Today, a good deal has been written about the form and value of wartime co-operation between the Mafia and American intelligence officers. Many of the claims made can be dismissed outright as myth: above all, the story that the Mafia played a key role in smoothing the Allied conquest of Sicily.7 It remains a fact that the US Office of Naval Intelligence contacted the Mafia mobster ‘Lucky’ Luciano and sought his support in guarding the New York docks against enemy sabotage.8 It is also the case that this was more progress than SOE managed to make in the city. After receiving Baker Street’s appeal for help, the New York office replied that it was in touch with someone in the Mafia – whom it did not name – ‘but so far without results’.9 A few weeks later it added that the Mafia was ‘not a cohesive association and had no representative abroad’.10
London had also asked for ‘all possible information on the Unione Siciliana … reported to be a secret society powerful in the U.S.A.’ New York told London that this was the Mafia.11 Actually New York was wrong. The Unione Siciliana was not the Mafia. That said, at points in its past it might not have been too dissimilar. Founded by Sicilian-Americans in the 1890s, it was Chicago-based and began as a charitable organisation to help settle new Sicilian immigrants. According to some accounts, it then became progressively more involved in organised crime – bootlegging, extortion, murder and the like – and rather less benevolent. One of its supposed presidents, the Chicago mobster Ignazio Lupo, known as ‘The Wolf’, is said to have installed hooks in his office on which to hang his victims, and burned six political rivals alive in his basement furnace.12
Although British understanding of America’s underworld may have been somewhat sketchy, it improved a little when Max Salvadori, then in New York, was asked for his assistance. Salvadori did his best, though he had no personal links to the Mafia in either the United States or Sicily. ‘Sicilians in the United States talk considerably about the Maffia [sic], its power and about their contacts with leading Maffiosi in Sicily,’ he reported in July 1942 after asking around among Sicilian immigrants. But whenever he had tried to find out more, he said, he had always found that those who claimed to be in contact with the Mafia were in touch ‘through some intermediary whom it was practically impossible to discover and who probably did not exist’. He added:
To evaluate the Sicilian Maffia, one can compare it to American rackets, which flourish when the authorities are easy-going and which usually collapse as soon as greater severity on the part of the authorities increases the risks. There is little doubt that there are still many Maffiosi in Sicily. On the other hand it seems very probable that their activities as such are practically nil and that they are nearly as much disorganized as the Italian freemasonry. Every Sicilian here seems to be of the opinion that the Maffia is stronger in the United States than in Sicily and even in the United States it does not seem able to achieve very much.
‘As far as I know,’ Salvadori went on, ‘Sicilians have a good deal of sympathy for the Maffia, chiefly since it does not seriously interfere with their activities. The Maffia satisfies their need for romanticism, adventure and mystery. Probably the less is the real strength of the Maffia, the greater is the admiration which Sicilians feel for it.’13
What SOE did appreciate was that it was contemplating an alliance with ‘an illegal and secret society’ famed for its criminality and violence. At the end of 1942, SOE’s Cairo office drew up the following report:
For years the [Sicilian] Maffia – the secret society for crime and murder – held sway on the island. Murders were committed and the terrible code of ‘[O]merta’ prevented the police from ever finding the culprit. Feuds flourished between families for generations and murder after murder was committed. No onlooker, whether implicated in the feud or not, would turn informer, even if a murder were committed in his presence. This was ‘Omerta’ and non-observance was punished by death …
Since its foundation the Maffia claims to defend the weak against the strong, to fight tyranny, and generally to redress any injustice. The Sicilians say that it has been libelled in Italy and abroad as an association of bandits, when in reality it is only an attempt to establish a state within the State on Freemason lines …
This is the theoretical programme. In practice the Maffia has always been trying to control justice and politics somewhat on similar lines as the Tammany Hall in America. The means employed, however, were much more ruthless …
This organisation has its own tribunals, the sentences of which are without appeal and generally ruthlessly carried out sooner or later. There have been cases of Maffiosi going to America to execute a sentence.
Aware that efficient Fascist policing had reduced its influence in recent years, the same report identified a possible lever that could perhaps be used to persuade the Mafia to work with the British. Might the Mafia collaborate if co-operation offered the opportunity to recover its earlier influence?
[A] weakening of the Fascist organization would help the Maffia to become reorganised and powerful. All the more so if a certain amount of help is forthcoming from the outside … [T]he Maffia remain a potential danger to Fascism if not [at present] a fully organised one … [I]f they want ‘to play’ with us they would be an ideal organisation for Sicily.14
‘Sporadic attempts seem to have been made in the past to contact the Maffia,’ the same report added. ‘We do not feel, however, that up to now the problem has been tackled thoroughly. In our opinion it is definitely worth while going full out and trying to find what possibilities exist.’ The report also mentioned, briefly, what SOE might do if and when contact with the Mafia was successfully made. Three SOE teams, each of three agents, comprising a leader, a wireless operator and a saboteur, would paddle ashore or drop by parachute. One team would be assigned to Palermo; another would go to Messina; and the third would establish itself in Sicily’s second city, Catania. Each team would open a wireless link between Sicily and the Allies, co-operate with the Mafia, organise and instruct cells of local sympathisers, and prepare attacks on agreed objectives, then begin propaganda, call in supplies, and open an active sabotage campaign. Targets would include shipping, petrol dumps, ordnance and aircraft factories, roads, railways, telephone lines, aerodromes, ‘high officials’ and the ferry connecting Messina to the mainland.15
It is possible that SOE tried subsequently to seek out the Sicilian Mafia with this plan in mind. Its surviving files, however, contain nothing to suggest that anything more than a few indirect and unconfirmed links were ever established. Nor are there any indications that SOE received any assistance from the American Office of Naval Intelligence with its Mafia-befriending efforts. Nor are there any suggestions that SOE received any help from the Office of Strategic Services (broadly speaking, the United States’ combined equivalent of SOE and MI6). In fact, OSS seems to have taken a deliberate decision to avoid even talking to the Mafia.16
A useful gauge of Cairo’s knowledge of Cosa Nostra is provided by a document surviving among the private papers of Julian Dobrski, the SOE staff officer who was manning Cairo’s Italian desk in 1942.17 This document is a typewritten list of a dozen or so alleged Mafia members whom SOE had hoped to contact. Drawn up in August, it became an appendix to a formal report on Sicily that Cairo produced at the end of the year. Today it also sheds equally interesting light on some of those who had provided the names.
Most of the names came apparently from Giovanni Di Giunta, the same Sicilian recruit from East Africa who had volunteered to kill Mussolini but whose loose chatter saw the mission terminated instead. Di Giunta is the only Italian recorded in SOE’s books as having claimed outright Mafia membership. Whether he had been genuine when claiming to be a Mafioso is very much open to doubt, however. The same family friend from Troina who remembered him in 2012, warning that Di Giunta was a man whose stories should not necessarily be believed, dismissed the Mafia-membership claim as ‘fantasy’ and may well have a point.18
Of the names that Di Giunta seemingly disclosed to SOE, mo
st jar badly with modern understanding of the Mafia’s social make-up in Sicily and its influence across the island. Though the spelling is a little awry, one name appears to be that of the Marchese Giovanni Romeo delle Torrazze. Possibly one of the least likely Sicilians to be a Mafioso, the Marchese was eighty-odd years old in 1942 and had been a high-ranking officer in the Italian Army in the First World War, an aide-to-camp to the King of Italy, a president of the military court in Palermo, and a senator; the King, indeed, had even holidayed at the Marchese’s Sicilian home. A second name on the list seems to be that of another Sicilian noble, the Marchese di Bonfonello, described as ‘Chief for the Palermo region’. Given the fact that these two men seem such unlikely candidates for Mafia membership – Romeo delle Torrazze is described as ‘Chief for the Catania region’ – it may be wondered if Di Giunta had mentioned them simply as notable Sicilians of influence, whereupon SOE made the mistake of assuming he meant Mafiosi.19
More intriguing are the names that Di Giunta gave of several individuals in Catania. There were two sets of brothers: their surnames were ‘San Filippo’ and ‘Paternostro’ and both were described as ‘representatives’ for Catania. There was also an individual called ‘Ciccio Cavaduzzo’ who was described as ‘Chief of the gunmen’. All could apparently be found at the Café Quattrocchi on Catania’s Via Etnea. ‘One of the [San Filippo] brothers, Domenico, is indicated to us as a person very likely to be anti-Fascist,’ SOE noted against the names. ‘Domenico is a big trader in “agrumi” [citrus fruits] and used to come monthly to Rome. It is suggested that he could travel to Switzerland on business.’20 To judge from that description, it is not impossible that this was Domenico Sanfilippo [sic], a successful agrumi businessman who, post-war, became owner of La Sicilia, the most prominent newspaper in eastern Sicily; today, a major publishing house is named after him. Cavadduzzo [sic], meanwhile, was the gangland name of the Ferrara family, which was, and may remain, heavily involved in Catania in organised crime. It is possible that ‘Ciccio Cavaduzzo’ was a member of the Mafia in 1942, although Cosa Nostra, which historically is associated much more with western Sicily, had minimal presence in Catania until after the war.21
Di Giunta was not the only SOE recruit to help compile that list. A man known as Pietro Floris also contributed. Floris, who worked for a time in Jerusalem on propaganda, was described as possibly linked to the Mafia in Tunis where many Mafiosi had fled to escape Cesare Mori’s attentions. He supplied the surnames of three alleged members of the Tunisian-based Mafia: Capizzi, Corso – ‘both last heard of in Addis Ababa’ – and Lasala. The third and final contributor to the list was Albino Scamporrino, a lawyer from Siracusa who had lived in Palermo and went under the SOE pseudonym of Luigi Marino. He gave the names of four men in Palermo: Valerio Candela, of 464 Corso Vittorio Emanuele; a man called Castagnaro who owned the Hotel Regina on Corso Vittorio Emanuele; Giuseppe Fiore, an olivezza (olive-grower); and finally an uditore (public official) named Francesco Torretta. ‘Anti-Fascist,’ SOE noted of the last. ‘He is, however, 65 years old but could probably put us in touch with relatives and friends. Was a big landowner, now has been ruined by Fascism.’22 It is not impossible that this ageing ‘Anti-Fascist’ was the same Francesco Torretta whom the Palermo police had recorded years earlier as a young member of a Mafia cosca (family).23
Scamporrino, the man who provided the Palermo names, had lived in Somaliland since 1938 and was one of a pair of Sicilian lawyers found in East Africa by SOE who claimed to have once worked for the Mafia, as opposed to having been members themselves. The other lawyer’s name was Francesco Sollima. Both men were over forty. Neither was judged to be very suitable for anything more active than drafting propaganda. Sollima, who worked well in the Middle East on producing material to be broadcast to Sicily, was considered for a time for a mission to Tunisia ‘to try and fix up Sicilian contacts’.24 But he was a sick man who required regular hospital treatment and the plan came to nothing. Scamporrino’s weakness was drugs. In July 1942, just a few months after joining SOE, he was caught peddling in Palestine. He was sacked and received fourteen days in prison. On his release he was sent to Kenya and re-interned.
Notes
1 G. Taylor to G. Jebb, ‘Italy’, 8 December 1941, TNA HS 6/901.
2 H. Seton-Watson, ‘SOE Work in Southern Italy and Sicily’, 17 February 1942, Dobrski papers.
3 ‘Appreciation of Situation in Sicily as in November 1942 with a view to Subversive Operations in that Country’, Dobrski papers, KCL.
4 P. Dixon to Captain F. C. Benn, MI3c, War Office, 3 February 1941, TNA HS 6/901.
5 Cipher telegram, SOE Cairo ‘to ACSS only’ [London], 22 November 1941, HS 6/901.
6 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/226.
7 Decades after the war, many authors and historians still adhered to the story that imprisoned members of the US-based Mafia had been instrumental in crucially smoothing the Allied conquest of Sicily in the summer of 1943. These mobsters, according to one writer, ‘saw collaboration as a means of winning personal favour and freedom as well as of helping their compatriots to throw off the restricting shackles of fascism’. The most famous Mafia boss alleged to have helped was ‘Lucky’ Luciano, ‘whose insignia – a yellow handkerchief marked with the letter L – fluttered from the allied invasion tanks as they headed, per instructions, for the small town of Villalba and Don Calogero [sic] Vizzini, head of the Sicilian mafia. Thanks to Vizzini and the orders sent through his chain of command, Sicily was occupied almost bloodlessly within days.’ A. Jamieson, ‘Mafia and Political Power 1943–1989’, International Affairs, 10/13, 1990, p. 13. A glance at the casualty figures and at the cemeteries in Sicily is enough to demonstrate that the battle was in fact very far from bloodless (American, British and Canadian forces lost more than 20,000 men killed and wounded as they cleared the island; Axis losses were even higher), while consensus is growing that no evidence exists of any American deal with the Mafia over Sicily or, for that matter, any decided plan for securing Mafia assistance with the invasion. Though still widely believed, the tale of advancing tanks adorned with ‘L’-embroidered handkerchiefs is emblematic of post-war Mafia-themed mythology. ‘The endless retellings of the episode have painted a thick crust of apocryphal conviction over it,’ John Dickie has written, ‘blurring its detail in some places, building up hardened swirls of pure invention in others. Most historians now dismiss it as fable.’ J. Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (London: Hodder, 2007), p. 237. This is not to say that there was no co-operation. The Office of Naval Intelligence does seem to have sought intelligence and contacts from the American Mafia and, in July 1943, a four-man ONI team accompanying the landings did get in touch with a few repatriated Sicilian-American criminals whose names had been passed along by contacts in New York. ‘They were extremely co-operative and helpful because they spoke both the dialect of that region and also some English,’ remembered Paul Alfieri, one of the team’s officers. R. Campbell, The Luciano Project, The Secret Wartime Collaboration of the Mafia and the US Navy (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977), p. 176. It would be hard to argue, however, that the ONI team and its local Sicilian-American contacts, which did gather some useful naval intelligence along the coast, had any discernible impact on the more decisive campaign inland. ‘By far the larger contribution was provided by the US Army Counter-Intelligence Corps,’ as Tim Newark has written, ‘who had eighty agents on the ground throughout the fighting. However, there is no evidence whatsoever of any kind of alliance between them and the Mafia in Sicily before or during the campaign.’ T. Newark, ‘Pact With the Devil?’, History Today, 57/4, 2007.
8 See, for example, Campbell, The Luciano Project; S. Lupo, ‘The Allies and the Mafia’, Journal of Modern Italian Studies, 2:1, 1997, pp. 21–33; M. Finkelstein, Separatism, the Allies and the Mafia: The Struggle for Sicilian Independence 1943–1948 (Cranbury: Lehigh University Press, 1998); T. Newark, The Mafia at War: Allied Collusion with the Mob (London: Greenhill Books, 2007); E. Costanzo
, The Mafia and the Allies: Sicily 1943 and the Return of the Mafia (London: Greenhill Books, 2007).
9 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/226.
10 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/265.
11 SOE War Diary, TNA HS 7/226.
12 Today, serious historians of organised crime in the United States doubt some of the tales of the Unione Siciliana’s criminality. For brief modern studies, see, for example: D. Critchley, The Origin of Organized Crime in America: The New York City Mafia, 1891–1931 (Oxford: Routledge, 2009), pp. 46–50, 208–10; and J. Fentress, Eminent Gangsters: Immigrants and the Birth of Organized Crime in America (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010), pp. 112–13.
13 M. Salvadori, ‘Reply to questionnaire concerning political conditions in Sicily’, 15 July 1942, Salvadori papers.
14 ‘Appreciation of Situation in Sicily as at the end of December 1942 with a view to Subversive Operations in that Country’, Dobrski papers, KCL.
15 Ibid.
16 M. Corvo, The OSS in Italy, 1942–1945: A Personal Memoir (New York: Praeger, 1990), p. 22. After the Sicily landings took place, however, OSS did begin to work with local Mafia members.
17 Dobrski had joined SOE in London in the summer of 1940. Born Giulio Giuliano Augusto Dobrski in Genoa in 1901, he was the son of an Italian-Irish mother and a father whose forebears had left Poland for Italy in the late eighteenth century. Brought up in Italy, France, Belgium, Switzerland and Spain, Dobrski spoke fluent Italian, French and English, had a degree from the University of Lyons and had served for two years as a junior officer in the Italian Army before coming to Britain in 1928, working thereafter in the City as a director of Lyons Silks Limited. Naturalised British in August 1939, he joined SOE with an introduction from René Pleven, a future French Prime Minister with whom he had been at school. Dobrski spent several months working in London on Italian matters, helping look for likely agents in various corners of the British Isles and keeping an eye on Italian students during training. Later, as a commissioned British Army officer with the name of Julian Anthony Dolbey, he was sent to the Mediterranean where he helped run an SOE office on Malta before eventually taking charge of Cairo’s Italian desk. ‘Very much a man of the world,’ reads a short report on him from 1941. ‘Quick and capable mind. Rather argumentative.’ Comments of the commandant of the Beaulieu training area, 25 September 1941, TNA HS 9/437/4.
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