As the crow flies, it is only some thirty-five kilometres from Palermo to Corleone. Yet when Adolfo Rossi made the journey on 17 October 1893—eight months after the Notarbartolo murder—the little train took its usual four and a quarter hours to wind a path through the treeless mountains. Much of the landscape traversed by the train was still parched by the Sicilian summer; bleached and rocky, it was marked only by the occasional ruined watchtower or the dark green of the sparsely scattered olive and lemon groves.
Adolfo Rossi was a journalist working for the liberal Roman daily La Tribuna. He had not long returned from the United States where he had spent a dozen years crossing the continent in search of his fortune. By the end of his time in America he had become editor of Il Progresso Italo-Americano, the leading organ of New York City’s growing Italian population. Rossi returned to Europe with a passionate enthusiasm for the openness and speed of life in the United States. He claimed that by comparison Italy seemed as closed and static as a cemetery.
Riding in the same compartment as Rossi was another man from the mainland, a young army officer. They began to talk about the subject on everyone’s lips: the desperate living conditions of Sicilian peasants. Rossi recorded the typical story that the officer told him:
It hurts to see some of the scenes you come across when you live here like I do. One hot day in July, I remember, I was on a long march with my men. We stopped for a rest by a farmyard where they were dividing out the grain harvest. I went in to ask for some water. The measuring had just finished, and the peasant had been left with no more than a small mound. Everything else had gone to his boss. The peasant stood with his hands and chin planted on the long handle of a shovel. At first, as if stunned, he stared at his share. Then he looked at his wife and four or five small children, thinking that after a year of sweat and hardship all he had left to feed his family with was that heap of grain. He seemed like a man set in stone. Except that a tear was sliding silently down from each eye.
For nearly two decades Italian reformers had in vain been denouncing the plight of the peasantry of the Sicilian interior: malnutrition, illiteracy, malaria, debt slavery, appalling working conditions, exploitation backed by mafia violence, theft justified by bought lawyers.
In Corleone, the peasants said that honest bosses were as rare as white flies. Many of the town’s 16,000 inhabitants were labourers whose meagre existence depended on the great grain farms that stretched far into the hills below its narrow streets, its tiny squares, and its baroque churches. Corleone existed to feed Palermo, yet it did not always seem able to feed its own people. One English traveller of the 1890s found the town inhabited by ‘pale, anaemic women, hollow-eyed men, ragged weird children who begged for bread, croaking in hoarse accents like weary old people tired of the world’.
Rossi had come to Corleone to interview a man who had devoted his life to changing these conditions, a man who would become a symbol of the struggle against both privation and the mafia.
* * *
The poverty of the peasants of the Sicilian interior had simple causes. The big landowners of Corleone and towns like it typically spent their time in Palermo and leased out their estates on short-term contracts to middlemen or gabelloti. The short leases meant that the gabelloti had to wring money out of the peasants quickly. The average gabelloto was a ruthless, self-made man; this was a job you could not do without making enemies. The gabelloti often had to protect themselves and their assets, notably cattle, from bandits and rustlers. Frequently the gabelloti were in league with or controlled the bandits. The gabelloti often needed friends in the legal business too; the abolition of the feudal system and the periodic auctions of church and state property had left thickets of red tape going back decades.
Gabelloti were such pivotal figures in Sicily’s violent economy that it was often assumed that being a mafioso and being a gabelloto were the same thing. It is more accurate to say that joining the mafia enabled a gabelloto to do his job better. For one thing, the mafia had contacts in Palermo where many of the lease deals were made. For another, membership of the honoured society offered the military power needed to combat unruly peasants.
That power was to be called on when, as if from nowhere, in the autumn before Adolfo Rossi’s journey to Corleone, the oppressed peasants of western and central Sicily began to form new organizations called Fasci. The Fasci had nothing in common with the militaristic, anti-democratic Fascist movement founded by Benito Mussolini a generation later. A fascio is simply a bundle, an image of solidarity; the Sicilian Fasci were brotherhoods that united the peasants against the landowners and the gabelloti.
For a few months in 1893 the Fasci movement made Corleone the focus of the nation’s attention. The local Fascio, founded and led by Bernardino Verro, was one of the first and best-organized groups on the island. The previous year, Verro had been a lowly municipal bureaucrat with only an unfinished education behind him—he had been expelled from secondary school. There were thousands of anonymous functionaries like him across Italy, men who were forced to rely on patronage to obtain administrative jobs that barely paid enough to feed their families. Verro, infuriated by the injustices he witnessed around him, rebelled.
When he became leader of the Corleone Fascio, Verro was sacked for his political beliefs. By then he was past caring. He made flaming speeches to the peasants in their own dialect with examples drawn from the fables they knew. With Utopian fervour he preached cooperation, discipline, and women’s rights. The future was socialist, he explained; the capitalist system was powerful because the power of love had waned, but the time was coming when the whole of humanity would be held in one loving embrace. Travelling by mule from Corleone, Verro spread the message through the nearby towns. Fasci formed wherever he spoke. Verro and the movement’s leaders were impassioned lay evangelists. ‘Like real brothers’, they would kiss each other on the mouth when they met.
It was Verro that the journalist Adolfo Rossi had come to Corleone to interview. By the time Rossi made his journey into the Sicilian interior, Verro was at the head of the first mass peasant strike in Italian history, a leader talking on equal terms with top politicians and officials, a man who had won sympathy from almost all sections of Italian society for the peasants he led.
The meeting between Rossi and Verro produced one of the few first-hand portraits of the Fasci leader. It is an interview influenced by Rossi’s acquired New World prejudices, as well as his readiness to indulge his Italian readers’ sentimental view of Sicily. For all that, it reveals much about what Verro and the Fasci were really like.
Other people who knew Verro describe him as a bear of a man, energetic and short-tempered with an absolute devotion to his cause. Rossi, in contrast, had a metropolitan eye for the outlandish: ‘The president of the Fascio is a young man of twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He genuinely has a touch of the Arab in his face, his beard, and especially his large, bulging eyes.’
Nevertheless Verro’s hope and enthusiasm shone through his responses to Rossi’s questions. ‘Our Fascio has about six thousand members, men and women … Our women have understood the advantages of a union of poor people so well that they now teach their children socialism.’ Rossi also discerned Verro’s political acumen. The demands set forth in Corleone had become the template for every Fascio on the island. They were clear and moderate: new contracts that stipulated an even split of produce between the proprietor and the peasants who rented small plots of land. Even many conservatives saw this as a fair and efficient arrangement. Most of the landowners in Corleone had accepted the deal. ‘The richest ones have not given in yet,’ Verro explained to Rossi. ‘Not so much for economic reasons; it is more out of pique. They don’t want to look as if they have given in to the Fasci.’
Verro proudly showed the journalist round the large vaulted hall that served as the headquarters of the Fascio. At one end, above a table, was a terracotta bust of Marx flanked by portraits of the patriotic heroes Mazzini and Garibaldi. Underneath the table there was a display of superannuated weapons: sabres, muskets, and a blunderbuss.
Rossi interviewed some of the peasants there. They explained how the members who could read and write kept the illiterate up to date with news from the rest of the island. The old soldiers among the membership had formed a uniformed band to play patriotic songs and the workers’ hymn that was the Fasci anthem. Rossi asked the peasants what they meant by socialism. ‘Revolution!’ came one reply; ‘Putting property together and all eating the same,’ came another. ‘I am fifty years old,’ explained a third peasant, ‘and I have never eaten meat.’
Rossi saved until last the most sensitive issue, the one his readers were most curious about: the relationship between the Fasci and crime. Italians would remember the role that gangs of gunmen had played in the many revolutionary episodes in recent Sicilian history; the mafia was little understood, but widely feared. The Sicilian landowners tried to claim that the Fasci were just the latest disguise for the island’s savage picaroons and wreckers. ‘What attitude have you taken to people with criminal records?’ Rossi asked Verro. The reply was strenuously upbeat:
There are only a few, and they have been convicted of minor things like stealing from fields, so we accept them into the Fascio as a way of improving them. Since the Fascio started the crime rate has dropped. There are hardly any more disputes, because any issues are sorted out through the Fascio: we often act like magistrates or arbitrators. The real criminals are some of the landowners: loan sharks, former protectors of brigands; they rape young peasant girls and thrash the workers. If you only knew what these bullies get away with! It is still like the Middle Ages here!
Rossi was evidently touched; he had also got the simple story he came to Corleone to write. To outsiders like him, it sometimes seemed as if nothing in the Sicilian countryside had changed since Roman times when slaves worked the wheat fields. So on his return he gave his readers a fable of good and evil set in a timeless faraway land:
In this island, in the middle of areas that are heaven on earth, there are others that seem like Africa, where thousands of slaves labour on land belonging to a handful of great lords. Indeed they are worse off than those ancient slaves, who at least had their bread guaranteed.
Verro was written up as a noble barbarian, a latter-day Spartacus.
Reading Rossi’s reports, it is tempting to think that his lazy fondness for certain stereotypical ideas about Sicily may just have cost him the story of his career. For what he did not realize is quite how complicated it is to be a hero in western Sicily.
Unbeknown to Rossi, only six months earlier Verro had been woken at dawn by a handful of gravel thrown against the window of his house in via San Nicolò. As agreed, he dressed quickly. Once outside, he was led the short distance through narrow streets to the house of a man he knew, a gabelloto on one of the estates that surrounded the town. There he was shown into a room where he found a group of men around a table. At its centre were three rifles and a piece of paper with a skull drawn on it.
The presiding boss began by explaining that the purpose of the meeting was to examine a proposal to admit Verro to the secret association—the members called themselves the Fratuzzi (‘the Brothers’). When prompted, the initiate Verro explained how the social movement he had founded in Corleone aimed to champion the interests of the oppressed proletarian masses. Satisfied with this account, the boss warned of the dangers that faced any man who did not keep the society secret. Verro was asked to repeat the Fratuzzi oath of loyalty before holding out his right hand for the thumb to be pricked with a pin. The blood was smeared on the image of the skull, which was then burned. In the light of the flames, Verro exchanged a fraternal kiss with each of the mafiosi in turn. He was told that, to introduce himself as a member of the Fratuzzi, he was to touch his incisors and complain of a toothache. He was now a member of the Corleone cosca of the mafia.
* * *
In becoming a mafioso Bernardino Verro was far from typical of Fasci leaders; and in leaving a written account of how he became one, he was unique among mafia initiates at the time. But Verro’s story—which would only come to light after his murder—is nonetheless highly significant. For a long time it was treated with perplexed scepticism by left-wing writers, and not just because most people did not believe in such a thing as a mafia initiation ritual. Over the sixty years and more that followed the flowering of the Fasci movement, mafiosi would intimidate and murder countless socialists, Communists, and trade union leaders—so many, in fact, that it came to seem as if the mafia’s very purpose was to batter the organized working class in the countryside into submission. And yet here, at the very origins of Italian peasant socialism, was a socialist hero consorting with the mafia.
Verro’s initiation is easy to explain from the Corleone cosca’s point of view. Men of honour never set themselves square against change—their aim is to steer it in the direction they want—and in 1892–3 the situation was highly unpredictable. The Fasci could end up turning the peasants into a new force in the Sicilian countryside, changing the way land was owned and worked; or they could fail and be sucked back into clannish local politics. The gabelloti affiliated to the mafia were unsure whether to oppose the Fasci or use them to get better lease terms out of the landlords. By approaching the Fasci leaders, the mafia was trying to make sure that it would be able to maintain its influence whatever the future held.
The mafia has a serenely unscrupulous attitude to political ideologies. It has no guiding political ideas, only tactics. Opportunism is its masthead value. For that reason, no social or political movement, of whatever colour, is born immune to mafia influence. The mafia’s unscrupulousness even extends to its own traditions. The initiation is not quite as hallowed a rite as is often believed, even by many mafiosi. If it is cheaper, less risky, and more effective to offer someone membership than it is to buy or bully them, then senior bosses will run through the necessary ritual performance.
As a result, the Fasci had to take constant care to avoid mafia infiltration. Some local groups even had it in their statutes that known mafiosi were barred from membership. Not the least reason for this is that elements in government would have been very happy to have a pretext to suppress the peasant organizations on the grounds that they were merely criminal gangs. As it turned out, a government investigation showed that the Fasci had largely been successful in keeping their ranks free of wrongdoers.
Yet in some places like Corleone the relationship between the Fasci leadership and the mafia had a fearsome intimacy to it. The peasant chiefs and the mafia bosses were competing in the same political marketplace for hearts and minds. The peasants wanted to force a better deal, and some of them were happy to take it from whoever looked most likely to deliver it, be they mafiosi or socialists.
* * *
Bernardino Verro’s side of the story of his initiation into the Fratuzzi would only come out after his death. The train of events was set in motion during the winter of 1892–3. At this time a low-level campaign of intimidation and provocation against the Fasci was under way. Activists were beaten up and haystacks were burned down so that the socialists could be blamed, thus increasing the chances of a military crackdown. There was police harassment and the Fasci leaders were being arrested on trumped-up charges. Some peasants were also responding to the landowners’ intransigence with vandalism. Verro and the other Fasci leaders knew that there were politicians in Rome who were looking for a chance to send the troops into Sicily. Many Fasci leaders believed that a violent confrontation with the state was inevitable, sooner or later. Voices within the movement were airing the possibility of an armed socialist insurrection to pre-empt the repression.
It was during these tense months that Verro heard strong rumours that he was about to be made to disappear. To protect himself he made sure he never walked the streets of Corleone alone. One night he saw—and avoided—three unknown men waiting for him near his house. Then a man from Corleone approached him repeatedly, expressing sympathy for the peasant movement and offering reassurances about his personal safety. He explained that the landowners had ordered his murder, but that there was a secret society in Corleone that was prepared to protect him. The society was even willing to offer him assistance and membership. All they asked was that he modify his hostile attitude to certain local men with great qualities and notable courage.
Verro decided to accept the offer. He, like most other Sicilians, probably had only an imprecise idea of what the mafia really was: perhaps a kind of Masonic league, or something more vague and informal. Understandably enough, the chance that the Corleone mafia offered Verro to save his own life helped him make up his mind to join.
There was also a broader background to Verro’s decision. During the same tense months of early 1893 there were exploratory contacts between men of honour and the socialist movement’s leadership at a regional level. Both sides were cagey. If there was going to be a revolution, the honoured society in each area had to assess whose side it would fight on. Was it better to back a distant and frail Italian state? Or infiltrate the socialist peasantry? For their part, the peasant leaders began to wonder whether an alliance with the mafia might not be a price worth paying for victory in the coming struggle. A Utopian faith in the power of socialism perhaps even gave them hope that the mafia could be incorporated and neutralized.
At the end of April, Verro and two other senior members of the Fasci umbrella organization met Palermo mafia bosses. The proposal was that a peasant revolution, if it came, would be spearheaded by ‘200,000 lions’—these lions being the mafiosi and their skirmishers. (The discussion seems to have been marked by a Homeric level of exaggeration.) Not a great deal of progress was made towards a deal. Accounts differ as to why: either the mafiosi reached the conclusion that the Italian state, in the end, was going to prove stronger than the Fasci; or the peasant leaders suspected that the mafia was trying to draw them into an ambush on behalf of the police and the landowners.
Bernardino Verro quickly came to regret accepting membership of the Corleone cosca. The Fratuzzi invaded the ‘New Era’—a club he had set up as a centre of republican and socialist activity. They ran card games there and used the gambling to pass counterfeit money into circulation. It was obvious to Verro that both he and the Corleone Fascio risked being discredited and labelled as criminals by the police, so he stayed away from the ‘New Era’ club. The distance separating mafiosi and peasant activists in Corleone became wider when the former took over land left uncultivated because of a strike organized by the Fascio. Verro rapidly abandoned all hope that the Fratuzzi and the peasants might form a pact. He would spend the rest of his life trying to make amends for joining the mafia—a mistake that would eventually cost him his life.
On 3 January 1894, the hawks in Rome and Sicily finally had their way: 50,000 troops enforced martial law and the dissolution of the Fasci. The crunch had come in December when the Fasci staged tax strikes and demanded that corrupt local councils be dissolved—a direct challenge to the mafia’s vital political interests. The level of violence began to rise. The worst incidents occurred when troops fired directly into crowds of demonstrators; eighty-three peasants were killed. In places, the fighting was deliberately provoked when persons unknown fired random shots from low rooftops or windows; with decisive cunning the mafiosi were acting on their decision to back the landowners and the state rather than the Fasci. The discipline that Verro had managed to instil in the peasants of Corleone meant that it was one of the few places where there was no bloodshed.
Bernardino Verro tried to escape Sicily, but was arrested on 16 January 1894 on board a steamer to Tunis and brought before a military tribunal. The charges were of conspiracy to provoke a revolt, incitement to civil war, violence, and destruction. During the trial the authorities banned mainland newspapers from the island. Verro was found guilty and sentenced to twelve years in prison. The harsh penalty shocked even many conservatives. Unexpectedly, in 1896, he was released in an amnesty. But the next decade of his life would be divided between political activism, prison, exile, and persecution by the authorities.
* * *
Verro was released at the end of a second prison sentence in the summer of 1907. (He had been convicted of slander after a newspaper that he had set up revealed that a senior local police officer had procured a young woman for the deputy prefect—her husband was in jail. Verro was sentenced to eighteen months when his key defence witnesses retracted.)
Hundreds of socialist peasants from the interior came to Palermo to welcome him on his release. Carrying flags and banners, they arrived early in the morning on a specially chartered train from Corleone. The town band, dressed in red shirts, led a procession through the streets. Women in traditional peasant costume marched under a banner that read ‘Corleone women’s section’. Heavily guarded, they walked along via Macqueda to the Ucciardone prison and there greeted Bernardino Verro with cheers, embraces, and tears. After a meeting in the Palermo workers’ chamber, they took him back to Corleone in triumph.
Now, thirteen years after the repression of the Fasci, morale in the peasant movement had never been higher. There was a more liberal government in power in Rome. The year before Verro’s release, a new law made it possible for cooperatives to borrow from the Banco di Sicilia on behalf of the peasants; the money was to be used to rent land directly from the owners. In Corleone, Verro immediately assumed the leadership of a cooperative formed for just this purpose. It had the potential to be the most powerful weapon yet against the mafia. The aim was to cut the middlemen, the gabelloti, out of the rural economy. Verro knew that the approaching struggle would probably be violent; two men who worked closely with him had been murdered while he was away. He knew too that the Fratuzzi in Corleone had a personal score to settle with him; he still carried the mortifying secret of his initiation.
The Fratuzzi were cautious at first. They initially attempted to bribe Verro to stop the cooperative taking their leases. Although the mafia managed to infiltrate many peasant associations across western Sicily, Verro resisted and by 1910 his cooperative had taken charge of nine estates, freeing hundreds of labourers from near-serfdom in the process.
But Verro’s cooperative also faced political opposition from a Catholic fund, the Cassa Agricola San Leoluca. It was a sign of a fundamental change happening across Italy. When Italian unification was completed in 1870 with the occupation of Rome, the Pope had declared the Church ‘despoiled’, shut himself in the Vatican, and instructed the faithful not to take any active part in the political life of the godless new country. Only towards the end of the nineteenth century did Catholics, with the approval of the clergy, begin to take political action. What drew them into the public domain was the need to protect the faithful from the subversive materialist creed of socialism.
Mafiosi had always dealt with priests as they did with politicians—man to man, favour for favour. Now the Church and the mafia also had common ideological ground in their hatred of socialism. The priests and lay believers who ran the Cassa Agricola San Leoluca are obscure figures; little is known about the Corleone Church. But some idea of the atmosphere among the local clergy emerges from the letter one canon wrote to the archbishop in 1902, asking him to stop Corleone priests carrying guns ‘both by day and by night’. The Catholic cooperative used the Fratuzzi to guard the land it rented. The most deadly phase of Verro’s struggle against the mafia was about to begin.
In 1910, Bernardino Verro launched a tax strike in protest at a corrupt Catholic mayor. The municipal administration collapsed. During the subsequent election campaign, Verro gave a speech denouncing the ‘mafia affiliated with the Catholics’. The reaction was swift. On the evening of 6 November he was waiting in the pharmacy for voting to finish when someone fired both barrels of a shotgun at him through the window. His hat was blown off and his wrist cut, but astoundingly he was otherwise unhurt. It seems that the would-be killer’s aim had been thrown off by the bright lights and reflections in the pharmacy cabinets. When Verro rushed outside to see whether he could identify his would-be assassin, he came face to face with a well-known mafioso who was evidently surprised to see him still alive. ‘You see, your boys could only make smoke this time,’ Verro said.
If in public he maintained a brave face, in private Verro was terrified. He began to discover just how far the mafia’s contacts reached; its links with the local member of parliament, the magistrature, and the clergy. The bullets fired at him, he said, stank of ‘mafia and incense’. He was forced to leave his beloved Corleone once again. Although he denounced to the authorities the men he thought had tried to kill him, the case went nowhere because witnesses were afraid to come forward.
In the spring of 1911, Verro wrote to a friend in despair when he heard that his comrade Lorenzo Panepinto, the peasant leader in Santo Stefano Quisquina, had been shot dead on his doorstep:
Have you seen what they did to poor Panepinto? The clerical-mafia gabelloti have risen up against the cooperatives. The truth is so terrible that it almost makes me insane with despondency. Every time I look at the wound on my left wrist I see two corpses in the scar: one is my own, and the other belongs to my good friend and comrade Panepinto. I have had to leave Corleone, where the maffia has declared me a traitor. What is there left for me to do? Become a criminal myself, and take vengeance with lead and dynamite? Or wait, like a dead man on holiday, to be murdered?
Troubles continued to pursue Verro. The treasurer of the peasants’ cooperative in Corleone was arrested for fraud and falsely stated that he had been working on Verro’s orders. (Strong evidence suggests instead that the treasurer had the support of the Fratuzzi.) Although there is now no suspicion that Verro was guilty of deliberate wrongdoing, it does seem that he was naive and lax in supervising the cooperative’s accounts. He was arrested and spent nearly two years in jail on remand.
When Verro was finally released in 1913, he still had the fraud charge hanging over him and seemed to his enemies to be a broken man; he was reduced to selling wine and pasta to get by. But his intention was merely to wait until his name was cleared before returning to politics. The peasants, their faith in him unshaken, begged him to head the socialist list in the local elections. They now had the vote at last; universal male suffrage, which had been introduced in 1912, was an unprecedented opportunity to fight for justice and equality by democratic means. Verro knew the dangers he faced; he would say to friends that the mafia was bound to end up killing him because it could not beat him any other way. But he felt it was his duty to accept the peasants’ plea. In 1914 he was overwhelmingly elected mayor of Corleone.
Verro’s political life in 1914 and early 1915 was dominated by the First World War. Like most socialists, and indeed most Italians, Verro opposed Italian intervention in the war. Three times in the previous two decades the people of Corleone had seemed to be on the brink of securing a more just future for themselves. In 1894, their Fasci were repressed by martial law; in 1910, their cooperative was checked by intrigue and violence; now, just as a broad-based democracy arrived, their hopes were to be denied by conscription. Italy eventually joined the war in May 1915.
But these were important months in Verro’s personal life too. After years on his own, the itinerant activist had settled down, and his partner (the couple were ideologically opposed to marriage) gave birth to a daughter; they named her Giuseppina Pace Umana—‘Josephine Human Peace’. In the autumn of 1915 the fraud trial that had caused Verro so much anxiety also, finally, began to draw near. Having spoken to the lawyers involved, he felt optimistic about his prospects for success.
On the afternoon of 3 November 1915, Verro left the Corleone town hall under a rapidly darkening sky. The downpour began as he turned the corner to climb via Tribuna. Just as he reached a flight of four steps that stretched the full width of the top end of the street, a bullet fired from a stable hit him under the left armpit. He staggered, turned, and pulled out his Browning pistol. He got off one futile shot before it jammed. Five more bullets hit him from two angles. He was probably already dead when he fell face down into the mud.
One of the killers then calmly emerged from cover and, it seems, knelt on the small of Verro’s back. He aimed his pistol at the base of his victim’s skull and fired four times. He then put the muzzle to Verro’s temple and pulled the trigger again. The state of the corpse was to serve as a warning to others.
* * *
Reports of the demonstratively savage murder were limited to a few lines in most national newspapers. News of the fighting on the western front, in Serbia, and on Italy’s north-eastern borders dominated the nation’s interest.
For many years following the failure of Sangiorgi’s maxi-trial in 1900 and the acquittal of Palizzolo and Fontana in 1904, it was hugely difficult to raise any interest in the fight against the mafia. Public opinion in Italy was resigned and sceptical; people greeted news of organized crime in Sicily with apathy and distaste. It was taken for granted that the Corleone mayor’s death was a mafia affair and that, very probably, no one would be held to account.
Not even the remarkable evidence produced in the trial helped it attract the public attention it deserved. Among Verro’s personal papers, the police discovered a testimony in his own hand that added a new layer of intrigue to a life that fully reflected a dramatic period in Sicilian history. It was Verro’s posthumous confession. In it he told the full story of his initiation into the Fratuzzi—a secret he had never divulged to anyone before—and gave a detailed account of how the mafia in Corleone operated. The policemen who discovered the document all swore to Verro’s absolute integrity and devotion to his cause; they believed that if he had revealed what he knew about the mafia, he would have been killed much earlier.
As expected, despite the highly public nature of the murder, no one was ever convicted; the trial ended after a few days when the chief prosecutor withdrew his evidence, stating that he did not feel it stood up. The collapse of the trial saw to it that, yet again, a reliable witness to the reality of the ‘honoured society’ was not believed.
The Fratuzzi had plenty of reasons to assassinate Bernardino Verro. The question is why they did it when they did. The police later surmised that the mafia feared Verro would use the fraud trial to expose what he knew about the association. It may also have entered the cosca’s thinking that the ongoing war would muffle the publicity surrounding the murder. Over the years, the Fratuzzi had tried without success to coopt Verro, corrupt him, defeat him politically, smear him, and intimidate him. Apparently, by 1915, only one instrument was left.
Even where it is at its most powerful, the mafia cannot just eliminate anyone it wants to without preparing for the consequences. Any killing involves calculating risks, and the killing of a powerful man like Verro, who had many passionate supporters in Corleone and beyond, was a particularly risky undertaking. Tragically, it seems that in this case the mafia had made its calculations accurately.
Verro was far from the last martyr of the peasant movement. A spate of political killings by the mafia followed both world wars. The tactics adopted against the Fasci in Corleone were to be used again; wherever the honoured society could not infiltrate peasant organizations, or create more pliable alternatives, it confronted them with terror. Among the mafia’s political victims at around the time that Verro fell were also five brave and honest priests whose names deserve to be recorded: Don Filippo Di Forti, in San Cataldo, 1910; Don Giorgio Gennaro, in Ciaculli, 1916; Don Costantino Stella, in Resuttana, 1919; Don Gaetano Millunzi, in Monreale, 1920; Don Stefano Caronia, in Gibellina, also in 1920. The new socially committed Catholicism was not entirely oblivious to the reality of the mafia, and paid a price in blood as a result.
In 1917, the peasants of Corleone erected a bust of Bernardino Verro in Piazza Nascè where the labourers gathered every morning in the hope of being hired by a gabelloto for a day’s work. Verro was depicted looking up via Tribuna to the spot where his murder had taken place. In 1925, the bust was stolen; it was never found. In 1992, a courageous young left-wing mayor of Palermo erected another bust as part of his effort to weave into the fabric of the town the memory of the mafia’s misdeeds. After being vandalized several times, the monument was finally destroyed in July 1994. The mafia was making the point that it pursues its victims even beyond the grave.
THE MAN WITH HAIR ON HIS HEART
In January 1925, Prime Minister Benito Mussolini stood up in parliament, assumed personal responsibility for the violence of his Fascist gangs, and launched the process of suppressing all opposition. Mussolini’s Fascist Party was no longer a government; it was a regime. A year later the new dictatorship brandished its authority by inaugurating a war on organized crime in Sicily.
The siege of Gangi, the opening showpiece of the war, began on the night of 1 January 1926 as heavy snow fell on the Madonie mountains. In the preceding days police and carabinieri in mobile parties of fifty had been gradually narrowing a cordon, arresting all those suspected of collaborating with bandits. The cordon and the cold together forced the bandits themselves back up into Gangi, which was known to be their headquarters. The police occupied hilltops and other strategic points near by. Telephone and telegraph wires were cut. Lorries and armoured cars blocked the access roads below. Then large numbers of police, with a sprinkling of black-shirted militiamen, struggled up the steep and narrow road into Gangi itself.
Gangi had seemed impregnable in its lofty isolation, dominating the landscape of the whole of central Sicily from its position in the Madonie; on a clear day the looming outline of Mount Etna can even be made out half across the island to the east. Locally the bandit leaders were referred to as ‘the prefect’ or ‘the chief of police’. They had been so powerful that they had even succeeded in persuading the mayor to turn down a government street-lighting subsidy on the grounds that the town’s steep alleys were actually safer in the dark.
Now the labyrinth was brightly lit and it teemed with uniformed men who were searching and occupying houses, making dozens of arrests. Many of the wanted men had retreated into secret rooms constructed by a local builder who was expert in the siting of false walls and ceilings. Only a few Gangitani risked sneaking out into the snow to take messages and victuals to the men in hiding. The rest huddled in their homes behind barred doors and windows.
The first bandit to give himself up emerged from his hideaway on the morning of 2 January. Gaetano Ferrarello, the ‘King of the Madonie’, was sixty-three years old and had been a fugitive from justice since the day when he killed his wife and her lover. That was more than half his life ago. It had taken him years to build an extensive network of cattle rustling, estate management, and extortion, and to construct the political protection needed to operate unmolested by the authorities. He let it be known that he would not give himself up to a policeman, but only to the mayor.
In the town hall, the officer commanding the besieging forces simply sat and waited for Ferrarello to appear. He found him to be a tall man with an almost military dignity of bearing and a patriarch’s beard that reached his belt. The bandit flung down his decorated stick on the desk and delivered a studied pronouncement: ‘My heart is trembling. This is the first time I have ever been in the presence of the law. I am giving myself up to restore peace and serenity to these people who have been so tormented.’ Several days later Ferrarello committed suicide in jail by throwing himself down a stairwell. No others were involved in the incident, it seems.
The operation continued. No one was allowed in or out of Gangi while the police mounted a series of stunts designed to humiliate the concealed bandits. Their cattle were confiscated; the most handsome beasts were slaughtered in the town square and offered for sale at token prices. Hostages were taken, including women and children. Policemen slept in bandits’ beds and—so strong rumours suggested—abused their women. Then the town crier was ordered to walk through the empty streets, banging a hefty drum at his hip:
Citizens of Gangi! His Excellency Cesare Mori, Prefect of Palermo, has sent the following telegram to the Mayor with the order to make his proclamation public:
I command all fugitives from justice in this territory to give themselves up to the authorities within twelve hours of the moment when this ultimatum is read out. Once that deadline has passed, the severest measures will be taken against their families, their possessions, and anyone who has helped them in any way.
Cesare Mori was the man Mussolini had chosen to lead his war on organized crime. The ultimatum was a typical gesture, demonstratively turning the Gangi operation into a man-to-man confrontation with the criminals.
Mori had been in Palermo during the siege, monitoring the press approval of his ‘Herculean labour’. On 10 January, with bandits still hiding in the town, he came to Gangi to proclaim its liberation in person. The piazza was suitably festooned and the band played military marches. Posters displayed Mussolini’s congratulatory message to his prefect. ‘I express my heartiest satisfaction and urge you to carry on until your work is done without regard for anyone, high or low. Fascism has cured Italy of many of its wounds. It will cauterize the sore of crime in Sicily—with red-hot iron if need be.’
If the Fascist-controlled press are to be believed, speeches were then made from the balcony of the town hall. The young Palermo Fascist chief Alfredo Cucco, a strutting little ophthalmologist in a black shirt and leather flying helmet, led the invited leaders as they echoed the Duce’s sentiments. Finally Mori stepped forward. He was just past his fifty-fourth birthday with regular if rather pointed features, an imposing build, and a deep voice. He relished the nicknames he had acquired during the years he had spent fighting crime in Sicily: the ‘iron prefect’, the ‘man with hair on his heart’. The heavy army boots and long thick scarf that he chose to wear with his immaculate suit were intended to reinforce the same message: here was a man of action, a personal enemy of the criminals. That very day one of the bandits still in hiding issued a threat to kill him.
Mori’s speech was characteristically far blunter than the ones that preceded it. He talked to Sicilians in what he considered to be their own rudimentary moral language.
Citizens! I will not give up the fight. The government will not give up the fight. You have a right to be freed from these villains. You will be. The operation will carry on until the whole of the province of Palermo is redeemed.
Through me, the government will do its duty to the full. You must do yours. You are not scared of guns. Yet you are afraid to be associated with the name ‘cop’. You must get used to thinking of the war on criminals as the duty of every honest citizen.
You are good people. Your bodies are sound and strong. You have all the right virile anatomical attributes. So you are men, and not sheep. Defend yourselves! Counter-attack!
Mori’s words sound as if they were meant for the ears of some higher breed of farm animal. Whether or not he actually delivered the speech that the newspapers printed is open to doubt. All the same, they typify the attitude of the man chosen to enact Fascism’s authoritarian fantasies in Sicily.
The siege was wound up a few days later; 130 fugitives from justice and some 300 of their accomplices had been arrested.
* * *
Militaristic, decisive, tough, spectacular: the siege of Gangi is remembered in more or less the way that Fascist propaganda wanted it to be, the way it very deliberately styled its war on organized crime. When mafia defectors began to talk to Giovanni Falcone in the 1980s, it became clear that mafiosi themselves had similar memories of the Fascist years. Catania man of honour Antonino Calderone, who turned pentito in 1986, revealed that, more than forty years after its fall, Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime remained a scar on the mafia’s folk memory.
The music changed [under Fascism]. Mafiosi had a hard life. Many were sent to a prison island, just from one day to the next … Mussolini, Mori, the people in charge of justice, they did this: they gave mafiosi five years of internal exile without trial, the maximum. And when those five years were over they issued a decree and gave them five more. Just like that. A decree! Five more years … After the war the mafia hardly existed any more. The Sicilian Families had all been broken up. The mafia was like a plant they don’t grow any more. My uncle Luigi, who had been a boss, an authority, was reduced to stealing to earn a crust.
Calderone was only a small boy when his uncle Luigi was suffering these indignities. Although the tales the youngster was told had the simplicity of all family memories, they undoubtedly had a basis in truth. The Fascist crackdown that began with the siege of Gangi allowed some policemen and magistrates who had accumulated years of experience in fighting the cosche to go on the offensive. The mafia suffered badly; a great many men of honour were sent to prison, with or without trial, and the rest of the organization went into hibernation.
Fascism claimed that it had solved the mafia problem. But like so much of what Mussolini said, it proved to be a hollow boast. And, although the Duce’s control over information still makes it difficult for historians to discern the truth, the real story of ‘the man with hair on his heart’—the mafia’s most feared enemy—is certainly darker and more intriguing than either Fascist propaganda or mafia memories suggest.
* * *
Cesare Mori’s parents only recognized his existence at the age of seven; until then he had been in the foundling hospital in Pavia, near Milan. For a bright boy from nowhere, with no contacts, in late-nineteenth-century Italy, the army and police were among the few places to make a career. The secret Interior Ministry files on Mori chart his inexorable rise and leave no doubt as to either his driving ambition—or his courage. In 1896, Mori was awarded a medal for pursuing and apprehending a pimp whom he had seen holding up a young soldier with a revolver while a prostitute tried to stab him in the back. It was to be the first of many face-to-face encounters with violent crime.
Mori’s superiors’ reports on all aspects of his work are glowing: ‘He is energetic, determined, and prudent. He knows every aspect of his job well, especially political policing duties because he knows the doctrines of all the parties and the habits and behaviour of politicians.’ Mori was already being marked out for promotion when, in Ravenna in 1903, he frisked a powerful local councillor whom he suspected of carrying a knife. (Sicily was not the only place where council politics could be a dangerous business.) A press campaign was mounted against him. The reward for Mori’s cussedness was a transfer to Castelvetrano, Sicily. From this point onwards, his life was entwined with the history of the mafia.
Electoral violence tacitly managed by the authorities, cattle rustling, and organized crime: for most of the next fourteen years Mori had the standard workload for the forces of order in the countryside of western Sicily. He applied himself to it with unstinting vigour. Local people regularly filed accusations that he had abused his authority. In 1906, he was promoted to superintendent. Three years later he was promoted again after killing a bandit during a lengthy firefight. In 1912, he distinguished himself once more by hunting down a ring of extortionists who had demanded money from an MP.
Policing in Italy was always highly politicized. Mori’s own political opinions—he was a conservative monarchist—were conventional enough to be subordinated to his ambitions. That meant conforming to the expectations of the powers that be, both in Rome and locally (at least when the two could be reconciled). In Sicily he had followed a line favourable to the most powerful interest group: the landowners.
When the Great War began, Mori was deputy chief of police in the city of Trapani on the western tip of the island. There were no military engagements in Sicily during the war, but everything that happened after Italy joined the fighting in May 1915 conspired to push the island towards an abyss of violence. Over 400,000 Sicilians—equivalent to more than the whole population of Palermo—were drafted. As had happened since the foundation of the Italian state, thousands of recruits avoided the draft by taking to the hills. Large-scale banditry made a comeback in the interior as these runaways turned to crime for survival. Without the hands to sow and harvest grain, the great estates began to convert to pasture for rearing animals. The demand for horses, mules, and meat at the front also meant increased livestock prices. Violent crime increased as competitive forces converged to cash in; cattle rustling increased dramatically, and there were frequent bloody conflicts over contracts to rent, manage, or ‘protect’ land. In places, the island came close to anarchy.
Mori was relentless in the fight against the rustlers who infested the countryside during the Great War. The horseback patrols that he led covered all terrain, at all hours, and in all weather conditions. He laid siege to villages to force out the fugitives, and on occasion even disguised himself as a monk to surprise his foes.
In 1917, Mori was promoted away from the island to become chief of police in the northern industrial city of Turin at the very time when disastrous military defeat at Caporetto threatened the country with collapse. Mori opposed the city’s militant socialist workers with his habitual resolve; many were killed. Three years later, in Rome, Mori ordered his men to charge a right-wing student demonstration; again deaths and injuries resulted.
It was in the years immediately after the First World War that Italy’s fledgeling democracy entered what would turn out to be a terminal crisis. The old patronage politicians no longer seemed able to contain the conflicting demands of the Socialists, the Catholics, and the Nationalists (who dreamed of an Italian ‘race’ devoted to imperial war). In 1918, as a desperate economic crisis took hold, hundreds of thousands of demobilized soldiers began to arrive back home. Many were determined to force a change, whether to the left or the right. The example of the Russian revolution excited many workers and peasants. The peninsula looked to some as if it were becoming ungovernable; revolution, or civil war, seemed imminent.
Sicily did not have a strong workers’ movement like the industrial North, but in 1919 and 1920 the island seemed to be consumed by mayhem unlike anything it had seen since the aftermath of Garibaldi’s expedition in 1860. The recruits who returned to Sicily reignited the struggle to control the land; the issues that the Fasci had first tried to address in the 1890s had not gone away. Now the ex-combatants felt that they deserved land in return for their sacrifice; in places they occupied estates by force. In Rome several political groupings made noises about helping veterans acquire plots and legalizing the forced occupation of uncultivated fields. Some landlords, feeling abandoned by Rome, began to resort to violence to defend their property. The mafia adopted the same tactics towards the peasant cooperatives that it had developed to cope with the Fasci movement: it variously infiltrated, cajoled, corrupted, and—if all else failed—terrorized and murdered.
It was also a time of numerous mafia wars. One of the most destabilizing influences was simply the return, among the veterans, of battle-hardened and ambitious young men from traditional mafia recruiting grounds. They had missed out on the profiteering and were now keen to make their presence felt—whether within the mafia or in autonomous gang operations. Mori talked of a ‘hailstorm’ of fighting among mafiosi after the war: ‘There were no rules, and no respect for anybody.’
* * *
The Fascist movement was founded in Milan in March 1919 by journalist and combat veteran Benito Mussolini. He aimed to institute a ‘trench-ocracy’, to bring the patriotic discipline and aggression of the front to bear on Italy’s stunted democracy. The following year, as the post-war wave of labour militancy receded, squads of Fascists began to build their movement by dishing out ferocious beatings to strikers and socialists across northern and central Italy. They attracted the favour of landowners and industrialists who were keen to assail the labour movement while it was on the retreat. Local police and other officials often turned a blind eye to the shootings, vandalism, and life-threatening doses of castor oil that the Fascist squads administered to their victims.
In the central-northern city of Bologna, there was one man who was not prepared to tolerate the activities of the black-shirted gangs who believed that their struggle to save the fatherland from the red menace set them above the law. In 1921, Cesare Mori, the boy from the foundling hospital, reached the top of the career ladder when he was appointed prefect of Bologna. There he treated the self-styled ‘national youth’ of Fascism as he had done other subversives. And Mori stuck to his task until blackshirts from nearby towns converged on Bologna and set up camp around his headquarters. They dramatized their protest in Fascist style by urinating in concert against the prefecture walls. The government backed down and Mori was transferred. The episode would leave a legacy of bitterness between Mori and the leaders of the Fascist squads.
Although the Partito Nazionale Fascista did not have great numerical strength in parliament, its tight organization and willingness to take risks gave it the upper hand over divided, vacillating politicians. In October 1922, Mussolini’s ‘March’ on Rome challenged the state to either give him power or put down his movement by force. In response, he was invited to form a coalition government and would remain as his country’s leader for the next two decades.
After Fascism took power in 1922, the squad leaders took their revenge and dismissed Mori altogether. His career had run aground for the simple reason that he had backed the wrong political masters. He could hardly be blamed, since few outside the Partito Nazionale Fascista would have predicted a blackshirt seizure of power. In an effort to refloat his ambitions, Mori soon came to terms with Fascism and began to mobilize his network of powerful friends. He made known his admiration for Mussolini, and claimed that he had in fact acted ‘fascistically’ throughout his career. He inserted flattering references to the Fascist project in his book, Among the Orange Blossoms Beyond the Mist—the cloying title betrayed his self-dramatizing side. But before Mori’s career could resume, Fascism would have to decide to come to grips with the Sicilian mafia.
* * *
In Sicily, as in the rest of the South, Fascism was never a grass-roots movement. Sicilian politics, with its clienteles and cliques, was a less ideological affair than in the North. Nor was there much call for strike breakers since the mafia already did that job efficiently enough. But once Mussolini took power, interest groups all over the island suddenly developed a fondness for black shirts and mock Roman salutes. Mafiosi too jumped on to the Duce’s victory chariot: the prefect described the ruling group on Gangi town council as ‘Fascist-mafioso’; another report described the dominant faction in San Mauro as a ‘Fascistized mafia’.
The Duce was personally popular in Sicily, but his movement lacked a strong base of support, so initially he needed these new friends. For a time it looked as if Fascism would adopt the traditional method of ruling Sicily by delegating power to the local grandees and pretending not to notice if mafiosi managed their election campaigns. One prince who was generally acknowledged to have mafia ties became a Minister in Mussolini’s cabinet.
It proved to be a short honeymoon. In its early days Fascism soon began to attract accusations that it was deaf to Sicily’s economic needs, while at the same time militant senior Fascists were causing alarm in certain circles in Sicily by proclaiming the need for a crusade against the mafia as well as the landowners and politicians who protected it. In April 1923, one such militant wrote to Mussolini with a plea:
Fascism aims to sweep away all the corruption poisoning the country’s politics and administration. It aims to break the shady factions and maggoty cabals infesting the sacred body of the nation. It cannot neglect this terrible centre of infection. If we want to save Sicily we must destroy the mafia … Then we will be able to set up our tents on the island; and they will be sounder than the ones that we pitched in the north by doing away with socialism.
The lurid language overlay a simple formula. The mafia—whatever it was—could serve the same purpose in Sicily that socialism had done in the North: it could be a convenient enemy for Fascism. In time, Mussolini was to make this strategy his own. His blackshirt movement styled itself as the antidote to the old world of patronage and devious compromise. Because mafiosi were often linked to politicians, a crusade against organized crime would allow the Fascists to strike simultaneously at some of the VIPs of the liberal system. There could be no better way to accentuate Fascism’s no-nonsense image.
In May 1924, Mussolini went to Sicily for the first time, sweeping into Palermo on the battleship Dante Alighieri with an escort of planes and submarines. In the province of Trapani, the Duce heard about Cesare Mori’s achievements before and during the war, and about how serious the mafia problem was there. A deputation of veterans told him that 216 murders had been committed in Marsala in a year; they explained that the mafia was the main reason for Fascism’s failure to take root on the island.
While Mussolini’s cortège was moving through Piana dei Greci near Palermo, the mayor, mafioso Don Francesco Cuccia, gestured disparagingly towards the Prime Minister’s bodyguards and muttered unctuously in his ear, ‘You are with me, you are under my protection. What do you need all these cops for?’ The Duce did not reply and fumed for the rest of the day at the insolence. His visit to the island was cut short. Don Francesco Cuccia’s lapse in etiquette has passed into legend as the catalyst for Mussolini’s war on the mafia. Within a few weeks of Mussolini’s return to Rome, all Mori’s lobbying paid off when he was sent back to Trapani.
Then, in 1924, events in the Italian capital dramatically deepened the chill between Fascism and Sicily. Shortly after the Duce’s trip to the island, some of his thugs kidnapped and murdered the Socialist Party leader. Italian public opinion was horrified, and Fascism’s political allies started to drift away. The surest way for a national leader to fall out of favour with a certain kind of Sicilian politician is to lose power. In the summer of 1924 Mussolini looked like doing just that.
But opposition inertia allowed the Duce gradually to stabilize the situation and then to move openly towards putting an end to democracy in Italy. When his thoughts turned again to Sicily, he was ready to implement his strategy.
The local election campaign of August 1925, the last before democracy disappeared, was also the last hurrah for the old political dignitaries of Sicily. Too late, with defeat at the hands of Mussolini now inevitable, they came out in opposition to Fascism and discovered the cause of freedom.
Among them was Vittorio Emanuele Orlando, a former Prime Minister and the most powerful Sicilian politician of the old order, whose power base was in a heavily mafia-infested area. Shortly before the vote he made a speech in Palermo’s Teatro Massimo, taking his cue from the government’s proclaimed intent to combat the mafia:
If by ‘mafia’, they mean having an exaggerated sense of honour; if they mean being furiously intolerant of bullying and injustice, and showing the generosity of spirit needed to stand up to the strong and be understanding towards the weak; if they mean having a loyalty to your friends that is stronger than anything, stronger even than death; if by ‘mafia’ they mean feelings like these, attitudes like these—even though they may sometimes be exaggerated—then I say to you that what they are talking about are the distinguishing traits of the Sicilian soul. And so I declare myself a maffioso and I am proud to be one!
It was a squalid tactic that only played into Mussolini’s hands. With the liberal state itself in mortal peril, Orlando could only fall back on the old ploy of deliberately confusing the mafia and Sicilian culture. His blatant winking at the bosses has entered history as one of the lowest moments in the long and shameless cohabitation between killers and the people’s elected representatives. Tommaso Buscetta would, much later, claim that Orlando was himself a man of honour.
It was time for Mussolini’s assault on the mafia to begin, and it was to Mori that he turned to impose Fascist authority on the unruly island. On 23 October 1925, Mori became prefect of Palermo with full powers to attack the mafia and with it the regime’s political enemies. He immediately began preparations for the campaign’s curtain-raiser: the siege of Gangi.
* * *
Cesare Mori prided himself on many things. Prominent among them were his beliefs about the way Sicilians think and behave, beliefs forged by his years of experience around Trapani. Homespun, dogmatic, and crass, they would be the basis for his campaign against the mafia.
I was able to penetrate the Sicilian mind. I found this mind, beneath the painful scars with which centuries of tyranny and oppression had marked it, often childlike, simple and kindly, apt to colour everything with generous feeling, ever inclined to deceive itself, to hope and to believe, and ready to lay all its knowledge, its affection and its co-operation at the feet of one who showed a desire to realise the people’s legitimate dream of justice and redemption.
The key to the mafia’s success, he argued, was its ability to strike an attitude designed to prey on this vulnerability and credulity at the core of the Sicilian makeup. The mafia, Mori believed, was not an organization. But, for the sake of maintaining law and order, the police and judicial system could assume that it was. In reality it was best described as ‘a peculiar way of looking at things’. Mafiosi were drawn together by a natural affinity rather than by initiation rites or formal bonds of any kind.
Upon these distinctly unpromising foundations Mori built his whole repressive programme. Quite simply, the impressionable mass of Sicilians had to be made to see, in as down-to-earth a way as possible, that the state was tougher than the men of honour. The Fascist state was to out-mafia the mafia. Theatre was to be the essence of Mori’s drive to establish law and order in Sicily. The Gangi operation was conceived in this spirit, as a way of striking awe into the simple souls still in thrall to the criminals.
Four months after the siege of Gangi, Mori put the same tactics to work against Don Vito Cascio-Ferro, a famous mafioso who had begun his career in 1892 by infiltrating the Fascio in Bisacquino not far from Corleone. Since then he had ventured as far as the United States and made his fortune smuggling cattle with a small fleet of boats. It is said that when Don Vito toured his mountain realm at the peak of his career, the officials of the towns he visited would wait for him outside the gates to kiss his hand. On May Day 1926, Cesare Mori came to address a public meeting in Cascio-Ferro’s territory. As a scirocco blew fine Saharan sand across the piazza, the ‘iron prefect’ opened with a pun both startling and corny: ‘My name is Mori and I will make people die!’ (‘Mori’ means ‘die’ in Italian.) ‘Crime must vanish just as this dust carried away by the wind vanishes!’
A few days later the ‘interprovincial’ antimafia police force that Mori had set up began a round-up in the area that included Bisacquino, Corleone, and Contessa Entellina. Over 150 suspects were arrested, among them Don Vito. His godson went to the local landlord to seek support but received a resigned reply: ‘Times have changed.’ It was the end of Don Vito’s reign. Soon afterwards, an old murder charge against him was resurrected. He adopted an acquiescent pose during his trial in 1930 while his lawyer forlornly ran through a familiar argument. Citing his client’s honourable behaviour in all circumstances, he maintained that ‘We must conclude that either Vito Cascio-Ferro is not a mafioso, or that the mafia, as scholars have often pointed out, is a conspicuous individualistic attitude, a form of defiance that has nothing wicked, base or criminal about it.’ It seems that the scirocco was blowing again when the judge handed down a life sentence. Don Vito died in prison in 1942.
* * *
Mori evidently thought that his dramatic techniques would work, not just on the Sicilians who were in awe of the mafia, but also on the mafiosi themselves. Soon after arresting Don Vito Cascio-Ferro in May 1926, he invited every estate warden in the province of Palermo to a stage-managed ceremony of loyalty. Twelve hundred of them assembled in military formation on a small hill near Roccapalumba. The only two invitees who could not make it sent medical certificates. Mori reviewed the ranks before making his speech: henceforth they were to protect private property on behalf of the state rather than the mafia. A military chaplain said mass on an open-air altar before reminding the wardens that they were about to take an oath of the utmost seriousness. Mori invited anyone present who was not prepared to swear loyalty to leave; he then turned his back to the audience. No one moved. When the ‘iron prefect’ turned round again, he read out the pledge. The wardens responded as one, ‘I swear.’ Martial music and Fascist hymns were played as they filed forward to sign their names.
The following year the redoubtable men who guarded the citrus fruit groves of the Conca d’Oro underwent a similar ritual. At the end, to mark their new allegiance, they were given boy scout-style brass badges, bearing crossed rifles on a background of orange blossom.
It should be said that this propaganda offensive was backed up by a hard-headed political strategy designed to win over the landowners to the regime. The masters of some great estates certainly appreciated Fascist efforts to cow overweening gabelloti and wardens. Many of Mori’s successes, such as the Gangi operation, were obtained by the eminently traditional method of putting pressure on landowners to betray the criminals they had been sheltering. More generally, Mori’s goal was to impress the population through strength rather than justice. The result was the kind of undiscriminating repression with which the islanders were all too familiar. Within less than three years of the start of Mori’s campaign, some 11,000 people were arrested, 5,000 of them in the province of Palermo alone. It is not possible that all of them were men of honour, or even members of bandit networks. Even one of the prosecuting magistrates involved in the antimafia war believed that honest men were arrested along with criminals.
The huge round-ups were followed by equally huge trials. The most prominent ones were carried out in an intimidatory atmosphere. Mori censored press accounts of proceedings, and endeavoured to create the sense that defending a mafioso was tantamount to being a mafioso. The convictions that Fascism needed often followed. The Duce proudly announced to parliament that the boss who had cheeked him in Piana dei Greci had received a lengthy sentence.
One of Mori’s most loudly trumpeted successes was triggered by the theft of a single ass in Mistretta. The case provides a good example of the ambiguities of the Fascist repression of organized crime. The theft of the ass set in motion a long chain of leads for the police, who eventually raided the offices of a wealthy defence lawyer and politician, Antonino Ortoleva. They discovered ninety suspicious letters describing transactions involving ‘saddles’ and pleas for intervention on behalf of ‘young students’ from across Sicily. The police thought they were coded references to animal thefts and arrested criminals. In fact the code was by no means clear. The letters may just have referred to the management of day-to-day shady favours—common political sleaze rather than violent organized crime. But Mori’s police entertained no such doubts: Antonino Ortoleva, they asserted, was nothing less than the boss of the ‘interprovincial mafia’.
Soon afterwards their theory found support when a man claiming to have been a member of the gang sent a letter of confession to the sub-prefect of Mistretta. A mafia court had been held regularly in Ortoleva’s office since 1913, he said. There, with Ortoleva presiding, the leaders—a ring comprising other professional men and some twenty toughs—would decide on the fate of anyone who obstructed their business. Soon afterwards the informant was shot down in the open countryside.
In all, 163 members of the ‘interprovincial mafia’ were put on trial in August 1928. Ortoleva did not turn up to pre-trial hearings, pleading that he was ill. The judge ordered that he be examined by two doctors. Their opinion was unequivocal: ‘Ortoleva has a normal constitution; his temperature is normal; there are no irregularities in his respiratory and cardio-vascular system; his nervous and sensory organs are normal, as are his mental state and intelligence.’ Two days later he was found dead in his cell.
It is not known whether there was any foul play involved in Ortoleva’s death. What is certain is that he never got the chance to put his side of the story, or to implicate anyone else. Ortoleva could have been the capo of the Mistretta-based organization, or simply a client of the criminals, impelled more or less against his will to favour their interests. He may have been murdered to stop him involving people higher up who were close to the regime.
There is much else that remains obscure about the ‘interprovincial mafia’. Although many of the defendants in the case were clearly up to no good, it is not known whether they did in fact constitute an organized, exclusive mafia on the model of the cosche of western and central Sicily. It may be that they were just the losers in a struggle between local factions. (But in the 1980s, Antonino Calderone, the same pentito who had such painful memories of the Fascist era, would name a descendant of one of the main Mistretta defendants as a member of Cosa Nostra.)
Despite all these doubts, there was only ever going to be one verdict to such a case in the ideological climate of the late 1920s. The propaganda value of dismantling a giant, centralized mafia conspiracy was just too high: 150 men were duly convicted of forming a criminal association.
* * *
Not all mafiosi fared badly under Fascism. Official American sources estimate that 500 of them escaped Mori’s clutches by emigrating to the USA. As will be clear from the following chapters, they found Prohibition America a welcoming refuge. Others discovered that the iron fist of Fascist repression often concealed a greasy palm of corruption. Giuseppe Genco Russo, the boss of Mussomeli in central Sicily, would survive the Mori operation to become one of the most prominent men of honour of the post-war years. Through the Fascist decades of the 1920s and 1930s, he accumulated a criminal record that is a mafioso archetype. He was repeatedly charged with theft, extortion, criminal association, intimidation, violence, and multiple homicide. Again and again charges were dropped or he was acquitted for ‘insufficient evidence’—the formula used when witnesses are too scared to come forward. Genco Russo was even snared in one of Mori’s round-ups near Agrigento, but he only ever served three years. In short, Fascism’s much-vaunted war on the mafia left Giuseppe Genco Russo all but unscathed. The most that can be said is that the increased attention from the law was an annoyance; the ‘special surveillance’ to which he was subjected between 1934 and 1938 certainly hampered his operations. In 1944, Genco Russo was officially declared ‘rehabilitated’. He was, of course, no such thing.
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The word ‘mafia’ was coined both as the description of a criminal organization and as a political weapon, an accusation to be hurled at opponents. Cesare Mori recognized this truth. ‘The label of mafioso is often applied in complete bad faith,’ he wrote. ‘It is used everywhere … as means to carry out vendettas, to work off grudges, to pull down enemies.’ His words were strikingly disingenuous. Mori’s ‘surgery’ on organized crime showed that Fascism pushed this old method of smearing opposition to new extremes.
The final irony of Mori’s campaign was that the ‘iron prefect’ himself was guilty of using the label mafioso in his own interests. In January 1927, as the Fascist Party was purged, Mori brought down his rival for influence in Rome, the Palermo Fascist chief Cucco—the ophthalmologist who had shared a platform with Mori in Gangi. The instrument of Mori’s wrath was the accusation that Cucco had helped young men fake eye diseases to avoid the draft. Mori did not stop the smearing there. Cucco was soon accused of fraud and being a member of the mafia. It took him until 1931 to clear his name.
Black shirts, badges, and nationalistic slogans notwithstanding, the ‘Mori operation’ was ambivalent in the same way that earlier attempts to repress the mafia had been: it combined brutality with hypocrisy. In the long term, the state’s reputation in Sicily could only suffer, and the results of Fascism’s war on the mafia were destined not to last; the mafia was suppressed, but it was not eradicated.
On 23 June 1929, after more than three and a half years as prefect of Palermo, Cesare Mori received a brief telegram from the Duce to tell him that his job was finished. Changes in the political balance of power within the party and the regime had undermined his backing. In a farewell speech to the Fascist Federation of Palermo, Mori tried his hand at modesty:
[T]here remains the man, the citizen Mori, the Fascist Mori, the fighter Mori, the man Mori, living and vital. Today he takes his path towards the horizon that is open to all men, to all men of good will. I have my star. I watch it faithfully because it shines, and will continue to shine, along the path of work and duty. I will be guided by the light of the Fatherland. There, my friends, we will meet again.
In reality, Mori was bitter about his removal. When he returned to Rome, the regime carefully avoided giving him much of a platform from which to make trouble. The former ‘iron prefect’ gave himself over to writing a self-glorifying, sententious account of his ‘hand-to-hand fight’ with the mafia. ‘Men of action make things happen, but do not judge them … From words I passed immediately to deeds.’ It was given a poor reception by the Fascist press. Some blackshirts had clearly not forgotten the day they pissed against the prefecture walls in Bologna.
During the 1930s, the official line was that Mori’s task had been completed. Fascism had beaten the mafia; it had solved the problem for good. Mori’s successor ordered the press to play down reports of crime. There were to be no more roundups or show trials. It was much easier and less conspicuous just to send suspects into internal exile without proper legal process; this, after all, was how the authorities had dealt with the mafia problem through most of the pre-Fascist era. Grey Fascist functionaries rapidly followed one another through the corridors of Palermo’s public buildings. With the regime’s attention switched elsewhere, Sicily sank into a sump of corruption and factionalism.
Mori’s death in 1942 went virtually unreported. The following year the Fascist regime collapsed and his work was entirely undone. The mafia’s salvation came from the United States. For during the same decades in which it struggled with socialism, Fascism, and war in Sicily, the mafia had become a part of American life.