Happy Ant-Heap

by Norman Lewis

  Judge: ‘Not quite so much philosophy.’

  With that, on 25 June 1968, the trial ended with the clearance of all the accused for lack of proof, and their subsequent release. That afternoon I saw an enraged Colonel Giuseppe Russo of the carabinieri, who had been sent from Milan to conduct an all-out war on the Mafia and to see to it that the accused men were not able to slip through the fingers of the police. He was a man of the north, handsome, clean-cut, frank, and with a take-it-or-leave-it manner. His office betrayed a liking for military order of a severe kind, with handcuffs—made to his own design, he confided—used as a paperweight on his desk. Contempt for the Sicilian environment in which he now found himself oozed from him. He referred to the Mafia as ‘an oriental conspiracy fostered by local interests’. ‘I have been sent here to finish it off,’ he said ‘and that I propose to do.

  ‘The Mafia feeds on respect,’ he continued. ‘They have been able to convince people that they are all-powerful, and our first step is to destroy this legend. This must be done by public humiliation. Take the case of Coppola [one of the three Cosa Nostra chiefs]. The custom here is to carry out arrests at night. I sent two men for him at the time of day when the neighbours would be about to see what happened. They chained him up and dragged him away. He lost face. For him things will never be quite the same.’

  I called on Boris Giuliano, chief of the Pubblica Sicurezza of Palermo, whose collaboration in bringing the recent case Russo had referred to in an offhand and grudging manner. He was a younger man than Russo, lively in southern style, who turned out to speak fluent and idiomatic English with a London accent and vocabulary, picked up, he cheerfully informed me, while working illegally as a waiter in various Soho restaurants. He was clearly happy to talk to an Englishman. Giuliano was even franker than Russo and it was soon evident that he was no more impressed with the new arrival from Milan than the colonel had been with him. He was particularly horrified at the account of Coppola’s arrest. ‘Russo’s signed his own death warrant,’ he said. ‘They’ll let things ride for a bit. Give the dust time to settle, then take him out. I give him five years.’

  ‘What would you have done?’

  ‘I’d have turned up in a plain car, been very polite, and given him a half-hour to get his things together. If there’d have been a woman around, I’d have bowed and apologised for the intrusion, and any kids in sight would have had a pat on the head. This is the way we play it. To Coppola I might have said, “You lead your life, I lead mine. I have to do what I’m told.” This man only has to lift a finger to have you snuffed out.’

  ‘There was some talk in our papers about smashing the Mafia this time,’ I said.

  ‘You can’t,’ he replied. ‘At best you can contain it, which is at least something. It’s the way of life down here, and to some extent we’re all in it. Supposing you ran a charity organisation and somebody came to you with an offer of tens of millions of lire to build an orphanage. Would you ask him where the money came from? Do you believe the bishop is going to investigate any suspiciously large contribution to Church funds? They call that buying in. You heard about the project to build a marina? This is extortion money being laundered through the banks. When you have a national bank working with the Mafia, what are we supposed to do?’

  There was a moment of confusion in the office. He was called away and came back saying he had to go out, but would like to see me again. I told him I would be staying on a couple more days, and gave him the name of my hotel, and it was left that he’d give me a ring and pop over if he could.

  Next morning he turned up at my hotel and we went down to the bar for a coffee. Sicilians who live at home in semi-darkness behind shuttered windows appreciate the maximum of light when they go out to relax. This place, despite the hour, was ablaze with the glitter of chandeliers. It went in for Empire-style gilt furniture, which Sicilians also like. The waiters were uniformed in scarlet and gold braid, like hussars, and the service was fast and good.

  Boris Giuliano made it clear that he approved. ‘And what do you think of it?’ he asked.

  ‘No complaints,’ I said.

  ‘In Milan they tell you to empty the boot of your car and leave it unlocked. None of that nonsense here. Nobody will touch a thing. For what they give it’s cheap, too. They know how to buy at the right prices. This is the best hotel on the island. Know who owns it?’

  ‘I can only guess.’

  ‘By staying here you’re contributing to mob funds. Want to take your trade elsewhere?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘There’s such a thing as carrying your principles too far.’

  He laughed. ‘Well, now you see how it is. You’re one of us now.’

  He had a couple of hours to spare, he said, and wanted to show me the sights. It came up that I’d been in Palermo before. When? he wanted to know. Five years before, I told him. ‘You won’t recognise it,’ he said. ‘Nobody could.’

  We drove up to the end of the Maqueda for a view of the new Palermo, rolling through the low hills in a great red tide of bricks into and over the grey city. ‘Fifty construction companies are working out there,’ Boris said, ‘with a man of respect on every board. They have the planning department in their pockets.’

  ‘So they’re taking over the city?’

  ‘Yes, but if they didn’t the Roman banks would, and the money would be siphoned off to Rome. This is a very complicated situation. The Mafia puts down petty crime and it makes work. It’s found jobs for 30,000 so far. Kids who used to live on bread and olive oil now eat meat. The inescapable fact is it has its uses.’

  ‘This used to be a beautiful town,’ I commented.

  ‘It still is where the developers have been kept out,’ he said.

  We turned back and parked in an alleyway behind the Quattro Canti, still the noblest of road intersections, and set out into the back streets winding eventually down to the sea. For the moment, the men changing Palermo were too absorbed in the new city to spare time and energy for the transformation that would sooner or later follow here. A cupola left by the Arabs lay cracked like an eggshell in a forgotten garden, where water running in a marble conduit showed through a filigree of leaves. Lizards darted in and out of the cracks in a Norman wall, and someone strummed on a mandolin against the fading rumpus of traffic. We found a bar down by the fish market into which legless ex-soldiers, face downwards on boards, dragged themselves by their hands to be fed by fishermen with the contents of sea-urchins. Nowhere could the heartlessness and the compassion of the Mediterranean have been more bitingly presented. Our presence went unnoticed: no one would listen in.

  ‘All the books tell you the same thing,’ Boris said. ‘We’re in the unique position of an island that’s been invaded and conquered by foreigners six times in succession. Every fresh batch of foreigners changed the laws, which meant laws ceased to exist. We’ve been slaves to six masters. They left us with nothing. The Mafia had to exist. It defended us, fought for us, then conquered us. Now we’ve been conquered a seventh time. We got rid of the others, but we’ll never get rid of this lot, because they speak the language. They’re not foreigners. They’re us.’

  Sicilians are lonely. The sense of isolation from which so many of them suffer sets them apart from the other races of Europe. It is a trait manifesting itself in a number of ways. There are no country houses, and no small villages on the island. People live in towns, where, much as they may be inclined to keep their own company, they are comforted by the sound of voices, the sight of traffic, of people in the streets. Nevertheless they are lovers of the countryside from which they feel themselves debarred, and enjoy nothing more than to celebrate festa by driving out into the grandeur of their empty landscape for a picnic and the collection of wild flowers, to which they are addicted. The problem then arises where to pull off the road. Drivers cruise along on the lookout for a pleasant spot, but also for company. Within minutes of a driver parking his car, he may expect to be joined by another. Each party, pretending not to be a
ware of the other, will get on with the business of lighting a barbecue fire and fetching water from a nearby stream. No greeting passes. Sometimes, when no second car arrives, those who have chosen the picnicking site will pack up and move on elsewhere.

  Boris Giuliano was yet another lonely Sicilian ruined in the matter of his capacity to resist loneliness and isolation by the conviviality of the years spent in London, then returned to a society where reticence and secrecy were the norm.

  He loved the excuse to speak English, which, I suspect, may have induced him more than once to put aside his work, and spend an hour or so with me in some corner of the city where he would be allowed to feed on memories of Soho’s Greek Street.

  I left Sicily and thereafter we exchanged sporadic correspondence from which I learned of journeys made to the US. It had become clear that the Mafia had moved in to control the traffic in heroin; their secret laboratories now produced one-quarter of the world’s supply. It was no longer possible for a policeman to continue to stand on the sidelines and talk about containment. On one occasion when he made a brief stopover in London I met him for an hour or so at the airport. He was on his way to Washington to confer with the FBI, and mentioned that a previous visit had had to do with the assassination of President Kennedy, when he had put the theory, later accepted by many Americans, that contrary to the findings of the Warren Commission, this had been organised by the Mafia. His contentions suggested the plot of a novel which I subsequently wrote about the assassination.

  In the early part of 1979, Boris’s letters stopped, due I supposed to the increasing pressure of his work. In July of that year he visited Marseilles and Milan in the course, as later revealed, of investigations into the allocation of spheres of influence in the narcotics trade between the US and Sicilian Mafia. It has been surmised that high government officials of both countries found themselves compromised as a result of these investigations.

  On 21 July he was back in Palermo, and at exactly 8 a.m., as usual, called in for a coffee at the Bar Lux, a few yards from where he lived. He stood at the counter to drink it, then chatted for a moment with several regulars before turning to go. At that moment there were about twenty customers, only one of whom could be traced by the police to give an account of what happened next. ‘I noticed a man who was trembling,’ this undoubtedly reluctant witness said. ‘He was white in the face. He must be ill, I thought. My first impulse was to offer to help. When the commissario went towards the door the man followed him. He drew a pistol and shot him three times in the neck. Signor Giuliano fell face downwards, and the man then fired four more bullets into his back.’

  The blundering and impetuous Colonel Giuseppe Russo had gone blindly to the attack of an opponent he did not understand. He had arrested suspects by the hundred, nearly all of whom were released through lack of evidence, thus surrounding himself with implacable enemies who were prepared to bide their time. This came in July 1977 when a phone call the colonel had been awaiting summoned him to a mysterious rendezvous. He was heard to say to the subordinate he called, ‘This is the breakthrough’, before the two men dashed off. The bodies of both men, riddled with bullets, were discovered in a remote part of the island some days later.

  Despite his long experience of the environment and the relative subtlety of his methods, Giuliano had lasted only another two years, almost to the day. He was accorded in death the extraordinary civic accolade of Cadavere Eccelente, with which only six (including Russo) had been honoured in the decade, and was carried to the grave in a hearse drawn by twelve horses. By subsequent accounts of his career, he may have come as near as any single man could have done to breaking the stranglehold of the Honoured Society.

  1989

  Beautiful Bean-Stew Faces

  CENTRAL AMERICA HAS BEEN frequently referred to by its great northern neighbour as the States’ backyard, and the undertone of presumed control and dependency suggested by the description has not been lost on the Spanish-speaking peoples of the countries concerned. Porfirio Diaz, a Mexican president at the close of the nineteenth century, famously attributed his country’s deficiencies to being ‘too near to the USA and too far from God’. Mexico was simply too big to have wholly collapsed under outside pressures but its smaller neighbours, squeezed into a territorial neck narrowing all the way down to Panama, never quite freed themselves from the exercise of Yankee power and wealth. Things for them took a turn for the worse after the last war as subservient dictators were warned against the spread of Communist ideas. Most of these came quickly to heel, but in Guatemala a democratically elected government proposing to defend its liberties by the importation of arms from Czechoslovakia provoked a CIA-mounted invasion and was rapidly overthrown.

  Anastasio Somoza of Nicaragua, whose father had been a lifelong friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt, offered an outstanding example of misrule. In his own country he was generally accepted as an outright psychopath, frequently visiting in person the torture chambers regarded as a normal accessory of such countries; he was even reputed to have installed a dungeon in the basement of his palace, in which opponents were subjected to psychological pressures by the presence of caged jaguars kept short of food. In 1979 there was an uprising against his regime led remarkably enough by Indians, normally accustomed to keep clear of revolutionary action and let the whites settle their disputes in their own way. On this occasion the President’s National Guard made the fatal mistake of throwing tear-gas canisters into a gathering of Monimbo Indians performing a ‘ceremony’, and the Indians, first dressed by their shamans in ritual tunics believed to confer invisibility, went into action, cleared the National Guards out of town, set up barricades to prevent their return, and the war was on. So great a source of inspiration was their action to the rebels’ muchachos that Monimbo dance masks were thereafter adopted as part of their uniforms.

  The Somozas, father and son, had by this time ruled Nicaragua for forty-three years—the longest period of unbroken terror in Latin American history. At his death, Anastasio Somoza was reputed to be the richest Latin American of all time. Among his innumerable assets were the whole seaport of Puerto Somoza, the national airline, the principal shipping line, a chain of luxury brothels in Argentina and one-quarter of Nicaragua’s cultivable land. Both Somozas were seen as good friends of the USA. On the occasion of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s meeting with the father, the American President had rebuked a member of his entourage who referred to Somoza as ‘no better than an assassin’. In a much-quoted reply the President corrected him, ‘Sure he’s a sonofabitch, but he’s our sonofabitch.’

  The fighting started by a band of Indians spread to all parts of the country and continued for three years, provoking innumerable massacres, in the course of which an estimated 5 per cent of the civilian population died, approximately half of these being women who had taken up arms in the Sandinista cause. In 1979 Somoza deserted his followers and fled the country to meet his end in Paraguay. Here, while taking part in a parade in his honour, he was blown in half by a bazooka shell fired from a nearby building, being the 105th Latin American president to the by violence in the twentieth century. Left to its own devices, his army disintegrated. The Nicaraguan air force sprayed the coffee and tobacco crops before decamping, while the National Guard took over the nation’s fishing fleet and sailed away, and the Sandinista regime came into being.

  Visiting the country on behalf of a Sunday newspaper in 1982, some two years after the debacle, I found that the only car for hire in the capital, Managua, was a glittering American monster, previously the property of a captain in the National Guard. This unique vehicle attracted curious glances everywhere and sometimes a small crowd. It possessed a powerful radio, and whenever held up by collapsed buildings, a bridge under repair or deep holes in the road, I tried to curry favour with the onlookers by blasting out revolutionary songs. The device was successful but not for the reasons intended. In reality most of the audience had had enough of music of this kind, and soon drifted away.

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bsp; I drove the absurd car out of town and into a beautiful landscape of forests, volcanoes and lakes, and occasional villages painted in all colours tucked into crevices of the red earth. Some of the houses had shell-holes in their walls, and one or two had lost their roofs. A single village sported a cafe. ‘Come in,’ said a woman standing at the door. ‘Stewed beans are available. One bowlful per person.’ This was good news, for so far that day I’d made do with coffee substitutes and a hunk of maize bread.

  I followed her in and she put a bowlful of stew in front of me and I tried a cautious spoonful. It was the national diet these days and the taste was at first sweet, leaving thereafter a lingering sourness at the base of the tongue. Many people I was told were obliged to eat nothing but this for days on end, but after the second spoonful I pushed the bowl away. The woman was watching me and I shook my head and smiled, ashamed at this wastage of precious food.

  There was a row of bullet holes in the counter, and I stuck the tip of my finger in one of these. ‘It’s nothing,’ the woman said. ‘They were fighting round here for three months. A battle a day. For us it made a change. If you live here it’s the boredom that finishes you off. Anything for a little excitement. We got used to the war. I hate to say this, but in a way I suppose we miss it.’ There was a cripple in the street outside dragging himself along on his hands and knees, the result, the woman said, of a newly invented torture causing permanent distortion of the limbs. The new government had supplied the ‘victim placard’ hanging from his neck, appealing to members of the public to come to his aid readily upon request.

  After this excursion it was back to Managua—a city that had never been given time to rouse itself from the coma into which it had fallen after the earthquake of 1972 before the coming of the revolution and war. Many who saw it at the time were reminded of pictures of Hiroshima, but now the eerie emptiness of the once bustling city centre was emphasised by the survival of the stark tower of the Bank of America and the disjointed mass of the theoretically earthquake-proof International Hotel. A few pedestrians were picking their way delicately through the rubble as if in fear of its colonisation by snakes. Space had been cleared round four burnt-out tanks, left where they were to encourage children to play in them, but there were no children in sight.