by John Dickie
All of this evidence arrived at a politically sensitive time. The Left was consolidating itself in power and discovering that the mafia was something rather more menacing than a peculiar Sicilian form of bravado. Then in November 1876 the state of law and order in Sicily became an international embarrassment when the English manager of a sulphur company was kidnapped in the province of Palermo; there were strong suspicions of mafia involvement.
The Left’s new Prefect of Palermo, Antonio Malusardi, became convinced that there was a link, or as he termed it, ‘a real correspondence’ between the various mafia cells. On 30 January 1877 the Prefect wrote to the Chief Prosecutor, the man in charge of the whole judicial system in Palermo, and urged him to unify the different mafia investigations so that the connections between the different cosche could be explored. In short, the Prefect of Palermo was asking the Chief Prosecutor to answer a simple but crucial question. Were there many criminal sects in Sicily, or was there just one single Freemasonry of delinquency? One Sicilian mafia, or many?
No Sicilian old enough to remember the 1980s can read Prefect Malusardi’s words without a shiver of recognition. For only in 1983, amid a terrifying upsurge in mafia violence, did Palermo investigators finally begin to base their strategy on the ‘real correspondences’ between the mafia gangs across western Sicily. To trace and document those correspondences, they formed an anti-mafia ‘pool’ of four specialised prosecutors.
In the summer of the following year, a leading Man of Honour called Tommaso Buscetta, who had lost many of his relatives in the ongoing slaughter, turned state’s witness. Buscetta, who was known as the ‘boss of the two worlds’ because of his transatlantic influence, gave the pool of investigators a deeper insight into the mafia than they had ever had. Among the many vital revelations provided by Buscetta was the initiation ritual that he, like every other Man of Honour, had undergone. In 1992, a verdict from the Court of Cassation, Italy’s Supreme Court, finally accepted the boss of two worlds’ testimony; it confirmed for the first time in history that the mafia was not a loose ensemble of local gangs but a single organisation, bound by an oath of loyalty until death. There was only one Sicilian mafia.
Two of Italy’s most courageous and able men would soon pay for this truth with their lives. Within weeks of the Supreme Court’s ruling, the leading members of the anti-mafia pool, Giovanni Falcone and Paolo Borsellino, were both blown up. Tragically, Prefect Malusardi’s hunch had finally been proven incontrovertibly—more than a century of bloodshed later. New research tells us that Italy could and should have answered Malusardi’s question shortly after he asked it.
The Chief Prosecutor’s reply to Prefect Malusardi’s letter about the mafia’s rituals took more than a month to arrive—a strange delay given the importance of the matter. Its conclusions were absolutely categorical.
Doubtless there are groups or associations of criminals of various sizes here and there in Sicily. But they are not confederated or bound to one another by links of mutual complicity.
The Chief Prosecutor was very hostile to the suggestion that there should be large-scale mafia prosecutions—Italians today call them ‘maxi-trials’. Such trials would trample on the autonomy of the magistracy, he protested, and open the way for politically motivated abuses of the law by the government. This argument won the day. In courts across Sicily over the following six years, a few mafiosi were put on trial, many of them for the first time. But they were tried as members of separate, locally based criminal organisations.
The Chief Prosecutor’s letter has often been cited by historians sceptical about the existence of a unified criminal network called ‘the mafia’. Falcone and Borsellino may have demonstrated beyond doubt the existence of the organisation known as Cosa Nostra, they argue, but it is naïve to project that finding back into the past. In 1877 the far-fetched theory that there was only one mafia suited the government’s purposes all too well, it has been claimed. There are few better pretexts for an authoritarian crackdown than the fantasy of a mysterious clandestine sect of murderers with links right across western Sicily. The Chief Prosecutor had access to all the available police evidence on the early mafia, much of which has since been lost. So if someone as knowledgeable as him thought that the different gangs were not ‘confederated’, who are we, at more than a century’s distance, to cast doubt on his conclusions?
Yet on closer inspection, the Chief Prosecutor’s letter is hardly a shining example of forensic logic. The different associations could not be linked, he argued, because fighting often broke out between them. The toothache dialogue was not a recent discovery, he added: tough guys across the island had been using the same formulaic exchange for a while to check whether the people they met shared a similar mindset; they had started doing it in the prison in Milazzo, and had probably copied the idea from a story about a noble bandit written by Alexandre Dumas, author of The Three Musketeers. The Chief Prosecutor concluded by conceding that on one occasion, and one only, the different gangs had indeed shown a sense of shared purpose: in the revolt of September 1866, when they united in the cause of overthrowing what they called the ‘despicable government’.
Quite why these points make for a decisive rebuttal of the theory that there was a single, unified mafia network is not entirely clear.
Mafiosi killed one another before 1877, and they have done so ever since. But that does not stop them being members of the same brotherhood.
The fact that the toothache routine may have been invented in prison does nothing to diminish the suspicions that surround it—quite the contrary. Nor indeed does the fact that it may have been copied from a novel, an opera, or whatever. As we know from the fable of the camorra’s Spanish origins, Italian criminal organisations like to create a rich mythology for themselves; we can hardly be surprised if they are unscrupulous enough to do it by plagiarising bits and pieces from the culture around them.
Last but not least, if many of the gangs were able to coordinate sufficiently well to rise up in simultaneous revolt in September 1866, did that not provide deeply worrying evidence of the links between them?
It is time we met the Chief Prosecutor who put his name to these shaky arguments. He was Carlo Morena, a highly respected magistrate who had been given many decorations during his distinguished career. He came from a place immune to Sicily’s ‘exaggerated haughtiness’, its proudly truculent attitude to official legality: he was born in 1821 in a village in the north, not far from the Ligurian coastal town of Savona.
In March 1876, just after being appointed to the most senior judicial position in Sicily, Morena was interviewed by a parliamentary inquiry about the state of justice in the Palermo area. His replies were frank—as befitted a magistrate who clearly believed in upholding the rule of law. Sicilian magistrates were weak or corrupt, Morena said; there was a wall of omertà among witnesses and even victims; and the courts handed out feeble punishments for violent crimes that undermined the authority of the state.
But by the time he came to reply to Prefect Malusardi ten months later, Carlo Morena was a mafioso. He did not have a ‘toothache’, and was not part of the sworn criminal fraternity. Nor was he necessarily even a willing aide to the gangsters. But he was nonetheless a ‘friend of the friends’, as the Sicilian expression has it.
Quite what the mafia did to win Morena over in 1876 is not known. He may have been subjected to any mixture of threats, bribery, blackmail and political pressure. As with the landowners that Marquis Rudinì labelled ‘brigands’, or indeed with Rudinì himself, many different scenarios are possible. But we can at least be sure that Chief Prosecutor Morena was working for the Honoured Society of Sicily. To find out why, we need to move much, much deeper into the world of the mafia—deeper than was ever possible before the discovery in 2009 of a quite exceptionally revealing document. That document is in the neat handwriting of the first genuine hero in the history of Italian organised crime, a man whose long and eventful career we will follow from now on.
/> If there is one thing that the mafia fears, it is good police. Despite all the co-management of crime in Naples and Palermo, nineteenth-century Italy did produce some very good police. Among the best of them was a blonde, square-jawed officer called Ermanno Sangiorgi. Sangiorgi’s bulky personal file is kept among the endless Ministry of the Interior papers in Rome’s Central State Archive. It covers a career that lasted nearly five decades. Sangiorgi retired in 1907, by which time he was the country’s most experienced and decorated mafia-fighter. Sangiorgi embodies all the tribulations of the fight against the mafia after Italian unification.
For very good personal and professional reasons, Sangiorgi had no doubts about what the mafia was: a clandestine sect of murderers with links right across western Sicily. For one thing, it was Sangiorgi who led the inquiry into the Uditore mafia whose boss was the dialect poet, don Antonino Giammona, and Sangiorgi who first discovered the initiation ritual and the ‘toothache’ dialogue.
What follows in the next chapter is the story of a previously unknown investigation that ran in parallel to the case of the Uditore mob. The mafia did not lightly forgive Ermanno Sangiorgi for exposing its initiation ritual. As the mafia’s vengeance played itself out, Sangiorgi was to discover just how subtle and ramified was its authority, and just how wrong Carlo Morena was to deny the existence of a unified criminal brotherhood in western Sicily.
Sangiorgi’s investigation also reveals the sinister manoeuvrings during the early years of the Left, which saw the mafia put on trial for the first time, but which also saw Sicilian politicians, among them the mafia’s friends, step onto the national political stage.
There is one background political issue that is worth keeping in mind from the outset of this story: discontinuity. The problem has bedevilled Italy’s response to organised crime for much of the last century and a half. After 1860, whether under the Right or the Left, the Italian system generated one fragile coalition government after another, and therefore a dizzying turnover of officials and policies.
Policing policy is a prime example. The short chain of command that concerns us here descends as follows: from the Prime Minister and then the Interior Minister in Rome, down to the Prefect of Palermo and then through the city’s chief of police to his officers on the ground. The following story is set over three and a half years, from November 1874 to June 1878. It was a bad period for policy discontinuity, but not unrepresentative: there were three Prime Ministers, four Interior Ministers, six Prefects of Palermo and three chiefs of police. Some of them barely had time to hang their jackets up before they were transferred. All the time, at every level, policy swung unpredictably between repressing the mafia and cultivating it. For frontline policemen like Ermanno Sangiorgi, these rapid changes in the political weather could have terrifying consequences.
9
DOUBLE VENDETTA
LIKE MOST ITALIAN POLICEMEN, ERMANNO SANGIORGI BADLY WANTED TO WIN THE favour of the civil servants who controlled his destiny and monitored every detail of his private life. Pay was poor. Conditions were tough. The Public Security Service had a national career structure and a habit of moving its officers rapidly between postings, so that even the rank and file could spend their entire careers in wandering exile among alien communities where the locals spoke incomprehensible dialects and regarded the cops with contempt.
Sangiorgi was from the centre-north of the country; he was born in 1840 in the Romagnol spa town of Riolo. He knew only too well how a police career could play havoc with family life. His first wife died, probably in childbirth, leaving him with a son, Achille, to care for on his own when he was not yet out of his teens. He got married for a second time in 1861, to Enrica Ricci, a girl from a respectable lower-middle-class Faenza family, and the couple gave their children the patriotic names of Italo and Italia. After 1863, much of Sangiorgi’s service was spent fighting brigand bands in the south. Posted to primitive mountain communities, he and his wife could not keep Achille with them much of the time. Promotion was the only path to a less arduous life, yet every step up the career ladder had to be twisted from the grasp of politicians and bureaucrats by means of strenuous hard work, string pulling, and sob stories. Sangiorgi had a high sense of his own worth and was dogged in the pursuit of his ambition. As a Prefect would later write of him, ‘he seeks out every possible means of getting himself noticed’.
In December 1874 Sangiorgi tried to get himself noticed by the Minister of the Interior, no less. For nine months he had been acting inspector in Trapani, on the westernmost tip of Sicily, he wrote. The permanent promotion to inspector that he had been promised had not yet materialised. Of course he had absolute confidence that this promise would be kept—so much so that he had not hesitated to dip into his own pocket to supplement his police pay. After all, he had a wife and three children to support. But his ‘intense desire’ was to show his gratitude to the minister with further services, and ‘to make himself ever more worthy of the Royal Government’s consideration’. Would it be possible, therefore, for him to be transferred ‘to a place where the conditions of law and order leave more to be desired’?
Sangiorgi was looking for action, and he got all the action he could ever have hoped for. In March 1875 he took charge of the biggest, most heavily populated, and most mafia-infested police district in Sicily: Castel Molo, covering the northern part of the Conca d’Oro. Within its administrative boundaries lay the Piana dei Colli—a fertile plain bounded on one side by the small mountains to Palermo’s north-west, and on the other by Monte Pellegrino, an isolated mass of rock that surges from the shore just to the city’s north. The Piana dei Colli was dotted with the villas and gardens of the wealthy. Yet, like the rest of the Conca d’Oro, its settlements had a fearsome reputation for lawlessness. A little further to the west, Castel Molo cops also policed the lemon groves of Passo di Rigano and Uditore. These satellite villages were, in Sangiorgi’s words, ‘sadly renowned for criminal associations and bloody crimes’. Sangiorgi diagnosed the cause of the bloodshed in Castel Molo with incisive calm.
The mafia dominated the situation, and it had even managed to infect the police station. In fact the main mafia bosses had all been granted gun licences. When murders and other serious crimes happened in the Castel Molo district, as they did frequently, the police chose its informers from among these men . . . They turned to the most notorious mafiosi for confidential information on who was guilty, with the frequent result that poor, honest families were sacrificed, criminals went unpunished, and the general public was disheartened and distrustful.
Clearly the policy of co-managing crime with the mafia was still fully operative. One of the most egregious cases of this policy concerned Sangiorgi’s immediate predecessor in charge of the Castel Molo police station, Inspector Matteo Ferro. Ferro had a close friendship with the mafioso who was to occupy a central role in Sangiorgi’s story: Giovanni Cusimano, known as il nero (‘Darky’) because of his complexion.
Salvatore Lo Piccolo, arrested in November 2007, in possession of a mafia rulebook (see p. 80). Lo Piccolo’s territory included the Piana dei Colli, where many of the earliest dramas of the Sicilian mafia’s history took place.
Inspector Ferro had already done a great deal to obstruct investigations into the Uditore mafia before Sangiorgi arrived; he had also gone on record to defend Darky, denying that he was a capomafia, calling him instead ‘an upright man, an individual who is completely devoted to law and order’. This despite the fact that Darky, among his many other crimes, had recently terrorised one landowner into granting him a lease on a villa worth 200,000 lire for the derisory annual fee of one hundred litres of olive oil. (A rent which, needless to say, Darky did not even deign to pay.) Once installed in the villa, Darky regularly received visits not only from the friendly local police inspector, Matteo Ferro, but also from a sergeant in the Carabinieri, and the editor of the local newspaper, L’Amico del Popolo (The People’s Friend). Everyone with any influence in the Piana dei Colli was a friend of D
arky’s.
Soon after establishing himself in Castel Molo police station, Sangiorgi acted.
I quickly grasped that I needed to adopt a method diametrically opposed to the one that the police had used thus far. So at once I started openly fighting the mafia.
An open fight against the mafia. The simplicity of these words should not mislead as to just how difficult the task really was. When Sangiorgi revoked the mafia bosses’ gun licences and handed out police cautions to them all, he had to overcome opposition on a scale that the police fighting the camorra in Naples had never encountered: Sangiorgi referred to ‘the intervention of Senators, MPs, senior magistrates and other notables’ in defence of the crime bosses. In other words, the mafia was already part of a network that reached up towards the higher echelons of Italy’s governing institutions. Sangiorgi’s story is a parable of just how difficult an open fight against that network can be.
At first, Sangiorgi achieved excellent results. ‘The mafia went into its shell’, he later recalled, ‘there was a positive reawakening of public morale, and a marked reduction in the number of crimes.’
Then in November 1875, eight months after Sangiorgi arrived in Palermo, a crippled old man, leaning heavily on a lawyer’s arm, was shown into his office. His name was Calogero Gambino, and he was the owner of a lemon grove in the Piana dei Colli, near the borgata of San Lorenzo. He began by saying that he had heard of Sangiorgi’s reputation as an honest and energetic cop, and so was now turning to him to obtain justice against the mafia.
