World, the World

by Norman Lewis

  It struck me as extraordinary that a number of the famous criminals in the dock, some of whom were said to have been in custody for as much as a year, should sport impressive sun-tans and be dressed in the smartest of outdoor fashion. Of this phenomenon Lo Buono said, ‘Do not believe everything you are told, Signor Luigi.’

  Within three days the trial showed signs of languishing. The most important of the accused failed to appear in court on grounds of sickness, and most of those who did were shown to have led exemplary lives. Several were known for their association with leading personalities of the church. Two had sons training for the priesthood. Another had paid for the building of an orphanage. John Benventre, one of the alleged Cosa Nostra chieftains (he had studied for holy orders in his youth), was head of a charity organisation famous throughout the United States. Vincenzo Martinez, also in charity, had lost an arm and been decorated for valour in the war and reminded one newspaperman of an ‘aloof and splendid Coriolanus’. Addressing the court on ‘the eventual triumph of virtue’, he said, ‘Surely we are all agreed that a quiet conscience is a man’s dearest possession,’ whereupon a mumble of approval spread through the court-room to reach its furthest corners. On 25 June all of the accused were cleared for lack of proof.

  It was evident within days of the trial’s opening that it would end as it did. With time on my hands I called on Colonel Giuseppe Russo of the Carabinieri, advertised in the press as having been sent to Sicily to carry out a conclusive war on the Mafia and to see to it that the accused men were not able to slip through the fingers of the police once again. He was an out-and-out northerner, tall by Sicilian standards, with a brusque manner and a dislike for the island he made little attempt to disguise. His office betrayed a liking for military order of a severe kind, with handcuffs—made to his own design, he confided—used as a paper-weight on his desk. He described the Mafia as ‘an oriental conspiracy fostered by local interests’, saying that he proposed to finish it off. Describing the methods he had in mind, he said, ‘Take the case of Frank Coppola.’ (One of the three American Cosa Nostra chiefs to have been discovered in Italy.) ‘The custom here is to carry out arrests by night, to avoid public humiliation, which is just what I have in store for these people. I sent two men for him just at the time when the neighbours would be up and about to see what happened, and they chained him up and dragged him away. It gave people a chance to see he’s no bigger where the law is concerned than any other man. You can forget about him. When crooks like Coppola lose face they’re done for.’

  Boris Giuliano, Chief of the Pubblica Sicurezza of Palermo, was next on my list. He was pleasant and informal and it came as a surprise that he should speak English fluently with a marked London accent. He explained this by telling me that for two years after taking his degree he had worked as a waiter in a restaurant in Frith Street, Soho—‘illegally’, he added with a touch of quiet pride. As it happened I knew the restaurant well and often ate there. It was celebrated among its regulars, including myself, for its escalope milanese, admitted at a time when food was in short supply to have been made with horse meat, so well prepared as to be preferred by many to the standard version employing veal. Giuliano claimed to have remembered me from those days, having trained himself as part of an intended policeman’s skills to keep a record of faces. This interview went off so well that that evening he called on me at my hotel—alleged, he said, to belong to a Mafia consortium and thus providing the best Palermo had to offer in the way of service and food.

  Hostility between the two Italian police forces, as I had learned in the British Army in Naples, was traditional, and Giuliano was horrified although not surprised to hear from me Russo’s story of the arrest. ‘He’s signed his own death warrant,’ he said. ‘They’ll give the dust time to settle, then take him out. I give him five years.’

  ‘So what would you have done?’

  ‘I’d have turned up in a plain car, been polite and given him half an hour to get his things together. If a woman had been around I’d have bowed and apologised for the intrusion. To Coppola I might have said, “You lead your life, and I lead mine. I have to do what I’m told.” Remember this man has only to lift a finger to have you snuffed out.

  ‘So what do you think of this place?’ he asked.

  I thought he meant the restaurant The waiters were dressed like hussars in scarlet and gold, and everyone was helpful and polite. ‘It’s excellent,’ I said, but he meant the city, and I told him that I was impressed to be told by the hotel’s doorman that I could leave my hire-car unlocked.

  ‘We have very little petty crime,’ Giuliano said. ‘No handbag snatching. No burglaries. This is a quiet place for the ordinary man to live in, because that’s the way the Mafia want it.’

  ‘So can Russo smash the Mafia?’

  Giuliano scoffed at the idea. ‘You can do deals with the Mafia, you can contain it, but no-one will ever smash it because its members are among the highest in the land.’

  I saw Giuliano again when I next visited Sicily and we exchanged sporadic correspondence on topics of mutual interest, from which I learned of his journeys to the United States. It became clear that the Mafia had moved in to control the trade of heroin. Their secret laboratories now produced one quarter of the world supply, and it was difficult for a policeman to continue to stand on the sidelines and talk about containment. On one occasion when Giuliano 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. He had put forward 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, The Sicilian Specialist, which I subsequently wrote about the assassination.

  Notwithstanding Giuliano’s prediction that his rival Colonel Russo would meet his end within five years of the Coppola incident, he actually lasted nine. He had arrested suspects by the hundred, nearly all of them released through lack of evidence, thus surrounding himself with implacable enemies, and in July 1977 his body was recovered riddled with bullets.

  In this cause Russo had fought head-on battles, and his end in this fashion had been seen in Palermo as a certainty. Boris Giuliano by comparison was an intellectual, a diplomat, who probably even tolerated working arrangements with his opponents, and under him the Pubblica Sicurezza had held its own, and if at the end things could hardly be said to be better, they were certainly no worse.

  On 21 July 1979, while taking his usual morning coffee in a bar near his house, Boris Giuliano was shot dead by an assassin who was able to escape. His funeral was celebrated in a way that suggests that many people of Palermo may have been grateful for the degree of protection he had been able to offer them. He was accorded in death the extraordinary civic accolade, far greater than any he had received in his lifetime, of Cadavere Eccelente, with which in this century only six Sicilians had been honoured, and was carried to the grave in a hearse drawn by twelve horses.

  Chapter Eleven

  OUTSTANDING IN THE LONG string of tragedies engulfing much of the South American continent at one time or another since the Spanish conquest, was the near-annihilation in the late sixties of the native races of Brazil. It came as a surprise that this was brought to the notice of the outside world by the Brazilian government itself, which offered no excuses, and described with absolute frankness the dimensions of the tragedy that had taken place. Murder, said the government report, had been committed on a huge scale. No-one knew precisely just how many had died out of sight and beyond reach of help in the measureless depths of the forests, but it might have been half the Indian population. And who had slaughtered all these innocents? The government’s own Indian Protection Service, the report confessed, by the employment of gangs of professional killers. The lands thus freed were then sold off, and the money embezzled by agents of the service.

&nb
sp; In 1968 the Attorney General, Jader Figueredo, broke this news to the nation and the world, adding the information that the ex-head of the service, Major Luis Neves, was now to be tried for forty-two crimes, including several murders. A further 134 functionaries were charged with similar crimes, and Senhor Figueredo doubted whether, of the Service’s 1,000 employees, as many as ten would be finally cleared of guilt.

  According to the reports, outright brutality of the old-fashioned kind existed alongside the most sophisticated methods of extermination. Professional bravos who normally shot the victims through the head or hacked them to pieces with machetes might be accompanied or replaced by men of science versed in the techniques of bacteriological warfare. Some tribes had simply disappeared. Once they had been there in the thousands and now they were gone. Sometimes figures could be supplied. Of the recently counted 19,000 Munducurus, only 1,200 were left. The Guaranies were reduced from 5,000 to 300. Decimation had left the Carajas with 400 out of 4,000. The Cintas Largas, estimated in 1966 to have totalled 10,000, had since been attacked by an overland force and from the air with their reduction to an estimated 500. The Government White Paper detailed an endless list of atrocities:

  The Maxacalis were given fire water then exterminated by the killers with machine-gun fire when they were drunk.

  The worst slaughter took place in Aripuana where the Cintas Largas Indians were attacked from the air using sticks of dynamite.

  To deal with the Beiços de Pau, an expedition was sent carrying foodstuffs for the Indians. These were mixed with arsenic and formicides. Next day a great number died, ‘due’ it was announced ‘to an epidemic’. Most of the Tapaunas were wiped out with gifts of sugar laced with arsenic.

  Two tribes of the Patachos were exterminated by doctors giving them smallpox infections.

  Pioneers in league with corrupt agents of the Service issued clothing to the Indians impregnated with the virus of smallpox, and having thus eliminated them took over their territory.

  In the Ministry of the Interior it was stated that crimes committed by ex-functionaries of the IPS amounted to more than 1,000, ranging from tearing out Indians’ finger nails to allowing them to die without assistance.

  These things happened during a period when the Sunday Times set out to gain ground over its competitors by an extended coverage of world events. The editor of the magazine, Peter Crookston, had liked my report on the trial in Sicily of leading mafiosi, and so he asked me to investigate what was happening in Brazil.

  In Rio de Janeiro the co-operation I received was immediate and total, and there was no doubt that the daily airings in the press of the mechanisms of genocide were received with a degree of horror equalling the reaction in Britain or any other country. Huge areas had been emptied of their human population by the methods described, yet a scrutiny of the small ads revealed that ‘cleared land’—meaning those areas from which any human presence had been removed—still fetched more in the market than those where the clearing remained to be done. Among these advertisements was one by Amazon Adventure Estates couched in poetic style with allusions to monkeys and macaws and the ‘occult’ glitter of gems in the banks of ‘mighty rivers sailed by ships of the explorer Orellana’. A Brazilian deputy revealed that Prince Rainier of Monaco had bought a presumably cleared estate twelve times the size of the principality.

  A single statement in the White Paper’s panorama of catastrophe astounded me in a way more than all the rest. There had been half-hearted explanations rather than excuses for the Service’s collapse based on starvation of financial backing and—in this colossal country almost the size of Europe—the demoralisation of underpaid agents faced with unthinkable isolation in their living tombs among the trees. An assistant secretary at the Ministry of the Interior spoke of the Service having to face ‘the disastrous impact of missionary activity’. A journalist friend of his on O Jornal do Brazil took me to what was left of Bororos’ Santa Criteria reserve to explain what was meant.

  The Bororos had been a great people celebrated by the account of the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss who had lived among them for several years. Lévi-Strauss had been led by his studies to form the conclusions of structural anthropology, including the proposition that a primitive people is not a backward people and indeed ‘may possess a genius for invention or action that leaves the achievements of civilized people far behind’. Writing of the Bororos, he said: ‘Few people are so profoundly religious’ adding that they were obsessed by their relationship with the dead, a concern manifested—in the manner of the ancient Egyptians—in lengthy and most elaborate funeral rites. It is this excess of spirituality that gets the Indians of Latin America into trouble with the missionaries, who so often appear as the representatives of a material world. The Bororos, left to themselves and seemingly unable to part with their dead, bury them twice, and this custom is the emotional basis of their lives. In the first instance—as if in hope of some miraculous revival—the body is placed in a temporary grave in the centre of the village, and covered with branches. When decomposition is advanced the flesh is removed from the bones which are painted and lovingly adorned with flowers, after which the final burial takes place in the depths of the forest.

  The American fundamentalist missionaries who had flooded into the country at the end of the war would have none of this, and were even able to have all such activities banned by law throughout Brazil. At this time only a single reservation maintained by the celebrated brothers Vilas Boas had been able to keep them out, and shortly before our arrival the Teresa Cristina Reserve given to the Indians ‘in perpetuity’ had been invaded by mobs of armed land-grabbers, with whom the missionaries had gone along. Thus their funeral rites were at an end, and with them, as it was to turn out, earthly pleasures of every kind. With the loss of their land the Bororos became instantly dependent on the missionaries, who forbade dancing, singing, smoking, and ‘heathen’ decorations of the body, offering in return a little work rewarded with handouts of food and clothing provided by charity organisations. By the time of our visit the reservation had become a typical forest slum. The Indians’ cows had been sold off by the agents of the Indian Protection Service, and the Indians were reduced to the normal hard-times diet of lizards, locusts and snakes. The reservation, said my journalist friend, had been divided into two farms, one run with slave labour. On this there was a mill for crushing the sugar cane, and to save the horses they used four children to turn the mill. ‘The missionaries’ he said, ‘have raised no objections to these things. “We were sent here,” they tell you, “to save souls, and this we are doing.” They started a school here which the Bororos children were compelled to attend. My paper has published instances of the young girls being prostituted, and in one case even given away. When I protested to the head missionary, he said, “She has witnessed for Christ, and that is all that matters. She will receive compensation in Heaven.”’

  It was the testimony of Diego di Ribeiro of O Jornal do Brazil, and what I saw on the Santa Cristina reservation with my own eyes, that brought about the change in my attitude to these Protestant fundamentalists. Previously I had contented myself with emphatic disagreement, but from this time on I opposed, and there was nothing in my subsequent experience of these destructive sects that did anything to lessen this opposition.

  No-one could have been more forthcoming in such lugubrious affairs than the upper echelons of the Brazilian police, and I was given immediate access to Federal Delegate Senhora Neves da Costa Vale, a slightly perfumed, sharp-eyed and elegant lady sent to Belen, close to Brazil’s border with Peru, to look into the matter of the near disappearance of the Ticuna tribe. She told me that they had fallen under the influence of a missionary who convinced them that the world was about to come to an end, and that they would be safe only on the estate of one Jordao Aires. There the Indians were promptly enslaved, being chained hand and foot in such a way that some had become lepers with the loss of their fingers. She confirmed the existence of an isla
nd called Armaça where Indians too old or sick to work were concentrated by Aires to await death. One extraordinary aspect of this business was that a senior police official should have been obliged to use a missionary plane in order to reach her destination in Belen.

  At lower levels the police fell over themselves to offer what help they could and I was whisked away by plane to talk to a hired gunman, Ataide, who had been awaiting trial for four years for multiple homicide. He was a small man with a wolfish triangular face and a deeply depressed expression shot through with occasional flare-ups of hope. Ataide had gained nationwide fame for spectacular and much publicised outbursts of remorse. He had participated in the overland expedition against the Cintas Largas and later allowed a priest to tape a confession of his involvement in the atrocity, parts of which he was happy to describe for the benefit of visitors such as myself. The attack, he explained, had been planned to coincide with the Indians’ annual feast of the Quarap. This, lasting a day and a night, was a theatrical representation of the legends of creation (remarkably similar to our own) interwoven with those of the tribe itself, plus a family reunion attended not only by the living but by the ancestral spirits.

  ‘As soon as we spotted their village,’ Ataide said, ‘we surrounded it and waited for the dawn when the Indians started to come out of their huts. I got the chief with the first shot from my old carbine and the fellows finished off the rest with their tommy-guns. I have got to say that I was all against what happened next. There was a young girl with a kid of about five yelling his head off. Chico, our leader, started after her and I told him to stop, and he said, “Our orders are to get rid of them all.” We were both religious men and I said, “You can’t do this. What are the padres going to say about it when we get back?” He shot the kid through the head, then he tied up the Indian girl, hung her head-downwards from a tree, legs apart, and chopped her in half right down the middle with his machete. “What was the point of that?” I asked him, and he said, “If I’d have left her in one piece all the boys would have been at her and discipline would have gone to pot. I’m the boss here and without me none of you bastards would ever get back.”’