had been subjected to the special security regimen of ammonizione, and fugitives from Sicily all met again in the New World, just as back in Sicily we find newly repatriated mafiosi attempting to reinsert themselves into the local balances of power, “bringing with them sizable amounts of cash of suspicious origin”; in some cases those attempts led to their deaths.¹⁰ Mafia families, like natural families, split up and reassembled in the complex and intertwining welter of relations extending across the Atlantic Ocean in both directions.

It has been pointed out that the Black Hand (mano nera), which took its name from the symbol inscribed on a great many extortion letters, represented not an actual organization but a criminal phenomenology, a form of crime practiced by groups operating independently, and not specifically Sicilian, but generally Italian; I would further venture to say that these groups operated on the model of the Camorra more than that of the Mafia. In fact, like the Camorra, the Black Hand focused on skimming from the economic transactions of the poor, which in this concrete case involved a community located at the lowest level of the social hierarchy, a community to which both the extorters and their victims belonged. Nonetheless, we cannot rule out the possibility that in a major immigration center such as New York, the Sicilian mafiosi might have played an important role in the underworld even before the formation of a native crime network.

This was, in fact, the working hypothesis on which the New York City government set to work in 1908, in the person of Commissioner Theodore Bingham, and based on a report provided by an “expert” who was absolutely convinced that “the ordinary Italian immigrant, as a rule, never becomes a criminal once he has reached America.” This report stated that the Black Hand was composed of criminals “who had already been criminals in Italy and that, once they arrived in America, they tended to gather into groups with others of their same kind.”¹¹ The American legal system—the report went on—was not equipped to fight these people because it lacked the sort of law enforcement tools (the special security regimen of ammonizione, domicilio coatto, or obligatory residence) that alone had proved effective in Italy. It was necessary to expel undesirables, proving that they had concealed their criminal records and that they had therefore entered the United States illegally.

Bingham therefore set up a “secret” operation, but the press immediately reported on it. The New York police lieutenant Joe Petrosino, originally from Padula, was sent to Italy to investigate criminal records of immigrants. Petrosino was a much feared persecutor of members of the Black Hand. In particular, he had been responsible for the repatriation of numerous immigrants whose papers were not in order.¹² He assumed that Italian authorities were in league with the criminals, or at the very best, were simply incompetent.¹³ And in fact, leaving aside a few informal contacts, Petrosino refused all offers of institutional collaboration and even the discreet police bodyguard offered to him when he landed in Palermo. As the questore (administrative director of the district police) Baldassarre Ceola later commented, Petrosino “completely accepted the prejudices held by those Sicilians who believe that they are better protected by turning to some notorious and greatly feared criminal who commands great respect and influence, rather than relying on the authorities and on the system of justice.”¹⁴ Above all, Petrosino adhered to the tradition of the Palermo police, though he did not realize it, and most importantly, despite the fact that he lacked any of the negotiating power enjoyed by the police, except for the power of the dollars that he paid to his informers and the feeble shadow of a legal authority from across the Atlantic Ocean. Thus, Petrosino was virtually defenseless, and with a “recklessness that appears almost inconceivable in such a renowned detective,”¹⁵ he ventured into the most classic triangle of police–Mafia–criminality. On 12 March 1909, he fell under a hail of bullets in the center of Palermo, in the Piazza Marina.

There followed a series of bitter accusations in the American press, once again leveling charges against the Italians of complicity, while the Italians in turn emphasized how amateurish Petrosino’s operation had been. The investigations, of course, focused on the route linking Palermo and New York. The usual confidential informers, together with anonymous letters mailed from New York, pointed an accusing finger at the Corleonese Giuseppe Morello, head of a group of New York counterfeiters who had resolved a business dispute with a fellow Italian in 1903 by killing him. This had brought them to Petrosino’s attention. Among the members of the group was an individual whom we know quite well, Giuseppe Fontana. After his acquittal at the Florence trial, Fontana had moved to the New World where he took up an old occupation, the fabrication and passing of counterfeit banknotes. Two other members of the group, Carlo Costantino and Antonino Passananti, had suddenly reappeared in their hometown of Partinico in perfect synchronization with Petrosino’s arrival. Using enigmatic coded telegrams, they had stayed in contact with Morello, who was back in America. Perhaps they were afraid that Petrosino might discover that Morello had a criminal record sufficient to provide grounds for his expulsion from the United States.¹⁶ Many reasons, linked both to the past and the present, might have prompted Costantino and Passananti to take concrete action. In addition to these two, the police arrested about fifteen other individuals, almost all of whom had returned from America, the entire network of the detective’s informers; and last of all, a Mafia capo, Don Vito Cascio-Ferro.

The criminal record of this interesting individual, prior to 1914, was marked by a number, not overwhelmingly large, of indictments (extortion, arson, kidnapping), all of which were resolved in acquittals. Cascio-Ferro certainly could not have been considered a provincial notable. In fact, his power was based on a network of relations extending over two continents, as well as an event of such international resonance—the Petrosino murder—that his reputation allowed him “to take sure-handed control of the Mafia throughout the entire territory of the province of Palermo.”¹⁷ Cascio-Ferro, together with Morello and Fontana, belonged to the group of counterfeiters that Petrosino arrested in 1903. Cascio-Ferro’s stay in New York, which began in 1901, ended suddenly on that occasion, though not without the customary trip to New Orleans. Following the murder, a photograph of Petrosino was found among Cascio-Ferro’s papers. Among Petrosino’s papers, moreover, a note was found that referred to Cascio-Ferro as a “highly dangerous criminal.” The New York policeman planned, among other things, to take a trip to Bisacquino, the feudal stronghold of the Mafia capo. Could it have been that Petrosino was hoping to obtain the invaluable information from none other than Don Vito Cascio-Ferro? This hypothesis has not previously been proposed, but it seems to be in keeping with the aims of Petrosino’s journey, as well as with the observation by the questore concerning criminals who command “great respect and influence.” As well as we can reconstruct, Petrosino was investigating an organization that falsified passports, under the control of the notorious aristocrat Francesco di Villarosa, that is, a network with footholds in both Sicily and America. It is worth noting that, at least until the 1920s, one of the leading activities of an eminent Sicilian American mafioso like Salvatore Maranzano was the clandestine importation of laborers.¹⁸ It would appear that Don Vito was also involved in clandestine expatriations, which he organized aboard fishing boats from Mazara del Vallo that sailed to Tunis, and from there, by ocean liners on the Marseilles–New York route.¹⁹ The Mafia capo was officially employed as the “representative of the Caruso postal shipping company.”²⁰ Could that have been another way of saying emigration agent? Perhaps Cascio-Ferro, after delving into the double game of the informer, decided to help out both himself and his American friends. Those American friends had made the voyage to Bisacquino that had proved unattainable to Petrosino—in the persons of Costantino and Passananti. In any case, many years later, Don Vito Cascio-Ferro boasted that he had killed Petrosino “in a disinterested manner,” with his own hands.²¹

The preliminary investigation (istruttoria) resulted in the decision not to proceed against any of the defendants. Cascio-Ferro brought in his own defense the testimony of the Honorable Domenico De Michele Ferrantelli, who claimed to have had Cascio-Ferro as his guest the evening of the murder. The alibi is not particularly credible, considering the close ties between the two. De Michele was a major trader in oil and grains, and Cascio-Ferro was his “business agent.” De Michele was the much discussed and controversial mayor of Burgio, rock-solid in that office, as well as the member of parliament for the district of Bivona, whereas Cascio-Ferro was his capo-elettore (this Italian term was used, especially by the press, to describe a political activist who worked to gather votes, roughly equivalent to the American “ward heeler”—translator’s note). It would be interesting to know whether De Michele had taken part in the expansion of Sicilian American trade that went hand in hand with the growth in migration.²² If so, Don Vito, with his trips to New York and New Orleans, would mirror on a larger scale the smaller figure, already familiar to us, of the mafioso who creates a network along the lines marked out by the business interests of important individuals. Let us not forget, in any case, the protective functions that inevitably accompany the business interests. Born in Palermo, Don Vito Cascio-Ferro moved to Bisacquino to follow his father, who was a campiere, or private guard of farmland, of Baron Antonino Inglese, a notorious usurper of state-owned lands. This was one of the effects of the growing centralization to Palermo of the market for leases and custodianships. Let us think back to Don Peppino il Lombardo who, through Giammona’s help, succeeded in obtaining a job as a sovrastante (local superintendent) in Alia. Or let us remember Don Bartolomeo Badalamenti traveling to Caltagirone with his entourage “of servants, roustabouts, and outlaws such as had never been seen before, who came and went and vanished without the slightest trace.”²³ And last of all, let us remember the operation undertaken by the prince of Mirto, who moved Fontana into the areas plundered by the brigand Varsalona,²⁴ that is, the Corleone–Sambuca–Burgio area, on the boundaries of the province of Palermo and the province of Agrigento. Here Cascio-Ferro lived, though with frequent stays in Palermo, which clearly remained a strategic location for the function of Mafia capo: gabellotto (renter and sublessor of parcels of farmland) or administrator of the Honorable De Michele and Baron Inglese in the Corleonese district, and an elegant gentleman in Palermo.

If we work our way backward into the earlier years of Cascio-Ferro’s life, we encounter an extraordinary political situation, that of the Fasci Siciliani of 1892–1893. To our surprise, we find Don Vito as the vice president of the Fascio of Bisacquino, while, in the role of lecturer on behalf of socialism, he succeeded in obtaining “something that would appear difficult to believe, … that the women no longer followed the processions of the Last Sacraments and that they say confession to him and to the president of the Fascio.” It is difficult to imagine the content of those confessions. When the Fasci Siciliani were suppressed, Cascio-Ferro fled to Tunis (December 1893), and from there a short while later he “returned, voluntarily, to the homeland, offering assurances to His Honor the questore of Palermo and the subprefect of Corleone that he would never again be involved in politics.”²⁵ From that time forward, his “political behavior was impeccable,” and through “his friendship with Baron Inglese and with the Honorable De Michele Ferrantelli” he won a position as a local notable; he enrolled in the town circle, winning “the respect of his fellow townspeople” and of the authorities.²⁶ This was in December 1908, less than a year before the murder of Petrosino.

A subversive thus becomes a uomo d’ordine, literally, man of order, a description that is not at odds with the description of a mafioso. What remains to be puzzled out is the underlying logic of his adherence to a left-wing movement opposed with a hint of hysteria by the ruling class and by the Crispi government, which undertook the suppression of that movement with military force. By examining that logic more carefully, we will be able to understand how, not only with the clientelistic machinery of New York and Chicago, but also with the same machinery in Corleone and Monreale, the phenomenon of the Mafia is linked to processes, however distorted and perverted, of democratization; how in both America, land of opportunity, and in postfeudal Sicily the success and growth of the Mafia fit into a larger context of social mobility and profound historical transformations.

In the immediate wake of the proclamation of the state of siege (December 1893), many militants in the Fasci were ordered to appear before military tribunals as a result of accusations “by convicts and people with prior convictions for common crimes.”²⁷ Among these people were the guardie comunali, the guardie campestri, or the guardie daziarie (respectively, town, rural, and financial gendarmeries), whom we recognize as manifestations of Mafia power. In many cases, these people shot into crowds, provoking insurrections in order to justify the repression of those same insurrections.²⁸ In the provinces of Palermo and Agrigento, when the Fasci campaigned concerning issues of municipal politics, taxes, use of state-owned lands, or even agricultural contracts, they might well have found that they were going up against oppressive and corrupt ruling classes, capable of all sorts of violent reactions. There was, however, no absolute ideological incompatibility between the left wing and the Mafia: “If the government abandons [the Mafia], it will place itself in the service of the clergy; if everyone abandons it, it will pose as a revolutionary movement,”²⁹ noted the socialist Drago, confirming something we already know about the post-Risorgimento period.

This problem can only be defined within a local context. Although it is impossible to hypothesize a shared and common political position of the Mafia, it is equally cumbersome to imagine complete homogeneity among a number of municipal Fasci that formed in just a few convulsive months, devoid of any significant coordination from above, with the exception of a self-proclaimed central committee in Palermo. It is possible, however, to identify a line of continuity into which the sudden flare-up of activity inserted itself. At Misilmeri, the Fascio organization was founded by Girolamo Sparti, a young university student related to both of the families that had been battling for years to take control of the town administration. In Monreale, no fewer than three Fasci were founded; one of them was under the leadership of the mayor, Rocco Balsano, a follower of Crispi, who suddenly decided to convert to socialism in order to safeguard the future of the farming association that served as the hub for his clientelistic network. In Lercara the Fascio was powerful, but it was impossible to say who led it. The bloody uprising of Christmas 1893 was to some degree incited by the Nicolosi party. The Nicolosis were well-known long-term abettors and accomplices of bandits; the uprising was directed against the party of the Sartorios, which had had control of town hall ever since 1876. In Marineo, the Fascio enjoyed the support of the Calderone party, which had recently lost power after wielding it in an absolute and dictatorial manner for more than ten years.³⁰

In some cases, this was nothing more than camouflage. In other cases we are looking at contrasts between progressives and conservatives, and in any event factional and family struggles, groups that split apart and then join together again using an ideological idiom for their ulterior motives. In a great many cases in the 1890s, an equilibrium was established among the local parties that would remain in place until the Great War. “In small villages, the families of moderate prosperity are nearly all relations of one kind or another … and not merely in a single party, even the members of opposition parties are related even though they are in opposing camps.”³¹ It is unlikely that new men would emerge, while new instruments linking the ruling class and society at large (agricultural associations, mutual aid societies, clubs) developed, in part to adapt the clientelistic machines to the expansion of suffrage as ordered by the electoral reforms of 1882 (political elections) and 1889 (administrative elections), a process that culminated in 1913 with universal male suffrage. Moreover, even in small cities and large villages in Sicily, between the end of the nineteenth century and the turn of the twentieth century, state legislation and the very processes of modernization began to call for the implementation of a system of public lighting, either gas or, later, electric, a road system and a sewer system, a health system, and public education. These were new opportunities to make money and control jobs, alongside the more traditional systems of controlling state resources and local taxes (What needs to be taxed? Who has to pay? Who has to collect the taxes, and how?), establishing a strong interest in controlling municipal administrations on the part of country political groups, with their entourage of contractors, landlords, leaseholders, long-term leaseholders, and uprooted lawyers, schoolteachers, pharmacists, clients, electors, cousins, aspirants, and plotters.³²

This was the tumultuous world of southern clientelism as depicted by the ferocious and brilliant observer Gaetano Salvemini; this was the world to which journalists and police sources refer when they use the term Mafia. Anyone attempting to distinguish between this concept and the concept of clientelism, however, would encounter serious difficulties. Quite frequently delegati di PS (or police inspectors) and questori describe as “mafiosi” those who are simply opponents of the government, such as, for instance, in Misilmeri the Sparti, Scozzari, and Di Pisa families.³³ However, the group favored by the government itself was the one headed on a provincial basis by Salvatore Avellone, one of the most controversial members of the Italian parliament owing to his ties with the Mafia. The frequent commissariamenti (establishment of government control) to which the prefect subjected this township should be put in the context of that disagreement, rather than any real effort to subdue the “Mafia.” In Monreale the municipal party led by Balsano, the future member of parliament, was accused of favoring its clients in the administration of public finance and contracts. Here, too, at the behest of Member of Parliament Masi (an opponent of Balsano) there intervened prefectorial commissioners (commissari prefettizi) who ascertained irregularities and, after a certain period of time, called for elections that, much as was the case in Misilmeri, only reinforced the existing balance of power. Note how the prefect, a follower of Giolitti, described by historians as omnipotent, acted not on behalf of a central and centralizing program, but simply to benefit a member of parliament eager to subdue an unruly municipal administration. Note, too, how municipal “Mafias” successfully withstood all comers. In Monreale, people ironically wondered why commissari prefettizi were appointed for life as in a “Turkish city.” Alongside the municipalist debates over the “proud Athens of Sicily” that refused to bow, there were other regionalist debates, previously rehearsed many times, on the “liberties conquered at the cost of blood” by an “unfortunate Sicily” and not respected by the government.³⁴

All of this, however, belongs largely to the realm of political history. In the specific terms of the present topic, we can record a generic but significant array of links between the governing groups and the criminal world. Of the Balsano party, “there were friends and supporters among people who had been arrested and tried.”³⁵ Di Pisa was a bloody-minded individual who frequently resolved his arguments with the sword cane that he always carried around with him, until he was wounded by pistol shots. A more clearly defined figure was Salvatore Sparti, who took office as mayor shortly after being released from jail; his murder trial ended in acquittal (though he was convicted for assault and battery, making threats, and other charges). He was a “natural protector of Mafia and scum.” He testified in favor of those who had been proposed as subjects for the special security regimen of ammonizione, with the inevitable refrain that he had been forced to do so in order to stave off the attempts of his adversaries.³⁶

Two towns such as Misilmeri and Monreale—towns that were certainly paesi di Mafia—failed to reflect the presence of the Mafia itself within their municipal institutions as clearly as we would have expected.

Let us attempt to broaden the picture. Both situations share a single element: the presence of large quantities of state-owned properties that are repeatedly parceled out, while the town administrations are unwilling or unable to exact the corresponding fees. In particular, only the commissari prefettizi, who are periodically appointed in the wake of the dissolution of those administrations, take any actions against those responsible for those usurpations “of many hundreds of hectares” of these lands, “since none of the peasants, out of fear of retaliation, is willing to take the initiative in starting legal action.”³⁷ Then there is geographic location: Misilmeri and especially Monreale are located on the boundary between the zone of large landholdings and the area of intensive agriculture; they have vast areas of farmland that gravitate economically around Palermo. The city’s governing class apparently has no particular interest in this countryside. This is one key to interpreting the factional struggle provided by the protagonists of that struggle. The majority groups in the two towns thus represent a bourgeoisie that does not own any beni rusticani—rural land—against whom the healthy public opinion of the “authorities” would turn as one, the uomini d’ordine (men of order) and the latifondisti (large landholders).³⁸ Part of the ruling class had in fact greater interest in municipal finance, the assignment of contracts, and the convergence of business interests around those contracts. And that portion of the ruling class won support by allowing the leaseholders to not pay the required fees for the use of township-owned lands and to purchase those lands at rock-bottom prices and resell them at a profit. These groups were interested in the countryside because it was a source of revenue for the municipal administration (surtaxes on the land, fees for emphyteusis) and because they were called on to ensure order in that countryside. We see the old problem of the guardie campestri, or rural and agricultural police, resurfacing, a problem along which we slide directly from the milieu of violent clientelism to the issue of Mafia violence. The service appears to be inefficient “because of the lack of discipline and the disagreements that exist in the Corps,”³⁹ but probably it is more accurate to talk of corruption. In Misilmeri, in 1903–1906, five guardie campestri were murdered; in 1907, eight of the twenty-five members of the Corps were put on trial for criminal conspiracy, two were imprisoned on charges of murder, and one was fired for stealing. Every so often the system of private and public guardianìa (the business of providing custodianship) imploded. In Monreale around 1911, Vittorio Calò, Mafia capo of the small agricultural town of Borgo Molara, developed a strong disagreement with the farming family of the Sciortinos, who apparently formed part of the tradition of the stoppagghieri; the Sciortinos were massacred. In November 1912, while Giuseppe Cavallaro, town treasurer, was returning from one of his giardini, or citrus groves, he was shot and killed by an unidentified assassin hidden behind a hedge. This murder took place thirty years after that of Father Simone and employed the exact same technique.⁴⁰ In the meanwhile, Calò perfected “the system of locuplamento, the guardianìe or custodianships, and the systems of ransom or collecting tributes,” until he reached the point of demanding a percentage on “any and all signs of human life.”⁴¹

As one landowner in Misilmeri wrote, the municipal consorteria (political association of aristocratic families) was responsible for “vandalous crimes, such as cutting down trees and grapevines, burning haystacks and barnyards,” the “social cancer” known as the Mafia. In a more moderate description, the police declared that “commissioners and councilors, many of whom have also suffered property damage, avoid meddling in police matters, for fear of more serious reprisals.”⁴² Perhaps what we are seeing here is a division of labor between the small-town politicians and the rural rackets, two distinct spheres that were nonetheless reciprocally functional. This situation corresponds to what Giovanna Fiume describes in connection with the Calderones of Marineo in the immediately preceding period.⁴³

If from the partially transformed area that rotates around Palermo we turn inland, toward the provincial hinterland with its large landholders, or further down, as far as the so-called Vallone, where it meets the boundaries of the Agrigento area and the Caltanissetta area, we encounter different conditions, and a much closer relationship between town and countryside. Here too, the episode of the fasci forms part of the continuity of the local parties. In Burgio in 1891, there existed three organizations that mirrored the division into town parishes (Parish of the Madonna del Carmine, Parish of Maria, and Parish of S. Nicola) and which, “because of the ferocious competition among the parties … exerted an influence on the masses.” In 1893, the first two organizations were transformed into fasci and then returned to their previous form in the wake of the repression.⁴⁴ In Casteltermini, the fascio, which was considered to be extremist, defended itself from police attempts to infiltrate it by holding its meetings in the palazzo of the major landowner, Francesco Lo Bue Perez, nephew of a senator, to the cry of “Viva il cavalier Lo Bue, viva il socialismo, viva i fasci!” (“Long live Cavalier Lo Bue, long live socialism, and long live the fasci!”)⁴⁵ At Contessa Entellina it was the Lo Jacono family who established the fascio; with various ups and downs, that family had controlled all local power and the market of the gabelle, or subcontracting of farmland leases, as far back as the late eighteenth century. The Lo Jacono family had also allowed its lands to be worked on a sharecropper basis, rather than with the traditional rental and sublease system.⁴⁶ With this outlook of potential reforms of the agricultural contracts, the townships offered a view of the large landholders and their grip on the countryside. “In the fasci of Girgenti (the old name for Agrigento—translator’s note), there is a praiseworthy example in S. Maria Belice, where the leaders are landowners. They have taught the peasants to believe … that he who works hard, saves his money, and cooperates will also become a landowner.” In S. Stefano Quisquina, the fascio was founded to the cry “Viva il Re e Margherita, evviva la legge!” (“Long live the King and Queen Margherita, long live the law!”) by the town councilor, Lorenzo Panepinto, who, however, like the founders of the fasci of Prizzi and Bisacquino (which included Cascio-Ferro), took part in the strikes over the division of products proclaimed by Nicola Barbato and Bernardino Verro, the prestigious socialist leaders of Piana degli Albanesi and Corleone, respectively. For moderates and radicals the objective was still the introduction of sharecropping.

The depression of the 1880s and 1890s reduced revenues, but, more than anything else, the profits of farming concerns. The result was the collapse of the market of the gabelle. This made the absentee landowners, who lived in Palermo, Rome, or even Madrid, even more the objects of hostility on the part of a municipal ruling class that was suddenly won over to the alternative of sharecropping, eager to establish new relations with the bourgeoisie—that is, middle-level peasants who were beginning to despair of ever rising to the rank of gabellotto. These peasants constituted the fundamental structure of the fasci, as they rode from one estate to another on horseback to persuade the laborers to boycott the landowners who were unwilling to accept the conditions established, those who even after the repression under Crispi kept alive “internal” socialism, at least in a number of agricultural situations where the leadership of the Verros, the Barbatos, and the Panepintos was emerging.⁴⁷ It is possible to state that here socialism and Mafia were founded on the same social groups while still setting forth two different models of mobility and relations with the country bourgeoisie and the large landholders. The simultaneous presence in a single area of a high level of both political mobilization and Mafia mobilization cannot be resolved in the oppositional logic of action and reaction. The report that in his youth Verro underwent a sort of Mafia initiation,⁴⁸ whether true or false, shows the roots in this common soil, ideally exemplified in the two figures of Verro himself and Cascio-Ferro, neighbors in their origins, though distant in their final destinies.

Many of the fasci charters called for the denial of membership to individuals responsible for public scandal, convicts, or mafiosi. All the same, the door was left open for those that L’Avanti! naïvely described as “a Mafia faithful to its generous origins, rooted in a legitimate rebellion against all forms of arrogance.”⁴⁹ La Plebe, a socialist newspaper published in S. Stefano Quisquina, describes the chance encounter between two groups—the group of those enrolled in the peasant league and the group of the “mafiosi.” The encounter ended with an exchange of witticisms and a common recognition of the moral superiority of the league supporters and adherents.⁵⁰ In a speech delivered in Prizzi in 1902, Verro stated that “as long as socialism has been preached, the lower forms of criminality have declined, and we hope that over time there will be a similar decline in the murders ordered by the alta Mafia.”⁵¹ This is a hypothesis of linear civilization of the social conflict in the course of which socialism would take the place of the Mafia, at least the “low Mafia,” eliminating its reasons for existence. When Cavalier Emanuele Arezzo accused his striking peasants of maintaining an “attitude that was in no wise civil and absolutely mafioso,” Panepinto replied that the Mafia represented only the “spontaneous product” of the large landholding.⁵²

Even Panepinto himself, confident—earnest elementary schoolteacher that he was—that socialism represented a form of collective pedagogy, was still obliged to convince himself of the empty inanity of all progressive automatism when he paid a visit to the community of his compatriots who had emigrated to Florida: “We had placed our trust in illusions concerning our townsfolk who had gone to work in Tampa but unfortunately, even the distance and the change in milieu seem to have done nothing to moderate their age-old propensities for reckless and criminal behavior. Dollars and good pay seem to have been of no help, unless someone can step in to help shape the political and moral consciousness of these proletarians.”⁵³

Panepinto’s trip also constituted an attempt to escape the difficulties inherent in the socialism of S. Stefano Quisquina, which was unable to carve out any space for itself in the wake of the excitement and enthusiasm of the great agrarian strikes of 1902, at least at the district or provincial level because of the age-old and unresolved conflict with De Michele Ferrantelli. Verro, too, the target of persecution by the authorities, left Corleone and sought refuge outside of Italy, or else decided to take party offices in Messina and Reggio Calabria. It is difficult to identify a “class-based” line in the towns of the large landholdings in Sicily. However, it was even less likely that men of this sort would be able to find new opportunities for themselves outside of the municipal stage.

The peasant movement emerged from its impasse around the end of the first decade of the twentieth century with the explosive growth of the collective tenancies, which took the place of the leagues as chief instrument of the organization. Thanks to the Sonnino Law of 1906, the cooperatives were now able to operate as terminals of the Banco di Sicilia for the issuance of agricultural credits, and thus take large landholdings in rental and then make them available to members in small lots. Among other things, in this phase, the more extensive use of crops that improved the soil (broadbean, clover) and the first introduction of chemical fertilizers allowed an intensification of crop rotations. This development finally broke the iron chain between cultivating wheat and letting the land lay fallow, which underlay the great nineteenth-century subleases, making peasant agriculture relatively prosperous. After an initial phase of hostility, the landowners began to consider “the collective intervention of the peasants in the rents as a natural effect of social evolution,”⁵⁴ especially appreciating the support offered in terms of revenue, which had first been threatened by the general crisis and subsequently by the dwindling of labor due to growing emigration. The demand generated by cooperatives primed the rental market, which now also involved both the gabellotto singolo (individual renter and sublessor of parcels of farmland) and the gabellotto collettivo (collective renter and sublessor of parcels of farmland), to use the terminology of the period, which significantly underscored the common role of the economic and politico-social intermediary with respect to the major (indeed, sole) resource that existed for peasant society. By transforming proximity into rivalry, the cooperatives found themselves in competition for the monopoly that, as we know, can trigger the greatest possible punishment.

The story begins with Bernardino Verro, forced by an attack in 1910 to leave Corleone. Clearly aware of the situation, he sketched out the levels of the Mafia network: in the town, the gabellotto and Mafia capo, Michelangelo Gennaro; on a provincial scale, the cricca protected by the subprefect Spata, married to a woman from the Torina family of Caccamo, and therefore a descendant of a venerable Mafia dynasty, and by Vincenzo Cascio of the provincial administrative coalition. Clientelism and family tied both of them to Member of Parliament Avellone, who had testified on Palizzolo’s behalf. Avellone, like Palizzolo, was a member of Rudinì’s entourage and had come out of the “moralizing” operation of Codronchi. There was of course also a connection with Palermo:

Avellone did not suggest or order [the attack], but he is a member of parliament for the district and must maintain ties with relatives and grandi elettori, or major ward heelers. I saw him with my own eyes in the Teatro Massimo café in Palermo, talking animatedly with Gaspare Tedeschi, a native of Palermo who lives in Villafrati, where he acts as Mafia capo and conceals Giovanni Mancuso, one of the pair, the one who shot me and then was in turn shot, and was then taken to the Palermo clinic run by Doctor Giuffrè, brother of the Mafia capo of Caltavuturo and well aware of the tenancy that was the reason I was shot. What a network! What a tangled ball of string! Tedeschi is well known to the Palermo magistrature, and one evening he even came to pay a call on me in the Piazza Bologni, offering to serve as a peace negotiator between me and the Mafia.⁵⁵

The story continues with Lorenzo Panepinto, leader of the socialists of S. Stefano Quisquina, then fully on the rebound after obtaining financing from the Banco di Sicilia to rent the former Mailla feudo, or estate. “Unquestionably the ‘subversive’ of 1911 was much more worrisome to their lordships than had been the subversive of 1893,”⁵⁶ and therefore the punishment had to be much harsher. On 16 May 1911, outside his front door, Panepinto was assassinated. His well-attended and massive funeral brought to public attention a profound and ancient Sicily, which appeared to the correspondent of L’Ora to be a “savage tribe” where the expression of grief was entirely focused on female figures. Surrounding the daughter of the capo, “the women of S. Stefano, wrapped tightly in their black shawls, seemed possessed by some unknown passion as they emitted frightful shrieks…. Vendetta was the word on everyone’s lips.” “Avenge him, avenge him,” the widow repeated as if it were a nursery rhyme.⁵⁷ But of course socialism could not face off with its enemies using their weapons: “It hardly seems as if this is 1911,” wrote a disconsolate Verro, accused of being a cascittuni (spy), incapable of finding an intermediate path between “becoming a criminal, inciting to criminal acts, or being assassinated.”⁵⁸

When, in the spring of 1914, the Corleonese left wing triumphed in the administrative elections, Verro was obliged to return home and serve as mayor, though he was fully aware of the dangers he faced. “Either drink or drown…. What would have become of this socialist movement if the workers, once they had power in their hands, decided not to take it?”⁵⁹ Less than a year later, he was shot down in the middle of the town. Another year passed and Nicolò Alongi, formerly a member of the fasci, leader of the peasant movement in Prizzi, himself a peasant, was attacked. A truce was called, and then, in September 1919, the secretary of the league, Giuseppe Rumore, was killed. From that day forth, Alongi described himself as a “dead man on vacation,” and he bid his friends farewell. “I don’t know if tomorrow I can embrace you again, but I am sure that others will rise to wave the banner that they want to tear from my hand.”⁶⁰ Not even a month went by, and the socialism of the large landholdings wept over a new victim.

The progress of the battles over the rental of the large landholdings around Prizzi, before the war but especially after, clearly indicates the motive for the murder. While the landowners were “willing to give in,” “the negative power” came entirely from the local gabellotti and their “relations of reciprocality, mutuality, interests, and even Mafia.”⁶¹ The most authoritative among them was Silvestre Cristina, closely tied to Cascio-Ferro, who would later wind up murdered, though in Palermo, just a few years later.⁶² The second-rank leader was Giorgio D’Angelo, the son of Luciano D’Angelo whom we saw as a Mafia capo in the 1880s and earlier, in the 1860s, as an accomplice and abettor of the gang of Don Peppino il Lombardo. On the other hand, the suspected murderer of Panepinto was a certain Giuseppe Anzalone, a young gabellotto from Lercara, with the same place of birth and the same name (a grandson then?) of another of the most notorious abettors and accomplices of the gang. A well-known figure, Anzalone, Jr., was especially respected for his family ties, as is shown by his title as “godson” of Camillo Finocchiaro-Aprile, the member of parliament from Lercara and the Italian minister of justice.⁶³ Thus, fifty or sixty years later, the foundational role of the experience as a brigand of Don Peppino proved its significance.

The picture of the Mafia in large landholdings in the first two decades of the twentieth century, however, is more complex and more intimately linked to the new structure that was emerging. The death of Panepinto does indeed fit into the context of the “uprising of the Mafia gabellotta,”⁶⁴ but it also forms part of the conflict with the Catholic rural savings and loans, with which apparently the mafiosi were especially close. A substantial element of Verro’s problem in Corleone had to do with the difficulty of preventing the socialist cooperative from falling prey to the appetites of profiteers. The police believed that the Mafia had succeeded in finding a position within that cooperative in the person of Angelo Palazzo, the administrator whom Verro had denounced for misappropriation of funds.⁶⁵ In short, an attempt was made to block the progress of the cooperatives, on the one hand, but also to take them over in other areas. The collective gabellotto may represent an instrument of the restructuring of Mafia power—just as in a more general sense around 1910 the peasant political machine was taking on a new articulation in western Sicily, with the spread of the instruments of tenancies and rural savings and loans. This led to the creation of such powerful entities as the Federazione Siciliana delle Cooperative (Sicilian Federation of Cooperatives), which in 1911 gathered 313 organizations of the Agrigento area under the leadership of the radical-socialist Enrico La Loggia. Similarly, the priests Michele Sclafani and Luigi Sturzo, the first a moderate clericalist and the other a Christian Democrat, brought renewal to the Catholic movement.

Let us consider the case of Villalba, a village in the Vallone that was traditionally the theater of brigandage as well as conflict between large landholders, who did not live in the village, and the borgesi, who staged major strikes as early as 1875, and again in 1893, 1901, and 1907, alternately allied “with the gabellotti against the large landowner or with the large landowner against the gabellotti.”⁶⁶ The quarrel focused on the two Miccichè and Belici feudi, or estates. The first estate was owned by the princely Palermo family of the Trabias, while the second estate was also administered from Palermo but belonged to Duke Francesco Thomas de Barberin, who lived in Paris. The Trabia family’s firm control over the first estate contrasted with the power of the intermediaries over the second one. Those intermediaries were none other than the Gucciones, who turned the estate into a refuge for brigands, including, at one period, Antonino Leone. It was the Belici estate that the people of Villalba, organized into the Cassa Rurale Cattolica (Catholic Rural Fund), asked for the tenancy and succeeded in 1908:

“The ideal had been attained,” the priest Sgarlata, chairman of the company, would later write. “Usury had practically been eliminated; the oppressors and the gouging middlemen had been eliminated. The peasant has once again attained with his liberation a love for the fields and for hard work; now that the peasants have become gabellotto and are working on their own behalf … they know that the sweat of their brow will come back to them in the form of prosperity and nourishment.”⁶⁷

But in the townsfolk’s eyes, all credit for the success of the operation was due to the priest’s young nephew, the very same Calogero Vizzini, who had been arrested just a few years earlier as an accomplice and abettor of the bandit Varsalona. Now, however, as guarantor of the transaction between the Paris-based landowner, the Palermo-based administrator, the cooperative, the peasants (and the Gucciones), Calogero Vizzini won for himself the title of “Don,” a title that would accompany his name throughout the course of a long and emblematic career. The gabella was assigned personally to Vizzini in accordance with a practice that was not uncommon in transactions between large landholders and peasant organizations, an indication of the central role played by that individual’s personal, financial, or political credibility. In this specific case, Don Calogero, or more familiarly Don Calò, kept for himself a substantial portion of the estate (290 hectares, or 717 acres), and graciously handed over the rest to the Cassa Rurale, or rural savings and loan.⁶⁸ The collective mobilization offered new areas of endeavor for the mediation services of Mafia notables.

S. Mauro Castelverde, 1894. The peasant Mariano Farinella was killed by several members of the Glorioso clan whom he had accused of stealing a cow. The young son of the victim, Vincenzo, witnessed the crime and after a lengthy hesitation, “broke the customary silence” and turned to the authorities. The trial, however, ended in acquittal, followed by the ineluctable elimination of the “spy” (1899). A few months later, during a nighttime attack on a farm, three of the alleged killers of the Farinellas were murdered, according to the investigators, by Antonio Farinella, son and brother, respectively, of the two dead men. Two other Gloriosos then escaped to America, but when they returned to their village fourteen years later, they found the vendetta of Farinella and his four brothers awaiting them.⁷⁰

Both of these cases involve a classic sequence out of the saga of brigandage: the murdered relative, justice denied, feud, and vendetta. The correspondence between legend and reality ends there, however. Farinella turned into a typical figure of the Alta Maffia, leaseholder, mayor, but also accomplice and abettor of Melchiorre Candino, a leading figure in local banditry.⁷¹ Varsalona remained a fugitive from the law for more than ten years, personifying what Detective Alongi called the turning point of brigandage: the abandonment of the old technique of kidnapping and the institution in the hinterland of a racket strategy borrowed from the coastal Mafia, with the creation of a network composed of bandits, campieri, or private guards of farmland, peasants, and landowners, with the levying of “a new type of land-based surtax that allowed landowners and gabellotti to move freely through the countryside … confident that they could buy back whatever was stolen from them by criminals not affiliated with the gang, who were inexorably suppressed.”⁷²

In the Varsalona and Farinella cases, then, there emerges a close similarity between the roles of mafioso and brigand, with the prime difference to be found in the warrant for the arrest of each. Candino lived in hiding for well over three decades, and according to public opinion his presence was tolerated “for services rendered to the police,”⁷³ feeding himself “with checks from the feudal landowners.” His time on the run would come to an end in 1922 with the surreal touch of a public manifestation of approval from the notables of Gangi, concerned about preserving order in the countryside after the “brigand” retired to a private existence.⁷⁴ We are quite distant, in this Sicilian setting, from the figure of the primitive rebel, the vindicator of the wrongs suffered by the poor at the hands of the wealthy and the powerful. This was made excruciatingly clear as well to two members of the Varsalona gang when they suggested, “in a moment of giddiness,” the kidnapping of a certain G. G. (Guccione) who had ordered the expropriation of the property of the father of one of the two gang members. Here was the problem: this Guccione, however, was (as usual) “the most generous and substantial contributor to the association,” and the very idea of such an act was so abhorrent to the brigand chief that he decided to inflict a death sentence, executed immediately and on the spot, on the imprudent foot soldiers.⁷⁵ There are those who, in the face of the “astonishing growth of cattle theft,” will be forced to give up “working the fields and the large landholdings,” the mayor of Contessa Entellina, Nicolò Lo Jacono, complained, and his family was exposed to the pressures of the brigand Grisafi. On the other hand, there were others who made use of their positive relations with the bandit to venture into the rental and lease market. As a result, Emanuele Coco, Mafia capo in Chiusa Sclafani, was able to take the place of the Lo Jacono family.⁷⁶ Orbiting around brigands in hiding, we always find the same basic characters: the notable who serves as an intermediary with the peasant society, the Palermo mafioso, the middlemen, the peasants, and the outcasts and misfits.⁷⁷ On the lower end of the social ladder, too, are the victims and the usufructuaries (roughly speaking, something like long-term sharecroppers) of the farmlands, grazing lands, businesses, and even manufactories,⁷⁸ which the brigand in hiding manages within the context of relations and clientele.

Many police officials continued to “say that criminality has grown to such excessive proportions that all measures against it are ineffective.”⁷⁹ One Catanian construction company working on a new railroad line was unable to prevent its (Siracusan) laborers from fleeing, “terrified” as they were at the murder of a technician in charge of construction, and more in general at the twelve murders that had taken place in a single year in the territory of Prizzi-Palazzo Adriano. The authorities unconcernedly observed that “in all this, taking into account the location and the setting, there is nothing abnormal.”⁸⁰ In any case, anyone who ventured to investigate highly placed protection complicity was walking out onto a minefield. Cutrera incurred the disapproval of his superiors on two occasions: the first time when during an investigation he attempted to “nail” as an accomplice and abettor of Varsalona the baronello (baronet) Peppino Coffari di Cammarata, and the second time when as a scholar he underscored the impotence of the authorities.⁸¹ The middleman who was robbed of a large sum of cash during an assault on the Palermo-Camporeale “postal automobile” feared that the situation would continue ad infinitum “with the wiles and those protected and guaranteed by the Honorables of Sicily which [are] in cahoots with the Mafia and when the case finally comes to trial, they impose their will on the judges and jurors with threats and are let loose in complete liberty.”⁸²

Of course, the system was neither so all-encompassing nor so stable: protection, as always, has a clientelistic character, and there are those who truckle under and pay, and others who resist. Every so often, in the form of open denunciations or anonymous letters, protests came to the ears of the authorities, who mobilized their forces in the hot zones. When that happened, there was a general exodus of abettors and accomplices from the towns in the center of the network, Cammarata and Castronovo in the case of Varsalona, “even before the squads and officials could reach the places they were assigned to cover—spontaneous and unnecessary evidence of the broad base of support of the criminal society.”⁸³ The squadriglie, or squadrons, were mobile groups made up of Carabinieri and police officers, who over time came to replace the army in garrisoning the territory, under the supervision of such skilled functionaries as Commissioner Cesare Mori and Commissioner Augusto Battioni.

Many bandits were in fact captured in this way, but the Great War arrived and only worsened the situation with the return of ex-convicts from Tunisia and America, and especially given the reactivation of the circuit of draft evasion, living undercover, and banditry.

Cattle theft, in fact, is the chief pursuit of old and new fugitives, while the campieri allow the passage of herds through the large landholdings, and the mafiosi falsify the necessary documentation to make it through the checkpoints. The limited availability of manpower and capital leads to the decline of the cultivation of grains in favor of grazing livestock, in part because of the high price of meat, given the demand of the army, inflation, and the abolition of the tariff on wheat, which would not be restored until 1924. This is just a typical oscillation of an economy based on large landholdings, which—depending on cyclical variations—focuses either on grazing livestock or cultivating crops. The wartime and postwar legislation, with freezes on rents, also makes gabella increasingly attractive to those who are concerned about falling victim to cattle rustlers, or rather who succeed in ensuring that these and other misfortunes befall their rivals. “A former large estate leased for eleven thousand lire would yield almost one hundred fifty. And so it was necessary to bend the landowners to one’s will, to ensure that they would rent us, at negligible, ridiculously low rates, their lands; and thus were made ready fortunes, quickly, reliably, a barony.”⁸⁵

The state’s response took into account the numerical inferiority of force and left unguarded such strategic areas as the Palermo countryside. In the interior, “squads for the prevention and punishment of cattle theft” were in operation and completed the turnaround that was begun during the earlier period. The squads, groups of seven or eight men on horse back, moved from one province to the other, rarely returning to their base, never relying on reinforcements in case of conflict. This was a risky tactic, as became evident in October 1916, when two policemen were killed near Contessa while chasing Grisafi. There was no thought of a return to the postunification period, with the besieging of small towns and blind repression. The squads remained a police tool; they moved according to a refined system of information, which allowed Mori, between Caltanissetta, Agrigento, and Palermo, to destroy the Carlino and Grillo gangs and at last to capture Grisafi. Grisafi worked with a network of no fewer than 375 abettors and accomplices, of whom 90 were in Caltabellotta, the village where he was born.⁸⁶

At the end of the war, the situation was quite serious. To the east, in the Madonie, the dissolution of the domain of Candino left room for his adversaries, such as the other aged fugitive from the law, Gaetano Ferrarello, who was joined by his nephew Salvatore Ferrarello, Nicolò Andaloro, the Dino brothers, and Onofrio Lisuzzo. The objective, here as well, was the creation of a network of campieri and leaseholders, skimming money from the properties through “begging letters,” the theft of livestock, and various forms of harassment and damage. The high mediator, Baron Sgadari of Gangi, guaranteed the agreements: “To put the matter to an end, I have persuaded them to settle for eight thousand lire,” he wrote to his brother-in-law, Leonardo Signorino, who was being plagued by extortion letters, “while on their part the undertakings that they made in my presence remain solid.” Signorino (Baron Pottino), on the other hand, was obliged to yield to the demands of his campiere, who even admitted that he was well aware that the previous payment “ought to have exempted him from paying any further tributes.” “I ask you for no more than an additional ten thousand lire,” Andaloro wrote to Signorino. “And I warn you, take care not to believe in the flatteries of some false friend, who will certainly enjoy the party between you and me, because I assure you that I will let you feel my most ferocious disdain.”⁸⁷

This is a reference to internal conflicts among the would-be protectors. In fact, the system of banditry in Gangi, which in some phases of its history operated in an organized manner, also went through periods of internal conflict like the feud that in 1922 led to the arrest of Andaloro himself by Battioni, guided by a tip from his sometime friend/sometime enemy Ferrarello. The settling of accounts became more complicated than in the times when Candino and Varsalona came to a ready agreement over how to split up the province, one taking the east and the other the west; criminal supply and appetites multiplied significantly. In this period, feuds began between the Barbaccias and the Lorellos for control of the forest of Ficuzza, a storage point for the herds stolen between Corleone and Palermo.⁸⁸ In the small town of Godrano, in the years between the end of the First World War and the period following the Second World War, fifty-eight men were killed over that property. There were bloodcurdling raids on farms, with massacres of entire families, including women and children. For instance, at Burgio and Sclafani in 1922 there were, respectively, seven and eight dead. The cause? “The predominance of the Mafia in the fields.”⁸⁹

The first massacre took place in the context of an endless feud that began at the turn of the century between Lucca Sicula, Bivona, and of course Burgio. During that feud, one faction swore it would “even kill the cats” of the opposing faction.⁹⁰ The second massacre occurred during the war between the Dino gang, expanding southwest from Gangi (Petralie, Polizzi, Alimena) and the “old Mafia” commanded by the Mogaveros of Polizzi and the Sorces of Mussomeli, with whom the other Gangi gang commanded by Lisuzzo made an alliance. Among the ferocious reprisals of the respective abettors and accomplices, the feigned peace treaties, betrayals, and schisms between brothers, it would be idle speculation to speak of a tension between banditry and a Mafia d’ordine (order-keeping Mafia) prompted by a simple “impulse of self-defense,” because on both sides we find a “greedy yearning for wealth, … robberies, extortions, and murders.”⁹¹ On both sides, there was ambition to establish one’s own form of order.

Less harsh was the battle going on to the east, toward the Mistretta area. For local gabellotti and campieri, chasing after the cattle rustlers meant venturing into “Ferrarello territory.” It was advisable to make use of a mediator and ask him to “say a few words to Gangi” in order to negotiate a price for the ransom and the recovery of the livestock.⁹² A great number of letters of this sort were found during the course of two searches (1925 and 1926) in the office of the lawyer Antonio Ortoleva of Mistretta, a member of the town council, a landowner, and a criminal lawyer who, in the years 1901–1913, successfully defended various men charged with cattle theft (including one of the Farinellas). The letters reveal Ortoleva’s role in the mechanism of cattle theft and extortion, in jury tampering, and in the racket of the gabelle. Through Ortoleva the landowners frequently paid the protection money intended for fugitives from the law. Instructions and reports appeared concerning the murders, in a code that is still relatively unclear. A former adept of the lawyer confessed that he chaired a Mafia tribunal active since 1913, which made not only business decisions, but also decisions of life and death. And in fact the adept-turned-informer was killed, as ordered.⁹³

It is noteworthy that letters were sent to Ortoleva from the Mistretta area and, more in general, from the province of Messina, from both the eastern and the western sectors of the province of Palermo, from the Caltanissetta area and the area around Enna, and even from the province of Catania. This outward expansion of the Mafia networks to take in eastern Sicily took place in accordance with an overriding logic of territorial proximity that was somewhat different from the approach that is familiar to us from the story of Bartolomeo Badalamenti in the neighboring Palagonia. Let us take the case of two of the lawyer-correspondents, the Tusa brothers from Mistretta who made agreements with Bartolomeo Badalamenti on the people to be hired on an estate after learning the “wishes of the well-known friends,” in a mediation between a priest and landowner and the brigand Salvatore Rapisarda of Adrano who wished to “protect him.”⁹⁴ The Tusas and their cousins, the Seminaras, moved progressively southeast along the trails of the transhumance, or seasonal movement of livestock, that brought the herds from the mountain above Messina to spend the winter in the Calatino area (an area corresponding to the Diocese of Caltagirone). In 1906 they were in Leonforte as administrators of the estates of the prince of Gangi, and following the First World War they had pushed almost all the way to Catania.⁹⁵ For that matter, in the interior zone of the Etna province, the gabellotti usually arrived from the east and brought with them a standard entourage of “tough” campieri and good relationships with fugitives from the law.⁹⁶ “It is a tradition in my family,” stated the Honorable Gesualdo Libertini, “to employ excellent individuals from Mistretta as campieri.”⁹⁷ That tradition was still in effect in 1926 when Libertini himself summoned the Tusas and the Seminaras to manage the large estate of Mandrerosse in the territory of Ramacca, formerly owned by the township of Caltagirone; it was subsequently sold to a local notable through the mediation of Luigi Sturzo and confirmed as such in the 1930s and 1940s when Sebastano Tusa, the sole brother not involved in the investigation,⁹⁸ continued to administer the property, also serving as delegato podestà or Fascist governor in the newly founded borgo (village) of Libertinia. Once the trail had been blazed, a flow in the opposite direction took fugitives from the law from eastern Sicily under Mafia protection into the Madonie, or Madonia Mountains. That was, for instance, the story of the Catanian smuggler Luigi Saitta, a story that had important repercussions.⁹⁹ Less peaceful was the expansion of gabellotti and campieri from Mistretta into zones of the old Mafia. The Catanian baron Giuseppe Camilleri, who had entrusted his lands in the Agrigento area to the Tusas since 1913, was forced to change his policies in the face of the harsh reaction from Canicattì.¹⁰⁰

The vastness of Ortoleva’s network of relations as well as his social qualities finally seems to have risen to the level of Alta Mafia. The protagonists of the trial of 1928–1929 were convinced that they had finally reached Sicily’s “interprovincial high command.” The following is from the summation of Member of Parliament Angelo Abisso, a native of Agrigento, who represented the civil plaintiffs:

In truth, the role of ambassador is not the same as that of chief or capo, and that is the difference crucial to any understanding of why we are suddenly asked to believe that Mistretta is the capital of the Mafia. This is a town that in the past had showed little if any Mafia presence, a place where traditionally “the arrogance of power … had no need of any specific instruments other than its well-oiled mechanisms of self-reproduction and corruption.”¹⁰²

A distinction can be made between two levels. The first level was that of the network of relations in which Ortoleva served as a mediator for the recovery of stolen livestock, a level as wide-ranging as the cattle herds themselves, as well as the campieri and gabellotti. There was also a second level, in the narrow space of the Mistretta area, an aggregate of interests whose postwar mutation, from the sphere of clientelism to that of crime, should not be interpreted on the basis of an entirely internal evolutionary logic, but rather in light of pressure from the Madonie. That pressure provoked reorderings of the territorial systems in adjoining areas in order to allow landowners and intermediaries to fight or negotiate.¹⁰³ On the other hand, the history of Contessa Entellina as reconstructed by Blok based on the minutes of the 1929 trial indicates an analogous process, the violent marginalization of the local cosca commanded by the Gassisi family by the Cascio-Ferro group, operating along the Burgio–Bisacquino–Corleone axis. Despite what clearly emerges from his own work, the Dutch anthropologist Blok emphasized that it was necessary to take into account exclusively the municipal dimension: “There is no local term to describe an array of mafiosi in areas larger than a single community. Each village or township had its own cosca. The members of that body operated within a distinct and limited territory that generally coincided with the township…. The local cosca was a small and relatively autonomous unit.”¹⁰⁴

In fact, it was precisely in this historic phase that the concept of cosca as a closed system of town or village, already fairly unrealistic within the context of the nineteenth century, became false.

The years following the First World War witnessed the extraordinary transformation of the proportional electoral system (1919), a culmination of the various effects of universal male suffrage (1913), the return home of hundreds of thousands of veterans determined to win a better life for themselves, and the struggle for land. This was the penultimate act of the centuries-old crisis/transformation of the economy based on the latifundium, or large landed estate. That crisis coincided with other factors related to the business cycle, such as the conversion of grain fields into pastureland, prompting the anger and protests of peasant movements. The resulting wave of protests involved occupations, country and small-town insurrections, demands for the intervention of the Opera Nazionale Combattenti (ONC, or National Veterans’ Association), and plans for agrarian reform. The process culminated in a mobilization of the market for farmland that would extend until the deflationary downturn of the second half of the 1920s. A total of 341 large estates were sold and broken up, for a total area of 139,802 hectares (345,458 acres), of which 51,971 hectares (128,423 acres) was sold through direct negotiations between parties, 45,346 hectares (112,052 acres) between private seller and buyer, and 41,482 hectares (102,504 acres) through the cooperatives.¹⁰⁵ The last two categories show how in many cases the peasant movement, in order to attain the desired result, required the help of intermediaries, both individual and collective: cooperatives, agricultural banks, and “workers’ associations,” all of which were emanations of the peasant or village parties. This context brought about a certain Mafia component. There were significant, though isolated, examples in eastern Sicily. To name a few, we have Palagonia, where Bartolomeo Badalamenti controlled the division of the large landholding; and Adrano, where an ex-convict who had returned from America took the office of mayor and gained access to the Cassa Rurale Cattolica (Catholic agricultural bank) and thus the operations of parceling out land.¹⁰⁶ Ortoleva took part in the distributions of state-owned land in 1921–1922,¹⁰⁷ but it would be difficult to describe him as a mafioso for that fact alone, were we not already familiar with his activities in the areas of cattle theft, racketeering, and close relations with fugitives from the law.

In Ribera there were two factions. One faction was led by the pharmacist Liborio Friscia, uncle of the combattentista (or pro-veteran) member of parliament, Abisso; the other faction was headed by the Honorable Antonino Parlapiano-Vella, a moderate and clericalist, as well as by his brother, Gaetano, mayor of the town. In the summer of 1919, the “Cesare Battisti” cooperative headed by Friscia turned to the ONC and, on behalf of its eight hundred members, asked for the lease of the large landholding that extended over half of the township’s territory. That large landholding belonged to Don Eristano Alvarez de Toledo, duke of Bivona, senator, and Spanish grandee. Somewhat concerned, Don Eristano traveled to the town, his very first visit, with the plan of selling everything to the Parlapianos. But the combattenti (or veterans) kidnapped the duke and held him for three days (26–28 January 1920) in his ancestral palazzo, subjecting him to intense pressure. They forced him to rent the land to the “Cesare Battisti” cooperative. As soon as he was liberated, however, His Grace created an international incident over the violence he had suffered at the hands of the “Bolsheviks” of Ribera.¹⁰⁸ And so the Parlapianos purchased the large landholding and rented it to three cooperatives established for that purpose by campieri “belonging to the local Mafia.” They, in turn, subleased the land, “at very high prices,” to other members of the same cooperatives. In the meantime, they prepared to sell the land to members of their clientelistic network.¹⁰⁹

In the matter at hand, it was the large landholders who wanted to sell, and they had come to an agreement with the political and financial middlemen. It was a different matter with the Polizzello estate in Mussomeli, the property of the princely family of the Trabias. Here the “Combattenti” and “Pastorizia” cooperatives at first requested the intervention of the ONC to expropriate the land, but in the face of the Trabias’ strong reaction, they decided to agree to preserve the status quo in a way that would preserve a role for the intermediating agencies. The stakeholders in those intermediaries frequently represented an elite that then managed the issuance of subleases. This was the field in which Giuseppe Genco Russo developed his career. Genco Russo was widely considered to be operating on behalf of Calogero Vizzini, to whom he was in fact linked by ties of comparaggio (although not quite the same as the “godfather” of the movies, this is a relationship of godfather/godmother and godson/ goddaughter—translator’s note). Members of the Genco family worked as campieri on Don Calò’s estates. The personality of Genco Russo, however, displayed a clearer criminal identity. He was frequently at odds with the law, especially because of the violent fighting with the various groups (which in turn also fought among themselves) in the Sorce family, fighting fiercely to stem the advance of the Dino gang from Gangi.¹¹⁰

Now let us examine the case of Villalba. Here the combattentistica, or pro-veteran, cooperative had occupied the Belici estate and asked to rent it, for now. Since 1909, ownership of that estate had passed into the hands of Matteo Guccione in person. Guccione was a new large landholder, who was no more in favor of the cooperatives than the old landholders had been. He held an equally dim view of the provincial commissions for untilled land and the “expropriating” agencies such as the ONC. Once again, through the mediation of Calogero Vizzini, the combattenti were cut out of the negotiations, and a contract for the purchase of the estate was signed by the Catholic cooperative. However, when the cooperative was unable to close the transaction before the expiration of the legal terms, it was again Don Calò who persuaded Guccione not to give up.¹¹¹ Was this an agreement between men of honor determined not to lose out on a major deal? Or was this a showdown between two different generations? Considering the fact that in the same period Guccione was forced, “with fraudulent methods,” to accept Giuseppe Sorce as a partner in another piece of property that he owned,¹¹² we can safely consider the changing of the guard of the Belici estate to be an emblematic event. To Vizzini it brought excellent land, authority, and renown among his fellow townsfolk, aside from the numerous questionable aspects of the complicated transaction.

A comparison between Mussomeli, Villalba, and Ribera is enlightening. Genco Russo remained for the moment the intermediary between the prince and the community. In contrast, Vizzini already had, to the same degree as the Parlapianos, the political and financial capacity to mastermind and control the entire operation of the land transactions. Vizzini was “a wealthy, powerful, feared man,” a “cavaliere, or knight, a multimillionaire,” who owned “large estates, some even outside of the province,”¹¹³ deeply involved in the operation (gabella) and the purchase of sulphur mines. However, like other “industrialists” in the sulphur sector of the Caltanissetta area, he too would be devastated by the crisis. In this context as well, he gave proof of his stature: he received sizable loans from the Banco di Sicilia, he was involved in the discussions of the fate of the Consorzio zolfifero (Sulphur-Mining Consortium), and he took part in London in the negotiations for the establishment of an international sulphur cartel (1922), alongside individuals with the status of Donegani, founder of Montecatini, or Jung, future minister of finance.¹¹⁴

In this context, Vizzini no longer corresponded to the stereotype of the country uncle who has never ventured out of his hometown, the notable interested in status and not profit, which is the source of the traditional and protective model of the Mafia. While the first depiction is false inasmuch as here we are dealing with evident historical discontinuities, the issue of community “protection” does in fact seem to play a role. Vizzini, Ortoleva, and Genco Russo show that in this historic phase the figure of the mafioso is comparable to that of the notable who, with the phraseology of a progressive, but with the intentions of a profiteer and clientelist, trampled on and instrumentalized the processes of democratization.

Moreover, the groups that won the greatest blocs of votes in the elections of 1919 and 1921 were progressive. They were the combattentistica (or pro-veteran) array that expanded on the Sicilian stage: radicals, social reformers, and social democrats. The popular—or Catholic—party, fit just as easily as the others (if not more easily?) into this political and criminal array, as we have already seen in the cases of Parlapiano and Vizzini and as we shall see as well in other cases. The Gassisis of Contessa Entellina supported Giovanni Lo Monte, owner of Mezzojuso and “political chief of the Mafia,” opposing the local large landholder Antonio Pecoraro, who was in turn supported by the Cascio-Ferro group and by the previously mentioned Coco, who had age-old clientelistic relations with him. This panorama would seem to offer the traditional model of relations between the ruling classes and the criminal classes, if it were not for the fact that Pecoraro himself was the proponent of one of the projects for agrarian reform as well as a leading figure in a new party. The bloody feud that resulted in the deaths of a number of members of the Gassisi–Lo Voi family stemmed from the introduction of the new proportional vote and the expansion of the electoral districts to cover the provincial scale, which therefore, in accordance with the more general line of development of the postwar years, only increased the territories of influence (and therefore offered greater terrain for combat) among the various Mafia groups. There was a corresponding decline in plebiscites and the serene intermediation on the part of notables among the array of interests present in the electoral district, according to the model of the older electoral system. Many years later the period’s leading Sicilian politician, Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, evoked this atmosphere with a strong element of nostalgia: “Now if this unanimity of sentiments and votes included elements that are qualified as Mafia, that would not undercut the solidarity that links me to these people, even if that were to mean that I would be perceived as a mafioso.”¹¹⁵

It was Orlando who, once again, made the distinction between a “bad” Mafia involved in criminal behavior and a “good” Mafia, an expression of honor and loyalty: “I declare that I am a mafioso and proud of the fact!” he stated in a renowned speech from 1925,¹¹⁶ echoing the words uttered by Morana in 1875. In both cases, the paradoxical declaration of Sicilian pride came from a ruling class in a state of difficulty, in the first case struggling against police laws, in the second case with Fascism. The steady and progressive clarification, however, of the concept of the Mafia over the fifty years that had passed between the two cases, and in particular the burst of violence in the postwar years, rendered far more evident the degree of connivance with the criminal milieu that formed part of the “unanimous consensus” observed in Partinico in the election of a member of parliament. The ruling class was so intimately involved in the mechanism that it seemed incapable of perceiving the danger of the phenomenon: the young Catholic member of parliament from Gela, Salvatore Aldisio, a future Christian Democratic leader, defended a claimed freedom by launching an attack on the government decision to revoke weapons permits, which he considered a “clear offense” to the “Sicilian people” and would cause “an economic hardship” with the sole rationale of giving credence to “musty legends.”¹¹⁷ And yet the nature of events in this same period in his own electoral district should have given Aldisio at least some degree of pause. There were the 109 murders in the city of Canicattì in 1919 alone; there were daily pitched battles in Sommatino, where rival groups of sulphur miners faced off with hand grenades and pistol fights in the center of town, with the rival groups rearming each evening at the town’s gun shop.¹¹⁸

In the Fascist context, the situation appeared equally grim. As the prefect of Palermo telegraphed in 1925: “Here Fascism consists of existing common individual groups…. Each section takes on, within its own township, specific attitudes in accordance with the prevalence in municipal administration or according to ties [with] elements of the Mafia or personal relations [with] situations in the past.”¹¹⁹

In 1924, Ortoleva was a Fascist; in Gangi Baron Sgadari and Baron Li Destri led a municipal administration that the police called “Fascist-Mafioso.”¹²⁰ Tending toward Fascism were the Cascio-Ferro group in Bisacquino and the group of Santo Termini, including the notorious mayor of S. Giuseppe Jato. In many cases, the mafiosi reserved their support for the notable “supporters” of the Mussolini government. Thus, the Farinellas founded the fascio in S. Mauro but supported Lo Monte, as well as Ciccio Cuccia, mayor of Piana degli Albanesi, with prior indictments for a long series of crimes, including a number of murders.¹²¹ In an unprecedented orgy of transformism, the large-or small-scale notables attempted to jump on the Fascist bandwagon in search of votes with which to run against Finocchiaro Aprile and Orlando, who did not go over to the opposition until 1925. The Lo Monte case shows how certain profoundly unqualified individuals got their start. Among the few new men was Alfredo Cucco, the ducino (or Little Duce) of Palermo, who in any case boasted of relations with the surgeon of Bagheria, Giuseppe Cirincione, who someone described as “a feared and horrifying capo, for the previous thirty years, of the Palermo Mafia.”¹²²

As we can see, the “political” chief of the Mafia is too often identified for that identification to be considered credible. However, the overstatement in this case highlights the link between political system and criminality, and the reciprocal pervasiveness between one sphere and the other. Listen to the tones of the despairing appeal to the royal prosecutor from a man destined to be murdered: “If it is true what Pietro Palazzolo says, and that is that he is the master not only of Gangi but even of Italy because everyone is one of his subjects, from the ministers on down to the lowliest copper, if this catastrophe really existed in Italy, as I almost feel it does, then forgive me for having disturbed you.”¹²³

The arrogant statement of Palazzolo, lieutenant to Ferrarello, corresponds to the general belief of both mafiosi and proper citizens, and therefore blazes the path to the reintroduction of the Fascist antidemocratic polemic. This allows a movement that is amply contaminated by the presence of notables to recover its own physiognomy: if the Mafia established a tie to “parliamentarianism,” then it would be necessary to move against the Mafia in order to overcome Sicilian Fascism’s weakness and lack of appeal. “If we want to save Sicily”—wrote the secretary of the fascio of Alcamo—“then we must crush this strange sort of organization that is the Mafia; if Fascism wants to do something meritorious for Sicily it must solve this problem, and then it may be sure to pitch tents on this island that are even more solid than the ones it pitched in the north by undermining Bolshevism.”¹²⁴

The pendulum of the anti-Mafia fight swung back to the right, as it had in the period following the Risorgimento. During his trip to Sicily in May 1924, Mussolini identified the struggle as a proving ground for a “regenerated” Italian state, avoiding, with skillful political instincts, the dangerous identification of the Mafia with Sicily: “It should no longer be tolerated that a few hundred criminals abuse, impoverish, and harm a population as magnificent as the people of Sicily.”¹²⁵ On 23 October 1925, Cesare Mori was appointed, with expansive powers, as prefect of Palermo.¹²⁶

This was a crucial turning point. Mori was certainly no Fascist. In fact, he was the Nitti loyalist and prefect who in Bologna in 1921 faced off against the Fascist squadracce, or violent “evil squads,” earning himself the undying enmity of the extremists. To appoint him to the position meant resuming the effort that the state had been carrying out during the war years, focusing again on a unified command and the mobility of forces moving over the entire western sector of Sicily. A man who was capable of personally killing a brigand as well as writing a book (however badly written)¹²⁷ constituted a safe investment for a government in search of effective propaganda. Mori’s experience, moreover, was not limited to those points. In 1920, in Trapani, he had succeeded in creating a position of equilibrium by supporting the peasant movement while at the same time keeping order in a way that was highly praised by the landowners.¹²⁸ Prior to that, he had fought against the anti-Giolitti faction led by Nunzio Nasi with such vigor and determination that the witticism was coined: “vedi Trapani e poi Mori” (a variant on the old saying “See Naples and Die,” which in Italian is “Vedi Napoli e poi mori”—translator’s note).¹²⁹ He was thus both a crime-fighter and someone who had vigorously opposed the adversaries of the government, a figure similar to the model that Mussolini projected, though the Duce did so on a far vaster scale. There was a personal dimension. In 1925 Mori portrayed—and saw—himself as “the little man who for many months with scanty resources nearly mastered the Mafia, until a member of parliament managed to secure his transfer.”¹³⁰ No differently from other technicians who had served under Nitti, such as Serpieri or Beneduce, he saw totalitarianism as offering a chance to obtain results that had been hindered by the red tape of democracy.

In this context, the work of a prefect was to be “not a police campaign on a more or less grand scale, but instead an insurrection of consciences, a revolt of spirits, the action of a people.”¹³¹ In the face of the risks of such repression becoming unpopular, and the threat of potential “Sicilianist” reactions, Mori was exceedingly careful to seek out points of contact, a code of communication with the culture, real or presumed, of the masses. In his view, as for Pitrè before him, there existed a good omertà that corresponded more or less to the concept of virility, with honorable corollaries that could be classed as national and Fascist values. The only task that remained was to eliminate the unfortunate criminal by-products of that “good omertà.” “Omertà contains within it the specific means to combat its own degenerations. Hence we must turn—and it is this that I mean to say—to pride as an instrument with which to react to arrogance and bullying; courage to react to violence; strength to react to strength; and rifles to react to rifles.”¹³²

The reader may note the crescendo of qualities, until the final pairing whereby strength and force were clearly representative of a value, whatever the means being pursued. The elements of the Sicilian cultural codes that Mori believed he had understood resembled, all too closely, the strength codes of Fascism. “The strength that defends production” was written on the badge that the prefect pinned on the chests of campieri in individual ceremonies because he wanted a personal relationship with the Sicilians. An interesting exchange of views occurred on one of those occasions. Mori: “If others happened to call you a sbirro (cop) when they see you wearing this badge?” and the campiere replied: “Your Excellency would have to forgive me, but in that case I would shoot them.” The prefect was pleased with that answer (“bravo,” he said),¹³³ since he was clearly not interested in the concept of legality, but only in establishing loyalty and strength. All of this took place in the context of vast assemblies during which there was inevitably a ringing appeal to the idea of individual and social self-defense, the exaltation of the courage of those, both landowners and peasants, who refused to give in and took up arms, just as in an earlier period, they had “dared to face Austrian machine guns.”¹³⁴ Mori praised the exemplary behavior in war of even mafiosi, who were still patriots, however corrupt. That thesis was laughable, if we remember the direct tie between banditry and draft-dodging, but it was useful in promoting the notion of an Italic community that was stronger than any secondary consideration. It is reasonable to wonder to what degree the prefect’s rhetoric created genuine consensus in bourgeois public opinion, but I would feel safe in ruling out that the para-mafioso campieri were greatly moved by it. Mutatis mutandis, the Lombard Mori is reminiscent of the Tuscan Fanfani as, during the campaign against divorce in the mid-1970s, he pointed (without success) to the danger that the citizens of Caltanissetta might be cuckolded, in an attempt to instrumentalize their fears of women’s sexual freedom.

The year 1926 was a succession of vast roundups, each of which resulted in hundreds of arrests, with a grand total by 1928 of eleven thousand people in prison: five thousand in the province of Palermo alone.¹³⁵ The sweep began in Gangi, continued on toward Mistretta, Bagheria, Misilmeri, the borgate of Palermo, Monreale, Corleone, and Partinico; then continued south toward the Agrigento area and the Caltanissetta area, next eastward, pushing through the area around Enna until it lapped at the edges of the zone around Caltagirone and the western Enean province. In this phase, a major central force was employed, moving from one town to the next. For instance, eight hundred agents descended on Bagheria, a mix of Carabinieri, militia detachments, and police officers, and arrested three hundred people.¹³⁶ The operation in the Conca d’Oro was somewhat complex. It targeted the two groups of the Sparacinos and the Gentiles, whose civil war in 1923–1924 had resulted in forty-six murders and attempted murders. But the complications ensued because many of those targeted for arrest took shelter in sophisticated underground hiding places. The same thing happened in Gangi, which in January 1926 was placed under military occupation as an example to international, national, and local public opinion. It was the prefect who wanted this crushing victory, in place of the prearranged surrender that had previously been set up in December 1925 in a negotiation between Inspector Spanò and the Ferrarello–Andaloro gangs, with the decisive mediation of Baron Sgadari.¹³⁷

In order to win on the terrain of folk values, the state had to gain itself a degree of “respect” by behaving in a more mafioso fashion than the mafiosi themselves, culminating in the harsh speech that Mori delivered on the town piazza of Gangi before an audience stunned by the arrest of 450 individuals, including 300 “accomplices and abettors.”¹³⁸ This led to the pointless deployment of public forces, the fake negotiations that led to betrayals that were proudly vaunted, and ferocious threats of reprisals against fugitives from the law that took the form of public slaughtering of their livestock, the auctioning off of their possessions, the deportation of their families, and, in a veiled threat, the raping of their women. A strange type of propaganda emerged, which would still be remembered many years later: when his mother and sister were arrested, Salvatore Giuliano responded that he would not behave like “those pathetic mafiosi of 1926” who surrendered without striking a blow in the face of such tactics.¹³⁹ The arrest of 213 women and children led to the surrender of thirty-five fugitives from the law in the Palermo countryside. This was no “stroll in the park”; rather, it was a terrorist operation; to Mori (a latter-day Javert), for that matter, relatives could only be innocent “in a manner of speaking.”¹⁴⁰ An American anthropologist working in Sicily in those years describes the inhabitants of Milocca being forced by the Italian Carabinieri to march toward Mussomeli, along with their livestock and (again) the families of those who had managed to escape. More than 100 of the 2,500 inhabitants would be sent to prison.¹⁴¹ One of them, a peasant who was acquitted after four years of imprisonment, told the story of the terrible episode in verse:

At the end of 1926, Mori sent back to Rome a voluminous dossier on crimes committed by Cucco, the head of Palermo’s Fascist Party. In January 1927, the party federation was dissolved, and the ducino was put on trial after a blindingly rapid parliamentary authorization. In 1928, another scandal hit the Honorable Antonino Di Giorgio, formerly a cabinet-level minister in a Mussolini government and a brilliant military commander in the Great War. It seemed as if the attack had been carried all the way up to the Alta Mafia: hadn’t the Duce ordered his men to attack “at the top and at the bottom”? Di Giorgio was pulled into Spanò’s investigations among his electorate in the Caronie,¹⁴³ and, though there was not the slightest proof or even evidence of any guilt, he was forced to retire from political life. Cucco, too, had close and compromising electoral ties, but the charges against him did not rise to the level of Mafia crimes; rather, they were administrative and professional irregularities, abuses of power. He was in any case absolved of wrongdoing after eleven separate trials. One verdict used the term conspiracy, reflecting a widespread impression.¹⁴⁴

This episode unfolded far more in the political aspect than the police-enforcement dimension of the Mori campaign. In the middle of the 1920s, Fascism liquidated the liberal outriders that had made its victory possible. Then it went on the attack against the positions of the notables within the party, destined to be ultimately transformed into a gray propagandistic apparatus of a hypercentralized regime in which decisions played out within the inner circles and in conflict with the “strong” powers: the church, the monarchy, the bureaucracies, both state and nonstate, and the manufacturers’ association, Confindustria. In the outlying areas, the prefects were encouraged to protect the PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista, or National Fascist Party) and were supported in their frequent clashes with federal officials; in all of Sicily, and perhaps in all of Italy, the elimination of individuals considered troublesome solely because they were independent was justified by issues of alleged immorality or profiteering.¹⁴⁵ In Palermo, the accusation was linked to the Mafia. “The designation of mafioso … is often used in perfectly bad faith and in every field, including the field of politics, as a way of performing vendettas, venting resentments, and defeating adversaries.”¹⁴⁶

It was Mori who said these words, and it was Mori himself who cynically applied the concept. The prefect knew perfectly well who would provide him with evidence to construct a dossier against Cucco: Roberto Paternostro, a lawyer defending numerous mafiosi, and now disgraced director of the fascio, who a few years before had expressed the concerns of the people of Palermo over the hypothesis of the arrival of someone like Mori, as well as a “Movimento italiano impero e lavoro” (Italian Empire and Labor Movement) composed for the most part of ex-convicts, which distinguished itself by its clearly sympathetic stance toward the Mafia as a supposed form of “syndicalism” through which the peasants “seized by force … the means of survival from the local seigneurs and large estate owners.” One last member was the highly compromised Honorable Lo Monte.¹⁴⁷ Paternostro, however, was the only one who would even momentarily return to power. The others would soon vanish, along with the ludi cartacei (paper playthings) of political liberty. There were other winners. The liquidation of the political personnel encouraged by Fascism led to a full-fledged current of agrarian revanchism, of which the Mori operation was only one of various components. “He aimed too high, and was cut down to size,”¹⁴⁸ Tina Whitaker wrote of Cucco. She was the mouthpiece of the dominant classes who did not believe the charges but who still desired to see strong state control over the party, and who were concerned over the refusal of Cucco’s followers to make Fascism nothing more than an updated version of moderateness, and the threats of new revolutionary “Vespers” against the large landholders. In Cucco’s description, in 1927 Mori was a man “in a genuine aristocratic frenzy,” moving “from one elegant drawing room to another, and from this reception to that soiree,” “intoxicated” with high society¹⁴⁹ and willing to elevate that society by placing at the head of the PNF (the Partito Nazionale Fascista, or National Fascist Party) the Marchese Paternò di Spedalotto and the duke of Belsito. This was the terrain, far more than the propagandistic field of the reconquest of folk values, where the relationship was constructed between Fascism and Sicily, a relationship that was meant to be a direct tie, without intermediaries, between the state and the various social classes. The intermediaries par excellence were the parasitic gabellotti, while Mori absolved the producers, meaning the landowners, inasmuch as they were victims of a state of necessity.¹⁵⁰

It is fair to wonder to what degree these sharp distinctions of role corresponded to the minutes of the major trials for criminal conspiracy, which succeeded one another beginning in 1927. These trials involved hundreds and hundreds of defendants, rising to a peak of 450 for the association of Casteltermini. In the judicial accounts, the parties oscillate ambiguously between the figure of the victim and the figure of the accomplice: extortion winds up being transformed into protection and even into partnership for taxes or sheepherding; there are cases in which cattle thieves, in exchange for the return of the stolen animals, demand and receive not money, but the thefts of other animals. In general, in war those who want to defend their positions are obliged to employ the same means as the enemy. That would constitute the state of necessity, which, however, could be applied to many individuals in different walks of life, both involved, found guilty, and acquitted.

Let us take as an example Giuseppe Ortoleva, brother of Antonio Ortoleva, indicted on charges of extortion against the priest-gabellotto Filadelfio Versaci, the former mayor of San Fratello.¹⁵¹ According to Ortoleva, it had been Versaci himself, after receiving threats from the bandit Russo, who had begged him “to order one of [his] campieri to settle the matter” until the campieri reported the demand for 8,000 lire, which on his own authority the middleman had reduced to 4,000 lire and had paid the sum out of his own pocket. However, Russo was not happy and began to target Versaci with thefts of livestock. The campieri themselves investigated those thefts, and thus another 3,000 lire was paid out, but the livestock was not returned because in the meanwhile the bandit had killed himself. As the reader can clearly see, defendant and accuser were as alike as two peas in a pod. By his own admission, this other Ortoleva was the commander of a military organization that negotiated with fugitives from the law of one zone and, it would appear, also in other areas. He played the role of mediator for which he was either paid in cash or else given the power to control an area that he could then convert into money by administering the gabella. The discourse became more complicated with the introduction, as realities demanded, of the varying independence of the campieri and the rake-off that they might choose to take for themselves. Similarly, there was the consideration of the advantage over his competitors that Versaci might enjoy from a potential link to the Ortoleva-campieri. Even the ritual of the begging letters (lettere di scrocco) was meant to create complicity among the various opposing parties, focus on the informality of the relationship with the middleman, and conceal from both judicial and ideological observers the reality of well-organized “industries.” The extorter urged his victim to turn to “trusted individuals” for the negotiation, and that victim was obliged to dig furiously among his various contacts. This is what the Messinese businessman threatened by brigands was forced to do, and after searching among his clients in Gangi he found one who told him that “these people exist, and it is not just, in fact, by no means prudent, to fail to satisfy their demands, it is necessary to act immediately, and you can rely implicitly upon me to help.”¹⁵²

This was the “society of the mafiosi, active and operational” that, according to the attorney general of Palermo, Luigi Giampietro, represented “in and of itself a criminal conspiracy,”¹⁵³ which did not require any evidence in the form of criminal actions by each of its members. In the two trials in which Calogero Vizzini faced charges as a capo and for a Mafia association, it is difficult to understand not only the defendant’s degree of guilt but even the reason for the charges themselves, which boiled down to the fact that the crimes were committed by his cottimisti (or pieceworkers) in the mines and by his campieri on the large landholdings, and therefore in relation to a profiteering network, without even a legal theory that this network served a criminal purpose.¹⁵⁴ The charges of association with the Mafia, which were so easily leveled against major gabellotti and poverty-stricken peasants, were instead avoided when dealing with large landholders, even in cases where they were linked to murders. One typical example concerned Pecoraro, whom numerous witnesses named in the Burgio trial against Cascio-Ferro and company. Still, Pecoraro was not indicted in that trial. Il Giornale di Sicilia even went so far as to eliminate, in its version of the letter written by the murder victim Gioachino Lo Voi before his death, one of the pillars of the prosecution’s case, a passage concerning the large landholder, “who is catholic in his views and thus protects all criminals. His supporters kill whoever they choose, steal constantly, and that scoundrel wishes to be elected to parliament and therefore protects them. Damned thieving rogue!”¹⁵⁵ Even more astonishing were the cases of Gangi. During the course of the negotiations with Spanò, Salvatore Ferrarello asked naïvely (or perhaps mischievously): “If we were to turn ourselves in, who would guarantee peace in the countryside?”¹⁵⁶ Order was kept on behalf of individuals such as Baron Sgadari, who for many years had protected fugitives from the law, carrying out financial transactions on their behalf and acting as intermediary with social and political authorities. Finally, he even negotiated their surrender on (false) promises of impunity, the reason for the chilling promises of reprisal in the courtroom during the trial at Termini. And yet, the same bandit, when he escaped from the prison where he was serving a life sentence during the subsequent world war, renounced any attempts at vendetta. “Have you ever heard of a certain Ferrarello?” Vizzini asked Montanelli, explaining to him the benefits of Mafia mediation. “He started his career like Giuliano and he wound up like a priest. He even decided, after he escaped from prison, not to kill Baron Sgadari, who was responsible for sending him to prison. Someone must have settled the matter through negotiation.”¹⁵⁷ Therefore, we can understand the astonishment of the English ambassador, Sir Ronald Graham, when he spotted Sgadari, whom he considered a capo dei capi of the capintesta (or top boss) Mafia, among the prominent supporters of Mori, elevated to the position of podestà.¹⁵⁸ And it was in fact at Gangi that we find one of the most noteworthy instances of a continuity of local power during Fascism around the families of the ricconi (roughly, tycoons) (Li Destri, Sgadari, and Mocciato), who commit “infamies,” as denounced in 1937 by the mounted Carabiniere, Francesco Cardenti:

Here, reasonably enough, brigands and internal exile appear to be inter changeable instruments; it is impossible to separate class power from its intimate connection with Mafia power.

Let us take, for instance, an episode that took place in the Conca d’Oro after the major roundup of April–May 1926. In June 1927, Giuseppe Carella was killed at Villa Adriana, the residence of Baron Luigi Bordonaro di Gebbiarossa.¹⁶⁰ The confessed murderer was Salvatore Sciacca, Jr., who claimed that he had killed Carella during a quarrel. In contrast, the investigation revealed that Sciacca had carefully prepared an ambush, and it also uncovered a longstanding series of disagreements between Carella and the Sciacca family. Salvatore Sciacca, Sr., also known as Cola Innusa, was indicted for ordering the killing. For nearly thirty years, the father had been curatolo of the villa, which was considered a family possession. In fact, the same position had previously been held by the father-in-law of Salvatore Sciacca, Sr., a certain Giuseppe Biondo who is familiar as the alto papavero (literally, top poppy, meaning powerful figure) of the cupola in the late nineteenth century. Carella was hired to improve the efficiency of the estate’s management, after the Sciaccas were relieved of command, and this put the family in a bad light in the baron’s eyes. As a result, Carella was punished. This was a classic Mafia situation. The prosecution asked for serious punishment, and the jury and magistrates complied. It was scandalous that Don Cola described as a “colleague” someone who was an “officer and a gentleman.”¹⁶¹ The people of Palermo were accustomed to seeing the spilling of blood of criminals, but not the blood of other members of society. Further evidence that the planners had misjudged the situation was the way that the crime was carried out. The victim was hacked to death with a billhook as in any other country murder. This may have been because reports that would have made it possible to stage the more customary ambush on the way home were absent. Sciacca, Sr., had an alibi, the best kind: when the murder was taking place, he was in the countryside with his padrone (or boss). However, as soon as the baron learned of the (unexpected) discovery of the corpse, he vanished, leaving his bodyguard alone on the road back to Palermo.

On behalf of the defense, Sciacca, Sr., identified the figure of the Homo sicilianus, uneducated and rough, but loyal to his superiors. In the parable that lay at the heart of his summation, the lawyer Ferdinando Li Donni¹⁶² imagined an argument among the jurors: a Neapolitan, a Lombard, and a Palermitan, the only one capable of understanding matters, who explained to the others that Cola was a mafioso “if what we mean by mafioso is a man who shares the beliefs of the countryside, omertà, minding one’s own business, obtaining testimonials. This, yes, colleagues. A man of the giardino, or citrus grove, he was.” However, “the court has asked us to determine not whether he was a mafioso, but whether he was a criminal. And I will prove to your satisfaction that he was forced to fight against criminals.” In Villa Adriana, there had been no theft or robbery in thirty years. “The criminals of the area knew perfectly well that they were not permitted to do any harm to any member of it [the baronial family]; otherwise the uomo del giardino (citrus grove custodian) would surely have them killed, to protect and defend those family members.” Having thus explained the mysteries to the outsiders, everything was now in place and the central point emerged, the saving link between the mafioso and the baron and the tie with other mafiosi and other barons: Cola would survive only if it was evident that he was in all ways a creature of his master, capable of killing at his orders but not on his own behalf. “Men of the countryside,” according to the lawyer Berna, “still remain primitive.” Instead, Cola

The prosecution described a pre-Fascist world of anti–property-owner abuses and arrogance, which ended with the blood of the “heroic” Carella. The defense noted that already, just a year ago, with the roundups, that world had collapsed, that the landowner had confirmed his faith beyond all restrictions, and that therefore the mafioso could not be a criminal.

Had the Sciaccas managed to keep from being overwhelmed by panic, they might well have succeeded in preserving some power in Villa Adriana. That power would certainly have been undermined and would have required some degree of caution, but it would have endured. This tells us a great deal about the space that remained within the context of the system of social relations while the Mafia as an association was swept away. In the giardini, as well as in the large landholdings, the perpetuation of the traditional systems throughout the Fascist period, even in untroubled “environmental” situations, represented a radical refutation of all supposed states of necessity. Mori showed off with great pride the thanks which the large landholders who had been enabled to raise the legal rents expressed to him;¹⁶⁴ in some cases, it was from 10 lire annually to 110,000 lire per year. A special commission decided which were the “infected towns” and dissolved the leases in those towns and villages, claiming that the result would be a return of the no-longer absentee farmers to the duties and delights of the fields. According to the chairman of that commission, the system of the gabella “sinks its roots in violence and blood and finds, when necessary, the perfection of its two contractual extremes in the rifle and the murder.”¹⁶⁵ But that was not how matters stood. The union agreements that called for the elimination of subleasing were evaded with various subterfuges.¹⁶⁶ The landowners were unable, or unwilling, to eliminate the intermediary and were satisfied with having put that intermediary (for the moment) in his place.

The special and favorable treatment accorded the large landholders constitutes the common element in all these trials, which otherwise show considerable differences one from another. Some of the trials rested on a fairly solid evidentiary foundation: the letters of Ortoleva and the letter from Lo Voi (Mistretta and Bisacquino), the testimony of the injured parties, and the accusations of complicity from various defendants. In order to obtain these results, the police employed methods that the British ambassador described as “energetic and ruthless,” beatings and genuine torture that in certain cases, such as during the trial for a Mafia association in Sommatino, came to light, destroying the prosecution’s case.¹⁶⁷ This, however, was only one of the components that shattered the omertà with which the grandfathers urged their grandsons to take revenge. “In any case, there is no justice, and the jurors are willing to acquit even in cases where they themselves were witnesses to the crime.”¹⁶⁸ There was a general and decisive change of course. For the most part, the “losers” were the ones who talked. Giuseppe Gassisi, “after someone murdered his son, put the law of emotion ahead of the law of omertà.”¹⁶⁹ Giovanni Latino, who survived the massacre of his entire family, identified the murderers after remaining silent for ten years. The clash between factions continued in the halls of justice; and in this process, there were further risks of instrumentalism, with a political configuration underlying the criminal road map. We should not be surprised to learn that behind the accusations leveled against the archpriest of Burgio, Vincenzo Baiamonte, in the trial of Sciacca, was the son of De Michele Ferrantelli, his political adversary and a longtime accomplice and abettor of Cascio-Ferro.¹⁷⁰ The accusations of the canon Giuseppe Di Prima of Campofranco against the former popolare (People’s Party) mayor Gaetano Bongiorno and various other religious were rooted in a bitter atmosphere of personal resentments and reciprocal extortions.¹⁷¹ Spanò held in reserve the indictment of the mayor of Casteldilucio, Domenico Di Giorgio, in case his brother, a general and former cabinet-level minister, might appear “as a witness on behalf of his friends” in politics.¹⁷² The testimony of a notable could prove decisive. At the trial of the association of Burgio, one faction attempted to block the revelations offered by the wife of a defendant belonging to the enemy group. “We have a powerful piece to move, the notary Musso, and through him we will do all imaginable harm to your husband.”¹⁷³ The reputation of being a mafioso, as we know, is based on the vox populi. Given the system of defamation and anonymous letters that would characterize the Fascist regime in other areas as well, “anyone who had resentments to air, or positions to achieve, found, with secret accusations made to the police and false testimony, a field of unhoped-for opportunities.”¹⁷⁴

This transfer of the political struggle to the judicial front threatened to create a new Cucco case in each of the villages and towns in central and western Sicily. In any case, the magistrature was prudent, handing down acquittals or lenient sentences in cases of alleged bid-fixing, alleged fraudulent bankruptcies of cooperatives, and alleged plundering of municipal treasuries (S. Giuseppe Jato, Partinico, and Sancipirrello). The game turned intricate. As the attack moved inland, it became secondary to the dynamic of local parties alternatively co-opted, fought over, or brought under the wing of the Fascist regime.¹⁷⁵ The Fascists’ ambition in any case was to chase down the local notables to the very inner and formative mechanism of their power, with the dissolution of cooperatives and associations. That was the case in Mistretta with the Cerere, formerly headed by Ortoleva; in Sommatino with the Circolo Nuovo linked to Lo Monte; in Corleone where the authorities dubbed the Circolo Agricolo (farmers’ association) the casino della mafia, alleging that it had always been called by that name. In Ribera the adherents of Abisso turned against the Parlapianos, but the Fascist regime wound up dissolving their organizations when Abisso fell into disfavor and disgrace. In Piana dei Greci, the three cooperatives were shut down in 1927 inasmuch as they were party vehicles. Among them was the socialist cooperative founded by Barbato, which had supported Mori and which had been allocated the leases of the feudi, confiscated from the notorious Mayor Cuccia. To the officials who were dissolving the cooperative, even though they acknowledged that it had been run and managed well and honestly, a peasant bitterly replied: “If the prefect Mori had listened to anything that we, the people directly interested, had to say, and had paid no attention to your idle chatter, we would never have come to this mess.”¹⁷⁶ Like the king and the Duce, the prefect had no idea of how many bad things had been done in his name.

In this case, the antidemocratic operation and the operation on behalf of the large landowners coincided in the general equation—so dear to the Fascists—of Democracy = Mafia. The suspicion arises that in a number of roundups the true link among the hundreds of individuals who were later found guilty of nothing more than association with the others was political. It is not difficult to imagine that in a town individuals linked by common interests or family ties should be associated one with another with vague aims, so as to give a judicial appearance to the “Nights of St. Bartholomew in which, in order to arrest fifty criminals, fifty more honest men were dragged into the abyss.”¹⁷⁷ Is it reasonable to think that the eleven thousand people imprisoned (and how many might have been arrested?) were all mafiosi? As a preliminary investigator noted, “It was considered a sect when there were a number of individuals working in collusion, or at least when there existed an associative relationship that I don’t believe can be identified but which, in conclusion, was something like a federation, at least the way I saw it.”¹⁷⁸

This statement from one of the magistrates involved in the campaign implies a certain lack of conceptual rigor. Mori, no lover of juridical technicalities, openly considered the charge of “criminal conspiracy” as little more than a technical expedient¹⁷⁹ and, with Orlando, was late in arriving at a formulation of the phenomenon of the Mafia as being due to a deviant regional culture that had a central aspect of individualism. We have seen that a lawyerly culture offers a proliferation of such new and old anthropological figures as the “man of the countryside” or the “man of the gardens.” The defense lawyers admitted the designation of mafioso for men such as Cascio-Ferro, while associating it with attitudes of “brash individualism, certainly not criminal acts.”¹⁸⁰ If the Mafia is a traditional phenomenon, the traditional Sicilian, always an individualist, would never dream of associating with anyone else in order to commit a crime, or indeed for any other reason. The lawyer Puglia responded with a letter-perfect syllogism, calling upon the “true and irreplaceable expert on the Sicilian soul” as his authority, as usual, Pitrè.¹⁸¹ With a somewhat greater degree of realism, Giampietro, on the other hand, described the arc that brought the Mafia to configure itself as a pseudo-state ordering, as well as a form of “insurance” underwritten by “landowners” and “businesspeople” in order to ensure the protection of their “property and persons.” The blood “vendetta” derived from internal competition and rivalry, and in keeping with the collective nature of the phenomenon, the vendetta could be “transverse,” that is, targeted “against others in the family or the association.” It always took the form of “an ambush, a betrayal,” and was executed with spectacular ferocity, “with an additional defilement of the corpse, pouring gasoline on it, or decapitating it, or else mutilating it or ravaging it in a horrifying manner, indicative of the terrible power of the Mafia.”

Aside from the various exaggerations and falsehoods, the collective dimension that was documented, however crudely, in the maxiprocessi (maxitrials) of the Fascist era remained the foundation of the phenomenon of the Mafia, and therefore, of the struggle against the Mafia. In our eyes as scholars, not judges, the verisimilitude of the prosecution case lies in the personal and family biographies of the various characters, in the historical continuity of the criminal powers, and in the logic of the action/reaction dynamic that characterized the nature of the association, such a difficult thing to prove in a court of law. In many of the legal proceedings, one fundamental detail was the delegation of trust to the (extrajudicial) information provided by the police. Giampietro attributed full evidentiary value to that information. This was also true of the Palermo Mafia trials, in which there was practically none of the variously honest, extorted, instrumental, or false testimony that the political and factional struggle tended to produce in small towns. See, for instance, the verdict against the 213 defendants of Piana dei Colli. Even the admittedly domesticated newspaper accounts describe a trial that took place in a surreal atmosphere, with the presiding magistrate “from time to time … barking out a name,” examinations that lasted a few moments, witnesses that denied everything, the prosecuting attorney urging the jurors, in the absence of factual evidence, to issue a guilty verdict on the basis of their “free beliefs.”¹⁸³ Finally, the trial made continual reliance on the police records of interviews and interrogations; at the same time, those accounts constituted the preliminary judicial investigation, the evidence, and the verdict and sentence themselves. It is unlikely that this sort of trial could offer any genuine safeguards against police power, which was, if anything, strengthened by a law passed in 1926, specifically for the “Sicilian provinces,” which called for internal exile for those whom the usual vox populi identified as the “leaders, participants, accomplices, and abettors” of criminal organizations. “Internal exile,” reiterated the public prosecutor, “is a deadly weapon”¹⁸⁴ to be used against those acquitted or sentenced to “moderate” punishments. One such case involved the Farinella brothers. One of them, Mauro Farinella, was sentenced to eight years in prison but was then obliged to serve first a four-year term of internal exile and then (without a break), a second four-year term of internal exile, and wound up dying on a small island (1940).

That aside, we will not pretend to believe that the preventive administrative policies were measures introduced by Fascism; they were the instrument that allowed the liberal state to bring the Mafia under control. Trials had always been based on police reports and transcripts. Indeed, if we think back to the stoppagghieri and Amoroso cases, we can consider defensive of civil rights the prohibition imposed on Spanò “against relying upon rumors and commonly accepted versions of events,” as well as the obligation to supply the source “where it is based on confidential reports.”¹⁸⁵ We cannot be certain that some of the verdicts might not have been “prepackaged” (though in any case there were a fair number of acquittals, especially in the “smaller” or “minor” trials). We cannot vouch for the veracity of accusations contained in far too many posthumous letters, and in testimony and confessions that may have been retracted in court. This, however, is true as well of regimes both previous and subsequent to Fascism.

What then should we say about the effects of the operation taken as a whole? We cannot ignore the operation’s intentional damage to civil rights, nor can we limit our observations to that aspect. The Mafia was not invented by Fascism, as Christopher Duggan seems to theorize; Duggan, in his very noteworthy study, failed to make the (difficult) distinction between the actions of the prefect and those of the police, which for a great many years to come (the last documented instance was the memories of Calderone)¹⁸⁶ the mafiosi remembered as a nightmarish ordeal. All observers agreed that there was a sharp decline in the number of murders after 1925. Statistics, however, provide only a partial picture of the actual phenomenon.¹⁸⁷ There are two opposing theses. According to some observers, Mori annihilated the Mafia, which then sprang back into existence in 1943, fully armed, like Pallas Athena bursting from Zeus’s forehead. Others believe that the prefect Mori was ordered to halt just as he was about to reach the “highest ranks,”¹⁸⁸ that is, that the campaign was directed primarily against small-time criminals, in accordance with a class-denominated approach. Discrimination by class was certainly present, but that separated the large landholders from everyone else. The repression struck at professionals, mayors, primarily large-scale gabellotti like the Ortolevas, the Tusas, the Gucciones, and the Farinellas. A few of them reemerged in the postwar years: Vizzini, Genco Russo, and Volpe.¹⁸⁹ Others left no heirs: Cascio-Ferro and Candino, Ferrarello and Andaloro, the two Palermo factions of the Gentiles and the Sparacinos. There are important names of the past and the future. Among the names of the past were a certain Giuseppe Fontana from Villabate and Salvatore Licata, a fourth-generation member, I believe, of the Mafia family of the Conca d’Oro; among the names of the future were a certain Giuseppe Di Cristina from Riesi, a Santo Fleres from Partinico, Giuseppe Panzeca from Caccamo, Calogero Lo Bue from Prizzi, Antonino Cottone from Villabate, and even a certain Stefano Bontà.¹⁹⁰ Among the five hundred mafiosi who escaped to the United States, “fleeing the same intolerable political climate,”¹⁹¹ we find many of the future bosses of Cosa Nostra: Joe Bonanno, Joe Masseria, Carlo Gambino, Joe Profaci, Stefano Magaddino; as well as a top-ranking narcotics smuggler like Frank Coppola.

Amidst terroristic excesses, the conviction of innocent defendants, and political persecutions, the policeman Mori and the inquisitor Giampietro met and soundly beat the Mafia.

But all linear historical continuity ended with the foreign occupation of Italy and the dissolution of the state, the adversary, model, and accomplice of the Mafia. The formidable shock was enough to get everything going again, without any need for the deus ex machina of a conspiracy with the Americans, and such elements as airplanes and tanks that arrived in Villalba with scarves with embroidered L’s (for Lucky Luciano), with the improbable consequence of a Mafia mobilization led by Don Calò to neutralize the Italian-German armies.¹⁹³ In any case, it seems quite unlikely that in 1942 there existed a Mafia with which the high command of the Allied intelligence services could come to any agreements at all. Instead, there is documentation that the U.S. Navy entrusted Luciano with defending the New York docks against German saboteurs, which, however, had never existed, because it was the boss himself who simulated the attacks to obtain release from prison.¹⁹⁴ Truly here was the classic Mafia style: threat and protection from the same source! On the Sicilian side, Luciano denies having played any role at all: “Back home, I didn’t have a single contact.”¹⁹⁵

Salvatore Lucania, also known as Lucky Luciano, left Lercara at the age of nine. The last wave of mafiosi who moved to America was the surge of refugees fleeing Mori. Then, with the collapse of migration, the channels were blocked.¹⁹⁶ In this phase, in part owing to Luciano’s efforts, an American organization was created that utilized the Sicilian model of affiliation but emerged from the previous restrictions, owing primarily to the enormous opportunity offered by Prohibition. In the meanwhile, in the wake of the Mori cyclone, the island component retreated, so that when the Mafia finally revived, there was a very evident gap.

The Mafia had some credits to redeem after combat on Sicily ended. The Anglo-American forces had a territory to administrate. The only institutions that survived from the wreckage of the collapsed government structure were the Carabinieri and the interprovincial police service (Servizio Interprovinciale di PS) created by Mori. Therefore, the occupying Allied forces looked around for anyone who held any informal power (priests, aristocrats); in so doing, they had in mind the model of the Italian American boss or that of the native chief who collaborated with British colonialists. For the municipal role of mayor, they entrusted themselves to pre-Fascist notables, and among them were a fair number of men “of respect.” The immediate problem was to restore or ensure order and to safeguard the food supplies that were threatened by the burgeoning black market. A number of officers called for a compromise that might perhaps entail “the acceptance to a certain degree on the part of the Allies of the principle of omertà, a code which the Mafia really understands and respects.”¹⁹⁷ But for that approach to work, what was required was a centralized Mafia, capable of controlling the teeming welter of swindlers, connivers, and bandits.

In the meanwhile, the other side was busily reorganizing. Sicily was in point of fact separate from Italy; the anti-Fascist parties were weak there and lacked national connections. (This was around the major historical turning point of 8 September 1943, when Dwight Eisenhower announced Italy’s unconditional surrender.) Some of the notables made early moves, demanding the formation of a separate Sicilian republic and founding the Movimento per l’Indipendenza Siciliana (MIS, Movement for Sicilian Independence). The leader of this organization was Andrea Finocchiaro Aprile, the leading exponent of the Nitti movement in Sicily in 1919–1924. He was the son of Camillo Finocchiaro Aprile, a cabinet minister during the Giolitti government. There were others as well, such as Lucio Tasca Bordonaro, who was active with Vizzini in the agrarian party in the years following the First World War, and formerly a representative of the landowners in the Consiglio Provinciale dell’Economia Corporativa (Provincial Council of Corporative Economics), and now mayor of Palermo. Orlando, on the other hand, remained behind the scenes, the leading figure of a past that was returning to power.

Here, as elsewhere throughout this book, I will refrain from narrating the general history of Sicily sub specie mafiosa up to and including the return to Italian administration, the defeat of Sicilian separatism, the creation of the Italian region of Sicily, and the fight for agrarian reform.¹⁹⁸ I only wish to emphasize that a great many mafiosi spent time in the ranks of the MIS: Vizzini, Navarra, Genco Russo; Paolino Bontate, and Gaetano Filippone; Pippo Calò and the young Tommaso Buscetta. According to Calderone, Concetto Gallo, a Catanian landowner and the commander of the Esercito Volontario per l’Indipendenza Siciliana (EVIS, Volunteer Army for Sicilian Independence), was also a mafioso.¹⁹⁹ In September 1945, on a Tasca estate, the leading figures of the movement decided to make use of some of the gangs that were marauding through the countryside to bring young blood to the EVIS. “That evening,” commented our old acquaintance, Francesco Spanò, “the ancient society of the Mafia in which all the cosche of Sicily were represented was duly reorganized.”²⁰⁰ And in fact the network of relations that Mori had lacerated and demolished found this opportunity to return to life, winding itself around the MIS. For the first and last time, the Mafia, instead of inserting itself into an existing power structure, seemed bent on contributing directly to a political hypothesis. It is hard to say how important Sicilianism, long cited and evoked by mafiosi and their lawyers, really was. Certainly, if they possessed any political ideology at all, this would be it. In more concrete terms, a focus on the movements of the liberal political class had emerged from Fascism but could not necessarily be recycled in a new Italy.

Like others, the Mafia claimed it was a victim of Fascism; but with a greater degree of credibility than the same claim advanced by the notables, and especially the large landholders to whom the Fascist regime had restored social power, if not political power.²⁰¹ Many preserved a vivid memory of the roundups and the maxiprocessi, which offered the spectacle of campieri and gabellotti tossed out on their ears, denounced, and persecuted by their protectors/protégés. Was what followed an automatic reconstitution of a conservative front that grouped these intermediate elements alongside the large landholders? Or might the gabellotti find a place for themselves in the antifeudal (and anti-Fascist) struggle that was being readied in the Sicilian countryside?²⁰² These were the problems facing the Sicilian left as it searched for a progressive bourgeoisie, or at least a “low” Mafia to set against the Mafia “alt” or “high” Mafia.

On 16 September 1944, a truck arrived in Villalba, loaded with militants accompanying the Sicilian regional Communist leader Girolamo Li Causi, formerly a major figure in the area of political emigration and in the Resistance. Vizzini and his nephew, Benedetto Farina, who took turns being mayor of the town, controlled a local Christian Democratic Party that was affiliated with the MIS. Nonetheless, they were willing to welcome the outsiders to Villalba. They asked only that they avoid making references to local issues “out of respect for the hospitality that was being accorded them.”²⁰³ The small-town society was not accustomed to outside interventions, which were reminiscent of Fascism. Indeed, it was the prepotenze or arrogant bullying of the Fascists that gave Don Calò, who was found innocent in court and who avoided internal exile twice thanks to the recommendations of a myriad of relatives in the priesthood, a certain element of his personal and political prestige. Internally, the community was lacerated by the conflict between the Catholic separatist faction led by the Vizzini-Farinas and the venerable local Pantaleone family whose scion, Michele, had founded a socialist group. Li Causi presented himself for the rally standing next to Michele Pantaleone: a signal that he did not wish to “remain at the surface level of ideological propaganda,” but instead meant to delve into questions that might not concern him directly, in particular the issue of the lease on the Miccichè estate. The Trabias had warded off the mediators for decades, and then, in the end (sic transit gloria mundi), the estate had fallen into the hands of the Catholic cooperative that was opposed to the left-wing cooperative. Note how the “high-level” political and ideological language is overlaid on the small-town political and factional idiom. When the Communist leader began to criticize the clientelistic management of the subleases implemented by the Catholics through the actions of a gabellotto, Don Calò shouted: “That’s a lie!” and mayhem (babbilonia) broke loose, with dozens of pistol shots and the tossing and explosion of five hand grenades. Fourteen people were wounded, including Li Causi, who, according to popular legend, “pointing his finger straight at his attacker,” continued to shout: “Why are you shooting, who are you shooting at? Can’t you see that you’re shooting at yourself?”

Evidently, the Communist leader, heir to Verro and Panepinto, could not refrain from a civilizing pedagogy concerning class conflict, bringing the Sicilian anomaly into the normative scheme whereby “the members of the old-style Mafia, in the battle over ownership of the land, would no longer need to operate outside the framework of the law.” For that reason, he condemned Vizzini as “unworthy of belonging even to the Mafia.” This is not all that far from the position of the Christian Democrat Bernardo Mattarella, who emphasized that “those elements in Villalba who looked sympathetically toward the Christian Democratic movement, which they were considering joining, were in no wise reactionaries. They were by and large peasants and small landowners” who only by chance happened to be in alliance with the “feudal landowners” of the MIS (the Sicilian Independentist Movement or Movimento Indipendentista Siciliano). To the contrary, that alliance was anything but accidental. The massacre of Villalba was in no way similar to the classic Mafia ambush; instead it represented an act of terrorism “justified and hailed by the separatist press.”²⁰⁴ The mastermind behind that massacre meant to take sides openly.

The same political outlook understood as a subversive operation, and not as mere political management of power (which would have remained firmly within the context of tradition), emerges from the most spectacular and distressing episodes of the postwar years in Sicily, the story of Salvatore Giuliano.²⁰⁵ And yet the future prince of Sicilian bandits began his career as a penniless black-market operator who happened to be taken by surprise by the Carabinieri and instinctively shot at them. This was a latter-day variant on a bandit tradition that generally begins on the highest notes of a vendetta carried out against an arrogant abuser or an infamous traitor, and therefore a case of defending one’s honor. The Sicily of the postwar years was a setting of poverty and desperation, a place that refused to contribute the wheat it produced to the government pool, thereby making it available to the other poor wretches in areas that failed to produce sufficient wheat. Sicily was increasingly closed behind the small-town barrier that the Communists were attempting to shatter by dubbing the government wheat pools “people’s granaries” and calling for a mobilization against the greedy large-scale farmers. In many towns, however, resistance was general, extending to all social layers, including many of the more left-leaning peasants. According to a rumor that was spreading in Villalba, Li Causi had been sent “by the government to force the peasants to take their crops to the government pool.”²⁰⁶ Emerging from this context, the Giuliano case would move in unexpected directions. The lord of Montelepre would wind up fighting on behalf of the more general (and generic) concept of “Sicily” and would ultimately become a protagonist in the first “strategy of tension” in the history of the Italian republic, the massacre of the peasants assembling with their red banners at Portella della Ginestra to commemorate May Day of 1947.

Such an outcome would have been inconceivable had it not been for Giuliano’s enrollment in EVIS as a colonel. The supply of violence bubbling up from below met with a significant demand. We are exploring the case of the first political bandit in the history of Sicily, a bandit who attacked the barracks of the forces of law and order as well as local Communist headquarters, a bandit who robbed eminent individuals, who killed high-ranking mafiosi such as Santo Fleres, and who personally assaulted columns of the Italian army. He did his best to give overall meaning to his actions, but with a series of zigzagging operations that betrayed no detectable strategic drive. In some cases, he attacked the police because they were a republican institution, while respecting the monarchist institution of the Carabinieri. At times he was in touch with the right-wing and monarchist MIS run by the Tascas and the Carcacis, while at other times he contacted the left-wing movement led by his lawyer, Antonino Varvaro, who won a considerable victory in Montelepre in the 1947 elections at the head of a separatist republican movement. Among those suspected of ordering the massacre of Portella we find not only the separatists of the various factions, but also the highest ranking leaders of the Christian Democratic Party and monarchist leaders in Palermo. It is likely that Giuliano was at some point in contact with all of these figures during his many peregrinations within and around the MIS, that he was entrusted (or believed that he had been) with major roles, while on a regional scale the Italian left wing won the elections of 1947, at the same time that the monarchy fell on a national scale and the north became increasingly powerful. It would seem that the decisive point was this transition from monarchy to republic, the moment of a plot involving the separatist right with Savoy politicians and generals. That separatist right, in order to take part in a reactionary front, appeared to be willing to discard its supposed vocation as an anti-unification and anti-Risorgimento movement.²⁰⁷ The point is that overlying this (possible) plot was another plot to take Giuliano dead or alive, with a corresponding emulation among the Carabinieri and police, with disconcerting results. For instance, the high police official Ciro Verdiani, who regularly paid friendly visits to Giuliano (as did the public attorney Emanuele Pili), informed the bandit: “Beware of your cousin.” The cousin in question was none other than Gaspare Pisciotta, with whom, through Nitto Minasola and the Mafia of Monreale, the Carabinieri of the Comando forze repressione banditismo (CFRB, or Command of the Forces for the Suppression of Banditry) under the leadership of Colonel Ugo Luca were then establishing contacts. Clearly, it was of some importance exactly who wound up capturing the bandit, or at least persuaded him to surrender with the complex baggage of his (supposed) secrets.

And so it was logical that Giuliano should be captured dead—murdered (it seems) by Pisciotta, according to a prior agreement with the CFRB. It was 4 July 1950, and the postwar years were winding down. The staging of a firefight with the Carabinieri was miserably flimsy, adding more doubts to those already existing; but more than anything else it was the murder of Pisciotta with the notorious strychnine-laced cup of coffee served to him in the prison of the Ucciardone that made it inevitable for a theory of a plot to emerge. Nor should the reader expect the mystery to be solved here. I will do no more than to emphasize that the story of the Mafia was strengthened on this occasion, legitimized in its order-keeping functions by the police officers who served in the Mori operation: Messana, Verdiani, and Spanò, as well as Luca himself: “Unless Giuliano soon falls into the hands of the law,” Messana wrote, “he will have to become a victim of the Mafia…. In these days, and it is no strange coincidence, not a few criminals, several of them notorious gang leaders, have been found murdered.”²⁰⁸

The period in question was the beginning of 1946, and Giuliano would be active for four more years. The murdered bandits represented the victims, not so much of the orders of some superorganization, but rather of the struggle over the redefinition of the criminal hierarchies in the chaos of the postwar years, which constituted the “humiliation” of the idea of a Mafia d’ordine, “the daily demonstration of the nonexistence of any mediating or regulating function for it.”²⁰⁹ It was the state institutions that, by insisting on evoking it, wound up finally bringing it into existence. One example only is in order here. Messana had a contact in the gang: Salvatore Ferreri, also known as Fra’ Diavolo, a man “in the hands” of the cosca of Alcamo, who promised to hand over Giuliano (but failed to deliver him). Fra’ Diavolo was mysteriously killed while he was under arrest in a Carabinieri barracks. According to Spanò, the Mafia capo of Alcamo, Vincenzo Rimi, was the “trustee for the murder of Ferreri by the Carabinieri, because he was afraid that Ferreri—if arrested—would talk.”²¹⁰ This is the opinion of a questore, not of a subversive. If we consider that Rimi would later become one of the most important and most “protected” figures of the Mafia in the 1950s and 1960s, we can make a few guesses about the corrupting effects of these ties. What effects did the victorious plot, the one linking Luca, Minasola, and Pisciotta, have? “We are a single body, bandits, police, and Mafia, like the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost,” Pisciotta shouted during his trial in Viterbo.²¹¹

There was, however, a difference in accentuation between the “orphans of Mori,” who reactivated the channels of communications with the mafiosi of the Madonie or of Alcamo, and Colonel Ugo Luca, a specialist in antiguerrilla warfare who had served in the Balkans. Luca also aimed at a political distinction between the category of the government forces and the subversive forces. He further claimed that Giuliano and the Communists were allied with the subversive forces.²¹² What was needed was a sacrificial victim, a scapegoat for a fronte d’ordine (order-keeping front) founded on the contrast between a supposedly good Mafia and the bad bandits. This resulted in an even worse version of what had happened in 1877, overturning the direction of the events of 1926. This was the basis of Giuliano’s bitter jest about the collaborationist vocation of the Mafia.²¹³ It also led to the legend (otherwise entirely baseless) of Giuliano as the Robin Hood of Montelepre. In any event, the case of Giuliano, however spectacular, was only part of a larger and more complex operation to bring the Sicilian separatists into the Christian Democratic Party: Mattarella’s prediction that the Villalbese would return to the Christian Democratic Party proved far more accurate than the corresponding Communist prediction of a breakup from within of the Mafia-associated political alignment. Let us listen to the version offered by another Christian Democratic leader, Giuseppe Alessi, from the province of Caltanissetta. Alessi described how the separatists of the Vallone, under the leadership of Calogero Volpe, and with the support of Genco Russo, entered the party en bloc. Alessi opposed the move, knowing full well (in part from his experience as a lawyer in a number of the trials held under the Fascist regime) that this was “the world of the three M’s: … Mills, Money, and Mafia, that is, the united forces that control life in the Vallone.” His friends, however, objected: “We need the protection of powerful individuals to halt the violence of the Communists.”²¹⁴ A longer road lay ahead for Vanni Sacco, the Mafia capo of Camporeale who went over to the liberal side and waited until the end of the 1950s to join forces with the Christian Democrats, over the objections of the mayor of Camporeale, Pasquale Almerico. Fanfani’s lieutenant Giovanni Gioia, later a cabinet-level minister, replied to Almerico: “The party needs people with whom we can build coalitions, it needs new blood, we cannot stand in the way of certain attempts to create a compromise.” Almerico was thus isolated and was killed in an attack in March 1957.

Beginning at the end of the war, with the agreement of the large landholders, control of the Mafia campieri over the large estates of western Sicily was restored.²¹⁵ This was done in a bid not only to control the bandits but also the peasant movement. The list of union organizers murdered in the postwar years grew horrifyingly long, with the killings of Accursio Miraglia, Placido Rizzotto, Salvatore Carnevale, and many others. Moreover, the defense of the existing situation was transformed, as usual, into an ambitious effort to take over new terrain. The Mafia path to social mobility and the redistribution of assets was an approach that competed with, and was therefore antagonistic to, all those paths proposed by the left beginning in the early twentieth century. This conflict was all the sharper now that the latifundium, or large landholding, was about to enter the last of its numerous crises, one that would prove ultimately to be fatal. Both before and after the great land reform of 1950, the large landholders began to sell, partly in order to forestall potential legal expropriation. When all was said and done, 500,000 hectares (1.25 million acres) of land changed hands. These transactions were often quite murky, and they frequently involved preemptive purchases by the usual buyers, who often managed to purchase the land at “affectionate” prices.²¹⁶ The large estates of Polizzello, Miccichè, Mandrebianche, and Mandrerosse were purchased and sold through the intermediation of Genco Russo,²¹⁷ Vizzini, and Tusa. Giuseppe Bua and Mariano Licari in Marsala, Vincenzo Di Carlo in Raffadali, and more or less all the former campieri with greater or lesser ties to the Mafia controlled this gigantic divestiture of the property of their former masters, and the resulting transactions resulted in new fortunes and new clientelism. One essential relationship was that with the Christian Democratic Party and the Coldiretti, or farmers’ association, which in turn offered access to the ERAS (Ente di Riforma Agraria Siciliana, or Sicilian Agency for Agricultural Reform) and to regional financing for the development of small-scale peasant land ownership.

Beginning from an affiliation with the separatists, then progressing through the liberal party, and winding up with the Christian Democratic Party and the Coldiretti, Michele Navarra (known as u patri nostru, or our father), a doctor and profiteer who created a shipping company by purchasing trucks from the Anglo-American administration, joined forces with Vanni Sacco in an attempt to seize control of the Consorzio di Bonifica dell’Alto e Medio Belice (Consortium for the Reclamation of Upper and Middle Belice). Navarra led the Corleonese Mafia in its revival “following the roundups of the prefect Mori.” During those roundups, wrote Sergeant Vignali, “local organized crime ceased all activity because … even the relatives of the cosca members were uprooted.” Navarra was a relative of the Lo Bues from Prizzi, the Gaglianos, and the Gennaros, who were involved in the Verro murder and were prosecuted by the Fascists. Filippo Gennaro, son of Michelangelo Gennaro, then identified as the Mafia capo, was again active in the years after the Second World War in the market for rental leases and intimidations.²¹⁸ Navarra, on the other hand, reacted badly to the return from America of Vincent Collura, an individual with ties to Frank Coppola and Joe Profaci. He saw Collura as overambitious, and soon afterward Collura died in a hail of lead (1957). Another annoying individual was the union organizer Placido Rizzotto whom one member of the cosca, Luciano Leggio, waylaid in the middle of town, inviting him to come along for a “heart to heart.” “As we were leaving town, Placido kept saying ‘Where are you taking me? Let me go!’ He was being taken to his death.”²¹⁹ Another individual who was taken to his death was a teenager who had the misfortune of witnessing something awful. He was admitted to the hospital for a nervous breakdown and was personally treated by Navarra with an injection.

At the end of the war, Leggio “was a young peasant, without possessions or resources.”²²⁰ He was a scassapagghiara in the literal meaning of the term, that is, a thief stealing sheaves of straw, caught in 1944 by the guardia campestre (rural watchman) Calogero Comajanni and transported by him from one end of town to the other, “practically kicking him all the way,”²²¹ to the Carabinieri barracks. Six months later, the young man took his revenge for this humiliation, with the classic ambush outside the victim’s house. It is not entirely true to say that Leggio had no resources, because he had a natural skill in handling weapons, evident from his youth. Thanks to this skill, he became a campiere for a certain Doctor Caruso, taking the place of a predecessor who had mysteriously been murdered (1945). At the age of twenty, Leggio was already a gabellotto, the youngest one in Sicily, and he became involved in the networks of cattle theft and clandestine slaughtering, while remaining a fugitive from the law, with a few intervals, from 1948 on. This Dottore Navarra was the channel through which Leggio avoided the fate of a “new Giuliano,” despite predictions to that effect in the headlines of Palermo newspapers in 1958. Still, the “bandit” was not content to act as a simple triggerman. His spirit of independence aroused Navarra’s suspicions, and so the big boss organized a murder plot against Leggio. The ambush failed because of the great fear that Leggio inspired in the professional killers. Leggio’s reaction was murderous. Navarra, u patri nostru, dismissive of precautions, was killed, his body riddled with bullets along with that of an unfortunate medical colleague (1958). The war culminated in a furious shootout that involved “forty or so criminals on both sides,” in the middle of the day, in the center of Corleone, prompting no reaction from the law enforcement authorities.²²² The Navarrians emerged in complete defeat.

And yet everyone expected Navarra to win; he controlled the social power, and he had the political contacts. If the Mafia really was nothing more than a club of notables, profiteers, and obedient thugs, the episode would have been incomprehensible. If the Mafia’s hierarchies reflected nothing more than the natural (that is, social) hierarchies, then Leggio would have remained the nonentity that he was. Instead, one essential piece of capital was the capacity to deal out violence. And it is important to see where that capital was placed. Giuliano played in the field of major-power politics, and that is where he died; Leggio invested in the circuits of the Mafia.

Let us consider the clash between the two sections of the Greco family, based, respectively, in the Palermo borgate of Croceverde Giardini and Ciaculli. The first section was led by Giuseppe Greco, known as Piddu u tinenti (Piddu is a nickname for Giuseppe, and tinenti is dialect for lieutenant); the second originated with a certain Salvatore Greco, already dead by the time of the events in question, thought to be the same Salvatore Greco whom we first encountered as the capo, or chief, of the Alta maffia (or “high Mafia”) in the years spanning the late nineteenth century and the early twentieth century.²²³ The history begins in 1939 with a clash over “issues of honor”: the right to sit on a bench in front of a church during the religious festival of the borgata. It continued with a nighttime ambush on the return home, and the first victim was a son of the “lieutenant.” Beginning in 1946, war broke out, consisting of raids, executions, and “mysterious disappearances,” culminating in an attack with the involvement of the Greco women of Ciaculli in a knife assault and wounding of a member of the opposing group. One of the women (Antonina) was in turn attacked and killed (1947). These developments were so stunning in their methods as to justify the hypothesis of the Giuliano gang’s involvement on the “lieutenant’s side”: but in all likelihood, that was an attempt to assign this ferocious and illegal violence to unidentified brigands, so distant from the regulations based on the code of honor and chivalry, traditionally attributed to infra-Mafia competition. I would venture to express my doubts concerning the history of the bench and the festival, considering the issues at stake: the lease on one of the largest citrus plantations in Sicily, belonging to the Tagliavias, shipowners and exporters as early as the middle of the nineteenth century; the management of companies dealing in citrus derivatives and shipping companies; the battle to control eastern Palermo (cattle theft, supplies for the city markets, and smuggling), which in 1956 led to the murder of the Mafia capo of Villabate Nino Cottone, related to the Grecos of Croceverde.²²⁴ By this date, the two Greco cousins of Ciaculli, Salvatore “chicchiteddu” and Totò “il lungo,” also known as “l’ingegnere,” were rising to the summit of power and dealings of the Palermo Mafia, and there were no further conflicts among relatives.²²⁵ As far as can be determined, an agreement was achieved through the mediation of Joe Profaci, who was originally from Villabate and had temporarily returned to Sicily.