by Norman Lewis
‘Looking at this place as it is now, it’s hard to believe things like that could ever have happened,’ Lesley said.
‘Naturally, but it’s impossible to imagine this town as it was. As soon as the sun went down it was absolutely silent. There were no street lamps, so it was quite dark. People went indoors and stayed there. The few that faced the gloom outside walked up and down in twos and threes with sawn-off shotguns held under the long cloaks they always wore at night. It was their way of showing how tough they were. The cafe stayed open at night to scrape a living from the odd customer. It had wall-slots instead of windows. The fellow at the door was an ex-lifer whose nose had been chopped off.’
‘Why didn’t the Mafia kill Dolci while they were about it?’ she asked.
‘There was no point in doing so. He was no danger to them and he was a likeable man who would express his point of view calmly enough and leave whoever he was talking to to think it over. It was the police the Mafia really hated, and thinking about it, that corpse dumped at his door might have been a police spy.’
We went on discussing Dolci and the Mafia, and I mentioned he had once said that it was the religious community who were his real enemies and spoke with such disapproval and animosity of his work. Shortly after he settled in Partinico he was picked up by the police and charged with being a political agitator. The basis of his so-called agitation and the legal action it provoked was his determination actually to employ Article IV of the Italian Constitution to serve the purposes of the poor. The article states: ‘The Republic recognizes the right of all its citizens to work, and ensures the conditions necessary to make this right effective.’ The device Dolci chose was a campaign of civil obedience - not of disobedience of the kind usually favoured by protesters. A local road had become unusable after heavy rains, and it had been made clear that due to a lack of funds it would not be repaired. Dolci’s plan was to persuade the peasants to undertake the work on their own account. Sixty unemployed roadworkers began to drain off the water, clear the verges, and remove the rocks and earth left by landslides. With that a force of 250 police arrived, led by an inspector who was promoted to superintendent next day for compelling the unemployed to leave the road as it was.
‘They put him in the Ucciardone! - in a cell containing forty-four other prisoners. When visited by his lawyer he told him that his only complaint was the number of bugs which prevented the prisoners from sleeping. Hearing of this, an aristocratic female admirer sent him a bottle of DDT which Dolci promptly returned to her “as there would not be enough to go round”. His would-be benefactress then sent four more gallons for which Dolci returned his heartiest thanks, and those of his fellow inmates. Thereafter he made no more criticisms of conditions in gaol.’
Shortly after Dolci’s release we took the last of our walks together, this time in an exploration of the great, glistening plain of Partinico. It was an area imbued with the mystique of pre-history that by a miracle seemed to have remained aloof from modern times. Here the civilization of antiquity drove back the desert and filled the landscape with a brilliant filigree of gardens. There is no place in the world that reeks more strongly of the remote past than this. Any house that is more than a hovel is the ghost of a Roman villa, displaying the wasted grandeur of a massive portico, cracked arch and vaulted interior. All around, the orange orchards of the newcomers spread their magnificent gloom, through which the peasants moved almost with stealth. Water, now the prey of the Mafia, gurgled everywhere through a complex of ancient conduits, splashing and cascading from the jaws of stone pythons into rimmed cisterns and ditches. Through Partinico’s scent of dust and oranges struck coldly a rank odour of marshes.
The sea appeared here as a surprise a mile or so beyond this enchanted spot. It came theatrically into view from the top of a sand dune with gulls screaming all around, and it was different from any sea I had seen before: dove-grey in a flat calm but patched with the most refulgent blue. Thousands of the tiniest of black crabs scattered over the wide beach. It was a windless day and we watched as a shallow wave unrolled like silk all along the shore, reaching to within thirty yards of where we stood, then withdrawing with a faint rustle of sand. A short distance away the waves broke against high ground and from this we saw sea eagles manoeuvring over water so brilliantly blue in this spot that it appeared almost that lamps had been lit below the surface. The grey, flickering shapes of a shoal of fish were passing through and an eagle came fluttering down in the attack like some gigantic black butterfly.
Danilo was in his element in such wild places. It was here, he said, that he came to rest when he could -although rest in his case meant vigorous activity and, here on the Partinico foreshore, a boyish chase after the weird crustaceans of the beach that scuttled at twice our running-speed for their holes as we came in sight.
In 1998, Partinico was back in the news again with a drive for tourism. Its Mafia past, underlined by the reforming efforts of Danilo Dolci and the years he spent there, was beginning to fade. Its main street was bustling with cafes, bars, beauty salons, a gymnasium and even a riding school. One or two unsightly shacks on the town’s outskirts had been pulled down. There seemed to be some hope that Partinico, with its legendary and even sinister history, would soon rival Corleone as an attraction for foreign tourists.
Corleone, of course, had the huge advantage of being featured in Francis Ford Coppola’s Godfather films, but Partinico, apart from its pleasant surroundings, was much more accessible. Corleone was an hour’s drive away from Palermo, Partinico an easy twenty minutes, but there was nowhere in the neighbourhood of either town to stay.
Determined to become part of the modern world, Partinico is changing rapidly. Every day, it seems, there is a new attraction: a pub-discotheque one week, a cafe bar with computer games the next. The order has gone out that the locals should smarten themselves up, although the complaint is not that they live too much in the past, but in the unacceptable present. From now on no one will be allowed to enter the municipio wearing Bermuda shorts, sandals or any garment incompatible with Partinico’s standard of civic dignity.
An excellent and up-to-date guidebook to Sicily speaks of the town as coming from the same desperate mould as Montelepre, Giuliano’s birthplace. Quite suddenly, within the last year, the description is out of date; instead it has become jestingly referred to as the Medellin of Sicily. For several years small amounts of Cannabis indica have been grown in the vicinity and in July 1998 a large area of surrounding territory was subjected to what Sicilian police now call (in English) a ‘blitz’. Some four thousand cannabis plants were discovered growing in soil exceptionally suitable for their cultivation. The plants, between four and six feet in height, were skilfully obscured from sight by grape-vines and lemon trees trained to provide fences.
This was the eleventh such raid that year, yet it was evident that total success still eluded the police, for in September there were more raids, this time on young people hawking bagfuls of freshly picked cannabis by the roadside at the entrance to Partinico. Notoriety alone probably contributed to the affluence of the place. Few visitors are likely to have gone there in search of high-quality narcotics, and curiosity is more likely to have been the attraction in the case of a small Sicilian town absurdly described in a newspaper as a miniature version of the drug capital of Colombia.
9
AFTER A BRIEF excursion to the beach near Partinico where Danilo Dolci had taken me years before, we decided to avoid the limited road coverage of western Sicily at this point and return to the capital. But before leaving for Palermo we went back into Partinico itself for a snack and a rest. The drive uphill along the narrow street leading to the town’s centre was even more congested than usual, with traffic jams behind carabinieri assault troops parked in vehicles at each end and groups of Pubblica Sicurezza police in the main street itself. The facts of the matter were explained by Pascuale, the English-speaking waiter at Trattoria Fontana. ‘Vito Vitale showed up. His wife runs a farm down
in the valley and he was seen down there last night. There’s half a million lire on his head. He has a girlfriend living on the other side of the hill.’
‘Think they’ll catch him?’
‘No. It happens all the time. How far you got to go today?’
‘Just Palermo.’
‘You’re going to be stopped a few times.’
‘What’s so remarkable about this man? What’s he wanted for?’
‘Kidnapping and murder. You used to hear about Toto Riina all the time. Now it’s Vitale. They say he’s taken over. He used to come in here when he was a kid. I never saw him because at that time I was in the States. I wouldn’t recognize him anyway. They say he’s grown a beard.’
In between serving customers Pascuale was ready with more details of the career of their famous local criminal and I was struck by the familiar folklore of the case. It was exactly like that of other top criminals who have become legends. All have started life as poor boys. Vito spent ten years as a shepherd before venturing into petty crime. Like Calo Vizzini and Toto Riina he was illiterate, and what has in some ways added to his legend is the story that being chased by the police for the first time he tunnelled into a ton of horse manure, in which he remained concealed for three days until the hunt had been abandoned. Up until then - as so often is the case in aspirant mafiosi – he is described as being exceptionally devout, and the local priest, as frequently happens in Sicilian village communities, supported his application to be trained for the Church. The application failed for a reason which once again provides a momentary glimpse of customs inherited from the depths of the past - because he was believed to possess second sight. Later, on the threshold of manhood, he was charged with a series of violent crimes, and in 1995, having managed to escape while under arrest for murder, he was officially classed as latitante – a fugitive from justice - and he became one of the most wanted men on the island. As is the case with too many mafiosi in Sicily, Vitale’s fugitive status proved no hindrance to carrying out his business as normal.
The reason for this state of affairs is largely because Sicily’s two separate police forces prefer to go their own way rather than work together. This was a problem for those charged with the maintenance of order in Italy during the war. The carabinieri, organized in military style, had no contact with the Pubblica Sicurezza, the civilian police, and both forces refused to engage in any undertaking in which their rivals were involved. The system was retained up until April 1998, when Vitale had been at large for three years. He was seen as exceptionally violent and dangerous, and the two police forces finally buried the hatchet and planned a unified offensive. In this combined effort much larger bodies of men could be employed than ever before. The police also benefited from the aid provided by several pentiti who had agreed to collaborate. Their escape from prison had been arranged and they had been sent to keep watch in the Partinico district to which, this being his home country, it was believed that Vitale would sooner or later return.
The breakthrough came within days of our conversation with Pascuale. The news broke that Vitale had been having an affair with a glamorous cousin, Girolama Barretta (married, two children, husband in prison), and that she had recently been spotted in the vicinity of Partinico. With that, a force of undercover policemen, including two professional beggars, was put together, dressed in various disguises and given the task of spying on Girolama’s every movement. It was soon reported back that she had made two recent appearances in Partinico where she had had her hair done and spoken to an estate agent about the possibility of renting one of the new houses going up at nearby Borgetto.
The news encouraged the police to carry their plans a stage further. Among the sophisticated innovations made available to the combined forces was a cannocchiale, sent over from the United States and described as the world’s most powerful telescope, previously employed only in the Gulf War. The telescope’s lens provided an enormous degree of magnification, yet the instrument could be easily concealed. From what the estate agent had let slip it was decided that the first trial of the cannocchiale would be at Borgetto. On delivery, however, it proved larger than expected, and several trees had to be dug up and replanted on the tiny mountain behind the town in order to screen the telescope with their branches. From among them the huge eye peered down into every window with blinds drawn back and upon movements of all kinds, even those of the larger animals.
Its field of vision included plots of unfinished buildings put up by a developer and a monastery at the roadside where a hill curved up into the town centre. After some days of unrewarding scrutiny a Mercedes with Vitale at the wheel pulled up at the monastery door. Girolama emerged and jumped into the car. The cannocchiale‘s eye swivelled to follow them past a mile or so of unfinished building-sites to a house without windows and with only a single floor, in which Vitale had established his headquarters. When the police arrived to arrest him he showed a degree of calm bordering upon indifference and the photographs published next day show a faintly derisory smile on his lips. Vitale had little taste for luxury, and had lived as he preferred to in the austere surroundings of his Partinico family house. It was the Mercedes that was his undoing.
For some reason the Vitale case appeared to stir the Sicilian imagination, feeding in the normal way contentedly on a staple diet of minor drama, swindles and political chicanery. Visiting my favourite bar in Palermo that week for my evening drink, the talk seemed to be of little else. For a week or two pictures taken of the boss shortly after his arrest continued to be printed in the newspapers. He is seen wrapped up in what seems to be a duvet, from which only his face appears, wearing his somewhat Mongolian smile. His lips are drawn back to reveal a row of abnormally small teeth. Later there were more pictures of him, flanked by a supporting cast of recently captured bosses, several of whom have the same slightly Mongolian features, accentuated in Vitale’s case by a moustache drooping from the corners of the mouth to the chin.
Asked shortly after his capture why he had chosen to conceal himself in a partially built house without windows or even a back door, he had replied nonchalantly that he preferred space to comfort. The headlines exultantly reported that he was now in a cell big enough for five.
It is generally accepted in Sicily that Tommaso Buscetta’s collaboration with the law in 1984 marked the beginning of a new era in the war against the Mafia. Although the triumph of good over evil Continued to be deferred, it had filled the island with pentiti collaborators, and also trebled the prison population. Spies and informers were everywhere and it was their enthusiasm and pertinacity, encouraged perhaps by small rewards, that led to the arrest and imprisonment of Vitale’s fifteen-year-old son, Giovanni.
Two weeks after Vitale’s capture the police arrived at the family home to carry ‘the little boss’, as he was called, off to prison. Two former members of the Vitale clan, now turned informers, reported that the superboss had boasted of his son’s ability to take over command, and claimed that his boy had already accompanied him on an occasion when killings were carried out. Following this report a listening device was fitted in a car known to be used by Giovanni and young friends of the family. According to the police they recorded a conversation discussing a proposed extortion and an attack on a local inspector of the Pubblica Sicurezza. There were unexpected complications in trying to bring a case against the young Vitale, not the least of which was that he was a minor.
It was a case without precedent, and full of procedural pitfalls. How could a minor be legally accepted as a capo-mafia} The decision was finally reached that in order for the hearing of a charge of Mafia-association to go ahead the doors of the courtroom would be ‘thrown wide’ in accordance with the ancient law of Norman origin: Porte Aperte. The tribunal was called upon to provide ‘visibility’ of its procedures and findings to all members of the public, who were thus permitted to assist at the trial. These were present while Giovanni Vitale was charged with oltraggio (outrage), violence and wounding. Added to this h
e was accused of ‘leaping’ to assume command of the Partinico Mafia and of passing on orders given to him by his father when he visited him in gaol. Giovanni Vitale was then committed to prison while awaiting trial.
Questioned after his arrest, the boy had denied all charges, insisting that on the date stated on the charge he had spent the whole day helping with the family’s cows. He was nevertheless taken to the Malaspina prison and placed in solitary confinement. His mother, Maria Lo Baida, had been refused permission to visit him. Appealing to an assembled crowd, she said, ‘My son is a serious boy who studies geometry in his second year and is at peace with his conscience. We’re humble people who live in a humble house.’ His grandmother, also present, said, ‘I seem to be in a madhouse. This child has been put away just as if he were a criminal, when he’s no more than a baby who wouldn’t harm a kitten.’
The chaplain of the Malaspina prison, Father Enrico Schirro, announced that he wished to see the boy and remind him that Jesus loved him. According to the press, the chaplain added that prison was the place where the individual confronts his conscience and that the silence of the cell can promote the most profound meditation and thus the restoration of the soul’s balance.
It was perhaps inevitable that, notwithstanding the success of their first combined operation, something would happen to damage the new and happy relationship between the two branches of the police. No sooner had the wonderful telescope been dismantled and re-packed for return to the United States than it was rumoured that once again the separate divisions were at daggers drawn. It was now said that the much-publicized tracking down of Vitale through his amorous cousin - and thus even the use of the telescope itself - had been a meaningless propaganda exercise. In fact Vitale’s capture had already been arranged through an informer of the Pubblica Sicurezza. To which the answer should perhaps have been, what did it matter how, and by whom, this man was captured so long as, after so many years, he had at last been removed from circulation?
