by John Dickie
The new law of August 1863 gave small panels of government functionaries and magistrates the power to punish certain categories of suspects without a trial. The punishment they could hand down was enforced residence—meaning internal exile to a penal colony on some rocky island off the Italian coast. Thanks to Spaventa, camorristi were included in the list of people who could be arbitrarily deprived of their liberty in this way.
Enforced residence was designed to deal with camorristi because they were difficult to prosecute by normal means, not least because they were so good at intimidating witnesses and could call on protectors among the elite of Neapolitan society. But once on their penal islands, camorristi had every opportunity to go about their usual business and also to turn younger inmates into hardened delinquents. In 1876 an army doctor spent three months working in a typical penal colony in the Adriatic Sea.
Among the enforced residents there are men who demand respect and unlimited veneration from the rest. Every day they buy, sell and meddle without provoking hatred or rivalry. Their word is usually law, and their every gesture a command. They are called camorristi. They have their statutes, their rites, their bosses. They win promotion according to the wickedness of their deeds. Each of them has a primary duty to keep silent about any crime, and to respond to orders from above with blind obedience.
Enforced residence became the police’s main weapon against suspected gangsters. But far from being a solution to Italy’s organised crime emergency as Silvio Spaventa hoped, it would turn out to be a way of perpetuating it.
In 1865, before these ironies had time to unfold, rumours of another criminal sect began to reach the Right’s administrators—‘the so-called Maffia’ of Sicily. The mafia would soon penetrate Italy’s new governing institutions far more thoroughly than did the camorra in Naples. So thoroughly as to make it impossible to tell where the sect ended and the state began.
PART II
GETTING TO KNOW THE MAFIA
6
REBELS IN CORDUROY
LIKE THE CAMORRA, THE SICILIAN MAFIA PRECIPITATED OUT FROM THE DIRTY POLITICS of Italian unification.
Before Garibaldi conquered Sicily in 1860 and handed it over to the new Kingdom of Italy, the island was ruled from Naples as part of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. In Sicily, as in Naples, the prisons of the early nineteenth century were filthy, overcrowded, badly managed, and run from within by camorristi. Educated revolutionaries joined secret Masonic sects like the Charcoal Burners. When the sect members were jailed they built relationships with the prison gangsters and recruited them as insurrectionary muscle. Soon those gangsters learned the benefits of organising along Masonic lines and, sure enough, the Bourbon authorities found it hard to govern without coming to terms with the thugs. In Sicily, just as in Naples, Italian patriots would overthrow the old regime only to find themselves repeating some of its nefarious dealings with organised crime.
But the Sicilian mafia was, from the outset, far more powerful than the Neapolitan camorra, far more profoundly enmeshed with political power, far more ferocious in its grip on the economy. Why? The short answer is that the mafia developed on an island that was not just lawless: it was a giant research institute for perfecting criminal business models.
The problems began before Italian unification, when Sicily belonged to the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies. The authority of the Bourbon state was more fragile in Sicily than anywhere else. The island had an entirely justified reputation as a crucible of revolution. In addition to half a dozen minor revolts there were major insurrections in 1820, 1848, and of course in May 1860, when Giuseppe Garibaldi’s redshirted invasion triggered the overthrow of Bourbon rule on the island. Sicily lurched between revolution and the restoration of order.
Under the Bourbons, Naples completely failed to impose order on the Sicilians, and the Sicilians proved too politically divided to impose order on themselves. Once upon a time, before the invention of policing, private militias beholden to great landowners kept the peace on much of the island. In the early nineteenth century, despite the attempt to introduce a centralised, modern police force, the situation began to degenerate. All too often, rather than being impartial enforcers of the law, the new policemen were merely one more competing source of power among many—racketeers in uniform. Alongside the cops were private armies, groups of bandits, armed bands of fathers and sons, local political factions, cattle rustlers: all of them murdered, stole, extorted and twisted the law in their own interests.
To make matters worse, Sicily was also going through the turmoil brought about by the transition from a feudal to a capitalist system of land ownership. No longer would property only be handed down from noble father to noble firstborn son. It could now be bought and sold on the open market. Wealth was becoming more mobile than it had ever been. In the west of Sicily there were fewer great landowners than in the east and the market for buying land, and particularly for renting and managing it, was more fluid. Here becoming a man of means was easier—as long as you were good with a gun and could buy good friends in the law and politics.
By the 1830s there were already signs of which criminal business model would eventually emerge victorious. In Naples the members of patriotic sects made a covenant with the street toughs of the camorra. But in lawless Sicily, scattered documentary records tell us that the revolutionary sects themselves sometimes turned to crime. One official report from 1830 tells of a Charcoal Burner sect that was muscling its way into local government contracts. In 1838 a Bourbon investigating magistrate sent a report from Trapani with news of what he called ‘Unions or brotherhoods, sects of a kind’: these Unions formed ‘little governments within the government’; they were an ongoing conspiracy against the efficient administration of state business. Were these Unions the mafia, or at least forerunners of the mafia? They may have been. But the documentary record is just too fragmentary and biased for us to be sure.
The condition of Sicily only seemed to worsen after it became part of Italy in 1860. The Right governments faced even graver problems imposing order here than they did in the rest of the south. A good proportion of Sicily’s political class favoured autonomy within the Kingdom of Italy. But the Right was highly reluctant to grant that autonomy. How could Sicily govern its own affairs, the Right reasoned, when the political landscape was filled with a parade of folk demons? A reactionary clergy who were nostalgic for the Bourbon kings; revolutionaries who wanted a republic and were prepared to ally themselves with outlaws in order to achieve it; local political cliques who stole, murdered and kidnapped their way to power. However, the Right’s only alternative to autonomy was military law. The Right ruled Sicily with both an iron fist and a wagging finger. In doing so, it made itself hated.
Palermo, 1860: freed prisoners parade their warder through the streets before shooting him. The Sicilian mafia was incubated in the political violence of the early to mid-1800s.
In 1865 came the first news of ‘the so-called Maffia or criminal association’. The Maffia was powerful, and powerfully enmeshed in Sicilian politics, or so one government envoy reported. Whatever this new word ‘Maffia’ or ‘mafia’ meant (and the uncertainty in the spelling was symptomatic of all manner of deeper mysteries), it provided a very good excuse for yet another crackdown: mass roundups of deserters, draft dodgers and suspected maffiosi duly followed.
Then, on Sunday 16 September 1866, the Right paid the price for the hatred it inspired in Sicily. On that morning, Italy—and history—got its first clear look at what is now the world’s most notorious criminal band.
Palermo in 1866. Almost the entire city was sliced into four quarters by two rectilinear streets, each lined with grimy-grand palaces and churches, each perhaps fifteen minutes’ walk from one gated end to the other. At the city’s centre, the meeting point of its two axes, was the piazza known as the Quattro Canti. The via Maqueda pointed north-west from here, aiming towards the only gap in the surrounding ring of mountains. Palermo’s one true suburb, the Borgo, ra
n along the north shore from near the Maqueda gate. The Borgo connected the city to its port and to the looming, bastioned walls of the Ucciardone—the great prison.
Palermo’s other principal thoroughfare, the Cassaro, ran directly inland from near the bay, across the Quattro Canti, and left the city at its south-western entrance adjacent to the massive bulk of the Royal Palace. In the middle distance it climbed the flank of Monte Caputo to Monreale, a city famed for its cathedral’s golden, mosaic-encrusted vault, which is dominated by the figure of Christ ‘Pantocrator’—the ruler of the universe, in all his kindly omnipotence.
The magnificent view inside Monreale Cathedral was matched by the one outside: from this height the eye scanned the expanse of countryside that separated Palermo from the mountains. Framed by the blue of the bay, the glossy green of orange groves was dappled with the grey of the olives; one-storey cottages threw out their white angles among the foliage, and water towers pointed at the sky. This was the Conca d’Oro (‘golden hollow’ or ‘golden shell’).
More than any other aspect of Palermo’s beautiful setting, it was the Conca d’Oro that earned the city the nickname la felice—‘the happy’, or ‘the lucky’. Yet any outsider unwise enough to wander along the lanes of the Conca d’Oro would have soon detected that there was something seriously wrong behind the Edenic façade. At many points along the walls surrounding the orange groves a sculpted crucifix accompanied by a crude inscription proclaimed the point where someone had been murdered for reporting a crime to the authorities. The Conca d’Oro was the most lawless place in the lawless island of Sicily; it was the birthplace of the Sicilian mafia.
So no one was surprised that when trouble entered Palermo on the morning of 16 September 1866, it came from the Conca d’Oro. Specifically, it came down the long, straight, dusty road from Monreale, through the citrus gardens, and past the Royal Palace. The vanguard of the revolt was a squad from Monreale itself; it comprised some 300 men, most of them armed with hunting guns and wearing the corduroy and fustian that were habitual for farmers and agricultural labourers. Similar squads marched on Palermo from the satellite villages of the Conca d’Oro and from the small towns in the mountains behind. Some sported caps, scarves and flags in republican red, or carried banners with the image of the city’s patron, Saint Rosalia.
By seven o’clock even the heaviest sleepers in the farthest corners of Palermo had been woken by the sound of musketry and shouting. There was confusion. But the urban masses quickly grabbed the chance to vent their frustrations.
Seven and a half days passed before troops restored order. Seven and a half days when barricades went up in the streets, when arms depots and official buildings were ransacked, when police stations and law courts were raided and criminal records burned, when respectable citizens were robbed at gunpoint in their homes, or forced to make contributions to support the insurrection.
The revolt of September 1866 came at a terrible time for Italian national morale. One of the reasons for the rebels’ initial success was that Palermo was lightly garrisoned. All available military forces had been sent to the north-eastern frontier where the Austrians inflicted humiliation by both land and sea at the battles of Custoza and Lissa. The anarchy down in western Sicily was a stab in the back.
Things could easily have been much worse. One of the revolt’s primary targets was the Ucciardone, housing two and a half thousand prisoners; many of them would have swollen the ranks of the squads. The rebels surrounded the jail and tried to blow a breach in the walls. But just in time, on the morning of 18 September, the steam corvette Tancredi arrived to shower the besiegers with grapeshot and grenades. One of the first men to be hit in this bombardment, his legs grotesquely mangled by shrapnel, was Turi Miceli, the fifty-three-year-old leader of the Monreale crew that had spearheaded the rebellion; he took hours to die of his injuries, and did so without uttering the slightest murmur of complaint.
Turi Miceli was a mafioso. He was a tall, imposing figure with a distinctive large scar on his face. Violence was his livelihood. The very sight of him, with his arquebus over his shoulder, had struck terror into the countryside around Palermo. Yet by the time Miceli died he was also a man of money and property, one of the wealthiest people in Monreale.
The camorra was, in its origins, a proletarian criminal association, incubated among the scum of the Neapolitan jails and slums. Mafiosi like Turi Miceli were, by contrast, ‘middle-class villains’—as one early mafia expert would term them. In much of the rest of western Europe this would have sounded like a contradiction in terms: ‘it seemed to subvert every single principle of political economy and social science’, as one bewildered observer noted. Men of property had a stake in maintaining the law—that much was surely a self-evident truth. Yet in Palermo’s environs, landowners had become criminals and accomplices. In western Sicily, violence was a profession for the upwardly mobile.
So before we retrace the path of mafioso Turi Miceli’s rise up the social ranks, it is worth highlighting the other striking contrasts between him and someone like Salvatore De Crescenzo, the ‘redeemed’ camorra boss. Early camorristi like De Crescenzo almost invariably had a long stretch inside on their underworld curriculum vitae. Yet prison does not appear in the documentary records that Turi Miceli left in his wake. As far as we know, Miceli did not spend a single day in jail, and the same can be said of many of the other bosses we will meet. Sicily certainly had its prison camorristi, and the mafia’s leaders willingly recruited such men. But some of the most important bosses perfected their skills elsewhere.
The first secret of Turi Miceli’s upward mobility lay in the business he was involved in. The land around Miceli’s hometown of Monreale was typical of the Conca d’Oro. It was divided up into smallholdings and the dominant crops were olives, vines and particularly oranges and lemons. Citrus fruit trees certainly appealed to the aesthetic senses of visitors, but they also furnished Sicily’s most important export business. From Palermo the lemons were mainly shipped across the Atlantic to the burgeoning market of the United States. There was serious money in citrus fruit: in 1860 it was calculated that Palermo’s lemon plantations were the most profitable agricultural land in Europe.
The big profits attracted big investment. To create an orange or lemon garden from nothing involved far more than just sticking a few trees in the ground; it was an expensive, long-term project. High walls had to be built to protect the plants from cold. There were roads to lay, storage facilities to construct and irrigation channels to dig. In fact, sophisticated irrigation was vital because if they were watered correctly, citrus fruit trees could crop twice a year instead of once. Yet after all this groundwork was done, it still took around eight years for the trees to start to produce fruit, and several more before the investment turned a profit.
In the Conca d’Oro, as everywhere else in the world, investment and profit came with a third indispensible ingredient of capitalism: risk. But in the Conca d’Oro, risk came dressed in corduroy.
The mafiosi of the Palermo hinterland learned the art of the protection racket by vandalising fruit groves, or threatening to vandalise them. Rather than extracting gold from fleas, they squeezed it from lemons. The options were many and varied: they could cut down trees, intimidate farmhands, starve irrigation channels of water at crucial moments of the season, kidnap landowners and their families, threaten wholesalers and cart drivers, and so on. So mafiosi wore many hats: they were the men who controlled the sluices of the precious irrigation channels; the guards who protected the groves at night; they were the brokers who took the lemons to market; the contractors who managed the groves on behalf of landowners; and they were also the bandits who kidnapped farmers and stole their highly valuable crops. By creating risk with one hand, and proffering protection with the other, mafiosi could infiltrate and manipulate the citrus fruit business in myriad ways. Some of them, like Turi Miceli, could even vandalise and murder their way to ownership of a lemon grove.
Turi Miceli
the mafioso was both a criminal and a market gardener. But, as the events of September 1866 showed, he was a revolutionary too—as were the other early mafia bosses. Sicily’s revolutions provided the other crucial propellant for the mafia’s ascent.
For when revolution came along, as it regularly did, it proved good for criminal business. The typical mafioso understood that fact better even than the typical camorrista. The inevitable confusion of revolution offered men like Turi Miceli the chance to open prisons, burn police records, kill off cops and informers and rob and blackmail wealthy people associated with the fallen regime. Then, once the bloodletting had passed, new revolutionary governments whose leaders needed enforcers would grant amnesties to powerful men ‘persecuted’ under the old order. In Sicily, much more than in Naples, revolution was the test bed of organised crime, and the launch pad for many a mobster’s rise up the social scale.
Turi Miceli’s rebel opportunism during the Risorgimento was breathtaking. When revolution against the Bourbons broke out in January 1848, Miceli was a known bandit—meaning that he indulged in cattle rustling and armed robbery. But he grasped the chance offered by the revolt with impressive daring: his squad, mostly comprising market gardeners, captured the Bourbon garrison in Monreale before trooping down the hill to Palermo. There, Miceli was celebrated by local poets and lauded in official dispatches for defeating a Bourbon cavalry unit near the Royal Palace. Despite disturbing reports of crimes committed by his men, Miceli was awarded the rank of colonel by the new revolutionary government, partly because his goons packed the meeting at which the officers were elected. The Monreale bandit had ‘remade his virginity’, as the Sicilian saying goes.
The following year, when the revolution began to fall apart and Bourbon troops were advancing on Palermo, Miceli promptly swapped sides: he toured the main streets and defensive entrenchments persuading the populace not to offer any resistance. His reward from the restored Bourbon authorities was yet another virginity: he was amnestied and given the chance to stuff his pockets. First he was made customs officer, paid 30 ducats a month to pick his own band of men and patrol a long stretch of coastline in eastern Sicily, presumably confiscating contraband and taking hefty bribes at the same time. Not long after that he won the tax-collecting franchise in Lercara Friddi, a sulphur-mining town not too far from Palermo. A senior government official gave him a job reference that said—in blatant contradiction of the facts—that Miceli played no part whatsoever in the 1848 revolution.
